consisted of ideals not deemed practical, since no
attempt was made to put them into practice in the
only logical manner,—by reorganizing civilization
to conform with them. The implication was that
the Christ who had preached these ideals was not practical....
There were undoubtedly men in the faculty of the University
who might have helped me had I known of them; who
might have given me, even at that time, a clew to the
modern, logical explanation of the Bible as an immortal
record of the thoughts and acts of men who had sought
to do just what I was seeking to do,—connect
the religious impulse to life and make it fruitful
in life: an explanation, by the way, a thousand-fold
more spiritual than the old. But I was hopelessly
entangled in the meshes of the mystic, the miraculous
and supernatural. If I had analyzed my yearnings,
I might have realized that I wanted to renounce the
life I had been leading, not because it was sinful,
but because it was aimless. I had not learned
that the Greek word for sin is “a missing of
the mark.” Just aimlessness! I had
been stirred with the desire to perform some service
for which the world would be grateful: to write
great literature, perchance. But it had never
been suggested to me that such swellings of the soul
are religious, that religion is that kind of feeling,
of motive power that drives the writer and the scientist,
the statesman and the sculptor as well as the priest
and the Prophet to serve mankind for the joy of serving:
that religion is creative, or it is nothing:
not mechanical, not a force imposed from without,
but a driving power within. The “religion”
I had learned was salvation from sin by miracle:
sin a deliberate rebellion, not a pathetic missing
of the mark of life; useful service of man, not the
wandering of untutored souls who had not been shown
the way. I felt religious. I wanted to go
to church, I wanted to maintain, when it was on me,
that exaltation I dimly felt as communion with a higher
power, with God, and which also was identical with
my desire to write, to create....
I bought books, sets of Wordsworth and Keats, of Milton
and Shelley and Shakespeare, and hid them away in
my bureau drawers lest Tom and my friends should see
them. These too I read secretly, making excuses
for not joining in the usual amusements. Once
I walked to Mrs. Bolton’s and inquired rather
shamefacedly for Hermann Krebs, only to be informed
that he had gone out.... There were lapses, of
course, when I went off on the old excursions,—for
the most part the usual undergraduate follies, though
some were of a more serious nature; on these I do not
care to dwell. Sex was still a mystery....
Always I awoke afterwards to bitter self-hatred and
despair.... But my work in English improved, and
I earned the commendation and friendship of Mr. Cheyne.
With a wisdom for which I was grateful he was careful
not to give much sign of it in classes, but the fact
that he was “getting soft on me” was evident
enough to be regarded with suspicion. Indeed
the state into which I had fallen became a matter
of increasing concern to my companions, who tried every
means from ridicule to sympathy, to discover its cause
and shake me out of it. The theory most accepted
was that I was in love.