I told him--as nicely as I could--about never making speeches, and why. It's always embarrassing. He covered up his very annoyed disappointment and decided all I needed was a working-over. He began this by ignoring the invitation--after a little more pressure got him nowhere. He talked about his church and the young people and their outlook: "You'd be interested in learning what's going on among religious liberals, Phil. In fact, you owe it to yourself to find out! And your writing shows you don't know! Dogma has simply gone overboard--and I mean overboard. We're studying psychology as hard as you are. We take up a book like the late Liebman's _Peace of Mind_--and learn to understand it. Hell-fire and damnation--original sin--that sort of rubbish--is out. We'll listen to a communist over there as attentively as to a priest. We believe Christ would have made the fair distribution of goods His business--if He were alive now. We sit around and air sex problems as frankly as the professors. Use their lingo. We don't believe religion ought to be a lifelong way of pain and hardship and self-torment and sorrow--" I'd been thinking about the Law of Opposites. What he was saying, I'd said, myself, in some instances. But not all. Some of it made me a little sick. I tried to interrupt but he barged ahead: "To us, religion is a practical attitude and a source of _joie de vivre_--or it's mistaken. We've got a gymnasium in my church and we hold weekly dances and weekly bingo games there. When we talk about the Master--we talk about a Man who is our Friend--not an Oriental mystic who left His disciples puzzled by contradictory advice. If you can't see your way clear to visiting with us--at this time--you certainly ought to be able to see the value of catching up with the status of modern Christianity--" "There are a couple of points that worry me," I said. "Come and thresh them out with us!" "I don't imagine Jesus would have been interested in communism, for example." "Because it's antagonistic to orthodox religion? Wasn't He an antagonist of orthodoxy, Himself?" "The logic escapes me, there. If I'm not mistaken, Jesus was exclusively concerned with the inner world. He was completely antimaterialist. Social systems were superficial to Him. He was agin the obsessive materialism of Near East capitalists two thousand years ago--and I strongly suspect He would see dialectical materialism as a mere spread of that unilateral pall over the conscious minds of the masses." "Superb! Come over and tell us that!" "You're supposed to know it, already," I answered. "And to be teaching it. Besides, I am a firm believer in Original Sin." "_What!_" The sloe gin and my iced coffee arrived. He offered to pay--a unique point--clumsy, but pleasant. George looked him over twice. George had never seen a clergyman in my haunts, except my father, whom he knew.