The Roman had still in dim recesses of his consciousness the feelings of an earlier age, for which every wild wood was peopled with mysterious powers; nature was full of unknown agencies whose workings man could but dimly perceive, and the ancient rites of his religion were the charms by which he held at bay the strange potencies of evil that surrounded him. The [p.88] Hebrew poet looked on nature even in her sterner aspects with the eyes of faith; hailstorm and thunder, and the very sea his people thought of with such dread, brought revelations to him of the Divine power controlling all; and because of this sense of unity, the mystery and wonder of the starry sky seemed to his inward ear vocal with harmonies. In some ways there has come to us in the last two centuries fuller knowledge of that reign of law which formed a part of the religious consciousness of the poets of ancient Israel. Science speaks to us of the insignificance of man beside the illimitable greatness of the universe of which he is ever striving to gain some knowledge, and trains us to revere the majesty of laws which he can only imperfectly apprehend. Yet it is well known how sadly one great leader of modern science regretted that in his old age he was no longer able to know the feeling of the beauty and majesty of the Alpine landscape which had so often helped him in the past, because, as it seemed to him, the habit of scientific analysis had taken from him that simpler sense of the earlier years, the direct consciousness of a beauty he could not explain. So true it is that the child's eyes and the childlike spirit only find the entrance into the Kingdom of Heaven, which is hid to the wise. One must not suppose, indeed, that the closing of this one door into the unseen means that others, too, are shut, or else the lot of the city-dweller would be even worse than it is. Dr. Johnson, kindliest and best [p.89] of townsmen, though he said that to see one green field was to see all green fields, was yet keenly sensitive to many of the lesser sacraments of man's social life; and those who read his prayers and meditations know that the invisible realities were to him no mere object of intellectual belief, but the atmosphere of his inmost thought. Yet it is a thing to be regretted that the habit of scientific research and the ordinary course of town life do too often so mould our faculties as to impede that vision which the contemplation of Nature still brings to the simple heart. The student's loss has its compensations, and may even involve in it an element of the noblest sacrifice; but this cannot be said of the man whose whole life is wrapped up in the making of money and in the pleasures and concerns of conventional urban society. Such men are robbing not only themselves and their families of the things which make life worth living, but a far wider circle; for they are helping to keep in being a civilization which deprives thousands of city children of ever knowing what the sacraments of nature mean. The majority of Londoners have never seen the sun rise, save over smoking chimneys; they have never been able to watch the full moon sailing across the clear blue of a cloudless night; never known a morning filled with the joyous exhilaration of sunlight only dimmed by the mist of the vanishing dew. Still less do such town-dwellers understand of the lonely silence of the night in the [p.90] open country, in which men may feel themselves back again amid the childhood of the race. True, the amber haze of day in London and the flicker of the gas lamps in the streets at night have a beauty of their own; but it is dearly bought if the price must be, at least for the greater part of our poorer men and women, and for almost all the children, so heavy a one as this. The civilization which shuts out from its gaze the vision of the stars may well grow blind to greater mysteries; if men will not listen to the music of the spheres, how should they hear the angel's song?