CHAPTER V
inthe cottonwood grove by the muddy river, three miles west of Paris, Kansas, the godly were gathered with lunch-baskets, linen dusters, and moist unhappy babies for the all-day celebration. Brothers Elmer Gantry and Edward Fislinger had been licensed to preach before, but now they were to be ordained as full-fledged preachers, as Baptist ministers.
They had come home from distant Mizpah Theological Seminary for ordination by their own council of churches, the Kayooska River Baptist Association. Both of them had another year to go out of the three-year seminary course, but by the more devout and rural brethren it is considered well to ordain the clerics early, so that even before they attain infallible wisdom they may fill backwoods pulpits and during week-ends do good works with divine authority.
His vacation after college Elmer had spent on a farm; during vacation after his first year in seminary he had been supervisor in a boys’ camp; now, after ordination, he was to supply at the smaller churches in his corner of Kansas.
During his second year of seminary, just finished, he had been more voluminously bored than ever at Terwillinger. Constantly he had thought of quitting, but after his journeys to the city of Monarch, where he was in closer relation to fancy ladies and to bartenders than one would have desired in a holy clerk, he got a second wind in his resolve to lead a pure life, and so managed to keep on toward perfection, as symbolized by the degree of Bachelor of Divinity.
But if he had been bored, he had acquired professional training.
He was able now to face any audience and to discourse authoritatively on any subject whatever, for any given time to the second, without trembling and without any errors of speech beyond an infrequent “ain’t” or “he don’t.” He had an elegant vocabulary. He knew eighteen synonyms for sin, half of them very long and impressive, and the others very short and explosive and minatory—minatory being one of his own best words, constantly useful in terrifying the as yet imaginary horde of sinners gathered before him.
He was no longer embarrassed by using the most intimate language about God; without grinning he could ask a seven-year-old boy, “Don’t you want to give up your vices?” and without flinching he could look a tobacco salesman in the eye and demand, “Have you ever knelt before the throne of grace?”
Whatever worldly expressions he might use insub rosaconversations with the less sanctified theological students, such as Harry Zenz, who was the most confirmed atheist in the school, in public he never so much as said “doggone,” and he had on tap, for immediate and skilled use, a number of such phrases as “Brother, I am willing to help you find religion,” “My whole life is a testimonial to my faith,” “To the inner eye there is no trouble in comprehending the three-fold nature of divinity,” “We don’t want any long-faced Christians in this church—the fellow that’s been washed in the blood of the Lamb is just so happy he goes ’round singing and hollering hallelujah all day long,” and “Come on now, all get together, and let’s make this the biggest collection this church has ever seen.” He could explain foreordination thoroughly, and he used the words “baptizo” and “Athanasian.”
He would, perhaps, be less orchestral, less Palladian, when he had been in practise for a year or two after graduation and discovered that the hearts of men are vile, their habits low, and that they are unwilling to hand the control of all those habits over to the parson. But he would recover again, and he was a promise of what he might be in twenty years, as a ten-thousand-dollar seer.
He had grown broader, his glossy hair, longer than at Terwillinger, was brushed back from his heavy white brow, his nails were oftener clean, and his speech was Jovian. It was more sonorous, more measured and pontifical; he could, and did, reveal his interested knowledge of your secret moral diabetes merely by saying, “How are we today, Brother?”
And though he had almost flunked in Greek, his thesis on “Sixteen Ways of Paying a Church Debt” had won the ten-dollar prize in Practical Theology.
He walked among the Kayooska Valley communicants, beside his mother. She was a small-town business woman; she was not unduly wrinkled or shabby; indeed she wore a good little black hat and a new brown silk frock with a long gold chain; but she was inconspicuous beside his bulk and sober magnificence.
He wore for the ceremony a new double-breasted suit of black broadcloth, and new black shoes. So did Eddie Fislinger, along with a funereal tie and a black wide felt hat, like a Texas congressman’s. But Elmer was more daring. Had he not understood that he must show dignity, he would have indulged himself in the gaudiness for which he had a talent. He had compromised by buying a beautiful light gray felt hat in Chicago, on his way home, and he had ventured on a red-bordered gray silk handkerchief, which gave a pleasing touch of color to his sober chest.
But he had left off, for the day, the large opal ring surrounded by almost gold serpents for which he had lusted and to which he had yielded when in liquor, in the city of Monarch.
He walked as an army with banners, he spoke like a trombone, he gestured widely with his large blanched thick hand; and his mother, on his arm, looked up in ecstasy. He wafted her among the crowd, affable as a candidate for probate judgeship, and she was covered with the fringes of his glory.
