you must swear to believe before you can make men and women
happier and more hopeful, rescue them from sin and misery!' You know
what it was."

Hodder nodded.

"It was a crime. It had nothing to do with religion. I thought it over
for a year--I couldn't. Oh, I have since been thankful. I can see now
what would have happened to me--I should have had fatty degeneration of
the soul."

The expression was not merely forcible, it was overwhelming. It brought
up before Holder's mind, with sickening reality, the fate he had himself
escaped. Fatty degeneration of the soul!

The little man, seeing the expression on the rector's face, curbed his
excitement, and feared he had gone too far.

"You will pardon me!" he said penitently, "I forget myself. I did not
mean all clergymen."

"I have never heard it put so well," Holder declared. "That is exactly
what occurs in many cases."

"Yes, it is that," said Engel, still puzzled, but encouraged, eyeing the
strong face of the other. "And they lament that the ministry hasn't more
big men. Sometimes they get one with the doctrinal type of mind
--a Newman--but how often? And even a Newman would be of little avail
to-day. It is Eucken who says that the individual, once released from
external authority, can never be turned back to it. And they have been
released by the hundreds of thousands ever since Luther's time, are being
freed by the hundreds of thousands to-day. Democracy, learning, science,
are releasing them, and no man, no matter how great he may be, can stem
that tide. The able men in the churches now--like your Phillips Brooks,
who died too soon--are beginning to see this. They are those who
developed after the vows of the theological schools were behind them.
Remove those vows, and you will see the young men come. Young men are
idealists, Mr. Hodder, and they embrace other professions where the mind
is free, and which are not one whit better paid than the ministry.

"And what is the result," he cried, "of the senseless insistence on the
letter instead of the spirit of the poetry of religion? Matthew Arnold
was a thousand times right when he inferred that Jesus Christ never spoke
literally and yet he is still being taken literally by most churches, and
all the literal sayings which were put into his mouth are maintained as
Gospel truth! What is the result of proclaiming Christianity in terms of
an ancient science and theology which awaken no quickening response in
the min