“Well—yes—in a way. I’ve had three brother Methodist clients from Wellspring come to me—two burglary and one forgery. But it’s more that I just like to make the wheels go round.”
Mr. Rigg was saying, an hour later, to Mr. William Dollinger Styles, “If you came and joined us, I know you’d like it—you’ve seen what a fine, upstanding, two-fisted, one-hundred-percent he-man Dr. Gantry is. Absolutely sound about business. And it would be a swell rebuke to your church for not accepting your advice. But we hate to invite you to come over to us—in fact Dr. Gantry absolutely forbade me to see you—for fear you’ll think it was just because you’re rich.”
For three days Styles shied, then he was led, trembling, up to the harness.
Afterward, Dr. G. Prosper Edwards of Pilgrim Congregational said to his spouse, “Why on earth didn’t we think of going right after Styles and inviting him to join us? It was so simple we never even thought of it. I really do feel quite cross. Why didn’t you think of it?”
VII
The second church meeting was postponed. It looked to Elmer as though Frank would be able to stay on at Dorchester Congregational and thus defy Elmer as the spiritual and moral leader of the city.
Elmer acted fearlessly.
In sermon after sermon he spoke of “that bunch of atheists out there at Dorchester.” Frank’s parishioners were alarmed. They were forced to explain (only they were never quite sure what they were explaining) to customers, to neighbors, to fellow lodge-members. They felt disgraced, and so it was that a second meeting was called.
Now Frank had fancied a spectacular resignation. He heard himself, standing before a startled audience, proclaiming, “I have decided that no one in this room, including your pastor, believes in the Christian religion. Not one of us would turn the other cheek. Not one of us would sell all that he has and give to the poor. Not one of us would give his coat to some man who took his overcoat. Every one of us lays up all the treasure he can. We don’t practise the Christian religion. We don’t intend to practise it. Therefore, we don’t believe in it. Therefore I resign, and I advise you to quit lying and disband.”
He saw himself, then, tramping down the aisle among his gaping hearers, and leaving the church forever.
But: “I’m too tired. Too miserable. And why hurt the poor bewildered souls? And—I am so tired.”
He stood up at the beginning of the second meeting and said gently, “I had refused to resign. I still feel I have an honest right to an honest pulpit. But I am setting brother against brother. I am not a Cause—I am only a friend. I have loved you and the work, the sound of friends singing together, the happiness of meeting on leisurely Sunday mornings. This I give up. I resign, and I wish I could say, ‘God be with you and bless you all.’ But the good Christians have taken God and made him into a menacing bully, and I cannot even say ‘God bless you,’ during this last moment, in a life given altogether to religion, when I shall ever stand in a pulpit.”
Elmer Gantry, in his next sermon, said that he was so broad-minded that he would be willing to receive an Infidel Shallard in his church, providing he repented.
VIII
When he found that he liked the Charity Organization Society and his work in that bleak institution no better than his work in the church, Frank laughed.
“As Bess said! A consistent malcontent! Well, I am consistent, anyway. And the relief not to be a preacher any more! Not to have to act sanctimonious! Not to have men consider you an old woman in trousers! To be able to laugh without watching its effect!”
Frank was given charge, at the C.O.S., of a lodging-house, a woodyard at which hoboes worked for two hours daily to pay for lodging and breakfast, and an employment bureau. He knew little about Scientific Charity, so he was shocked by the icy manner in which his subordinates—the aged virgin at the inquiry desk, the boss of the woodyard, the clerk at the lodging-house, the young lady who asked the applicants about their religion and vices—treated the shambling unfortunates as criminals who had deliberately committed the crime of poverty.
They were as efficient and as tender as vermin-exterminators.
In this acid perfection, Frank longed for the mystery that clings to even the dourest or politest tabernacle. He fell in the way of going often to the huge St. Dominic’s Catholic Church, of which the eloquent Father de Pinna was pastor, with Father Matthew Smeesby, the new sort of American, state-university-bred priest, as assistant pastor and liaison officer.
St. Dominic’s was, for Zenith, an ancient edifice, and the coal-smoke from the South Zenith factories had aged the gray stone to a semblance of historic centuries. The interior, with its dim irregularity, its lofty roof, the curious shrines, the mysterious door at the top of a flight of stone steps, unloosed Frank’s imagination. It touched him to see the people kneeling at any hour. He had never known a church to which the plain people came for prayer. Despite its dusky magnificence, they seemed to find in the church their home. And when he saw the gold and crimson of solemn high mass blazing at the end of the dark aisle, with the crush of people visibly believing in the presence of God, he wondered if he had indeed found the worship he had fumblingly sought.
He knew that to believe literally in Purgatory and the Immaculate Conception, the Real Presence and the authority of the hierarchy, was as impossible for him as to believe in Zeus.
“But,” he pondered, “isn’t it possible that the whole thing is so gorgeous a fairytale that to criticize it would be like trying to prove that Jack did not kill
