lily out of black ooze, but has descended out of heaven from God like the New Jerusalem once seeen in vision. Old Plutarch's penetrating discernment of the nature of things has not been improved upon, but only confirmed by subsequent ages. It was his opinion that "a city might sooner be built without any ground to fix it on than a commonwealth be constituted altogether void of religion, or being constituted, be preserved." The apothegm which we quoted at the beginning we repeat now at the end. Lacordaire, speaking of the decline of nations, said: "The earth has devoured all those who have no longer regarded heaven save as the physical eye discovers it on the horizon." The epitaph of all the men and all the nations who have really perished is brief and explicit. In the dialect and idiom of this essay, it reads: They failed to regard the Double Sky. To ignore the spiritual is death; to be spiritually minded is life, peace, and lasting prosperity.

Lamartine, the Frenchman, statesman, poet, and historian, looking with envy upon nations whose great men were like Washington and Franklin, Sidney and Cromwell, uttered this lament for his own country, which seemed to him destitute of such leaders: "The great men of other countries live and die on the scene of history, looking up to heaven; our great men appear to live and die, forgetting completely the only idea which is worth living and dying for—they

live and die looking at the spectator, or, at most, at posterity." Only men who fear God and care for the verdict and approval of Heaven can possibly lead nations of true greatness. Guizot, historian, statesman, and student of public affairs, when he fled from the unstability and unsafety of government in France to the shelter of stable England, said to Lord Shaftesbury, "Sir, it is their religion which has saved the English people from the ills which afflict France." A critic of Greek civilization notes that the main lines of Greek architecture are parallel with the ground, and the main channels of Greek thought followed the same course. The Greek temple merely decorates the earth. The Greek people lived only for that purpose and on that level. And because earth-decorating Hellas knew nothing higher than Olympus and Parnassus, and her gods were carnal, of the earth earthy, therefore the earth devoured her, and the glory that was Greece, like the splendor that was Rome, went drifting with its dead things down the dark of history.

THUS SAITH THE POET

"By Tigris, or the streams of Ind,
Ere Colchis rose, or Babylon,
Forgotten empires dreamed and sinned,
Setting tall towns against the dawn,

"Which, when the proud Sun smote upon,
Flashed fire for fire and pride for pride;

Their names were . . . ask oblivion!
"They had no vision, and they died.'

"Queens, dusk of hair and tawny skinned,
That loll where fellow leopards fawn,
Their hearts are dust before the wind,
Their loves, that shook the world, are wan

"Passion is mighty . . . but, anon,

Strong Death has Romance for his bride;
Their legends . . ask oblivion!

"They had no vision, and they died.'

"Heroes, the braggart trumps that dinned
Their futile triumphs, monarch, pawn,

Wild tribesmen, kingdoms disciplined,
Passed like a whirlwind and were gone;

"They built with bronze and gold and brawn,
The inner Vision still denied;

Their conquests . . . ask oblivion!
"They had no vision, and they died.'

Josiah Royce, in his most notable book, speaking of the human reason as one of the sources of religious insight, says, "Man's reason can perceive a heaven which overarches us, a heaven which sends down influences that can transform us, that can enter into our will and give us an impulse as well as a plan of life." The impact of the Power which moves upon the human spirit from above is felt by the ethical sense of every well-developed soul; and the more highly sensitized a man's nature is, the more he is aware of such impact, and the more distinctly he realizes

it to be as unmistakably personal in its origin as it is spiritualizing in its effect upon his own personality. Such a soul is liable to have as vivid an experience as Russell Lowell had in one momentous hour which he thus described: "I had never before felt so clearly the Spirit of God in and around me. The whole room seemed to me full of God. The air seemed to quiver with the hovering presence of Something, I knew not what." To spell that Something with a capital is not unreasonable. It is that Power which makes for righteousness and urges man onward and upward, giving both the impulse and the power. Look up, for above the dark night the stars are shining. When the French general said to the Vendean peasant, "We will tear down your chapels, we will burn your Bibles, we will kill your clergy, we will scatter your congregations, we will destroy everything that can make you think of your God," that unperturbed peasant answered with cool and serene irony, "You will leave us the stars, won't you?" And the French man of war decided, after reflection, that he would mercifully leave them the stars. So he magnanimously restrained his almightiness from disturbing the sky; and so long as the stars shine overhead, men will think of God and down through endless generations men with uplifted faces will call to their downcast brothers, "Look unto the heavens and see." Richter said that so long as the word God endures

in human language, it will direct the eyes of men upward; and whenever men look up, they can see the name of their God and Father blazoned in shining worlds across the boundless blue dome that overarches human life.

One supreme Voice there is which calls us to look up and describes and interprets to us the contents of the spiritual heavens. It is that authoritative Voice which sounded from the Mount of Olives, and from the crest of Calvary, and now from the Heaven of heavens and in our heart of hearts. Except by heeding that Voice we know of no salvation. This Napoleon implied and confessed when he said, "The nearer I approach in my study of Christ, the more carefully I examine everything that is above me." Ecce Calum! Behold the Double Sky. Above, in the Heaven of heavens, is the home of the soul, a building of God, a house not made with hands, in the realm of the eternal, up into which the ransomed spirit, freed from "this muddy vesture of decay," ascends, singing:

"Good-by, dear earthly sky!

I leave thee as the gauzy dragon-fly
Leaves the green pool to try

His vast ambition in the vaster sky."