HIS friendship 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 in _her_ trials, 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, I _am_ going to get out of the church! Think of it! A
_preacher_, 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’d
_like_ to 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 with _you_ is, 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’re _bunk_!’ 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, not _very_ many, 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’ve _said_ all—”
“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 the _Advocate_, 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! You _do_ know 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 of _knowing_ the 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 entirely _different_.
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 what _were_ the 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 were _born_ to 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!
“What _did_ he 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 agonizingly _dull_!”