I
HE did not stand by the altar now, uplifted in a vow that he would be
good and reverent. He was like the new general manager of a factory as
he bustled for the first time through the Wellspring Methodist Church,
Zenith, and his first comment was “The plant’s run down—have to buck it
up.”
He was accompanied on his inspection by his staff: Miss Bundle, church
secretary and personal secretary to himself, a decayed and plaintive
lady distressingly free of seductiveness; Miss Weezeger, the deaconess,
given to fat and good works; and A. F. Cherry, organist and musical
director, engaged only on part time.
He was disappointed that the church could not give him a pastoral
assistant or a director of religious education. He’d have them, soon
enough—and boss them! Great!
He found an auditorium which would hold sixteen hundred people but which
was offensively gloomy in its streaky windows, its brown plaster walls,
its cast-iron pillars. The rear wall of the chancel was painted a
lugubrious blue scattered with stars which had ceased to twinkle; and
the pulpit was of dark oak, crowned with a foolish, tasseled, faded
green velvet cushion. The whole auditorium was heavy and forbidding; the
stretch of empty brown-grained pews stared at him dolorously.
“Certainly must have been a swell bunch of cheerful Christians that made
this layout! I’ll have a new church here in five years—one with some
pep to it, and Gothic fixin’s and an up-to-date educational and
entertainment plant,” reflected the new priest.
The Sunday School rooms were spacious enough, but dingy, scattered with
torn hymn books; the kitchen in the basement, for church suppers, had a
rusty ancient stove and piles of chipped dishes. Elmer’s own study and
office was airless, and looked out on the flivver-crowded yard of a
garage. And Mr. Cherry said the organ was rather more than wheezy.
“Oh, well,” Elmer conferred with himself afterward, “what do I care!
Anyway, there’s plenty of room for the crowds, and, believe me, I’m the
boy can drag ’em in! . . . God, what a frump that Bundle woman is! One
of these days I’ll have a smart girl secretary—a good-looker. Well,
hurray, ready for the big work! I’ll show this town what high-class
preaching is!”
Not for three days did he chance to think that Cleo might also like to
see the church.
II
Though there were nearly four hundred thousand people in Zenith and only
nine hundred in Banjo Crossing, Elmer’s reception in the Zenith church
basement was remarkably like his reception in the Banjo basement. There
were the same rugged, hard-handed brothers, the same ample sisters
renowned for making doughnuts, the same brisk little men given to
giggling and pious jests. There were the same homemade ice cream and
homemade oratory. But there were five times as many people as at the
Banjo reception, and Elmer was ever a lover of quantity. And among the
transplanted rustics were several prosperous professional men, several
well-gowned women, and some pretty girls who looked as though they went
to dancing school, Discipline or not.
He felt cheerful and loving toward them—his, as he pointed out to them,
“fellow crusaders marching on resolutely to achievement of the Kingdom
of God on earth.”
It was easy to discover which of the members present from the Official
Board of the church were most worth his attentions. Mr. Ernest Apfelmus,
one of the stewards, was the owner of the Gem of the Ocean Pie and Cake
Corporation. He looked like a puffy and bewildered urchin suddenly blown
up to vast size; he was very rich, Miss Bundle whispered; and he did not
know how to spend his money except on his wife’s diamonds and the cause
of the Lord. Elmer paid court to Mr. Apfelmus and his wife, who spoke
quite a little English.
Not so rich but even more important, Elmer guessed, was T. J. Rigg, the
famous criminal lawyer, a trustee of Wellspring Church.
Mr. Rigg was small, deep-wrinkled, with amused and knowing eyes. He
would be, Elmer felt instantly, a good man with whom to drink. His
wife’s face was that of a girl, round and smooth and blue-eyed, though
she was fifty and more, and her laughter was lively.
“Those are folks I can shoot straight with,” decided Elmer, and he kept
near them.
Rigg hinted, “Say, Reverend, why don’t you and your good lady come up to
my house after this, and we can loosen up and have a good laugh and get
over this sewing-circle business.”
“I’d certainly like to.” As he spoke Elmer was considering that if he
was really to loosen up, he could not have Cleo about. “Only, I’m afraid
my wife has a headache, poor girl. We’ll just send her along home and
I’ll come with you.”
“After you shake hands a few thousand more times!”
“Exactly!”
