Thus in its perils and opportunities, in its satisfactions and resistances, in its gifts and responsibilities, for good or for evil, life is an adventure. In facing its evil, we shall not let it daunt or depress our spirits; we shall surrender some of our responsibility for the Universe, and face forward, working and encouraging those around us to coöperate with us and with all who suffer, in fighting preventable wrong. Death we shall transcend by interpreting everything in terms of life; we shall be victorious over it by recognizing in it an aspect of a larger life in which we are immersed. We shall accept gladly the wealth of days poured out for us. Alive, in a living world, we shall cultivate those interests and qualities which enhance life. We shall try to keep the widest possible fund of interests in order that life may mount ever richer, and not become jaded and wearied in its ebb-flow. We shall never cease to put our questions to the heart of the world, intent on tracking down the mysteries of its behavior and its meaning, using each morsel of knowledge to pry further into its secrets, and testing the tools we use by the product they create and the hidden chambers they open. To face the perils and hazards fearlessly, and absorb the satisfactions joyfully, to be curious and brave and eager,--is to know the adventure of life. VII SOME THOUGHTS ON RELIGION In youth we grow and learn and always the universe widens around us. The horizon recedes faster than we can journey towards it. There comes a time when we look back with longing to the days when everything we learned seemed a fast gaining upon the powers of darkness, and each new principle seemed to illuminate and explain an immense region of the world. We had only to keep on learning in steady progress, it seemed, until we should have dominion over the whole of it. But there came a time, perhaps, when advance halted, and our carefully ordered world began to dissipate and loose ends and fringes to appear. It became a real struggle to keep our knowledge securely boxed in our one system, indeed, in any system, as we found when we restlessly tried one dogma after another as strong-boxes for our spiritual goods. Always something eluded us; it was “ever not quite.” Just when we were safest, some new experience came up to be most incongruously unaccounted for. We had our goods, for instance, safely stowed away in the box of “materialism,” when suddenly we realized that, on its theory, our whole life might run along precisely as we see it now, we might talk and love and paint and build without a glimmer of consciousness, that wondrous stuff which is so palpably our light and our life. The materialist can see in us nothing but the inert accompaniment of our bodies, the helpless, useless, and even annoying spectators of the play of physical forces through these curious compounds of chemical elements that we call our bodies. Or if, filled with the joy of creation, we tried to