I
THE state 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 so _awfully_ many 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 Ghost _in
camera_ at 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 to _me_! 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 one _raison d’être_ of 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 the _innascibilitas_ attribute and the
_res 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 are _some_
intelligent 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 that _is_ new,
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’t _stand_ it!” 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!”