Elmer was edified to find that Mr. Rigg had a limousine with a
chauffeur—one of the few in which Elmer had yet ridden. He did like to
have his Christian brethren well heeled. But the sight of the limousine
made him less chummy with the Riggses, more respectful and unctuous, and
when they had dropped Cleo at the hotel, Elmer leaned gracefully back on
the velvet seat, waved his large hand poetically, and breathed, “Such a
welcome the dear people gave me! I am so grateful! What a real
outpouring of the spirit!”
“Look here,” sniffed Rigg, “you don’t have to be pious with us! Ma and I
are a couple of old dragoons. We like religion; like the good old
hymns—takes us back to the hick town we came from; and we believe
religion is a fine thing to keep people in order—they think of higher
things instead of all these strikes and big wages and the kind of
hell-raising that’s throwing the industrial system all out of kilter.
And I like a fine upstanding preacher that can give a good show. So I’m
willing to be a trustee. But we ain’t pious. And any time you want to
let down—and I reckon there must be times when a big cuss like you must
get pretty sick of listening to the sniveling sisterhood!—you just come
to us, and if you want to smoke or even throw in a little jolt of
liquor, as I’ve been known to do, why we’ll understand. How about it,
Ma?”
“You bet!” said Mrs. Rigg. “And I’ll go down to the kitchen, if cook
isn’t there, and fry you up a couple of eggs, and if you don’t tell the
rest of the brethren, there’s always a couple of bottles of beer on the
ice. Like one?”
“_Would_ I!” cheered Elmer. “You bet I would! Only—I cut out drinking
and smoking quite a few years ago. Oh, I had my share before that! But I
stopped, absolute, and I’d hate to break my record. But you go right
ahead. And I want to say that it’ll be a mighty big relief to have some
folks in the church that I can talk to without shocking ’em half to
death. Some of these holier-than-thou birds—— Lord, they won’t let a
preacher be a human being!”
The Rigg house was large, rather faded, full of books which had been
read—history, biography, travels. The smaller sitting-room, with its
log fire and large padded chairs, looked comfortable, but Mrs. Rigg
shouted, “Oh, let’s go out to the kitchen and shake up a welsh rabbit! I
love to cook, and I don’t dast till after the servants go to bed.”
So his first conference with T. J. Rigg, who became the only authentic
friend Elmer had known since Jim Lefferts, was held at the shiny
white-enamel-topped table in the huge kitchen, with Mrs. Rigg stalking
about, bringing them welsh rabbit, with celery, cold chicken, whatever
she found in the ice box.
“I want your advice, Brother Rigg,” said Elmer. “I want to make my first
sermon here something sen—well, something that’ll make ’em sit up and
listen. I don’t have to get the subject in for the church ads till
tomorrow. Now what do you think of some pacifism?”
“Eh?”
“I know what you think. Of course during the war I was just as patriotic
as anybody—Four-Minute Man, and in another month I’d of been in
uniform. But honest, some of the churches are getting a lot of kick out
of hollering pacifism now the war’s all safely over—some of the biggest
preachers in the country. But far’s I’ve heard, nobody’s started it here
in Zenith yet, and it might make a big sensation.”
“Yes, that’s so, and course it’s perfectly all right to adopt pacifism
as long as there’s no chance for another war.”
“Or do you think—you know the congregation here—do you think a more
dignified and kind of you might say poetic expository sermon would
impress ’em more? Or what about a good, vigorous,
right-out-from-the-shoulder attack on vice? You know, booze and
immorality—like short skirts—by golly, girls’ skirts getting shorter
every year!”
“Now that’s what I’d vote for,” said Rigg. “That’s what gets ’em.
Nothing like a good juicy vice sermon to bring in the crowds. Yes, sir!
Fearless attack on all this drinking and this awful sex immorality
that’s getting so prevalent.” Mr. Rigg meditatively mixed a highball,
keeping it light because next morning in court he had to defend a lady
accused of running a badger game. “You bet. Some folks say sermons like
that are just sensational, but I always tell ’em: once the preacher gets
the folks into the church that way—and mighty few appreciate how hard
it is to do a good vice sermon; jolt ’em enough and yet not make it too
dirty—once you get in the folks, then you can give ’em some good,
solid, old-time religion and show ’em salvation and teach ’em to observe
the laws and do an honest day’s work for an honest day’s pay, ’stead of
clock-watching like my doggone clerks do! Yep, if you ask me, try the
vice. . . . Oh, say, Ma, do you think the Reverend would be shocked by
that story about the chambermaid and the traveling man that Mark was
telling us?”
