le your scientific imagination and your tongue, or
else you'll have the whole college by the ears. For the present, you
are letting off harmless rockets. Before you know it, though, you'll be
dynamiting the whole establishment. Best go slow."

Brenton attempted one last stand.

"Have I any right to go slow, doctor, when there's a principle
involved? Have I any right to suppress eternal truths--"

Then the doctor lost his temper.

"Eternal pollywogs!" he burst out. "Man, you're daft. Who told you what
truths are eternal? Who told you where science ends, and where theology
begins? Who told you what we mean, when we say _provable_? For two
thousand years, and then some more, we have been slowly sifting down a
whole mass of ill-assorted beliefs into two great facts: Creator and
created. For practical purposes, isn't that all we need to know? Isn't
it all that we any of us can grasp: the surety that the Creative Mind
would never have taken the trouble to fashion us, in the first place if
he hadn't put inside us all the needful germs of progress, all the
needful intellect to grasp the evident duty that lies just ahead? What
else, then, do you need? No. Don't try to talk about it. Just go out
and take a good, long walk in the fresh air, and forget your latter end
in the more important concerns of deep breathing. You are getting
disgustingly round-shouldered. Good bye. And, by the way, I'll tell
Olive you will be back here to dinner."

But Brenton, going on his way, was totally oblivious to the doctor's
sage counsel as to the merits of deep breathing. Neither did he realize
in the least the splendid optimism of the stern old doctor's creed. For
the hour, optimism was quite beyond his ken. He only realized that his
own world had gone bad; that failure awaited him at every turn, not a
downright and practical failure, either, but a nebulous and
indeterminate futility. His life had been nothing but one restless
struggle to arrive at something finite, something which should satisfy
alike his heart and reason. Instead of gaining the one thing, it seemed
to him that all had been lost. His present existence was as focusless
as an eye after its lens has been extracted. His past had been opaque,
his future would be permanently blurred. And for what good had been all
the pain? It would have been far better, far more sane, if he had clung
stoutly to the flaming horns of his hereditary Calvinism. Infinitely
better to feel their scorchi