ded and he went on: "I think that is true,
but with this difference between the illustration you cite and the case
in point. You women must be passionate enthusiasts to win, because the
thing you want is concrete and imminent and personal. I have no
intention of setting up as a _vade mecum_, founding a new cult,
proselyting or even preaching my own doctrines; in the first place I
shall change them as I discover better ones, or when they fail to bring
results, and in the second I shall be too busy practicing my theories to
find time to exploit them."

"There you are wrong," said his sister. "When a man like Jenner comes
along that is the time for practicing, but when smallpox has been rooted
out and tuberculosis forgotten, men will still read what Socrates had to
say of immortality and the sermon on the mount. When you hear people
belittle the written and the spoken Word, it becomes us to remember that
'In the beginning the Word was God,' and all that we know of past
civilizations is the word they have left behind, painted on their stony
walls or burned in a brick to say, 'After me cometh a builder. Tell him
I too have known.'"

"But, my dear sister," Jack answered, "don't you think assuming the role
of the teacher may be just a trifle, only a trifle, presumptuous on my
part?"

"I don't quite know what your new views are," she answered.

"They are not new," he said. "In fact they are most of them of such
hoary antiquity that they are lost in the mists that brooded over the
face of the deep. It is only the application that is new. Even that has
always been understood by certain great souls. Pythagoras is said to
have taught the Greeks to believe in metempsychosis for the purpose of
making them kinder to lesser forms of life; like many beauty worshipers
they were frankly inhuman, and it took heroic measures to create even a
glimmering perception of the unity of life which is the basis of all the
great world religions, whether it be Buddha's 'Who hurteth another
hurteth himself,' or Christ's commandment, 'Love one another'; the Yogi
looking first at the prince and then at the pauper and saying, 'I am
that,' or Father Damien going into voluntary exile for the sake of the
souls of the wretched lepers. The Prince of Peace preached the doctrine
of spiritual inspiration, and the King of Conquerors said 'Imagination
rules the world.' Jesus or Napoleon--both knew that back of the visible
man himself is the thought of the man,