"The questions it asks have not yet been answered, so far as I know,"
said he, "and I do not think they can be by the alleged experts in such
things."

Then a sudden fancy seized him, and he broke out with a novel
proposition:

"You have little to do to-morrow, nor have I much on my hands.
Speaking of this to you has awakened an old interest in me and made me
curious. Help me to-morrow. We'll make up now a list of twenty
leading clergymen. I know most of them personally, and some of them
can reason. We'll each take a cab and each visit ten, exhibiting these
verses, going over them stanza by stanza, explaining the doubts they
have aroused, and asking for such solution as the clergymen have, and
such solace as it may afford. That will be rather an interesting
experiment, will it not?"

I fell in with his whim, and the next day we made the rounds agreed
upon.

What a curious thing it was! How men of various creeds felt confident
and repeated the old platitudes, and would be anything but logical!
How one or two were honest, and said they could not answer.

And how absurd, we said at night, the keeping of men to tell us what
can no more be learned in a theological school than in a blacksmith
shop, and in neither place as well as in the woods or on the sea! Yet
there was no scoffing in it. We were neither irreligious.