million miles of the firmament! The wonder is here, not there; now, not to
be, now always. Things that have been miscalled supernatural appear to me
simple,more natural than nature, than earth, than sea,or sun. It is beyond
telling more natural that I should have a soul than not, that there should
be
immortality; I think there is much more than immortality. It
is matter which is the supernatural, and difficult of under-standing. Why
this clod of earth I hold in my hand? Why this water which drops sparkling
from my fingers dipped in the brook?
Why are they at all? When? How? What for? Matter is beyond understanding,
mysterious, impenetrable; I touch it easily, comprehend it, no. Soul,
mind--the thought, the idea--is easily understood, it understands itself and
is conscious.

The supernatural miscalled, the natural in truth, is the real.
To me everything is supernatural. How strange that condition of mind which
cannot accept anything but the earth, the sea, the tangible universe!
Without the misnamed supernatural these to me seem incomplete, unfinished.
Without soul all these are dead. Except when I walk by the sea, and my soul
is by it, the sea is dead. Those seas by which no man has stood-- which no
soul has been--whether on earth or the planets, are dead. No matter how
majestic the planet rolls in space, unless a soul be there it is dead. As I
move about in the sunshine I feel in the midst of the supernatural: in the
midst of immortal things. It is impossibble to wrest the mind down to the
same laws that rule pieces of timber, water, or earth. They do not control
the soul, however rigidly they may bind matter. So full am I always of a
sense of the immortality now at this moment round about me, that it would
not surprise me in the least if a circumstance outside physical experience
occurred. It would seem to me quite natural. Give the soul the power it
conceives, and there would be nothing wonderful in it.