dangers when I reviewed Miss Addams's
book? You, too, were a prophet. Let me tell you how it all came about. The
other day I wrote up Mme. Adam's _Romance of My Childhood and Youth_
(Addams and Adam--the name has a fatality for me), and took occasion to
make it the text of a tremendous preachment against our latter-day
Simony,--as well it might be, for Mme. Adam grew up in the thirties and
forties when France was a huge seething caldron in which all these modern
notions were brewing together. And unfortunately we are just beginning now
where France left off a score of years ago. You have already seen the
review, no doubt, and it is superfluous to repeat its argument. But for my
own justification to you I want to quote a few sentences from the book.
You disdained to make any reply to my letter on Lyman Abbott, and I fear
you have grown weary of the whole subject; but certainly you will be
interested in what I am copying out for you now. In one of her chapters,
then, Mme. Adam writes:

Nature, Science, Humanity, are the three terms of initiation. First
comes nature, which rules everything; then the revelations of nature,
revelations which mean science--that is to say, phenomena made clear
in themselves and observed by man; and lastly, the appropriation of
phenomena for useful social purposes.... There is no error in nature,
no perversity in man; evil comes only from society.... He [Mme.
Adam's father] delighted in proving to me that it was useless for man
to seek beyond nature for unattainable chimeras, for the infinite
which our finite conception was unable to understand, and for the
immaterial, which our materiality can never satisfactorily
explain.... They [these humanitarian socialists] resembled my father.
Their doubts--and they had many!--were of too recent a date to have
dried up their souls; _they no longer believed in a divine Christ;
they still believed in a human one_. They worshipped that mysterious
Science, which replaced for them the supernatural, and which had not
then brought all its brutality to light in crushing man under
machinery.

Could anything be more illuminating than that? Does it not set forth the
close cousinship of humanitarianism with socialism and the fungous growth
of the two out of the mouldering ruins of faith and the foul reek of a
sensuous philosophy? And do you not see why any surrender to this modern
cult of human comfort means the indefinite postpone