I
FRANK SHALLARD had graduated from Mizpah Theological Seminary and taken
his first pulpit. And now that he was a minister, theoretically
different from all ordinary people, he was wondering whether there was
any value to the ministry whatever.
Of what value were doggerel hymns raggedly sung? What value in sermons,
when the congregation seemed not at all different from people who never
heard sermons? Were all ministers and all churches, Frank wondered,
merely superstitious survivals, merely fire-insurance? Suppose there
were such things as inspiring sermons. Suppose there could be such a
curious office as minister, as Professional Good Man; such a thing as
learning Goodness just as one learned plumbing or dentistry. Even so,
what training had he or his classmates, or his professors—whose D. D.
degrees did not protect them from indigestion and bad tempers—in this
trade of Professional Goodness?
He was supposed to cure an affliction called vice. But he had never
encountered vice; he didn’t know just what were the interesting things
that people did when they were being vicious. How long would a drunkard
listen to the counsel of one who had never been inside a saloon?
He was supposed to bring peace to mankind. But what did he know of the
forces which cause wars, personal or class or national; what of drugs,
passion, criminal desire; of capitalism, banking, labor, wages, taxes;
international struggles for trade, munition trusts, ambitious soldiers?
He was supposed to comfort the sick. But what did he know of sickness?
How could he tell when he ought to pray and when he ought to recommend
salts?
He was supposed to explain to troubled mankind the purposes of God
Almighty, to chat with him, and even advise him about his duties as
regards rainfall and the church debt. But which God Almighty? Professor
Bruno Zechlin had introduced Frank to a hundred gods besides the Jewish
Jehovah, or Yahveh, who had been but a poor and rather surly relation of
such serene aristocrats as Zeus.
He was supposed to have undergone a mystic change whereby it was
possible to live without normal appetites. He was supposed to behold
girls’ ankles without interest and, for light amusement, to be satisfied
by reading church papers and shaking hands with deacons. But he found
himself most uncomfortably interested in the flicker of ankles, he
longed for the theater, and no repentance could keep him from reading
novels, though his professors had exposed them as time-wasting and
frivolous.
What had he learned?
Enough Hebrew and Greek to be able to crawl through the Bible by using
lexicons—so that, like all his classmates once they were out of the
seminary, he always read it in English. A good many of the more
condemnatory texts of the Bible—rather less than the average Holy
Roller carpenter-evangelist. The theory that India and Africa have woes
because they are not Christianized, but that Christianized Bangor and
Des Moines have woes because the devil, a being obviously more potent
than omnipotent God, sneaks around counteracting the work of Baptist
preachers.
He had learned, in theory, the ways of raising money through church
fairs; he had learned what he was to say on pastoral visits. He had
learned that Roger Williams, Adoniram Judson, Luther, Calvin, Jonathan
Edwards, and George Washington were the greatest men in history; that
Lincoln was given to fervent prayer at all crises; and that Ingersoll
had called his non-existent son to his death-bed and bidden him become
an orthodox Christian. He had learned that the Pope at Rome was plotting
to come to America and get hold of the government, and was prevented
only by the denunciations of the Baptist clergy with a little help from
the Methodists and Presbyterians; that most crime was caused either by
alcohol or by people leaving the Baptist fold for Unitarianism; and that
clergymen ought not to wear red ties.
He had learned how to assemble Jewish texts, Greek philosophy, and
Middle-Western evangelistic anecdotes into a sermon. And he had learned
that poverty is blessed, but that bankers make the best deacons.
Otherwise, as he wretchedly examined his equipment, facing his career,
Frank did not seem to have learned anything whatever.
From Elmer Gantry’s relations to Lulu Bains, from Harry Zenz’s almost
frank hint that he was an atheist, Frank perceived that a preacher can
be a scoundrel or a hypocrite and still be accepted by his congregation.
From the manners of Dean Trosper, who served his God with vinegar, he
perceived that a man may be free of all the skilled sins, may follow
every rule of the church, and still bring only fear to his flock.
Listening to the celebrated divines who visited the seminary and showed
off to the infant prophets, he perceived that a man could make scholarly
and violent sounds and yet not say anything which remained in the mind
for six minutes.
He concluded, in fact, that if there was any value in churches and a
ministry, of which he was not very certain, in any case there could be
no value in himself as a minister.
Yet he had been ordained, he had taken a pulpit.
