In this religion of the open, I have come to understand and gather peace from the whispering voices and even the silence of all God-loving things. I have learned to love trees, and there are times when I put my hands on them because I love them, and rest my head against them because they are comrades and their comradeship and their might give me courage. There is a gnarled old cripple of an oak in the yard of my Michigan home, a broken and twisted dwarf which many people have told me to destroy. But that tree and I have “talked over” many things together; it has pointed out to me how to stand up under adversity, has shown me how to put up a man’s fight. For, eaten to the heart, a deformity among its kind, each spring and summer saw it making its valiant struggle to “do its best.” It was then I became its friend, gave it a helping hand, stopped its decay and death, and each season now the old oak is stronger, and often I go out and sit with my back against it, and I hear and understand its voice, and I know that it is a great friend that will never do me wrong.

It is thus that this religion of mine finds its strength from the sources of great and unknown power. But before it comes in all its peace and joy, man must bring down his head from out of the clouds of egoism, and say, “The oak is as great as I – perhaps greater.”

Not long ago, it seemed to me that my world had gone dark and that it would never grow completely light again. In perhaps the darkest hour, I flung myself down upon the ground close to the bank of a stream. And then, close over my head – so close I could have tossed a pebble to it – a warbler near burst its little throat in song. And the miracle of it was that it was a dark and sunless day. But the warbler sang, and then he chirped in the boughs above; and when I looked at the ground beside me again, I saw there, peeping up at me out of the grass, a single violet. And the bird and the violet gave me more courage and cleared my world for me more than all the human friends who had told me they were sorry. The violet said, “I am still here; you will never lose me,” and the little warbler said, “I will always sing – through all the years you live.” And stronger than ever came the faith in me that these things were no more an accident of creation than man himself.

Once I saw this Great Doctor of mine a burning, vibrant force in a room of a crowded tenement, from the roof of which one could not see a blade of grass or a tree. In fact, that force filled three rooms, in which lived a man and woman and five children. I spent an hour in those rooms on a Sunday afternoon, and the experience of that hour in a hot and crowded tenement was a mightier sermon than was ever preached to me in the heart of a forest. At every window was a box in which green stuff was growing. There were flowers in pots. A pair of canary-birds looked down upon the smoky roofs of a great city and sang. What interested me most was two contrivances the man had made to force oats into swift germination and growth. In a week, he told me, the green sprout of an oat would be two inches long. Then I saw why they were grown. Several times while I was there would a dove come to a window and wait for a bit of the green. I could see they were different doves. They told me at least a dozen were accustomed to come in that way. They were the children’s pets. A little baby in arms cooed at them and waved his arms in delight. I have seen many poor tenement families, but that, I think, was the only happy one. The singing of the birds, the coming of the doves, the growing of green things in their room were their inspiration, their hope, the promise of dreams that would some day come true. Nature had become their religion, and yet they did not know it as such. It was calling them out into the great open spaces – and they were living in anticipation of that day when they would answer the call.

Because I have spent much of my time in adventuring in distant wildernesses, and exploring where other men have not gone, it has been accepted by many that my love for nature means a love for the distant and, for most people, the inaccessible wilds. It is true that in the vast and silent places one comes nearer, perhaps, to the deeper truths of life. Of the wild and its miracles I love to write, and when I come to that part of my story, I shall possibly be happiest. But I would be unfair to myself, and the religion of nature itself, if the great truth were not first emphasized that its treasures are to be possessed by mankind wherever one may turn – even in a prison cell. I was personally in touch with one remarkable instance of this in the Michigan State Penitentiary, at Jackson, where a canary-bird and a red geranium saved a man from madness and eventually gained him a pardon, sending him out into the world a living being with a new and better religion than he had ever dreamed of before.

But the open skies and the free air were intended from the beginning of things as the greatest gifts to man, and it is there, if one is sick in body or soul, that one should seek. Whether it is a mile or a thousand miles from a city makes little difference. For nature is the universal law. It is everywhere. It is neither mystery nor mysterious. Its pages are open; its life is vibrant with the desire to be understood. The one miracle is for man to bring himself down out of the clouds of his egoism and replace his passion for destruction with the desire to understand.

I have in mind a case in point.

I had a very dear friend, a newspaper man, whose wife had died. I don’t know that I ever saw a man more utterly broken up, for his love for her was more than love. It was worship. He grew faded and thin, and a gray patch over his temple turned white. The mightiest efforts of his friends could do nothing. He wanted to be alone, alone in his home, where he could grieve himself to death by inches. I knew that his case was harder because he was merely tolerant of religion. One day, the idea came to me that resulted in his spiritual and physical salvation. I took him in my auto, and we went out into the country four or five miles, opened a gate, drove down a long lane, and stopped at the edge of a forty-acre wood.

“Fred, I am going to show you a wonderful city,” I said. “Come with me – quietly.”

We climbed over the fence, and I led him to the heart of the wood, and there we sat down, with our backs to a log.

“Now, just to humor me, be very still,” I said. “Don’t move, don’t speak – just listen.”

It was three o’clock in the afternoon, that wonderful time of a summer day when nature seems to rouse herself from midday slumber to fill the world with her rustling life. The sun fell slantwise through the wood, and here and there, under the roofs of the trees, we could see golden pools and streams of it on the cool earth.

“This is one of the most wonderful cities in the world,” I whispered, “and there are hundreds and thousands of such cities, some of them within the reach of all.”

