“Ah, I didn’t think all that,” Mr. Engel protested, and his parchment skin actually performed the miracle of flushing.  “I am not so stupid.  And once, long ago when I was young, I was going to be a minister myself.”

“What prevented you?” asked Holder, interested.

“You want me to be frank—­yes, well, I couldn’t take the vows.”  The brown eyes of the quiet, humorous, self-contained and dried-up custodian of the city’s reading flamed up.  “I felt the call,” he exclaimed.  “You may not credit it to look at me now, Mr. Hodder.  They said to me, ’here is what 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