It was all very well to choose, as he had done, a more elastic creed, to fling his life's allegiance into a communion whose tenets were so framed as to adjust themselves to the strain of purely individual interpretation. One must have tenets to interpret. What happened, when they became untenable? One might construe the Nicene Creed into a round dozen different 'ologies. A mere framework, a skeleton of belief such as the Apostles' Creed was capable of no such reconstruction. One either believed it, or one did not. Unless--Did anybody ever believe any one thing in its unmodified entirety? Did anybody ever give a categorical denial to any clause of any creed? That was the worst of the whole matter. Half-doubts and half-beliefs crisscrossed and interlaced at every point. One day's doctrine was the next day's error. It was well-nigh impossible to draw a straight line, no matter how short, and take one's stand upon it, and say out boldly _I believe_, and then add just as boldly _I shall keep on believing_. After all, though, that was what he professed to do. The outward setting of his life, from the early celebration of a Sunday morning down to the virtuous reversal of his collar buttons, was the badge of his profession. In his secret heart, as the Advent season came and went, and as the Lenten penances drew near, Scott Brenton had no way of telling where in reality he stood; yet, day by day and week by week, he had to step forth before his congregation and toilsomely erect a platform of belief upon which, in the end, his feet refused to mount. Instead, with every semblance of priestly humility, he stood aside and assisted his hearers to clamber up ahead of him. Once there, he knew that he could count upon their smug enjoyment of their own eminence to make them forget to notice whether or not he took his stand beside them. Of course, he despised himself acutely. Of course, he had hours and moods when he felt that he must lift up his voice and shout aloud to all men--What? That he did not know exactly what he did believe? For, in reality, that was all the whole pother was amounting to. What was the use in starting the alarm, when the whole great crisis might be merely a matter of imagination, of indigestion, even, as Doctor Keltridge had diagnosed it? In that case, the best, the only remedy was work.