as a very learned
magazine published in its behalf, and I heard David Starr Jordan say
no man could tell whether it was a mere jargon of words, meaningless
and empty, or whether monism was the profoundest philosophy the world
has ever known."

"I don't care what you call it," said Adam, stoutly. "I am not afraid
of names, and I don't know anything about any of those religions,
pantheism, Spinozaism, or monism; but I do know I would rather a child
of mine saw God in everything than that he saw God in nothing save his
own narrow creed. I would rather he was a pantheist than a Calvinist.
Spinoza never burned any one, did he, nor preached that hell was paved
with infants' skulls?"

Robin clapped her hands and laughed again. "I beg your pardon for
laughing," she said, "but the idea of Spinoza, the 'God-intoxicated
man,' presiding over an auto-da-fe is too absurd. If you only
remembered anything about his gentle, retiring spirit and melancholy
life; I think he was better known in our time than in his own, but his
philosophy does not satisfy me. I am willing to grant the identity of
life, and its divine possibilities, but I cannot worship it as life
itself, a mere manifestation of nature. I know that there is such a
thing as living rock, and that it may be killed by a bolt of lightning
as readily as a tree; but this does not make it any more worthy of
worship than I am, and that is terribly unworthy. The rock and I are
types of life, stages in the development of life, but for my child
there must be something better. For the child I must lay hold on the
everlasting life; I must find the rock that is higher than I. I do not
know of any manifestation of that life so great, so godlike, and so
lovable as His who said, 'I am the way, the truth, and the life.'"

"But surely you do not believe in the Immaculate Conception?" asked
Adam, incredulously.

"I don't care anything about it, one way or the other. It's the
immaculate life that concerns me. As you said yourself a few minutes
ago, words cannot frighten me. Am I going to stand carping, 'Can any
good come out of Nazareth?' What do I care if it comes out of Sodom
and Gomorrah, if it is good?"

"But you surely don't believe in the miracles?" he asked.

"Surely I do, in some of them at least. I have seen a miracle or so
myself. Besides, if you remember the greatest proof He gave was that
the gospel was preached to the poor. Buddha was a prince; he whom the
Jews expected was t