A book may contain valuable truths and sound sentiments of universal appeal, but if the literary coinage is feeble, if the page is not strongly individualized, freshly and clearly stamped by the purpose of the writer, it cannot take rank as good literature. To become literature, truth must be perpetually reborn, reincarnated, and begin life anew. A successful utterance always has value, always has truth, though in its purely intellectual aspects it may not correspond with the truth as we see it. I cannot accept all of Ruskin’s views upon our civilization or all of Tolstoi’s upon art, yet I see that they speak the truth as it defines itself to their minds and feelings. A counter-statement may be equally true. The struggle for existence goes on in the ideal world as well as in the real. The strongest mind, the fittest statement, survives for the time being. That a system of philosophy or religion perishes or is laid aside is not because it is not or was not true, but because it is not true to the new minds and under the new conditions. It no longer expresses what the world thinks and feels. It is outgrown. Was not Calvinism true to our fathers? It is no longer true to us because we were born at a later day in the world. With regard to truths of science, we may say, once a truth always a truth, because the world of fact and of things is always under the same law, but the truth of sentiments and emotions changes with changing minds and hearts. The tree of life, unlike all other trees, bears different fruit to each generation. What our fathers found nourishing and satisfying in religion, in art, in philosophy, we find tasteless and stale. Every gospel has its day. The moral and intellectual horizon of the race is perpetually changing. IV