common racial consciousness. We must all strive to be men beyond
essential harm; else, standing blindly before the meaning and destiny of
the race, we should go mad. Most of us try to think, intellectuals; fear
to abandon ourselves to alarming states of feeling where reason is
crowded to the wall. And yet I feel that by abandoning ourselves
completely to mere feeling lies our only hope to find the logic of the
race that no individual reason can master.

"Let me tell you of something that recently happened to me which shows
how strong this race feeling is, as opposed to merely individual or
family feeling. I heard that my mother was dying. I had become
reconciled long ago, had seen many things more clearly; for if joy is of
the heart, sorrow is of the soul, by which we see. I wonder if woman has
a 'lake' in her heart. I used to think my mother had, and when I called
to see her once more, the old love-longing caught me by the throat. My
presence seemed to help her some, but, though moved, I had passed beyond
the family boundary-line, and was engaged in stripping myself of
everything not belonging to the soul. If I wish to be something more
than myself, I must be prepared to lose all, even myself. And what is my
family and my mother?"

Terry does not like to use the word "religion." But he certainly belongs
to the type of the religious man. One of the most marked characteristics
of the religious temperament is this abandonment of personal and family
ties, this indifference and often hostility to social law, "this
emotional devotion to something intangible." All the anarchists and
social rebels I have known have, more or less, the religious
temperament, although a large part of their activity is employed in
scoffing at and reviling religion--as they think the God of theology has
been largely responsible for the organisation of social and political
injustice. But the deeply religious spirits have often been hostile to
theology, as well as to all other complicated forms of society. Here are
some religious words:

"There must be some meaning," wrote Terry, "for all this ancient agony.
Oh, that I might expand my written words into an Epic of the Slums, into
an Iliad of the Proletaire! If an oyster can turn its pain into a pearl,
then, verily, when we have suffered enough, something must arise out of
our torture--else the world has no meaning. On this theory, all my pangs
are still to come. I too will arise out of my sacrifici