From William Schaberg's Writing The Big Book, Page 72, on Bill's pragmatism and religious flexibility: 

Bob most likely had his own ideas on how things should work and he may have expressed some of those to Bill in private conversations, but he consistently  deferred to Wilson's decisions whenever they disagreed substantively on the evolving policies and procedures within A.A.

With so many acknowledged differences between them, it is unusual they did not have the kind of arguments one would normally expect under such circumstances. Still, it must be remembered these were not normal circumstances, but rather a situation where stubborn disagreement or even outright rebellion might well be the direct road back to drinking. (Witness Hank Parkhurst's slip from sobriety just eighteen months after this.) Given that reality, Bob Smith - despite his greater age and his impressive medical credentials - always accommodated Bill's desires and routinely yielded to his 'sponsor' as the final decision maker.

One of the fundamental and potentially contentious differences between them at this time was their approach and allegiance to religion. Bob Smith was far more devout and committed than Bill Wilson, characteristically claiming, as he did in 1945, that he "averaged at least an hour's reading each day for the past ten years son some religious subject... [always returning however] to the simple teachings in The Sermon on the Mount, the Book of James, and the 13th Chapter of Corinthians in the Bible for his fundamentals." Dr. Bob was a believer and what he believed in were the fundamentals of the Christian religion.

Bill, on the other hand, read a wide variety of spiritual books, but the most important and influential of these was not the Bible. In fact, in a 1954 interview with T. Henry Williams, Bill claimed that when he first came to Akron in May 1935, he "hadn't looked in the Bible, up to that time, at all." However true that may have been, what he had been reading with keen attention in 1935 was William James's The Varieties of Religious Experience, a 1902 work by America's leading philosopher-psychologist who emphasized the multiplicity of spiritual roads, all of which could be followed with equal success. Although Bill' s belief in God was profoundly deep and personal. he took a very eclectic approach to religion and would best be described as a seeker rather than a believer.

More important, Wilson - again following in the footsteps of William James - was a confirmed pragmatist, consistently shunning dogma and putting his faith in what worked. In its simplest form, Bill's credo was: "any good idea will work and any bad idea, when tried, will fail of its own weakness." In both is personal life and in Alcoholics Anonymous, Wilson always preferred to investigate and embrace the solution that promised the best and most reliable results rather than committing himself to any particular rule or law.  His emphasis on the practical versus Bob Smith's prescriptive approach would have accounted for many, if not most, of the difficulties these two men would have to navigate over the fifteen years of their relationship.

Page 72

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