Elmer was not shocked. In fact he had another droll tale himself.
He went home at one.
“I’ll have a good time with those folks,” he reflected, in the luxury of
a taxicab. “Only, better be careful with old Rigg. He’s a shrewd bird,
and he’s onto me. . . . Now what do you mean?” indignantly. “What do you
mean by ‘onto me’? There’s nothing to be onto! I refused a drink and a
cigar, didn’t I? I never cuss except when I lose my temper, do I? I’m
leading an absolutely Christian life. And I’m bringing a whale of a lot
more souls into churches than any of these pussy-footing tin saints
that’re afraid to laugh and jolly people. ‘Onto me’ nothing!”
III
On Saturday morning, on the page of religious advertisements in the
Zenith newspapers, Elmer’s first sermon was announced in a two-column
spread as dealing with the promising problem: “Can Strangers Find Haunts
of Vice in Zenith?”
They could, and with gratifying ease, said Elmer in his sermon. He said
it before at least four hundred people, as against the hundred who had
normally been attending.
He himself was a stranger in Zenith, and he had gone forth and he had
been “appalled—aghast—bowed in shocked horror” at the amount of vice,
and such interesting and attractive vice. He had investigated Braun’s
Island, a rackety beach and dance-floor and restaurant at South Zenith,
and he had found mixed bathing. He described the ladies’ legs; he
described the two amiable young women who had picked him up. He told of
the waiter who, though he denied that Braun’s Restaurant itself sold
liquor, had been willing to let him know where to get it, and where to
find an all-night game of poker—“and, mind you, playing poker for
keeps, you understand,” Elmer explained.
On Washington Avenue, North, he had found two movies in which “the
dreadful painted purveyors of putrescent vice”—he meant the movie
actors—had on the screen danced “suggestive steps which would bring the
blush of shame to the cheeks of any decent woman,” and in which the same
purveyors had taken drinks which he assumed to be the deadly cocktails.
On his way to his hotel after these movies three ladies of the night had
accosted him, right under the White Way of lights. Street-corner
loafers—he had apparently been very chummy with them—had told him of
blind pigs, of dope-peddlers, of strange lecheries.
“That,” he shouted, “is what one stranger was able to find in your
city—now _my_ city, and well beloved! But could he find virtue so
easily, could he, could he? Or just a lot of easy-going churches,
lollygagging along, while the just God threatens this city with the fire
and devouring brimstone that destroyed proud Sodom and Gomorrah in their
abominations! Listen! With the help of God Almighty, let us raise here
in this church a standard of virtue that no stranger can help seeing!
We’re lazy. We’re not burning with a fever of righteousness. On your
knees, you slothful, and pray God to forgive you and to aid you and me
to form a brotherhood of helpful, joyous, fiercely righteous followers
of every commandment of the Lord Our God!”
The newspapers carried almost all of it. . . . It had just happened that
there were reporters present—it had just happened that Elmer had been
calling up the _Advocate-Times_ on Saturday—it had just happened that
he remembered he had met Bill Kingdom, the _Advocate_ reporter, in
Sparta—it had just happened that to help out good old Bill he had let
him know there would be something stirring in the church, come Sunday.
The next Saturday Elmer advertised “Is There a Real Devil Sneaking
Around with Horns and Hoofs?” On Sunday there were seven hundred
present. Within two months Elmer was preaching, ever more confidently
and dramatically, to larger crowds than were drawn by any other church
in Zenith except four or five.
But, “Oh, he’s just a new sensation—he can’t last out—hasn’t got the
learning and staying-power. Besides, Old Town is shot to pieces,” said
Elmer’s fellow vinters—particularly his annoyed fellow Methodists.
IV
Cleo and he had found a gracious old house in Old Town, to be had cheap
because of the ragged neighborhood. He had hinted to her that since he
was making such a spiritual sacrifice as to take a lower salary in
coming to Zenith, her father, as a zealous Christian, ought to help them
out; and if she should be unable to make her father perceive this, Elmer
would regretfully have to be angry with her.
She came back from a visit to Banjo Crossing with two thousand dollars.
