CHAPTER XXVII
elmer, in court, got convictions of sixteen out of the twenty-seven fiends whom he had arrested, with an extra six months for Oscar Hochlauf for resisting arrest and the use of abusive and profane language. The judge praised him; the mayor forgave him; the chief of police shook his hand and invited him to use a police squad at any time; and some of the younger reporters did not cover their mouths with their hands.
Vice was ended in Zenith. It was thirty days before any of the gay ladies were really back at work—though the gentlemanly jailers at the workhouse did let some of them out for an occasional night.
Every Sunday evening now people were turned from the door of Elmer’s church. If they did not always have a sermon about vice, at least they enjoyed the saxophone solos, and singing “There’ll be a Hot Time in the Old Town Tonight.” And once they were entertained by a professional juggler who wore (it was Elmer’s own idea) a placard proclaiming that he stood for “God’s Word” and who showed how easy it was to pick up weights symbolically labeled “Sin” and “Sorrow” and “Ignorance” and “Papistry.”
The trustees were discussing the erection of a new and much larger church, a project for which Elmer himself had begun to prepare a year before, by reminding the trustees how many new apartment-houses were replacing the run-down residences in Old Town.
The trustees raised his salary to five thousand, and they increased the budget for institutional work. Elmer did not institute so many clubs for students of chiropractic and the art of motion-picture acting as did Dr. Otto Hickenlooper of Central Methodist, but there was scarcely an hour from nine in the morning till ten at night when some circle was not trying to do good to somebody . . . and even after ten there were often Elmer and Lulu Bains Naylor, conferring on cooking classes.
Elmer had seen the danger of his crusading publicity and his Lively Sunday Evenings—the danger of being considered a clown instead of a great moral leader.
“I’ve got to figure out some way so’s I keep dignified and yet keep folks interested,” he meditated. “The thing is sort of to have other people do the monkey-business, but me, I got to be up-stage and not smile as much as I’ve been doing. And just when the poor chumps think my Sunday evening is nothing but a vaudeville show, I’ll suddenly soak ’em with a regular old-time hell-fire and damnation sermon, or be poetic and that stuff.”
It worked, reasonably. Though many of his rival preachers in Zenith went on calling him “clown” and “charlatan” and “sensationalist,” no one could fail to appreciate his lofty soul and his weighty scholarship, once they had seen him stand in agonized silent prayer, then level his long forefinger and intone:
“You have laughed now. You have sung. You have been merry. But what came ye forth into the wilderness for to see? Merely laughter? I want you to stop a moment now and think just how long it is since you have realized that any night death may demand your souls, and that then, laughter or no laughter, unless you have found the peace of God, unless you have accepted Christ Jesus as your savior, you may with no chance of last-minute repentance be hurled into horrible and shrieking and appalling eternal torture!”
Elmer had become so distinguished that the Rotary Club elected him to membership with zeal.
The Rotary Club was an assemblage of accountants, tailors, osteopaths, university-presidents, carpet-manufacturers, advertising men, millinery-dealers, ice-dealers, piano salesmen, laundrymen, and like leaders of public thought, who met weekly for the purposes of lunching together, listening to addresses by visiting actors and by lobbyists against the recognition of Russia, beholding vaudeville teams in eccentric dances, and indulging in passionate rhapsodies about Service and Business Ethics. They asserted that their one desire in their several callings was not to make money but only to serve and benefit a thing called the Public. They were as earnest about this as was the Reverend Elmer Gantry about vice.
He was extraordinarily at home among the Rotarians; equally happy in being a good fellow with such good fellows as these and in making short speeches to the effect that “Jesus Christ would be a Rotarian if he lived today—Lincoln would be a Rotarian today—William McKinley would be a Rotarian today. All these men preached the principles of Rotary: one for all and all for one; helpfulness towards one’s community, and respect for God.”
It was a rule of this organization, which was merry and full of greetings in between inspirational addresses, that every one should, at lunch, be called by his first name. They shouted at the Reverend Mr. Gantry as “Elmer” or “Elm,” while he called his haberdasher “Ike” and beamed on his shoe-seller as “Rudy.” A few years before, this intimacy might have led him into indiscretions, into speaking vulgarly, or even desiring a drink. But he had learned his rôle of dignity now, and though he observed, “Dandy day, Shorty!” he was quick to follow it up unhesitatingly with an orotund “I trust that you have been able to enjoy the beauty of the vernal foliage in the country this week.” So Shorty and his pals went up and down informing the citizenry that Reverend Gantry was a “good scout, a prince of a good fellow, but a mighty deep thinker, and a real honest-to-God orator.”
When Elmer informed T. J. Rigg of the joys of Rotary, the lawyer scratched his chin and suggested, “Fine. But look here, Brother Elmer. There’s one thing you’re neglecting: the really big boys with the long pockets. Got to know ’em. Not many of ’em Methodists—they go out for Episcopalianism or Presbyterianism or Congregationalism or Christian Science, or stay out of the church altogether. But that’s no reason why we can’t turn theirmoneyMethodist. You wouldn’t find but mighty few of these Rotarians in the Tonawanda Country Club—into which I bought my way by blackmailing, you might say, a wheat speculator.”
