react
in a thousand ways upon ideas and ideals--but a question of
moulding spiritual concepts by the direct influence of the ideas
and impulses manifested in external nature. Man's soul was in
constant, if generally subconscious, communion with his
material environment, and his thinking was thereby largely
coloured and fashioned. And if the kind and quality of the
influence vary from age to age, and from people to people, it is
not the less continuously potent. The complexities of modern
life, the interminglings of civilisations, tend to obscure its
manifestations; science, wrongly pursued, seems hostile to
continued vigour. But underneath the play of the cross-currents
on the surface, is the resistless swing of the tide.

An illustration of another class is found in Max Mueller's
brilliant lectures on "Physical Religion," the chief theme of
which is the development of Agni, the Vedic god of fire. The
starting-point was the sensuous perception of the physical
qualities of fire. The Idea and the will immanent in these
qualities gradually raised men's thoughts from the material to
the spiritual, until the Eastern world attained to what Max
Mueller calls "a precious line from the Veda"--"He who above
the gods was the One God"--composed at least one thousand
years before the Christian era. It was not the result of a
supernatural revelation, but a natural outcome of man's thoughts
guided and moulded by impressions of outward phenomena.
That is to say, as Max Mueller observes, there was nothing in it
artificial--simply that which man could not help saying, being
what he was and seeing what he saw.

In the instances just advanced, the broad principle is most
assuredly established that nature has a definite and continuous
effect upon the development of man's conduct and thought. And
as a consequence of this, we may affirm that Wordsworth's
experience is true, in its measure, of all normal members of the
race who are in touch with nature:

"Therefore am I still
A lover of the meadows and the woods
And mountains; and of all that we behold
Of this green earth; both what they half create
And what perceive; well pleased to recognise
In nature and the language of the sense,
The anchor of my purest thoughts, the nurse,
The guide, the guardian of my heart, and soul
Of all my moral being."

Why, even old Dr. Johnson in his Dictionary days would write
to his friend Langton, in Linco