Elmer Gantry (37 page)

“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
rewrite 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 percent of sermons and
Sunday School teachings are so agonizingly DULL!”

However impatient he was with Frank, Philip McGarry’s last wish was to set Elmer Gantry piously baying on Frank’s trail.
It was rather an accident. Philip sat next to Elmer at a dinner to discuss missionary funds; he remembered that Frank and
Elmer had been classmates; and with a sincerely affectionate “It’s too bad the poor boy worries so over what are really
matters for Faith,” he gave away to Elmer most of Frank’s heresies.

Now in the bustle of raising funds to build a vast new church, Elmer had forgotten his notion of saving the renowned
hardware impresario, Mr. William Dollinger Styles, and his millions from contamination by Frank’s blasphemies.

“We could use old Styles, and you could get some fine publicity by attacking Shallard’s attempt to steal Jesus and even
Hell away from us,” said Elmer’s confidant, Mr. T. J. Rigg, when he was consulted.

“Say, that’s great. How liberalism leads to theism. Fine! Wait till Mr. Frank Shallard opens his mouth and puts his foot
in it again!” said the Reverend Elmer Gantry. “Say, I wonder how we could get a report of his sermons? The poor fish isn’t
important enough so’s they very often report his junk in the papers.”

“I’ll take care of that. I’ve got a girl in my office, good fast worker, that I’ll have go and take down all his sermons.
They’ll just think she’s practising stenography.”

“Well, by golly, that’s one good use for sermons. Ha, ha, ha!” said Elmer.

“Yes, sir, by golly, found at last. Ha, ha, ha!” said Mr. T. J. Rigg.

In less than a month Frank maddened the citizens of Zenith by asserting, in the pulpit, that though he was in favor of
temperance, he was not for Prohibition; that the methods of the Anti–Saloon League were those of a lumber lobby.

Elmer had his chance.

He advertised that he would speak on “Fake Preachers—and Who They Are.”

In his sermon he said that Frank Shallard (by name) was a liar, a fool, an ingrate whom he had tried to help in seminary,
a thief who was trying to steal Christ from an ailing world.

Elmer saw to it—T. J. Rigg arranged a foursome—that he played golf with William Dollinger Styles that week.

“I was awfully sorry, Mr. Styles,” he said, “to feel it my duty to jump on your pastor, Mr. Shallard, last Sunday, but
when a fellow stands up and makes fun of Jesus Christ—well, it’s time to forget mercy!”

“I thought you were kind of hard on him. I didn’t hear his sermon myself—I’m a church-member, but it does seem like
things pile up so at the office that I have to spend almost every Sunday morning there. But from what they’ve told me, he
wasn’t so wild.”

“Then you don’t think Shallard is practically an atheist?”

“Why, no! Nice decent fellow—”

“Mr. Styles, do you realize that all over town people are wondering how a man like you can give his support to a man like
Shallard? Do you realize that not only the ministers but also laymen are saying that Shallard is secretly both an agnostic
and a socialist, though he’s afraid to come out and admit it? I hear it everywhere. People are afraid to tell you. Jiminy,
I’m kind of scared of you myself! Feel I’ve got a lot of nerve!”

“Well, I ain’t so fierce,” said Mr. Styles, very pleased.

“Anyway, I’d hate to have you think I was sneaking around damning Shallard behind his back. Why don’t you do this? You
and some of the other Dorchester deacons have Shallard for lunch or dinner, and have me there, and let me put a few
questions to him. I’ll talk to the fellow straight! Do you feel you can afford to be known as tolerating an infidel in your
church? Oughtn’t you to make him come out from under cover and admit what he thinks? If I’m wrong, I’ll apologize to you and
to him, and you can call me all the kinds of nosey, meddling, cranky, interfering fool you want to!”

“Well—He seems kind of a nice fellow.” Mr. Styles was uncomfortable. “But if you’re right about him being really an
infidel, don’t know’s I could stand that.”

“How’d it be if you and some of your deacons and Shallard came and had dinner with me in a private room at the Athletic
Club next Friday evening?”

“Well, all right—”

Frank was so simple as to lose his temper when Elmer had bullied him, roared at him, bulked at him, long enough, with
Frank’s own deacons accepting Elmer as an authority. He was irritated out of all caution, and he screamed back at Elmer that
he did not accept Jesus Christ as divine; that he was not sure of a future life; that he wasn’t even certain of a personal
God.

Mr. William Dollinger Styles snapped, “Then just why, Mr. Shallard, don’t you get out of the ministry before you’re
kicked out?”

