That the creed was "filmy," the foothold "unsteady," is altogether likely, for the ancient supports were removed, the pillars that replaced them were shaking, and tradition alone remained to hold by. But religion was still the Poetry of Life, and kept its place among the interests singly represented by art, music, literature, philosophy, those fine intimations of a higher state, those splendid foreshadowings of the future, those noble efforts to solve problems that must be forever insoluble. My creed did not pretend to be final or even definite. It was simply a study, a preliminary sketch, an essay towards truth. A claim to completeness, to logical consistency, would have been fatal. Still less, if possible, did it pretend to meet popular wants. It resolutely turned in the opposite direction, and took up positions which, it was understood, the general public could not occupy without abandoning all its works and retiring to other ground. No effort was made to commend it to common opinion; on the contrary, everything like concession was shunned, and the slightest signal of agreement with current beliefs was regarded as a warning against a compromise of principle. Nothing was assumed except the validity of the human faculties, including, of course, the higher reason, the insight of genius, and such feelings as were parts of the rational constitution, together with perfect liberty in their exercise. Every theological system was repudiated; even the doctrines of a conscious Deity and the individual immortality of the soul were left open to discussion, the atheist and the materialist being listened to with as much deference as any. These doctrines were accepted, yet not on the ground of authority or tradition, but simply considered as faiths, hopes, sentiments of the spiritual being; the existence of living mind, coupled with the demand for unity, seeming to guarantee the first, the fact of individual persistency appearing to demonstrate the second. But all definition was carefully avoided, conviction being confined to the main idea, and being purely spiritual in its character, not in the least dogmatical, or exclusive of knowledge. Of doctrine in the usual sense there was none. There was merely thought. The very teaching was more of the nature of suggestion than of final conclusion. For this reason no account of the "credo" can be given, all fixed expressions of views being discountenanced as premature, and therefore irrational. This should be distinctly understood by those interested in coming at the truth on this subject. The object was to disintegrate, to pulverize, to enable mind to float freely in the air of intellect, to the end that it might crystallize about natural centres. All dogmatism, that of the infidel as well as that of the believer, of the man of science as well as of the theologian, of the sensualist as well as of the spiritualist, was obnoxious. There was no sympathy with those who regarded the case as