Jingle birds Squeek birds and Clatter birds. Jingle birds has fat rusty
stumacks. I have not the trouble to obsurv any more kinds."




CHAPTER IX

ON SURVIVING THE IDOLS WE BUILD


It is the way of life to be forever building new idols in place of the
old. Into the fabric of these the most of us put so much of ourselves that
a little of us dies each time a cherished image crumbles from age or is
shattered by some lightning-stroke of truth from a cloud electric with
doubt. This is why we fade and wither as the leaf. Could we but sweep
aside the wreck without dismay and raise a new idol from the overflowing
certainty of youth, then indeed should we have eaten from that other tree
in Eden, for the defence of which is set the angel with the flaming sword.
But this may not be. Fatuously we stake our souls on each new
creation--deeming that _here_, in sooth, is one that shall endure beyond
the end of time. To the last we are dull to the truth that our idols are
meant to be broken, to give way to other idols still to be broken.

And so we lose a little of ourselves each time an idol falls; and,
learning thus to doubt, wistfully, stoically we learn to die, leaving some
last idol triumphantly surviving us. For--and this is the third lesson
from that tree of Truth--we learn to doubt, not the perfection of our
idols, but the divinity of their creator. And it would seem that this is
quite as it should be. So long as the idol-maker will be a slave to his