unding Nature the ample complement of
themselves. Man, too, finds in his Environment provision for all
capacities, scope for the exercise of every faculty, room for the
indulgence of each appetite, a just supply for every want. So the
spiritual man at the apex of the pyramid of life finds in the vaster
range of his Environment a provision, as much higher, it is true, as he
is higher, but as delicately adjusted to his varying needs. And all
this is supplied to him just as the lower organisms are ministered to by
the lower environment, in the same simple ways, in the same constant
sequence, as appropriately and as lavishly. We fail to praise the
ceaseless ministry of the great inanimate world around us only because
its kindness is unobtrusive. Nature is always noiseless. All her
greatest gifts are given in secret. And we forget how truly every good
and perfect gift comes from without, and from above, because no pause in
her changeless beneficence teaches us the sad lesson of deprivation.

It is not a strange thing, then, for the soul to find its life in God.
This is its native air. God as the Environment of the soul has been from
the remotest age the doctrine of all the deepest thinkers in religion.
How profoundly Hebrew poetry is saturated with this high thought will
appear when we try to conceive of it with this left out. True poetry is
only science in another form. And long before it was possible for
religion to give scientific expression to its greatest truths, men of
insight uttered themselves in psalms which could not have been truer to
Nature had the most modern light controlled the inspiration. "As the
hart panteth after the water-brooks, so panteth my soul after Thee, O
God." What fine sense of the analogy of the natural and the spiritual
does not underlie these words. As the hart after its Environment, so man
after his; as the water-brooks are fitly designed to meet the natural
wants, so fitly does God implement the spiritual need of man. It will be
noticed that in the Hebrew poets the longing for God never strikes one
as morbid, or unnatural to the men who utter it. It is as natural to
them to long for God as for the swallow to seek her nest. Throughout all
their images no suspicion rises within us that they are exaggerating. We
feel how truly they are reading themselves, their deepest selves. No
false note occurs in all their aspiration. There is no weariness even in
their ceaseless sighing, except the lover's