“O to be satisfied, satisfied,
    Only to lie at Thy feet.”

is a hymn we used to sing in church.  We yearn to be satisfied and yet we know because we are not satisfied we grow . ...

“The mystical hanker after something higher,” is religion, and yet it should not be all of religion; for man’s own sake there should be some cross to which one can cling, some Christ who can hear and give peace to the waves.  I wish I could be a Catholic, and yet I can not feel that once you have a free spirit that it is right to go back into the monastery, and shut yourself up away from doubts, making your soul strong only through prayer.  There are two principles in the world fighting all the time, and the one makes the other possible.  There is no “perfect,” there is a “better” only.  And in this fight one does not become better by prayer—­ prayer is only the ammunition wagon, the supply train, where one can get masks for poison gas and cartridges for the guns.

Pfeiffer said a good thing the other day, quite like him to say it, too.  We were talking of churches and he said he never went to one because he did not believe in abasing or prostrating himself before God, he saw no sense in it; God didn’t respect one for it, and moreover he was part of God himself and he couldn’t prostrate himself before himself.  I asked him if he didn’t recognize humility as a virtue, and he said, “No, the higher you hold your head the more God-like you are.”

Humility, to me, seems to be the basis of sympathy.  We stoop to conquer in that we are not self-assertive and self-assured, for if we “know” that we are right we can not know how others think or feel.  We can not grow.

You know there are two great classes of people, those who are challenged by what they see, and those who are not.  Now the only kind who grow are the former.  But what is it to grow?  If we “evermore come out by that same door wherein we went” surely there is no object in being curious.  Can there be growth when we are in an endless circle? ...

Now after all my struggle, I fall back not on reason but on instinct, on a primal desire, and perhaps this is my rudimentary soul, the mystical hanker after something higher.  That is a real thing.  The purpose of nature seems to be to put it into me and make it very important to me.  That being so I can not overlook it, and must obey it.  The thing that pleases me as I look back upon it, is the thing I must do; that sets the standard for me; that is morals and religion.  If there is any chap who the day after sings with joy over being a devil—­that man I never heard of—­but if he takes delight in what he did that was fiendish, then he must follow and should follow that bent until he sees that it is fiendish.  He has to have more light.  But I really don’t believe there is any such fellow, who clearly sees what he did and rejoices in it.  All of us sing, “I want to be an angel.”  There is the whole of revelation, and all things that tend to make us gratify that desire are good.  I guess that is pragmatism, in words of one syllable.