y the end of the summer,
I'd got him to where he admitted that a law-abiding God was an
improvement on his old, erratic, lawless, irate Deity; that it was
treating Him with a long way more respect to endow Him with the
attributes of a high-minded gentleman than to consider Him a mere
purveyor of red-hot discipline for sins He had specifically created.
Then, in the end, I put it squarely up to him: if he must preach at
all, why not choose a church that stood for law and order in the
universe, a church that, hanging to the old traditions, yet held out
her arms to the new interpretations of the law and gospel, instead of
sticking to the cast-iron, white-hot Calvinism which hadn't marched an
inch, hadn't so much as changed the focus of its spectacles, since the
pre-Darwin days of the very first of his ancestral parsons."

"Well?"

"Well." And Whittenden pulled himself up short. "This is where you
begin to come in on the scene, you reprobate. I had just got him on his
legs, marching sanely along, to the tune of 'All Thy works shall praise
Thy name,' when the doctors came lugging you home into his very parish,
laid you down underneath his very nose. No wonder you upset him,
completely bowled him over off his theological pins. His God was just
and loving and logical, even if a little bit more given to personal
interference than any but a Calvinistic God is supposed to be. And here
were you, from all accounts a law-abiding citizen--of course the
theologian in him failed to take the black powder into account--smitten
down in your prime by what he was electing to call the hand of Divine
Providence. Of course, it tousled up all the notions I had been
stroking down so carefully. He came on a knot--from his own story, I
think it was the question as to why a purely innocent Opdyke was chosen
as an object of wrathful vengeance. Then he immediately went panicky.
That's the erratic strain in him. Up to a certain point, he's logical;
then he gets into a seething mass of mismatched syllogisms. In this
case, if Providence was good, and you also were good, then Providence
wouldn't have knocked you into a cocked hat. No matter now about the
sympathy of my phrase; I want you to get the gist of the whole
situation. Well, he turned and twisted that around into form _AAA_,
_EAE_, and so on down the line; and, worse luck, he twisted himself
with it till he lost all his point of view, got dizzy, and missed his
footing utterly. The original troub