‘No, I am not. Not that it is any of your business. My religious faith is a private matter between me and my God. What my inner beliefs are you will have to judge by my actions . . . for you are not invited to question me about them. I decline to explain them nor to justify them to you. Nor to anyone. . – not the Lodge Master. . . nor the Grand Inquisitor, if it comes to that.’
‘But you do believe in God?’
‘I told you so, didn’t I? Not that you had any business asking me.’
‘Then you must believe in other things?’
‘Of course I do! I believe that a man has an obligation to be merciful to the weak – . . patient with the stupid . . . generous with the poor. I think he is obliged to lay down his life for his brothers, should it be required of him. But I don’t propose to prove any of those things; they are beyond proof. And I don’t demand that you believe as I do.’
I let out my breath. ‘I’m satisfied, Zeb.’
Instead of looking pleased he answered, ‘That’s mighty kind of you, brother, mighty kind! Sorry-I shouldn’t be sarcastic. But I had no intention of asking for your approval. You goaded me-accidentally, I’m sure-into discussing matters that I never intend to discuss.’ He stopped to light up another of those stinking cigarettes and went on more quietly. ‘John, I suppose that I am, in my own cantankerous way, a very narrow man myself. I believe very strongly in freedom of religion-but I think that that freedom is best expressed as freedom to keep quiet. From my point of view, a great deal of openly expressed piety is insufferable conceit.’
‘Huh?’
‘Not every case-I’ve known the good and the humble and the devout. But how about the man who claims to know what the Great Architect is thinking? The man who claims to be privy to His Inner Plans? It strikes me as sacrilegious conceit of the worst sort-this character probably has never been any closer to His Trestle Board than you or I. But it makes him feel good to claim to be on chummy terms with the Almighty, it builds his ego, and lets him lay down the law to you and me. Pfui! Along comes a knothead with a loud voice, an I.Q. around 90, hair in his ears, dirty underwear, and a lot of ambition. He’s too lazy to be a farmer, too stupid to be an engineer, too unreliable to be a banker-but, brother, can he pray! After a while he has gathered around him other knotheads who don’t have his vivid imagination and self-assurance but like the idea of having a direct line of Omnipotence. Then this character is no longer Nehemiah Scudder but the First Prophet’
I was going along with him, feeling shocked but rather pleasantly so, until he named the First Prophet. Perhaps my own spiritual state at that time could have been described as that of a ‘primitive’ follower of the First Prophet-that is to say, I had decided that the Prophet Incarnate was the devil himself and that all of his works were bad, but that belief did not affect the basics of the faith I had learned from my mother. The thing to do was to purge and reform the Church, not to destroy it. I mention this because my own case paralleled a very serious military problem that was to develop later.
I found that Zeb was studying my face. ‘Did I get you on the raw again, Old fellow? I didn’t mean to.’
‘Not at all,’ I answered stiffly, and went on to explain that, in my opinion, the sinfulness of the present gang of devils that had taken over the Church in no way invalidated the true faith. ‘After all, no matter what you think nor how much you may like to show off your cynicism, the doctrines are a matter of logical necessity. The Prophet Incarnate and his cohorts can pervert them, but they can’t destroy them-and it doesn’t matter whether the real Prophet had dirty underwear or not.’