ou are writing."

Dan Spain leaned over and attended the fire. After poking it to his
satisfaction, he picked up a live coal and dropped it in the bowl of his
pipe. Finally he spoke, and his words were startling enough. "Just at
present," he said, "I am writing an autobiography of God."

There was a sudden rattle at the shutter.

"What was that?" I asked nervously.

Dan Spain laughed. "Wind," he replied, "wind through the trees.
Lightning may strike us dead at any moment because of my blasphemous
ambitions. That is why I live as a hermit--should God's lightning strike
at me, there will be no complications through it hitting an innocent
bystander. You are the first person who has spent a night under this
roof with me. I am sorry to subject you to the danger, but you came
without an invitation."

"But why," I asked, "do you want to write a blasphemous book? You are
aware, I suppose, that it might be suppressed."

"In a country, the constitution of which guarantees freedom of speech
and religious liberty, I grant the possibility."

"Then why," I persisted, "do you want to write it?"

"Because," said Spain, "I am tired of tempering the wind of truth to the
lamb of stupidity. Must we so fear the anger of the childish mob, that
we dare not deprive them of their fairy tales of ghosts and gobblins,
lest they kick out the props of civilizations? Must we, who no longer
bend the knees of the mind in spook idolatry nor shake with the ague of
hell fear, pretend that science and religion have been reconciled and
mumble incantations to a metaphysical essence instead of saying to a
maternal God to open the windows of the sky and spill rain out of
heaven? I want to write a blasphemous book because the gods who throttle
human intelligence and block human progress have revealed their
vulnerable spot--for they are the gods who fear laughter."

"But surely?" I said, "all that is old stuff--Ingersoll has been dead
twenty years. Present day thinkers only smile indulgently when some
handsome faced bucolic clergyman invades a metropolitan pulpit and gets
the forgotten monkey argument into the headlines of the daily press.
Modern philosophy has reconciled religion and science and shown that
they hail from the same psychic origins."

"The dictionary has never been made a sacred book," returned Spain, "and
I cannot try men for heresy who blaspheme it. If a man wishes to
designate the emotions he experiences when gazing at the stars by t