Countenance this....

...seculars. I know, not gonna happen.

Marxism, after all, explained everything; and I was not yet smart enough to hold this against it. The intellectual sophistication of the tradition seemed incontrovertible; and I was not yet familiar with the stylistic cunning of apologetics and polemics, modern or medieval, which can spin into existence a vast and intoxicating literature without ever examining its own foundations. I was a liberal, but an infirm one--infirm liberalism being the liberalism that fails to engage its enemies on the left as ferociously as its enemies on the right.