re not advanced beings.

[Illustration: I'd hate to be a wild animal]

The test of a civilized person is first self-awareness, and then depth
after depth of sincerity in self-confrontation. "Unhealthy?" Why,
certainly! "Risky?" Yes; like all exploring. But unless you are capable
of this kind of thinking, what are you? No matter how able or great, you
are still with the animals.

Here and there is a person who achieves this in ways of his own. Not
through brain-work alone, or most surely, can insight be won. A few have
by nature a true yet instinctive self-knowledge. But that takes a pure
soul. The tricks of self-deceiving are too many and ingenious for most
of us....

Speaking of pure souls reminds me of the editor of the Outlook, good old
Lyman Abbott, although his is unfortunately the kind that is tastelessly
pure. He's as wholesome and good as oatmeal is, but the salt was left
out. An excellent person but wingless; not stupid, but dull.
Yet--there's something about him--he has an attractive integrity. He
puts on no airs. He is simple, unpretentious, and he's so
straightforward he makes me respect him.

Many people respect Lyman Abbott. Yet I was surprised to. Well, I had
the Rollo books given to me, as a child; I had to read them on Sundays;
and the author of those awful volumes was Lyman Abbott's father. He
wrote books for the young. People who write books for the young are a
tribe by themselves, and little did I suppose I should ever live to
respect one.

Rollo was a Sunday-school boy. Lyman Abbott's a Sunday-school man. He
combines in himself the excellencies and the colorlessness of the
Sunday-school atmosphere. When it comes time to group us as sheep or as
goats, I know this, there won't be any question that he is a regular
sheep. No capers for him, except the most innocent capers. No tossing of
that excellent head, no kicking up of his heels. There isn't the
faintest suspicion of goatiness in him.

Yet it's strange he's so hopeless: he likes certain forms of adventure.
He was a bill-collector once. And when Kansas was being settled so
bloodily, in our slavery days, he felt wishful to go there. He once did
some detective work too, and he greatly enjoyed it. But his tastes are
all heavily flavored with moral intentions.

"My recreations," he says in his book, "I took rather seriously. I
neither danced nor played cards, and after I joined the church very
rarely went to the theater." He liked music, liked