the Challenge of Universal Death, and, by winning the victory there, wins it everywhere else. The last enemy to be destroyed is Death, the summary frustration-not alone as it affects the individual, but as the doom of the visible system to which he belongs-of societies, of civilizations, of planets, of suns, and of stars; so that not man only but the whole creation, groaning and travailing together in pain until now, shall be delivered from the vicious circle of meaningless self-repetition, from the bondage of corruption, into the glorious liberty of the children of God. A complete transfiguration of the meaning of life—such is the victory that religion wins by facing the Challenge of her last enemy and by destroying it. All frustrations come to a head in Death. Destroy that and you destroy them all. They sink into insignificance. They become light afflictions not worthy to be compared to the glory that is revealed. A religion which overcomes all other enemies, but yet turns tail or puts its head in the sand when the last enemy sounds his challenge from the great deep, is a vanquished religion.

Such is the scope and majesty of religion, as it was conceived by the original genius of Christianity, and by the great teachers of India. That vision has passed away from the modern world. It must be restored if the churches are to live. The old terminology indeed may never come back, and need not. But the power must be recovered which can meet the Challenge of Life in that immensely expanded form which includes the Challenge of Death.

I know not how that can be done except by boldly confronting the very worst that pessimism has to say to us. Beyond the need of accommodating religion to science, of reconciling it with democratic aspirations, of using it as a

motive for social and political reform, all of which needs, if pressed too hard, belittle religion into a mere reënforcement of our moral powers, a serviceable handmaid of our secular interests, and leave us overthrown when the spearhead of life's tragedy is pointed at our breasts beyond all that there is a deeper need. We must grasp the nettle. In all these accommodations and reconciliations there is no answer to that sense of an overarching futility which haunts the background of our minds in these days, the deeper self that stands in the presence of Death and is not to be silenced by loudtongued doctrines of progress, which seem to have been invented for the vain purpose of shouting it down.

Nor is the Challenge of Life, brought thus to its point in the Challenge of Death, to be met by the doctrine of Personal Immortality — certainly not by that alone. The answer lies in a far deeper and more comprehensive thought, from which our personal immortality may follow as a sequence, but of which it is not the whole nor even the beginning.

The answer lies in the thought that the history of this visible universe, the whole presentation of it in space and time, is no more than a fragment, perhaps no more than a shadow, of its reality. As revealed to our senses, as apprehended by our faculties of perception, the universe is a mere thing, a lifeless object, infinite in extent and duration, but as dead as any stone. Death has dominion over the whole of it. Save in the spots where life has exceptionally appeared for a season in its nooks and crevices, the universe is all one vast empire of Death. Thought of in that way, as an immensity of dead matter and blind force, the impression it makes upon the mind is dreadful. One's heart breaks in the presence of it. To be alive in such a universe is to be

alive in a tomb. Look up to the firmament on a clear night, stretch your imagination to the immensities it reveals to you, then think of it as all dead mechanism - and you will encounter the Challenge of Death in its most poignant and tremendous form.

But what if it is not all dead? What if all is alive-alive as we are, but with richness and fullness of life which compare with ours as the ocean compares with a drop of water? Well, there is a spiritual insight which has seen just that. There is a way of thought that meets the Challenge of Death by affirming just that. We call it the doctrine of Divine Immanence, which is the philosopher's way of saying that the whole universe is alive not a dead thing to be exploited, but a living Being to be loved.

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The Divine Immanence - a weak a weak thing, surely, if you approach it as a mere theme for controversy, but a power stronger than Death to those who have felt it in the calmer moments of their lives and there are many such even in the noisy years that are passing over us. "There shall be a depth of silence in thee deeper than this sea, which is but ten miles deep: a Silence unsoundable, known to God only.' "The great Empire of Silence: higher than the stars; deeper than the Kingdoms of Death. It alone is great; all else is small.' Not in the atmosphere of our controversial interests, not on the field where vociferous theologies are striving with one another as to which shall be greatest, but in the depth of that unsoundable Silence will the secret be found which makes us victors over the last enemy - the religion whose scope and majesty are more than

a match for Death. Entering through the Silence into conscious fellowship with the life of the Living Universe, we ask no further question about our personal immortality, for eternal life is already won. There is no aspect of our experience but will have its part in that great transfiguration, no form of Life's Challenge but will be met with a bolder courage, the bright hours growing brighter, the dark hours growing bright. The Immanence of God! Not a new form of theological contention, but the silent answer of the soul to the Challenge of Death, which is the spearpoint of the Challenge of Life.