“Because I’m not yet sure—Though I do think our present churches are as absurd as a belief in witchcraft, yet I believe
there could be a church free of superstition, helpful to the needy, and giving people that mystic something stronger than
reason, that sense of being uplifted in common worship of an unknowable power for good. Myself, I’d be lonely with nothing
but bleak debating-societies. I think—at least I still think—that for many souls there is this need of worship, even of
beautiful ceremonial—”

“‘Mystic need of worship!’ ‘Unknowable power for good!’ Words, words, words! Milk and water! THAT, when you have the
glorious and certain figure of Christ Jesus to worship and follow!” bellowed Elmer. “Pardon me, gentlemen, for intruding,
but it makes me, not as a preacher but just as a humble and devout Christian, sick to my stomach to hear a fellow feel that
he knows so blame’ much he’s able to throw out of the window the Christ that the whole civilized world has believed in for
countless centuries! And try to replace him with a lot of gassy phrases! Excuse me, Mr. Styles, but after all, religion is a
serious business, and if we’re going to call ourselves Christians at all, we have to bear testimony to the proven fact of
God. Forgive me.”

“It’s quite all right, Dr. Gantry. I know just how you feel,” said Styles. “And while I’m no authority on religion, I
feel the same way you do, and I guess these other gentlemen do, too. . . . Now, Shallard, you’re entitled to your own views,
but not in our pulpit! Why don’t you just resign before we kick you out?”

“You can’t kick me out! It takes the whole church to do that!”

“The whole church’ll damn well do it, you watch ’em!” said Deacon William Dollinger Styles.

“What are we going to do, dear?” Bess said wearily. “I’ll stand by you, of course, but let’s be practical. Don’t you
think it would make less trouble if you did resign?”

“I’ve done nothing for which to resign! I’ve led a thoroughly decent life. I haven’t lied or been indecent or stolen.
I’ve preached imagination, happiness, justice, seeking for the truth. I’m no sage, Heaven knows, but I’ve given my people a
knowledge that there are such things as ethnology and biology, that there are books like ‘Ethan Frome’ and ‘Père Goriot’ and
Tono–Bungay’ and Renan’s ‘Jesus,’ that there is nothing wicked in looking straight at life—”

“Dear, I said PRACTICAL!”

“Oh, thunder, I don’t know. I think I can get a job in the Charity Organization Society here—the general secretary
happens to be pretty liberal.”

“I hate to have us leave the church entirely. I’m sort of at home there. Why not see if they’d like to have you in the
Unitarian Church?”

“Too respectable. Scared. Same old sanctified phrases I’m trying to get rid of—and won’t ever quite get rid of, I’m
afraid.”

A meeting of the church body had been called to decide on Frank’s worthiness, and the members had been informed by Styles
that Frank was attacking all religion. Instantly a number of the adherents who had been quite unalarmed by what they
themselves had heard in the pulpit perceived that Frank was a dangerous fellow and more than likely to injure omnipotent
God.

Before the meeting, one woman, who remained fond of him, fretted to Frank, “Oh, can’t you understand what a dreadful
thing you’re doing to question the divinity of Christ and all? I’m afraid you’re going to hurt religion permanently. If you
could open your eyes and see—if you could only understand what my religion has meant to me in times of despair! I don’t know
what I would have done during my typhoid without that consolation! You’re a bright, smart man when you let yourself be. If
you’d only go and have a good talk with Dr. G. Prosper Edwards. He’s an older man than you, and he’s a doctor of divinity,
and he has such huge crowds at Pilgrim Church, and I’m sure he could show you where you’re wrong and make everything
perfectly clear to you.”

Frank’s sister, married now to an Akron lawyer, came to stay with them. They had been happy, Frank and she, in the tepid
but amiable house of their minister-father; they had played at church, with dolls and salt-cellars for congregation; books
were always about them, natural to them; and at their father’s table they had heard doctors, preachers, lawyers,
politicians, talk of high matters.

The sister bubbled to Bess, “You know, Frank doesn’t believe half he says! He just likes to show off. He’s a real good
Christian at heart, if he only knew it. Why, he was such a good Christian boy— he led the B.Y.P.U.—he COULDN’T have drifted
away from Christ into all this nonsense that nobody takes seriously except a lot of long-haired dirty cranks! And he’ll
break his father’s heart! I’m going to have a good talk with that young man, and bring him to his senses!”

On the street Frank met the great Dr. McTiger, pastor of the Royal Ridge Presbyterian Church.

Dr. McTiger had been born in Scotland, graduated at Edinburgh, and he secretly—not too secretly—despised all American
universities and seminaries and their alumni. He was a large, impatient, brusque man, renowned for the length of his
sermons.

