and persecution of the malevolent upon the kindly—­and He could have made it all otherwise!  With a Free Will He could have brought growth without pain, being omnipotent.  Here we see God as a monster,—­responsible for sweat shops and the Marne, in the sense that His will could have averted these things.  So I say God is not Good, save in the sense that He is that sunrise this morning.  But night cometh, when thieves break through and steal.  More sunlight—­that is the meaning of the phrase “God is Good”—­a belief in a tendency, in the temporality of darkness, of night, a sureness that the day will come and “There will be no night there.”

This is a long disquisition, but I just had to get it out of my system; yet I can’t, it bothers, and confuses, and perplexes, and hinders, I believe.  Better brush it away for practical purposes and have the Will to Believe, for thence cometh strength.  Pragmatically C. S. works out with certain people; and to them it is Truth.  I wish it were so with my doubting mind, that I could believe.  I am willing to be cured tho’ I do not understand and cannot believe, and this they say they can do.  But it has not been done with me.

Lunch broke into this discourse, and then a walk.  This time on the other side of the house, the other side of the hill.  There I found a new world.  Palms, huge ones, thirty feet across, with their dead branches strewing the ground, making a coarse woven carpet; and pines, large ones, yet not so gigantic as yours on the road beyond the creek; and acacia in full golden bloom, glorious, yet modest tree, a very rare, non-self-assertive tree, a truly Christian tree, beautiful but not prideful.  Bamboo in great clumps, erect, yielding but not to be broken—­wise, tenacious orientals!  And I walked on the off-cast seed of the pepper, and beside cacti higher than my head with spears of crimson, and across a sweep of lawn over which oranges had been dropped, by the generosity of an up-hill row of trees that were saying, “We must make room for the next generation.”  The flowers (oxalis) and leaves I enclose made a mat, close clinging to the earth, a mat of white, red, and lavender resting on these clover-like leaves that rested in turn directly on the ground.  And all about, a hundred plants I did not know, into which my footsteps sent quail and rabbit, that did not fear me really but could not quite say that Man is Love.

I have written you a long line, may it serve for a time as a word also to your dear Lady, whose letter and rare bit of verse I have also received.  I do hope that you soon master whatever ails you.  Don’t lose faith in yourself, above all things.  Believe that you are all that your friends believe you to be—­a Civilized Medicine Man.  Be as deluded as we are.  Affectionately,

LANE

To John W. Hallowell

Los Angeles, February 21, 1921 my dear Jack,—­It is Sunday morning, very early; the sun is trying to get out of bed, a mocking bird is hailing its effort with great gurgling.  I am sitting near an open window looking down into orange trees, which are a very dark shadow, and I am just as happy in my heart as I can be with a bum heart, and no home, and a scattered family.  But —!  Bad word that “but.”