Religion is universal; not in the superficial sense that every man has some of it, but in the far deeper sense that it transfigures the meaning of the entire universe in which we live and die, and of which we are living and dying parts. Under the touch of religion every phenomenon in the universe changes the fashion of its countenance: the corruptible puts on incorruption; the mortal puts on immortality; every atom in the structure of things rises from death to life in a general resurrection, its face shining as the sun, its garments becoming whiter than the light. Death hath no more dominion over it, for it is spiritual through and through.

Religion is no 'beneficent extra.' Nor can you say of it, as Matthew Arnold said of immortality, that it constitutes three fourths of life; nor the ninety-nine hundredths of life; nor any larger fraction you choose to name. It is the principle of a universal transvaluation, which makes all things new, pain becoming joy, law becoming love, Death becoming Life.

It seems a bit strange that the mere dropping of a letter into the post box should at the same moment drop on to my shoulders such a feeling of weight - especially since the letter had been written and lying on the desk for a month. The deliberate severing of connections with the monthly pay-check, unless of course there is another paycheck in the offing, is always a serious thing, for, plebeian as it sounds, one must eat.

The letter was my husband's resignation his deliberate abandonment of a position he has held unhappily for about twelve years. We have been talking about his resignation for two years. He finally wrote the letter a month ago, and then left it on the desk where we could read it occasionally until we were sure we knew what it meant.

It really means that I, the wife, am to be the breadwinner for some time to come. A reversal of the usual domestic situation, true, but one that, under the circumstances, I am happy to be able to be a party to.

The emotion that flooded me on the short walk home from the post box must be the same that comes to every man when he marries and promises to provide for his wife and the children that may come to them. It is a feeling of awful and holy-responsibility. Our friends will not feel that way about it when they learn what we have done, but we have not done it for the benefit

I

of our friends. We did it because, since I am earning as much as my husband earned in his distasteful work, there is no longer any need of his making himself unhappy in an uncongenial occupation. And we did it because he is happy in doing something else that will, in time, bring him a comfortable living, but that will probably require several years of apprenticeship on a small income. Life is too short for unnecessary unhappiness.

For a number of years my husband has made an avocation of writing. He has sold some of his articles and, now that he will have all of his time for this work instead of the occasional weekends his job gave him at home, he will sell more of it. But the path of a writer is steep and stony, and so, since the die is cast, I am flooded with questions. Suppose I, temporarily the family breadwinner, and a free-lance publicity and advertising woman at that, - should be ill? Suppose it is true that such an arrangement as ours always works out disastrously? Suppose the woman's-page writers of the newspapers are right, and a man always hates a woman on whom he is dependent? Suppose my husband, who has lived in hotels and trains most of the past twelve years, finds hours at a desk at home too monotonous? I know how cramping four walls can be. He has that to learn.

And I fear that I am responsible for his decision. At least, I planted the

germ of the idea. It began when he was in the hospital with blood-poisoning two years ago, and the doctors thought for a time that the amputation of a leg was the only thing that would save his life. When I went in to see him I said, 'You have always wanted to write. You don't need two legs to do that. And I'll feel justified in having been a business woman instead of a good housewife if you'll let me pay the bills while you get started.'

A serum, tried as a last resort, brought him out of the hospital with two legs. But during the weary uncertainty we talked about all the ways and means of his having a try at the work he loved. When he was well and ready to go back to his job of selling steel, he said half jokingly, as if he thought it an impossibility, 'When you can earn as much as my present salary, then I'll chuck the job and let you pay the rent for a while.' He has had a raise in salary since then, but this year I earned as much as his new salary.

