In other words, if I did not exactly pass my youth in the Garden of Eden it was passed in that Earthly Paradise which the poets have planted with immortelles. This way of entering the world has perils of its own. When you have once tasted life so finely, when fact has come to you sifted from all its baser constituents, when the flowers of passion have been presented to you tied in a nosegay by the supersensitive hands of a Shelley or a Heine, reality is apt to strike you as crude and commonplace, if not actually to inspire you with a sense of repulsion. In the daily round of life you will sicken with a nostalgia for that ideal country to which it is difficult to return when childhood is over. You will always compare ordinary folk with those ideal types which are the final results of the finest selection by the finest minds which is the secret of art.
"Yet art, with the exception of the noble Greek drama, is not a good preparation for life. Its ethical meaning is too subtly interwoven with the very texture of the character in conflict with life. You need experience to unravel it. Religion deals with the home-truths of morality in a much simpler way, besides giving them a sanction which puts them beyond the reach of appeal. In making the love of God the basis of man's relation to man it brings home to the humblest the immutability of law.
"In a certain sense I had turned Christian for a time. I did not trouble my head about the evidences of Christianity. I put aside all troublesome inquiries about the possibility of reconciling its tenets with the known order of the universe. I wanted a belief: so I ignored everything that it was impossible to reconcile with the natural order, and went straight to the heart of this profoundly personal religion."
There is no saying what might for a time have befallen
