m the Earth', and some
notes he had made for future chapters on infant damnation and other
distinctive features of orthodox creeds. He told an anecdote of an
old minister who declared that Presbyterianism without infant
damnation would be like the dog on the train that couldn't be
identified because it had lost its tag.

Somewhat on the defensive I said, "But we must admit that the so-
called Christian nations are the most enlightened and progressive."

He answered, "Yes, but in spite of their religion, not because of
it. The Church has opposed every innovation and discovery from the
day of Galileo down to our own time, when the use of anesthetics in
child-birth was regarded as a sin because it avoided the biblical
curse pronounced against Eve. And every step in astronomy and
geology ever taken has been opposed by bigotry and superstition.
The Greeks surpassed us in artistic culture and in architecture five
hundred years before the Christian religion was born.

"I have been reading Gibbon's celebrated Fifteenth Chapter," he said
later, "and I don't see what Christians found against it. It is so
mild--so gentle in its sarcasm." He added that he had been reading
also a little book of brief biographies and had found in it the
saying of Darwin's father, "Unitarianism is a featherbed to catch
falling Christians."

"I was glad to find and identify that saying," he said; "it is so
good."

He finished the evening by reading a chapter from Carlyle's French
Revolution--a fine pyrotechnic passage--the gathering at Versailles.
I said that Carlyle somehow reminded me of a fervid stump-speaker
who pounded his fists and went at his audience fiercely, determined
to convince them.

"Yes," he said, "but he is the best one that ever lived."

November 10. This morning early he heard me stirring and called. I
went in and found him propped up with a book, as usual. He said:

"I seldom read Christmas stories, but this is very beautiful. It
has made me cry. I want you to read it." (It was Booth
Tarkington's 'Beasley's Christmas Party'.) "Tarkington has the true
touch," he said; "his work always satisfies me." Another book he
has been reading with great enjoyment is James Branch Cabell's
Chivalry. He cannot say enough of the subtle poetic art with which
Cabell has flung the light of rom