"His side, only. Mine was a degree less serious, Reed. Sorry for him as I was, I couldn't help a certain amusement at seeing him get himself into such a mess over nothing. How any person with a fair share of common sense can--Well, I toiled over him, all summer. Talk about mines! I mined in him. I sank new shafts and I dug out new veins, and I presented samples of ore for his inspection. By 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 trouble lay in his sheer inability to tally up you and a benign Providence into any proper sort of a sum.