"Frank dear," she hurried on eagerly, "it's almost funny, only it's all so plumb crazy. Do you ever go to Meeting? I mean church?"
"I'm afraid I don't," Frank admitted ruefully.
"I do," cried the girl. "Oh yes, I do." Then she laughed. "It's more funny than you'd expect, if—if you only think about it. I always think a lot when I go. It makes me think, but not in the way the parson would have me. I always start thinking about him. It seems so queer, him standing up there talking Bible stuff, and telling you what it means, just, for all the world, as if he'd wrote it, and knew all about it; just as if he was a personal friend of that great machine thing that keeps this world buzzing around and sets us feeling, and doing, and happy, and miserable. Then he gets paid like any hired man for talking to us all, just as if we were silly folk who couldn't think just as well as him. But he don't really think far. He just tells you what he's told to tell you by those who pay him his wages, and if he told you anything else he'd lose his job, and maybe have to plow for a living, and then be told by some other feller every seventh day he was a fool and a sinner.
"Then you go to another church—or meeting house. It used to make me real bad one time. But it doesn't now, because I'm getting to understand better. Well, at the other place they tell you all different. And while you're listening it makes you think the other feller's a fool, and—and ought to be making hay, or maybe eating it. Then you get mazed up with so much contradiction about Life, and God, and all the other things, so you find another church. Then that feller gets up and tells you that none of the others have got it right—no one else in the world but him, as the representative of his particular religion. And he asks you to help him send out missionaries, and things, to tell everybody that don't think the same as him they're fools and worse, and—and—they're all going plumb to hell—wherever that is.
"Now what does it all come to, Frank?" she cried, with eyes glowing and cheeks flushed with enthusiasm. "Why, just this. We're born into this world, which is a wonderful, wonderful place, through none of our doing. A big God, somewhere, gives us our life, and implants in us a wonderful sense of right and wrong, and we've just got to use it the best we know. We don't know anything beyond the limits of understanding He's given us, and He doesn't intend us to know more. He just seems to say, 'Go right along and work out your own salvation; and when you've done, I'll come along and see how you've been doing, and, maybe, I'll fix it so your failures won't happen in the newer lives I set going.' That's how it seems to me. So you don't need to listen more than you want to what other folks, no wiser than yourself, tell you of what's right and what's wrong. You don't; because they don't know any better than you—and that's a fact. So when you come and tell me you're disgraced, just because your pa and momma weren't preached at by a feller all dressed in white, and they didn't have bells ringing, and she didn't have a trousseau, and the folks didn't get around and make speeches, and pile a shower of paper stuff down their backs, I say you're not. None of it matters. Nothing in the whole wide world matters—so long as we don't let go our hold on that sense of right and wrong which the good God gave us. That's all that really does matter to us. It's no concern of ours what folks who came before us did, or the doings of folks who're coming after. We've got to do our work. We've got to love and live till it pleases our great big God to tell us to stop. And I'm most sure if we do that, and hold tight to our sense of right and wrong, and act as it prompts us, we're just doing His Will—as He wants us to do it."
Frank sat staring in wide astonishment at the girl's flushed face and bright, enthusiastic eyes. But the effect of her words, her understanding of things, upon him was none the less. He felt the great underlying truth in all she said, and it brought him a measure of comfort which his own lack of real thought had left him without.
"Phyl!" he almost gasped.
The girl broke into happy laughter.
"Say, Frank," she cried, "don't tell me I'll—I'll go to hell for it all. I—I couldn't stand that—from you."
The boy shook his head. He, too, joined in the laugh. He felt he wanted to laugh. It was as though she had suddenly relieved him of an intolerable burden.