He was so astonishingly calm, so tremendously sure of himself, so well
versed in his patriarchs, so practised in all logical disputes, so
thoroughly at home in all the eaves and the alleys, the case-mates and
the bastions of the citadel of his faith, that it seemed as though he
might dare take it up with all the doubters on earth. And yet how poor
he seemed to me, how naked and miserable, locked up in his formulated
system, like a bug in the hollow of a dead piece of wood, helplessly
adrift upon the wild waters of reality. He was not a narrow-minded
fanatic either, and knew the issues of science as well or better than I
- but he had his words, his formulas, his logical snares and ropes, in
which he caught all these troublesome and unmanageable truths and
hitched them to his car of faith: the true word, the correct argument,
the convincing phraseology that is the fine and artfully painted
panorama which the devil employs to separate us from the free true
world.
I was exacting in those days and was not contented with the people, who
were no better than they could be.
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