Eddie Fislinger's note-book on the Practical Theology lectures (which Elmer viewed as Elmer's note-book also, before examinations) was crammed with such practical theology as:
Pastoral visiting:
- No partiality.
- Don't neglect hired girls, be cordial.
- Guard conversation, pleasing manner and laugh and maybe one funny story but no scandal or crit. of others.
- Stay only 15-30 minutes.
- Ask if like to pray with, not insist.
- Rem gt opportunities during sickness, sorrow, marriage.
- Ask jokingly why husband not oftener to church.
The course in Hymnology Elmer found tolerable; the courses in New Testament Interpretation, Church History, Theology, Missions, and Comparative Religions he stolidly endured and warmly cursed. Who the dickens cared whether Adoniram Judson became a Baptist by reading his Greek New Testament? Why all this fuss about a lot of prophecies in Revelation—he wasn't going to preach that highbrow stuff! And expecting them to make something out of this filioque argument in theology! Foolish!
The teachers of New Testament and Church History were ministers whom admiring but bored metropolitan congregations had kicked up-stairs. To both of them polite deacons had said, "We consider you essentially scholarly, Brother, rather than pastoral. Very scholarly. We're pulling wires to get you the high honor that's your due—election to a chair in one of the Baptist seminaries. While they may pay a little less, you'll have much more of the honor you so richly deserve, and lots easier work, as you might say."
The grateful savants had accepted, and they were spending the rest of their lives reading fifteenth-hand opinions, taking pleasant naps, and drooling out to yawning students the anemic and wordy bookishness which they called learning.
But the worst of Elmer's annoyances were the courses given by Dr. Bruno Zechlin, Professor of Greek, Hebrew, and Old Testament Exegesis.
Bruno Zechlin was a Ph. D. of Bonn, an S. T. D. of Edin-
