suppose they were as bad as you think. I still wouldn't feel it was my duty to foul my own nest, to make this grand old Methodist Church, with its saints and heroes like Wesley and Asbury and Quayle and Cartwright and McDowell and McConnell—why, the tears almost come to my eyes when I think of men like that! Look here: Suppose you were at war, in a famous regiment. Suppose a lot of your fellow soldiers, even the present commander of the regiment himself, were rotters—cowards. Would you feel called on to desert? Or to fight all the harder to make up for their faults?"
"Phil, next to the humorous ragging I spoke of, and the use of stale phrases, the worst cancer in religious discussion is the use of the metaphor! The Protestant church is not a regiment. You're not a soldier. The soldier has to fight when and as he's told. You have absolute liberty, outside of a few moral and doctrinal compulsions."
"Ah-hah, now I've got you, my logical young friend! If we have that liberty, why aren't you willing to stay in the church? Oh, Frank, Frank, you are such a fool! I know that you long for righteousness. Can't you see that you can get it best by staying in the church, liberalizing from within, instead of running away and leaving the people to the ministrations of the Gantrys?"
"I know. I've been thinking just that all these years. That's why I'm still a preacher! But I'm coming to believe that it's tommyrot. I'm coming to think that the hell-howling old mossbacks corrupt the honest liberals a lot more than the liberals lighten the backwoods minds of the fundamentalists. What the dickens is the church accomplishing, really? Why have a church at all? What has it for humanity that you won't find in worldly sources—schools, books, conversation?"
"It has this, Frank: It has the unique personality and teachings of Jesus Christ, and there is something in Jesus, there is something in the way he spoke, there is something in the feeling of a man when he suddenly has that inexpressible experience of knowing the Master and his presence, which makes the church of Jesus different from any other merely human institution or instrument whatsoever! Jesus is not simply greater and wiser than Socrates or Voltaire; he is entirely different. Anybody can interpret and teach Socrates or Voltaire—in schools or books or conversation. But to interpret
