downward to God man's thoughts and hopes. The animal life that
stretches in an expanse so wide between the Creator and His best work
can not connect the human and the divine. But when the spirit to which
nature comes in man has once seen the Spirit in which nature must
begin, then the wireless telegraphy comes into play. The heart, that
is the last product of life, sends out its mysterious currents, its
aspirations, its gladness, its grief, and its hope; and these repeat
themselves in the great heart of God. And forth from the Spirit behind
nature issue the messages of recognition, of sympathy, of intimated
ideals and endless incentive, that register themselves in the soul of
man. Nature is a solid, sympathetic, and now and then glorified, and
yet dumb, highway between God and man. Her beauty belongs to the
Spirit that she does not know, and it speaks to the Spirit that is
older than her child. She is a mute, unconscious sacrament between the
infinite reason and the finite, a path for the lightning that plays
backward and forward between the soul of man and the soul of God.
The great primal fact in the human environment is that man is the
interpreter of nature. In this character of interpreter of nature he
receives his first message from God, and makes his first response.

II. The second fact in the human situation is that religion is the
interpreter of man. As man looks backward he beholds beyond nature
a face like his own, only diviner; and ever afterward the noblest
aspiration of his soul is to win the smile of that face and to escape
its frown. Our self-comprehending Adam would confess that he knew
himself only when he noted within him the lover of the infinite. And
here history leads the way. You look into "The Book of the Dead," and
you see what high and serious things religion meant for the early
Egyptian. The pyramids are monuments to religion. The art of the
ancient races was chiefly homage to the divine. The Athenian Parthenon