Cleo had an instinct for agreeable furniture. For the old house, with
its white mahogany paneling, she got reproductions of early New England
chairs and commodes and tables. There was a white-framed fireplace and a
fine old crystal chandelier in the living-room.
“Some class! We can entertain the bon ton here, and, believe me, I’ll
soon be having a lot of ’em coming to church! . . . Sometimes I do wish,
though, I’d gone out for the Episcopal Church. Lots more class there,
and they don’t beef if a minister takes a little drink,” he said to
Cleo.
“Oh, Elmer, how _can_ you! When Methodism stands for—”
“Oh, God, I do wish that just once you wouldn’t deliberately
misunderstand me! Here I was just carrying on a philosophical
discussion, and not speaking personal, and you go and—”
His house in order, he gave attention to clothes. He dressed as
calculatingly as an actor. For the pulpit, he continued to wear morning
clothes. For his church study, he chose offensively inoffensive lounge
suits, gray and brown and striped blue, with linen collars and quiet
blue ties. For addresses before slightly boisterous lunch-clubs, he went
in for manly tweeds and manly soft collars, along with his manly voice
and manly jesting.
He combed his thick hair back from his strong, square face, and
permitted it to hang, mane-like, just a bit over his collar. But it was
still too black to be altogether prophetic.
The two thousand was gone before they had been in Zenith a month.
“But it’s all a good investment,” he said. “When I meet the Big Bugs,
they’ll see I may have a dump of a church in a bum section but I can put
up as good a front as if I were preaching on Chickasaw Road.”
V
If in Banjo Crossing Elmer had been bored by inactivity, in Zenith he
was almost exhausted by the demands.
Wellspring Church had been carrying on a score of institutional affairs,
and Elmer doubled them, for nothing brought in more sympathy, publicity,
and contributions. Rich old hyenas who never went to church would ooze
out a hundred dollars or even five hundred when you described the
shawled mothers coming tearfully to the milk station.
There were classes in manual training, in domestic science, in
gymnastics, in bird study, for the poor boys and girls of Old Town.
There were troops of Boy Scouts, of Camp Fire Girls. There were Ladies’
Aid meetings, Women’s Missionary Society meetings, regular church
suppers before prayer-meeting, a Bible Training School for Sunday School
teachers, a sewing society, nursing and free food for the sick and poor,
half a dozen clubs of young men and women, half a dozen circles of
matrons, and a Men’s Club with monthly dinners, for which the pastor had
to snare prominent speakers without payment. The Sunday School was like
a small university. And every day there were dozens of callers who asked
the pastor for comfort, for advice, for money—young men in temptation,
widows wanting jobs, old widows wanting assurance of immortality, hoboes
wanting hand-outs, and eloquent book-agents. Where in Banjo the
villagers had been shy to expose their cancerous sorrows, in the city
there were always lonely people who reveled in being a little twisted, a
little curious, a little shameful; who yearned to talk about themselves
and who expected the pastor to be forever interested.
Elmer scarce had time to prepare his sermons, though he really did yearn
now to make them original and eloquent. He was no longer satisfied to
depend on his barrel. He wanted to increase his vocabulary; he was even
willing to have new ideas, lifted out of biology and biography and
political editorials.
He was out of the house daily at eight in the morning—usually after a
breakfast in which he desired to know of Cleo why the deuce she couldn’t
keep Nat and Bunny quiet while he read the paper—and he did not return
till six, burning with weariness. He had to study in the evening. . . .
He was always testy. . . . His children were afraid of him, even when he
boisterously decided to enact the Kind Parent for one evening and to
ride them pickaback, whether or no they wanted to be ridden pickaback.
They feared God properly and kept his commandments, did Nat and Bunny,
because their father so admirably prefigured God.
When Cleo was busy with meetings and clubs at the church, Elmer blamed
her for neglecting the house; when she slackened her church work, he was
able equally to blame her for not helping him professionally. And
obviously it was because she had so badly arranged the home routine that
he never had time for morning Family Worship. . . . But he made up for
it by the violence of his Grace before Meat, during which he glared at
the children if they stirred in their chairs.
And always the telephone was ringing—not only in his office but at home
in the evening.
