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of to the new Christianity, it would still have achieved, as now, the world-leadership in the arts and sciences which we call civilization. Perhaps you, and some other leaders in the sciences, do not know your own debt to Christianity.

Your letter which I am reviewing gives one an impression of a very good man striving to reconcile certain preconceived and rooted ideas, partly Agnostic, partly Christian, with life and history; trying to forget that the things material are the really temporal, and that there are things spiritual which, in the nature of what could constitute immortality, must be the things immortal.

I take it that you do not seriously consider things spiritual. You say the thought of life, without your body as the base for your mind's activities, is unthinkable. Of course, that merely proves a personal limitation, and a regrettable one. I wonder if you give serious place to the world's best Poets who are unscientific, naturally — but spiritual? John Butler Yeats has recently written: 'Poetry is the champion and the voice of the inner man. Had we not this champion to speak for us, externality would swamp the world, and nothing would be heard but the noise of its machinery.' If the thought of living forever makes you tired, as you say, then perhaps the noise of the machinery, very pleasant machinery, much

of it,
has worn you out!

being all you have listened to,

Pardon me if I say that I do not think your articles are 'stabilizers'; or that they bring hope, or comfort, or happiness; or replace the want of these with anything more than 'the noise of the machinery.' I would not take seriously, if I were you, the approval you cite from the majority of your correspondents. If you will reflect, you will agree, I am sure, that after a speech upon, say, Tariffs, Temperance, or

what not, things upon which the world is divided into two or more camps, those who rush up to grasp the speaker's hand are those who always did agree with him, or those who wished uneasy doubts, or unstable convictions, bolstered up.

I am sincerely glad that you can subscribe to 'most of the articles in my creed, or "Anchor." But please do not call my Anchor a creed. Creeds, as you know, are not based upon 'indisputable fact.' That in my church was made in the third century; we have learned something since. They should be anchors. In mine are Church, Prayer, Immortality. I fear you leave these out. You apparently refuse to contemplate a world made up of Pantheists, which could, and would, say, and act, ‘After us, the deluge.'

No, I do not think that Darwin, Huxley, et al. would have been safe men to administer our human affairs, since you ask. Roosevelt, of a later civilization, knew all that they did and much more; he was a Christian and an administrator for tor for you. Emerson may have praised Pantheists at one period of his life; hardly when he was at his best.

Well, a happy winter to you in California. I see that I am trying to tie you to all of my Anchor, believing that, in the winter of your years, you are still pliable. If you are, you are a wonder! But do consider the 'inner man' spoken of by Yeats; and the effect of your articles, if not constructive.

(From John Burroughs)

LA JOLLA, CALIFORNIA, December 29, 1919. I with my son and four friends, have been here a week, and we are very happy. The world here is all sun, sky, and sea, never a cloud in sight, and the Pacific breaking its long roll upon the rocks one hundred yards below us. In February we go to Pasadena until spring.

Referring to our correspondence of a few weeks ago, and your statement that you did not think Huxley, Spencer, et al. would be safe men to administer our human affairs, and that our civilization is based upon Christianity

I wonder if you remember that the founders of our government, Washington, Jefferson, Franklin, did not accept Christianity? They were Deists. Both Franklin and Jefferson spoke very disrespectfully, not to say contemptuously, of the Christian scheme of salvation; and Washington said in so many words in a message to Congress, "The government of the United States is not in any sense founded on the Christian religion.' The founders of the Republic were free-thinkers. Washington entertained the infidel Volney at the White House, and had the works of Voltaire in his library. He gave Volney a letter of recommendation to the American people, in which he said that, if men are good workmen, 'they may be Jews or Christians, or they may be Atheists.' Jefferson quotes Gouverneur Morris as saying that 'General Washington believed no more in that system [Christianity] than I do.'

You confound our ethical system, which we all accept, with Christianity. Our ethical system is the growth of ages. What is true in Christianity is not new, and what is new is not true. Our civilization is founded upon reason and science. I have said in one of my printed articles that 'a man is saved, not by the truth of what he believes, but by the truth of his belief.' His creed may be perfectly absurd, like that of the Christian Scientists, but if it affords him an 'anchorage,' if he can fit it into his scheme of life, that is enough. The religion of the Greeks and Romans was not ours; but see what nerves, what poets, what philosophers, developed

under it!

the Japs and Chinese saves them. The mass of our own people believe in Christianity on Sundays (or used to before the automobile came in); but how few of them practise it in their daily lives. They practise the square deal, because it is good policy; it pays best in the long run.

