of pain. And out of these calamities which his body has suffered, and suffers still, a creative soul and a luminous mind look out upon us — a soul in which there is no trace of brokenness, or rancor, or ingratitude and unbelief in God, or despair and despondency; on the contrary, he calls upon people to understand and to grasp gladness, and delight, and hope. He is a giant who defied life and rebelled against it; calamities tightened his faith in God, and his luminous awareness of the Christianity in which he believed — as a reliance upon the spirit, as mercy and charity and forbearance and forgiveness, not as rites and statues and fanaticism, not even as an ornamented cross. For love comes before the cross, and were it not for love there would be no Christianity. His view of the uni-verse, as regards man's existence, matches Nietzsche's view of man the thinker, the giant, the creator — the universe standing by its own essence; but he differs from him at the point where this uni-verse which is man, in his phrase, comes into contact with God. And he inclines toward Rousseau in the relation of this giant man to society — Rousseau, who said: "Corruption came to men only by way of society," and who declared that society is the enemy of this man and the destroyer of the individual personality. Society corrupts, and subjugates man, and treats him as a machine at the will of a usurping individual, who — by force, or by charlatanry, or by eloquence — sets himself up as a leader and hides behind this soci-ety to perpetuate his personality, his domination, and his influence. At one time this society is called communism, Nazism, fascism; at another it calls itself God's own chosen people. And in all these cases he sees man suffering and the universe sinking down into the depths of his soul, and he will not allow racialism to lord it over the people. He did not want life as trade, and greed, and satiety upon satiety, and vanity, and palaces; he wanted it as an opening upon knowledge, an unveiling of the human self, an aspiration toward the creative spirit. Man is an end, not a means; he is a base of transformation for society, for humanity, and for the universe, rising above selfishness — man: the man of love and sacrifice, the thinking, reasoning man, who

gives of his culture and his art light, not battleships and airplanes and machines. Culture is a building of minds, a preparing of hearts, a polishing of morals, an opening of souls — and an immortality in the nature of man. He defies death and does not fear it, because he sees in it one of the conditions of immortality; and the fear of it is the fear of the seaman who has not rigged his sails against drowning. And by his call to rig these sails of ours he reminds me of the holy verse, "Be watchful" — for man is joined, past to present to future.

And through these views, saturated with the oneness of God, he set out in company with St. Thomas Aquinas, and St. Augustine, and Bergson, and the other philosophers conscious, with a comprehensive consciousness, of the truth of existence and its bond with God and with man.

The pain presses hard upon him and the calamity looms terrible before him, and he sees Job, beside himself, as a dwarf before the pyramids. Job washed his feet in laban — but as for him, his soul has flowed upon the scalpels' edge for nineteen years.

And in the book, besides this man's rebellion and his revolt against people for people's sake, there is reproach. And a loneliness of soul. The friends he loved have forgotten him; not one of them has remembered him, none has consoled him with a visit, or a letter — not even a telephone call.

My companions! Are there in hardship any but a few who kept my loyalty through the black onrush of calamities?

And he reproaches — and in his reproach is the revolt of friendship stabbed, and the pride of a great soul in its refusals and its pain; and a longing for death, for the release of his soul from his body — because death, in his belief, is an everlasting sleep, green with dreams, eternal in its raptures, its bliss waves of delights, and a cradle of serenity for a lifeblood that flowed upon the scalpels' edge and dyed their blades with its blood.

And the poet's defiance and resolve return to him, and he cries out with a heart gnawed by pain and a soul set aflame by faith:

"O God, this worldly life is the valley of tears, and the true philosophy is the philosophy of pain. Woe to him who gulps down

pleasures cup after cup in dread of the truth. I thank Thee, O God, for Thou hast purified me with pains and smelted my soul in the crucible of torment, to take me pure unto Thee. My torment, beside Thy fire, is nothing worth the mention; and my whole life has been one great sin: Thou gavest me the enjoyment of health, and I turned aside to vanity. O God, Thy slaves are the free, and the free of this world are slaves. O God, make me a