Certainly these three coercive factors, and many others, too, bear strangely upon all our attempts to think. The beauty and the happiness of religion, perhaps, lie in the fact that it has little to do with thinking. As far as any man knows, up to now, the universe is insoluble; and the mind, ardent particle, rather resents insolubility. It resents the solemn circling of the Dipper, seen from the front porch every clear night. Filling itself with slow darkness, gently tilting and draining again, it too cruelly reminds us of the orderly immensities of space. And religion may very well be considered a form of art and of anesthetic to soften the onset of that insolvency. It is reason’s petition in bankruptcy, “to drown the memory of that insolence.” If it makes us happy, we need inquire no further; for happiness is what all pursue. Perhaps, indeed, we are but memoranda in the note-book of the cosmic Author, jottings of some story that flashed into His mind one day, but which He did not trouble to write. So we are hunting, hunting endlessly for the rest of the plot. Or we are surf-bathers in an ocean where one step carries us beyond our depth. Accept any figure of speech that appeals to you. No work of art or literature yet, so far as I know, has given an adequate presentment of the glory and agony and mirth and excitement of being alive. Suppose some visitor from another planet dropped in for an evening and could communicate his inquisition. We wanted to give him just one book that would offer a picture, trustworthy, frank, recognizable, of the life we have known--man’s long campaign with nature, with other men, with woman, with himself. Some suggest “Candide,” but I find that great book too pitiless. Some, Browne’s “Religio Medici,” but is it not too witty? We might, in a hasty ransack of the shelves, linger momently upon Boswell or Walt Whitman or Shakespere’s Sonnets or “Moby Dick”; or upon the Book of Common Prayer or a photograph of Gozzoli’s “Viaggio dei Re Magi.” But not even these would duly serve. It would have to be an anthology, I fear; perhaps Robert Bridges’s “Spirit of Man,” though it should really have a stouter infusion of the seventeenth century, when God-intoxicated and Eros-maddened poets like John Donne and Andrew Marvell uttered their ecstatic and magnanimous despair.