again, slowly and painfully. Gradually, in past year or so, the mystery of Christ has been forcing itself upon me. I advance hesitantly, and retreat, fearful of abandoning my reason, again and again. Sometimes I seem almost on the point of grasping the significance of this life, and able to accept it as contrary to material laws without the loss of my grasp of facts, but it always eludes me, I can’t seem to let it go. But this I know, faith cannot be argued or reasoned. Those who believe have not manufactured it themselves. Nor can I construct my own faith by my own will. However, I should be in a receptive state of mind; I should want to believe. That I can’t quite bring myself to do.
     Reading in my diary of 1914. I often mention God in my rambles in the fields and woods at that time. This is like a revolution to me, showing how poorly our memory serves us, for I imagined that my cutting loose from a belief in a divine being to have taken place much earlier, or in fact I never really admitted God as a possibility. It gives me pleasure, and my thought was as I read these early rhapsodies of mine “I believed then, wholly and joyously, and I can again, it is in my nature” and it seems to me that that only way to experience again that glad rhapsodic delight in life, to see nature with a pure, innocent eye, is to believe wholly and unreservedly in God, a God of goodness, not simply an all-powerful spirit composed of equal pertains of good and evil, bit one wholly good.
     Like “Barbellion” I am vexed in these early diaries of my preoccupation with nature, instead of the more interesting