For the ordination, perhaps two hundred Baptist laymen and laywomen and at least two hundred babies had come in from neighboring congregations by buckboard, democrat wagon, and buggy. (It was 1905; there was as yet no Ford nearer than Fort Scott.) They were honest, kindly, solid folk; farmers and blacksmiths and cobblers; men with tanned deep-lined faces, wearing creased “best suits”; the women, deep bosomed or work-shriveled, in clean gingham. There was one village banker, very chatty and democratic, in a new crash suit. They milled like cattle, in dust up to their shoe laces, and dust veiled them, in the still heat, under the dusty branches of the cottonwoods from which floated shreds to catch and glisten on the rough fabric of their clothes.
Six preachers had combined to assist the Paris parson in his ceremony, and one of them was no less than the Rev. Dr. Ingle, come all the way from St. Joe, where he was said to have a Sunday School of six hundred. As a young man—very thin and eloquent in a frock coat—Dr. Ingle had for six months preached in Paris, and Mrs. Gantry remembered him as her favorite minister. He had been so kind to her when she was ill; had come in to read “Ben Hur” aloud, and tell stories to a chunky little Elmer given to hiding behind furniture and heaving vegetables at visitors.
“Well, well, Brother, so this is the little tad I used to know as a shaver! Well, you always were a good little mannie, and they tell me that now you’re a consecrated young man—that you’re destined to do a great work for the Lord,” Dr. Ingle greeted Elmer.
“Thank you, Doctor. Pray for me. It’s an honor to have you come from your great church,” said Elmer.
“Not a bit of trouble. On my way to Colorado—I’ve taken a cabin way up in the mountains there—glorious view—sunsets—painted by the Lord himself. My congregation have been so good as to give me two months’ vacation. Wish you could pop up there for a while, Brother Elmer.”
“I wish I could, Doctor, but I have to try in my humble way to keep the fires burning around here.”
Mrs. Gantry was panting. To have her little boy discoursing with Dr. Ingle as though they were equals! To hear him talking like a preacher—just asnatural! And some day—Elmer with a famous church; with a cottage in Colorado for the summer; married to a dear pious little woman, with half a dozen children; and herself invited to join them for the summer; all of them kneeling in family prayers, led by Elmer . . . though it was true Elmer declined to hold family prayers just now; said he’d had too much of it in seminary all year . . . too bad, but she’d keep on coaxing . . . and if he justwouldstop smoking, as she’d begged and besought him to do . . . well, perhaps if he didn’t have a few naughtinesses left, he wouldn’t hardly be her little boy any more. . . . How she’d had to scold once upon a time to get him to wash his hands and put on the nice red woolen wristlets she’d knitted for him!
No less satisfying to her was the way in which Elmer impressed all their neighbors. Charley Watley, the house-painter, commander of the Ezra P. Nickerson Post of the G. A. R. of Paris, who had always pulled his white mustache and grunted when she had tried to explain Elmer’s hidden powers of holiness, took her aside to admit: “You were right, Sister; he makes a fine upstanding young man of God.”
They encountered that town problem, Hank McVittle, the druggist. Elmer and he had been mates; together they had stolen sugar-corn, drunk hard cider, and indulged in haymow venery. Hank was a small red man, with a lascivious and knowing eye. It was certain that he had come today only to laugh at Elmer.
They met face on, and Hank observed, “Morning, Mrs. Gantry. Well, Elmy, going to be a preacher, eh?”
“I am, Hank.”
“Like it?” Hank was grinning and scratching his cheek with a freckled hand; other unsanctified Parisians were listening.
Elmer boomed, “I do, Hank. I love it! I love the ways of the Lord, and I don’t ever propose to put my foot into any others! Because I’ve tasted the fruit of evil, Hank—you know that. And there’s nothing to it. What fun we had, Hank, was nothing to the peace and joy I feel now. I’m kind of sorry for you, my boy.” He loomed over Hank, dropped his paw heavily on his shoulder. “Why don’t you try to get right with God? Or maybe you’re smarter than he is!”
“Never claimed to be anything of the sort!” snapped Hank, and in that testiness Elmer triumphed, his mother exulted.
She was sorry to see how few were congratulating Eddie Fislinger, who was also milling, but motherless, inconspicuous, meek to the presiding clergy.
Old Jewkins, humble, gentle old farmer, inched up to murmur, “Like to shake your hand, Brother Elmer. Mighty fine to see you chosen thus and put aside for the work of the Lord. Jiggity! T’ think I remember you as knee-high to a grasshopper! I suppose you study a lot of awful learned books now.”
“They make us work good and hard, Brother Jewkins. They give us pretty deep stuff: hermeneutics, chrestomathy, pericopes, exegesis, homiletics, liturgics, isagogics, Greek and Hebrew and Aramaic, hymnology, apologetics—oh, a good deal.”
“Well! I shouldsayso!” worshiped old Jewkins, while Mrs. Gantry marveled to find Elmer even more profound than she had thought, and Elmer reflected proudly that he really did know what all but a couple of the words meant.
