But a baby is the Kingdom of God, and if you try to kiss a baby
he will know whether you are shaved or not. Perhaps I am mixing
up being shaved and being saved; my democratic sympathies have
always led me to drop my 'h's.' In another moment I may suggest
that goats represent the lost because goats have long beards.
This is growing altogether too allegorical.

"Nevertheless," I added, as I paid the bill, "I have really been
profoundly interested in what you told me about the New Shaving.
Have you ever heard of a thing called the New theology?"

He smiled and said that he had not.


XXIII

The Toy Theatre

There is only one reason why all grown-up people do not play with toys;
and it is a fair reason. The reason is that playing with toys
takes so very much more time and trouble than anything else.
Playing as children mean playing is the most serious thing in the world;
and as soon as we have small duties or small sorrows we have to
abandon to some extent so enormous and ambitious a plan of life.
We have enough strength for politics and commerce and art and philosophy;
we have not enough strength for play. This is a truth which every one
will recognize who, as a child, has ever played with anything at all;
any one who has played with bricks, any one who has played with dolls,
any one who has played with tin soldiers. My journalistic work,
which earns money, is not pursued with such awful persistency as that