housewife thought we might stay.

"

The horse

more than the rider appeared to win her. But she said we must wait "until the old man comes," and the old man said no, he wasn't "fixed to keep strangers." We did not tell him that the needed "fixtures were missing on the inside. Another and another "no" followed, and the two tired travellers climbed the hill out of that valley as darkness was settling down upon it, with the lines of the missionary hymn forcing themselves into the mind of one of the travellers,

That night I slept in a trundle-bed in a Norwegian log house, and found next morning that three or four of the white-headed children had slept on the floor that I might have a bed. At breakfast the good woman urged me to take more molasses. She didn't want to take any pay, because she wasn't "fixed to keep strangers.' I could not tell her how much ampler were her accommodations than those of the crusty farmer with the big barn and the white house, how much wealthier she was than he.

But what is the chief lesson of this vacation

ride? Simply this: There is much life all about us that we fail to realize. To teach us to appreciate and utilize the resources of this life is the mission of religion. We need help to realize the bigness of the world. We perhaps have dwelt too long upon the inconceivable stretches of Astronomy. We have tried to fix in our

minds the distance between us and the sun. This should not exclude from our minds that higher realization of the wealth there is in the spaces which we can traverse. From Chicago to Spring Green by train is only a night's sleep, but from Chicago to Spring Green on horseback is a week full of miles, each mile of which sustains its quota of marvellous life. From Chicago to Spring Green by country road the way is lined with hundreds of schoolhouses and scores of churches, with probably a graveyard once in every six miles or less. Every quarter of a mile, or oftener, there is a home, and in these homes babes are born, children wail, and mothers weep. Around these homes cluster the hopes of spring and the disappointments of autumn, the strain of summer and the solitudes of winter. Between Chicago and Spring Green I passed through some thirty villages with their

clustered groups of workmen and workwomen, and the road I traversed is only one of the countless two-hundred-mile stretches that radiate from Chicago. Perhaps realizing the extent and content of one such route, feeling the mystery of it, letting its pains and joys, its past and present, touch one with awe, may bring God nearer, make revelation a reality and inspiration a fact of inward experience more successfully than would a course in a divinity school, and may prove a greater help to piety than knowing all about the Hebrew kings or being able to read the New Testament in the original Greek.

But marvellous and awe-inspiring as is such a stretch of space, it is still empty and barren compared to the still greater stretches that reach through any human life. It was a greater distance from the cradle of that simple schoolteacher to the schoolroom than it is from Chicago to Spring Green, or even to Boston, with the Hudson River and Berkshire Hills thrown in. There are greater alternations of heights and depths, thirsting sands and blooming flowers, in the life of that unsophisticated little "schoolma'am" not yet out of her teens than nature has to give anywhere in her geological or geo

graphical formations. The difficult thing to do is to realize, not only the extent but the variety and the beauty that are packed away within the reach of anybody, within the being of everybody.

The people of the West have heard a great deal about the monotony of western scenery. They have learned in their blindness to concede that their prairies are "stale, flat, and unprofitable" save for the purposes of pasturing cattle and raising corn. I have no reflections to make or comparisons to institute. Let not the hands say to the feet, "I have no need of you," nor the feet to the head, "I have no need of you." I simply say that the primal mission of religion is to bring a realizing sense of the world-the world of matter and of mind revealed around and within us wherever we may be, and that in proportion as we realize it we touch the hem of immensity, we are embowered in variety, we find things so interlocked, so blended, that beauty breaks upon us everywhere. The central thing in Emerson's philosophy of life is found in his oft-repeated protest against the habit of mind which is always seeking glory and beauty in some distant place, always reaching for remote revelations of nature and of God. "Why go to Italy,"

he says, "to see a sunset that you can see from your own kitchen door?" I suspect that this is the central thing in religion also, a realizing sense of the fulness of earth, an apprehension of the pregnant life that makes metropolitan to some order of living beings the oak leaf, that populates the hillock with communities which in their own way live in Parisian splendor; that recognizes in the matted sward, the pebbled beach, and slaty hill-top a carpet more exquisitely inwrought than the rarest of Persian rugs, a tessellated pavement a thousand times more varied and exquisite than any found in Roman hall or Pompeian villa.

"What a great thought of God was that when he thought a tree," says Ruskin. And a noble elm in a pasture, that beckons to its shelter with its pendulous branches, is as direct a projection out of the heart and mind of God as are the elms on Boston Common. If the one does not summon us to the silent litanies of nature's worship, we shall waste much of our vacation money in travelling to see the other. If the voice of the Lord is not heard in the Wisconsin pine tree by him who walks beneath it, he will hear but a faint echo of that voice in the cedars of Leb