hands. Through the intellectual discussion which I had started pierced the realization that this man had no time for the husk, the rind, the cramping cover of ideas. He had accepted my terms at first merely for the sake of reaching my mind with a ray of the new light which, like some undreamed of primal element, has created for him-the words are his own-a new earth and a new heaven.

I have heaped up my figures of speech in seeking to convey to you an impression. But it is the figure of light that I must leave in your imagination! Paul himself used it constantly, as if seeking to cleave an obscurant sky. Vividly, at every turn, he made the contrast between darkness and light. The contrasts insisted upon by our systems of thought have always interested me. Here are our Roman State and family dividing the pious from the impious, according to their obedience or disobedience to the obligations of an established religion. Here are the Stoics judging us by our submission to or our rebellion against the universal law of Nature. Virgil saw on the one hand the man who bows to the decrees of Destiny, and on the other the man who futilely resists them, victim of his own passions. Lucretius scorned the blind credulity of the religious, and urged upon us the freedom born of scientific knowledge. And so on and on-each system has its own measure of division. But this man I was talking with, this prisoner bound to one of our soldiers, was visioning on the one side a whole world in darkness and on the other the illuminated ones, the children of light, who recognize a new law of Love. Darkness and light, darkness and light -these words he used over and over, until a strange sensation befell me. I seemed to see myself coming down, down through long and dusky corridors of thought, to find at the end the open sky and wide sunlit spaces, and the radiance and freshness of a day that would never die.

But I must leave my sensations and try more intelligibly to pass on to you the ideas that emerged from the conversation. This, however, will be a difficult thing to do because the ideas for Paul focused and centered in a person, to me unknown and even incomprehensible. The person is little Irene's Jesus Christassuming heroic proportions when he is reflected through a brain

Anna

like Paul's. Do you ask me if he is a god, like Osiris, like Isis, springing from the East and appearing in Rome? I lightly assumed that when I first heard of him-I was patient with Felicia only because the results of a new cult were so delightful. Anna, however, gave me the impression of worshiping in human terms the remembered life of a man so good and so richly endowed with personality that he became for others a norm and an inspiration. I remember once hearing Seneca say that one of the most practical ways of living well was to pick out a master-Cato, for example, if you liked an austere one, or some gentler Læliusand follow him. Choose one, he said, whose own life has satisfied you and then picture him always to yourself as guide and as pattern. "You can never straighten a crooked thing"-his vivid phrase stayed by me-"unless you use a ruler." seemed to me to have found in Jesus the sort of "ruler" recommended by our arch-Stoic. This is amazing when you consider the quite uninteresting facts of His life as they give them to you. He was a common workman who lived some thirty years ago in Palestine. He evidently had a religious mission and native powers of persuasion, because, when He could get time from His work, He went about from village to village, acquiring a following among the lower classes. But His ideas were obnoxious to the authorities-revolutionary, I imagine and after a while they crucified Him in Jerusalem as a dangerous character. Whether He was an agitator or not, He seems to have made upon His immediate friends and followers an indelible impression which they have passed on to those who never saw Him.

To me, as you will readily understand, all this did not seem particularly interesting-perhaps I am too cold for hero worship, too indifferent to personal judgments to put my mind, however inferior, into anyone else's keeping. Seneca's advice caught my attention without persuading me. I have always yielded more easily to abstractions and principles of thought than to their exemplification, usually so inadequate, in some specific personality. So I had dismissed Anna's feeling for Jesus about as lightly as I dismissed Irene's.

But with Paul I had no choice, in that hour which he dominated. I received an extraordinary impression, connected with that other

impression of which I just spoke. It was as if, whenever and wherever I emerged from darkness, I found a Person clothed in light, from whose touch sprang the radiant and immortal day. At any rate (for I must again rein myself in with terms comprehensible to you), I recognized that this Jesus becomes the central point of all that Paul teaches. Just how far He is to him a master in Seneca's sense, or a divine personage, was not clear to me. Sometimes I thought he was talking of a personal friend, and sometimes of an idea, according to Plato's use of the word. Certainly every question of mine led to Jesus Christ. As far as I can make out, on thinking it over, the two words taken together indicate the Personality which, in Paul's thought, animates all laws and principles of life. The "law of love", the "law of spirit"-whatever law emerged in our conversation-was transformed from an abstraction into an issue of man's highest personality. I am sure there is a Platonic strain in it somewhere, as if among the Ideas laid up in heaven were that of a perfect humanity, made known to consciousness, and hence usable as a pattern, under a specific name. The transition from the good carpenter in Palestine, whom Paul had only heard of, to an allanimating Personality seems to have been made by way of a resurrection after crucifixion. This whole matter, however, is obscure to me. The particular story is absurd on the face of it. Yet Paul reiterated that he preached "Jesus" crucified, and also that if "Christ" had not risen from the grave, then all his preaching was in vain. I cannot tell you what he meant. I. have no idea now, nor had I then. Only then-then-and this was another strange part of that strange hour's experience-I was burned by the man's eyes, set astir by his voice, shaken by a passion that sheathed him like a flame, swept onward by gusts of thought that seemed to rise from the recesses of life itself.

