n into a cold, bleak eternity
where everything was swept up in their courses, was there ever any--

At this point in his never-ending circle, Scott Brenton usually started
to his feet, seized his hat and stick and shut his study door behind
him. All out-doors was too small to think in. Violent exercise was the
one fit setting for such thought. In the end, though, the wish for
exercise only took him down across the valley, and spent itself just as
he reached the river's brink. There, on the long white bridge, he stood
by the half-hour at a time, his arms folded on the rail, his eyes fixed
vaguely on the wintry current, a steel-gray stretch of sliding,
slipping water down which the rough white ice cakes came floating,
drifting silently, relentlessly, unendingly, to crash against the stone
piers of the bridge. In that same way, out of the gray, bleak
perspective of his thoughts, the doubts came floating, drifting down
upon him with the same relentlessness, to crash against the foundations
of his belief. Between the two of them, however, there was this
difference: the piers were never chipped or shaken by the ice cakes. He
could not say as much as that for his beliefs.

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 seas