This, too, is Baal-worship,
hardly distinguishable in essence from that cruder devotion to the
fructifying and terrifying powers of nature against which the prophets
of Israel made their war. In much that Fiona Macleod has written we feel
the spirit struggling like Samson against its bonds of green withes,
though by no means always able to break them as he did; or lying down in
an earth-bound stupor, content with the world that nature produces and
sustains. Here, among the elemental roots of things, when the heart is
satisfying itself with the passionate life of nature, the red flower
grows in the green life, and the imperative of passion becomes the final
law.
On the other hand, a child of nature may remember that he is also a
child of the spirit; and, even in the Vale Perilous, the spirit may be
an instinctive and faithful guide. Because we love the woods we need not
worship the sacred mistletoe. Because we listen to the sea we need not
reject greater and more intelligible voices of the Word of Life. And the
mention of the sea, and the memory of all that it has meant in Fiona
Macleod's writing, reminds us strangely of that old text, "Born of water
and of the Spirit.
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