remorseful tenderness for this grim, righteous man, now that he had
emancipated mind and conscience from his teaching: so true it often is
that affection is possible only where obedience is not demanded. He
turned off sorrowfully to the counter, and a few moments later, getting
the attention of the clerk, asked in a low conscience-stricken tone for
"The Origin of Species" and "The Descent of Man"; conscience-stricken
at the sight of the money in his palm to pay for them.

"What are you going to do with these?" inquired a Bible student who had
joined him at the counter and fingered the books.

"Read them," said the lad, joyously, "and understand them if I can."

He pinned them against his heart with his elbow and all but ran back to
the dormitory. Having reached there, he altered his purpose and instead
of mounting to his room, went away off to a quiet spot on the campus
and, lying down in the grass under the wide open sky, opened his wide
Darwin.

It was the first time in his life that he had ever encountered outside
of the Bible a mind of the highest order, or listened to it, as it
delivered over to mankind the astounding treasures of its knowledge and
wisdom in accents of appealing, almost plaintive modesty.

That day the lad changed his teachers.

Of the session more than two months yet remained. Every few days he
might have been seen at the store, examining books, drawing money
reluctantly from his pocket, hurrying away with another volume.
Sometimes he would deliver to the clerk the title of a work written on
a slip of paper: an unheard-of book; to be ordered--perhaps from the
Old World. For one great book inevitably leads to another. They have
their parentage, kinship, generations. They are watch-towers in sight
of each other on the same human highway. They are strands in a single
cable belting the globe. Link by link David's investigating hands were
slipping eagerly along a mighty chain of truths, forged separately by
the giants of his time and now welded together in the glowing thought
of the world.

Not all of these were scientific works. Some were works which followed
in the wake of the new science, with rapid applications of its methods
and results to other subjects, scarce conterminous or not even germane.
For in the light of the great central idea of Evolution, all
departments of human knowledge had to be reviewed, reconsidered,
reconceived, rearranged, rewritten. Every foremost scholar of the
world