NOTE.- Mr. Savage being much worn and needing rest, this sermon will close the series of "Unity Pulpit " for the present season.

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NATURE AND HUMAN NATURE.*

"Speak to the earth, and it shall teach thee."— JOB xii, 8. "My heart and my flesh crieth out for the living God." lxxxiv., 2.

PSALM

We need at the outset to come to an understanding as to what we are to mean by the word "nature." The late Dr. Horace Bushnell some years ago published a somewhat famous work in its time, called Nature and the Supernatural. In that book, he divided the universe into two. Nature was the visible world, excluding God and excluding all possible invisible intelligences, and also, as I understand him, excluding the free agency of man. This is one use of this word "nature."

If we conceive nature as simply a complex mechanism, a system of order, forces acting under the law of cause and effect, and look nowhere beyond phenomena, then, of course, the action of any free intelligence will be regarded as something extra-natural or supernatural. This is the old use of

the word "nature."

If we go back to the root of the word, and study it etymologically, we shall find it to mean that which is born, or that which becomes, that which is made; and so it will cover all created things. In this sense, of course, we shall have this division between nature and the supernatural, between the thing made and the power that made it. And, if we are to regard nature as this complex mechanism of unintelligent force, then man is as supernatural as any invisible intelligence working upon him.

Ordinarily, I think the universe is divided into three the supernatural, the world of nature, and the world of man. I * Phonographically reported by Isabel C. Barrows.

do not believe, philosophically speaking, in dividing it at all in this fashion. I believe that whatever is, whether in the heavens above, or the earth beneath, or wherever we go in all the universe,- that whatever exists, is a part of nature. I do not believe in any power above or outside of things that interferes arbitrarily with the working of those natural forces; but yet, to my mind, this position is not antitheistic. It does not interfere with my faith in God; for I regard natural force working according to law as one manifestation of the method, the habit, so to speak, of the divine Power, that is not only back of and beneath, below and around, all nature, but that is working continually in the midst of and through all nature. And in this definition, also, I would include man; for however we may look upon him, whether we are theists or atheists or agnostics, man is a development of the universe, a product of what we are accustomed to call nature, its highest manifestation, its crowning flower. So that, in this broader use, this word "nature" includes whatever exists.

For the purpose that I have in mind this morning, I shall go back, and stand by the old definition. I shall divide the universe into three parts,-God, the visible world, and man; and I shall speak of the relations of man and nature, and raise the question whether there is in the natural world, without going deeper and higher, without seeking beyond the apparent and the visible, satisfaction for the permanent hungers, the yearnings, the wants, the aspirations of man; and whether the existence of these unsatisfied human hungers, if we find they do exist, these things we want and that other men cannot satisfy,- do give us some reasonable ground for belief that there are underneath all these things the everlasting arms, in which, and in which alone, we may find the rest for which we seek.

After the long winter, when the winds begin to blow warm from the south, and the southward lying snowdrifts are melted, and when all traces and signs of the cold are gone; when the grasses cover the fields, and the leaves are out on the trees, and the whole world is awakened to the