incident to the use of his excellent sacramental means! In this our reader need not follow the Red man. What a wonderful thing it is, indeed, to conceive, as modern intelligent people do, of all things in terms of vital process! The world is evolution, is a bursting bud. Are we prepared to say that we put it better for the religious spirit of our times than did the Norseman when he conceived of the world-Ash, its tap root down in inscrutable Reality reaching to the Roaring Cauldron, the fount of the yawning Abyss, the well of the unknown future? its other two roots reaching, the one to the past, to be watered by historic experience, and the other into eternal principles, prehistoric yet ever present? Can we express it better than to say that the worldAsh rises into the home of the Gods through the region of expanding Stillness, where shine as the stars the heroes of the human race? The whole Symbol with all its manifold minor suggestiveness can hardly fail to arouse religious awe. Stray leaves blown loose by the winds in the upper heaven from the branches of the world-Ash flutter down to us on earth through stratum after stratum of white cloud and blue sky, until we pick up some single leaf and, examining its texture, its veining, its outline edges, its color, we look up toward the invisible boughs whence it came: Ygdrasil, the cosmic tree, planted ere the beginning of time by the unknowable All-Father. Such stray leaves are offered in this anthology. Is it too much to ask the reader to help the editor by making this publication of practical use, by calling it to the attention of those of the children of God he or she may know, who are susceptible to the appeal of the great body of inspired literature which it modestly undertakes to represent? In so far as he does so, the reader will have a part in the good work of facilitating popular access to sources of perpetual refreshment and pentecostal inspiration. PAGE 3 6 10 12 131 17 23 29 33 132 134 TABLE OF CONTENTS Hiranyagarbha Pragatya's Hymn to the Unknown Creator. A Zarathustrian Te Deum (Zarathustra's Prayer)... St. Patrick's Breastplate, or Hymn before Tara. St. Francis of Assisi's Canticle of the Sun... Notes (November Issue)....... SPECIMENS OF AMERICAN ABORIGINAL RELIGION: Hymn to Wakonda, the Thunder God of Mystery. Pawnee Ritual of the Heroic Change of Name Notes (October Issue)... Notes (January Issue). GOD IN AMERICAN HISTORY: Office for American Holy Days in the words of our Statesmen |