which vitality is fed, we get a more impressive sense of the power
and skill of the Creator than we do when we turn the telescope
toward the heavens. Yet Mr. Emerson would have us believe that the
Being who saw fit to make all these little things, to arrange and
throw into relation all these masses of detail, to paint the
plumage of a bird, and the back of a fly, as richly as he paints
the drapery of the descending sun, does not condescend to take
practical interest in the affairs of men and women! My God, what
blindness! Bird, bee, blossom--be my teacher. I do not like Mr.
Emerson's lesson.

The logical sequence of disbelief in what Mr. Emerson calls a
"pistareen Providence" is a belief in pantheism or polytheism.
There is certainly nothing ridiculous in the faith that the Being
who contrived and arranged, and adjusted the infinite littlenesses
of creation, and ordained their laws, and who continues their
existence, maintains an intimate interest in the only intelligent
creatures he has placed in this world. The little bird that sings
to me, the bee that bears me honey, the blossom that brings me
perfume, all testify to me that He who created them will not
neglect nor forget His own child. If I look up into the firmament,
and send my imagination into its deep abysses, and think that
further than even dreams can go, those abysses are strewn with
stars; if I think of comets coming and going with the rush of
lightning, and yet occupying whole centuries in their journey; or
if I only sit down by the sea, and think of the waves that kiss
other shores thousands of miles away, I am oppressed by a sense of
my own littleness. I ask the question whether the God who has such
large things in His care, can think of me--a speck on an infinite
aggregate of surface--a mote uneasily shifting in the boundless