"There you are wrong," said his sister. "When a man like Jenner comes along that is the time for practicing, but when smallpox has been rooted out and tuberculosis forgotten, men will still read what Socrates had to say of immortality and the sermon on the mount. When you hear people belittle the written and the spoken Word, it becomes us to remember that 'In the beginning the Word was God,' and all that we know of past civilizations is the word they have left behind, painted on their stony walls or burned in a brick to say, 'After me cometh a builder. Tell him I too have known.'" "But, my dear sister," Jack answered, "don't you think assuming the role of the teacher may be just a trifle, only a trifle, presumptuous on my part?" "I don't quite know what your new views are," she answered. "They are not new," he said. "In fact they are most of them of such hoary antiquity that they are lost in the mists that brooded over the face of the deep. It is only the application that is new. Even that has always been understood by certain great souls. Pythagoras is said to have taught the Greeks to believe in metempsychosis for the purpose of making them kinder to lesser forms of life; like many beauty worshipers they were frankly inhuman, and it took heroic measures to create even a glimmering perception of the unity of life which is the basis of all the great world religions, whether it be Buddha's 'Who hurteth another hurteth himself,' or Christ's commandment, 'Love one another'; the Yogi looking first at the prince and then at the pauper and saying, 'I am that,' or Father Damien going into voluntary exile for the sake of the souls of the wretched lepers. The Prince of Peace preached the doctrine of spiritual inspiration, and the King of Conquerors said 'Imagination rules the world.' Jesus or Napoleon--both knew that back of the visible man himself is the thought of the man, which controls him, and other men through him, if it possesses power and vitality and truth." "Then it is a kind of new thought?" asked Hilda. "Rather a renaissance of old thought. The modern quest of the Grail is not for the crystal cup that held the holy elements, but for the divine life itself, the principle that inspires men to action. The philosopher of our day is not a hermit, theorizing about vague abstractions, but vitally alive to the problems that confront this day and generation, and modern psychology is changing all the methods of the great processes of existence. Education, medicine, law, are all in process of transformation. Grandsons of the men who denounced Mesmer as a charlatan thronged the clinics of Charcot."