of to the whole army of toiling men, the publicans and the sinners, who cry out in their need to him, and in that very cry establish the relation over which the schools and philosophers have been agonizing for ages? It is life that teaches, and few can go very far in it without learning that something beyond brute force is at the heart of power. To "feel after" and find it is better than asking some other feeler how far along he is in the business. And if a writer has spent his life in trying to bring this truth home to men and still they turn to him for illumination and some coveted revelation, is it strange that he calls them his "ignorant disciples."

A knowledge that can only come from within is a curious thing to be demanding of one's teachers and it is a recognized difficulty in the study of even psychic phenomena that not all the testimony in the world will convince a man of anything occult that he can not verify in his own experience. Who of all the devout advocates of a literal Scripture verily believes that Lazarus rose from the dead, or, claiming to believe it, takes in one shadow of its tremendous import in the still baffling questions of death and the hereafter? Out of the depths of his own consciousness, or nowhere, man comes to the belief in immortality, and so in the silence and deeps of his own soul and its needs, he touches hands with God and the spirit forces, or nowhere. To what mounts of power or vision the touch shall lift him is another matter not to be determined by the teachers.

Not all who see God in the burning bush take off their shoes or leave the night behind them. Yet, there are souls that can make their bed in hell without losing their hold on God, while others can serve in all his holy temples without ever finding him. Here, too, the soul baffles the creed-makers and psychologist and renders it impossible to say by

what principle of light or darkness the power of the invisible is made known to it. That always and everywhere that power waits to unfold itself to every soul is about all that can be confidently asserted. And if, knowing that, man can not manage to make his own connection with the life forces, it is doubtful if all the prophets or teachers in the universe can do much to help him.

T

SATAN IN LITERATURE

NO Shakespeare and his contemporaries the Prince of Darkness was a gentleman. The flower of wickedness of old required some fineness in it. Sin was a sweet morsel under the tongue. The confessions of a Rosseau or Augustine touched the empyrean as well as the pit. Verlaine in the slums or the criminal's cell was still a god of celestial flights and unrivaled intuitions of spirit truth. Villon in his blackest moments bore still the spotless sheen of "the snows of yesterday." The divinity of genius glorified the very cohorts of hell, and Satan was but a fallen Lucifer, whom the worshipers of power and greatness must perforce admire.

All this was too much honor for Satan. "The angels, not half so happy in heaven, went envying him" and his. And so now he has fallen from his high estate, and we have the "journal intime," or notes from his confessional, full of small worries over toothbrushes and black underclothes, and redolent of vulgar oaths, which science tells us the most impotent of his subjects indulge in to change the currents of their ruffled being by shocking ears polite. Worst of all, the women, who have taken him in charge, propose to marry him and dress him out in "conventional clothes" and set him up in a little red and yellow heaven of short duration, which shall match him. It is hard to part like this with the grand Byronic devil, or accomplished Mephistopheles of literature. But, after all, it may be the only

way to escape his beguiling subtleties and set up a safer ruler in his place.

The work of the decadents and even realists, the D'Annuncios, and Moores, and Zolas, has been to cultivate the devil along such low and loathsome lines that every trace of Lucifer-like greatness has been taken out of him, and unless some new devil can be put in literature it is no use asking us to run along the slimy track of this poor, shining, pessimistic Satan, in conventional clothes or petticoats, wildly anathematizing the universe and asking us to pity him in his own damnation. It was a very wise discerner of the laws of life who tells us that "when half gods go, the gods arrive," and it may be that when this Satanic half god of the romances fails him he will cast about for some true god to put in his place. And then perhaps we shall see that spiritual renaissance in literature which the spiritual renaissance in thought and philosophy should have ushered in ere this.

To resolve some strength, intensity and sparkle of effervescent life into the better forces, some Miltonic touch to show "the might and majesty of loveliness," has been the crying need of modern life and literature. For though all science and philosophy conspire to show us how poor, stupid and self-destructive evil is, and how weak, senseless and craven the cry of the pessimist, yet the effort to bring life and letters up to the standard of such teaching is scarcely perceptible, unless it may be in this very dismantling of the devil of all the finer glories that once shone about him. That does, indeed, suggest the hope that some grand master of the new order may arise to consign the glories and heroism of life to their true place and show us "how sublime it is to suffer and be strong." Nay, more, to refuse to suffer like dumb beasts of the field, when we may swing ourselves into

the ryhthmic joy and harmony of the spheres and look down the ages with a laugh and a song.

There was a time, to be sure, when about everything bright, spicy, and beguiling was consigned to the devil. That was before the teachers had shown us that "the mischief in a boy is the basis of his education," or the theologians had opened their ears to the Psalmist's declaration that "gladness is sown for the upright." Beauty and strength belong, indeed, to the sanctuaries of the Lord of life, in these days, and "the diseased has he not strengthened." That is why the diseased and neurotic writers send out such weak and piteous wails to some "devil, fate, or world," to come and help them, and more and more as they define the devil they believe in, they show him totally impotent to do anything for them. The angels of light are sweeping through his old dominion, and gathering to themselves even the bright and primrose things of human dalliance he has been wont to claim. Mirth and laughter, wit and song, are of them, love is all of them, and those natural human desires, into which the poor degenerates are trying to fuse such lurid flames of hell, burn with their brightest glow at their pure altars. It is the white heat of the furnace, not the red, that marks the utmost intensity of the fire, and life at its mightiest is ever the white flame. The writers who can show us that, are the coming masters in literature, and all science and nature are ready to wait upon them.

"Any nose may ravage with impunity a rose," says one of our sarcastic poets, but the sweet rose of life is not to lose its fragrance because it has become, in the nostrils of the decadent or pessimist, "an empty damned weariness." The end of it can only be, now as ever, that the rose will belong to him who can pluck it, and a hundred devils to paint it red will not turn it over to the grasp of any too weak to