my
soul, "guide me to a Man, to a door that leads to a Man--a world-lover
or prophet?" Then I fled (I always do after a course of churches) to the
hills from whence cometh strength. David tried to believe this. I do
sometimes, but hills are great, still, coldly companionable, rather
heartless fellows. I know in my heart that all the hills on earth, with
all their halos on them, their cities of leaves, and circles of life,
would not take the place to me, in mystery, closeness, illimitableness,
and wonder--of one man.

And when I turn from the world of affairs and churches, to the world of
scholarship, I cannot say that I find relief. Even scholarship,
scholarship itself, is under a stone most of it, prone and pale and like
all the rest, under The Emphasis of Things. Scholarship is getting to be
a mere huge New York, infinite rows and streets of things, taught by
rows of men who have made themselves over into things, to another row of
men who are trying to make themselves over into things. I visit one
after the other of our great colleges, with their forlorn, lonesome
little chapels, cosy-corners for God and for the humanities, their vast
Thing-libraries, men like dots in them, their great long, reached-out
laboratories, stables for truth, and I am obliged to confess in spirit
that even the colleges, in all ages the strongholds of the human past,
and the human future, the citadels of manhood, are getting to be great
man-blind centres, shambles of souls, places for turning every man out
from himself, every man away from other men, making a Thing of him--or
at best a Columbus for a new kind of fly, or valet to a worm, or tag or
label on Matter.

When one considers that it is a literal, scientific, demonstrable fact
that there is not a single evil that can be named in modern life,
social, religious, political, or industrial, which is not based on the
narrowness and blindness of classes of men toward one another, it is
very hard to sit by and watch the modern college almost everywhere, with
its silent, deadly Thing-emphasis upon it, educating every man it can
reach, into not knowing other men, into not knowing even himself.

VI

The Outsiders

One cannot but look with deep pleasure at first, and with much relief,
upon these healthy objective modern men of ours. The only way out, for
spiritual hardihood, after the world-sick Middle Ages, was a Columbus, a
vast splendid train of Things after him, of men who emphasised