when they take place in ourselves; how then are we to see and understand them when they take place in others?

But women who go to bed pessimists often arise optimists, and Mrs. Harper, after reading the Times the next morning, went to the telephone and rang up Major Rooke. After all, there was no real reason to suppose they were less friends than they had been. Nothing had actually happened. And if she had inadvertently hurt him in any way, say by not sufficiently praising his friend only it had begun, of course, before that -surely it was her duty to make amends for it. For although Mrs. Harper was full of proper pride, she had also a generous heart that would not willingly give little hurts a chance to grow into great

ones.

"I wondered," she said, when each had inquired after the health of the other and had agreed that the morning looked promising, "if you would care to take me to another lecture to-night?"

After what seemed to her an appreciable hesitation, during which she questioned the wisdom of what she had done, he replied that he would, most certainly, and asked what the lecture was about. "It's by Mr. Reeves Smedley," she answered. "He's lecturing on Present Day Psychology. It's his great subject, you know, and I think it ought to be very interesting."

Major Rocke said that he thought so too, but there was something in his voice that was both unconvincing and unconvinced. Still, she told herself, if he really hadn't wanted to go, he could have pleaded another engagement, and she wouldn't, of course, have believed him, and that would have ended everything.

She said that as she was going quite near the Philharmonic Hall that morning she would get the tickets herself. This was agreed upon, on the condition that she would consent to dine with him before the lecture.

"We ought to give it every chance," he said. "It's only fair to Mr. Reeves

Smedley to dine well and comfortably before listening to what he has to say.'

But although they did indeed dine well and comfortably, it seemed that their first easy comradeship had vanished beyond all hope of recapture. Something, she was now perfectly certain, had happened, but what that something was she had no idea. Nor would her pride allow her to question him, for she would neither show him that she was aware of the change which had taken place, nor risk placing him in a difficult and embarrassing situation, from which he could only extricate himself, perhaps, by lying; and she had already discovered that he was one of the world's most inefficient liars.

So when he asked her what her plans were, she answered that it was time for her to think about going home, at which his heart sank, for so far there had been no mention of her return to America. But he pulled himself together and said that no doubt she was looking forward very much to being in her own country once more; and she was so chilled by this that for some time she could find nothing at all to say, and could only wonder, as she had wondered a hundred times before, how things had managed to go so wrong.

But in the face of his politely distant manner, she found courage to say,

"It's been one of the happiest times of my life, this visit to London. It's been all and more than I had hoped."

"Ah, well," he returned, "you've accomplished a great deal, and that must add enormously to the pleasure of it. Your articles are going to be a great success, I'm sure of that."

"I wasn't thinking of my writing at all," she said, but this fell on barren ground and the next words that he spoke were addressed to the waiter on the subject of fish.

The lecture hall was already full when they arrived, for they had lingered, each hoping for some miracle to take place, over their coffee. They found their seats just as the applause which had greeted

the lecturer ceased, and were uncomfortably aware that their entrance had delayed for a moment his opening words.

Upon the platform, where such lighting as there was was concentrated, stood a tall, bearded man, one hand resting in conventional attitude upon a table. Through thick glasses his eyes looked pleasantly upon his audience, and he waited, like an indulgent father, for the small, bustling noises to cease before he spoke.

"I shall now be told," said Major Rooke to himself, "that the mind of man is but one degree superior to the mind of the anthropoid ape-whatever he is. Why is it they can never tell us anything pleasant about ourselves?"

But he was entirely wrong. There issued from the lips of the lecturer one of the most comforting and heart-warming discourses that Major Rooke, in his low and uncomfortable state of mind, could possibly have imagined. It seemed as though Mr. Reeves Smedley knew that in the fourth row of that hall sat a man whose very soul was parched for just such heavenly dew; and Major Rooke sat and drank it in like a thirsty plant, and with every word his belief in himself returned to him.

Although Mr. Reeves Smedley spoke with great respect and deference of Mr. Darwin, he said that he, personally, had never been convinced that the human mind was necessarily a mere development of the mind of the beast.

He believed, he said, that Science would shortly discover that the mind of man-with all the qualities which make it superior to the beast's mind-is not only higher, but entirely different, and by no means a mere growth or development of that appearance of mentality we perceive in the animal.

