o lie awake at nights nursing suicidal thoughts over
Schopenhauer? You have lived without principles, you say. And wasted
your youth. And are homeless now all round, with no morals, no country,
no religion. But will you make all this better by making things much
worse?

You've no reason to envy me my country life, by the way, and there's
no sense in your going about longing for the little church of your
childhood, with its Moses and hymns and God. Well, longing does no harm,
perhaps, but don't ever try to find it. The fact is, old fellow, that
such things are not to be found any more.

I take it that religion had the same power on you in your childhood
as it had with me. We were wild young scamps, both of us, but we liked
going to church, not for the sake of the sermons, but to bow our heads
when the hymn arose and join in singing it. When the waves of the
organ-music rolled through the church, it seemed--to me at least--as if
something were set swelling in my own soul, bearing me away to lands
and kingdoms where all at last was as it should be. And when we went out
into the world we went with some echo of the hymn in our hearts, and we
might curse Jehovah, but in a corner of our minds the hymn lived on as
a craving, a hunger for some world-harmony. All through the busy day
we might bear our part in the roaring song of the steel, but in the
evenings, on our lonely couch, another power would come forth in our
minds, the hunger for the infinite, the longing to be cradled and borne
up on the waves of eternity, whose way is past all finding out.

Never believe, though, that you'll find the church of your childhood
now in any of our country places. We have electric light now everywhere,
telephones, separators, labour unions and political meetings, but the
church stands empty. I have been there. The organ wails as if it had the
toothache, the precentor sneezes out a hymn, the congregation does not
lift the roof off with its voice, for the very good reason that there
is no congregation there. And the priest, poor devil, stands up in his
pulpit with his black moustache and pince-nez; he is an officer in
the army reserve, and he reads out his highly rational remarks from a
manuscript. But his face says all the time--"You two paupers down there
that make up my congregation, you don't believe a word I am saying;
but never mind, I don't believe it either." It's a tragic business when
people have outgrown their own conception of t