“Oh, no. Don’t think I give all my love to the Methodists. I take them only because they’re your particular breed. My own Congregationalists, the Baptists who taught me that immersion is more important than social justice, the Presbyterians, the Campbellites, the whole lot—oh, I love ’em all about equally!”
“And what about yourself? What about me?”
“You know what I think of myself—a man too feeble to stand up and risk being called a crank or a vile atheist! And about you, my young liberal friend, I was just saving you to the last in my exhibit of Methodist parsons! You’re the worst of the lot!”
“Oh, now, Frank!” yawned Bess.
She was sleepy. How preachers did talk! Did plasterers and authors and stockbrokers sit up half the night discussing their souls, fretting as to whether plastering or authorship or stock-broking was worth while?
She yawned again, kissed Frank, patted Philip’s cheek, and made exit with, “You may be feeble, Frank, but you certainly can talk a strong, rugged young wife to death!”
Frank, usually to be cowed by her jocose grumbling and Philip’s friendly jabs, was tonight afire and unquenchable.
“Yes, you’re the worst of all, Phil! You do know something of human beings. You’re not like old Potts, who’s always so informative about how much sin there is in the world and always so astonished when he meets an actual sinner. And you don’t think it matters a hang whether a seeker after decency gets ducked—otherwise baptized—or not. And yet when you get up in the pulpit, from the way you wallow in prayer people believe that you’re just as chummy with the Deity as Potts or Gantry. Your liberalism never lasts you more than from my house to the streetcar. You talk about the golden streets of Heaven and the blessed peace of the hereafter, and yet you’ve admitted to me, time and again, that you haven’t the slightest idea whether there is any personal life after death. You talk about Redemption, and the Sacrament of the Lord’s Supper, and how God helps this nation to win a war and hits that other with a flood, and a lot more things that you don’t believe privately at all.”
“Oh, I know! Thunder! But you yourself—you pray in church.”
“Not really. For over a year now I’ve never addressed a prayer to any definite deity. I say something like ‘Let us in meditation, forgetting the worries of daily life, join our spirits in longing for the coming of perpetual peace’—something like that.”
“Well, it sounds like a pretty punk prayer to me, Frankie! The only trouble with you is, you feel you’re called on to rewrite the Lord’s Prayer for him!”
Philip laughed gustily, and slapped Frank’s shoulder.
“Damn it, don’t be so jocular! I know it’s a poor prayer. It’s terrible. Nebulous. Meaningless. Like a barker at the New Thought sideshow. I don’t mind your disliking it, but I do mind your trying to be humorous! Why is it that you lads who defend the church are so facetious when you really get down to discussing the roots of religion?”
“I know, Frank. Effect of too much preaching. But seriously: Yes, I do say things in the pulpit that I don’t mean literally. What of it? People understand these symbols; they’ve been brought up with them, they’re comfortable with them. My object in preaching is to teach the art of living as far as I can; to encourage my people—and myself—to be kind, to be honest, to be clean, to be courageous, to love God and their fellow-men; and the whole experience of the church shows that those lessons can best be taught through such really noble concepts as salvation and the presence of the Holy Ghost and Heaven and so on.”
“Hm. Does it? Has the church ever tried anything else? And just what the dickens do you mean by ‘being clean’ and ‘being honest’ and ‘teaching the art of living’? Lord, how we preachers do love to use phrases that don’t mean anything! But suppose you were perfectly right. Nevertheless, by using the same theological slang as a Gantry or a Toomis or a Potts, you unconsciously make everybody believe that you think and act like them too.”
“Nonsense! Not that I’m particularly drawn by the charms of any of these fellow sages. I’d rather be wrecked on a desert island with you, you old atheist!—you darned old fool! But suppose they were as bad as you think. I still wouldn’t feel it was my duty to foul my own nest, to make this grand old Methodist Church, with its saints and heroes like Wesley and Asbury and Quayle and Cartwright and McDowell and McConnell—why, the tears almost come to my eyes when I think of men like that! Look here: Suppose you were at war, in a famous regiment. Suppose a lot of your fellow soldiers, even the present commander of the regiment himself, were rotters—cowards. Would you feel called on to desert? Or to fight all the harder to make up for their faults?”
“Phil, next to the humorous ragging I spoke of, and the use of stale phrases, the worst cancer in religious discussion is the use of the metaphor! The Protestant church is not a regiment. You’re not a soldier. The soldier has to fight when and as he’s told. You have absolute liberty, outside of a few moral and doctrinal compulsions.”
“Ah-hah, now I’ve got you, my logical young friend! If we have that liberty, why aren’t you willing to stay in the church? Oh, Frank, Frank, you are such a fool! I know that you long for righteousness. Can’t you see that you can get it best by staying in the church, liberalizing from within, instead of running away and leaving the people to the ministrations of the Gantrys?”
“I know. I’ve been thinking just that all these years. That’s why I’m still a preacher! But I’m coming to believe that it’s tommyrot. I’m coming to think that the hell-howling old mossbacks corrupt the
