dying in lingering ways no farmer would even inflict on his stock. In those years, too, I went through other bitterness no sensitive boy would be prepared for.

certainly none

So at 18 and 19 and 20 I knew there could be no God whatsoever deserving a thought or a nod from the least of us. For even the least of us, if we had any power to act, would stop the insufferable evil I myself saw and experienced and lived. How, then, could there be a God or, at least, a God worth knowing?

That is a completely logical viewpoint for any thinking man who has seen more hell under his own nose than the hell-fire preachers will ever dream up to threaten those who ignore their party lines.

The no-god logic becomes the more impelling, when we remember that some 30 million people have been slaughtered, in so-called cold blood in so-called Christian nations, right in our own time. And I, for one, would never pit logic against the arguments of cynics who see religion only as the opium of a doomed and despairing people.

So far as I know, there is only one way to escape from the terror of the logic a way that every man has to test for himself a way that starts with the realization that God has

many aspects.

As dispassionate Principle, he clearly will not save the big wide world from anything. Just look around. But as a Personality, he will quietly enter into the life of you or me or of anybody else who loves him really, and wants him. and the experience of that one individual with the world then becomes better. And what is the world, after all, beyond our own personal experience of it? The only world I can ever know is "my world", the world I meet personally, in my own physical and psychic life.

That, as I found, is the only world that God transforms. And if this process is mere auto-suggestion or hypnosis-as some of the cynics would like to suggest I can only say I've never heard of a practitioner of those arts who could induce with them, in anybody's life, the magic results I'm talking about.

And one more thing. Because our power to invoke God into our lives seems to start with our imagining power which we really must use in realizing his presence there let no one leap to the conclusion that He is imaginary. Our whole atomic science has grown up out of imagined pictures of "things" that nobody in the world ever did see. And one could go on with all that subject, and write a book.

But I want to tell one more story, and come to an end.

The

here came a day when a greatly needed Answer showed up on no horizon at all. Now I had learned various things as I went along. That we must never ask to have the will of another man bent to our own. That we must never ask for something that belongs to another. That we must never decree, in asking, how our Answer will come.

Within those limits, I had found it proper to ask for anything in the world that I'd help a son of my own to go after-if he needed it, wanted it, and I had power to help.

And so I felt distressed, and puzzled for a long time, when a request made in all sincerity seemed ignored. Then I woke up one morning with a sharp memory. I remembered a man from a long time before who had once done me a cruel injustice. His act against me had involved my whole livelihood. It had injured me the more, because he struck at me from the vantage point of a friend. That sort of close thrust makes a huge wound. Had I not been trusting him completely, he could not have struck so. So when this man made a gesture, months afterward, of apologizing, I wrote him bitterly that I never wished to see him again. Then I let my own anger and fear-for the betrayed man is a fearful man-sink down into the wound, and covered it slowly over.

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