. With all that was beautiful and true in the myths dear to
mankind it did not conflict, annulling only the vicious dogmatism of
literal interpretation. In this connection I remembered something that
Krebs had said--in our talk about poetry and art,--that these were
emotion, religion expressed by the tools reason had evolved. Music, he
had declared, came nearest to the cry of the human soul....

That theology cleared for faith an open road, made of faith a reasonable
thing, yet did not rob it of a sense of high adventure; cleansed it of
the taints of thrift and selfish concern. In this reaffirmation of
vitalism there might be a future, yes, an individual future, yet it was
far from the smug conception of salvation. Here was a faith conferred by
the freedom of truth; a faith that lost and regained itself in life; it
was dynamic in its operation; for, as Lessing said, the searching after
truth, and not its possession, gives happiness to man. In the words of an
American scientist, taken from his book on Heredity, "The evolutionary
idea has forced man to consider the probable future of his own race on
earth and to take measures to control that future, a matter he had
previously left largely to fate."

Here indeed was another sign of the times, to find in a strictly
scientific work a sentence truly religious! As I continued to read these
works, I found them suffused with religion, religion of a kind and
quality I had not imagined. The birthright of the spirit of man was
freedom, freedom to experiment, to determine, to create--to create
himself, to create society in the image of God! Spiritual creation the
function of cooperative man through the coming ages, the task that was to
make him divine. Here indeed was the germ of a new sanction, of a new
motive, of a new religion that strangely harmonized with the concepts of
the old--once the dynamic power of these was revealed.

I had been thinking of my family--of my family in terms of Matthew--and
yet with a growing yearning that embraced them all. I had not informed
Maude of my illness, and I had managed to warn Tom Peters not to do so. I
had simply written her that after the campaign I had gone for a rest to
California; yet in her letters to me, after this information had reached
her, I detected a restrained anxiety and affection that troubled me.
Sequences of words curiously convey meanings and implications that
transcend their literal sense, true thoughts and feelings are d