(From Herbert D. Miles)

ASHEVILLE, N.C., January 12, 1920. My pleasure in having your letter of a few days ago was not unmixed with a certain feeling of guilt, in view of the possibility of our questions being too complicated, and your strength too limited, to attempt adequate discussion in writing- a view that is held I am sure by Dr. Barrus, from whom I have recently heard. It is charming, as you say, at La Jolla, with 'never a cloud in sight.' I am a little prejudiced, even in this January season, in favor of my home country here in Asheville; the clouds over the great old Blue Ridge mountains, which are falling back tier upon tier in the distance to the west, from my windows, are ever-changing visions of beauty, and fall upon real trees, in their shadows, something that you have few of in California, except in spots, where you have the greatest in the world, · and our occasional rough and cold day serves to make even more delightful our usual bright and lovely days, of the temperature of the northern May.

Without prolonging what we shall not allow to degenerate into an argument which would convince neither of us, allow me merely to comment upon your new remarks. I have a feeling that you constantly miss something vital, in your line of thought and your conclusions; that may be characteristic of the Pantheist! You say, apparently in contradiction of my insistence that civilization is based upon Christianity,

The religion of ancestral worship of that Washington, Jefferson, and others

did not accept Christianity; and you go on to quote Washington as to the government of the United States. Without going into any dispute as to all this, are we to assume that you consider civilization to have begun with the establishment of the United States? I would say rather that these gentlemen of history, without doubt virtuous and great, made the same error that John Burroughs

also without doubt virtuous and great-is making: that they wholly failed in realizing the debt they were under to that slowly developing, but none the less potent and true thing Christianity! How many practise Christianity in their daily lives is beside the mark. Would you condemn a great physician because (as is usually the case) he fails to practise what he preaches? That is, would you damn his science? You say that civilization is founded upon 'reason and science.', Well, does that damn Christianity? You say that our ethical system is the growth of the ages. What of it? Do Christians claim that we would have no ethical system without Christ and the Christian principles? By no means. But we would have Athens and the Roman Empire over again and the Hun.

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roughs, roughs, to put it in that perfectly frank manner at which neither of us has taken offense, your writings upon religion have pleased you, and, as with anything you write, they have been received with respect; but they have shown us a God, near in the sense of his being in a spadeful of dirt, but billions of miles away and terribly nebulous, when it comes to having a Father to whom to pray. You may like that, but it is bad for the rest of us; you have, therefore, done much harm and disturbed much fairly earned peace of mind innocent though you undoubtedly have been of any such intention. You have missed the bull's-eye. This is: 'Love the Lord thy God with all thy mind, and with all thy heart, and with all thy soul; and love thy neighbor as thyself.' I do not mean to imply that you have not personally, in your life, done all of that; I mean that the teaching of Pantheism puts God, as I have stated, billions of miles away, a nebulous thing, regardless of the theory of his being in all Nature; a theory which Christianity embraces, for that matter. We cannot love, in that manner so completely pictured in the above quotation, a Pantheistic Godwhich is why I hold that you miss the

In a nutshell, my dear Mr. Bur- bull's-eye.

REBECCA

BY ARTHUR SHERBURNE HARDY

'WHY should n't I, if I want to?' The reins fell on Billy's rough back with an emphatic slap, but met with no response. The shaggy hoofs continued to pound the frozen road with the stolid indifference to stimuli born of the conviction that in the long run a steady gait was the part of wisdom.

The road covered two miles for the arrow's one, with that contempt for grade and distance which characterized the early settler, who first chose his dwelling-place and compelled the road to follow. Between the low stone walls, whose boulders were continually evincing a desire to return to their earlier resting-places, down the rocky pitch to the creaking bridge in the meadow, and up again through the moaning forest, it wound its way, mysterious, unending. Another slap.

'I can - if I want to.'

