rom me the joy of living here in the
green valleys of this present world!" Was such a prayer more selfish than
the sobbing petitions of the penitents there about the church-rail, asking
for heavenly peace? I have peace already, the ancient peace of the forests
as sweet as the breath of God. I ask for no more.

You see, dear "Spirit of gloom," that I have sent you all my little
scriptures in return for your "malignant mutterings." My God is a pastoral
Divinity, while yours is a terrible Mystery, hidden behind systems of
philosophy, vanishing before Eastern mysticism into an insensate Nirvana,
revealing ways of escape too awful to contemplate. I could not survive the
thoughts of such a God for my own. I am _His_ heathen. By the way, did you
ever think what an unmanageable estate that is--"And I will give you the
heathen for your inheritance"?

XIII

PHILIP TO JESSICA

MY DEAR MISS DOANE:

What mental blindness led me to give you such a book? What demon of
perversity tempted you to send me such a review of Miss Addams's
Hull-House heresies? You know my abhorrence of our "kind-hearted
materialism" (so you call it), yet you calmly write me a long panegyric on
this last outbreak of humanitarian unrighteousness--unrighteousness, I
say, vaunting materialism, undisciplined feminism, everything that denotes
moral deliquescence. Of course I see the good, even the wise, things that
are in the book, but why didn't you expose the serpent that lurks under
the flowers?

As a matter of fact, what is good in the book is old, what is bad is new.
Do you suppose that this love of humanity which has practically grown into
the religion of men,--do you suppose that this was not known to the world
before? The necessity of union and social adhesion was seen clearly enough
in the Middle Ages. The notion that morality, in its lower working at
least, is dependent on a man's relation to the community, was the basis of
Aristotle's Ethics, who made of it a catchword with his _politikon zoon_
(your father will translate it for you as "a political animal"). The
"social compunction" is as ancient as the heart of man. How could we live
peacefully in the world without it? Literature has reflected its existence
in a thousand different ways. Here and there it will be found touched with
that sense of universal pity which we look upon as a peculiar mark of its
present manifestation. In that most perfect of all Latin passages does not
Virgil call