“My!” sighed his mother. “You’re getting so educated, I declare t’ goodness pretty soon I won’t hardly dare to talk to you!”
“Oh, no. There’ll never come a time when you and I won’t be the best of pals, or when I won’t need the inspiration of your prayers!” said Elmer Gantry melodiously, with refined but manly laughter.
They were assembling on benches, wagon-seats and boxes for the ceremony of ordination.
The pulpit was a wooden table with a huge Bible and a pitcher of lemonade. Behind it were seven rocking chairs for the clergy, and just in front, two hard wooden chairs for the candidates.
The present local pastor, Brother Dinger, was a meager man, slow of speech and given to long prayers. He rapped on the table. “We will, uh, we will now begin.”
. . . Elmer, looking handsome on a kitchen chair in front of the rows of flushed hot faces. He stopped fretting that his shiny new black shoes were dust-gray. His heart pounded. He was in for it! No escape! He was going to be a pastor! Last chance for Jim Lefferts, and Lord knew where Jim was. He couldn’t— His shoulder muscles were rigid. Then they relaxed wearily, as though he had struggled to satiety, while Brother Dinger went on:
“Well, we’ll start with the usual, uh, examination of our young brothers, and the brethren have, uh, they’ve been good enough, uh, to let me, uh, in whose charge one, uh, one of these fine young brothers has always lived and made his home—to let me, uh, let me ask the questions. Now, Brother Gantry, do you believe fully and whole-heartedly in baptism by immersion?”
Elmer was thinking, “What a rotten pulpit voice the poor duck has,” but aloud he was rumbling:
“I believe, Brother, and I’ve been taught, that possibly a manmightbe saved if he’d just been baptized by sprinkling or pouring, but only if he were ignorant of the truth. Of course immersion is the only Scriptural way—if we’re really going to be like Christ, we must be buried with him in baptism.”
“That’s fine, Brother Gantry. Praise God! Now, Brother Fislinger, do you believe in the final perseverance of the saints?”
Eddie’s eager but cracked voice explaining—on—on—somniferous as the locusts in the blazing fields across the Kayooska River.
As there is no hierarchy in the Baptist Church, but only a free association of like-minded local churches, so are there no canonical forms of procedure, but only customs. The ceremony of ordination is not a definite rite; it may vary as the local associations will, and ordination is conferred not by any bishop but by the general approval of the churches in an association.
The questions were followed by the “charge to the candidates,” a tremendous discourse by the great Dr. Ingle, in which he commended study, light meals, and helping the sick by going and reading texts to them. Every one joined then in a tremendous basket-lunch on long plank tables by the cool river . . . banana layer cake, doughnuts, fried chicken, chocolate layer cake, scalloped potatoes, hermit cookies, cocoanut layer cake, pickled tomato preserves, on plates which skidded about the table, with coffee poured into saucerless cups from a vast tin pot, inevitably scalding at least one child, who howled. There were hearty shouts of “Pass the lemon pie, Sister Skiff,” and “That was a fine discourse of Brother Ingle’s,” and “Oh, dear, I dropped my spoon and an ant got on it—well, I’ll just wipe it on my apron—that was fine the way Brother Gantry explained how the Baptist Church has existed ever since Bible days.” . . . Boys bathing, shrieking, splashing one another. . . . Boys getting into the poison ivy. . . . Boys becoming so infected with the poison ivy that they would turn spotty and begin to swell within seven hours. . . . Dr. Ingle enthusiastically telling the other clergy of his trip to the Holy Land. . . . Elmer lying about his fondness for the faculty of his theological seminary.
Reassembled after lunch, Brother Tusker, minister of the largest congregation in the association, gave the “charge to the churches.” This was always the juicest and most scandalous and delightful part of the ordination ceremony. In it the clergy had a chance to get back at the parishioners who, as large contributors, as guaranteed saints, had all year been nagging them.
Here were these fine young men going into the ministry, said Brother Tusker. Well, it was up to them to help. Brother Gantry and Brother Fislinger were leaping with the joy of sacrifice and learning. Then let the churches give ’em a chance, and not make ’em spend all the time hot-footing it around, as some older preachers had to do, raising their own salaries! Let folks quit criticizing; let ’em appreciate godly lives and the quickening word once in a while, instead of ham-ham-hammering their preachers all day long!
And certain of the parties who criticized the preachers’ wives for idleness—funny the way some ofthemseemed to have so much time to gad around and notice things and spread scandal! T’wa’n’t only the menfolks that the Savior was thinking of when he talked about them that were without sin being the only folks that were qualified to heave any rocks!
The other preachers leaned back in their chairs and tried to look casual, and hoped that Brother Tusker was going to bear down even a lee-tle heavier on that matter of raising salaries.
In his sermon and the concluding ordination prayer Brother Knoblaugh (of Barkinsville) summed up, for the benefit of Elmer Gantry, Eddie Fislinger, and God, the history of the Baptists, the importance of missions, and the perils of not reading the Bible before breakfast daily.