“But—but—why, T. J., those Rotarians—why there’s fellows in there like Ira Runyon, the managing editor of theAdvocate, and Win Grant, the realtor—”
“Yeh, but the owner of theAdvocate, and the banker that’s letting Win Grant run on till he bankrupts, and the corporation counsel that keeps ’em all out of jail, you don’t findthosemalefactors going to no lunch club and yipping about Service! You find ’em sitting at small tables at the old Union Club, and laughing themselves sick about Service. And for golf, they go to Tonawanda. I couldn’t get you into the Union Club. They wouldn’t have any preacher that talks about vice—the kind of preacher that belongs to the Union talks about the new model Cadillac and how hard it is to get genuwine Eye-talian vermouth. But the Tonawanda—— They might let you in. For respectability. To prove that they couldn’t have the gin they’ve got in their lockers in their lockers.”
It was done, though it took six months and a deal of secret politics conducted by T. J. Rigg.
Wellspring Church, including the pastor of Wellspring, bloomed with pride that Elmer had been so elevated socially as to be allowed to play golf with bankers.
Only he couldn’t play golf.
From April to July, while he never appeared on the links with other players, Elmer took lessons from the Tonawanda professional, three mornings a week, driving out in the smart new Buick which he had bought and almost paid for.
The professional was a traditionally small and gnarled and sandy Scotchman, from Indiana, and he was so traditionally rude that Elmer put on meekness.
“Put back your divots! D’you think this is a church?” snapped the professional.
“Damn it, I always forget, Scotty,” whined Elmer. “Guess it must be hard on you to have to train these preachers.”
“Preachers is nothing to me, and millionaires is nothing to me, but gawf grounds is a lot,” grunted Scotty. (He was a zealous Presbyterian and to be picturesquely rude to Christian customers was as hard for him as it was to keep up the Scotch accent which he had learned from a real Liverpool Irishman.)
Elmer was strong, he was placid when he was out-of-doors, and his eye was quick. When he first appeared publicly at Tonawanda, in a foursome with T. J. Rigg and two most respectable doctors, he and his game were watched and commended. When he dressed in the locker-room and did not appear to note the square bottle in use ten feet away, he was accepted as a man of the world.
William Dollinger Styles, member of the Tonawanda house committee, president of the fabulous W. D. Styles Wholesale Hardware Company—the man who had introduced the Bite Edge Ax through all the land from Louisville to Detroit, and introduced white knickers to the Tonawanda Club—this baron, this bishop, of business actually introduced himself to Elmer and made him welcome.
“Glad to see you here, dominie. Played much golf?”
“No, I’ve only taken it up recently, but you bet I’m going to be a real fan from now on.”
“That’s fine. Tell you how I feel about it, Reverend. We fellows that have to stick to our desks and make decisions that guide the common people, you religiously and me commercially, it’s a good thing for us, and through us for them, to go out and get next to Nature, and put ourselves in shape to tackle our complicated problems (as I said recently in an after-dinner speech at the Chamber of Commerce banquet) and keep a good sane outlook so’s we won’t be swept away by every breeze of fickle and changing public opinion and so inevitably—”
In fact, said Mr. William Dollinger Styles, he liked golf.
Elmer tenderly agreed with “Yes, that’s certainly a fact; certainly is a fact. Be a good thing for a whole lot of preachers if they got out and exercised more instead of always reading.”
“Yes, I wish you’d tell my dominie that—not that I go to church such a whole lot, but I’m church treasurer and take kind of an interest—Dorchester Congregational—Reverend Shallard.”
“Oh! Frank Shallard! Why, I knew him in theological seminary! Fine, straight, intelligent fellow, Frank.”
“Well, yes, but I don’t like the way he’s always carrying on and almost coming right out and defending a lot of these crooked labor unions. That’s why I don’t hardly ever hear his sermons, but I can’t get the deacons to see it. And as I say, be better for him if he got outdoors more. Well, glad to met you, Reverend. You must join one of our foursomes some day—if you can stand a little cussing, maybe!”
“Well, I’ll try to, sir! Been mighty fine to have met you!”
“H’m!” reflected Elmer. “So Frank, the belly-aching highbrow, has got as rich a man as Styles in his fold, and Styles doesn’t like him. Wonder if Styles could turn Methodist—wonder if he could be pinched off Frank? I’ll ask Rigg.”
But the charm of the place, the day, the implied social position, was such that Elmer turned from these purely religious broodings to more esthetic thoughts.
Rigg had driven home. Elmer sat by himself on the huge porch of the Tonawanda Club, a long gray countryhouse on a hill sloping to the Appleseed River, with tawny fields of barley among orchards on the bank beyond. The golf-course was scattered with men in Harris tweeds, girls in short skirts which fluttered about their legs. A man in white flannels drove up in a Rolls-Royce roadster—the only one in Zenith as yet—and Elmer felt ennobled by belonging to the same club with a Rolls-Royce. On the lawn before the porch, men with English-officer mustaches and pretty women in pale frocks were taking tea at tables under striped garden-umbrellas.
