Elmer grasped the edge of his work-table. The top cracked. His strength pleased him. He pulled up his dingy red sweater, smoothed his huge biceps, and again tackled his apostolic labors:
Let’s see now: The fellows at the Y. would expect him to say—
He had it! Nobody ever amounted to a darn except as the—what was it?—as the inscrutable designs of Providence intended him to be.
Elmer was very busy making vast and unformed scrawls in a ten-cent note-book hitherto devoted to German. He darted up, looking scholarly, and gathered his library about him: his Bible, given to him by his mother; his New Testament, given by a Sunday School teacher; his text-books in Weekly Bible and Church History; and one-fourteenth of a fourteen-volume set of Great Orations of the World which, in a rare and alcoholic moment of bibliomania, he had purchased in Cato for seventeen cents. He piled them and repiled them and tapped them with his fountain-pen.
His original stimulus had run out entirely.
Well, he’d get help from the Bible. It was all inspired, every word, no matter what scoffers like Jim said. He’d take the first text he turned to and talk on that.
He opened on: “Now therefore, Tatnai, governor beyond the river, Shethar-boznai, and your companions the Apharsachites, which are beyond the river, be ye far from thence,” an injunction spirited but not at present helpful.
He returned to pulling his luxuriant hair and scratching.
Golly. Must be something.
The only way of putting it all over life was to understand these Forces that the scientists, with their laboratories and everything, couldn’t savvy, but to a real Christian they were just as easy as rolling off a log—