from the time the first hominid looked up at the stars and was amazed by them, a sweet savor has been rising from this earth, every part of it—a silent music worthy of God’s pleasure. What we have expressed, compared with what we have found no way to express, is overwhelmingly the lesser part. Loyalties and tendernesses that we are scarcely aware of might seem, from a divine perspective, the most beautiful things in creation, even in their evanescence. Such things are universally human. They forbid the distinctions “us” and “them.” We do not know what we obliterate when we drop a bomb. And
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