It was a childish ignorance,

But now 'tis little joy

To know I'm farther off from heaven

Than when I was a boy.

All literature and life throb with the pathos of this cry, yet few pause to question why it should be so, or what it would mean if man's consciousness of heaven and nearness to it grew with his growth and strengthened with his strength, instead of falling away into the "obstinate questioning" and "blank misgivings" of the world-worn creature who trembles, as the poet tells us, before the high instincts of his childhood "like a guilty thing surprised." Somehow to reverse his steps and become again as a little child was the only redemption which the Lord himself discerned for the wretched wanderers who had strayed so far away from those glad groves of childhood whose palm tree tops "were close against the sky." Yet how shall a man be born again when he is old was the legitimate question that waited upon it, and not all the subtlest logic of the Christian faith and mysteries could answer it in a manner exactly creditable to the crooked wanderer. To worry "through the toil and moil of many years" just for the brilliant "chance of getting back to where and what he was" is not all that was to be expected of a progressive being, or a progressive order of being, and this squeezing of a frightened penitent into heaven at the last gasp, when all his life has been a chase in the other direction, is not a thing to do humanity proud, any way you look at it.

That the end of man's mortal life should be fairer, purer, diviner than any dream of its beginning is what the law of life demands, and what the Giver of Life must have intended when he made man. What thwarted the plan or stepped in at the quickening point of a soul to turn the evolutionary

course of being into confusion is, of course, the question that has torn philosophers and theologians since time began. But that such earth blight need not be, one little babe of Bethlehem, wearing human flesh and walking in growing grace and beauty, all human ways, has testified to all time. And the sweetest thing at the heart of all that testimony was the ceaseless insistence that he came from the Father and knew all men as his brethren. Convince man of his heredity from God, or, as the old Brahmin has it, “tell him who and what he is," and heaven will lie about him in age as in infancy, nor can all "the years that bring the inevitable yoke make him

Forget the glories he hath known

And that imperial palace whence he came.

CONCERNING FOOLS

HE dangers of a little knowledge are beginning to en

gage the attention of writers and educators the world over. After a long swing of the pendulum in the direction of cramming, pruning, pounding into pedagogic holes and casts, the reaction has begun, and we are told that we are all "boors of culture," victims of mob violence in education, rows of misfits in the garments of knowledge, and, in short, as the oldest authority on the subject has it, "in professing ourselves to be wise we have become fools." Any one might have seen that it would end in this when, indeed, nature made us fools in the beginning, and science has been systematically protesting to us that in all that is worth knowing we must remain fools to the end. To set up, therefore, that we know anything, is to fly in the face of all the brilliant mystery and tangle of things to which we have been born. The only thing that we can legitimately claim of life or society is the right to be fools after our own hearts.

It is mainly a question of choice in the kingdom of fools, and it is not clear why one fool has not about as good a right. to protection as another. According to all teachers, preachers, schools or sects, the people on the other side are always a set of fools or scoundrels, and every man who has a difference with another man sets him down as a hopeless idiot if he can not bring him over to his own view.

It is impossible to determine how many "kinds of an ignoramus" the human being everywhere becomes when any question of the other sex is uppermost. From the begin

ning men and women have been largely fools and enigmas to each other, and the safest thing that either of them can ask under the circumstances is the right to remain so. There is no possible indication that the modern effort to tear away the veil and find something more comprehensible and well ordered behind it is of any advantage to either party. "A fool there was, and he made his prayer," is rather the keynote to the situation still, especially where any tender romance is considered among creatures who really prefer to believe each other everything under the shining heavens but just what they are. That Charlotte, "like a well-conducted person, goes on spreading bread and butter," is the last thing that her lover wants to hear about her when he is borne worsted past her on a shutter. That she should go into hysterics like any common little idiot would please him better. And Charlotte-does she want to know that her lover is putting heart, breath, brain and every fiber of his being into a man's chase for place or power, instead of being ready to sacrifice all creation for one smile from her, as he has idiotically sworn that he could? "Thou little thinkest how a little foolery governs the world," said one of the old philosophers, and what would become of love's world without it not the bravest of the world's philosophers has undertaken to set forth.

If half we tell the girls were true,

If half we swear to be or do,

Were aught but lying's bright illusion,

This world would be in strange confusion,

sang the honest Byron, and yet to-day every creature in love believes things that would turn the very stars out of their courses if they were true. And who would undertake to end it? It would be the very madness the Bible itself

warns us against when it declares that "he that increaseth knowledge increaseth sorrow." Yet here are our new guides telling us to prove all things, and stand for nothing that is not based on facts ground out of our own experience.

But, of course, this is because they have caught the maniacs to the idea of "being well informed" trying, like the New York belle of Boyesen's acquaintance, to get the gist of Spinoza's philosophy out of her learned partner as she swung round the ballroom floor with him, or the club woman "doing" the "Women of the Renaissance" for a next fortnight's paper, or that "half educated woman" of Prof. Munsterberg's dinner acquaintance, settling problems of life, death and the soul's essence "between two spoonfuls of ice cream.' And they don't like it. They call them all fools for their pains, and no doubt they are; but, after all, what more of certified knowledge have their wise critics achieved by longer poring into the heart of things? And why is the connection of wars and fashion plates, doorknobs and crops in Europe, learned in Herbert Spencer and frivolous in the society girl? If the grade scholar opines that two and two may make five he is put on the dunce block. When Ibsen asks, "Who will guarantee me that on Jupiter two and two do not make five?" the world cries "Hear! hear!" The wise man knows that he is a fool, says Shakespeare, but does he when he flounts all other fools for being fools after their own kind, and is he really ready to respect a farmer who does not know "a Hobbema from a garden tool,” because he does know a wheatfield from early rye, or to trust a physician who asks him "if Ambroise Pare was the Ambroise that loved Heloise so deeply," because he has mastered the intricacies of appendicitis?

Not until the scholars themselves are ready to admit that life is too short and beclouded to make it other than a choice