It was doubtful whether he could have endured the necessary lying had it
not been for Dean Trosper’s bullying and his father’s confusing pleas.
Frank’s father was easy-going enough, but he had been a Baptist
clergyman for so many years that the church was sacred to him. To have
had his son deny it would have broken him. He would have been shocked to
be told that he was advising Frank to lie, but he explained that the
answers to the ordination examination were after all poetic symbols,
sanctified by generations of loving usage; that they need not be taken
literally.
So Frank Shallard, pupil of Bruno Zechlin, said nervously to an
examining cleric that, yes, he did believe that baptism by immersion was
appointed by God himself as the only valid way of beginning a righteous
life; that, yes, unrepentant sinners would go to a literal Hell; that,
yes, these unrepentant sinners included all persons who did not go to
evangelical churches if they had the chance; and that, yes, the Maker of
a universe with stars a hundred thousand light-years apart was
interested, furious, and very personal about it if a small boy played
baseball on Sunday afternoon.
Half an hour after the ordination and the somewhat comforting welcome by
veterans of the ministry, he hated himself, and ached to flee, but again
the traditional “not wanting to hurt his father” kept him from being
honest. So he stayed in the church . . . and went on hurting his father
for years instead of for a day.
II
It was a lonely and troubled young man, the Frank Shallard who for his
first pastorate came to the Baptist Church at Catawba, a town of
eighteen hundred, in the same state with Zenith and the Mizpah Seminary.
The town liked him, and did not take him seriously. They said his
sermons were “real poetic”; they admired him for being able to sit with
old Mrs. Randall, who had been an invalid for thirty years, a bore for
sixty, and never ill a day in her life. They admired him for trying to
start a boys’ club, though they did not go so far in their support as to
contribute anything. They all called him “Reverend,” and told him that
he was amazingly sound in doctrine for one so unfortunately well
educated; and he stayed on, in a vacuum.
Frank felt well about his fifth sermon in Catawba; felt that he was done
with hesitations. He had decided to ignore controversial theology,
ignore all dogma, and concentrate on the leadership of Jesus. That was
his topic, there in the chapel with its walls of glaring robin’s-egg
blue—the eager-eyed, curly-headed boy, his rather shrill voice the wail
of a violin as he gave his picture of Jesus, the kindly friend, the
unfailing refuge, the gallant leader.
He was certain that he had done well; he was thinking of it on Monday
morning as he walked from his boarding-house to the post office.
He saw one Lem Staples, a jovial horse-doctor who was known as the
Village Atheist, sitting on a decayed carriage seat in front of the
Fashion Livery Barn. Doc Staples was a subscriber to the _Truth Seeker_,
a periodical said to be infidel, and he quoted Robert Ingersoll, Ed
Howe, Colonel Watterson, Elbert Hubbard, and other writers who were
rumored to believe that a Catholic was as good as a Methodist or
Baptist. The Doc lived alone, “baching it” in a little yellow cottage,
and Frank had heard that he sat up till all hours, eleven and even
later, playing cribbage in Mart Blum’s saloon.
Frank disliked him, and did not know him. He was prepared to welcome
honest inquiry, but a fellow who was an avowed atheist, why, Frank
raged, he was a fool! Who made the flowers, the butterflies, the
sunsets, the laughter of little children? Those things didn’t just
_happen_! Besides: why couldn’t the man keep his doubts to himself, and
not try to take from other people the religion which was their one
comfort and strength in illness, sorrow, want? A matter not of Morality
but of reverence for other people’s belief, in fact of Good Taste—
This morning, as Frank scampered down Vermont Street, Lem Staples called
to him, “Fine day, Reverend. Say! In a hurry?”
“I’m—— No, not especially.”
“Come sit down. Couple o’ questions I’m worried about.”
Frank sat, his neck prickling with embarrassment.
“Say, Reverend, old Ma Gherkins was telling me about your sermon
yesterday. You figger that no matter what kind of a creed a fellow’s
got, the one thing we can all bank on, absolute, is the teaching of
Jesus?”
“Why, yes, that’s it roughly. Doctor.”
“And you feel that any sensible fellow will follow his teaching?”
“Why, yes, certainly.”
“And you feel that the churches, no matter what faults they may have, do
hand out this truth of Jesus better than if we didn’t have no churches
at all?”
