sical to reveal him. The fact that spiritual life
is here is evidence that it takes spiritual life fully to display the
truth about creation's reality. As an old mystic put it: "God sleeps
in the stone, he dreams in the animal, he wakes in man!"

It was this approach to God which saved the best spiritual life of the
nineteenth century. For in the eighteenth century Christianity came
nearer to being driven out of business than ever in her history before.
She had believed in a carpenter god who had made the world and
occasionally tinkered with it in events which men called miracles. But
new knowledge made that carpenter god impossible. Area after area
where he had been supposed to operate was closed to him by the
discovery of natural law until at last even comets were seen to be
law-abiding and he was escorted clean to the edge of the universe and
bowed out altogether. Nobody who has not read the contemporary
literature of the eighteenth century can know what dryness of soul
resulted.

Man, however, cannot live without God. Our fathers had to have God
back again. But if God were to come back again he could not return as
an occasional tinkerer; he had to come as the life in all that lives,
the indwelling presence throughout his creation, whose ways of working
are the laws, so that he penetrates and informs them all. No absentee
landlord could be welcomed back, but if God came as the resident soul
of all creation, men could comprehend that. And he did come back that
way. His return is the glory of the nineteenth century. In the best
visions of the century's prophets that glory shines.

MRS. BROWNING:

"Earth's crammed with heaven,
And every common bush afire with God:
But only he who sees, takes off his shoes."

TENNYSON:

"Speak to Him, thou, for He hears, and
Spirit with Spirit can meet--
Closer is He than breathing, and nearer
than hands and feet."

COLERIDGE:

"Glory to Thee, Father of Earth and Heaven!
All conscious presence of the Universe!
Nature's vast ever-acting Energy!"

WORDSWORTH:

"a sense sublime
Of something far more deeply interfused,
Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns,
And the round ocean and the living air
And the blue sky, and in the mind of man;
A motion and a spirit, that impels
All thinking things, all objects of all thoughts,
And rolls through all things."

CARLYLE:

"Then sawest thou that this f