significant of a closer approach to the understanding of spiritual
things than that which has been made along these lines.

To all the generations before our own matter was a sheer and positive
density. Its hardness, solidity, and actuality could not be gainsaid.
Earth was earth; iron was iron; wood was wood. Blood was blood; flesh
was flesh; bone was bone. A man was a material being attached to a
material planet, as a sponge is attached to the bottom of the sea. All
that he touched and ate and wore and used was of the same material
Absolute. As to the spiritual there could be a question; as to the
material there could be none. The speculation of occasional
philosophers, that matter might not after all be more than a mental
phenomenon, was invariably hooted down. "I know that matter is matter by
standing on it," are in substance the words attributed to even so
spiritually-minded a man as the great Dr. Johnson. On this point, as
perhaps on some others, he may be taken as a spokesman for the Caucasian
portion of our race.

And now comes modern physical science reducing matter to a tenuousness
only one remove from the purely spiritual, if it is as much as that.
Gone is the mass of the mountains, the stoniness of rocks, the hard
solidity of iron. The human body, as someone puts it, is no more than a
few pails of water and a handful of ash. Ash and water are alike
dissipated into gases, and gases into elements more subtle still.
Keeping strictly to the material modern science has reached the confines
of materiality. Where it will lead us next no man knows.

But the inference is not unfair that the world of matter is to a
considerable degree, and perhaps altogether, a world of man's own
creation. That is to say, while God is doing one thing with it, the