“Certainly. Otherwise, I shouldn’t be in the church!”
“Then can you tell me why it is that nine-tenths of the really
sure-enough on-the-job membership of the churches is made up of two
classes: the plumb ignorant, that’re scared of hell and that swallow any
fool doctrine, and, second, the awful’ respectable folks that play the
church so’s to seem more respectable? Why is that? Why is it the
high-class skilled workmen and the smart professional men usually
snicker at the church and don’t go near it once a month? Why is it?”
“It isn’t true, perhaps that’s why!” Frank felt triumphant. He looked
across at the pile of rusty horseshoes and plowshares among the mullen
weeds beside the blacksmith’s shop; he reflected that he would clean up
this town, be a power for good. Less snappishly he explained,
“Naturally, I haven’t any statistics about it, but the fact is that
almost every intelligent and influential man in the country belongs to
some church or other.”
“Yeh—belongs. But does he go?”
Frank plodded off, annoyed. He tried to restore himself by insisting
that Doc Staples was a lout, very amusing in the way he mingled rustic
grammar with half-digested words from his adult reading. But he was
jarred. Here was the Common Man whom the church was supposed to
convince.
Frank remembered from his father’s pastorates how many theoretical
church-members seemed blithely able month on month to stay away from the
sermonizing; he remembered the merchants who impressively passed the
contribution plate yet afterward, in conversation with his father,
seemed to have but vague notions of what the sermon had been.
He studied his own congregation. There they were: the stiff-collared
village respectables, and the simple, kindly, rustic mass, who
understood him only when he promised Heaven as a reward for a life of
monogamy and honest chicken-raising, or threatened them with Hell for
drinking hard cider.
Catawba had—its only urban feature—a furniture factory with unusually
competent workmen, few of whom attended church. Now Frank Shallard had
all his life been insulated from what he gently despised as “the working
class.” Maids at his father’s house and the elderly, devout, and
incompetent negroes who attended the furnace; plumbers or electricians
coming to the parsonage for repairs; railway men to whom he tried to
talk on journeys; only these had he known, and always with unconscious
superiority.
Now he timidly sought to get acquainted with the cabinet-makers as they
sat at lunch in the factory grounds. They accepted him good-naturedly,
but he felt that they chuckled behind his back when he crept away.
For the first time he was ashamed of being a preacher, of being a
Christian. He longed to prove he was nevertheless a “real man,” and
didn’t know how to prove it. He found that all the cabinet-makers save
the Catholics laughed at the church and thanked the God in whom they did
not believe that they did not have to listen to sermons on Sunday
mornings, when there were beautiful back porches to sit on, beautiful
sporting news to read, beautiful beer to drink. Even the Catholics
seemed rather doubtful about the power of a purchased mass to help their
deceased relatives out of Purgatory. Several of them admitted that they
merely “did their Easter duty”—went to confession and mass but once a
year.
It occurred to him that he had never known how large a race of
intelligent and independent workmen there were in between the masters
and the human truck-horses. He had never known how casually these manual
aristocrats despised the church; how they jeered at their leaders,
officers of the A. F. of L., who played safe by adhering to a voluble
Christianity, He could not get away from his discoveries. They made him
self-conscious as he went about the village streets trying to look like
a junior prophet and feeling like a masquerader.
He might have left the ministry but for the Reverend Andrew Pengilly,
pastor of the Catawba Methodist Church.
III
If you had cut Andrew Pengilly to the core, you would have found him
white clear through. He was a type of clergyman favored in pious
fiction, yet he actually did exist.
To every congregation he had served these forty years, he had been a
shepherd. They had loved him, listened to him, and underpaid him. In
1906, when Frank came to Catawba, Mr. Pengilly was a frail stooped
veteran with silver hair, thin silver mustache, and a slow smile which
embraced the world.
Andrew Pengilly had gone into the Civil War as a drummer boy, slept
blanketless and barefoot and wounded in the frost of Tennessee
mountains, and come out still a child, to “clerk in a store” and teach
Sunday School. He had been converted at ten, but at twenty-five he was
overpowered by the preaching of Osage Joe, the Indian evangelist, became
a Methodist preacher, and never afterward doubted the peace of God. He
was married at thirty to a passionate, singing girl with kind lips. He
loved her so romantically—just to tuck the crazy-quilt about her was
poetry, and her cowhide shoes were to him fairy slippers—he loved her
so ungrudgingly that when she died, in childbirth, within a year after
their marriage, he had nothing left for any other woman. He lived alone,
with the undiminished vision of her. Not the most scandalmongering
Mother in Zion had ever hinted that Mr. Pengilly looked damply upon the
widows in his fold.
