XIV. A Christmas Contemplation: the Mystery of the Logos

Man no longer sees his own living humanity in the divine and spiritual Cosmos, he sees the lifeless work of divine spirit in the earthly world. He sees it at first, not in the abstract form in which we see it to-day, as sensibly physical begins and events, held together by that abstract thread of ideas which we call Natural Law; he sees it as an ocean of divine, spiritual being. In all that he beholds—in the rise and wane of life in the creatures of the animal world, in the growth and budding of the plants, in springing fountain and flowing stream, in the gatherings of wind and cloud—he sees the heaving and falling billows of this ocean of divine, spiritual Being. All these many shapes of life and doing round about him are to him the gestures, the acts, are to him the language of the gods, of that divine Being which underlies the world of ‘Nature.’