anywhere exists.

The parting of Life's road at Doubt and Faith! How many pilgrim feet
throughout the ages, toiling devoutly thus far, have shrunk back before
that unexpected and appalling sign! Disciples of the living Lord,
saints, philosophers, scholars, priests, knights, statesmen--what a
throng! What thoughts there born, prayers there ended, vows there
broken, light there breaking, hearts there torn in twain! Mighty
mountain rock! rising full in the road of journeying humanity. Around
its base the tides of the generations dividing as part the long racing
billows of the sea about some awful cliff.

The lad closed his note-book, and taking his chair to the window,
folded his arms on the sill and looked out. Soon he noticed what had
escaped him before. Beyond the tree, at the foot of the ash-heap, a
single dandelion had opened. It burned like a steadfast yellow lamp,
low in the edge of the young grass. These two simple things--the locust
leaves, touched by the sun, shaken by the south wind; the dandelion
shining in the grass--awoke in him the whole vision of the spring now
rising anew out of the Earth, all over the land: great Nature! And the
vision of this caused him to think of something else.

On the Sunday following his talk with the lad, the pastor had preached
the most arousing sermon that the lad had heard: it had grown out of
that interview: it was on modern infidelity--the new infidelity as
contrasted with the old.

In this sermon he had arraigned certain books as largely responsible.
He called them by their titles. He warned his people against them. Here
recommenced the old story: the lad was at once seized with a desire to
read those books, thus exhibiting again the identical trait that had
already caused him so much trouble. But this trait was perhaps
himself--his core; the demand of his nature to hear both sides, to
judge evidence, test things by his own reason, get at the deepest root
of a matter: to see Truth, and to see Truth whole.

Curiously enough, these books, and some others, had been much heard of
by the lad since coming to college: once; then several times; then
apparently everywhere and all the time. For, intellectually, they had
become atmospheric: they had to be breathed, as a newly introduced
vital element of the air, whether liked or not liked by the breathers.
They were the early works of the great Darwin, together with some of
that related illustrious group of scientific investigator