ndent sense of
good-fellowship that liquor brings.

VII.

The crisis through which I passed at Cambridge, inaugurated by the
events I have just related, I find very difficult to portray. It was a
religious crisis, of course, and my most pathetic memory concerning it
is of the vain attempts to connect my yearnings and discontents with
the theology I had been taught; I began in secret to read my Bible, yet
nothing I hit upon seemed to point a way out of my present predicament,
to give any definite clew to the solution of my life. I was not mature
enough to reflect that orthodoxy was a Sunday religion unrelated to a
world whose wheels were turned by the motives of self-interest; that it
consisted of ideals not deemed practical, since no attempt was made
to put them into practice in the only logical manner,--by reorganizing
civilization to conform with them. The implication was that the
Christ who had preached these ideals was not practical.... There were
undoubtedly men in the faculty of the University who might have helped
me had I known of them; who might have given me, even at that time,
a clew to the modern, logical explanation of the Bible as an immortal
record of the thoughts and acts of men who had sought to do just what
I was seeking to do,--connect the religious impulse to life and make
it fruitful in life: an explanation, by the way, a thousand-fold more
spiritual than the old. But I was hopelessly entangled in the meshes
of the mystic, the miraculous and supernatural. If I had analyzed my
yearnings, I might have realized that I wanted to renounce the life I
had been leading, not because it was sinful, but because it was aimless.
I had not learned that the Greek word for sin is "a missing of the
mark." Just aimlessness! I had been stirred with the desire to perform
some service for which the world would be grateful: to write great
literature, perchance. But it had never been suggested to me that such
swellings of the soul are religious, that religion is that kind of
feeling, of motive power that drives the writer and the scientist, the
statesman and the sculptor as well as the priest and the Prophet to
serve mankind for the joy of serving: that religion is creative, or
it is nothing: not mechanical, not a force imposed from without, but a
driving power within. The "religion" I had learned was salvation from
sin by miracle: sin a deliberate rebellion, not a pathetic missing of
the mark of life; useful serv