“I try to! And let me tell you, young fellow, I’ve got a few of ’em far enough along so they’re having the sense to leave me and my evangelical church and go off to the Unitarians or stay away from church altogether—thus, Bess darling, depriving my wife and babes of a few more pennies! But seriously, Phil—”
“A man always says ‘But seriously’ when he feels the previous arguments haven’t been so good yet!”
“Maybe. But anyway, what I mean to say is: Of course my liberalism is all foolishness! Do you know why my people stand for it? They’re not enough interested to realize what I’m saying! If I had a successor who was a fundamentalist, they’d like him just as well or better, and they’d go back a-whooping to the sacred hellfire that I’ve coaxed ’em out of. They don’t believe I mean it when I take a shot at the fear of eternal punishment, and the whole magic and taboo system of worshiping the Bible and the ministry, and all the other skull-decorated vestiges of horror there are in so-called Christianity! They don’t know it! Partly it’s because they’ve been trained not to believe anything much they hear in sermons. But also it’s my fault. I’m not aggressive. I ought to jump around like a lunatic or a popular evangelist, and shout, ‘D’ you understand? When I say that most of your religious opinions are bunk, why, what I mean is, they’re bunk!’ I’ve never been violently enough in earnest to be beaten for the sake of the Lord our God! … Not yet!”
“Hah, there I’ve got you, Frank! Tickles me to see you try to be the village atheist! ‘For the sake of the Lord’ you just said. And how often I’ve heard you say at parting ‘God bless you’—and you meant it! Oh, no, you don’t believe in Christ! Not any more than the Pope at Rome!”
“I suppose that if I said ‘God damn you,’ that would also prove that I was a devout Christian! Oh, Phil, I can’t understand how a man as honest as you, as really fond of helping people—and of tolerating them!—can stand being classed with a lot of your fellow preachers and not even kick about it! Think of your going on enduring being a fellow Methodist preacher right in the same town with Elmer Gantry and not standing up in ministers’ meeting and saying, ‘Either he gets out or I do!’ ”
“I know! You idiot, don’t you suppose those of us that are halfway decent suffer from being classed with Gantry, and that we hate him more than you do? But even if Elmer is rather on the swine side, what of it? Would you condemn a fine aspiring institution, full of broad-gauged, earnest fellows, because one of them was a washout?”
“One? Just one? I’ll admit there aren’t many, not very many, hogs like Gantry in your church, or any other, but let me give my loving fraternal opinions of a few others of your splendid Methodist fellows! Bishop Toomis is a gasbag. Chester Brown, with his candles and chanting, he’s merely an Episcopalian who’d go over to the Episcopal church if he weren’t afraid he’d lose too much salary in starting again—just as a good share of the Anglo-Catholic Episcopalians are merely Catholics who’d go over to Rome if they weren’t afraid of losing social caste. Otto Hickenlooper, with his institutions—the rich are so moved by his charities that they hand him money and Otto gets praised for spending that money. Fine vicious circle. And think of some poor young idiot studying art, wasting his time and twisting his ideas, at Otto’s strictly moral art class, where the teacher is chosen more for his opinions on the sacraments than for his knowledge of composition.”
“But, Frank, I’ve said all—”
“And the sound, the scholarly, the well-balanced Dr. Mahlon Potts! Oh, he’s a perfectly good man, and not a fanatic. Doesn’t believe that evolution is a fiendish doctrine. The only trouble with him—as with most famous preachers—is that he hasn’t the slightest notion what human beings are like. He’s insulated; has been ever since he became a preacher. He goes to the deathbeds of prostitutes (but not very often, I’ll bet!) but he can’t understand that perfectly decent husbands and wives often can’t get along because of sexual incompatibility.
“Potts lives in a library; he gets his idea of human motives out of George Eliot and Margaret Deland, and his ideas of economics out of editorials in the Advocate, and his idea as to what he really is accomplishing out of the flattery of his Ladies’ Aid! He’s a much worse criminal than Gantry! I imagine Elmer has some desire to be a good fellow and share his swag, but Dr. Potts wants to make over an entire world of living, bleeding, sweating, loving, fighting human beings into the likeness of Dr. Potts—of Dr. Potts taking his afternoon nap and snoring under a shelf of books about the doctrines of the Ante-Nicene Fathers!”
“Golly, you simply love us! And I suppose you think I admire all these fellows! Why, they regard me as a heretic, from the bishop down,” said Philip McGarry.
“And yet you stay with them!”
“Any
