was
highly "religious" then) worked in a self-centred circle. I never
strayed from the deadly taint of some gentle form of egotism. I was then
truly in a "vault." I did things for a system of ethics, not because of
a fine rush of social brotherly intuition. My imagination was ever
concerned with me and my prospects, my salvation. I honestly and soberly
believe that your "high window of the imagination" works out in our
world as such a force for egotism; it is a self-captivating thing, it
divorces man from the plain and bitter realities of life, it brings an
anti-social emancipation to him. I can sincerely make this terrible
charge against the modern world, and that is, that it is its bent
towards mysticism, its blinding itself through hysteria, which makes
possible in its civilization its desperate inequalities of
life-expression, its tortured children, its unhappy men and women, its
wasted potentiality. We have not been humble and asked what is man; we
have not allowed ourselves to weigh sorrow. It is in such a use that our
powers of imagination could be brotherly. We look on high in ecstasy,
and fail to be on flame because 'of the suffering of those whose wounds
are bare to our eyes on the street.

And that brings me to my concept of a God. God exists in us because of
our bundle of social brother-acts. Contemplation and crying out and
assertions of belief are in the main notices that we are substituting
something for acts. Our God should be a thing discovered only in
retrospect. We live, we fight, we know others, and, as Overstreet says,
our God sins and fights at our shoulder. He may be a mean God or a fine
one. He is limited in his stature by our service.

I fear your God, because I think he is a product of the unreal and
unhelpful, that he has a "bad psychological past," that he is subtly
egotistical, that he fills the vision and leaves no room for the simple
and patient deeds of brotherhood, a heavenly contemplation taking the
place of earthly deeds.

You feel that I quote too many minds and am hobbled by it. I delight
just now in the companionship of men through their books. I am devoted
to knowing the facts of the lives of other humans and the train of
thought which their experiences have started. To lead them is like
talking to them. I suspect, even dread, the "original thinker" who knows
little of the experiments and failures of the thinkers of other places
and times. To me such a stand denies that promisin