Through this long prayer, the visiting pastors stood with their hands on the heads of Elmer and Eddie.
There was a grotesque hitch at first. Most of the ministers were little men who could no more than reach up to Elmer’s head. They stood strained and awkward and unecclesiastical, these shabby good men, before the restless audience. There was a giggle. Elmer had a dramatic flash. He knelt abruptly, and Eddie, peering and awkward, followed him.
In the powdery gray dust Elmer knelt, ignoring it. On his head were the worn hands of three veteran preachers, and suddenly he was humble, for a moment he was veritably being ordained to the priestly service of God.
He had been only impatient till this instant. In the chapels at Mizpah and Terwillinger he had heard too many famous visiting pulpiteers to be impressed by the rustic eloquence of the Kayooska Association. But he felt now their diffident tenderness, their unlettered fervor—these poverty-twisted parsons who believed, patient in their bare and baking tabernacles, that they were saving the world, and who wistfully welcomed the youths that they themselves had been.
For the first time in weeks Elmer prayed not as an exhibition but sincerely, passionately, savoring righteousness:
“Dear God—I’ll get down to it—not show off but just think of thee—do good—God help me!”
Coolness fluttered the heavy dust-caked leaves, and as the sighing crowd creaked up from their benches, Elmer Gantry stood confident . . . ordained minister of the gospel.
CHAPTER VI
thestate of Winnemac lies between Pittsburgh and Chicago, and in Winnemac, perhaps a hundred miles south of the city of Zenith, is Babylon, a town which suggests New England more than the Middle West. Large elms shade it, there are white pillars beyond lilac bushes, and round about the town is a serenity unknown on the gusty prairies.
Here is Mizpah Theological Seminary, of the Northern Baptists. (There is a Northern and Southern convention of this distinguished denomination, because before the Civil War the Northern Baptists proved by the Bible, unanswerably, that slavery was wrong; and the Southern Baptists proved by the Bible, irrefutably, that slavery was the will of God.)
The three buildings of the seminary are attractive: brick with white cupolas, green blinds at the small-paned wide windows. But within they are bare, with hand-rubbings along the plaster walls, with portraits of missionaries and ragged volumes of sermons.
The large structure is the dormitory, Elizabeth J. Schmutz Hall—known to the less reverent as Smut Hall.
Here lived Elmer Gantry, now ordained but completing the last year of work for his Bachelor of Divinity degree, a commodity of value in bargaining with the larger churches.
There were only sixteen left now of his original class of thirty-five. The others had dropped out, for rural preaching, life insurance, or a melancholy return to plowing. There was no one with whom he wanted to live, and he dwelt sulkily in a single room, with a cot, a Bible, a portrait of his mother, and with a copy of “What a Young Man Ought to Know,” concealed inside his one starched pulpit shirt.
He disliked most of his class. They were too rustic or too pious, too inquisitive about his monthly trips to the city of Monarch or simply too dull. Elmer liked the company of what he regarded as intellectual people. He never understood what they were saying, but to hear them saying it made him feel superior.
The group which he most frequented gathered in the room of Frank Shallard and Don Pickens, the large corner room on the second floor of Smut Hall.
It was not an esthetic room. Though Frank Shallard might have come to admire pictures, great music, civilized furniture, he had been trained to regard them as worldly, and to content himself with art which “presented a message,” to regard “Les Miserables” as superior because the bishop was a kind man, and “The Scarlet Letter” as a poor book because the heroine was sinful and the author didn’t mind.
The walls were of old plaster, cracked and turned deathly gray, marked with the blood of mosquitoes and bed-bugs slain in portentous battles long ago by theologians now gone forth to bestow their thus uplifted visions on a materialistic world. The bed was a skeleton of rusty iron bars, sagging in the center, with a comforter which was not too clean. Trunks were in the corners, and the wardrobe was a row of hooks behind a calico curtain. The grass matting was slowly dividing into separate strands, and under the study table it had been scuffed through to the cheap pine flooring.
The only pictures were Frank’s steel engraving of Roger Williams, his framed and pansy-painted copy of “Pippa Passes,” and Don Pickens’ favorite, a country church by winter moonlight, with tinsel snow, which sparkled delightfully. The only untheological books were Frank’s poets: Wordsworth, Longfellow, Tennyson, Browning, in standard volumes, fine-printed and dismal, and one really dangerous papist document, his “Imitation of Christ,” about which there was argument at least once a week.
In this room, squatting on straight chairs, the trunks, and the bed, on a November evening in 1905, were five young men besides Elmer and Eddie Fislinger. Eddie did not really belong to the group, but he persisted in following Elmer, feeling that not even yet was everything quite right with the brother.
