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 Chicago University 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 knockdown-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 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 workingmen in your church turning dangerous as long as you’ve got that tightfisted 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 rundown 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 pickpockets 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 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, or 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!”
Chapter XXIV
I
It was during his inquiry about clerical allies and rivals—they were the same thing—that Elmer learned that two