Elmer knew none of them actually, but a few by sight.
“Golly, I’ll be right in with all these swells some day! Must work it careful, and be snooty, and not try to pick ’em up too quick.”
A group of weighty-looking men of fifty, near him, were conversing on the arts and public policy. As he listened, Elmer decided, “Yep, Rigg was right. Those are fine fellows at the Rotary Club; fine, high-class, educated gentlemen, and certainly raking in the money; mighty cute in business but upholding the highest ideals. But they haven’t got the class of these really Big Boys.”
Entranced, he gave heed to the magnates—a bond broker, a mine-owner, a lawyer, a millionaire lumberman:
“Yes, sir, what the country at large doesn’t understand is that the stabilization of sterling has a good effect on our trade with Britain—”
“I told them that far from refusing to recognize the rights of labor, I had myself come up from the ranks, to some extent, and I was doing all in my power to benefit them, but I certainly did refuse to listen to the caterwauling of a lot of hired agitators from the so-called unions, and that if they didn’t like the way I did things—”
“Yes, it opened at 73½, but knowing what had happened to Saracen Common—”
“Yes, sir, you can depend on a Pierce-Arrow, you certainly can—”
Elmer drew a youthful, passionate, shuddering breath at being so nearly in communion with the powers that governed Zenith and thought for Zenith, that governed America and thought for it. He longed to stay, but he had the task, unworthy of his powers of social decoration, of preparing a short clever talk on missions among the Digger Indians.
As he drove home he rejoiced, “Some day I’ll be able to put it over with the best of ’em socially. When I get to be a bishop, believe me I’m not going to hang around jawing about Sunday School methods! I’ll be entertaining the bon ton, senators and everybody. . . . Cleo would look fine at a big dinner, with the right dress. . . . If she wasn’t so darn’ priggish. Oh, maybe she’ll die before then. . . . I think I’ll marry an Episcopalian. . . . I wonder if I could get an Episcopal bishopric if I switched to that nightshirt crowd? More class. No; Methodist bigger church; and don’t guess the Episcopalopians would stand any good red-blooded sermons on vice and all that.”
The Gilfeather Chautauqua Corporation, which conducts week-long Chautauquas in small towns, had not been interested when Elmer had hinted, three years ago, that he had a Message to the Youth of America, one worth at least a hundred a week, and that he would be glad to go right out to the Youth and deliver it. But when Elmer’s demolition of all vice in Zenith had made him celebrated, and even gained him a paragraph or two as the Crusading Parson, in New York and Chicago, the Gilfeather Corporation had a new appreciation. They came to him, besieged him, offered him two hundred a week and headlines in the posters, for a three-months tour.
But Elmer did not want to ask the trustees for a three-months leave. He had a notion of a summer in Europe a year or two from now. That extended study of European culture, first hand, would be just the finishing polish to enable him to hold any pulpit in the country.
He did, however, fill in during late August and early September as substitute for a Gilfeather headliner—the renowned J. Thurston Wallett, M. D., D. O., D. N., who had delighted thousands with his witty and instructive lecture, “Diet or Die, Nature or Nix,” until he had unfortunately been taken ill at Powassie, Iowa, from eating too many green cantaloupes.
Elmer had planned to spend August with his family in Northern Michigan—planned it most uncomfortably, for while it was conceivable to endure Cleo in the city, with his work, his clubs, and Lulu, a month with no relief from her solemn drooping face and cry-baby voice would be trying even to a Professional Good Man.
He explained to her that duty called, and departed with speed, stopping only long enough to get several books of inspirational essays from the public library for aid in preparing his Chautauqua lecture.
He was delighted with his coming adventure—money, fame in new quarters, crowds for whom he would not have to think up fresh personal experiences. And he might find a woman friend who would understand him and give to his own solid genius that lighter touch of the feminine. He was, he admitted, almost as tired of Lulu as of Cleo. He pictured a Chautauqua lady pianist or soprano or ventriloquist or soloist on the musical saw—he pictured a surprised, thrilled meeting in the amber light under the canvas roof—recognition between kindred fine and lonely souls—
And he found it of course.
Elmer’s metaphysical lecture, entitled “Whoa Up, Youth!” with its counsel about abstinence, chastity, industry, and honesty, its heaven-vaulting poetic passage about Love (the only bow on life’s dark cloud, the morning and the evening star), and its anecdote of his fight to save a college-mate named Jim from drink and atheism, became one of the classics among Chautauqua masterpieces.
And Elmer better than any one else among the Talent (except perhaps the gentleman who played national anthems on water glasses, a Lettish gentleman innocent of English) sidestepped on the question of the K. K. K.
The new Ku Klux Klan, an organization of the fathers, younger brothers, and employees of the men who had succeeded and became Rotarians, had just become a political difficulty. Many of the most worthy Methodist and Baptist clergymen supported it and were supported by it; and personally Elmer admired its principle—to keep all foreigners, Jews, Catholics, and negroes in their place, which was no place at all, and let the country be led by native Protestants, like Elmer Gantry.
