shall be our supposition."

"Certainly; that is clear."

"Now I come to it. God, knowing our needs, built our house for our
needs--not as one man may build for another, but as no man can build for
himself. For our comfort, education, training, he has put into form for us
all the otherwise hidden thoughts and feelings of our heart. Even when he
speaks of the hidden things of the Spirit of God, he uses the forms or
pictures of Nature. The world is, as it were, the human, unseen world
turned inside out, that we may see it. On the walls of the house that he
has built for us, God has hung up the pictures--ever-living, ever-changing
pictures--of all that passes in our souls. Form and colour and motion are
there,--ever-modelling, ever-renewing, never wearying. Without this living
portraiture from within, we should have no word to utter that should
represent a single act of the inner world. Metaphysics could have no
existence, not to speak of poetry, not to speak of the commonest language
of affection. But all is done in such spiritual suggestion, portrait and
definition are so avoided, the whole is in such fluent evanescence, that
the producing mind is only aided, never overwhelmed. It never amounts to
representation. It affords but the material which the thinking, feeling
soul can use, interpret, and apply for its own purposes of speech. It is,
as it were, the forms of thought cast into a lovely chaos by the inferior
laws of matter, thence to be withdrawn by what we call the creative genius
that God has given to men, and moulded, and modelled, and arranged, and
built up to its own shapes and its own purposes."

"Then I presume you would say that no mere transcript, if I may use the
word, of nature is the worthy work of an artist."