l, "over every man. I
saw that the man did not see the Hands. I saw that they reached out of
infinity for him down through the days and the nights. And whether he
slept or prayed or wrought, I saw that they still reached out for him,
and folded themselves about him."

And I asked God what The Hands were.

"The man calls them Heredity and Environment," God said.

And God laughed.

Words came from far for me and waited in tumult within me. But my mouth
was filled with silence.

* * * * *

I know that I do not know the world, but out of my little corner of time
and space I have watched in it,--watched men and truths struggling in
it, and in the struggle it has seemed to me I have seen three kinds of
men. I have seen the man who feels that he is being made, and the man
who feels that he is making himself. But I have seen also another kind
of man--the man who feels that the Universe is at work on him, but
(within limits) under his own supervision.

I have made a compact in my soul with this man, for a new world. He is
not willing to be a mere manufactured man--one more being turned out
from The Factory of Circumstance--neither does he think very much of the
man who makes himself--who could make himself. If he were to try such a
thing--try to make a man himself, he would really rather try it, if the
truth must be told, on some one else.

As near as he can define it, life seems to be (to the normal or inspired
man) a kind of alternate grasping and being grasped. Sometimes he feels
his destiny tossed between the Two Immeasurable Hands. Sometimes he
feels that they have paused--that the Immeasurable Hands have been lent
to him, that the toss of destiny is made his own.

He watches these two great forces playing under heaven, before his eyes,
with his immortal life, every day. His soul takes these powers of
heaven, as the mariner takes the winds of the sea. He tacks to destiny.
He takes the same attitude toward the laws of heredity and environment
that the Creator took when He made them. He takes it for granted that a
God who made these laws as conveniences for Himself, in running a
Universe, must have intended them for men as conveniences in living in
it. In proportion as men have been like God they have treated these laws
as He does--as conveniences. Thousands of men are doing it to-day. Men
did it for thousands of years before they knew what the laws were, when
they merely followed the