I suppose I must have been born an insurrecto. Pursuing the story of the dark ages when men were burnt at the stake for the heresy of refusing to bow to the will of the majority, it is not the voice of the Protestant or the Catholic that issues from the flames and reaches my heart, but the cry of suffering man, my brother. To me a saint is a saint whether he wears wooden shoes or goes barefoot, whether he gets his baptism silently out of a font of consecrated water or comes dripping from the depths of the nearest brook, shouting, "Glory hallelujah!" From my boyhood the persecution of man for opinion's sake--and no matter for what opinion's sake--has roused within me the only devil I have ever personally known. My reading has embraced not a few works which seek or which affect to deal with the mystery of life and death. Each and every one of them leaves a mystery still. For all their learning and research--their positivity and contradiction--none of the writers know more than I think I know myself, and all that I think I know myself may be abridged to the simple rescript, I know nothing. The wisest of us reck not whence we came or whither we go; the human mind is unable to conceive the eternal in either direction; the soul of man inscrutable even to himself. _The night has a thousand eyes, The day but one; Yet the light of the bright world dies With the dying sun._ _The mind has a thousand eyes, The heart but one; Yet the light of a whole life dies When love is done._ All that there is to religion, therefore, is faith; not much more in politics. We are variously told that the church is losing its hold upon men. If it be true it is either that it gives itself over to theology--the pride of opinion--or yields itself to the celebration of the mammon of unrighteousness. I do not believe that it is true. Never in the history of the world was Jesus of Nazareth so interesting and predominant. Between Buddha, teaching the blessing of eternal sleep, and Christ, teaching the blessing of eternal life, mankind has been long divided, but slowly, surely, the influence of the Christ has overtaken that of the Buddha until that portion of the world which has advanced most by process of evolution from the primal state of man now worships at the shrine of Christ and him risen from the dead, not at the sign of Buddha and total oblivion.