A little slender, eager, swaying body, and a great violin above which his face seemed worshipping. His eyes turned deep blue as flowers when he raised his head for some lovely soaring tone or dropped it on his instrument over some deep G string melody. His mouth was the saddest little mouth I've ever seen, and somehow you could watch the music coursing through his cheek bones. His right foot kept moving gently inside his shoe, always in perfect time. The New Paganism DEWITT C. WING One of the momentous achievements of applied science is the convincing demonstration that the earth is a living thing. It is as truly a live organism as any of the animals of which it is the mother. Life could not have been evolved by or from it if there had not been life in it. We do not require an inexplicable miracle to account for the evolution of man; we can trace his pedigree back to an ancestry with fins and gills, and of course it stretches far beyond that comparatively recent stage in his development. From the beginning of the world conditions have steadily grown more favorable to the habitation of the earth by the higher animals. Since man is a part of the earth, what he himself has done to bring about this auspicious change may be credited to the mind or life resident in the earth. Then there is essential goodness in the earth--which is not saying that there is no evil in it. The world is a better place for a man to live in now than it was when his ancestors occupied dismal caves. It is no illusion that, design or no design, the cosmic urge has been toward goodness, by which I mean an increasingly hospitable dwelling-place for men. There have been recessions, and there will be others, but, apart from faith and hope, established facts compel the man who understands them to declare his absolute and unalterable certainty that the inexorable law of life's becoming greater than it is cannot be nullified. So that, regardless of all poverty and misery, of all that is unlovely, of all the blind and passionate class hatreds and sex quibbles, the man who really thinks must think hopefully. There is indeed the most ample justification of optimism. The world is God, and the man who worships it the new pagan. He comes off the same stock as the old pagans, who were called heathens--because they were not Christians. They were, in fact, the classic earth-lovers, and, hence, more truly the sons of God than the crusaders who, directed by an anthropomorphic Deity, tortured and killed them. The new pagan, who not only feels, smells, hears, and sees the earth, but comprehends the established scientific facts about it, finds a keener and larger delight and satisfaction in it than his forefathers could experience. He loves it with his heart and his mind. Having this attitude toward it, he wishes to serve it, prompted by the same motive which actuates him when he serves his immediate father and mother.