Newman; and I hope by and by to get him to listen to a little of the Imitation, at breakfast."
"You would do much better," I said, "to read with him John Morley's Compromise or Santayana's Poetry and Religion. Nothing will so decisively check, just now, the growth in him of a religious sense as any attempt to persuade him that the beneficent powers in the universe are pleased with ascetic withdrawals from life, or that they countenance authoritative limitations on the use of the intelligence."
"But isn't Morley an atheist?" inquired Cornelia.
I ignored the question, for it was growing dark between the walls of the little valley, and we were entering the deeper darkness of the trees on the domain of Santo Espiritu.
"Oliver," I said, "is reaching out into the real world, into his own times, and gathering up here and there, without very much high counsel, everything that, as he puts it, sounds good to him. That is going to be the substance of his religion; that will be what he believes in. Whether this collection of his beliefs will acquire for him the compulsion and animating power, the 'psychological efficacy' of the religions which possess a great
