in this land of oranges and alligator pears and ripe raspberries!), chicken and green peas, and bran biscuit and tea for lunch; a couple of green vegetables and bran biscuit and a small black, for dinner.  And all this I write with a supreme sense of virtue, which Simon Stylites or St. Benedict could not more than parallel.  As to smoking—­a pipe, generous in size but of the mildest possible tobacco, after breakfast.  A mild, large cigar after lunch, and pause here and worship—­no cigar after dinner.  (But this latter is a Lenten innovation.  I would not have you think I am preparing for immediate ascension.)

As to treatment, an osteopath and a Christian Scientist are my present complement.  Each morning the former, and each evening the latter.  The former to gratify myself, the latter to gratify a dear friend who “believed and was saved.”  The osteo is rational, the C. S., with limitations and reservations. ...

The C. S. is a woman, the sister of an artist I used to know.  If she did not ask or expect that I believe certain things, we would get on better.  I can believe in God as the Principle of Life, that seems scientific.  I am willing to call Him Spirit, that is Christian.  That He is Supreme in the Universe, I admit.  That sin and sickness may with further light be overmastered I do not deny; physical death, of course, seems to me a thing not worth bothering about.  But that God is all good, I cannot asseverate in the living presence of a few Devils whom I know, unless I deny that He is omnipresent and omnipotent, or unless I say that Bad is Good.  God cannot be good and all powerful without being also responsible for Bad, and therefore be both Good and Bad.  This I can believe, and it brings me to Emerson’s transcendentalism, which is set forth in the Sphinx—­“Deep Love lieth under these pictures of Time, which fade in the light of their meaning sublime.”  In a word we are growing into the Good.  The Bad is not the ultimate, but is none the less real.  This is better than Manicheism, the Miltonian contest between the Good Spirit and the Bad, which Wells also in his Invisible King presents; a simple theory, understandable but not to my mind subject to careful scrutiny.  There is but one God, one Force, one Principle, one Spirit, and it is working its way through, expressing itself as best it can.  And Evil is a partial view, one phase of undevelopment, the muck through which, by God’s own law, we must come; and indeed He could not have sent us any other way.  This means that He is bound, too.  Is this supposable?  Omnipresent?  Yes!  All pervading!  In all!  But Omnipotent?  No, not in the sense that He could change the Order of Things, for He is the Order of Things Himself.  Is there even in Him complete Freedom of Will, freedom to make a world other than this?  One wishes, in a sense, to say so, but the horror of it! for then He is responsible for the cruelty of the ant-heap, the feeding of the carnivorous upon the vegetable eaters, the preying