When at the end of a cloudy day the sun bursts forth in splendor and sets red in the west, it is a sign to the weather-wise that the next day will be fair.  To the devotee of the sacramental life it holds a richer promise.  To him the sun is a symbol of the love of God; the clouds, those worldly preoccupations of his own which hide its face from him.  This purely physical phenomenon, therefore, which brings to most men a scarcely noticed augmentation of heat and light, and an indication of fair weather on the morrow, induces in the mystic an ineffable sense of divine immanence and beneficence, and an assurance of their continuance beyond the dark night of the death of the body.

When the sacramentalist goes swimming in the sea he enjoys to the full the attendant physical exhilaration, but a greater joy flows from the thought that he is back with his great Sea-Mother—­that feminine principle of which the sea is the perfect symbol, since water brings all things to birth and nurtures them.  When at the end of a day he lays aside his clothes—­that two-dimensional sheath of the three-dimensional body—­it is in full assurance that his body in turn will be abandoned by the inwardly retreating consciousness, and that he will range wherever he wills during the hours of sleep, clothed in his subtle four-dimensional body, related to the physical body as that is related to the clothes it wears.

To every sincere seeker nature reveals her secrets, but since men differ in their curiosities she reveals different things to different men.  All are rewarded for their devotion in accordance with their interests and desires, but woman-like, nature reveals herself most fully to him who worships not the fair form of her, but her soul.  This favored lover is the mystic; for ever seeking instruction in things spiritual, he perceives in nature an allegory of the soul, and interprets her symbols in terms of the sacramental life.

The brook, pursuing its tortuous and stony pathway in untiring effort to reach its gravitational centre, is a symbol of the Pilgrim’s progress, impelled by love to seek God within his heart.  The modest daisy by the roadside, and the wanton sunflower in the garden alike seek to image the sun, the god of their worship, a core of seeds and fringe of petals representing their best effort to mimic the flaming disc and far-flung corona of the sun.  Man seeks less ardently, and so more ineffectively in his will and imagination to image God.  In the reverent study of insect and animal life we gain some hint of what we have been and what we may become—­something corresponding to the grub, a burrowing thing; to the caterpillar, a crawling thing; and finally to the butterfly, a radiant winged creature.

After this fashion then does he who has embraced the sacramental life come to perceive in the “sensuous manifold” of nature, that one divine Reality which ever seeks to instruct him in supermundane wisdom, and to woo him to superhuman blessedness and peace.  In time, this reading of earth in terms of heaven, becomes a settled habit.  Then, in Emerson’s phrase, he has hitched his wagon to a star, and changed his grocer’s cart into a chariot of the sun.