But you know me well enough to know that this vicarious emotion of mine was momentary. The gusts passed, leaving me still in pursuit of a clear path of understanding. And it was in this quieter mood that I received my final impressions from Paul. It is because of them that I am writing to you at all. As we talked on I saw that much that these Christians teach is old and familiar. Monotheism, certainly, is philosophically assumed by

most of us, in spite of the motley forms of our apparent religion. Also the assumption of an Eternal Purpose behind all phenomena is good Stoic dogma. As for "kindness" to people about youwhy, you remember the Stoic phrase Mother liked so much— "for mortal to help mortal, that is God." Socrates in prison for conscience's sake four hundred years ago was just as considerate toward his jailer as this prisoner seems to be. The immortality of the soul-when hasn't somebody believed in it! I confess I don't, but Plato seems to have convinced himself of the proposition! All kinds of virtues, courage, honesty, temperance, faithfulness to duty-certainly we Romans don't need to be taught these things from Jerusalem. Even the curious mystical idea that Paul seemed once to suggest, of a divine person dying to save others as a sort of atonement, is not new. I found that long ago in my Greek studies, and I remember that you wrote of it once in commenting on the Isis worship. Over against all your Oriental cults, however, and over against Hellenic Orphism, Paul's religion, as he explained it, seemed to me to have an especially fine element. Whatever it is, it is not a doctrine only for initiates while others are left outside. I liked the value that Paul assigned to every single individual. He said it was a corollary of the fact that Jesus Christ died for and saved the meanest as well as the highest. At any rate, I liked the clean breath of it all, the sweeping away of secrets, the free passage of the "light" to every man, woman, and child, rich or poor, learned or ignorant.

But I was speaking of the familiarity, in one form or another, of many of the specific things mentioned by Paul. And yet, Sulpicius, little by little the conviction grew upon me that here was a way of thinking and a way of acting stupendously new. I had a vision of a city different from Plato's or Zeno's or any other, fresh as a new planet that dawns upon our eyes. It seemed radiant with new things-with the new man, the new law, the new hope, the new joy, the new fruits of a new spirit. These words dropped constantly from the lips of Paul. I began to yield to them. I felt as if I were casting off one old garment after another, and would in the end find myself face to face with a new self living a new life.

Every Christian
Vitality is their

Life-life, that, Sulpicius, is the word that took root in me that day, and may—who knows?-come to flower. I have met seems to me to be amazingly alive. common possession. Even Irene has it, in a young and gentle way. It ripples through her like a little brook. In Felicia it is like a new fountain opened up to flood a shallow pool. In Anna this stream swells to a deep and tranquil river. In Paul it surges and engulfs like a mighty torrent. As far as I can make out, they have this life because they draw it out of eternal things and conceive it to flow on toward eternal things. They themselves would say that it springs from God in Jesus Christ, and seeks God in Jesus Christ. They all-except Paul, of course, who sits there apart in forced inaction-they all keep right on living the littlest sort of everyday life. But I think that they live it in the presence of God and of eternity. I am aware that philosophers have preached some such sort of abstraction as this, but I must confess to you that I have never before in my whole life seen one individual, not even Mother, who was doing it as these Christians are. They seem set free from every inhibition, as if an inexhaustible power were there to draw upon, in proportion to the size of the cup that nature permits them to hold at the fountain's

source.

It is late, and I have written this with my own hand. The lamp-the bronze one with the doves on it-do you remember? burns low. Are you close to me in the shadows of the room, heart of my heart, or have I long since driven you away? Do you question me? No, I am not going to tell you that I have become a Christian. I shall never go with Felicia to Christian homes and meetings. I fancy I could not stand their words. Nor shall I go back to Paul. But I have seen a star rising in the darkness; I have seen a fountain gushing in the sunlight. Goodbye, and may all good things be yours. Felicia and Calpurnius spoke of you especially this morning and sent their affectionate greetings. Felicla wants you to come home soon, and bring her an ivory doll, and a baby crocodile- please!

Your Honoria.