Little book-learning had Andrew Pengilly in his youth, and to this day
he knew nothing of Biblical criticism, of the origin of religions, of
the sociology which was beginning to absorb church-leaders, but his
Bible he knew, and believed, word by word, and somehow he had drifted
into the reading of ecstatic books of mysticism. He was a mystic,
complete; the world of plows and pavements and hatred was less to him
than the world of angels, whose silver robes seemed to flash in the air
about him as he meditated alone in his cottage. He was as ignorant of
Modern Sunday School Methods as of single tax or Lithuanian finances,
yet few Protestants had read more in the Early Fathers.
On Frank Shallard’s first day in Catawba, when he was unpacking his
books in his room at the residence of Deacon Halter, the druggist, the
Reverend Mr. Pengilly was announced. Frank went down to the parlor
(gilded cattails and a basket of stereopticon views) and his loneliness
was warmed by Mr. Pengilly’s enveloping smile, his drawling voice:
“Welcome, Brother! I’m Pengilly, of the Methodist Church. I never was
much of a hand at seeing any difference between the denominations, and I
hope we’ll be able to work together for the glory of God. I do hope so!
And I hope you’ll go fishing with me. I know,” enthusiastically, “a pond
where there’s some elegant pickerel!”
Many evenings they spent in Mr. Pengilly’s cottage, which was less
littered and odorous than that of the village atheist, Doc Lem Staples,
only because the stalwart ladies of Mr. Pengilly’s congregation vied in
sweeping for him, dusting for him, disarranging his books and
hen-tracked sermon-notes, and bullying him in the matters of rubbers and
winter flannels. They would not let him prepare his own meals—they made
him endure the several boarding-houses in turn—but sometimes of an
evening he would cook scrambled eggs for Frank. He had pride in his
cooking. He had never tried anything but scrambled eggs.
His living-room was overpowering with portraits and carbon prints.
Though every local official board pled with him about it, he insisted on
including madonnas, cinquecento resurrections, St. Francis of Assisi,
and even a Sacred Heart, with such Methodist worthies as Leonidas
Hamline and the cloaked romantic Francis Asbury. In the bay window was a
pyramid of wire shelves filled with geraniums. Mr. Pengilly was an
earnest gardener, except during such weeks as he fell into dreams and
forgot to weed and water, and through the winter he watched for the
geranium leaves to wither enough so that he could pick them off and be
able to feel busy.
All over the room were the aged dog and ancient cat, who detested each
other, never ceased growling at each other, and at night slept curled
together.
In an antiquated and badly listed rocking-chair, padded with calico
cushions, Frank listened to Mr. Pengilly’s ramblings. For a time they
talked only of externals; gossip of their parishes; laughter at the man
who went from church to church fretting the respectable by shouting
“Hallelujah”; local chatter not without a wholesome and comforting
malice. Frank was at first afraid to bare his youthful hesitancies to so
serene an old saint, but at last he admitted his doubts.
How, he demanded, could you reconcile a Loving God with one who would
strike down an Uzza for the laudable act of trying to save the Ark of
the Covenant from falling, who would kill forty-two children (and
somewhat ludicrously) for shouting at Elisha as any small boy in Catawba
today would shout? Was it reasonable? And, if it wasn’t, if any part of
the Bible was mythical, where to stop? How could we know if anything in
the Bible was “inspired”?
Mr. Pengilly was not shocked, nor was he very agitated. His thin fingers
together, far down in his worn plush chair, he mused:
“Yes, I’m told the higher critics ask these things. I believe it bothers
people. But I wonder if perhaps God hasn’t put these stumbling blocks in
the Bible as a test of our faith, of our willingness to accept with all
our hearts and souls a thing that may seem ridiculous to our minds? You
see, our minds don’t go far. Think—how much does even an astronomer
know about folks on Mars, if there are any folks there? Isn’t it with
our hearts, our faith, that we have to accept Jesus Christ, and not with
our historical charts? Don’t we _feel_ his influence on our lives? Isn’t
it the biggest men that feel it the most? Maybe God wants to keep out of
the ministry all the folks that are so stuck on their poor minds that
they can’t be humble and just accept the great overpowering truth of
Christ’s mercy. Do you—— When do you feel nearest to God? When you’re
reading some awful’ smart book criticizing the Bible or when you kneel
in prayer and your spirit just flows forth and you _know_ that you’re in
communion with him?”
