He sought a consultation with Father Matthew Smeesby. They had met, as fellow ministers, at many dinners.
The good father sat at a Grand Rapids desk, in a room altogether businesslike save for a carved Bavarian cupboard and a crucifix on the barren plaster wall. Smeesby was a man of forty, a crisper Philip McGarry.
“You were an American university man, weren’t you, Father?” Frank asked.
“Yes. University of Indiana. Played halfback.”
“Then I think I can talk to you. It seems to me that so many of your priests are not merely foreign by birth, Poles and whatnot, but they look down on American mores and want to mold us to their ideas and ways. But you—Tell me: Would it be conceivable for an—I won’t say an intelligent, but at least a reasonably well-read man like myself, who finds it quite impossible to believe one word of your doctrines—”
“Huh!”
“—but who is tremendously impressed by your ritual and the spirit of worship—could such a man be received into the Roman Catholic Church, honestly, with the understanding that to him your dogmas are nothing but symbols?”
“Most certainly not!”
“Don’t you know any priests who love the Church but don’t literally believe all the doctrines?”
“I do not! I know no such persons! Shallard, you can’t understand the authority and reasonableness of the Church. You’re not ready to. You think too much of your puerile powers of reasoning. You haven’t enough divine humility to comprehend the ages of wisdom that have gone to building up this fortress, and you stand outside its walls, one pitifully lonely little figure, blowing the trumpet of your egotism, and demanding of the sentry, ‘Take me to your commander. I am graciously inclined to assist him. Only he must understand that I think his granite walls are pasteboard, and I reserve the right to blow them down when I get tired of them.’ Man, if you were a prostitute or a murderer and came to me saying ‘Can I be saved?’ I’d cry ‘Yes!’ and give my life to helping you. But you’re obsessed by a worse crime than murder—pride of intellect! And yet you haven’t such an awfully overpowering intellect to be proud of, and I’m not sure but that’s the worst crime of all! Good day!”
He added, as Frank ragingly opened the door, “Go home and pray for simplicity.”
“Go home and pray that I may be made like you? Pray to have your humility and your manners?” said Frank.
It was a fortnight later that for his own satisfaction Frank set down in the notebook which he had always carried for sermon ideas, which he still carried for the sermons they would never let him preach again, a conclusion:
“The Roman Catholic Church is superior to the militant Protestant Church. It does not compel you to give up your sense of beauty, your sense of humor, or your pleasant vices. It merely requires you to give up your honesty, your reason, your heart and soul.”
IX
Frank had been with the Charity Organization Society for three years, and he had become assistant general secretary at the time of the Dayton evolution trial. It was at this time that the brisker conservative clergymen saw that their influence and oratory and incomes were threatened by any authentic learning. A few of them were so intelligent as to know that not only was biology dangerous to their positions, but also history—which gave no very sanctified reputation to the Christian church; astronomy—which found no convenient Heaven in the skies and snickered politely at the notion of making the sun stand still in order to win a Jewish border skirmish; psychology—which doubted the superiority of a Baptist preacher fresh from the farm to trained laboratory researchers; and all the other sciences of the modern university. They saw that a proper school should teach nothing but bookkeeping, agriculture, geometry, dead languages made deader by leaving out all the amusing literature, and the Hebrew Bible as interpreted by men superbly trained to ignore contradictions, men technically called “Fundamentalists.”
This perception the clergy and their most admired laymen expressed in quick action. They formed half a dozen competent and well-financed organizations to threaten rustic state legislators with political failure and bribe them with unctuous clerical praise, so that these back-street and backwoods Solons would forbid the teaching in all state-supported schools and colleges of anything which was not approved by the evangelists.
It worked edifyingly.
To oppose them there were organized a few groups of scholars. One of these organizations asked Frank to speak for them. He was delighted to feel an audience before him again, and he got leave from the Zenith Charity Organization Society for a lecture tour.
He came excitedly and proudly to his first assignment, in a roaring modern city in the Southwest. He loved the town; believed really that he came to it with a “message.” He tasted the Western air greedily, admired the buildings flashing up where but yesterday had been prairie. He smiled from the hotel bus when he saw a poster which announced that the Reverend Frank Shallard would speak on “Are the Fundamentalists Witch Hunters?” at Central Labor Hall, auspices of the League for Free Science.
“Bully! Fighting again! I’ve found that religion I’ve been looking for!”
He peered out for other posters. … They were all defaced.
At his hotel was a note, typed, anonymous: “We don’t want you and your hellish atheism here. We can think for ourselves without any imported ‘liberals.’ If you enjoy life, you’d better be out of this decent Christian city before evening. God help you if you aren’t! We have enough mercy to give warning, but enough of God’s justice to see you get yours right if you don’t listen. Blasphemers get what they