But he perceived that in the cities there were prominent people, nice people, rich people, even among the Methodists and Baptists, who felt that a man could be a Jew and still an American citizen. It seemed to him more truly American, also a lot safer, to avoid the problem. So everywhere he took a message of reconciliation to the effect:
“Regarding religious, political, and social organizations, I defend the right of every man in our free America to organize with his fellows when and as he pleases, for any purpose he pleases, but I also defend the right of any other free American citizen to demand that such an organization shall not dictate his mode of thought or, so long as it be moral, his mode of conduct.”
That pleased both the K. K. K. and the opponents of the K. K. K., and everybody admired Elmer’s powers of thought.
He came with a boom and a flash to the town of Blackfoot Creek, Indiana, and there the local committee permitted the Methodist minister, one Andrew Pengilly, to entertain his renowned brother priest.
Always a little lonely, lost in the ceaseless unfolding of his mysticism, old Andrew Pengilly had been the lonelier since Frank Shallard had left him.
When he heard that the Reverend Elmer Gantry was coming, Mr. Pengilly murmured to the local committee that it would be a pleasure to put up Mr. Gantry and save him from the scurfy village hotel.
He had read of Mr. Gantry as an impressive orator, a courageous fighter against Sin. Mr. Pengilly sighed. Himself, somehow, he had never been able to find so very much Sin about. His fault. A silly old dreamer. He rejoiced that he, the mousy village curé, was about to have here, glorifying his cottage, a St. Michael in dazzling armor.
After the evening Chautauqua Elmer sat in Mr. Pengilly’s hovel, and he was graciously condescending.
“You say, Brother Pengilly, that you’ve heard of our work at Wellspring? But do we get so near the hearts of the weak and unfortunate as you here? Oh, no; sometimes I think that my first pastorate, in a town smaller than this, was in many ways more blessed than our tremendous to-do in the great city. And whatisaccomplished there is no credit to me. I have such splendid, such touchingly loyal assistants—Mr. Webster, the assistant pastor—such a consecrated worker, and yet right on the job—and Mr. Wink, and Miss Weezeger, the deaconess, anddearMiss Bundle, the secretary—sucha faithful soul,soindustrious. Oh, yes, I am singularly blessed! But, uh, but— Given these people, who really do the work, we’ve been able to put over some pretty good things—with God’s leading. Why, say, we’ve started the only class in show-window dressing in any church in the United States—and I should suppose England and France! We’ve already seen the most wonderful results, not only in raising the salary of several of the fine young men in our church, but in increasing business throughout the city and improving the appearance of show-windows, and you know how much that adds to the beauty of the down-town streets! And the crowds do seem to be increasing steadily. We had over eleven hundred present on my last Sunday evening in Zenith, and that in summer! And during the season we often have nearly eighteen hundred, in an auditorium that’s only supposed to seat sixteen hundred! And with all modesty—it’s not my doing but the methods we’re working up—I think I may say that every man, woman, and child goes away happy and yet with a message to sustain ’em through the week. You see—oh, of course I give ’em the straight old-time gospel in my sermon—I’m not the least bit afraid of talking right up to ’em and reminding them of the awful consequences of sin and ignorance and spiritual sloth. Yes, sir! No blinking the horrors of the old-time proven Hell, not in any churchI’mrunning! But also we make ’em get together, and their pastor is just one of their own chums, and we sing cheerful, comforting songs, and do they like it? Say! It shows up in the collections!”
“Mr. Gantry,” said Andrew Pengilly, “why don’t you believe in God?”
CHAPTER XXVIII
hisfriendship with Dr. Philip McGarry of the Arbor Church was all, Frank Shallard felt, that kept him in the church. As to his round little wife Bess and the three respectable children, he had for them less passion than compassion, and he could, he supposed, make enough money somehow to care for them.
McGarry was not an extraordinary scholar, not especially eloquent, not remarkably virtuous, but in him there was kindness along with robust humor, a yearning for justice steeled by common sense, and just that quality of authentic good-fellowship which the Professional Good Fellows of Zenith, whether preachers or shoe-salesmen, blasphemed against by shouting and guffawing and back-slapping. Women trusted in his strength and his honor; children were bold with him; men disclosed to him their veiled sorrows; and he was more nimble to help them than to be shocked.
Frank worshiped him.
Himself a bachelor, McGarry had become an intimate of Frank’s house. He knew where the ice-pick was kept, and where the thermos bottles for picnics; he was as likely as Frank to wash up after late suppers; and if he called and the elder Shallards were not in, he slipped up-stairs and was found there scandalously keeping the children awake by stories of his hunting in Montana and Arizona and Saskatchewan.
It was thus when Frank and Bess came home from prayer-meeting one evening. Philip McGarry’s own prayer-meetings were brief. A good many people said they were as artificial a form of religious bait as Elmer Gantry’s Lively Sunday Evenings, but if McGarry did also have the habit of making people sing “Smile, Smile, Smile” on all public events except possibly funerals, at least he was not so insistent about their shouting it.
