One of the basic grievances of this older generation against the younger of to-day, with its social agitation, its religious heresy, its presumptive individuality, its economic restlessness, is that all this makes it uncomfortable. When you have found growing older to be a process of the reconciliation of the spirit to life, it is decidedly disconcerting to have some youngster come along and point out the irreconcilable things in the universe. Just as you have made a tacit agreement to call certain things non-existent, it is highly discommoding to have somebody shout with strident tones that they are very real and significant. When, after much struggling and compromise, you have got your world clamped down, it is discouraging to have a gale arise which threatens to blow over all your structure. Through so much of the current writing runs this quiet note of disapprobation. These agnostic professors who unsettle the faith of our youth, these “intellectuals who stick a finger in everybody’s pie in the name of social justice,” these sensation-mongers who unveil great masses of political and social corruption, these remorseless scientists who would reveal so many of our reticences--why can’t they let us alone? Can they not see that God’s in his heaven, all’s right with the world? II Now I know this older generation which doth protest so much. I have lived with it for the last fifteen years, ever since I began to wonder whether all was for the best in the best of all possible worlds. I was educated by it, grew up with it. I doubt if any generation ever had a more docile pupil than I. What they taught me, I find they still believe, or at least so many of them as have not gone over to the enemy, or been captured by the militant youth of to-day. Or, as seems rather likely, they no longer precisely believe, but they want their own arguments to convince themselves. It is probable that when we really believe a thing with all our hearts, we do not attempt to justify it. Justification comes only when we are beginning to doubt it.