re that rule would not be. So,
likewise with the omnipotent, omniscient, omnipresent mind of God.

CHAPTER XXVI

The most dangerous thing to possess a man to the extent of dominating
him is an idea. It can and does ride him to destruction. Eugene's idea
of the perfection of eighteen was one of the most dangerous things in
his nature. In a way, combined with the inability of Angela to command
his interest and loyalty, it had been his undoing up to this date. A
religious idea followed in a narrow sense would have diverted this
other, but it also might have destroyed him, if he had been able to
follow it. Fortunately the theory he was now interesting himself in was
not a narrow dogmatic one in any sense, but religion in its large
aspects, a comprehensive resume and spiritual co-ordination of the
metaphysical speculation of the time, which was worthy of anyone's
intelligent inquiry. Christian Science as a cult or religion was shunned
by current religions and religionists as something outre, impossible,
uncanny--as necromancy, imagination, hypnotism, mesmerism,
spiritism--everything, in short, that it was not, and little, if
anything, that it really was. Mrs. Eddy had formulated or rather
restated a fact that was to be found in the sacred writings of India; in
the Hebrew testaments, old and new; in Socrates, Marcus Aurelius, St.
Augustine, Emerson, and Carlyle. The one variation notable between her
and the moderns was that her _ruling unity_ was not malicious, as Eugene
and many others fancied, but helpful. Her _unity_ was a _unity_ of love.
God was everything but the father of evil, which according to her was an
illusion--neither fact nor substance--sound and fury, signifying
nothing.

It must be remembered that during all the time Eugene was doing this
painful and religious speculation he was living in the extreme northern
portion of the city, working desultorily at some paintings which he
thought he might sell, visiting Angela occasionally, safely hidden away
in the maternity hospital at One Hundred and Tenth Street, thinking
hourly and momentarily of Suzanne, and wondering if, by any chance, he
should ever see her any more. His mind had been so inflamed by the
beauty and the disposition of this girl that he was really not normal
any longer. He needed some shock, some catastrophe greater than any he
had previously experienced to bring him to his senses. The loss of his
position had done something. The loss of S