What should Miss Weezeger, the deaconess, do about this old Miss Mally,
who wanted a new nightgown? Could the Reverend Gantry give a short talk
on “Advertising and the Church” to the Ad Club next Tuesday noon? Could
he address the Letitia Music and Literary Club on “Religion and Poetry”
next Thursday at four—just when he had a meeting with the Official
Board. The church janitor wanted to start the furnace, but the coal
hadn’t been delivered. What advice would the Reverend Mr. Gantry give to
a young man who wanted to go to college and had no money? From what book
was that quotation about “Cato learned Greek at eighty Sophocles” which
he had used in last Sunday’s sermon? Would Mr. Gantry be so kind and
address the Lincoln School next Friday morning at nine-fifteen—the dear
children would be so glad of any Message he had to give them, and the
regular speaker couldn’t show up. Would it be all right for the Girls’
Basket Ball team to use the basement tonight? Could the Reverend come
out, right now, to the house of Ben T. Evers, 2616 Appleby Street—five
miles away—because grandmother was very ill and needed consolation.
What the dickens did the Reverend mean by saying, last Sunday, that
hell-fire might be merely spiritual and figurative—didn’t he know that
that was agin Matthew V:29: “Thy whole body should be cast into hell.”
Could he get the proof of the church bulletin back to the printers right
away? Could the officers of the Southwest Circle of Women meet in Mr.
Gantry’s study tomorrow? Would Reverend Gantry speak at the Old Town
Improvement Association Banquet? Did the Reverend want to buy a
secondhand motor-car in A-1 shape? Could the Reverend—
“God!” said the Reverend; and, “Huh? Why, no, of course you couldn’t
answer ’em for me, Cleo. But at least you might try to keep from humming
when I’m simply killing myself trying to take care of all these blame’
fools and sacrificing myself and everything!”
And the letters.
In response to every sermon he had messages informing him that he was
the bright hope of evangelicism and that he was a cloven-hoofed fiend;
that he was a rousing orator and a human saxophone. One sermon on the
delights of Heaven, which he pictured as a perpetual summer afternoon at
a lake resort, brought in the same mail four comments:
i have got an idea for you verry important since hearing yrs of
last sunday evening why do’nt you hold services every evning to
tell people & etc about heven and danger of hell we must hurry
hurry hurry, the church in a bad way and is up to us who have
many and infaliable proofs of heven and hell to hasten yes we
must rescew the parishing, make everywhere the call of the lord,
fill the churches and empty these damable theatre.
Yrs for his coming,
JAMES C. WICKES,
2113 A, McGrew Street.
The writer is an honest and unwavering Christian and I want to
tell you, Gantry, that the only decent and helpful and enjoyable
thing about your sermon last Sunday A. M. was your finally
saying “Let us pray,” only _you_ should have said “Let me prey.”
By your wibbly-wabbly emphasis on Heaven and your fear to
emphasize the horrors of Hell, you get people into an
easy-going, self-satisfied frame of mind where they slip easily
into sin, and while pretending to be an earnest and literal
believer in every word of the Scriptures, you are an atheist in
sheep’s clothing. I am a minister of the gospel and know whereof
I speak.
Yours,
ALMON JEWINGS STRAFE.
I heard your rotten old-fashioned sermon last Sunday. You
pretend to be liberal, but you are just a hide-bound
conservative. Nobody believes in a material heaven or hell any
more, and you make yourself ridiculous by talking about them.
Wake up and study some modern dope.
A STUDENT.
Dear Brother, your lovely sermon last Sunday about Heaven was
the finest I have ever heard. I am quite an old lady and not
awful well and in my ills and griefs, especially about my
grandson who drinks, your wonderful words give me such a comfort
I cannot describe to you.
Yours admiringly,
MRS. R. R. GOMMERIE.
And he was expected, save with the virulent anonymous letters, to answer
all of them . . . in his stuffy office, facing a shelf of black-bound
books, dictating to the plaintive Miss Bundle, who never caught an
address, who always single-spaced the letters which should have been
double-spaced, and who had a speed which seemed adequate until you
discovered that she attained it by leaving out most of the verbs and
adjectives.
VI
Whether or not he was irritable on week days, Sundays were to his
nervous family a hell of keeping out of his way, and for himself they
had the strain of a theatrical first night.
