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IF I WERE TWENTY-ONE I WOULD
MAKE SOME PERMANENT, AMICABLE ARRANGEMENT WITH MY CONSCIENCE

God, Duty, Death, and Moral Responsibility are huge facts which no life can escape. They are the external sphinxes by the road of every man’s existence. He must frame some sort of an answer to them.

It may please the reader to know how I have answered them. It is very simple.

I am familiar, to some extent, with most of the religions, cults, and creeds of mankind. There are certain points common to every decent religion, for in every kind of church you are taught to be honest, pure-minded, unselfish, reverent, brave, loyal, and the like.

These elements of religion may be called the Great Common Divisor of all faiths.

This G. C. D. is my religion. It is what more than fifty years of thought and experience has winnowed out for me. It is my religion. And I think I glimpse what Emerson meant when he wrote that “all good men are of one religion.”

And the matter can be reduced to yet plainer terms. There is but “one thing needful,” and there’s no use being “careful and troubled about many things.” That one thing is to do right.

To do Right and not Wrong will save any man’s soul, and if he believes any doctrine that implies doing wrong he is lost.

So, let a man of twenty-one resolve, and keep his purpose, that, no matter what comes, no matter how mixed his theology may be, no matter what may be the rewards of wrong-doing, or the perils and losses of right-doing, he will do right; then, if there is any moral law in the universe, that man must sometime, somewhere, arrive at his inward triumph, his spiritual victory and peace.

And the corollary of this is that if I have done wrong the best and only way to cure it is to quit doing wrong and begin to do right. If any man will stick to this, make it his anchor in times of storm, his pole-star in nights of uncertainty, he will cast out of his life that which is life’s greatest enemy—Fear. He need not fear man nor woman, nor governments nor mischief-makers, nor the devil nor God. He will be able to say with the accent of sincerity that word of William Ernest Henley, to me the greatest spiritual declaration in any language:

Let me repeat that I have not been telling what I did with the implication that the youth of