seems incontrovertible and satisfactory.  Many of them are praying for me, and each that I may see the TRUTH from his standpoint.  For their prayers I am grateful.  I cannot afford to lose the spirit of love behind and in every one of them.  But for the worry about me in their minds, I have neither respect, regard, toleration, nor sympathy.  I don’t want it, can do without it, and I resent its being there.  To each and all of them I say firmly:  Quit Your Worrying about my religion, or want of it.  I am in the hands of the same loving God that you are.  I have the promise of God’s Guiding Spirit as much as you have.  I have listened respectfully and with an earnest and sincere desire to see and know the Truth, to all you have said, and now I want to be left alone.  I have come to exclaim with Browning in Rabbi Ben Ezra: 

    Now, who shall arbitrate? 
    Ten men love what I hate,
    Shun what I follow, slight what I receive;
    Ten, who in ears and eyes
    Match me.  We all surmise,
  They this thing, and I that:  whom shall my soul believe?

For myself I have concluded that no one shall choose my religion for me, and all the worrying in the world shall not change my attitude.

And it is to the worrying of my friends that they owe this state of mind.  For this reason, I found myself one day counting up the number of people of different beliefs who had solemnly promised to pray for me.  There were Methodists, Campbellites, Baptists, Roman Catholics, Episcopalians, Seventh Day Adventists, Presbyterians, Nazarenes, Holy Rollers, and others.  Then the query arose:  Whose prayers will be answered on my behalf?  Each is sure that his are the ones that can be effective; yet their prayers differ; they are, to some degree, antagonistic, and insofar as they petition that I become one of their particular fold, they nullify each other, as it is utterly impossible that I accept the specific form of faith of each.  The consequent result in my own mind is that as I cannot possibly become what all these good people desire I should be, as their desires and prayers for me controvert each other, I must respectfully decline to be bound by any one of them.  I must and will do my own choosing.  Hence all the worry on my behalf is energy, strength, and effort wasted.

Let me repeat, then, to the worrier about the salvation of others:  You are in a poor business. Quit Your Worrying.  Hands off!  This is none of your concern.  Believe as little or as much and what you will for your own soul’s salvation, but do not put forth your conceptions as the only conceptions possible of Divine Truth before another soul who may have an immeasurably larger vision than you have.  Oh, the pitiableness of man’s colossal conceit, the arrogance of his ignorance.  As if the God of the Universe were so small that one paltry, finite man could contain in his pint measure