"But Billy Graham is simply stone-age," he laughed condescendingly. His Radcliffe date lapsed into silence at this, and he quaffed the rest of his scotch with an indulgent chuckle.

At first I thought he was from Princeton, there were so many of them around that weekend. He held a pipe in his teeeth, had a Scotch in his hand, and was dressed like the incarnate ideal of Ivy Magazine. But squelching a Cliffie with a crack like that overcame my initial repugnance, so sidling over, I soon put in a friendly word for Bertrand Russell.

"Oh, that anachronistic imp," he smiled, giving me the same amused look he'd accorded the mention of Billy Graham. "Superficial, smart-aleck, shallow. And outdated. Agnostics are eighteenth century."

He pushed our way through the crowd to the liquor cabinet, where he poured himself some more Sooth.

"Tillich," he said to me. "Tillich. That's the stuff you want to read. Sophisticated. Twentieth-century. The cutting edge of knowledge. All the insights of White-head, Freud, Jung, Buber, Langer, Kierkegaard, Satre, et cetera. And more," he said looking me straight in the eye.

"God," he said solemnly.

"You want a drink?" he asked.

I said not just then and he led me back to where we'd left his date.

"You see the trouble with you atheists--as well as Graham," he resumed, classifying me without warrant, --"is you take the Creed and the Bible and so forth literally, as if all they meant was just what they said. Like the resurrection, I mean. I suppose you think that means somebody actually, physically, rose up from being dead."

I admitted that was how the resurrection had always sounded to me.

"Well, far from it, far from it indeed," he smiled heartily.

He sipped his Scotch and looked far away. "The thing is, that you've got to allow for a connotational semantic, non-discursive elements forming a nevertheless meaningful Gestalt....Atheists, fundamentalists, they all talk about God as if He was a finite object, as if He were a thing."

"But isn't everything a thing?" the girl asked naively. He sighed with exasperation, then broke into a smile.

"Look, I can't go into it all now," he said to me. "But come by Emerson next Thursday at eleven. He's talking on the Ground of Being then: that's God. Emerson H."

And he, the girl, and the Scotch melted into the crowd of cocktails.