“I hear, young man,” he shouted at Frank, “that you have read one whole book on the pre-Christian mysteries and decided
that our doctrines are secondhand and that you are now going to destroy the church. You should have more pity! With the loss
of a profound intellect like yours, my young friend, I should doubt if the church can stagger on! It’s a pity that after
discovering scholarship you didn’t go on and get enough of that same scholarship to perceive that by the wondrous
beneficence of God’s mercy the early church was led to combine many alien factors in the one perfection of the Christian
brotherhood! I don’t know whether it’s ignorance of church history or lack of humor that chiefly distinguishes you, my young
friend! Go and sin no more!”

From Andrew Pengilly came a scrawled, shaky letter begging Frank to stand true and not deliver his appointed flock to the
devil. That hurt.

The first church business meeting did not settle the question of Frank’s remaining. He was questioned about his
doctrines, and he shocked them by being candid, but the men whom he had helped, the women whom he had consoled in sickness,
the fathers who had gone to him when their daughters “had gotten into trouble,” stood by him for all the threats of
Styles.

A second meeting would have to be called before they took a vote.

When Elmer read of this, he galloped to T. J. Rigg. “Here’s our chance!” he gloated. “If the first meeting had kicked
Frank out, Styles might have stayed with their church, though I do think he likes my brand of theology and my Republican
politics. But why don’t you go to him now, T. J., and hint around about how his church has insulted him?”

“All right, Elmer. Another soul saved. Brother Styles has still got the first dollar he ever earned, but maybe we can get
ten cents of it away from him for the new church. Only—Him being so much richer than I, I hope you won’t go to him for
spiritual advice and inspiration, instead of me.”

“You bet I won’t, T. J.! Nobody has ever accused Elmer Gantry of being disloyal to his friends! My only hope is that your
guidance of this church has been of some value to you yourself.”

“Well—yes—in a way. I’ve had three brother Methodist clients from Wellspring come to me—two burglary and one forgery. But
it’s more that I just like to make the wheels go round.”

Mr. Rigg was saying, an hour later, to Mr. William Dollinger Styles, “If you came and joined us, I know you’d like
it—you’ve seen what a fine, upstanding, two-fisted, one-hundred-percent he-man Dr. Gantry is. Absolutely sound about
business. And it would be a swell rebuke to your church for not accepting your advice. But we hate to invite you to come
over to us—in fact Dr. Gantry absolutely forbade me to see you—for fear you’ll think it was just because you’re rich.”

For three days Styles shied, then he was led, trembling, up to the harness.

Afterward, Dr. G. Prosper Edwards of Pilgrim Congregational said to his spouse, “Why on earth didn’t WE think of going
right after Styles and inviting him to join us? It was so simple we never even thought of it. I really do feel quite cross.
Why didn’t YOU think of it?”

The second church meeting was postponed. It looked to Elmer as though Frank would be able to stay on at Dorchester
Congregational and thus defy Elmer as the spiritual and moral leader of the city.

Elmer acted fearlessly.

In sermon after sermon he spoke of “that bunch of atheists out there at Dorchester.” Frank’s parishioners were alarmed.
They were forced to explain (only they were never quite sure what they were explaining) to customers, to neighbors, to
fellow lodge-members. They felt disgraced, and so it was that a second meeting was called.

Now Frank had fancied a spectacular resignation. He heard himself, standing before a startled audience, proclaiming, “I
have decided that no one in this room, including your pastor, believes in the Christian religion. Not one of us would turn
the other cheek. Not one of us would sell all that he has and give to the poor. Not one of us would give his coat to some
man who took his overcoat. Every one of us lays up all the treasure he can. We don’t practise the Christian religion. We
don’t intend to practise it. Therefore, we don’t believe in it. Therefore I resign, and I advise you to quit lying and
disband.”

He saw himself, then, tramping down the aisle among his gaping hearers, and leaving the church forever.

But: “I’m too tired. Too miserable. And why hurt the poor bewildered souls? And—I am so tired.”

He stood up at the beginning of the second meeting and said gently, “I had refused to resign. I still feel I have an
honest right to an honest pulpit. But I am setting brother against brother. I am not a Cause—I am only a friend. I have
loved you and the work, the sound of friends singing together, the happiness of meeting on leisurely Sunday mornings. This I
give up. I resign, and I wish I could say, ‘God be with you and bless you all.’ But the good Christians have taken God and
made him into a menacing bully, and I cannot even say ‘God bless you,’ during this last moment, in a life given altogether
to religion, when I shall ever stand in a pulpit.”

Elmer Gantry, in his next sermon, said that he was so broad-minded that he would be willing to receive an Infidel
Shallard in his church, providing he repented.