"But every religion has had its Founder, hasn't it?" "_I_ don't call it a religion, my dear fellow! It's a science, like any other science. Ethics is The Science of Human Relation. It is called Applied Sociology--that's all." "How does a thing like that touch one, personally?" I asked. "How does any science touch one personally? One studies a science, one teaches a science, one uses a science. That's the point--the _use_ of it. Our old scheme of religion was a thing to 'believe,' or 'deny'; it was a sort of shibboleth, a test question one had to pass examination in to get good marks! What I'm telling you about is a general recognition of right behavior, and a general grasp of the necessary power." "You leave out entirely the emotional side of religion." "Do I? I did not intend to. You see, we do not distinguish religion from life now, and are apt to forget old terms. You are thinking, I suppose, of the love of God, and man, which we used to preach. We practice it now. "That Energy I spoke of, when perceived by us, is called Love. Love, the real thing we had in mind when we said 'God is Love,' is beneficent energy. It is the impulse of service, the desire to do, to help, to make, to benefit. That is the 'love' we were told to bestow on one another. Now we do." "Yes; but what made you do it? What keeps you up to it?" "Just nature, John. It is human nature. We used to believe otherwise." He was quiet for a while. "One of these new doctors got hold of me, when I was about as near the bottom as one can go and get back. Not a priest with a formula, nor a reformer with an exhortation; but a real physician, a soul-doctor, with a passionate enthusiasm for an interesting case. That's what I was, John; not a lost soul; not even a 'sinner'--just 'a case.' Have you heard about these moral sanitariums?" "Yes--but not definitely." "Well, as soon as this view of things took hold, they began to want to isolate bad cases, and cure them if they could. And they cured me." "How, Frank--_how_? What did they tell you that you didn't know before? What did they do to you?" "Sane, strong, intelligent minds put themselves in connection with mine, John, and shared their strength with me. I was made to feel that my individual failure was no great matter, but that my social duty was; that the whole of my dirty past was as nothing to all our splendid future, that whatever I had done was merely to be forgotten--the sooner the better, and that all life was open before me--all human life; endless, beautiful, profoundly interesting--the game was on, and I was in it.