They drifted down to the parsonage living-room, which Bess had made gay with chintzes, Frank studious with portentous books of sociology. Frank sat deep in a chair smoking a pipe—he could never quite get over looking like a youngish college professor who smokes to show what a manly fellow he is. McGarry wandered about the room. He had a way of pointing arguments by shaking objects of furniture—pokers, vases, books, lamps—which was as dangerous as it looked.
“Oh, I was rotten at prayer-meeting tonight,” Frank grumbled. “Darn it, I can’t seem to go on being interested in the fact that old Mrs. Besom finds God such a comfort in her trials. Mrs. Besom’s daughter-in-law doesn’t find Mrs. Besom any comfort inhertrials, let me tell you! And yet I don’t see how I can say to her, after she’s been fluttering around among the angels and advertising how dead certain she is that Jesus loves her—I haven’t quite the nerve to say, ‘Sister, you tight-fisted, poison-tongued, old hellcat—’ ”
“Why,Frank!” from Bess, in placid piety.
“ ‘—you go home and forget your popularity in Heaven and ask your son and his wife to forgive you for trying to make them your kind of saint, with acidity of the spiritual stomach!’ ”
“Why,Frank!”
“Let him rave, Bess,” said McGarry. “If a preacher didn’t cuss his congregation out once in a while, nobody but St. John would ever’ve lasted—and I’ll bet he wasn’t very good at weekly services and parish visiting!”
“And,” went on Frank, “tomorrow I’ve got a funeral. That Henry Semp. Weighed two hundred and eighty pounds from the neck down and three ounces from the neck up. Perfectly good Christian citizen who believed that Warren G. Harding was the greatest man since George Washington. I’m sure he never beat his wife. Worthy communicant. But when his wife came to hire me, she wept like the dickens when she talked about Henry’s death, but I noticed from the window that when she went off down the street she looked particularly cheerful. Yes, Henry was a bulwark of the nation; not to be sneered at by highbrows. And I’m dead certain, from something she said, that every year they’ve jipped the Government out of every cent they could on their income tax. And tomorrow I’m supposed to stand up there and tell his friends what a moral example and intellectual Titan he was, and how the poor little woman is simply broken by sorrow. Well, cheer up! From what I know of her, she’ll be married again within six months, and if I do a good job of priesting tomorrow, maybe I’ll get the fee! Oh, Lord, Phil, what a job, what a lying compromising job, this being a minister!”
It was their hundredth argument over the question.
McGarry waved a pillow, discarded it for Bess’ purse, while she tried not to look alarmed, and shouted, “It is not! As I heard a big New York preacher say one day: he knew how imperfect the ministry is, and how many second-raters get into it, and yet if he had a thousand lives, he’d want to be a minister of the gospel, to be a man showing the philosophy of Jesus to mankind, in every one of ’em. And the church universal, no matter what its failings, is still the only institution in which we can work together to hand on that gospel. Maybe it’s your fault, not the church’s, young Frank, if you’re so scared of your people that you lie at funerals! I don’t, by Jiminy!”
“You do, by Jiminy, my dear Phil! You don’t know it. No, what you do is, you hypnotize yourself until you’re convinced that every dear departed was a model of some virtue, and then you rhapsodize about that.”
“Well, probably he was!”
“Of course. Probably your burglar was a model of courage, and your gambler a model of kindness to everybody except the people he robbed, but I don’t like being hired to praise burglars and gamblers and respectable loan-sharks and food-hounds like Henry Semp, and encourage youngsters to accept their standards, and so keep on perpetuating this barbarous civilization for which we preachers are as responsible as the lawyers or the politicians or the soldiers or even the school-masters. No, sir! Oh, Iamgoing to get out of the church! Think of it! Apreacher, getting religion, getting saved, getting honest, getting out! Then I’d know the joys of sanctification that you Methodys talk about!”
“Oh, you make me tired!” Bess complained, not very aggressively. She looked, at forty-one, like a plump and amiable girl of twenty. “Honestly, Phil, I do wish you could show Frank where he’s wrong. I can’t, and I’ve been trying these fifteen years.”
“You have, my lamb!”
“Honestly, Phil, can’t you make him see it?” said Bess. “He’s—of course I do adore him, but of all the cry-babies I ever met— He’s the worst of all my children! He talks about going into charity work, about getting a job with a labor bank or a labor paper, about lecturing, about trying to write. Can’t you make him see that he’d be just as discontented whatever he did? I’ll bet you the labor leaders and radical agitators and the Charity Organization Society people aren’t perfect little angels any more than preachers are!”
“Heavens, I don’t expect ’em to be! I don’t expect to be content,” Frank protested. “And isn’t it a good thing to have a few people who are always yammering? Never get anywhere without. What a joke that a minister, who’s supposed to have such divine authority that he can threaten people with hell, is also supposed to be such an office-boy that he can be cussed out and fired if he dares to criticize capitalists or his fellow ministers! Anyway— Dear Bess, it’s rotten on you. I’dliketo be a contented sort, I’d like to ‘succeed,’ to be satisfied with being half-honest. But I can’t. . . . You see, Phil, I was brought up to believe the Christian God wasn’t a scared and compromising public servant, but the creator and advocate of the whole merciless truth, and I reckon that training spoiled me—I actually took my teachers seriously!”