The musical ripple of a creek came to our ears. And then, slowly at first, there came upon my friend the wonder of it all. He understood – at last. About us, through all that forty acres of wood, the air seemed to whisper forth a strange and wonderful life. Over our heads, we heard a grating sound. It was a squirrel gnawing through the shell of a last autumn’s nut. On an old stub, a woodpecker hammered. Close about us were the “cheep, cheep, cheep,” and “twit, twit, twit,” of little brown brushbirds. A warbler burst suddenly into a glorious snatch of song. A quarter of a mile away, a crow cawed, and between us and the crow we heard a fox-squirrel barking, and, a little later, saw it, with its mate, scrambling in play up and down the trees. My friend caught my arm and pointed. He was becoming interested, and what he saw was a fat young woodchuck passing near us on a foraging expedition to a neighboring clover field.

For an hour we did not move, and through all that city was the drone and voice of life, and that life was a soft and wonderful song, soothing one almost to sleep. And when, at last, my friend whispered again, “It sounds as though everything is talking,” I knew that the spirit of the thing had got into him. Then I drew his attention to a colony of big black ants whose fortress was in the log against which we were resting. They were working. Two of them were trying to drag a dead caterpillar over my friend’s knee. When we rose to go, I led him past a little swale in which a score of blackbirds had bred their young. On a slender willow, a bobolink was singing. A land-turtle lumbered back into the water, and the bright eyes of green-headed frogs stared at us from patches of scum. Under a bush, a score of toads were teaching their tiny youngsters to swim. When my friend saw the little fellows clinging to their mothers’ backs, he laughed – the first time in many months.

When we went back to the car, I said:

“You have seen just one ten-thousandth of what nature holds for you and every other man and woman. You haven’t believed in God very strongly. But you’ve got to now. That’s God back there in the wood.”

That was four years ago. To-day, that man not only lives in the heart of nature but, from a special assignment man, he has risen to the managing editorship of a big metropolitan daily. He has only his summer vacation in which to get out into the big woods, but he has made room for nature all about him. From early spring until late autumn, his front and back yard fairly burst with life. And it is not, like most yards, merely for show and passing pleasure to the eyes. He has brought himself down out of the clouds of man’s egoism, and is learning and taking strength from nature – which he now worships as the great “I am.” He has developed a hobby for “interbreeding plants,” as he calls it, and especially gladioli. Each morning in spring and summer and autumn, he goes out into his garden, and, from the thousand living things there, he receives strength for his nerve-racking duties of the day; and at night, after his task is done, he returns to his garden to seek that peace which is the great and vibrant force of the life that is there. During the months of winter, he has his little conservatory. And this man – for more than thirty years – hardly knew whether an oak grew from an acorn or a seed!

Yet has he one great regret. And more than once he has said to me, with that grief in his voice which will never quite die out: “If we had only found these things before, she would be with me now. I am convinced of it. It was this strength she needed to keep her from fading away – to build her up into joyous life again. Sometimes I wonder why the Great Power that is above did not let her live to go into the wood with us that day.”

Hours have passed since I first sat down to write these thoughts that were in my mind. The storm has passed, and, following it, there has come a marvelous silence. Both my door and window are open, and there is rare sweetness in the breath of the rain-washed air. I can hear the near-by trees dripping. The creek runs with a louder ripple. The moon is shimmering through the fleecy clouds that are racing south and east – toward my “civilized” home, fifteen hundred miles away. Over all this world of mine there is, just now, a vast and voiceless quiet. And if I were superstitious, or filled with the imagination of some of the prophets of old, I am sure I would hear a Voice speaking out of that mighty solitude, and it would say:

“O you mortal, blind – blind as the rocks which make up the mountains!

“Blind as the trees which you think have neither ears nor eyes!

“Made to see, yet unseeing; making mystery out of that which was born with you; seeking – yet seeking afar for that which lies close at hand!

“You want peace. You go in quest of a Breast mightier than all life to rest thy tired head upon. And thy quest is like the drifting of a ship without a rudder at sea. For you think that the world is young because thou livest in it now – and it is old, so old that thousands and tens of thousands of peoples lived and died before Christ was born. You think that civilization has come to pass, and ‘civilization’ has died a thousand times under the dust of the ages. You believe you are treading the only path to God – yet have a million billion people died before you, unknowing the religions which you now know.

“O you mortals of to-day, you are small and near-sighted, and hard of hearing – even more than they who lived a million years before you, when the world was an hour or two younger than now!

“What are you? Proud of thy purse, vain of thy power, conceited in thy self-glorification – yet you seek a simple thing and cannot find it. You cannot find rest. You cannot find faith. You cannot find understanding. You cannot find that Breast mightier than all life upon which to rest thy head when the end comes and when you go to join those trillions who have gone before you.

“And, in your despair, you cry out that you know not which way to turn, that you seek in darkness, that the world is a wilderness of schisms and religions, and that you cannot tell which is the right and which is the wrong. For you know that worlds have lived and died through the eons of centuries before Christianity was born. And you are oppressed by doubt even as you grope!

“Yet you know deep in thy soul that the heavens were not an accident. You know that hundreds and thousands of worlds greater than thine own have traveled their paths in space for eternities. You know that the sun was set in the skies so long ago that all the people of the earth could not count the years of its life. And you know that a Great Hand placed it there. And that Hand, you say, was God.

“Yet you seek – and you seek – and you seek – and doubt everlastingly clouds thine eyes; and when darkness comes and you stand at the edge of the Great Beyond, you look back, and – lo! – the path you have traveled seems very short, and it is cluttered with brambles and thorns and the wreckage of shattered hopes and wasted years.

“And then you see the Light!

“And, as thy spirit departs, the mystery unveils – the answer comes.

“For that which you sought, you looked too far. Close under thy feet and close over thy head might you have found it!”