| 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 Edinburgh. He was one of the dozen authentic scholars in all the theological institutions of America, and incidentally he was a thorough failure. He lectured haltingly, he wrote obscurely, he could not talk to God as though he knew him personally, and he could not be friendly with numbskulls.
Mizpah Seminary belonged to the right-wing of the Baptists; it represented what was twenty years later to be known as “fundamentalism”; and in Mizpah Dr. Zechlin had been suspected of heresy.
He also had a heathenish tawny German beard, and he had been born not in Kansas or Ohio but in a city ridiculously named Frankfort.
Elmer despised him, because of the beard, because he was enthusiastic about Hebrew syntax, because he had no useful tips for ambitious young professional prophets, and because he had seemed singularly to enjoy flunking Elmer in Greek, which Elmer was making up with a flinching courage piteous to behold.
But Frank Shallard loved Dr. Zechlin, him alone among the members of the faculty.