“A preacher has got to be just as husky and pack just as good a wallop as a prize-fighter. He ought to be able to throw out any roughneck that tries to interrupt his meetings, and still more, strength makes such a hit with the women in his congregation—of course I don’t mean it in any wrong way,” said Wallace Umstead.
Wallace was a student-instructor, head of the minute seminary gymnasium and “director of physical culture”; a young man who had a military mustache and who did brisk things on horizontal bars. He was a state university B. A. and graduate of a physical-training school. He was going into Y. M. C. A. work when he should have a divinity degree, and he was fond of saying, “Oh, I’m still one of the Boys, you know, even if I am a prof.”
“That’s right,” agreed Elmer Gantry. “Say, I had—I was holding a meeting at Grauten, Kansas, last summer, and there was a big boob that kept interrupting, so I just jumped down from the platform and went up to him, and he says, ‘Say, Parson,’ he says, ‘can you tell us what the Almighty wants us to do about prohibition, considering he told Paul to take some wine for his stomach’s sake?’ ‘I don’t know as I can,’ I says, ‘but you want to remember he also commanded us to cast out devils!’ and I yanked that yahoo out of his seat and threw him out on his ear, and say, the whole crowd—well, there weren’t soawfullymany there, but they certainly did give him the ha-ha! You bet. And to be a husky makes a hit with the whole congregation, men’s well as women. Bet there’s more’n one high-toned preacher that got his pulpit because the deacons felt he could lick ’em. Of course praying and all that is all O. K., but you got to be practical! We’re here to do good, but first you have to cinch a job that you can do good in!”
“You’re commercial!” protested Eddie Fislinger, and Frank Shallard: “Good heavens, Gantry, is that all your religion means to you?”
“Besides,” said Horace Carp, “you have the wrong angle. It isn’t mere brute force that appeals to women—to congregations. It’s a beautiful voice. I don’t envy you your bulk, Elmer—besides, you’re going to get fat—”
“I am like hell!”
“—but what I could do with that voice of yours! I’d have ’em all weeping! I’d read ’em poetry from the pulpit!”
Horace Carp was the one High Churchman in the Seminary. He was a young man who resembled a water spaniel, who concealed saints’ images, incense, and a long piece of scarlet brocade in his room, and who wore a purple velvet smoking-jacket. He was always raging because his father, a wholesale plumber and pious, had threatened to kick him out if he went to an Episcopal seminary instead of a Baptist fortress.
“Yes, you prob’ly would read ’em poetry!” said Elmer. “That’s the trouble with you high-falutin’ guys. You think you can get people by a lot of poetry and junk. What gets ’em and holds ’em and brings ’em to their pews every Sunday is the straight gospel—and it don’t hurt one bit to scare ’em into being righteous with the good old-fashioned Hell!”
“You bet—providing you encourage ’em to keep their bodies in swell shape, too,” condescended Wallace Umstead. “Well, I don’t want to talk as a prof—after all I’m glad I can still remain just one of the Boys—but you aren’t going to develop any very big horse-power in your praying tomorrow morning if you don’t get your sleep. And me to my little downy! G’night!”
At the closing of the door, Harry Zenz, the seminary iconoclast, yawned, “Wallace is probably the finest slice of tripe in my wide clerical experience. Thank God, he’s gone! Now we can be natural and talk dirty!”
“And yet,” complained Frank Shallard, “you encourage him to stay and talk about his pet methods of exercise! Don’t you ever tell the truth, Harry?”
“Never carelessly. Why, you idiot, I want Wallace to run and let the dean know what an earnest worker in the vineyard I am. Frank, you’re a poor innocent. I suspect you actually believe some of the dope they teach us here. And yet you’re a man of some reading. You’re the only person in Mizpah except myself who could appreciate a paragraph of Huxley. Lord, how I pity you when you get into the ministry! Of course, Fislinger here is a grocery clerk, Elmer is a ward politician, Horace is a dancing master—”
He was drowned beneath a surf of protests, not too jocose and friendly.
Harry Zenz was older than the others—thirty-two at least. He was plump, almost completely bald, and fond of sitting still; and he could look profoundly stupid. He was a man of ill-assorted but astonishing knowledge; and in the church ten miles from Mizpah which he had regularly supplied for two years he was considered a man of humorless learning and bloodless piety. He was a complete and cheerful atheist, but he admitted it only to Elmer Gantry and Horace Carp. Elmer regarded him as a sort of Jim Lefferts, but he was as different from Jim as pork fat from a crystal. He hid his giggling atheism—Jim flourished his; he despised women—Jim had a disillusioned pity for the Juanita Klauzels of the world; he had an intellect—Jim had only cynical guesses.