Approving this sentiment, Billy, halfway up the hill, stopped and, pulling the reins through the saddle rings, reached for a tuft of withered grass, which all summer long had escaped hoof and wheel, to perish in the winter.

'I might - if I was n't fifty.' At fifty, when it was too late, past prudence seemed a mockery—a gate to happiness locked by prudery. Rebecca sighed. If she could stand at that gate again!

'Indeed I would!'

The reins tightened with a jerk, haunches flattened instantly, and legs strained to the load.

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Be Good and You will be Happy. Had n't she been good? When would she be happy?

In village parlance Rebecca 'ran' the farm - one of those hilly rock-strewn farms demanding constant prodding to prevent it from 'running out.' Down by the brook in the birch woods were pleasant places- pools of dark silent water, where the brook brooded before deciding to take the leap to the next one, to pause again, out of breath; shallows where it sang to Rebecca, who never sang except at seven-day intervals in the church choir. The brook was always singing, even in winter, cheerily, to the shivering birches.

But pleasant places produced nothing. Pleasant places never did. Alluring, they bred idleness, all that brood of prohibited pleasures generically grouped by the minister under the word 'sin.' The bare upland pasture where the cows grazed, the shed where they were milked, the barn-cellar where the pigs wallowed, the chicken-yard bereft of grass, the vegetable patch, with its tat

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tered scarecrow rocking in the windthese counted. No food or raiment came from that wanton, running without thought of the future, purpose, or conscience, through meadow and wood to the sea.

Sometimes

not now, in winter, but when the crocuses came Rebecca wrestled spiritually with the brook a thing without roots or attachments, a mere gadabout, scornful of duty, of everything behind it, in its eagerness to get on. Life was real, life was earnest. As for the goal beyond the grave, she wished that it might come occasionally at the end of the day, instead of at the end of living, like Billy's grain and blanket. Even at fifty the grave was a long way off.

Strictly speaking, Rebecca was fortyeight, a fact she strictly adhered to in public. In the privacy of her own thoughts, when grim and vindictive, she was fifty; down among the birches, forty; and, in crocus-time, even thirty. 'Steady, capable woman- no sense about Rebecca!' was the village verdict, knowing little of what it could not see or touch.

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Billy's wants attended to, Rebecca went into the house. Her mother, sitting by the window, had been watching for her return.

'You've been gone a long time.' For an ailing old woman, watching day after day at the window of a hilltop farm, every hour was 'a long time.' But the querulous voice passed over Rebecca's soul without leaving a trace. After forty years of duty, its surface, like Billy's hide, had ceased to be supersensitive. Rebecca possessed what the minister called 'a healthy spirit.'

'Yes, mother,' she said, warming her hands at the range; 'Billy is n't as spry as he used to be.'

'Did you see the Squire?' 'Yes, mother.'

'Is it true?'

'Yes, mother, it's true.'

And the truth shall make you free! The sentence from the minister's sermon came from nowhere, like a bird alighting on a twig — ridiculously inapposite. That impertinent busybody, the irresponsible mind, was one of Rebecca's trials.

Then, for a long time, there was silence, their thoughts going their separate ways. Much hard and solitary thinking preceded 'getting together' for these

two.

Rebecca hung her squirrel coat in the closet and turned to the door. 'Where are you going now, Rebecca?' "To the office, mother.'

The 'office' was a low one-story building, with a single door and room, where her father used to consult his clients - even hilltop villages requiring lawyers as well as ministers and doctors.

That, however, was long ago, and the office had descended to Rebecca, with its legend in gilt letters still on the panel of its door. Here she kept the farmaccounts, her books, and her dreams. Whenever she spoke of 'going home,' it was the office she had in mind.

It boasted a desk, above which Washington was perpetually delivering his farewell address; a horsehair sofa, whose billowy surface was reminiscent of former clients; a bookcase with diamond panes, - the law books had been relegated to the upper shelves, — and a redeeming fireplace, open, hospitable, framed in a white mantelpiece, with Ionic columns and garlands of roses in plaster, on which, under the clock, stood a group of two grotesque porcelain figures in bright colors: a woman, holding high a tambourine, and a man with a guitar. The child Rebecca had given these gay figures ecstatic adoration, as representing a wonderful world inhabited by fairies, gypsies, and other mythical persons to which

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