He was up at seven, looking over his sermon-notes, preparing his talk to
the Sunday School, and snarling at Cleo, “Good Lord, you might have
breakfast on time today, at least, and why in heaven’s name you can’t
get that furnace-man here so I won’t have to freeze while I’m doing my
studying—”
He was at Sunday School at a quarter to ten, and often he had to take
the huge Men’s Bible Class and instruct it in the more occult meanings
of the Bible, out of his knowledge of the original Hebrew and Greek as
denied to the laity.
Morning church services began at eleven. Now that he often had as many
as a thousand in the audience, as he peeped out at them from the study
he had stage-fright. Could he hold them? What the deuce had he intended
to say about communion? He couldn’t remember a word of it.
It was not easy to keep on urging the unsaved to come forward as though
he really thought they would and as though he cared a hang whether they
did or not. It was not easy, on communion Sundays, when they knelt round
the altar rail, to keep from laughing at the sanctimonious eyes and prim
mouths of brethren whom he knew to be crooks in private business.
It was not easy to go on saying with proper conviction that whosoever
looked on a woman to lust after her would go booming down to hell when
there was a pretty and admiring girl in the front row. And it was
hardest of all, when he had done his public job, when he was tired and
wanted to let down, to stand about after the sermon and be hand-shaken
by aged spinster saints who expected him to listen without grinning
while they quavered that he was a silver-plated angel and that they were
just like him.
To have to think up a new, bright, pious quip for each of them! To see
large sporting males regarding him the while as though he were an old
woman in trousers!
By the time he came home for Sunday lunch he was looking for a chance to
feel injured and unappreciated and pestered and put upon, and usually he
found the chance.
There were still ahead of him, for the rest of the day, the Sunday
evening service, often the Epworth League, sometimes special meetings at
four. Whenever the children disturbed his Sunday afternoon nap, Elmer
gave an impersonation of the prophets. Why! All he asked of Nat and
Bunny was that, as a Methodist minister’s children, they should not be
seen on the streets or in the parks on the blessed Sabbath afternoon,
and that they should not be heard about the house. He told them, often,
that they were committing an unexampled sin by causing him to fall into
bad tempers unbecoming a Man of God.
But through all these labors and this lack of domestic sympathy he
struggled successfully.
VII
Elmer was as friendly as ever with Bishop Toomis.
He had conferred early with the bishop and with the canny
lawyer-trustee, T. J. Rigg, as to what fellow-clergymen in Zenith it
would be worth his while to know.
Among the ministers outside the Methodist Church, they recommended Dr.
G. Prosper Edwards, the highly cultured pastor of the Pilgrim
Congregational Church, Dr. John Jennison Drew, the active but sanctified
leader of the Chatham Road Presbyterian Church, that solid Baptist, the
Reverend Hosea Jessup, and Willis Fortune Tate, who, though he was an
Episcopalian and very shaky as regards liquor and hell, had one of the
suavest and most expensive flocks in town. And if one could endure the
Christian Scientists’ smirking conviction that they alone had the truth,
there was the celebrated leader of the First Christian Science Church,
Mr. Irving Tillish.
The Methodist ministers of Zenith Elmer met and studied at their regular
Monday morning meetings, in the funeral and wedding chapel of Central
Church. They looked like a group of prosperous and active business men.
Only two of them ever wore clerical waistcoats, and of these only one
compromised with the Papacy and the errors of Canterbury by turning his
collar around. A few resembled farmers, a few stone-masons, but most of
them looked like retail shops. The Reverend Mr. Chatterton Weeks
indulged in claret-colored “fancy socks,” silk handkerchiefs, and an
enormous emerald ring, and gave a pleasant suggestion of vaudeville. Nor
were they too sanctimonious. They slapped one another’s backs, they used
first names, they shouted, “I hear you’re grabbing off all the crowds in
town, you old cuss!” and for the manlier and more successful of them it
was quite the thing to use now and then a daring “damn.”
It would, to an innocent layman, have been startling to see them sitting
in rows like schoolboys; to hear them listening not to addresses on
credit and the routing of hardware but to short helpful talks on Faith.
The balance was kept, however, by an adequate number of papers on trade
subjects—the sort of pews most soothing to the back; the value of
sending postcards reading “Where were you last Sunday, old scout? We
sure did miss you at the Men’s Bible Class”; the comparative values of a
giant imitation thermometer, a giant clock, and a giant automobile
speedometer, as a register of the money coming in during special drives;
the question of gold and silver stars as rewards for Sunday School
attendance; the effectiveness of giving the children savings-banks in
the likeness of a jolly little church to encourage them to save their
pennies for Christian work; and the morality of violin solos.
