to her alone, “I wish you would let me quit the Temple, and go to
the State University.”
She looked up from the mass of dough she was kneading.
“But why, Claude?”
“Well, I could learn more, for one thing. The professors at the
Temple aren’t much good. Most of them are just preachers who
couldn’t make a living at preaching.”
The look of pain that always disarmed Claude came instantly into
his mother’s face. “Son, don’t say such things. I can’t believe
but teachers are more interested in their students when they are
concerned for their spiritual development, as well as the mental.
Brother Weldon said many of the professors at the State
University are not Christian men; they even boast of it, in some
cases.”
“Oh, I guess most of them are good men, all right; at any rate
they know their subjects. These little pin-headed preachers like
Weldon do a lot of harm, running about the country talking. He’s
sent around to pull in students for his own school. If he didn’t
get them he’d lose his job. I wish he’d never got me. Most of the
fellows who flunk out at the State come to us, just as he did.”
“But how can there be any serious study where they give so much
time to athletics and frivolity? They pay their football coach a
larger salary than their President. And those fraternity houses
are places where boys learn all sorts of evil. I’ve heard that
dreadful things go on in them sometimes. Besides, it would take
more money, and you couldn’t live as cheaply as you do at the
Chapins’.”
Claude made no reply. He stood before her frowning and pulling at
a calloused spot on the inside of his palm. Mrs. Wheeler looked
at him wistfully. “I’m sure you must be able to study better in a
quiet, serious atmosphere,” she said.
He sighed and turned away. If his mother had been the least bit
unctuous, like Brother Weldon, he could have told her many
enlightening facts. But she was so trusting and childlike, so
faithful by nature and so ignorant of life as he knew it, that it
was hopeless to argue with her. He could shock her and make her
fear the world even more than she did, but he could never make
her understand.
His mother was old-fashioned. She thought dancing and
card-playing dangerous pastimes—only rough people did such
things when she was a girl in Vermont—and “worldliness” only
another word for wickedness. According to her conception of
education, one should learn, not think; and above all, one must
not enquire. The history of the human race, as it lay behind one,
was already explained; and so was its destiny, which lay before.
The mind should remain obediently within the theological concept
of history.
Nat Wheeler didn’t care where his son went to school, but he,
too, took it for granted that the religious institution was
cheaper than the State University; and that because the students
