steps he had cut at such infinite pain; but he toiled on till, reaching the summit, he fell exhausted. He lay dying, alone and desolate; but as the breath left his body a single white feather from the bird of truth floated through the air and fell upon his breast. The allegory embodies a truth for all time. But Lowell supplies a correcting idea in his familiar lines:

"Careless seems the great avenger: history's pages but record

One death-grapple in the darkness, 'twixt old systems and the word;

Truth for ever on the scaffold, Wrong for ever on the

throne

Yet that scaffold sways the future, and behind the dim unknown

Standeth God within the shadow, keeping watch above His own."

Evasion of the truth spells moral bankruptcy: honesty in facing the truth breeds moral courage. Rupert Brooke, the gallant young poet who died in the Gallipoli Campaign, gave beauty a second place to truth. His one desire, we are told, was to tell the truth at all costs, and let beauty take care of itself. To Herbert Spencer truth was a religion, and in praise of truth he burst into at least one passage of poetic ecstasy: "Truth, like Venus, the embodiment of all moral beauty, is born on the clashing waves of public opinion." Browning sacrificed the form of his poetry to his passion for truth. Dean Farrar jeopardized his popularity with the Evangelicals in the Church of England by his passionate proclamation of what he conceived to be a vital truth. Loyalty to the truth has cost martyrs

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their lives in every century of the Christian era. In the quest for truth mere reason is inadequate. If not actually discredited, pure reason "makes humbler claims on men's allegiance" to-day than it did forty years ago. The spiritual principle has reasserted itself-the moral sense and the human conscience have restored themselves. For the determination of truth," says Mrs. De Bunsen, "much more is needed than reason alone-will, imagination, emotion, each has its part to play. Reason is not the sole judge of truth. By some minds deliberately, by many more unconsciously, she has been dethroned." "Truth begets truth as confidence wins confidence."

"Give truth, and your gift will be paid in kind,

And honor will honor meet."

"What you are speaks so loud I cannot hear what

you say," says Emerson. What we are speaks so loudly, that what we say rarely matters.

XV

OPEN-MINDEDNESS

PEN-MINDEDNESS is the exact antithesis

of dogmatism. There are some issues in life upon which boys and men alike must take their stand, and be adamant if they are to be worthy citizens. Truth, charity, temperance - these are fundamentals of character upon which no one can boast that he is "a Gallio, caring for none of these things." But there are other matters upon which open-mindedness-an attitude of suspended judgment-is both wise and desirable. The raw amateur risks a fall if he dogmatizes where only specialists have the right to express an opinion.

If I take Spiritualism as an example of the type of subject upon which open-mindedness is a sensible attitude for a young man, it is not because I have the faintest sympathy with spiritualism. Belief in the continuance of personality after death-without which life would be a horror-rests on deep intuition, religious faith, and some scientific evidence. Spiritualists are groping for the means to hold communication with those who have passed through the valley of the shadow. Some of them are working on what they believe to be strictly scientific lines, and applying to spiritualistic phenomena the tests they apply to scientific experiments in other fields

than the psychic. It appears to me that the attitude of the agnostic-of "I do not know," which is the exact meaning of the word-is wise. Reservation of judgment is commendable open-mindedness while such questions are being probed by earnest and devout savants. Attaching any sort of label to a thing does not dispose of it. Theologians may derive happiness from tacking the name of an old heresy to a new thought; but no heresy persists unless it enshrines some element of truth. Developments should be awaited open-mindedly, and evidence should be weighed with judicial patience. It may even be that God is allowing men to penetrate into the secrets of the Unseen, and it may possibly be that, as Francis Thompson says—

"The drift of pinions, would we hearken,
Beats at our own clay-shuttered doors."

Let it be clearly understood, however, that openmindedness is not credulity-that it does not imply readiness to accept convictions without testing the validity of the evidence on which they must rest. Credulity is becoming one of the dangers of our age. The impossible has been achieved so often, that we have passed through an age of scepticism into what may become something even worse-an age of blind credulity. We must guard against letting convictions rest on mere conjectures, and against snapping conclusions from the air. Every brilliant guess at truth is not to be hailed as a revelation. The Athenians, who were ever in quest of some new thing, missed the durable satisfaction of fidelity to any established truth. They plunged through fogs of doubt into bogs

of despair. It is open-minded to cling to old faiths till new truths have made them untenable.

Even in keeping an open mind on such an issue as spiritualism, it is quite legitimate to remember the chicanery which has discredited almost all spiritualistic mediums. "The whole subject," it has been well said, "is entangled with trickery and charlatanism, and there is something very suspicious about the sickening puerility of the unutterable tosh in many of the alleged messages." Browning had some equally scathing things to say of spiritualists in "Mr. Sludge the Medium." Again, however, it must be borne in mind that God, in His infinite wisdom, has, in the processes of His self-revelation to the souls of men, used some very earthen vessels as culverts of His grace. The cardinals who fixed the canon and framed the creeds were not all immaculate characters; and the history of religious revivals reveals that evangelists who have had many ignoble traits themselves have been the means of changing ugly lives into gracious characters. Open-mindedness impels a man to balance pros and cons in this fashion and to reach his final conclusions unbiased by a priori prejudices.

The labeling method of dealing with a new thing settles nothing. Wherever any new subject comes under discussion in a company of men, some one, who perhaps "recommends as wildly as he spells," oracularly remarks: "That is just Socialism," or "That is nothing but sheer Bolshevism." He may have strayed into the truth; but the truth of a label does not guarantee the fallacy of the thing labeled. During the war, when America to a moderate extent and Great Britain to the fullest degree took over railways