Zenz interrupted their protests:
“So you’re a bunch of Erasmuses! You ought to know. And there’s no hypocrisy in what we teach and preach! We’re a specially selected group of Parsifals—beautiful to the eye and stirring to the ear and overflowing with knowledge of what God said to the Holy Ghostin cameraat 9:16 last Wednesday morning. We’re all just rarin’ to go out and preach the precious Baptist doctrine of ‘Get ducked or duck.’ We’re wonders. We admit it. And people actually sit and listen to us, and don’t choke! I suppose they’re overwhelmed by our nerve! And we have to have nerve, or we’d never dare to stand in a pulpit again. We’d quit, and pray God to forgive us for having stood up there and pretended that we represent God, and that we can explain what we ourselves say are the unexplainable mysteries! But I still claim that there are preachers who haven’t our holiness. Why is it that the clergy are so given to sex crimes?”
“That’s not true!” from Eddie Fislinger.
“Don’t talk that way!” Don Pickens begged. Don was Frank’s roommate: a slight youth, so gentle, so affectionate, that even that raging lion of righteousness, Dean Trosper, was moved to spare him.
Harry Zenz patted his arm. “Oh, you, Don—you’ll always be a monk. But if you don’t believe it, Fislinger, look at the statistics of the five thousand odd crimes committed by clergymen—that is those who got caught—since the eighties, and note the percentage of sex offenses—rape, incest, bigamy, enticing young girls—oh, a lovely record!”
Elmer was yawning, “Oh, God, I do get so sick of you fellows yammering and arguing and discussing. All perfectly simple—maybe we preachers aren’t perfect; don’t pretend to be; but we do a lot of good.”
“That’s right,” said Eddie. “But maybe it is true that—The snares of sex are so dreadful that even ministers of the gospel get trapped. And the perfectly simple solution is continence—just take it out in prayer and good hard exercise.”
“Oh, sure, Eddie, you bet; what a help you’re going to be to the young men in your church,” purred Harry Zenz.
Frank Shallard was meditating unhappily. “Just why are we going to be preachers, anyway? Why are you, Harry, if you think we’re all such liars?”
“Oh, not liars, Frank—just practical, as Elmer put it. Me, it’s easy. I’m not ambitious. I don’t want money enough to hustle for it. I like to sit and read. I like intellectual acrobatics and no work. And you can have all that in the ministry—unless you’re one of these chumps that get up big institutional outfits and work themselves to death for publicity.”
“You certainly have a fine high view of the ministry!” growled Elmer.
“Well, all right, what’s your fine high purpose in becoming a Man of God, Brother Gantry?”
“Well, I— Rats, it’s perfectly clear. Preacher can do a lot of good—give help and— And explain religion.”
“I wish you’d explain it tome! Especially I want to know to what extent are Christian symbols descended from indecent barbaric symbols?”
“Oh, you make me tired!”
Horace Carp fluttered, “Of course none of you consecrated windjammers ever think of the oneraison d’êtreof the church, which is to add beauty to the barren lives of the common people!”
“Yeh! It certainly must make the common people feel awfully common to hear Brother Gantry spiel about the errors of supralapsarianism!”
“I never preach about any such a doggone thing!” Elmer protested. “I just give ’em a good helpful sermon, with some jokes sprinkled in to make it interesting and some stuff about the theater or something that’ll startle ’em a little and wake ’em up and help ’em to lead better and fuller daily lives.”
“Oh, do you, dearie!” said Zenz. “My error. I thought you probably gave ’em a lot of helpful hints about theinnascibilitasattribute and theres sacramenti. Well, Frank, why did you become a theologue?”
“I can’t tell you when you put it sneeringly. I believe there are mystic experiences which you can follow only if you are truly set apart.”
“Well, I know why I came here,” said Don Pickens. “My dad sent me!”
“So did mine!” complained Horace Carp. “But what I can’t understand is: Why are any of us in an ole Baptist school? Horrible denomination—all these moldly barns of churches, and people coughing illiterate hymns, and long-winded preachers always springing a bright new idea like ‘All the world needs to solve its problems is to get back to the gospel of Jesus Christ.’ The only church is the Episcopal! Music! Vestments! Stately prayers! Lovely architecture! Dignity! Authority! Believe me, as soon as I can make the break, I’m going to switch over to the Episcopalians. And then I’ll have a social position, and be able to marry a nice rich girl.”
“No, you’re wrong,” said Zenz. “The Baptist Church is the only denomination worth while, except possibly the Methodist.”
“I’m glad to hear you say that,” marveled Eddie.
“Because the Baptists and the Methodists have all the numbskulls—except those that belong to the Catholic Church and the henhouse sects—and so even you, Horace, can get away with being a prophet. There aresomeintelligent people in the Episcopal and Congregational Churches, and a few of the Campbellite flocks, and they check up on you. Of course all Presbyterians are half-wits, too, but they have a standard doctrine, and they can trap you into a heresy trial. But in the Baptist and Methodist Churches, man! There’s the berth for philosophers like me and hoot-owls like you, Eddie! All you have to do with Baptists and Methodists, as Father Carp suggests—”
“If you agree with me about anything, I withdraw it,” said Horace.
