We get accustomed to and become tolerant of everything save pain. Even in such upheaval as the World War it was beyond belief how little the mechanism of daily life was disjointed. Fifteen millions of men and more were engaged in a life-and-death struggle, and yet the ordinary events of daily life were very little disturbed. People seemed to have time for work, for play, for relaxation, for contemplation. I was always reminded of this by reading the papers and observing people in theatres, concert-halls, stadia, churches, restaurants, and public places generally. I realize full well that one cannot sit still and nurse either his griefs or his hopes; that man is so constituted that he must display activity in some form. But I never fully realized that man is chronically happy. And yet it must be so, for how otherwise could he come out from prisons rotund and well-nourished, or from dark filthy tenements with a smile on his face? How else could we be so pleasure-seeking and pleasure-displaying as we were in those agonal days of the war? The war put many things out of joint, but it did not divorce man from felicity save in individual instances or for short periods of time. The thing that the war dislocated most was further tolerance of the paradoxes of the Christian religion, the irreconcilability between preached and practised Christianity. Every one admits that the fundamental principles of Christianity are perfect and beautiful--that is, they are as perfect and as beautiful as the finite mind can grasp. But nothing can be more imperfect and uglier than the way in which the professional pietist practises it. There isn't a tenet, as formulated by its Founder, or such perfect disciples as St. Francis of Assisi, to which the professing or professional Christian conforms even approximately; and because his fellow man, prostituting it in some similar way to conform with his personal bias, does not agree with him, he proceeds to point the finger of scorn at him and to hail him as infidel and unbeliever.