Elmer Gantry (9 page)

The state of Winnemac lies between Pittsburgh and Chicago, and in Winnemac, perhaps a hundred miles south of the city of
Zenith, is Babylon, a town which suggests New England more than the Middle West. Large elms shade it, there are white
pillars beyond lilac bushes, and round about the town is a serenity unknown on the gusty prairies.

Here is Mizpah Theological Seminary, of the Northern Baptists. (There is a Northern and Southern convention of this
distinguished denomination, because before the Civil War the Northern Baptists proved by the Bible, unanswerably, that
slavery was wrong; and the Southern Baptists proved by the Bible, irrefutably, that slavery was the will of God.)

The three buildings of the seminary are attractive; brick with white cupolas, green blinds at the small-paned wide
windows. But within they are bare, with hand-rubbings along the plaster walls, with portraits of missionaries and ragged
volumes of sermons.

The large structure is the dormitory, Elizabeth J. Schmutz Hall— known to the less reverent as Smut Hall.

Here lived Elmer Gantry, now ordained but completing the last year of work for his Bachelor of Divinity degree, a
commodity of value in bargaining with the larger churches.

There were only sixteen left now of his original class of thirty-five. The others had dropped out, for rural preaching,
life insurance, or a melancholy return to plowing. There was no one with whom he wanted to live, and he dwelt sulkily in a
single room, with a cot, a Bible, a portrait of his mother, and with a copy of “What a Young Man Ought to Know,” concealed
inside his one starched pulpit shirt.

He disliked most of his class. They were too rustic or too pious, too inquisitive about his monthly trips to the city of
Monarch or simply too dull. Elmer liked the company of what he regarded as intellectual people. He never understood what
they were saying, but to hear them saying it made him feel superior.

The group which he most frequented gathered in the room of Frank Shallard and Don Pickens, the large corner room on the
second floor of Smut Hall.

It was not an esthetic room. Though Frank Shallard might have come to admire pictures, great music, civilized furniture,
he had been trained to regard them as worldly, and to content himself with art which “presented a message,” to regard “Les
Miserables” as superior because the bishop was a kind man, and “The Scarlet Letter” as a poor book because the heroine was
sinful and the author didn’t mind.

The walls were of old plaster, cracked and turned deathly gray, marked with the blood of mosquitoes and bed-bugs slain in
portentous battles long ago by theologians now gone forth to bestow their thus uplifted visions on a materialistic world.
The bed was a skeleton of rusty iron bars, sagging in the center, with a comforter which was not too clean. Trunks were in
the corners, and the wardrobe was a row of hooks behind a calico curtain. The grass matting was slowly dividing into
separate strands, and under the study table it had been scuffed through to the cheap pine flooring.

The only pictures were Frank’s steel engraving of Roger Williams, his framed and pansy-painted copy of “Pippa Passes,”
and Don Pickens’ favorite, a country church by winter moonlight, with tinsel snow, which sparkled delightfully. The only
untheological books were Frank’s poets: Wordsworth, Longfellow, Tennyson, Browning, in standard volumes, fine-printed and
dismal, and one really dangerous papist document, his “Imitation of Christ,” about which there was argument at least once a
week.

In his room squatting on straight chairs, the trunks, and the bed, on a November evening in 1905, were five young men
besides Elmer and Eddie Fislinger. Eddie did not really belong to the group, but he persisted in following Elmer, feeling
that not even yet was everything quite right with the brother.

“A preacher has got to be just as husky and pack just as good a wallop as a prize-fighter. He ought to be able to throw
out any roughneck that tries to interrupt his meetings, and still more, strength makes such a hit with the women in his
congregation—of course I don’t mean it any wrong way,” said Wallace Umstead.

Wallace was a student-instructor, head of the minute seminary gymnasium and “director of physical culture”; a young man
who had a military mustache and who did brisk things on horizontal bars. He was a state university B.A. and graduate of a
physical-training school. He was going into Y.M.C.A. work when he should have a divinity degree, and he was fond of saying,
“Oh, I’m still one of the boys, you know, even if I am a prof.”

