understand now the experience I had in crossing the street once in New York. There were, of course, crowds of people, and so there was some concern on my part about doing my own small navigating successfully. Then all at once there was that sense of something deeper present, and a feeling that if I let go all would be well. I did. I relaxed, giving over my surface tension and letting myself float into the tide of people as a swimmer gives himself to the water. It all went simply and easily then. But there was much more to it than the simple surface fact. It was as though for a moment I had caught the undercurrent of the crowd, its rhythm, and so could move in it, be carried easily and naturally by it. I had found my place, and fitted in like a note in a piece of music. I think this small experience might be true for all of life. Under everything we do there is probably this great life-giving undercurrent, the spirit of each activity, but we usually fail to perceive it. If we could get into touch with it more frequently, all of life would move much more easily

for us. We should not then sail such choppy seas. We might catch the tune, so to speak, in everything in people as well as in activities. But to do so one must let go of one's surface self, and make at least a little gesture toward the spiritual. Let go, let go that seems to be the constant command. Let go of the surface anxiety, the terrible snatch and scramble and fear of getting left in some way, and reach out toward the spiritual. If one dared to let go, one would drop only a little way, yet that little way might carry one into a whole new aspect of life. It was what Christ was always proclaiming — a losing of a losing of one's life to save it, a surrender to the life more abundant. But the initial attempt must come from ourselves, although no doubt the Holy Spirit instigates us to it.

To live all lives, to string them upon myself,
Millions of beads on one continuous strand.
I think before I was born the face of my soul
Must have peered and peered through the gor-
geous windows of life,

Like a child peeping in at a toy shop, bewildered by all

The rich display, and uncertain how to invest
His penny. Well, my penny of birth is expended,
But now, walking the aisles inside of the shop,
I see laid out an endless assortment of lives
Sad lives, gay lives, broken lives, woolly-dog
lives,

Everything that hath breath praises the Lord; Grotesque jumping-jack lives. I do not care

and I?

I desire them all, not to handle and touch, but to live,

To be there at the heart, at the quick of each

breath. But how

Could one ever obtain such a madness and wonder of life?

The spirit of life is through it all, and life is God, and God is love — ecstasy! Not a sparrow falls to the ground without your Father in Heaven

of course not! How could it, since He is there at its very heart? Call not thou anything common or uncleanoh, I will not! I will not! I will hold the vision clear. The Kingdom of Heaven has come nigh unto you. It is all about, here and now, in every human being walking the streets, in every sparrow flying, in every green leaf blowing in the wind. In every living thing it is here

before us, is surging up to us in every act of life. How stupid I am, how blind most of the time! But to-day my eyes are open; I am moving in the mystery of life. I must hold the vision, recapturing it every morning, every day plunging it more and more into each act of life. I see how all of life should be glorified by the realization of this life more abundant, pouring it into every activity, re-creating all with joy. But as yet the vision is fleeting, so hard to hold, so difficult to carry through into all one's busy life. It is like cobwebs on the grass. One sees them distinctly in the early morning, gradually fading as the sun advances, but renewed again the next day. The vision comes to me again and again, but it is lost in the heat of life's activities, even in the simple activities of the life I lead. Why am I so inept in carrying it through? It is the amazing adventure-behold the vision, then try to clothe it in the garment of life. Nothing too small for it, nothing too big. When one tries to put it into life, one knows the poet's despair and delight in endeavoring to put pure poetry into words. The vision is there; one struggles to interpret it; but the hardness and selfish

ness of circumstances carry it all awry, just as words with their inflexibility break the fleeting gift of poetry into something hard and concrete. Yet the attempt must be made.

If we are ever to rest in pure vision, it is not now. Now it must be brought into active life in some way, through some one of the endless channels which offer. The effort is the thing. If it is bungling and unsuccessful, as it is almost certain to be, for the vision must always be far above its realization, no matter. The attempt has been made; you have taken a hand in the great game; some other player sees, VOL. 136- - NO. 6

knows what you are about, and is stimulated, as you have been stimulated by his effort. 'I know! I know!' he cries out across the murk and failure. 'Oh, I know what you have attempted. It is my game also, the greatest game in all life— the very heart of life itself!'

The spirit may be utilized in all the ways of existence, once it has found an entrance into the world, but the entrance, in human lives at least, must be through the opening of the heart. That is the everlasting door that the psalmist cries upon to be lifted up. 'Lift up your heads, O ye gates; and be ye lift up, ye everlasting doors; and the King of glory shall come in!' When one makes an attempt to lift up the everlasting door, through the offering of one's small self in prayer and meditation as one sinks into deeper and deeper levels of consciousness, of selfsurrender and stillness, one becomes aware at times of a sensation of rhythm, almost of half-guessed music, as if just beyond this utter silence there surged a tide of melody waiting for an opening through which to pour itself.

Oh, shout! Oh, shout, ye sons of God!
And shawms of joy reply,
To lift the everlasting door,
To throw it wide and high;
That He, the King of Glory,
Who is the King of Song,
May enter in with laughter
Where melodies belong!
Oh, lift it up- the heart of man,
That gate so long held fast-
Oh, beat it down with melody,
With joyous blast on blast!

