life was. He had secured inklings at times, he thought,
by reading such things as Emerson's "Oversoul," "The Meditations of
Marcus Aurelius," and Plato. God was a spirit, he thought, as Christ had
said to the woman at the well in Samaria, but whether this spirit
concerned itself with mortal affairs, where was so much suffering and
contention, was another matter. Personally he had never believed so--or
been at all sure. He had always been moved by the Sermon on the Mount;
the beauty of Christ's attitude toward the troubles of the world, the
wonder of the faith of the old prophets in insisting that God is God,
that there are no other Gods before him, and that he would repay
iniquity with disfavor. Whether he did or not was an open question with
him. This question of sin had always puzzled him--original sin. Were
there laws which ante-dated human experience, which were in God--The
Word--before it was made flesh? If so, what were these laws? Did they
concern matrimony--some spiritual union which was older than life
itself? Did they concern stealing? What was stealing outside of life?
Where was it before man began? Or did it only begin with man?
Ridiculous! It must relate to something in chemistry and physics, which
had worked out in life. A sociologist--a great professor in one of the
colleges had once told him that he did not believe in success or
failure, sin, or a sense of self-righteousness except as they were
related to built-up instincts in the race--instincts related solely to
the self-preservation and the evolution of the race. Beyond that was
nothing. Spiritual morality? Bah! He knew nothing about it.

Such rank agnosticism could not but have had its weight with Eugene. He
was a doubter ever. All life, as I have said before, went to pieces
under his scalpel, and he could not put it together again logically,
once he had it cut up. People talked about the sanctity of marriage,
but, heavens, marriage was an evolution! He knew that. Someone had
written a two-volume treatise on it--"The History of Human Marriage," or
something like that and in it animals were shown to have mated only for
so long as it took to rear the young, to get them to the point at which
they could take care of themselves. And wasn't this really what was at
the basis of modern marriage? He had read in this history, if he
recalled aright, that the only reason marriage had come to be looked
upon as sacred, and for life, was the length of time it took t