In the very advent of my spiritual life I gravitated toward the church.  There I added to my faith a theology.  A theologian is a fighter—­a doctrinaire.  Every item of knowledge I got I sharpened into a weapon to confound the Catholics.

Before my nakedness was wholly covered I was shouting with my sect for “Queen and Constitution,” and I could discuss the historic Episcopate before I could write my own name.  Then came a hidebound orthodoxy.  I measured life by a book and for every ill that flesh is heir to I had an “appropriate” text.  I had a formula for the salvation of the race.  I divided humanity into two camps—­the goats and the sheep.  I had a literal hell for one crowd and a beautiful heaven for the other.  The logical result of this was a caste of good (saved) people for whom I became a sort of an ecclesiastical attorney.  Naturally one outgrows such obsolescence.  Such archaism has an antidote:  it is an open-minded study of the life of Jesus.  The result of such a study to me was a rediscovery of myself, that I think is what Jesus always does for an inquiring soul.  He is the Supreme Individualist, the Master of Personality.

I did not ask him what to wear or how to vote.  I did not even ask him what was moral or immoral, for these things change with time and place and circumstance.

I asked him the old eternal questions of life and death and immortality, of God and my neighbour, of sin and service.  The answers stripped me of fear and gave me a scorn of consequences.  The secret of Jesus is to find God in the soul of humanity.  The cause of Jesus is the righting of world wrongs; the religion of Jesus the binding together of souls in the solidarity of the race.

* * * * *

Three miles north of Peekskill and two miles east of the Hudson river lies this farm place that I have named Happy Hollow.  It looks to me as if God had just taken a big handful of earth out from between these hills of Putnam County and made a shelter here for man and beast.

[Illustration:  “Happy Hollow,” Mr. Irvine’s Present Home Near Peekskill, New York]

The Hollow is meadow-land through which runs a brook.  Across the meadow in front of the house, rises almost perpendicularly a hill five hundred feet high.  It is clothed now in autumnal glory.  On the summit there are several bare patches of granite rock surrounded by tall dark green cedars that look like forest monks, from my study window.  There are over two hundred acres, two-thirds of them woodland.  Through the woods there are miles and miles of old lumber roads over which my predecessors have hauled lumber since the days of the Revolution.

“Is there a view of the Hudson River from any of these hills?” I asked when buying.

“Somewhere,” said the owner, but she was not quite sure.

One day I was exploring the fastnesses and came upon a rock ledge standing a hundred feet high.  I walked to the edge, pushed the branches of the elder bushes aside and out there in front of me lay that glorious valley and beyond the valley over the top of my house lay the mighty river like an unsheathed sword!