the divine love and family, each ministering to the other, a failure or a myth. "Sirs, by your own confession you have never seen altruism. You are miles and miles away from human brotherhood. How do you know it is not religion? How can you say that if properly encouraged to show its head, the thing you deprecate might not only prove a religion, but, like Ben Adam's name in the angel reckoning, lead all the rest." To say that it is impossible is to say that all the sacred teachers of the earth have been giving themselves for an idea, that the Master himself laid down his life for a delution, and, in "giving men an example that they should do as he had done," set the world forever on a false trail and merely raised a mirage in life's desert. There must be something in this idea of a love surpassing the love of self that comes in to exalt humanity, or the poets, seers and philosophers, as well as the sacred teachers of all ages, have gone astray, and, before the new wave in the old thought is quite swept from the planet one would really like to know what it is. To make it easy a young and prominent minister recently assured his hearers that it was not a matter of loving every brother who got his name on the church rolls. You don't do that and you can't, and it is not demanded of you, he added, and it seemed as though a great thrill of satisfaction and relief passed through the large audience. And then he quoted various tender passages of Scripture, touching ungodly men, to show, very much as the "Goblin boy" has it, that "religious cussing" could be done "according to the Bible." In short, that brotherly love, inside or outside of the church, meant little more than following the instincts of the human heart in the direction of the fair and pleasing everywhere. Meantime the unpleasing and the unblest, who is to go after Judas, Simon Magus, and the great company of the unlovely and the foresworn whom Dante so conveniently chains up in the lowest pit of hell, "according to the Scripture." There is apparently not a power in earth or heaven so far as yet made known to man to make brothers of any of them. More significant still is the company of the Dr. Fell order, at the other end of the pendulum. Nothing in all the creeds or brotherhoods has carried man beyond the familiar old doggerel: "I do not love thee, Doctor Fell; The reason why I can not tell," etc. Only the blessed little intermediates, the children of the slums and the Ghetto, have walked straight into our hearts so that we love them, even to the extent of giving them "ruffles for their shirts," and that is mainly because the authors have fitted them out with such enticing mental frills in introducing them. No one can fairly say that he has grasped this brotherhood problem because he goes slumming, or takes some Maxime Gorky to his bosom. All this emphasizes the minister's idea that it is not simply being on the church or human roll that insures the love of a brother, but presenting the qualities and attractions meet for it—which certainly other than bodies of divinity could make out for us with little trouble. The altruism which sacrifices self for other selves, individual or collective, can not legitimately therefore be put forward as a step toward universal brotherhood in any sense of knitted hearts and sympathies. Something wider than this must cover a field which contains antagonisms and difference so great as to make even the touch of nature, in many cases, hard to find. Really to allow men the right to their differences, the rejection of the alien ties, and yet love them to the extent of having mercy on them, might come nearer to the help needed, and perhaps included in the Master's thought when he said "Go ye and learn what that meaneth; I will have mercy and not sacirfice." In any case, to get as far in the love of humanity as to have charity and tolerance for brothers and non-brothers alike would be an immense stride in the direction of the millennium. It is curious, indeed, to hear so much loud talk of sacrifice and self-giving for the good of others, when just a decent regard for them, a simple attitude of common kindness toward them, would be all required. It is precisely as the poet sees it: So many gods, so many creeds, So many paths that wind and wind, When men can love each other to the extent of being kind even to "the unthankful and to the evil" they will have a right indeed to put their humanitarianism on a footing with religion, and it would be like denying the Master to rise up and say that the church would have none of it. In a brilliant article in the Nouville Revue on the "Secret of Human Happiness," M. Novikoff declares that the object of socialism to give to each inhabitant of the planet an existence worthy of man-is the beginning and end of all political wisdom, while its means, collectivism, is pure madness. Thus may it be with the whole brotherhood idea. An existence worthy of man may be the true debt man owes to man, and, that paid, brotherhoods and social orders could take care of themselves. To count nothing human as foreign to you, or lacking in a claim to your fair treatment and respect, is an old teaching in human brotherhood, which no new science, socialism or religion has been able to supplant. Nor can any authority logically declare the whole system void till that divine idea has taken root in human society. If such humanitarianism could not save the soul it could at least project it well along in the path of that eternal law and justice whose "seat is the bosom of God," whose "voice the harmony of the world." A DREAMS AND VISIONS T last the impossible heroes of fiction are explained to us. They are such stuff as dreams are made of and their little life is rounded by a vision. Altogether the disclosure is a rash one. No writer short of Dante can afford to tell his visions, if he has them, and he had to pass among mortals as "the man who had been through hell” in consequence. Generally speaking, it is much out of hades that the visions come, for, if we are to trust the authors, it is only when they have reached the last pitch of desperation and despair that the visions burst upon them. That is why the unregenerate "line-o'type" poets are trying to make it a matter of mince pie. That is why the craziest thing an author can do is to tell his troubles or escapes to a reporter. If angels or devils have come to his relief, let him lock the secret in his own breast and pretend at least that he has evolved the brilliant climax or troublesome solution from his inner consciousness. Only Prof. James and a few others know that it is the same thing, and until they have taught us something further about the "lifting of that threshold of consciousness," which lets in the vision, even they can not have much to say. The curious thing in the case, however, is that they are more tolerant than the general public to the imperfect vision and will go about patiently investigating visions and revelations of uneducated Websters, and travesties of life and art, which that same public rejects with a sneer and a jest. The underlying demand of the public is that anything which |