“Oh, tut, tut, Frank; trouble with you is,” Philip McGarry yawned, “trouble withyouis, you like arguing more than you do patiently working out the spiritual problems of some poor, dumm, infinitely piteous human being that comes to you for help, and that doesn’t care a hoot whether you advocate Zoroastrianism or Seventh-day Adventism, so long as he feels that you love him and that you can bring him strength from a power higher than himself. I know that if you could lose your intellectual pride, if you could forget that you have to make a new world, better’n the Creator’s, right away tonight—you and Bernard Shaw and H. G. Wells and H. L. Mencken and Sinclair Lewis (Lord, how that book of Lewis’, ‘Main Street,’ did bore me, as much of it as I read; it just rambled on forever, and all he could see was that some of the Gopher Prairie hicks didn’t go to literary teas quite as often as he does!—that was all he could see among those splendid heroic pioneers)! Well, as I was saying, if instead of starting in where your congregation has left off, because they never had your chance, you could draw them along with you—”
“I try to! And let me tell you, young fellow, I’ve got a few of ’em far enough along so they’re having the sense to leave me and my evangelical church and go off to the Unitarians or stay away from church altogether—thus, Bess darling, depriving my wife and babes of a few more pennies! But seriously, Phil—”
“A man always says ‘But seriously’ when he feels the previous arguments haven’t been so good yet!”
“Maybe. But anyway, what I mean to say is: Of course my liberalism is all foolishness! Do you know why my people stand for it? They’re not enough interested to realize what I’m saying! If I had a successor who was a fundamentalist, they’d like him just as well or better, and they’d go back a-whooping to the sacred hell-fire that I’ve coaxed ’em out of. They don’t believe I mean it when I take a shot at the fear of eternal punishment, and the whole magic and taboo system of worshiping the Bible and the ministry, and all the other skull-decorated vestiges of horror there are in so-called Christianity! They don’t know it! Partly it’s because they’ve been trained not to believe anything much they hear in sermons. But also it’s my fault. I’m not aggressive. I ought to jump around like a lunatic or a popular evangelist, and shout, ‘D’ you understand? When I say that most of your religious opinions are bunk, why, what I mean is, they’rebunk!’ I’ve never been violently enough in earnest to be beaten for the sake of the Lord our God! . . . Not yet!”
“Hah, there I’ve got you, Frank! Tickles me to see you try to be the village atheist! ‘For the sake of the Lord’ you just said. And how often I’ve heard you say at parting ‘God bless you’—and you meant it! Oh, no, you don’t believe in Christ! Not any more than the Pope at Rome!”
“I suppose that if I said ‘God damn you,’ that would also prove that I was a devout Christian! Oh, Phil, I can’t understand how a man as honest as you, as really fond of helping people—and of tolerating them!—can stand being classed with a lot of your fellow preachers and not even kick about it! Think of your going on enduring being a fellow Methodist preacher right in the same town with Elmer Gantry and not standing up in ministers’ meeting and saying, ‘Either he gets out or I do!’ ”
“I know! You idiot, don’t you suppose those of us that are halfway decent suffer from being classed with Gantry, and that we hate him more than you do? But even if Elmer is rather on the swine side, what of it? Would you condemn a fine aspiring institution, full of broad-gauged, earnest fellows, because one of them was a wash-out?”
“One? Just one? I’ll admit there aren’t many, notverymany, hogs like Gantry in your church, or any other, but let me give my loving fraternal opinions of a few others of your splendid Methodist fellows! Bishop Toomis is a gas-bag. Chester Brown, with his candles and chanting, he’s merely an Episcopalian who’d go over to the Episcopal church if he weren’t afraid he’d lose too much salary in starting again—just as a good share of the Anglo-Catholic Episcopalians are merely Catholics who’d go over to Rome if they weren’t afraid of losing social caste. Otto Hickenlooper, with his institutions—the rich are so moved by his charities that they hand him money and Otto gets praised for spending that money. Fine vicious circle. And think of some poor young idiot studying art, wasting his time and twisting his ideas, at Otto’s strictly moral art class, where the teacher is chosen more for his opinions on the sacraments than for his knowledge of composition.”
“But, Frank, I’vesaidall—”
“And the sound, the scholarly, the well-balanced Dr. Mahlon Potts! Oh, he’s a perfectly good man, and not a fanatic. Doesn’t believe that evolution is a fiendish doctrine. The only trouble with him—as with most famous preachers—is that he hasn’t the slightest notion what human beings are like. He’s insulated; has been ever since he became a preacher. He goes to the death-beds of prostitutes (but not very often, I’ll bet!) but he can’t understand that perfectly decent husbands and wives often can’t get along because of sexual incompatibility.