We were only on the brink, he continued, of a real knowledge of the mind of man. And he went on to praise that mind and to show the vast complexities of it. As for its possibilities, they were, he believed, unlimited. He thought we were about to witness the dawn of new

faculties, hitherto regarded as supernormal. He saw no reason why the socalled astral plane should not little by little penetrate the terrestial, thereby opening up new worlds for us. If we could only purge man's mind, he said, of mischievous impulses, and instill there instead a belief in its own power and in its own great destiny, to what sublime heights might it not rise?

And after leading them from hope to hope for a fleeting two hours, he smiled, as if smiling to himself, and with one hand grasping his short beard, said,

"Two weeks ago, I myself sat where you are now sitting, and listened to a brilliant talk by one of our greatest scholars on the size of the earth in relation to space. In many lay minds that lecture, convincing and enthralling as it was, must have brought about a state bordering on mental paralysis, for it showed with cruel clearness the microscopic littleness of our earth and of ourselves. 'We,' many of you must have said, 'are of less consequence than the louse that lives upon the louse that lives upon the louse that lives in the ear of a fieldmouse.' But what I want to impress upon you to-night is this:

"Where the scale is so great, differences of size cease to exist, because we are trying to measure them with the immeasurable. And now let me quote William James to you in one of the most magnificent passages he ever wrote for the comfort and enlightenment of mankind."

He leaned forward and pointed a finger straight at Major Rooke.

"So long,' says William James, 'as we deal with the cosmic and the general, we deal only with the symbols of reality, but as soon as we deal with private and personal phenomena, as such, we deal with realities in the completest sense of the term.""

The gentleman who had introduced Mr. Reeves Smedley now rose to his feet in the midst of the applause that the lecturer received and so well deserved, and made a short speech of appreciation

and thanks. But all the time he was speaking Major Rooke was saying to himself,

"Private and personal phenomena... private and personal phenomena My God! Why have I never heard that before?"

He had been trying to measure himself with the immeasurable, and Mrs. Harper was immeasurable. Perhaps he himself was immeasurable. Differences cease to exist! . . .

He heard her murmur, as if to herself, "Oh, he gives one new faith in oneself."

So she too had been in need of that! His heart warmed and expanded, and something wholly new entered into it. His hand, seemingly of its own volition,

dropped to the seat beside him and encountered there the small, warm hand of Mrs. Harper and closed on it. Private and personal phenomena indeed! . . . And her hand twisted in his and opened, and their fingers locked, and as that private and personal phenomenon took place their faces turnly slowly toward each other, and in the semidarkness their eyes met, and Major Rooke dealt with realities in the completest sense of the

term.

His lips moved, very slightly, but they formed the word, "dearest," and her lips moved, and they formed the same word, and heaven with its vast, with its infinite spaces opened for Major Rooke, and he no longer felt little, for he was unafraid.

IT

T is a late August afternoon in Nantucket. A summer breeze gently lifts the hangings of my study windows. Outside, this quiet, sun-saturated hour is an end in itself. I look northward toward the silent, white Great Point lighthouse across the narrow strip of moorland which separates Nantucket Harbor from the ocean. The sky is high and cloudless, and the blue harbor beneath stretches itself in warm comfort, lazily, in fullness of self-enjoyment, as if the slightest ripple might break the charm of this moment. Over at the right, where the dark ocean meets the sky, a solitary schooner with white sails loafs on its outbound journey-who cares whither? In the distance a wild bird calls. Only that and the heavy rhythm of the white surf falling on the sand break the silence. Everything is happening here, yet nothing. This afternoon needs no future to lean upon or give it a right to be. If the world ceased to-day, this would be its meaning.

Why cannot the life of man be like this? Why must we invent fictions in order to live, in order to find the meaning and value of our world? Why are we different from those flowers out there which fill this summer day with their own fragrance and color, or those waves which fall upon the shore, breaking and receding and content with their inevitability? We, too, are but waves in the great ocean of existence. Is anything really lost when at last we have spent our momentary energy and have returned to the great sea which threw us out? Yet we are loath to return to the unfathomable. We would forever keep our sea foam and our rustling noise as we creep over the beach sand. Is our

individuality more significant than that which separates those breakers from the ocean from which they came? Perhaps! We, at least, of all natural phenomena, are unwilling to lose our identity. We regard our return as tragedy, and that which holds back our flowing as evil.

