big city and may look into ten thousand faces and see none that is
lovely. Is not the return of man to a natural life on the earth a great
enough idea to inspire humanity? Is not the idea of a civilization amid
the green trees and fields under the smokeless sky alluring? Yes, but
men say there is no intellectual life working on the land. No
intellectual life when man is surrounded by mystery and miracle! When
the mysterious forces which bring to birth and life are yet
undiscovered; when the earth is teeming with life, and the dumb brown
lips of the ridges are breathing mystery! Is not the growth of a tree
from a tiny cell hidden in the earth as provocative of thought as the
things men learn at the schools? Is not thought on these things more
interesting than the sophistries of the newspapers? It is only in
Nature, and by thought on the problems of Nature, that our intellect
grows to any real truth and draws near to the Mighty Mind which laid the
foundations of the world.

Our civilizations are a nightmare, a bad dream. They have no longer the
grandeur of Babylon or Nineveh. They grow meaner and meaner as they
grow more urbanized. What could be more depressing than the miles of
poverty-stricken streets around the heart of our modern cities? The
memory lies on one "heavy as frost and deep almost as life." It is
terrible to think of the children playing on the pavements; the
depletion of vitality, with artificial stimulus supplied from the
flaring drink-shops. The spirit grows heavy as if death lay on it while
it moves amid such things. And outside these places the clouds are
flying overhead snowy and spiritual as of old, the sun is shining, the
winds are blowing, the fields are green, the forests are murmuring leaf
to leaf, but the magic that God made is unknown to these poor folk. The
creation of a rural civilization is the greatest need of our time. It
may not come in our days, but we can lay the foundations of it,