“Potts lives in a library; he gets his idea of human motives out of George Eliot and Margaret Deland, and his ideas of economics out of editorials in theAdvocate, and his idea as to what he really is accomplishing out of the flattery of his Ladies’ Aid! He’s a much worse criminal than Gantry! I imagine Elmer has some desire to be a good fellow and share his swag, but Dr. Potts wants to make over an entire world of living, bleeding, sweating, loving, fighting human beings into the likeness of Dr. Potts—of Dr. Potts taking his afternoon nap and snoring under a shelf of books about the doctrines of the Ante-Nicene Fathers!”
“Golly, you simply love us! And I suppose you think I admire all these fellows! Why, they regard me as a heretic, from the bishop down,” said Philip McGarry.
“And yet you stay with them!”
“Any other church better?”
“Oh, no. Don’t think I give all my love to the Methodists. I take them only because they’re your particular breed. My own Congregationalists, the Baptists who taught me that immersion is more important than social justice, the Presbyterians, the Campbellites, the whole lot—oh, I love ’em all about equally!”
“And what about yourself? What about me?”
“You know what I think of myself—a man too feeble to stand up and risk being called a crank or a vile atheist! And about you, my young liberal friend, I was just saving you to the last in my exhibit of Methodist parsons! You’re the worst of the lot!”
“Oh, now, Frank!” yawned Bess.
She was sleepy. How preachers did talk! Did plasterers and authors and stock-brokers sit up half the night discussing their souls, fretting as to whether plastering or authorship or stock-broking was worth while?
She yawned again, kissed Frank, patted Philip’s cheek, and made exit with, “You may be feeble, Frank, but you certainly can talk a strong, rugged young wife to death!”
Frank, usually to be cowed by her jocose grumbling and Philip’s friendly jabs, was tonight afire and unquenchable.
“Yes, you’re the worst of all, Phil! Youdoknow something of human beings. You’re not like old Potts, who’s always so informative about how much sin there is in the world and always so astonished when he meets an actual sinner. And you don’t think it matters a hang whether a seeker after decency gets ducked—otherwise baptized—or not. And yet when you get up in the pulpit, from the way you wallow in prayer people believe that you’re just as chummy with the Deity as Potts or Gantry. Your liberalism never lasts you more than from my house to the street-car. You talk about the golden streets of Heaven and the blessed peace of the hereafter, and yet you’ve admitted to me, time and again, that you haven’t the slightest idea whether there is any personal life after death. You talk about Redemption, and the Sacrament of the Lord’s Supper, and how God helps this nation to win a war and hits that other with a flood, and a lot more things that you don’t believe privately at all.”
“Oh, I know! Thunder! But you yourself—you pray in church.”
“Not really. For over a year now I’ve never addressed a prayer to any definite deity. I say something like ‘Let us in meditation, forgetting the worries of daily life, join our spirits in longing for the coming of perpetual peace’—something like that.”
“Well, it sounds like a pretty punk prayer to me, Frankie! The only trouble with you is, you feel you’re called on to re-write the Lord’s Prayer for him!”
Philip laughed gustily, and slapped Frank’s shoulder.
“Damn it, don’t be so jocular! I know it’s a poor prayer. It’s terrible. Nebulous. Meaningless. Like a barker at the New Thought side-show. I don’t mind your disliking it, but I do mind your trying to be humorous! Why is it that you lads who defend the church are so facetious when you really get down to discussing the roots of religion?”
“I know, Frank. Effect of too much preaching. But seriously: Yes, I do say things in the pulpit that I don’t mean literally. What of it? People understand these symbols; they’ve been brought up with them, they’re comfortable with them. My object in preaching is to teach the art of living as far as I can; to encourage my people—and myself—to be kind, to be honest, to be clean, to be courageous, to love God and their fellow-men; and the whole experience of the church shows that those lessons can best be taught through such really noble concepts as salvation and the presence of the Holy Ghost and Heaven and so on.”
“Hm. Does it? Has the church ever tried anything else? And just what the dickens do you mean by ‘being clean’ and ‘being honest’ and ‘teaching the art of living’? Lord, how we preachers do love to use phrases that don’t mean anything! But suppose you were perfectly right. Nevertheless, by using the same theological slang as a Gantry or a Toomis or a Potts, you unconsciously make everybody believe that you think and act like them too.”
“Nonsense! Not that I’m particularly drawn by the charms of any of these fellow sages. I’d rather be wrecked on a desert island with you, you old atheist!—you darned old fool! But suppose they were as bad as you think. I still wouldn’t feel it was my duty to foul my own nest, to make this grand old Methodist Church, with its saints and heroes like Wesley and Asbury and Quayle and Cartwright and McDowell and McConnell—why, the tears almost come to my eyes when I think of men like that! Look here: Suppose you were at war, in a famous regiment. Suppose a lot of your fellow soldiers, even the present commander of the regiment himself, were rotters—cowards. Would you feel called on to desert? Or to fight all the harder to make up for their faults?”