“All you have to do,” said Zenz, “is to get some sound and perfectly meaningless doctrine and keep repeating it. You won’t bore the laymen—in fact the only thing they resent is something thatisnew, so they have to work their brains. Oh, no, Father Carp—the Episcopal pulpit for actors that aren’t good enough to get on the stage, but the good old Baptist fold for realists!”
“You make me tired, Harry!” complained Eddie. “You just want to show off, that’s all. You’re a lot better Baptist and a lot better Christian than you let on to be, and I can prove it. Folks wouldn’t go on listening to your sermons unless they carried conviction. No, sir! You can fool folks once or twice with a lot of swell-sounding words but in the long run it’s sincerity they look for. And one thing that makes me know you’re on the right side is that you don’t practise open communion. Golly, I feel that everything we Baptists stand for is threatened by those darn’ so-called liberals that are beginning to practise open communion.”
“Rats!” grumbled Harry. “Of all the fool Baptist egotisms, close communion is the worst! Nobody but people we consider saved to be allowed to take communion with us! Nobody can meet God unless we introduce ’em! Self-appointed guardians of the blood and body of Jesus Christ! Whew!”
“Absolutely,” from Horace Carp. “And there is absolutely no Scriptural basis for close communion.”
“There certainly is!” shrieked Eddie. “Frank, where’s your Bible?”
“Gee, I left it in O. T. E. Where’s yours, Don?”
“Well, I’ll be switched! I had the darn’ thing here just this evening,” lamented Don Pickens, after a search.
“Oh, I remember. I was killing a cockroach with it. It’s on top of your wardrobe,” said Elmer.
“Gee, honest, you hadn’t ought to kill cockroaches with a Bible!” mourned Eddie Fislinger. “Now here’s the Bible, good and straight, for close communion, Harry. It says in First Corinthians, 11:27 and 29: ‘Whoever shall eat this bread and drink this cup of the Lord unworthily shall be guilty of the body and the blood of the Lord. For he that eateth and drinketh unworthily eateth and drinketh damnation to himself.’ And how can there be a worthy Christian unless he’s been baptized by immersion?”
“I do wonder sometimes,” mused Frank Shallard, “if we aren’t rather impious, we Baptists, to set ourselves up as the keepers of the gates of God, deciding just who is righteous, who is worthy to commune.”
“But there’s nothing else we can do,” explained Eddie. “The Baptist Church, being the only pure Scriptural church, is the one real church of God, and we’re not setting ourselves up—we’re just following God’s ordinances.”
Horace Carp had also been reveling in the popular Mizpah sport of looking up Biblical texts to prove a preconceived opinion. “I don’t find anything here about Baptists,” he said.
“Nor about your doggoned old Episcopalians, either—darn’ snobs!—and the preachers wearing nightshirts!” from Eddie.
“You bet your life you find something—it talks about bishops, and that means Episcopal bishops—the papes and the Methodists are uncanonical bishops,” rejoiced Horace. “I’ll bet you two dollars and sixty-seven cents I wind up as an Episcopal bishop, and, believe me, I’ll be high-church as hell—all the candles I can get on the altar.”
Harry Zenz was speculating, “I suppose it’s unscientific to believe that because I happen to be a Baptist practitioner myself and see what word-splitting, text-twisting, applause-hungry, job-hunting, medieval-minded second-raters even the biggest Baptist leaders are, therefore the Baptist Church is the worst of the lot. I don’t suppose it’s really any worse than the Presbyterian or the Congregational or Disciples or Lutheran or any other. But— Say, you, Fislinger, ever occur to you how dangerous it is, this Bible-worship? You and I might have to quit preaching and go to work. You tell the muttonheads that the Bible contains absolutely everything necessary for salvation, don’t you?”
“Of course.”
“Then what’s the use of having any preachers? Any church? Let people stay home and read the Bible!”
“Well—well—it says—”
The door was dashed open, and Brother Karkis entered.
Brother Karkis was no youthful student. He was forty-three, heavy-handed and big-footed, and his voice was the voice of a Great Dane. Born to the farm, he had been ordained a Baptist preacher for twenty years now, and up and down through the Dakotas, Nebraska, Arkansas, he had bellowed in up-creek tabernacles.
His only formal education had been in country schools; and of all books save the Bible, revivalistic hymnals, a concordance handy for finding sermon-texts, and a manual of poultry-keeping, he was soundly ignorant. He had never met a woman of the world, never drunk a glass of wine, never heard a bar of great music, and his neck was not free from the dust of cornfields.
