The Birmingham age-herald., 1924-06-06
Our Star
By DIR. FRANK CRANE

l From the most remote antiquity there has been a belief, or call it a suspicion or a fancy, that stars have relations to and influ. ences upon souls.
 | When Wordsworth made the phrase, The soul that rises in us our lifes star" he struck chord full of the overtones of the centuries,
 The scholars of a thousand years studies, classified, and applied the laws of star in fluence as if it were fact Every king had his astrologers The fancy grew that those myriad points of light in the sky were but each one a twin with some human creature, that every souls fate and future lay somewhere bound up with some one of those twinklng indices upon the page of night.
 Reduced to plain English, the idea under lying all this is that some will or powers in the unknown around about me moves me as a pawn upon the chessboard and determines the events of my life.
 | It is, an instinctive attempt to find req son and order in the apparent haphazard of earthly happenings; it is the effort of the mind to rationalize the universe.
 We shall probably never be able to mas ter the secret of why things happen, but to the last day of time humanity will refuse to believe that things happen for no reason at all. Intelligence simply cannot conceive of q world whose god is chance 1 like to think of my star, though know it to he only a pretty fancy. like it, first, because I love to taste the creed of the past, of other times and men; it seems to make me a brother to them
 Somewhere there in the lovely clusters that hang like grapes of light in the ardor of infinite night somewhere is my star a little pulsing soul there in that nebulous number even as I am here among the nebulae of earth's millions
 | It moves me, has my program. Being nearer God (who sitteth in the circle of the heavens) than l. it better understands His plans; so it is leading me, in it's own way of angel wisdom, up to God, up to the divine stature to be mine. To this end He writes each day what is to happen to me- now q surprise of pleasure, now a grief, now a thrill of success, now the dull pain of failure.
 It's mind is not to make me happy. Souls that see must understand that they would starve upon diet of nothing but happiness. Its mind is to make me starlike, to work some stellar majesty into this fretful earth mess.
 | No one can prove any of this. It is a matter that lies too deep in the secrets of life for intellect to handle.
 Perhaps it is but the intertia of centuries of superstition. Very well I am content to feel in me the spiritual inheritance of my race. Perhaps it is truer than the intellec- tual stuff bequeathed me.
 But 1 believe it is a matter of instinct. pure, primal instinct, that bears the soul of men in it's highest moods, to the feeling that in some way it is led.
 do not want to be negligible dust grain blown by the winds of chance, either here among men or hereafter among stars
 Is not every religion the attempt of the parent chaos; to realize that the destiny souls instinct to establish order out of ap- about it, as well as the thought life within | it. is purposeful, intelligent, reasonable?
 We mean all that we say--God.