them still floating, floating down the
stream, out and away from the sight of men. Does this make me a Baptist,
I wonder?

I fear not, I fear not; because I am unable to rid myself of the
impression that there are many roads leading to heaven, and I have never
believed in what is called close communion. I have not hated and am
unable to hate any man because either in political or in religious
opinion he differs from me and insists upon voting his party ticket and
worshiping his Creator according to his conscience. Perfect freedom of
conscience and thought has been my lifelong contention.

I suppose I must have been born an insurrecto. Pursuing the story of the
dark ages when men were burnt at the stake for the heresy of refusing to
bow to the will of the majority, it is not the voice of the Protestant
or the Catholic that issues from the flames and reaches my heart, but
the cry of suffering man, my brother. To me a saint is a saint whether
he wears wooden shoes or goes barefoot, whether he gets his baptism
silently out of a font of consecrated water or comes dripping from
the depths of the nearest brook, shouting, "Glory hallelujah!" From my
boyhood the persecution of man for opinion's sake--and no matter for
what opinion's sake--has roused within me the only devil I have ever
personally known.

My reading has embraced not a few works which seek or which affect to
deal with the mystery of life and death. Each and every one of them
leaves a mystery still. For all their learning and research--their
positivity and contradiction--none of the writers know more than I think
I know myself, and all that I think I know myself may be abridged to
the simple rescript, I know nothing. The wisest of us reck not whence we
came or whither we go; the human mind is unable to conceive the eternal
in either direction; the soul of man inscrutable even to himself.

_The night has a thousand eyes,
The day but one;
Yet the light of the bright world dies
With the dying sun._

_The mind has a thousand eyes,
The heart but one;
Yet the light of a whole life dies
When love is done._

All that there is to religion, therefore, is faith; not much more in
politics. We are variously told that the church is losing its hold
upon men. If it be true it is either that it gives itself over to
theology--the pride of opinion--or yields itself to the celebration of
the mammon of unrighteousness.

I do not believe that it is true. Nev