He thinks with regret of the great days when he could at harvest time at least go down into Hungary and work on the big estates and bring back, as his wage, a side of bacon for the winter. That was wealth, to him.

It looked like a pagan banner planted on a Christian rampart.

There's a classic book by Albert Ellis called When AA Doesn't Work for You. It's in a field called harm reduction. You don't have to believe in God. You don't have to be abstinent. You do less harm the next time than you did the last time.