not as a spectacle but as the simmering vat in
which the greater destiny of man brews and brews....

Sec. 7

It was necessary to tell my father of my intentions. I made numerous
beginnings. I tore up several letters and quarrelled bitterly with the
hotel pens. At first I tried to describe the change that had happened to
my mind, to give him some impression of the new light, the release that
had come to me. But how difficult this present world is with its tainted
and poisoned phrases and its tangled misunderstandings! Here was I
writing for the first time in my life of something essentially religious
and writing it to him whose profession was religion, and I could find no
words to convey my meaning to him that did not seem to me fraught with
the possibilities of misinterpretation. One evening I made a desperate
resolve to let myself go, and scrawled my heart out to him as it seemed
that night, a strange, long letter. It was one of the profoundest
regrets that came to me when I saw him dead last winter that I did not
risk his misunderstanding and post that letter. But when I re-read it in
the next morning's daylight it seemed to me so rhetorical, so full
of--what shall I call it?--spiritual bombast, it so caricatured and
reflected upon the deep feelings sustaining me, that I could not post it
for shamefacedness, and I tore it up into little pieces and sent
instead the briefest of notes.

"I am doing no good here in Switzerland," I wrote. "Would you mind if I
went east? I want to see something of the world outside Europe. I have a
fancy I may find something to do beyond there. Of course, it will cost
rather more than my present allowance. I will do my best to economize.
Don't bother if it bothers you--I've been bother enough to you...."

He replied still more compactly. "By all means. I will send you some
circular notes, Poste Restante, Rome. That will be on your way. Good
wishes to you, Stephen. I'm glad you want to go east instead of just
staying in Switzerland."

I sit here now and wonder, little son, what he thought, what he
supposed, what he understood.

I loved my father, and I began to perceive he loved me wonderfully. I
can imagine no man I would have sooner had for a priest than him; all
priestcraft lays hands if it can, and with an excellent wisdom, upon the
titles and dignity of fatherhood; and yet here am I left to guessing--I
do not know whether my father ever worshipped, whether he ever prayed
with