ere I get my knowledge but the place where I
put it together) is a great meadow--ten square splendid level miles of
it--as fenceless and as open as a sky--merely two mountains to stand
guard. If H---- the scientist who lives nearest to me (that is;
nearest to my mind,) were to come down to me to-morrow morning, down
in my meadow, with its huge triangle of trolleys and railways humming
gently around the edges and tell me that he had found a God, I would
not believe it. "Where?" I would say, "in which Bottle?" I have groped
for one all these years. Ever since I was a child I have been groping
for a God. I thought one had to. I have turned over the pages of
ancient books and hunted in morning papers and rummaged in the events
of the great world and looked on the under sides of leaves and guessed
on the other sides of the stars and all in vain. I never could make
out to find a God in that way. I wonder if anyone can.

I know it is not the right spirit to have, but I must confess that
when the scientist (the smaller sort of scientist around the corner in
my mind and everybody's mind) with all his retorts and things,
pottering with his argument of design, comes down to me in my meadow
and reminds me that he has been looking for a God and tells me
cautiously and with all his kind, conscientious hems and haws that he
has found Him, I wonder if he has.

The very necessity a man is under of seeking a God at all, in a world
alive all over like this, of feeling obliged to go on a long journey
to search one out makes one doubt if the kind of God he would find
would be worth while. I have never caught a man yet who has found his
God in this way, enjoying Him or getting anyone else to.

It does seem to me that the idea of a God is an absolutely plain,
rudimentary, fundamental, universal human instinct, that the very
essence of finding a God consists in His not having to be looked for,
in giving one's self up to one's plain every-day infinite experiences.
I suppose if it could be analyzed, the poet's real quarrel with the
scientist is not that he is material, but that he is not material
enough,--he does not conceive matter enough to find a God. I cannot
believe for instance that any man on earth to whom the great spectacle
of matter going on every day before his eyes is a scarcely noticed
thing--any man who is willing to turn aside from this spectacle--this
spectacle as a whole--and who looks for a God like a chemist in a
bottle for