id of inspiration and poetry, though poetry might be
called its complement. 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 implica