from the rationality of Nature.  Man learns from Nature how to master and control her.  He turns her currents into new channels; he spurs her in directions of his own.  Nature has no economic or scientific rationality.  She progresses by the method of trial and error.  Her advance is symbolized by that of the child learning to walk.  She experiments endlessly.  Evolution has worked all around the horizon.  In feeling her way to man she has produced thousands of other forms of life.  The globe is peopled as it is because the creative energy was blind and did not at once find the single straight road to man.  Had the law of variation worked only in one direction, man might have found himself the sole occupant of the universe.  Behold the varieties of trees, of shrubs, of grasses, of birds, of insects, because Nature does not work as man does, with an eye single to one particular end.  She scatters, she sows her seed upon the wind, she commits her germs to the waves and the floods.  Nature is indifferent to waste, because what goes out of one pocket goes into another.  She is indifferent to failure, because failure on one line means success on some other.

IV

But I am not preaching much of a gospel, am I?  Only the gospel of contentment, of appreciation, of heeding simple near-by things—­a gospel the burden of which still is love, but love that goes hand in hand with understanding.

There is so much in Nature that is lovely and lovable, and so much that gives us pause.  But here it is, and here we are, and we must make the most of it.  If the ways of the Eternal as revealed in his works are past finding out, we must still unflinchingly face what our reason reveals to us.  “Red in tooth and claw.”  Nature does not preach; she enforces, she executes.  All her answers are yea, yea, or nay, nay.  Of the virtues and beatitudes of which the gospel of Christ makes so much—­meekness, forgiveness, self-denial, charity, love, holiness—­she knows nothing.  Put yourself in her way, and she crushes you; she burns you, freezes you, stings you, bites you, or devours you.

Yet I would not say that the study of Nature did not favor meekness or sobriety or gentleness or forgiveness or charity, because the great Nature students and prophets, like Darwin, would rise up and confound me.  Certainly it favors seriousness, truthfulness, and simplicity of life; or, are only the serious and single-minded drawn to the study of Nature?  I doubt very much if it favors devoutness or holiness, as those qualities are inculcated by the church, or any form of religious enthusiasm.  Devoutness and holiness come of an attitude toward the universe that is in many ways incompatible with that implied by the pursuit of natural science.  The joy of the Nature student like Darwin or any great naturalist is to know, to find out the reason of things and the meaning of things, to trace the footsteps of the creative