“My organization,” said Mr. Tillish, “could not think of joining in a wild witch-hunt, any more than we could in indiscriminate charity. For both the poverty-laden and the vicious—” He made a little whistling between his beautiful but false teeth, and went on with frigid benignancy. “For all such, the truth is clearly stated in ‘Science and Health’ and made public in all our meetings—the truth that both vice and poverty, like sickness, are unreal, are errors, to be got rid of by understanding that God is All-in-all; that disease, death, evil, sin deny good, omnipotent God, life. Well! If these so-called sufferers do not care to take the truth when it is freely offered them, is that our fault? I understand your sympathy with the unfortunate, but you are not going to put out ignorance by fire.”
“Golly, let me crawl too,” chuckled Rabbi Amos. “If you want to get a vice-crusading rabbi, get one of these smart-aleck young liberals from the Cincinnati school—and they’ll mostly have too much sympathy with the sinners to help you either! Anyway, my congregation is so horribly respectable that if their rabbi did anything but sit in his study and look learned, they’d kick him out.”
“And I,” said Dr. Willis Fortune Tate, of St. Colomb’s Episcopal, “if you will permit me to say so, can regard such a project as our acting like policemen and dealing with these malefactors in person as nothing short of vulgar, as well as useless. I understand your high ideals, Dr. Gantry—”
“Mr. Gantry.”
“—Mr. Gantry, and I honor you for them, and respect your energy, but I beg you to consider how the press and the ordinary laity, with their incurably common and untrained minds, would misunderstand.”
“I’m afraid I must agree with Dr. Tate,” said the Congregational Dr. G. Prosper Edwards, in the manner of the Pilgrim’s Monument agreeing with Westminister Abbey.
And as for the others, they said they really must “take time and think it over,” and they all got away as hastily and cordially as they could.
Elmer walked with his friend and pillar, Mr. T. J. Rigg, toward the dentist’s office in which even an ordinary minister of God would shortly take on strangely normal writhings and gurglings.
“They’re a fine bunch of scared prophets, a noble lot of apostolic ice-cream cones!” protested Mr. Rigg. “Hard luck, Brother Elmer! I’m sorry. It really is good stuff, this vice-crusading. Oh, I don’t suppose it makes the slightest difference in the amount of vice—and I don’t know that it ought to make any. Got to give fellows that haven’t our advantages some chance to let off steam. But it does get the church a lot of attention. I’m mighty proud of the way we’re building up Wellspring Church again. Kind of a hobby with me. But makes me indignant, these spiritual cold-storage eggs not supporting you!”
But as he looked up he saw that Elmer was grinning.
“I’m not worried, T. J. Fact, I’m tickled to death. First place, I’ve scared ’em off the subject of vice. Before they get back to preaching about it, I’ll have the whole subject absolutely patented for our church. And now they won’t have the nerve to imitate me if I do do this personal crusading stunt. Third, I can preach against ’em! And I will! You watch me! Oh, not mention any names—no comeback—but tell ’em how I pleaded with a gang of preachers to take practical methods to end immorality, and they were all scared!”
“Fine!” said the benevolent trustee. “We’ll let ’em know that Wellspring is the one church that’s really following the gospel.”
“We sure will! Now listen, T. J.: if you trustees will stand for the expense, I want to get a couple of good private detectives or something, and have ’em dig up a lot of real addresses of places that are vicious—there must be some of ’em—and get some evidence. Then I’ll jump on the police for not having pinched these places. I’ll say they’re so wide open that the police must know of ’em. And probably that’s true, too. Man! A sensation! Run our disclosures every Sunday evening for a month! Make the chief of police try to answer us in the press!”
“Good stuff! Well, I know a fellow—he was a government man, prohibition agent, and got fired for boozing and blackmail. He’s not exactly a double-crosser, lot straighter than most prohibition agents, but still I think he could slip us some real addresses. I’ll have him see you.”
IV
When from his pulpit the Reverend Elmer Gantry announced that the authorities of Zenith were “deliberately conniving in protected vice,” and that he could give the addresses and ownerships of sixteen brothels, eleven blind tigers, and two agencies for selling cocaine and heroin, along with an obscene private burlesque show so dreadful that he could only hint at the nature of its program, when he attacked the chief of police and promised to give more detailed complaints next Sunday, then the town exploded.
There were front-page newspaper stories, yelping replies by the mayor and chief of police, re-replies from Elmer, interviews with everybody, and a full-page account of white slavery in Chicago. In clubs and offices, in church societies and the backrooms of “soft-drink stands,” there was a blizzard of talk. Elmer had to be protected against hundreds of callers, telephoners, letter writers. His assistant, Sidney Webster, and Miss Bundle, the secretary, could not keep the mob from him, and he hid out in T. J. Rigg’s house, accessible to no one, except to newspaper reporters who for any Christian and brotherly reason might care to see him.
For the second Sunday evening of his jeremiad, the church was full half an hour before opening-time, standing-room was taken even to the back of the lobby, hundreds clamored at the closed doors.
He gave the exact addresses of
