As the fragrance and colour of the rose must in some occult way be properties of the rude earth from which they are drawn by the sun, may not human love also be a kindly property of matter—­that mysterious life-stuff in which is packed such marvellous potentialities?  Evidently love must be somewhere in the universe—­else it had not got into the heart of man; and perhaps pity slides down like an angel in the rays of the solar energy, while there is the potential beating of a human heart even in the hard crust of the carbon compounds.

I confess that this seems to me no mere fancy, but a really comforting speculation.  Pain, we say, is inherent in the scheme of the universe; but is not love seen to be no less inherent, too?

There must be some soul of beauty to animate the lovely face of the world, some soul of goodness to account for its saints.  If the gods are cruel, it is strange that man should be so kind, and that some pathetic spirit of tenderness should seem to stir even in the bosoms of beasts and birds.

Meanwhile, we cannot too often insist that, whatever uncertainties there be, man has one certainty—­himself.  Science has really adduced nothing essential against his significance.  That he is not as big as an Alp, as heavy as a star, or as long-lived as an eagle, is nothing against his proper importance.  Even a nobleman is of more significance in the world than his acres, and giants are not proverbial for their intellectual or spiritual qualities.  The ant is of more importance than the ass, and the great eye of a beautiful woman is more significant than the whole clayey bulk of Mars.

After all the scientific mockery of the old religious ideal of the importance of man, one begins to wonder if his Ptolemaic fancy that he was the centre of the universe, and that it was all made for him, is not nearer the If truth than the pitiless theories which hardly allow him equality with the flea that perishes.

Suppose if, after all, the stars were really meant as his bedtime candles, and the sun’s purpose in rising is really that he may catch the 8.37!

For, as Sir Thomas Browne says in his solemn English, ’there is surely a piece of Divinity in us, something that was before the elements, and owes no homage unto the sun.’

The long winter of materialistic science seems to be breaking up, and the old ideals are seen trooping back with something more than their old beauty, in the new spiritual spring that seems to be moving in the hearts of men.

After all its talk, science has done little more than correct the misprints of religion.  Essentially, the old spiritualistic and poetic theories of life are seen, not merely weakly to satisfy the cravings of man’s nature, but to be mostly in harmony with certain strange and moving facts in his constitution, which the materialists unscientifically ignore.