but the very confusion
is a challenge to human intelligence. Here are all the materials for a
more beautiful world. All that is needed is to find the proper
combination. Goodness alone will not do the work. Goodness grown strong
and wise by much experience is, as the man on the street would say,
"quite a different proposition." Why not try it?

We may not live to see any dramatic entrance of the world upon "the
thousand years of peace," but we are living in a time when men are
rapidly learning the art of doing peacefully many things which once
were done with infinite strife and confusion. We live in a time when
intelligence is applied to the work of love. The children of light are
less content than they once were to be outranked in sagacity by the
children of this world. The result is that many things which once were
the dreams of saints and sages have come within the field of practical
business and practical politics. They are a part of the day's work. A
person of active temperament may prefer to live in this stirring period,
rather than to have his birth postponed to the millennium.

It is only the incorrigible doctrinaire who refuses to sympathize with
the illogical processes by which the world is gradually being made
better. With him it is the millennium or nothing. He will tolerate no
indirect approach. He will give no credit for partial approximations. He
insists on holding every one strictly to his first fault. There shall be
no wriggling out of a false position, no gradual change in function, no
adaptations of old tools to new uses.

In the next essay I shall have something to say about this way of
looking at things. It would do no harm to stir up the doctrinaire
assumptions with the bayonet-poker.

II

On Being a Doctrinaire

[Illustration]

The question is sometimes asked by those who devise tests of literary
taste, "If you were cast upon a desert island and were allowed but one
book, what book would you choose?"

If I were in such a predicament I should say to the pirate chief who was
about to maroon me, "My dear sir, as this island seems, for the time
being, to have been overlooked by Mr. Andrew Carnegie, I must ask the
loan of a volume from your private library. And if it is convenient for
you to allow me but one volume at a time, I pray that it may be the
Unabridged Dictionary."

I should choose the Unabridged Dictionary, not only because it is big,
but because it is mentally filling.