"Recently, I've been thinking I might write a little paper about some college friends at Williams. I was in college with Harry James Smith (author of _Mrs. Bumpstead Lee_), Max Eastman, and 'Go-to-Hell' Whittlesey. As editor of the _Williams Monthly_ I have accepted and rejected manuscripts of both the two latter, and have reminiscences of their literary youth. "Then I spent a summer in the _Post_ and _Nation_ in 1908, which is a pleasant chapter to remember; another summer teaching at Columbia; this past summer teaching at the University of California. My favorite recreations are climbing little mountains, chopping wood, and canoeing on Lake Michigan. "This summer I have been picking out a place to die in--or rather looking over the sites offered in California. I lean towards the high Sierras, up above the Yosemite Valley. "My ambition in life is to retire--perhaps at the age of seventy--and write only for amusement. When I can abandon the task of improving my contemporaries, I hope to become a popular author." Professor Sherman, you will note, is almost an exact contemporary of H. L. Mencken, with whom he has crossed swords in more than one spirited encounter; and Sherman is likely to give as good as he takes in such scuffles, or even rather better. It is high time that his critical sagacity and powerful reasoning were better known in the market-place. UNTIL I met the Butlerians I used to think that the religious spirit in our times was very precious, there was so little of it. I thought one should hold one's breath before it as before the flicker of one's last match on a cold night in the woods. "What if it should go out?" I said; but my apprehension was groundless. It can never go out. The religious spirit is indestructible and constant in quantity like the sum of universal energy in which matches and suns are alike but momentary sparkles and phases. This great truth I learned of the Butlerians: Though the forms and objects of religious belief wax old as a garment and are changed, faith, which is, after all, the precious thing, endures forever. Destroy a man's faith in God and he will worship humanity; destroy his faith in humanity and he will worship science; destroy his faith in science and he will worship himself; destroy his faith in himself and he will worship Samuel Butler.