they really know what is wrong. Such a young person persistently
believes that behind all suffering, behind sin and want, must lie
redeeming magnanimity. He may imagine the world to be tragic and
terrible, but it never for an instant occurs to him that it may
be contemptible or squalid or self-seeking. Apparently I looked
upon the efforts of the trades-unionists as I did upon those of
Frederic Harrison and the Positivists whom I heard the next
Sunday in Newton Hall, as a manifestation of "loyalty to
humanity" and an attempt to aid in its progress. I was
enormously interested in the Positivists during these European
years; I imagined that their philosophical conception of man's
religious development might include all expressions of that for
which so many ages of men have struggled and aspired. I vaguely
hoped for this universal comity when I stood in Stonehenge, on
the Acropolis in Athens, or in the Sistine Chapel in the Vatican.
But never did I so desire it as in the cathedrals of Winchester,
Notre Dame, Amiens. One winter's day I traveled from Munich to
Ulm because I imagined from what the art books said that the
cathedral hoarded a medieval statement of the Positivists' final
synthesis, prefiguring their conception of a "Supreme Humanity."

In this I was not altogether disappointed. The religious history
carved on the choir stalls at Ulm contained Greek philosophers as
well as Hebrew prophets, and among the disciples and saints stood
the discoverer of music and a builder of pagan temples. Even then
I was startled, forgetting for the moment the religious revolutions
of south Germany, to catch sight of a window showing Luther as
he affixed his thesis on the door at Wittenberg, the picture
shining clear in the midst of the older glass of saint and symbol.