Page:Americans (1922).djvu/333

 of Justinian. His hobby had turned into a camel, and he hoped, if he rode long enough in silence, that at last he might come on a city of thought along the great highways of exchange.

Though Henry Adams was "a Darwinian for fun," in his search for God he was as much in earnest as a man can be who sets out for a far country which he knows that he shall never reach. To him, as to his great-grandfather and his grandfather before him, the tribal Jehovah created by the ancient Semitic imagination, the competitor of Baal and Astoreth, was a mythological abomination, surviving in the minds of those early New England pedants who had instigated the hanging of witches in Salem and the persecution of Quakers and Anabaptists. His ancestors, John and Abigail and John Quincy Adams, had entered into the religious enlightenment of the eighteenth century. But to him, a son of the mid-nineteenth century, the improved God of the Deists and the Unitarians—the bland, just, and benevolent Providence of Franklin, Jefferson and John Quincy Adams—had become as obsolete and incredible as the more markedly vertebrate deity of Increase Mather's time.

Those who read Henry Adams with inadequate sense of his irony may feel that the God whose laws he attempted to discover in his quest through contemporary science is not more real than the Providence of the Deists nor less dreadful than the Jehovah of the old theologians. That all-pervad-