His hand indicated a sculptured crucifix near by.
“Do you believe everything still?” he answered. “Can you?”
As he looked at me, I suppose that he read negation in my eyes.
“No more can I,” he murmured. Again he looked in among the tombstones and flowers, where the old custodian saw us and took off his hat. “Howdy, Daddy Ben!” John Mayrant returned pleasantly, and then resuming to me: “No more can I believe everything.” Then he gave a brief, comical laugh. “And I hope my aunts won’t find that out! They would think me gone to perdition indeed. But I always go to church here” (he pointed to the quiet building, which, for all its modest size and simplicity, had a stately and inexpressible charm), “because I like to kneel where my mother said her prayers, you know.” He flushed a little over this confidence into which he had fallen, but he continued: “I like the words of the service, too, and I don’t ask myself over-curiously what I do believe; but there’s a permanent something within us—a Greater Self—don’t you think?”
“A permanent something,” I assented, “which has created all the religions all over the earth from the beginning, and of which Christianity itself is merely one of the present temples.”
He made an exclamation at my word “present.”
“Do you think anything in this world is final?” I asked him.
“But—” he began, somewhat at a loss.
“Haven’t you found out yet that human nature is the one indestructible reality that we know?”
“But—” he began again.