Nor were the assembled clergy too inhumanly unboastful in their reports
of increased attendance and collections.
Elmer saw that the Zenith district superintendent, one Fred Orr, could
be neglected as a creeping and silent fellow who was all right at prayer
and who seemed to lead an almost irritatingly pure life, but who had no
useful notions about increasing collections.
The Methodist preachers whom he had to take seriously as rivals were
four.
There was Chester Brown, the ritualist, of the new and ultra-Gothic
Asbury Church. He was almost as bad, they said, as an Episcopalian. He
wore a clerical waistcoat buttoned up to his collar; he had a robed
choir and the processional; he was rumored once to have had candles on
what was practically an altar. He was, to Elmer, distressingly literary
and dramatic. It was said that he had literary gifts; his articles
appeared not only in the _Advocate_ but in the _Christian Century_ and
the _New Republic_—rather whimsical essays, safely Christian but frank
about the church’s sloth and wealth and blindness. He had been Professor
of English Literature and Church History in Luccock College, and he did
such sermons on books as Elmer, with his exhausting knowledge of
Longfellow and George Eliot, could never touch.
Dr. Otto Hickenlooper of Central Church was an even more distressing
rival. His was the most active institutional church of the whole state.
He had not only manual training and gymnastics but sacred pageants,
classes in painting (never from the nude), classes in French and
batik-making and sex hygiene and bookkeeping and short-story writing. He
had clubs for railroad men, for stenographers, for bell-boys; and after
the church suppers the young people were encouraged to sit about in
booths to which the newspapers referred flippantly as “courting
corners.”
Dr. Hickenlooper had come out hard for Social Service. He was in
sympathy with the American Federation of Labor, the I. W. W., the
Socialists, the Communists, and the Nonpartisan League, which was more
than they were with one another. He held Sunday evening lectures on the
Folly of War, the Minimum Wage, the need of clean milk; and once a month
he had an open forum, to which were invited the most dangerous radical
speakers, who were allowed to say absolutely anything they liked,
provided they did not curse, refer to adultery, or criticize the
leadership of Christ.
Dr. Mahlon Potts, of the First Methodist Church, seemed to Elmer at
first glance less difficult to oust. He was fat, pompous, full of heavy
rumbles of piety. He was a stage parson. “Ah, my dear Brother!” he
boomed; and “How are we this morning, my dear Doctor, and how is the
lovely little wife?” But Dr. Potts had the largest congregation of any
church of any denomination in Zenith. He was so respectable. He was so
safe. People knew where they were, with him. He was adequately flowery
of speech—he could do up a mountain, a sunset, a burning of the
martyrs, a reception of the same by the saints in heaven, as well as any
preacher in town. But he never doubted nor let any one else doubt that
by attending the Methodist Church regularly, and observing the rules of
repentance, salvation, baptism, communion, and liberal giving, every one
would have a minimum of cancer and tuberculosis and sin, and
unquestionably arrive in heaven.
These three Elmer envied but respected; one man he envied and loathed.
That was Philip McGarry of the Arbor Methodist Church.
Philip McGarry, Ph. D. of the University of Chicago in economics and
philosophy—only everybody who liked him, layman or fellow-parson,
seemed to call him “Phil”—was at the age of thirty-five known through
the whole American Methodist Church as an _enfant terrible_. The various
sectional editions of the _Advocate_ admired him but clucked like doting
and alarmed hens over his frequent improprieties. He was accused of
every heresy. He never denied them, and the only dogma he was known to
give out positively was the leadership of Jesus—as to whose divinity he
was indefinite.
He was a stocky, smiling man, fond of boxing, and even at a funeral
incapable of breathing, “Ah, sister!”
He criticized everything. He criticized even bishops—for being too fat,
for being too ambitious, for gassing about Charity during a
knock-down-and-drag-out strike. He criticized, but amiably, the social
and institutional and generally philanthropic Dr. Otto Hickenlooper,
with his clubs for the study of Karl Marx and his Sunday afternoon
reception for lonely traveling-men.
“You’re a good lad, Otto,” said Dr. McGarry—and openly, in the
preachers’ Monday meetings: “You mean well, but you’re one of these
darned philanthropists.”
