Editorial October 22, 1904 Issue

"The trees are crowned with glory"

Who can ever forget the joys of a perfect autumnal day! To stand under oaks and maples that revel in hues for which even a Veronese, a Dolci, and a Murillo have vainly striven, and, looking up and beyond, to drink in the delicious flood of tinted light that is sifted out of cerulean depths, — this is to enter the treasure-house of the sun. It is to find one's own explanation for the "wood-mania" of a Thoreau and a Burroughs, and with them pleasures which yield only blessing, for in them the beautiful is the good.

Even they who are neither poets nor artists may sense the pervading charm of that genuineness, that unpretentious giving which always makes its appeal as we look upon the flowers, the trees, and the "aspiring hills;" and when the splendors of the sunset are spread upon the earth, so that, as we walk beneath the falling leaves, we are embowered in color; then, indeed, to the spiritually awakened, "the crude forms of human thought take on higher symbols and significations, the scientifically Christian views of the universe" begin to "appear, illuminating time with the glory of eternity" (Science and Health, p. 502). In such a moment our higher education is distinctly advanced through the realization that the truly helpful return of human experience is always found in its suggestiveness. We see that the nobler and only fitting statement of life and its environment is to be made in spiritual terms. With the writer of the Epistle to the Hebrews, we begin to recognize the signs and intimations of that universe "not made of things which do appear."

The gain of this spiritual and poetic interpretation of the interesting and beautiful in nature is an hundred-fold. The things all about us which are of God and ever declare His glory, but which the materially minded, the world's wayfaring, have passed by unheeded, because unperceived, — these come into vision, and we enter upon our inheritance of the only real value of large domains which others may have self-deceivingly fancied to be their exclusive possession. We begin to fellowship with those —

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