The words we now address to the unseen powers may be vague and universal, but the words they are said to address to us are parochial and even private.
While the Higher Thought Centre would widen worship everywhere to a temple not made with hands, the Psychical Research Society is conducting practical experiments round a haunted house.
Men may become cosmopolitans, but ghosts remain patriots.
Men may or may not expect an act of healing to take place at a holy well, but nobody expects it ten miles from the well; and even the sceptic who comes to expose the ghost-haunted churchyard has to haunt the churchyard like a ghost.

There may be something faintly amusing about the idea of demi-gods with door-knockers and dinner tables, and demons, one may almost say, keeping the home fires burning.

But the driving force of this dark mystery of locality is all the more indisputable because it drives against most modern theories and associations.
The truth is that, upon a more transcendental consideration, we do not know what place is any more than we know what time is.
We do not know of the unknown powers that they cannot concentrate in space as in time, or find in a spot something that corresponds to a crisis.

And if this be felt everywhere, it is necessarily and abnormally felt in those alleged holy places and sacred spots.
It is felt supremely in all those lands of the Near East which lie about the holy hill of Zion.
In these lands an impression grows steadily on the mind much too large for most of the recent religious or scientific definitions.
The bogus heraldry of Haeckel is as obviously insufficient as any quaint old chronicle tracing the genealogies of English kings through the chiefs of Troy to the children of Noah.

There is no difference, except that the tale of the Dark Ages can never be proved, while the travesty of the Darwinian theory can sometimes be disproved.
But I should diminish my meaning if I suggested it as a mere score in the Victorian game of Scripture versus Science.
Some much larger mystery veils the origins of man than most partisans on either side have realised; and in these strange primeval plains the traveller does realise it.