“Nice word to use publicly—’darned’!” meditated the shocked Reverend
Elmer Gantry.
“All your stuff at Central, Otto,” said Dr. McGarry, “is paternalistic.
You hand out rations to the dear pee-pul and keep ’em obedient. You talk
about socialism and pacifism, and say a lot of nice things about ’em,
but you always explain that reforms must come in due time, which means
never, and then only through the kind supervision of Rockefeller and
Henry Ford. And I always suspect that your activities have behind ’em
the sneaking purpose of luring the poor chumps into religion—even into
Methodism!”
The whole ministerial meeting broke into yelps.
“Well, of course, that’s the purpose—”
“Well, if you’ll kindly tell me why you stay in the Methodist Church
when you think it’s so unimportant to—”
“Just what are you, a minister of the gospel, seeking _except_
religion—”
The meeting, on such a morning, was certain to stray from the
consideration of using egg-coal in church furnaces to the question as to
what, when they weren’t before their congregations and on record, they
really believed about the whole thing.
That was a very dangerous and silly thing, reflected Elmer Gantry. No
telling where you’d get to, if you went blatting around about a lot of
these fool problems. Preach the straight Bible gospel and make folks
good, he demanded, and leave all these ticklish questions of theology
and social service to the profs!
Philip McGarry wound up his cheerful attack on Dr. Hickenlooper, the
first morning when Elmer disgustedly encountered him, by insisting, “You
see, Otto, your reforms couldn’t mean anything, or you wouldn’t be able
to hold onto as many prosperous money-grabbing parishioners as you do.
No risk of the working-men in your church turning dangerous as long as
you’ve got that tight-fisted Joe Hanley as one of your trustees! Thank
Heaven, I haven’t got a respectable person in my whole blooming flock!”
(“Yeh, and there’s where you gave yourself away, McGarry,” Elmer
chuckled inwardly. “That’s the first thing you’ve said that’s true!”)
Philip McGarry’s church was in a part of the city incomparably more
run-down than Elmer’s Old Town. It was called “The Arbor”; it had in
pioneer days been the vineyard-sheltered village, along the Chaloosa
River, from which had grown the modern Zenith. Now it was all dives,
brothels, wretched tenements, cheap-jack shops. Yet here McGarry lived,
a bachelor, seemingly well content, counseling pick-pockets and
scrubwomen, and giving on Friday evenings a series of lectures packed by
eager Jewish girl students, radical workmen, old cranks, and wistful
rich girls coming in limousines down from the spacious gardens of Royal
Ridge.
“I’ll have trouble with that McGarry if we both stay in this town. Him
and I will never get along together,” thought Elmer. “Well, I’ll keep
away from him; I’ll treat him with some of this Christian charity that
he talks so darn’ much about and can’t understand the real meaning of!
We’ll just dismiss him—and most of these other birds. But the big
three—how’ll I handle them?”
He could not, even if he should have a new church, outdo Chester Brown
in ecclesiastical elegance or literary messages. He could never touch
Otto Hickenlooper in institutions and social service. He could never
beat Mahlon Potts in appealing to the well-to-do respectables.
Yet he could beat them all together!
Planning it delightedly, at the ministers’ meeting, on his way home, by
the fireplace at night, he saw that each of these stars was so
specialized that he neglected the good publicity-bringing features of
the others. Elmer would combine them; be almost as elevating as Chester
Brown, almost as institutional and meddling as Otto Hickenlooper, almost
as solidly safe and moral as Mahlon Potts. And all three of them, in
fact every preacher in town except one Presbyterian, were neglecting
the—well, some people called it sensational, but that was just envy;
the proper word, considered Elmer, was _powerful_, or perhaps
_fearless_, or _stimulating_—all of them were neglecting a powerful,
fearless, stimulating, and devil-challenging concentration on vice.
Booze. Legs. Society bridge. You bet!
Not overdo it, of course, but the town would come to know that in the
sermons of the Reverend Elmer Gantry there would always be something
spicy and yet improving.
“Oh, I can put it over the whole bunch!” Elmer stretched his big arms in
joyous vigor. “I’ll build a new church. I’ll take the crowds away from
all of ’em. I’ll be the one big preacher in Zenith. And
then—— Chicago? New York? Bishopric? Whatever I want! Whee!”