I know so many men, and women too for that matter, who are unhappy in their jobs and who dare not leave those jobs to hunt more congenial work because of loved ones dependent upon them, that I am happy to be able to make it possible for my husband to be one of the few who dare to take a chance. I feel, as I told him in the hospital, that my years of work have been justified. I have worked when I ought to have been helping him entertain customers and when, according to the rules of the game, I ought to have been playing up to the big boss by entertaining his wife and daughter when they were in town. Kotowing to the big boss and his womenfolk goes against the grain with me and I have n't done it. I have n't noticed that such efforts have advanced other men in the company, either. So I have gone on working because I wanted to

work, and because I liked to work, until work has become such a habit that I should be unhappy if I were not busy.

II

For eighteen years, since the age of seventeen, I have earned my own living. For two or three months after the war I tried being a housewife, but we were both so unhappy in the effort that I gave it up.

In the early years of our marriage neither my husband nor I earned much money and we needed our combined incomes for living expenses. I remember how I resented the joint checkingaccount we had then, which I came to refer to in my mind as a ‘put and take' account I deposited my checks and my husband paid the bills. I felt that I got much less out of my earnings after I was married than I got before. Now we are going to have another joint account and right there another question pops up. Have I grown more unselfish during these past ten years, or shall I think of the trips and other luxuries I might have had if my husband had kept his job? Have I come to love work enough for its own sake to be happy in it, or do I love it for the dollars it brings me? And shall I continue to love it when these dollars must be shared?

Do men, I wonder, so question themselves when they are about to become responsible for the future comforts of the girls they marry? Under the circumstances, are these natural questions? I wonder.

I have been going back over the ten years we have been married and the eight years of free-lancing before that, and have been trying to face the future in the light of the past. Between the situation at the time we were married, when my two mottoes were "Take a chance' and 'Do as you darn please,'

and the present situation, there is this difference I fell in love with my husband during his illness two years ago. I thought I loved him when I married him, but there was always the thought in reserve that nothing but death need be permanent. I thought I loved my husband on the day we were married. I doubted it before the day was over, and there were other times during the first eight years of our marriage when I doubted it. To-day I think I'm one of the luckiest women in the world, because I have n't a doubt left on the subject. I know.

There is time, plenty of it, during the nights when one's husband is fighting for his life to discover one's real feelings. During that winter I found that I'd been breaking one of the first rules of our younger generation. I had been deceiving myself. I discovered that I really loved my husband. Perhaps I had loved him all the time. Perhaps the sort of love I have for him now is something that must grow with the years. Perhaps the care and watching before the doctors took him to the hospital brought it about. I have been told that it is impossible to care for a helpless infant for a time without coming to give it something akin to mother love. Caring for a very ill husband may have had the same effect, although it is n't entirely a maternal love I have for him now. There may be something maternal mixed up in it, for we have no children, and there is something of the maternal in all women that we must pour out in some direction.

When we announced our marriage to a friend she laughed and said, 'Well, the first five years are the hardest. If you stick that out you're safe for the next hundred.' She was right. They were the hardest, for me at any rate, for it required just about five years for me to adjust myself to the state of matrimony.

III

I remember a sentence from a book I read recently: 'Only lasting desires can carry one into action.'

It took two years of considering this step to bring my husband to the point of resigning. During those two years there were more unpleasant episodes than usual in his work-and selling steel during the ups and downs of the business situation since the war has not all been pleasant.

Selling steel involves, for instance, entertaining buyers. Often they are men who began as workers on the openhearth floor, and who learned about steel from making it. Good fellows of many good qualities, nevertheless their development has been one-sided. They retain to the end of their lives the physical vigor and toughness that enabled them to stand twelve-hour shifts in the heat of the steel mill. When they come to New York on business, or when business takes them to the many conventions that are a part of the steel game, they must be entertained. And showing the sights of the metropolis to steel men under Prohibition is — well, to put it mildly is apt to pall on a minister's son. Yes, my husband is a minister's son.

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Part of a steel salesman's job, especially in New York City, is entertaining the out-of-town steel man. It means putting in the regular eight-hour day at the regular duties, and then arranging a dinner party, a theatre party, and a midnight-show party, and then probably putting the visitor to bed if he is unable to put himself to bed. Then, in order to snatch every possible minute of sleep, the salesman usually sleeps in a hotel downtown, rather than waste precious minutes on the subway. The salesman must be back on the job the next day, and there may be other visitors the next night, or the man who