st_ a belief in Christian Science
to almost a belief that a devil ruled the world, a Gargantuan
Brobdingnagian Mountebank, who plotted tragedy for all ideals and
rejoiced in swine and dullards and a grunting, sweating, beefy
immorality. By degrees his God, if he could have been said to have had
one in his consciousness, sank back into a dual personality or a
compound of good and evil--the most ideal and ascetic good, as well as
the most fantastic and swinish evil. His God, for a time at least, was a
God of storms and horrors as well as of serenities and perfections. He
then reached a state not of abnegation, but of philosophic
open-mindedness or agnosticism. He came to know that he did not know
what to believe. All apparently was permitted, nothing fixed. Perhaps
life loved only change, equation, drama, laughter. When in moments of
private speculation or social argument he was prone to condemn it
loudest, he realized that at worst and at best it was beautiful,
artistic, gay, that, however, he might age, groan, complain, withdraw,
wither, still, in spite of him, this large thing which he at once loved
and detested was sparkling on. He might quarrel, but it did not care; he
might fail or die, but it could not. He was negligible--but, oh, the
sting and delight of its inner shrines and favorable illusions.

And curiously, for a time, even while he was changing in this way, he
went back to see Mrs. Johns, principally because he liked her. She
seemed to be a motherly soul to him, contributing some of the old
atmosphere he had enjoyed in his own home in Alexandria. This woman,
from working constantly in the esoteric depths, which Mrs. Eddy's book
suggests, demonstrating for herself, as she thought, through her belief
in or understanding of, the oneness of the universe (its non-malicious,
affectionate control, the non-existence of fear, pain, disease, and
death itself), had become so grounded in her faith that evil positively
did not exist save in the belief of mortals, that at times she almost
convinced Eugene that it was so. He speculated long and deeply along
these lines with her. He had come to lean on her in his misery quite as
a boy might on his mother.

The universe to her was, as Mrs. Eddy said, spiritual, not material, and
no wretched condition, however seemingly powerful, could hold against
the truth--could gainsay divine harmony. God was good. All that is, is
God. Hence all that is, is good or it is an illusion. It