“Don’t talk to me about the evangelical churches,” cried Willys. “The ‘uplift’ has hit the churches till they are nothing but community-improvement societies, with no more religion in them than the municipal waterworks. There is no more real relation between religion and prohibition than there is between signing the pledge and seeing the Beatific Vision. Wine is as much a part of our traditional religion as it was of the Greek religion. The Jews still drink their Passover wine. Why shouldn’t they? What do you make of that passage in the Old Testament about the winecup in the hand of God? What do you make of the wine at the marriage feast in the New Testament? Or the wine in the Holy Grail? Or the sacramental wine, drunk by all the faithful, till the spirit of mystical fellowship evaporated in the grape-juice of that paradox, the individual communion cup?”
“But it’s much more sanitary that way,” said Cornelia firmly, “really much nicer. And since everyone knows that it’s only a beautiful old form—”
“Oh, you formalists!” Willys ejaculated. “You formalists are the real atheists. Till the days of frank atheism, we wished our friends Godspeed, we pledged their healths, and we launched our ships with a libation of wine. The central act of religious worship for two thousand years was a kind of sacred intoxication in the blood of the living God. Omit the central act, and religion disappears; and all you’ve got left is a lot of unedifying bishops wrangling over ‘the higher criticism’ of fifty years ago. It’s the vengeance of the Dionysiac element in Christianity overtaking them. I repeat what I said before—It’s just as true of bishops as it is of workingmen: human life can’t be sustained without a little edge of ecstasy. If we try it, something will burst. That’s my forecast!”
“And your remedial measure—” said Oliver, “your remedy, rooted in the necessities of the situation?”
“Why, moderate drinking, of course,” replied the novelist, lapsing into the wide arms of the chair, like one from whom all the virtue has departed. “Teach Americans to drink as the Greeks drink to-day: wine everywhere, no one drunk.”
“Not a bad idea,” chuckled His Excellency.
“An idea of quite startling originality,” I added.
“Our ‘dry battery’ is crackling with suppressed thunderbolts,” said Oliver. “But”—he glanced at his watch—“it lacks only ten minutes of midnight and the dawn of a better era for the world. While the inhabitants of this borough of Manhattan are meditating on their sins of the past year, and signifying repentance by various acts of atonement, it is fitting that we should not let the hour pass without some appropriate ceremony. Professor, you haven’t seen my new set of Casanova—a Christmas gift from the wittiest of my French friends. Let me show it to you. Willys admires it immensely.”
Willys and I followed our host to his bookshelves, while Cornelia idly turned the pages of the new American Mercury. But why go into details? Oliver’s edition of the Mémoires, handsomely bound in full morocco and locked in a glass case, proved to be the mask of His Excellency’s “diplomatic reserve.” From the ingredients of two or three “volumes” he compounded something which he told us was known in Washington as the “Gentlemen’s Agreement,” because it agreed with gentlemen.
As the clock and the bells and the whistles sounded the knell of 1923, Oliver exclaimed, “Why, Cornelia, where’s the Professor’s buttermilk,” and he and Willys clinked glasses, and drank “To the vengeance of Dionysus!”