“Phil, next to the humorous ragging I spoke of, and the use of stale phrases, the worst cancer in religious discussion is the use of the metaphor! The Protestant church is not a regiment. You’re not a soldier. The soldier has to fight when and as he’s told. You have absolute liberty, outside of a few moral and doctrinal compulsions.”
“Ah-hah, now I’ve got you, my logical young friend! If we have that liberty, why aren’t you willing to stay in the church? Oh, Frank, Frank, you are such a fool! I know that you long for righteousness. Can’t you see that you can get it best by staying in the church, liberalizing from within, instead of running away and leaving the people to the ministrations of the Gantrys?”
“I know. I’ve been thinking just that all these years. That’s why I’m still a preacher! But I’m coming to believe that it’s tommyrot. I’m coming to think that the hell-howling old mossbacks corrupt the honest liberals a lot more than the liberals lighten the backwoods minds of the fundamentalists. What the dickens is the church accomplishing, really? Why have a church at all? What has it for humanity that you won’t find in worldly sources—schools, books, conversation?”
“It has this, Frank: It has the unique personality and teachings of Jesus Christ, and there is something in Jesus, there is something in the way he spoke, there is something in the feeling of a man when he suddenly has that inexpressible experience ofknowingthe Master and his presence, which makes the church of Jesus different from any other merely human institution or instrument whatsoever! Jesus is not simply greater and wiser than Socrates or Voltaire; he is entirelydifferent. Anybody can interpret and teach Socrates or Voltaire—in schools or books or conversation. But to interpret the personality and teachings of Jesus requires an especially called, chosen, trained, consecrated body of men, united in an especial institution—the church.”
“Phil, it sounds so splendid. But just whatwerethe personality and the teachings of Jesus? I’ll admit it’s the heart of the controversy over the Christian religion:—aside from the fact that, of course, most people believe in a church because they werebornto it. But the essential query is: Did Jesus—if the Biblical accounts of him are even half accurate—have a particularly noble personality, and were his teachings particularly original and profound? You know it’s almost impossible to get people to read the Bible honestly. They’ve been so brought up to take the church interpretation of every word that they read into it whatever they’ve been taught to find there. It’s been so with me, up to the last couple of years. But now I’m becoming a quarter free, and I’m appalled to see that I don’t find Jesus an especially admirable character!
“He is picturesque. He tells splendid stories. He’s a good fellow, fond of low company—in fact the idea of Jesus, whom the bishops of his day cursed as a rounder and wine-bibber, being chosen as the god of the Prohibitionists is one of the funniest twists in history. But he’s vain, he praises himself outrageously, he’s fond of astonishing people by little magical tricks which we’ve been taught to revere as ‘miracles.’ He is furious as a child in a tantrum when people don’t recognize him as a great leader. He loses his temper. He blasts the poor barren fig-tree when it doesn’t feed him. What minds people have! They hear preachers proving by the Bible the exact opposites, that the Roman Catholic Church is divinely ordained and that it is against all divine ordinances, and it never occurs to them that far from the Christian religion—or any other religion—being a blessing to humanity, it’s produced such confusion in all thinking, such secondhand viewing of actualities, that only now are we beginning to ask what and why we are, and what we can do with life!
“Just what are the teachings of Christ? Did he come to bring peace or more war? He says both. Did he approve earthly monarchies or rebel against them? He says both. Did he ever—think of it, God himself, taking on human form to help the earth—did he ever suggest sanitation, which would have saved millions from plagues? And you can’t say his failure there was because he was too lofty to consider mere sickness. On the contrary, he was awfully interested in it, always healing some one—providing they flattered his vanity enough!
“Whatdidhe teach? One place in the Sermon on the Mount he advises—let me get my Bible—here it is: ‘Let your light so shine before men that they may see your good works and glorify your Father which is in heaven,’ and then five minutes later he’s saying, ‘Take heed that ye do not your alms before men, to be seen of them, otherwise ye have no reward of your Father which is in heaven.’ That’s an absolute contradiction, in the one document which is the charter of the whole Christian Church. Oh, I know you can reconcile them, Phil. That’s the whole aim of the ministerial training: to teach us to reconcile contradictions by saying that one of them doesn’t mean what it means—and it’s always a good stunt to throw in ‘You’d understand it if you’d only read it in the original Greek’!
“There’s just one thing that does stand out clearly and uncontradicted in Jesus’ teaching. He advocated a system of economics whereby no one saved money or stored up wheat or did anything but live like a tramp. If this teaching of his had been accepted, the world would have starved in twenty years after his death!
“No, wait, Phil, just one second and then I’m through!”
He talked till dawn.
Frank’s last protest, as they stood on the steps in the cold grayness, was:
“My objection to the church isn’t that the preachers are cruel, hypocritical, actually wicked, though some of them are that, too—think of how many are arrested for selling fake stock, for seducing fourteen-year-old girls in orphanages under their care, for arson, for murder. And it isn’t so much that the church is in bondage to Big Business and doctrines as laid down by millionaires—though a lot of churches are that, too. My chief objection is that ninety-nine per cent. of sermons and Sunday School teachings are so agonizinglydull!”