Wayfarings: A Record of Adventure and Liberation in the Life of the Spirit

Abstract

THIS autobiographical study will interest many who have lived through the period of intellectual transition which had its keynote in the evolution-idea. It tells frankly, sometimes naïvely, of the author's “advance from the credulities of Calvinism to that liberty of open-mindedness which permits the continual readjustment of belief to the ever-widening experience of life.” Greatly influenced by Wordsworth, Emerson, Thoreau, and Walt Whitman, he reached, after many wayfarings and much discipline, a serene faith in the orderliness, rationality, progressiveness, and purposefulness of the cosmic process. “The Universe must needs care for all its creatures.” “The Spirit of the whole must surely be present and effective in all its parts.” “The Creative Spirit of Life must be continually present and effective in all forms of its activity, in all creatures through which it lives and has its being.” But what gives the book a special interest for us here is its disclosure of what the beauty of Nature—even in its most familiar expressions—may come to mean to a busy man in the way of “refreshment and inspiration and consoling grace.” In the quietness of old age he went to a garden-city and continued to make his soul and to find “this world, with all its strangeness and apparent failure, a very homelike, habitable place.” In the autumn, though he did not strain to listen, he heard the voice of spring. To many readers, especially of patient years, “Wayfarings” will give much pleasure.