“That’s right,” agreed Elmer Gantry. “Say, I had—I was holding a meeting at Grauten, Kansas, last summer, and there was a
big boob that kept interrupting, so I just jumped down from the platform and went up to him, and he says, ‘Say, Parson,’ he
says, ‘Can you tell us what the Almighty wants us to do about prohibition, considering he told Paul to take some wine for
his stomach’s sake?’ ‘I don’t know as I can,’ I says, ‘but you want to remember he also commanded us to cast out devils!’
and I yanked that yahoo out of his seat and threw him out on his ear, and say, the whole crowd—well, there weren’t so
awfully many there, but they certainly did give him the ha-ha! You bet. And to be husky makes a hit with the whole
congregation, men’s well as women. But there’s more’n one high-toned preacher that got his pulpit because the deacons felt
he could lick ’em. Of course praying and all that is all O.K., but you got to be practical! We’re here to do good, but first
you have to cinch a job that you can do good in!”

“You’re commercial!” protested Eddie Fislinger, and Frank Shallard: “Good heavens, Gantry, is that all your religion
means to you?”

“Besides,” said Horace Carp, “you have the wrong angle. It isn’t mere brute force that appeals to women—to congregations.
It’s a beautiful voice. I don’t envy you your bulk, Elmer—besides, you’re going to get fat—”

“I am like hell!”

“—but what I could do with that voice of yours! I’d have ’em all weeping! I’d read ’em poetry from the pulpit!”

Horace Carp was the one High Churchman in the Seminary. He was a young man who resembled a water spaniel, who concealed
Saints’ images, incense, and a long piece of scarlet brocade in his room, and who wore a purple velvet smoking-jacket. He
was always raging because his father, a wholesale plumber and pious, had threatened to kick him out if he went to an
Episcopal seminary instead of a Baptist fortress.

“Yes, you prob’ly would read ’em poetry!” said Elmer. “That’s the trouble with you high-falutin’ guys. You think you can
get people by a lot of poetry and junk. What gets ’em and holds ’em and brings ’em to their pews every Sunday is the
straight gospel—and it don’t hurt one bit to scare ’em into being righteous with the good old-fashioned Hell!”

“You bet—providing you encourage ’em to keep their bodies in swell shape, too,” condescended Wallace Umstead. “Well, I
don’t want to talk as a prof—after all I’m glad I can still remain just one of the Boys—but you aren’t going to develop any
very big horse-power in your praying tomorrow morning if you don’t get your sleep. And me to my little downy! G’night!”

At the closing of the door, Harry Zenz, the seminary iconoclast, yawned, “Wallace is probably the finest slice of tripe
in my wide clerical experience. Thank God, he’s gone! Now we can be natural and talk dirty!”

“And yet,” complained Frank Shallard, “you encourage him to stay and talk about his pet methods of exercise! Don’t you
ever tell the truth, Harry?”

“Never carelessly. Why, you idiot, I want Wallace to run and let the dean know what an earnest worker in the vineyard I
am. Frank, you’re a poor innocent. I suspect you actually believe some of the dope they teach us here. And yet you’re a man
of some reading. You’re the only person in Mizpah except myself who could appreciate a paragraph of Huxley. Lord, how I pity
you when you get into the ministry! Of course, Fislinger here is a grocery clerk, Elmer is a ward politician, Horace is a
dancing master—”

He was drowned beneath a surf of protests, not too jocose and friendly.

Harry Zenz was older than the others—thirty-two at least. He was plump, almost completely bald, and fond of sitting
still; and he could look profoundly stupid. He was a man of ill-assorted but astonishing knowledge; and in the church ten
miles from Mizpah which he had regularly supplied for two years he was considered a man of humorless learning and bloodless
piety. He was a complete and cheerful atheist, but he admitted it only to Elmer Gantry and Horace Carp. Elmer regarded him
as a sort of Jim Lefferts, but he was as different from Jim as pork fat from a crystal. He hid his giggling atheism—Jim
flourished his; he despised women—Jim had a disillusioned pity for the Juanita Klauzels of the world; he had an
intellect—Jim had only cynical guesses.

Zenz interrupted their protests:

“So you’re a bunch of Erasmuses! You ought to know. And there’s no hypocrisy in what we teach and preach! We’re a
specially selected group of Parsifals—beautiful to the eye and stirring to the ear and overflowing with knowledge of what
God said to the Holy Ghost in camera at 9:16 last Wednesday morning. We’re all just rarin’ to go out and preach the precious
Baptist doctrine of ‘Get ducked or duck.’ We’re wonders. We admit it. And people actually sit and listen to us, and don’t
choke! I suppose they’re overwhelmed by our nerve! And we have to have nerve, or we’d never dare to stand in a pulpit again.
We’d quit, and pray God to forgive us for having stood up there and pretended that we represent God, and that we can explain
what we ourselves say are the unexplainable mysteries! But I still claim that there are preachers who haven’t our holiness.
Why is it that the clergy are so given to sex crimes?”

