“It has this, Frank: It has the unique personality and teachings of Jesus Christ, and there is something in Jesus, there is something in the way he spoke, there is something in the feeling of a man when he suddenly has that inexpressible experience of knowing the Master and his presence, which makes the church of Jesus different from any other merely human institution or instrument whatsoever! Jesus is not simply greater and wiser than Socrates or Voltaire; he is entirely different. Anybody can interpret and teach Socrates or Voltaire—in schools or books or conversation. But to interpret the personality and teachings of Jesus requires an especially called, chosen, trained, consecrated body of men, united in an especial institution—the church.”
“Phil, it sounds so splendid. But just what were the personality and the teachings of Jesus? I’ll admit it’s the heart of the controversy over the Christian religion:—aside from the fact that, of course, most people believe in a church because they were born to it. But the essential query is: Did Jesus—if the Biblical accounts of him are even half accurate—have a particularly noble personality, and were his teachings particularly original and profound? You know it’s almost impossible to get people to read the Bible honestly. They’ve been so brought up to take the church interpretation of every word that they read into it whatever they’ve been taught to find there. It’s been so with me, up to the last couple of years. But now I’m becoming a quarter free, and I’m appalled to see that I don’t find Jesus an especially admirable character!
“He is picturesque. He tells splendid stories. He’s a good fellow, fond of low company—in fact the idea of Jesus, whom the bishops of his day cursed as a rounder and wine-bibber, being chosen as the god of the Prohibitionists is one of the funniest twists in history. But he’s vain, he praises himself outrageously, he’s fond of astonishing people by little magical tricks which we’ve been taught to revere as ‘miracles.’ He is furious as a child in a tantrum when people don’t recognize him as a great leader. He loses his temper. He blasts the poor barren fig-tree when it doesn’t feed him. What minds people have! They hear preachers proving by the Bible the exact opposites, that the Roman Catholic Church is divinely ordained and that it is against all divine ordinances, and it never occurs to them that far from the Christian religion—or any other religion—being a blessing to humanity, it’s produced such confusion in all thinking, such secondhand viewing of actualities, that only now are we beginning to ask what and why we are, and what we can do with life!
“Just what are the teachings of Christ? Did he come to bring peace or more war? He says both. Did he approve earthly monarchies or rebel against them? He says both. Did he ever—think of it, God himself, taking on human form to help the earth—did he ever suggest sanitation, which would have saved millions from plagues? And you can’t say his failure there was because he was too lofty to consider mere sickness. On the contrary, he was awfully interested in it, always healing someone—providing they flattered his vanity enough!
“What did he teach? One place in the Sermon on the Mount he advises—let me get my Bible—here it is: ‘Let your light so shine before men that they may see your good works and glorify your Father which is in heaven,’ and then five minutes later he’s saying, ‘Take heed that ye do not your alms before men, to be seen of them, otherwise ye have no reward of your Father which is in heaven.’ That’s an absolute contradiction, in the one document which is the charter of the whole Christian Church. Oh, I know you can reconcile them, Phil. That’s the whole aim of the ministerial training: to teach us to reconcile contradictions by saying that one of them doesn’t mean what it means—and it’s always a good stunt to throw in ‘You’d understand it if you’d only read it in the original Greek’!
“There’s just one thing that does stand out clearly and uncontradicted in Jesus’ teaching. He advocated a system of economics whereby no one saved money or stored up wheat or did anything but live like a tramp. If this teaching of his had been accepted, the world would have starved in twenty years, after his death!
“No, wait, Phil, just one second and then I’m through!”
He talked till dawn.
Frank’s last protest, as they stood on the steps in the cold grayness, was:
“My objection to the church isn’t that the preachers are cruel, hypocritical, actually wicked, though some of them are that, too—think of how many are arrested for selling fake stock, for seducing fourteen-year-old girls in orphanages under their care, for arson, for murder. And it isn’t so much that the church is in bondage to Big Business and doctrines as laid down by millionaires—though a lot of churches are that, too. My chief objection is that ninety-nine percent of sermons and Sunday School teachings are so agonizingly dull!”
Chapter XXIX
I
However impatient he was with Frank, Philip McGarry’s last wish was to set Elmer Gantry piously baying on Frank’s trail. It was rather an accident. Philip sat next to Elmer at a dinner to discuss missionary funds; he remembered that Frank and Elmer had been classmates; and with a sincerely affectionate “It’s too bad the poor boy worries so over what are really matters for Faith,” he gave away to Elmer most of Frank’s heresies.
Now in the bustle of raising funds to build a vast new church, Elmer had forgotten his notion of saving the renowned hardware
