not so vitally concerned." No wonder California, the land of saints and angels, wept.
Not much to be added to, or explained, in that," Mr. Burbank said to me, smiling. He disliked talking. Looking rather frail, pale and artistic—he somehow reminded me at once of my good friend Eden Phillpotts, the most artistic of living writers after D'Annunzio—he seemed born to finger a brush or a pen, not a spade. Artist he was, of course: the great artist of modern science. He worked with its flower. He did not speculate about it.
"There is nothing at all new in this interview," he said. I had, of course, read his Training of the Human Plant, and had for that enshrined him in my Dictionary of Modern Rationalists, but, on the rare occasions when he does speak in public, he speaks out in a way that goes far to redeem the credit of American science. "Here," he said to me, "you have the sentiments I lately expressed in the pulpit of a chapel at Santa Rosa."
It was just the same outspoken denunciation of theology. "No avenging Jewish God, no Satanic devil, no fiery hell, is of any interest to me," he said. Jesus? He liked the literary figure, but "the clear light of science teaches us that we must be our own saviors." God? "The God within us is the only available God we know." We must come out from "behind theological barbed-wire fences," into "the great ocean of scientific truth." "Science, unlike theology, never leads to insanity." The word "ceremony," he pungently said, "is derived from cerements" or "grave clothes." Very topical,