“That’s not true!” from Eddie Fislinger.

“Don’t talk that way!” Don Pickens begged. Don was Frank’s roommate: a slight youth, so gentle, so affectionate, that
even that raging lion of righteousness, Dean Trosper, was moved to spare him.

Harry Zenz patted his arm. “Oh, you, Don—you’ll always be a monk. But if you don’t believe it, Fislinger, look at the
statistics of the five thousand odd crimes committed by clergymen—that is those who got caught—since the eighties, and note
the percentage of sex offenses—rape, incest, bigamy, enticing young girls—oh, a lovely record!”

Elmer was yawning, “Oh, God, I do get so sick of you fellows yammering and arguing and discussing. All perfectly
simple—maybe we preachers aren’t perfect: don’t pretend to be; but we do a lot of good.”

“That’s right,” said Eddie. “But maybe it is true that—The snares of sex are so dreadful that even ministers of the
gospel get trapped. And the perfectly simple solution is continence—just take it out in prayer and good hard exercise.”

“Oh, sure, Eddie, you bet; what a help you’re going to be to the young men in your church,” purred Harry Zenz.

Frank Shallard was meditating unhappily. “Just why are we going to be preachers, anyway? Why are you, Harry, if you think
we’re all such liars?”

“Oh, not liars, Frank—just practical, as Elmer put it. Me, it’s easy. I’m not ambitious. I don’t want money enough to
hustle for it. I like to sit and read. I like intellectual acrobatics and no work. And you can have all that in the
ministry—unless you’re one of these chumps that get up big institutional outfits and work themselves to death for
publicity.”

“You certainly have a fine high view of the ministry!” growled Elmer.

“Well, all right, what’s your fine high purpose in becoming a Man of God, Brother Gantry?”

“Well, I—Rats, it’s perfectly clear. Preacher can do a lot of good—give help and—And explain religion.”

“I wish you’d explain it to me! Especially I want to know to what extent are Christian symbols descended from indecent
barbaric symbols?”

“Oh, you make me tired!”

Horace Carp fluttered, “Of course none of you consecrated windjammers ever think of the one raison d’être of the church,
which is to add beauty to the barren lives of the common people!”

“Yeh! It certainly must make the common people feel awfully common to hear Brother Gantry spiel about the errors of
supralapsarianism!”

“I never preach about any such a doggone thing!” Elmer protested. “I just give ’em a good helpful sermon, with some jokes
sprinkled in to make it interesting and some stuff about the theater or something that’ll startle ’em a little and wake ’em
up, and help ’em to lead better and fuller daily lives.”

“Oh, do you, dearie!” said Zenz. “My error. I thought you probably gave ’em a lot of helpful hints about the
innascibilitas attribute and the res sacramenti. Well, Frank, why did you become a theologue?”

“I can’t tell you when you put it sneeringly. I believe there are mystic experiences which you can follow only if you are
truly set apart.”

“Well, I know why I came here,” said Don Pickens. “My dad sent me!”

“So did mine!” complained Horace Carp. “But what I can’t understand is: Why are any of us in an ole Baptist school?
Horrible denomination—all these moldy barns of churches, and people coughing illiterate hymns, and long-winded preachers
always springing a bright new idea like ‘All the world needs to solve its problems is to get back to the gospel of Jesus
Christ.’ The only church is the Episcopal! Music! Vestments! Stately prayers! Lovely architecture! Dignity! Authority!
Believe me, as soon as I can make the break, I’m going to switch over to the Episcopalians. And then I’ll have a social
position, and be able to marry a nice rich girl.”

“No, you’re wrong,” said Zenz. “The Baptist Church is the only denomination worth while, except possibly the
Methodist.”

“I’m glad to hear you say that,” marveled Eddie.

“Because the Baptists and the Methodists have all the numbskulls— except those that belong to the Catholic Church and the
henhouse sects—and so even you, Horace, can get away with being a prophet. There are some intelligent people in the
Episcopal and Congregational Churches, and a few of the Campbellite flocks, and they check up on you. Of course all
Presbyterians are half-wits, too, but they have a standard doctrine, and they can trap you into a heresy trial. But in the
Baptist and Methodist Churches, man! There’s the berth for philosophers like me and hoot-owls like you, Eddie! All you have
to do with Baptists and Methodists, as Father Carp suggests—”