[Footnote 29:  Songs from the Clay, p. 68.]

  “Brothers, what is it ye mean,
  What is it ye try to say
  That so earnestly ye lean
  From the spirit to the clay.

  “There are weary gulfs between
  Here and sunny Paradise,
  Brothers!  What is it ye mean
  That ye search with burning eyes,

  “Down for me whose fire is clogged,
  Clamped in sullen, earthy mould,
  Battened down and fogged and bogged,
  Where the clay is seven-fold.”

Now we understand the tragic aspect of nature and of the human soul caught in this cosmic dualism without which corresponds to the ethical dualism within.  This perception of the One behind the many in nature, of the thing-in-itself, as distinguished from the many expressions of that thing, is the chief theme for preaching.  This is what brings men to themselves.  Herein, as Dr. Newman Smyth has pointed out, appears the unique marvel of personality.  “It becomes conscious of itself as individual and it individualizes the world; it is the one discovering itself among the many.  In the midst of uniformities of nature, moving at will on the plane of natural necessities, weaving the pattern of its ideas through the warp of natural laws, runs the personal life.  On the same plane and amid these uniformities, yet itself a sphere of being of another order; in it, yet disentangled from it, and having its center in itself, it lives and moves and has its being, breaking no thread of nature’s weaving, subject to its own law, and manifesting a dynamic of its own."[30]

[Footnote 30:  The Meaning of the Personal Life, p. 173.]

The source, then, as we see it, of all human hopes and human dignity, the urge that lies behind all metaphysics and much of literature and art, the thing that makes men eager to live, yet nobly curious to die, is this conviction that One like unto ourselves but from whom we have made ourselves unlike, akin to our real, if buried, person, walketh with us in the fiery furnace of our life.  There is a Spirit in man and the breath of the Almighty giveth him understanding.  Starting from this interpretation, we can begin to order the baffling and teasing aspects, the illusive nature of the world.  Why this ever failing, but never ending struggle against unseen odds to grasp and understand and live with the Divine?  Why, between the two, the absolute and the changeless spirit, unseen but felt, and the hesitant and timid spirit of a man, would there seem to be a great gulf fixed?  Because we are wrong.  Because man finds the gulf within himself.  He chafes at the limitations of time and space?  Yes; but he chafes more at the mystery and weakness, the mingled deceitfulness and cunning and splendor of the human heart.  Because there is no one of us who can say, I have made my life pure, I am free from my sin.  He knows that the gulf is there between the fallible and human, and the more than human; he does not know how to cross it; he says,