Italy, south and north, with its strings of garlic, its festoons of sausages, its hurdy-gurdy, and its rich harvest of children. We had glimpses of France, of its table d’hôte and painted women; travelled through darkest Africa, touched upon India, and then were back again upon Broadway.

As in the sky above us the architectures of the world strive to blend and fuse, making a mighty new impress; so below, these colonies to the right and colonies to the left, like the huge limbs of some ill-shapen monster, try to blend into America.

What is it all to be when blended?

Of course we went to the theater. We saw a German problem play made over to please the American taste. The Herr Director knew the play almost by heart, and he nearly jumped upon the stage in righteous indignation when in the last act, where the author drops all his characters into a bottomless pit and everything ends in confusion, the play ended in the conventional “God-bless-you-my-children,” “happy-ever-after” manner.

We walked the streets of New York until past midnight, and finally looked down upon it from the roof of our hostelry. We could see the moon creeping out and shedding its mellow glow over the gayly lighted city. The noises were almost musical up there—like sustained organ notes—and we talked about the play with its happy ending.

“You are right,” I said; “that happy ending is foolish and childish. Things do not always end happily; but this thing, this experiment in making a nation out of torn fragments, this founding of cities in a day out of second and third hand material, this experiment in man-making and nation-building must end well; for, if it doesn’t, God’s great experiment has failed. Shall I say, God’s last experiment has failed? You see we mustn’t fail—it must end well.”

The streets were all but silent. From the great clock on the Metropolitan tower hanging in mid-air, came the flashes that marked the morning hour. Thick mists floated in from the sea and filled the narrow, chasm-like streets with weird, fantastic shapes.

The Herr Director said good-night. The Frau Directorin did likewise. They said it very solemnly, as behooves those who have looked deep into the heart of a great mystery who have felt the touch of a mighty spirit striving, struggling, agonizing to shape a new nation out of the world’s refuse.

II

Our National Creed

THE Herr Director and the Frau Directorin wished to go to church on Sunday, and after eating a piously late breakfast I spread before them New York City’s religious bill of fare, bewildering in its variety and puzzling in its terminology.

I gave them a choice between four varieties of Catholics: Roman, Greek, Old and Apostolic; more than twice that number of Lutherans, separated one from the other by degrees of orthodoxy and nearness to or farness from their historic confessions.

There were Methodists who were free and those who were Episcopalian, Episcopalians who were not Methodists but were reformed, and those who made no such pretensions; all these invited us to worship with them.

Many varieties of Baptists announced their sermons and services, offering a choice between those who were free and those who were just Baptists, and between those who were Baptists on the Seventh Day and those who did not specify the day on which they were Baptists.

We also had a chance to discriminate between Dutch Reformed, German Reformed or Presbyterian Reformed, and United Presbyterians divided from other Presbyterians (presumably unreformed) for reasons known to the Fathers who died long since.

If we had been radically inclined we might have browsed among Unitarians, Ethical Culturists, and could even have worshipped among those who make a religion out of not having any.

The most interesting column to the Herr Director was that which contained our exotic cults, those we have imported and those which prove that we have not neglected our home industry.

It was disconcerting to me, who was trying to introduce our national spirit, to realize how varied its religious expression is, and the Herr Director got no little amusement out of the story I told him of the student in one of our colleges who, it is said, came to the librarian and asked for a book on “Wild Religions I have Met.” When the librarian suggested it might be Seton Thompson’s book on Wild Animals, he said it was not in the department of Zoölogy, but in Philosophy in which the assignment for the reading was given. The book was then quickly found. It was Prof. William James’ “The Varieties of Religious Experience.”

When we succeeded in rescuing the Frau Directorin out of the maze of Sunday Supplements in which she was entangled, we started in pursuit of a proper place of worship, in anything but a worshipful mood. I was bent upon showing that which is vastly more difficult to interpret than sky-scrapers, the Herr Director was doubtful that we had any religious spirit at all, and the Frau Directorin mourned the fact that she had to leave behind her so much paper which might have served such good purposes if she had it at home.

Fifth Avenue recovers something of its departed exclusiveness on Sunday morning; for although the cheaper stores are crowding upon those which never descend to bargain counters, this is not true of the churches. They still are in good repute, and await the stated hour of service on Sunday morning without excitement, having advertised nothing, offering no ecclesiastical bargains; content to live as the birds of the air, whom the “Heavenly Father feedeth.” The street was almost deserted; here and there a taxicab darted on its way to or from the railway station; the hour of the limousines had not yet come, and the people who strolled along were evidently, like ourselves, unfashionable sojourners seeking a tabernacle in Gotham’s wilderness.

Sauntering along the street was less interesting than usual, for not only were there no crowds, the shop-windows were all artistically curtained and there was nothing to see. The Frau Directorin did not like it at all, “for what good is it to walk along the shopping streets if you can’t look into the shops?”

“You see, my dear,” the Herr Director remarked, “that is to help you obey one of the ten commandments which womankind is especially prone to break, ‘Thou shalt not covet.’ Incidentally it proves that we are in a country in which you are allowed to do as you please every day and do nothing on Sunday.”

“No,” I replied, “it merely proves that we are trying to save one day a week from the contamination of our materialistic existence.”

“It merely proves,” he echoed, “that you have inherited from your Anglo-Saxon ancestors the worst thing they could leave you: their hypocrisy. I stepped behind a curtained bar this morning and found it running at full blast. You evidently do your drinking in private on Sunday and your praying in public. You know we in Germany do the opposite.”

“No, you do your praying and drinking both in public, and both seem to be a part of your religion,” I answered. “Very likely you are right. There is about us this taint of hypocrisy; but that only shows that we are a deeply religious people, conscious of the fact that our ideals are upon a higher plane than our performance. We are not as eager as you are to proclaim our frailties from the housetop.

“The average American wants you to believe him to be a pretty decent fellow till you find him out to be different; while you Germans make a virtue of a certain kind of brutal frankness, which is worse than hypocrisy, since you try to make it an excuse for all sorts of private and national sins. The real criminal is never a hypocrite.”

I do not