said her prayers, you know." He flushed a little over this
confidence into which he had fallen, but he continued: "I like the words
of the service, too, and I don't ask myself over-curiously what I
do believe; but there's a permanent something within us--a Greater
Self--don't you think?"

"A permanent something," I assented, "which has created all the
religions all over the earth from the beginning, and of which
Christianity itself is merely one of the present temples."

He made an exclamation at my word "present."

"Do you think anything in this world is final?" I asked him.

"But--" he began, somewhat at a loss.

"Haven't you found out yet that human nature is the one indestructible
reality that we know?"

"But--" he began again.

"Don't we have the 'latest thing' all the time, and never the
ultimate thing, never, never? The latest thing in women's hats is that
huge-brimmed affair with the veil as voluminous as a double-bed mosquito
netting. That hat will look improbable next spring. The latest thing
in science is radium. Radium has exploded the conservation of energy
theory--turned it into a last year's hat. Answer me, if Christianity is
the same as when it wore among its savage ornaments a devil with horns
and a flaming Hell! Forever and forever the human race reaches out its
hand and shapes some system, some creed, some government, and declares:
'This is at length the final thing, the cure-all,' and lo and behold,
something flowing and eternal in the race itself presently splits the
creed and the government to pieces! Truth is a very marvelous thing. We
feel it; it can fill our eyes with tears, our hearts with joy, it can
make us die for it; but once our human lips attempt to formulate and
thus imprison it, it becomes a lie. You cannot shut truth up in any
words."

"But it shall prevail!" the boy exclaimed with a sort of passion.

"Everything prevails," I answered him.

"I don't like that," he said.

"Neither do I," I returned. "But Jacob got Esau's inheritance by a mean
trick."

"Jacob was punished for it."

"Did that help Esau much?"

"You are a pessimist!"

"Just because I see Jacob and Esau to-day, alive and kicking in Wall
Street, Washington, Newport, everywhere?"

"You're no optimist, anyhow!"

"I hope I'm blind in neither eye."

"You don't give us credit--"

"For what?"

"For what we've accomplished since Jacob."

"Printing, steam, and electricity, for instance? They spread the