Yet we bring much of our evil with us. If the sweltering millions who to-day run about the great city were to come here, they would spoil it all. Man spoils his world because it spoils him. To-morrow morning's paper will be filled with stories of accident, murder, suicide, and political chicanery. Other things in nature are complete; they are what they are; we are not. We must find the meaning and value of our lives in fiction and illusion. We must find escape and compensation where other living things are content with reality. Reality for us is but half hospitable. Over it we have woven the web of civilization and set the ends of self-consciousness, and between that which man has achieved--and necessarily so-and that which he is by nature, compromise must be made. There is no return to nature for us. The meaning of life for us is no longer to be realized in the mere fact of living. We must create it.

Religion is an effort to give to living a meaning. Its symbols and ceremonies are compromises between the self-sufficient mystery of life and what civilization requires of us all. Perhaps in this way we bring back something of that sense of harmony with all things which other living creatures possess as part of their very existence. The method by which this harmony is achieved is less important than the fact that it is achieved at all. In a very real sense this return

is a realization of a great truth. The very sense of self-importance which the mechanisms of religion seek to preserve, the "salvation of the soul," may be but an appreciation of an elemental fact of existence. Over this fact man has superimposed a crust of convention and of utilitarian interest. In all his practical reasoning he abstracts only those aspects and gives his attention to only those portions of his object which are relevant to his purposes. Everything becomes but the means to some end. All things exist for the sake of something else. This is ever the life of reason. It is only in æsthetic appreciation that anything may be regarded as its own end. Religion, however fictitious its formulæ may be, is the recognition of ends. Somehow, somewhen, something must exist for its own sake and be an end in itself. Somewhere there must be fruition and completeness; this is what in figurative language religion is trying to say. It may not be true that we walk by faith and not by sight; so far as it is possible, I think it is better that we walk by sight, but the ends toward which we are walking are set by faith. In the last analysis our judgments are æsthetic judgments. The world has meaning for us only because, as James said, we are interested spectators in the game. We prefer some things to others, and because of our preferences we intervene in the course of events, with foreknowledge of results, in order that desirable results may follow. The fact that certain ends are desirable depends upon the fact that we are the sort of beings we are, and that is all we can say. We are concerned only with that "truthfulness" which consists in adequate adjustment between the organism and its environment. And from this point of view, we are obliged to say that religious ideas are fictions, the value of which consists wholly in the results of the behavior they start going.

Consequently, one may view either with hope or despair the possibility of a revival of religion. It all depends upon

the kind of people whose spiritual dilemmas are to become the prevailing standards of value. Little men do not become great men when they become religious, nor do superior people become commonplace. However, a revival of religion, should it occur, would tend to make somebody's solution of the psychological problem of living a standard which most people would try to copy. Therefore, all depends upon the type of man whose spiritual life is to be imitated. In contemplating the future of religion, just as in contemplating any other possible social future, I have learned to ask one question. It is very simple: "Who goes there?" The sanctions of religion serve to fix for long periods the supremacy of certain spiritual types of men. We happen to live in an age when mental mediocrity has a hearing and an influence such as it probably never enjoyed before. Therefore, a revival of religion might give such mediocrity a social prestige which would keep it in a position of spiritual control for centuries.

There is a sense in which each man, if let alone, would be religious in his own way. Some will always be religious, and uniquely so, to the end of time. But history teaches us that there have been periods in which religion has become a mass movement. And all such periods have tended to fix for subsequent generations the religious forms of those whose spiritual issues thus gained prominence.

Are there indications that we are likely to have in the near future another mass movement toward some type of organized religion?-for this is what for the masses a religious revival means. If we bear in mind that religion is primarily a mechanism of escape from the real, it would seem that there are many things in our modern world which, psychologically considered, would lead to some sort of religious revival.

There is a widespread desire for some one who can give the world a new gospel or some one who will at any rate capture the imagination of the mass, touch its