A SHORT time ago, while desiring and striving to bring to light a more abundant, harmonious, and perfect sense of life where the desire for death as well as the expectation of it were much in evidence, I had a short time alone amid the wonders and beauties of nature in one of her calm, serene moods. The greater glory of the sun was being succeeded by the lesser, yet gentler and more companionable, glory of the stars. The world about me and above me seemed too fair and lovely and young to be the old earth and the old heavens, yet not spiritual and permanent and perfect enough to be the new earth and the new heavens of hope and of prophecy and of the pure spiritual vision.
In this mood and environment I found myself putting to God, as well as to my own higher self, this query: Why so much effort and struggle to transcend and control what seems to be the natural order of that which we miscall physical nature? Would it not be better to give ourselves happily to the study and to the love of nature, to the doing of our human tasks so well that they would become acts of genuine beauty as well as deeds of real service, and to the bringing into consciousness and expression such universal good will and perfect love as would at least make this world a partial paradise, rather than to give ourselves to such a difficult and unwelcome task as that of trying to overcome all that is unlike our very highest sense of good? The new-old answer which came to this new-old question has meant so much to me that I can only regret my own sense of limitation, as well as the limitations of human language, which will not permit me to share it with others more perfectly.
The answer came first in the form of questions like the following: If the universe looks so beautiful, lovely, and perfect to our limited, imperfect, and often distorted vision, how much more beautiful, lovely, and perfect must it appear to Him who sees it, loves it, and governs it perfectly? If our concept of the universe symbolizes and expresses such loveliness, harmony, and perfection as it does in our highest and best moments, may not the universe, as it really and eternally exists in and to the divine Mind, be absolutely fair, beautiful, lovely, harmonious, and good? Is not all the partial truth, beauty, harmony, and goodness we see reflected and symbolized by the visible universe, a promise as well as a prophecy of perfect truth, beauty, harmony, and goodness? Will not the universe appear to us ever fairer, lovelier, more harmonious, as we grow in purity, kindness, wisdom, and goodness,—as we become more and more beautiful within? Will not the universe look to us more and more as it looks to God,—as it is,—as we become more and more like Him? Or, as Plato puts it. "But what if man had eyes to see the true beauty—the divine beauty, I mean, pure and clear and unalloyed, not clogged with the pollutions of mortality, and all of the colors and vanities of human life—thither looking, and holding converse with the true beauty, divine and simple?" And with Browning's fine lines may we not say,—
