I refer to your intellectual and spiritual upbringing, because I venture to wonder if it was in the least like my own.  I was brought up, I rejoice to say, in the bosom of an orthodox Puritan family.  I was led and driven to believe that man was everybody, and that God was somebody—­and that not merely the Sabbath, but the whole universe, was made for man:  that the stars were his bedtime candles, and that the sun arose to ensure his catching the 8.37 of a morning.

On this belief I acted for many years.  Every young man believes that there is no god but God, and that he is born to be His prophet—­though perhaps that belief is not so common nowadays.  I am speaking of many years ago.

Science, however, has long since changed all that.  Those terrible Muses, geology, astronomy, and particularly biology, have reduced man to a humility which, if in some degree salutary, becomes in its excess highly dangerous.  Why should one maggot in this great cheese of the world take itself more seriously than others?  Why dream mightily and do bravely if we are but a little higher than the beasts that perish?  Nature cares nothing about us, and her giant forces laugh at our fancies.  The world has no such meaning as we thought.  Poets and saints, deluded by unhealthy imaginations, have misled us, and it is quite likely that the wild waves are really saying nothing more important than ’Beecham’s Pills.’

‘Give us a definition of life,’ I asked a certain famous scientist and philosopher whom I am privileged to call my friend.

‘Nothing easier!’ he gaily replied.  ’Life is a product of solar energy, falling upon the carbon compounds, on the outer crust of a particular planet, in a particular corner of the solar system.’

‘And that,’ I said, ’really satisfies you as a definition of life—­of all the wistful wonder of the world!’ And as I spoke I thought of Moses with mystically shining face upon the Mount of the Law, of Ezekiel rapt in his divine fancies, of Socrates drinking his cup of hemlock, of Christ’s agony in the garden; the golden faces of the great of the world passed as in a dream before me,—­soldiers, saints, poets, and lovers.  I thought of Horatius on the bridge, of the holy and gentle soul of St. Francis, of Chatterton in his splendid despair, and in fancy I went with the awestruck citizens of Verona to reverently gaze at the bodies of two young lovers who had counted the world well lost if they might only leave it together.

The carbon compounds!

I took down Romeo and Juliet, listened to its passionate spheral music, and the carbon compounds have never troubled me again.

Love laughs at the carbon compounds, and a great book, a noble act, a beautiful face, make nonsense of such cheap formula for the mystery of human life.