expressions of the religious life with all humility and
sincerity. It was doubtless true that I was

"Weary of myself and sick of asking
What I am and what I ought to be,"

and that various cherished safeguards and claims to
self-dependence had been broken into by many piteous failures.
But certainly I had been brought to the conclusion that
"sincerely to give up one's conceit or hope of being good in
one's own right is the only door to the Universe's deeper
reaches." Perhaps the young clergyman recognized this as the test
of the Christian temper, at any rate he required little assent to
dogma or miracle, and assured me that while both the ministry and
the officers of his church were obliged to subscribe to doctrines
of well-known severity, the faith required to the laity was
almost early Christian in its simplicity. I was conscious of no
change from my childish acceptance of the teachings of the
Gospels, but at this moment something persuasive within made me
long for an outward symbol of fellowship, some bond of peace,
some blessed spot where unity of spirit might claim right of way
over all differences. There was also growing within me an almost
passionate devotion to the ideals of democracy, and when in all
history had these ideals been so thrillingly expressed as when
the faith of the fisherman and the slave had been boldly opposed
to the accepted moral belief that the well-being of a privileged
few might justly be built upon the ignorance and sacrifice of the
many? Who was I, with my dreams of universal fellowship, that I
did not identify myself with the institutional statement of this
belief, as it stood in the little village in which I was born,