ONE of my early memories is of a church, a brick church with a long, broad flight of steps leading up to a big bare churchroom - and at the front of this room three tall Christmas trees decorated with tinsel and cotton, with candles ready for the lighting. The trees were arranged in a triangle with the centre one at the back. Of the mechanics of those three trees I have a vivid memory, because I was to be the golden-haired angel with a starry crown, standing on a platform higher than my father's head - an angel with one hand poised beneath the dove of peace, and the other extending an olive branch. After I was poised the outer trees were to be swung back by a scissor arrange-. ment to disclose the angel.

It seemed strange that God and the minister should want a little girl to wear a white nightgown, and no shoes or stockings, in the church. It made the little girl's heart beat very hard and fast.

They were lighting the candles when the cotton caught on fire, and there was almost a stampede among the audience. My sister and her nurse were pushed down the long front steps, and people were knocked down. After the excitement was over and the candles safely lighted, the angel was put on the platform a little girl not over four years old, with one outstretched hand holding a spray of leaves, and the other touching a white dove that gently swayed on its wire. The outer trees were moved aside, and red-fire flares lighted. As the flares blazed up, terror struck to the

heart of the frightened child, and with a wild cry for her father she leaped from the platform into his arms, and the dove of peace still swayed from the tree. There was no thought of God or any heavenly protection. I do not believe that religion is inherent in the human soul or that it is an hereditary factor. It is the result of training and of the need for something by which one may live.

Religion, temperance, and politics were a sad mixture in my childish mind, because at that same time I remember being put on the big church platform to recite 'Have courage, my boy, to say No,' at a temperance rally; and then, not knowing how to get off the platform, I stood there and cried at the top of my voice until mother came and lifted me down that was church again. Then I remember a political parade, with torches, celebrating the reëlection of our Congressman, Colonel Pete Hepburn, after a defeat four years before. Mary held me on a fence post and mother marched well at the head of the parade with a little flag; and the old man standing next to me kept shouting, 'Praise God!'-so that was religion, too. I thought one had to be good to be allowed to carry the flag in a big parade. This was Western Iowa in the early eighties.

years old and then I prayed for something that I knew was wrong, and my prayer was granted.

Mother and the baby had been at grandfather's for some months because Aunty Belle was very ill there, and all that winter I was alone with my father and Mary, who took care of the house and me and of my father and the horse and the cow, and I wanted mother to come home. So I went out into the barn, knelt down, squeezed my eyes tight shut, and prayed aloud that Aunty Belle might die so that mother and the baby would come home. And Aunty Belle did die almost immediately, as I remember now.

Mary told me very gently, but I went out into the barn to rejoice. I knew I must pretend to be sorry, so when I came back into the house my face was solemn, and I cried. Even to this day, after almost forty years, I can always bring tears when I really want to laugh by thinking, 'Aunty Belle is dead.'

A long time afterward I asked mother whether God would answer a prayer if you asked for something wrong, and she said, 'Of course not!'

The Bible was traditional in our household. Aunt Martha had read the Bible through before she was six, they said. I tried to do it, but was interrupted when we moved, and I doubt if now I have ever read all of it - I have a bad habit of skipping all the 'begats.' Our family is old Covenanter Scotch, and during the summer-time we lived with grandfather and grandmother, who were strict United Presbyterians. Sunday was always the Sabbath, and on that day no unnecessary work was done. We sang Psalms ('Sams'), not hymns. The church was bare and forbidding except for the sunlight through the stained-glass windows. There were no cushions on the uncomfortable pews. We heard long sermons on doctrine,

and no music except the Psalms and a choir without accompaniment. We belonged to the more progressive church -the second church which split off from the first because those in the first church held that it was ungodly to start the choir with a pitch-pipe instead of a do-me-sol-do which might be pitched too high or too low. I loved some of the Psalms:

By Babel's streams we sat and wept
For mem-em-em-ory still-ill-ill to Zion clung
The wind alone our harp strings swept
That a-a-on the droo-oo-ooping willows hung.

We were not allowed to read anything but the Bible on the Sabbath, our meals were cold, and we might not go buggy-riding or play. We were taught that God was a righteous God, and that He was ever waiting to visit His wrath on His children. Hell was close ahead the true Biblical version.

At this time there is the memory also of family worship night and morning. Grandfather's house was on one crest of the double-crested hill, and two hundred yards across the road on the other crest was great-grandfather's house, where he lived with great-grandmother; and as a child I always wanted to go across the road for evening worship, for just as the darkness began to fall we would hear faintly the quavering voices singing a Psalm. We did not sing at worship at grandfather's. We had a reading from the Bible and then a prayer. Grandfather had two basic prayers, one for morning and one for evening, with little personal variations each day. I did not always understand all the words they went so fast, always ending 'command sin and sickness to proper distance from us, and command Thy blessing upon us, for Thine is the power and glory forever. Amen.'

Family worship and blessing before we might partake of food are always tinged with the picture of grand