ns. These facts are
viewed in the tale as such people might well view them. And yet the
issues involved are, like all the problems of young lovers, issues
that are bound up with all the interests of religion and with the
whole problem of the reality of a spiritual world. These issues are
treated as they truly are, with a result that is fairly supernatural
in its ancient but always new appeal to a source of insight that we
can reach only through sorrow.

Since the question inevitably concerns the prospects of the proposed
marriage, the first statement of the problem is fully in harmony with
the spirit of recent pragmatism. The truth of the assertion: "We ought
to marry," is surely a truth that, as the pragmatists would say, the
young lovers who make the assertion should regard as quite inseparable
from the probable results to which this marriage will lead in concrete
life. Such a truth then is, one would say, wholly empirical. A
marriage proposal, to use the favourite phrase of pragmatism, is a
"working hypothesis." Such hypotheses must be submitted to the test of
experience. No such test, it would seem, would be absolute. What does
poor humanity know as to the real values of our destiny? Meanwhile the
whole problem of good and evil is in question. Marriage, especially
under certain conditions, will lead to one or another sorrow. Can one
face {243} sorrow with any really deeper trust in life? Is life really
a good at all, since there is so much sorrow in it? Must not any
prudent person be afraid of life? Ought the lovers to defy fortune and
to ignore obvious worldly prudence?

Such is the first statement of the problem. Its treatment in this
admirable sketch shows an insight into the nature of good and evil
which I had myself come to regard as very little present to the minds
of the story-tellers of to-day, who are so often dominated by the
recent love of power, by the tedious blindness of modern
individualism, by false doctrines as to the merely temporal expediency
of truth, and by the merely glittering show of unspiritual worldly
efficiency. I rejoice to find that, in a literature which has been, of
late, so devastated by a popularly trivial interpretation of
pragmatism, and by an equally trivial disregard for the "rule of
reason," there is still place for so straightforward and practical a
recognition of eternal truth as the wise woman who has written this
short story exemplifies.

The issue regarding this particu