The brain is itself a nut from the tree Ygdrasil; it carries the world, and in the first glances we anticipate all knowledge.  The joy of life does not wait for any theory of life, for we have only slept since the thought in us was embodied in this system; we took part in the making; we are drowsily at home with ourselves therein; we forget, yet do not forget, the roundness of design.  As in a common experience we are often close upon some name which we seek to recall,—­we feel, but cannot touch it,—­so the secret of Nature lies close to the mind, and sustains us as if by magnetic communication, while we have yet no faculty to explore our own being or this apparition of it, the whirl of worlds.

We have rightly held genius to be miracle; but our great hope is postponed for lack of perception that all life is miracle, that man in every endowment is a form of the same plastic, incalculable power.  Yet as we are brought to seek goodness, being sinners, so we shall be brought to seek the last perception, being dolts.  The masters have not been quite masters, and their theory has never respected the natural as opening to a supernatural mind.  We eat and drink and wait to be arrested, not by sunshine, but lightning.  It comes at last, revealing from heaven the height and depth of our human prospect.  The vision is appalling; the seer is stricken to the ground; he has no organ able to bear this light; he is blinded; he runs trembling for counsel to Paul, who was beaten from his horse, to Samuel, who was called in sleep, to Jesus, who taught the new birth, to John, who saw the white throne.  But after a little we learn that the new experience is native to us as breath.  No degeneracy of any period, no immersion in war, trade, production, tradition, can quite hide the cardinal fact that this strength of antiquity, of eternity, waits to descend, and does from time to time descend, into the private breast.  He who prays has made the discovery, and is put by his own act in lonely communication with all heavens.

We find the sacred history legible only in the same light by which it was written:  we are referred by it, therefore, to sources of interpretation above itself.  God was hidden in the sky; the book in another sky; who shall reveal God hidden in the book?  After so many ages, it has become a riddle as difficult of solution as any for which it offers solution:  the last and best puzzle of the exulting old Sphinx, who will never be cheated of her jest.  Our Christianity misses the highest value of the book, as it indicates the resource of universal man.  We use the cover as some charm against danger, but the secret of devotion is not reached.  At last it is plain that secular, nigh impenetrable Nature is a door as easily opened as this of the book.  We must read upon our knees, we wait for grace to open the text, God must descend to light the page.  The Quaker names our interpreter an inner light, the Church a Holy Ghost to purge the heart and eye.  A deity who comes directly, and is no longer to seek when we are ready to read, must abolish the book.  Of all gods offered in our Pantheon, of all persons in our Trinity, this must be the first.