Now this despair is partly the result of an excessive responsibility that we have taken for the universe. In youth, if we are earnest and eager, we tend to take every bit of experience that comes to us, as either a justification or a condemnation of the world. We are all instinctive monists at that age, and crave a complete whole. As we unconsciously construct our philosophy of life, each fact gets automatically recorded as confirming or denying the competency of the world we live in. Even the first shock of disillusionment, which banishes those dreams of a beautiful, orderly, and rational world that had suffused childhood with their golden light, did not shatter the conviction that there was somehow at least a Lord’s side. The sudden closing of the account in the second shock, when the world turns on us, shows us how mighty has been the issue at stake,--nothing less than our faith in the universe, and, perhaps, in the last resort, of our faith in ourselves. We see now that our breathless seriousness of youth was all along simply a studying of our crowded experience to see whether it was on the Lord’s side or not. And now in our doubt we are left with a weight on our souls which is not our own, a burden which we have really usurped. In its adventure with evil, youth must not allow this strange, metaphysical responsibility to depress and incapacitate it. We shall never face life freely and bravely and worthily if we do. I may wonder, it is true, as I look out on these peaceful fields, with the warm sun and blue sky above me and the kindly faces of my good friends around me, how this can be the same world that houses the millions of poor and wretched people in their burning and huddled quarters in the city. Can these days, in which I am free to come and go and walk and study as I will, be the same that measure out the long hours of drudgery to thousands of youth amid the whir of machines, and these long restful nights of mine, the same that are for them only gasps breaking a long monotony? It must be the same world, however, whether we can ever reconcile ourselves to it or not. But we need plainly feel no responsibility for what happened previously to our generation. Our responsibility now is a collective, a social responsibility. And it is only for the evil that society might prevent were it organized wisely and justly. Beyond that it does not go. For the accidental evil that is showered upon the world, we are not responsible, and we need not feel either that the integrity of the universe is necessarily compromised by it. It is necessary to be somewhat self-centred in considering it. We must trust our own feelings rather than any rational proof. In spite of everything, the world seems to us so unconquerably good, it affords so many satisfactions, and is so rich in beauty and kindliness, that we have a right to assume that there is a side of things that we miss in our pessimistic contemplation of misfortune and disaster. We see