“Oh, of course—”
“Don’t you think maybe he will explain all these puzzling things in his
own good time? And meanwhile wouldn’t you rather be a help to poor sick
worried folks than write a cute little book finding fault?”
“Oh, well—”
“And has there ever been anything like the Old Book for bringing lost
souls home to happiness? Hasn’t it _worked_?”
In Andrew Pengilly’s solacing presence these seemed authentic arguments,
actual revelations; Bruno Zechlin was far off and gray; and Frank was
content.
Equally did Mr. Pengilly console him about the intelligent workmen who
would have none of the church. The old man simply laughed.
“Good Heavens, boy! What do you expect, as a preacher? A whole world
that’s saved, and nothing for you to do? Reckon you don’t get much
salary, but how do you expect to earn that much? These folks don’t go to
any Christian church? Huh! When the Master started out, wa’n’t anybody
going to a Christian church! Go out and get ’em!”
Which seemed disastrously reasonable to the shamed Frank; and he went
out to get ’em, and didn’t do so, and continued in his ministry.
He had heard in theological seminary of the “practise of the presence of
God” as a papist mystery. Now he encountered it. Mr. Pengilly taught him
to kneel, his mind free of all worries, all prides, all hunger, his lips
repeating “Be thou visibly present with me”—not as a charm but that his
lips might not be soiled with more earthly phrases—and, when he had
become strained and weary and exalted, to feel a Something glowing and
almost terrifying about him, and to experience thus, he was certain, the
actual, loving, proven nearness of the Divinity.
He began to call his mentor Father Pengilly, and the old man chided him
only a little . . . presently did not chide him at all.
For all his innocence and his mysticism, Father Pengilly was not a fool
nor weak. He spoke up harshly to a loud-mouthed grocer, new come to
town, who considered the patriarch a subject for what he called
“kidding,” and who shouted, “Well, I’m getting tired of waiting for you
preachers to pray for rain. Guess you don’t believe the stuff much
yourselves!” He spoke up to old Miss Udell, the purity specialist of the
town, when she came to snuffle that Amy Dove was carrying on with the
boys in the twilight. “I know how you like a scandal, Sister,” said he.
“Maybe ’tain’t Christian to deny you one. But I happen to know all about
Amy. Now if you’d go out and help poor old crippled Sister Eckstein do
her washing, maybe you’d keep busy enough so’s you could get along
without your daily scandal.”
He had humor, as well, Father Pengilly. He could smile over the cranks
in the congregation. And he liked the village atheist, Doc Lem Staples.
He had him at the house, and it healed Frank’s spirit to hear with what
beatific calm Father Pengilly listened to the Doc’s jibes about the
penny-pinchers and the sinners in the church.
“Lem,” said Father Pengilly, “you’ll be surprised at this, but I must
tell you that there’s two-three sinners in your fold, too. Why, I’ve
heard of even horse-thieves that didn’t belong to churches. That must
prove something, I guess. Yes, sir, I admire to hear you tell about the
kind-hearted atheists, after reading about the cannibals, who are
remarkably little plagued with us Methodists and Baptists.”
Not in his garden only but in the woods, along the river, Father
Pengilly found God in Nature. He was insane about fishing—though
indifferent to the catching of any actual fish. Frank floated with him
in a mossy scow, in a placid backwater under the willows. He heard the
gurgle of water among the roots and watched the circles from a leaping
bass. The old man (his ruddy face and silver mustache shaded by a
shocking hayfield straw hat) hummed “There’s a wideness in God’s mercy
like the wideness of the sea.” When Father Pengilly mocked him, “And you
have to go to books to find God, young man!” then Frank was content to
follow him, to be his fellow preacher, to depend more on Pengilly’s long
experience than on irritating questions, to take any explanation of the
validity of the Bible, of the mission of the church, the leadership of
Christ, which might satisfy this soldier of the cross.
Frank became more powerful as a preacher. He went from Catawba, via
pastorates in two or three larger towns, to Eureka, a camp of forty
thousand brisk industrialists, and here he was picked up and married by
the amiable Bess.
