unesthetic marks printed on it, and of considerably less use, therefore of less holiness and less romance, than a shirt or a blanket. But to the unprejudiced thinker, like himself, it was a symbol, sacred only by suggestion but not the less sacred.
After nearly two decades he knew that he had been fooling himself; that he did not actually admire Jesus as the sole leader; that the teachings of Jesus were contradictory and borrowed from earlier rabbis; and that if the teachings of Christianity were adequate flags, symbols, philosophies for most of the bellowing preachers whom he met and detested, then perforce they must for him be the flags, the symbols, of the enemy.
Yet he went on as a Baptist preacher, as a teacher of ministerial cubs.
He tried to explain it to Frank Shallard without seeming too shameful.
First, he suggested, it was hard for any man, it was especially hard for a teacher of sixty-five, to go back on the philosophy he had taught all his life. It made that life seem too pitifully futile.
And he did love to tread theological labyrinths.
And, he admitted, as they plodded back through a winter twilight, he was afraid to come out with the truth lest he plain lose his job.
Man of learning he was, but too sorry a preacher to be accepted by a liberal religious society, too lumbering a writer for journalism; and outside the world of religious parasitism (his own phrase) he had no way of earning his living. If he were kicked out of Mizpah, he would starve.
"So!" he said grimly. "I would hate to see you go through all this, Frank."
"But—but—but— What am I to do, Dr. Zechlin? Do you think I ought to get out of the church? Now? While there's time?"
"You have lived the church. You would probably be lonely without it. Maybe you should stay in it . . . to destroy it!"
"But you wouldn't want it destroyed? Even if some details of dogma aren't true—or even all of 'em—think what a consolation religion and the church are to weak humanity!"
"Are they? I wonder! Don't cheerful agnostics, who know they're going to die dead, worry much less than good Baptists,
