Thus an almost universal trait of the religious temperament is in its delight in beauty.  Sometimes it is repressed by an irreligious asceticism or narrowed and stunted by a literal and external faith.  But when the religious man is left free, it is appropriate to his genius that he finds the world full of a high pleasure crowded with sound, color, fragrance, form, in which he takes exquisite delight.  There is, in short, a serene and poetic naturalism, loosely called “nature-worship,” which is keenly felt by both saints and sinners.  All it needs for its consecration and perfection is to help men to see that this naturalism is vital and precious because, as a matter of fact, it is something more than naturalism, and more than pleasure objectified.

Recall, for instance, the splendors of the external world and that best season of our climate, the long, slow-breathing autumn.  What high pleasure we take in those hushed days of mid-November in the soft brown turf of the uplands, the fragrant smell of mellow earth and burning leaves, the purple haze that dims and magnifies the quiescent hills.  Who is not strangely moved by that profound and brooding peace into which Nature then gathers up the multitudinous strivings, the myriad activities of her life?  Who does not love to lie, in those slow-waning days upon the sands which hold within their golden cup the murmuring and dreaming sea?  The very amplitude of the natural world, its far-flung grace and loveliness, spread out in rolling moor and winding stream and stately forest marching up the mountain-side, subdues and elevates the spirit of a man.

Now, so it has always been and so men have always longed to be the worshipers of beauty.  Therefore they have believed in a conscious and eternal Spirit behind it.  Because again we know that personality is the only thing we have of absolute worth.  A man cannot, therefore, worship beauty, wholly relinquish himself to its high delights, if he conceives of this majestic grace as impersonal and inanimate.  For that which we worship must be greater than we.  Behind it, therefore, just because it seems to us so beautiful, must be something that calls to the hidden deeps of the soul, something intimately akin to our own spirits.  So man worships not nature, but the God of nature; senses an Eternal Presence behind all gracious form.  For that interprets beauty and consecrates the spell of beauty over us.  This gives a final meaning to what the soul perceives is an utter loveliness.  This gives to beauty an eternal and cosmic significance commensurate to its charm and power.  As long as men’s hearts surge, too, when the tide yearns up the beach; as long as their souls become articulate when the birds sing in the dawn, and the flowers lift themselves to the sun; so long will men believe that only from a supreme and conscious Loveliness, a joyous and a gracious Spirit could have come the beauty which is so intimately related to the spirit of a man.