, who
are going to lead it along the paths of space and the footsteps of the
worlds into the Great Presence.

The greatest astronomer or chemist is the man who glows with the joy of
wrestling with God, of putting strength to strength.

To the geologist who goes groping about in stones, his whole life is a
kind of mind-reading of the ground, a passion for getting underneath,
for communing flesh to flesh with a planet. What he feels when he breaks
a bit of rock is the whole round earth--the wonder of it--the great
cinder floating through space. He would all but risk his life or sell
his soul for a bit of lava. He is studying the phrenology of a star. All
the other stars watch him. The feeling of being in a kind of eternal,
invisible, infinite enterprise, of carrying out a world, of tracking a
God, takes possession of him. He may not admit there is a God, in so
many words, but his geology admits it. He devotes his whole life to
appreciating a God, and the God takes the deed for the word, appreciates
his appreciation, whether he does or not. If he says that he does not
believe in a God, he merely means that he does not believe in Calvin's
God, or in the present dapper, familiar little God or the hero of the
sermon last Sunday. All he means by not believing in a God is that his
God has not been represented yet. In the meantime he and his geology go
sternly, implacably on for thousands of years, while churches come and
go. So does his God. His geology is his own ineradicable worship. His
religion, his passion for the all, for communing through the part with
the Whole, is merely called by the name of geology. In so far as a man's
geology is real to him, if he is after anything but a degree in it, or a
thesis or a salary, his geology is an infinite passion taking possession
of him, soul and body, carrying him along with it, sweeping him out with
it into the great workroom, the flame and the glow of the world-shop of
God.

It would not seem necessary to say it if it were not so stoutly denied,
but living as we do, most of us, with a great flock of little scientists
around us, pecking on the infinite most of them, each with his own
little private strut, or blasphemy, bragging of a world without a God,
it does seem as if it were going to be the great strategic event of the
twentieth century, for all men, to get the sciences and the humanities
together once more, if only in our own thoughts, to make ourselves
believe as we must