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, who worry lest their sons and cousins and sweethearts fail to get into the Baptist heaven—or what is even worse, who wonder if they may not have guessed wrong—if God may not be a Catholic, maybe, or a Mormon or a Seventh-day Adventist instead of a Baptist, and then they’ll go to hell themselves! Consolation? No! But—Stay in the church. Till you want to get out.”
Frank stayed.
III
By Senior year he had read many of Dr. Zechlin’s bootlegged books: Davenport’s “Primitive Traits in Religious Revivals,” which asserted that the shoutings and foamings and twitchings at revival meetings were no more sanctified than any other barbaric religious frenzies; Dods and Sunderland on the origin of the Bible, which indicated that the Bible was no more holy and infallible than Homer; Nathaniel Schmidt’s revolutionary life of Jesus, “The Prophet of Nazareth,” and White’s “History of the Warfare of Science with Theology,” which painted religion as the enemy, not the promoter, of human progress. He was indeed—in a Baptist seminary!—a specimen of the “young man ruined by godless education” whom the Baptist periodicals loved to paint.