But it would have been a waste of pity to sigh over Brother Karkis as a plucky poor student. He had no longing for further knowledge; he was certain that he already had it all. He despised the faculty as book-adulterated wobblers in the faith—he could “out-pray and out-holler and out-save the whole lot of ’em.” He desired a Mizpah degree only because it would get him a better paid job—or, as he put it, with the 1850 vocabulary which he found adequate for 1905, because it would “lead him into a wider field of usefulness.”
“Say, don’t you fellers ever do anything but sit around and argue and discuss and bellyache?” he shouted. “My lands, I can hear your racket way down the hall! Be a lot better for you young fellers if you’d forget your smart-aleck arguin’ and spend the evening on your knees in prayer! Oh, you’re a fine lot of smart educated swells, but you’ll find where that rubbish gets you when you go out and have to wrestle with old Satan for unregenerate souls! What are you gasbags arguing about, anyway?”
“Harry says,” wailed Eddie Fislinger, “that there’s nothing in the Bible that says Christians have to have a church or preachers.”
“Huh! And him that thinks he’s so educated. Where’s a Bible?”
It was now in the hands of Elmer, who had been reading his favorite book, “The Song of Solomon.”
“Well, Brother Gantry, glad see there’s one galoot here that’s got sense enough to stick by the Old Book and get himself right with God, ’stead of shooting off his face like some Pedo-Baptist. Now look here, Brother Zenz: It says here in Hebrews, ‘Forsake not the assembling of yourselves together.’ There, I guess that’ll hold you!”
“My dear brother in the Lord,” said Harry, “the only thing suggested there is an assembly like the Plymouth Brotherhood, with no regular paid preachers. As I was explaining to Brother Fislinger: Personally, I’m so ardent an admirer of the Bible that I’m thinking of starting a sect where we all just sing a hymn together, then sit and read our Bibles all day long, and not have any preachers getting between us and the all-sufficient Word of God. I expect you to join, Brother Karkis, unless you’re one of these dirty higher critics that want to break down the Bible.”
“Oh, you make me tired,” said Eddie.
“You make me tired—always twisting the plain commands of Scripture,” said Brother Karkis, shutting the door—weightily, and from the outside.
“You all make me tired. My God, how you fellows can argue!” said Elmer, chewing his Pittsburgh stogie.
The room was thick now with tobacco fumes. Though in Mizpah Seminary smoking was frowned on, practically forbidden by custom, all of the consecrated company save Eddie Fislinger were at it.
He rasped, “This air is something terrible! Why you fellows touch that vile weed— Worms and men are the only animals who indulge in tobacco! I’m going to get out of here.”
There was strangely little complaint.
Rid of Eddie, the others turned to their invariable topic: what they called “sex.”
Frank Shallard and Don Pickens were virgins, timid and fascinated, respectful and urgent; Horace Carp had had one fumbling little greensick experience; and all three listened with nervous eagerness to the experiences of Elmer and Harry Zenz. Tonight Elmer’s mind reeked with it, and he who had been almost silent during the ecclesiastical wrangling was voluble now. The youngsters panted as he chronicled his meetings with a willing choir-singer, this summer past.
“Tell me—tell me,” fretted Don. “Do girls, oh—nice girls—do they really ever—uh—go with a preacher? And aren’t you ashamed to face them afterwards, in church?”
“Huh!” observed Zenz, and “Ashamed? They worship you!” declared Elmer. “They stand by you the way no wife ever would—as long as they do fall for you. Why, this girl— Oh, well, she sang something elegant.”
He finished vaguely, reminiscently. Suddenly he was bored at treading the mysteries of sex with these mooncalves. He lunged up.
“Going?” said Frank.
Elmer posed at the door, smirking, his hands on his hips, “Oh, no. Not a-tall.” He looked at his watch. (It was a watch which reminded you of Elmer himself: large, thick, shiny, with a near-gold case.) “I merely have a date with a girl, that’s all!”
He was lying, but he had been roused by his own stories, and he would have given a year of life if his boast were true. He returned to his solitary room in a fever. “God, if Juanita were only here, or Agatha, or even that little chambermaid at Solomon Junction—what the dickens was her name now?” he longed.
He sat motionless on the edge of his bed. He clenched his fists. He groaned and gripped his knees. He sprang up, to race about the room, to return and sit dolorously entranced.
“Oh, God, I can’tstandit!” he moaned.
He was inconceivably lonely.
He had no friends. He had never had a friend since Jim Lefferts. Harry Zenz despised his brains, Frank Shallard despised his manners, and the rest of them he himself despised. He was bored by the droning seminary professors all day, the schoolboyish arguing all evening; and in the rash of prayer-meetings and chapel-meetings and special praise-meetings he was bored by hearing the same enthusiasts gambol in the same Scriptural rejoicings.
“Oh, yes, I want to go on and preach. Couldn’t go back to just business or the farm. Miss the hymns, the being boss. But—I can’t do it! God, I am so lonely! If Juanita was just here!”