What I did, instead, was that night to tear a turned-down page from the Bible, with a verse on it that two fellows in a pup-tent had once found and read aloud together. Then I burned the rest of the book. The verse on the page I saved, and carried around till it wore out, was in Samuel I, 18 and read: "The soul of Jonathan was knit with the soul of David, and Jonathan loved him as his own soul."

After that, for a long time, there wasn't any health in me.

here does a youth find guidance, in making good use of the fine potential which the fools would tell him to despise? In the Athens of Plato, he would have had great teachers. In today's world, he has his wits and the bars. I also found the libraries, thank God.

—

It was among the philosophers Royce of Harvard, in particular that I ultimately started looking for a God big enough to include me and my character in his outlook. As I got mature enough to think about an infinite God with infinite aspects, it seemed clear to me. that he could be apprehended in whatever fashion served a human need.

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even a homosexual aspect without any impiety at all. I found the eastern lands knew all this well. There, for thousands of years, God has been bisexual. Our own Shakers are said to have addressed a Father-Mother God; and Mrs. Eddy took over that idea into her Christian Science.

I saw merit in this. One of my personal problems, out of my youth, was that the very word "Father" made me cringe in my guts. And while the idea of God-as Mother-suggested no open arms to me, either for my mother, I regret to say, was a completely voracious woman yet there was an approach here. Such concepts held clear the air for me. But intellectual concept cold philosophy bare definition -these are not religion. Religion is reaching out eagerly to a Living God who can love and be loved, who can be spoken to, who may answer.

Britain's C. S. Lewis once wrote that the primitive Jews were very wise when they regarded God as a great Patriarch striding the hills. Any modern who vaguely thinks of God as pervading everything is using a pallid metaphor borrowed from chemistry; he is thinking of God as a Gas. And, said Lewis, how much better it is to choose a picture that holds deep emotional meaning for us as we try to realize the Undefinable ideal.

The idea back of Lewis' words was to become crucial for me. It is of course in no way original with the Oxford graduate who moved from atheism into orthodoxy. In more than one of the Hindu schools, for instance, the neophyte learns that his first task in seeking the Divine Power as a reality in his life is to visualize God in a form that completely satisfies every aspect of his own particular character, a form that he can love with combined sensual, intellectual, and spiritual delight.

It was in this wise that I came to understand the First Commandment. You doubtless recall that only two Commandments were laid down by the Teacher in the New Testament. (Matthew XXII 37-40) The First requires that we love God with all our heart and all our soul and all our mind. This same commandment appears, in some form, in every religion in the world that is anything more than a mere code of ethic.

But it had always seemed to me a ridiculous thing. I had loved a comrade like that all of him with all of me. But to love an Indefinable, Invisible Idea that way? I had long thought the texts absurd.

Yet now I began to see a light to understand what our imagination is required to do for us. I began to sense, for instance, that the Catholics have showed instinctive wisdom to a degree not possessed by Protestants or Mohammedans in the use of images. The images in the Catholic Church offer you a choice of man, woman or child, as symbols to

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