and culminating episode of the adventure of life. Are all such speculations idle and frivolous? Have they no place on the mental horizon of a youth of to-day, living in a world whose inner nature all the mighty achievements of the scientists, fruitful as they have been in their practical effects, have tended rather to obscure than to illumine? Well, a settled conviction that we live in a mechanical world, with no penumbra of mystery about us, checks the life-enhancing powers, and chills and depresses the spirit. A belief in the deadness of things actually seems to kill much of the glowing life that makes up our appreciation of art and personality in the world. The scientific philosophy is as much a matter of metaphysics, of theoretical conjecture, as the worst fanaticisms of religion. We have a right to shoot our guesses into the unknown. Life is no adventure if we let our knowledge, still so feeble and flickering, smother us. In this scientific age there is a call for youth to soar and paint a new spiritual sky to arch over our heads. If the old poetry is dead, youth must feel and write the new poetry. It has a challenge both to transcend the physical evil that taints the earth and the materialistic poison that numbs our spirits. The wise men thought they were getting the old world thoroughly charted and explained. But there has been a spiritual expansion these recent years which has created new seas to be explored and new atmospheres to breathe. It has been discovered that the world is alive, and that discovery has almost taken away men’s breaths; it has been discovered that evolution is creative and that we are real factors in that creation. After exploring the heights and depths of the stars, and getting ourselves into a state of mind where we saw the world objectively and diminished man and his interests almost to a pin-point, we have come with a rush to the realization that personality and values are, after all, the important things in a living world. And no problem of life or death can be idle. A hundred years ago it was thought chastening to the fierce pride of youth to remind it often of man’s mortality. But youth to-day must think of everything in terms of life; yes, even of death in terms of life. We need not the chastening of pride, but the stimulation to a sense of the limitless potentialities of life. No thought or action that really enhances life is frivolous or fruitless.