o rear the
human young. It took so long that the parents were old, safely so,
before the children were launched into the world. Then why separate?

But it was the duty of everybody to raise children.

Ah! there had been the trouble. He had been bothered by that. The home
centered around that. Children! Race reproduction! Pulling this wagon of
evolution! Was every man who did not inevitably damned? Was the race
spirit against him? Look at the men and women who didn't--who couldn't.
Thousands and thousands. And those who did always thought those who
didn't were wrong. The whole American spirit he had always felt to be
intensely set in this direction--the idea of having children and rearing
them, a conservative work-a-day spirit. Look at his father. And yet
other men were so shrewd that they preyed on this spirit, moving
factories to where this race spirit was the most active, so that they
could hire the children cheaply, and nothing happened to them, or did
something happen?

However, Myrtle continued to plead with him to look into this new
interpretation of the Scriptures, claiming that it was true, that it
would bring him into an understanding of spirit which would
drive away all these mortal ills, that it was above all mortal
conception--spiritual over all, and so he thought about that. She told
him that if it was right that he should cease to live with Angela, it
would come to pass, and that if it was not, it would not; but anyhow and
in any event in this truth there would be peace and happiness to him. He
should do what was right ("seek ye first the Kingdom of God"), and then
all these things would be added unto him.

And it seemed terribly silly at first to Eugene for him to be listening
at all to any such talk, but later it was not so much so. There were
long arguments and appeals, breakfast and dinner, or Sunday dinners at
Myrtle's apartment, arguments with Bangs and Myrtle concerning every
phase of the Science teaching, some visits to the Wednesday experience
and testimony meetings of their church, at which Eugene heard statements
concerning marvelous cures which he could scarcely believe, and so on.
So long as the testimonies confined themselves to complaints which might
be due to nervous imagination, he was satisfied that their cures were
possibly due to religious enthusiasm, which dispelled their belief in
something which they did not have, but when they were cured of cancer,
consumption, locomotor-ataxia,