IV
Bess Needham, later to be Bess Shallard, was remarkably like a robin.
She had the same cheerfulness, the same round ruddiness, and the same
conviction that early rising, chirping, philoprogenitiveness, and strict
attention to food were the aims of existence. She had met Frank at a
church “social,” she had pitied what she regarded as his underfed
pallor, she had directed her father, an amiable and competent dentist,
to invite Frank home, for “a real feed” and bright music on the
phonograph. She listened fondly to his talk—she had no notion what it
was about, but she liked the sound of it.
He was stirred by her sleek neck, her comfortable bosom, by the dimpled
fingers which stroked his hair before he knew that he longed for it. He
was warmed by her assertion that he “put it all over” the Rev. Dr.
Seager, the older Baptist parson in Eureka. So she was able to marry him
without a struggle, and they had three children in the shortest possible
time.
She was an admirable wife and mother. She filled the hot water bottle
for his bed, she cooked corn beef and cabbage perfectly, she was polite
to the most exasperating parishioners, she saved money, and when he sat
with fellow clerics companionably worrying about the sacraments, she
listened to him, and him alone, with beaming motherliness.
He realized that with a wife and three children he could not consider
leaving the church; and the moment he realized it he began to feel
trapped and to worry about his conscience all the more.
V
There was, in Eureka, with its steel mills, its briskness, its conflict
between hard-fisted manufacturers and hard-headed socialists, nothing of
the contemplation of Catawba, where thoughts seemed far-off stars to
gaze on through the mist. Here was a violent rush of ideas, and from
this rose the “Preachers’ Liberal Club,” toward which Frank was drawn
before he had been in Eureka a fortnight.
The ring-leader of these liberals was Hermann Kassebaum, the modernist
rabbi—young, handsome, black of eye and blacker of hair, full of
laughter, regarded by the elect of the town as a shallow charlatan and a
dangerous fellow, and actually the most scholarly man Frank had ever
encountered, except for Bruno Zechlin. With him consorted a placidly
atheistic Unitarian minister, a Presbyterian who was orthodox on Sunday
and revolutionary on Monday, a wavering Congregationalist, and an
Anglo-Catholic Episcopalian, who was enthusiastic about the beauties of
the ritual and the Mithraic origin of the same.
And Frank’s fretting wearily started all over again. He re-read
Harnack’s “What Is Christianity?” Sunderland’s “Origin and Nature of the
Bible,” James’s “Varieties of Religious Experience,” Frazer’s “Golden
Bough.”
He was in the pleasing situation where whatever he did was wrong. He
could not content himself with the discussions of the Liberal Club. “If
you fellows believe that way, why don’t you get out of the church?” he
kept demanding. Yet he could not leave them; could not, therefore,
greatly succeed among the Baptist brethren. His good wife, Bess, when he
diffidently hinted of his doubts, protested, “You can’t reach people
just through their minds. Besides, they wouldn’t understand you if you
_did_ come right out and tell ’em the truth—as you see it. They aren’t
ready for it.”
His worst doubt was the doubt of himself. And in this quite undignified
wavering he remained, envying equally Rabbi Kassebaum’s public scoffing
at all religion and the thundering certainties of the cover-to-cover
evangelicals. He who each Sunday morning neatly pointed his congregation
the way to Heaven was himself tossed in a Purgatory of self-despising
doubt, where his every domestic virtue was cowardice, his every mystic
aspiration a superstitious mockery, and his every desire to be honest a
cruelty which he must spare Bess and his well-loved brood.
He was in this mood when the Reverend Elmer Gantry suddenly came,
booming and confident, big and handsome and glossy, into his study, and
explained that if Frank could let him have a hundred dollars, Elmer, and
presumably the Lord, would be grateful and return the money within two
weeks.
The sight of Elmer as a fellow pastor was too much for Frank. To get rid
of him, he hastily gave Elmer the hundred he had saved up toward payment
of the last two obstetrical bills, and sat afterward at his desk, his
head between his lax hands, praying, “O Lord, guide me!”
He leapt up. “No! Elmer said the Lord had been guiding _him_! I’ll take
a chance on guiding myself! I will—” Again, weakly, “But how can I hurt
Bess, hurt my dad, hurt Father Pengilly? Oh, I’ll go on!”