Perhaps here is where I may quote a letter Carl received just before leaving Berkeley, and his answer to it.  This correspondence brings up several points on which Carl at times received criticism, and I should like to give the two sides, each so typical of the point of view it represents.

February 28, 1917

MY DEAR CARLETON PARKER,—­

When we so casually meet it is as distressing as it is amusing to me, to know that the God I intuitively defend presents to you the image of the curled and scented monster of the Assyrian sculpture.

He was never that to me, and the visualization of an imaginative child is a remarkable thing.  From the first, the word “God,” spoken in the comfortable (almost smug) atmosphere of the old Unitarian congregation, took my breath and tranced me into a vision of a great flood of vibrating light, and only light.

I wonder if, in your childhood, some frightening picture in some old book was not the thing that you are still fighting against?  So that, emancipated as you are, you are still a little afraid, and must perforce—­with a remainder of the brave swagger of youth—­set up a barrier of authorities to fight behind, and, quite unconsciously, you are thus building yourself into a vault in which no flowers can bloom—­because you have sealed the high window of the imagination so that the frightening God may not look in upon you—­this same window through which simple men get an illumination that saves their lives, and in the light of which they communicate kindly, one with the other, their faith and hopes?

I am impelled to say this to you, first, because of the responsibility which rests upon you in your relation to young minds; and, second, I like you and your eagerness and the zest for Truth that you transmit.

You are dedicated to the pursuit of Truth, and you afford us the dramatic incidents of your pursuit.

Yet up to this moment it seems to me you are accepting Truth at second-hand.

I counted seventeen “authorities” quoted, chapter and verse (and then abandoned the enumeration), in the free talk of the other evening; and asked myself if this reverence of the student for the master, was all that we were ultimately to have of that vivid individual whom we had so counted upon as Carl Parker?

I wondered, too, if, in the great opportunity that has come to you, those simple country boys and girls of Washington were to be thus deprived,—­were to find not you but your “authorities,”—­because Carl Parker refused (even ever so modestly) to learn that Truth, denied the aid of the free imagination, takes revenge upon her disciple, by shutting off from him the sources of life by which a man is made free, and reducing his mind—­his rich, variable, potential mind—­to the mechanical operation of a repetitious machine.

I feel this danger for you, and for the youths you are to educate, so poignantly that I venture to write with this frankness.