That is the modern scientific conception; look for a moment at its greatness.  Man as final issue of nature must turn round and look backward.  He must look down the long line of life to the far-off first beginning.  He must pass beyond the earliest forms in which the vital movement began to the mysterious, formless, eternal power behind all.  And it is here that nature is lifted into a new character by her human product.  In that eternal power there must be a reason to account for man’s reason, conscience to account for his conscience, love to account for his love, spirit to explain his spirit.  Nature as mother must become spirit to account for the soul of her son.  The flower shows what was in the seed, the oak is the revelation of what was in the heart of the acorn; and man as the last and best outcome of nature is the authoritative expression of the power that is behind nature.  Thus the mind that is the final product of nature discovers the mind that is the source of nature.  Man seeking the origin of his being finds it on the farther side of nature in One like unto a son of man.  He learns later to distinguish between the reality and the image, between God and godlike man.  And then a wireless telegraphy is established between them across the vast untraveled distances of nature.  The life near to God can not send the tokens of His inmost character upward to man; the brute life near to man can not carry downward to God man’s thoughts and hopes.  The animal life that stretches in an expanse so wide between the Creator and His best work can not connect the human and the divine.  But when the spirit to which nature comes in man has once seen the Spirit in which nature must begin, then the wireless telegraphy comes into play.  The heart, that is the last product of life, sends out its mysterious currents, its aspirations, its gladness, its grief, and its hope; and these repeat themselves in the great heart of God.  And forth from the Spirit behind nature issue the messages of recognition, of sympathy, of intimated ideals and endless incentive, that register themselves in the soul of man.  Nature is a solid, sympathetic, and now and then glorified, and yet dumb, highway between God and man.  Her beauty belongs to the Spirit that she does not know, and it speaks to the Spirit that is older than her child.  She is a mute, unconscious sacrament between the infinite reason and the finite, a path for the lightning that plays backward and forward between the soul of man and the soul of God.  The great primal fact in the human environment is that man is the interpreter of nature.  In this character of interpreter of nature he receives his first message from God, and makes his first response.