“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 schoolmasters. 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 crybabies 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, dumb, 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
