“And yet,” complained Frank Shallard, “you encourage him to stay and talk about his pet methods of exercise! Don’t you ever tell the truth, Harry?”
“Never carelessly. Why, you idiot, I want Wallace to run and let the dean know what an earnest worker in the vineyard I am. Frank, you’re a poor innocent. I suspect you actually believe some of the dope they teach us here. And yet you’re a man of some reading. You’re the only person in Mizpah except myself who could appreciate a paragraph of Huxley. Lord, how I pity you when you get into the ministry! Of course, Fislinger here is a grocery clerk, Elmer is a ward politician, Horace is a dancing master—”
He was drowned beneath a surf of protests, not too jocose and friendly.
Harry Zenz was older than the others—thirty-two at least. He was plump, almost completely bald, and fond of sitting still; and he could look profoundly stupid. He was a man of ill-assorted but astonishing knowledge; and in the church ten miles from Mizpah which he had regularly supplied for two years he was considered a man of humorless learning and bloodless piety. He was a complete and cheerful atheist, but he admitted it only to Elmer Gantry and Horace Carp. Elmer regarded him as a sort of Jim Lefferts, but he was as different from Jim as pork fat from a crystal. He hid his giggling atheism—Jim flourished his; he despised women—Jim had a disillusioned pity for the Juanita Klauzels of the world; he had an intellect—Jim had only cynical guesses.
Zenz interrupted their protests:
“So you’re a bunch of Erasmuses! You ought to know. And there’s no hypocrisy in what we teach and preach! We’re a specially selected group of Parsifals—beautiful to the eye and stirring to the ear and overflowing with knowledge of what God said to the Holy Ghost in camera at 9:16 last Wednesday morning. We’re all just rarin’ to go out and preach the precious Baptist doctrine of ‘Get ducked or duck.’ We’re wonders. We admit it. And people actually sit and listen to us, and don’t choke! I suppose they’re overwhelmed by our nerve! And we have to have nerve, or we’d never dare to stand in a pulpit again. We’d quit, and pray God to forgive us for having stood up there and pretended that we represent God, and that we can explain what we ourselves say are the unexplainable mysteries! But I still claim that there are preachers who haven’t our holiness. Why is it that the clergy are so given to sex crimes?”
“That’s not true!” from Eddie Fislinger.
“Don’t talk that way!” Don Pickens begged. Don was Frank’s roommate: a slight youth, so gentle, so affectionate, that even that raging lion of righteousness, Dean Trosper, was moved to spare him.
Harry Zenz patted his arm. “Oh, you, Don—you’ll always be a monk. But if you don’t believe it, Fislinger, look at the statistics of the five thousand odd crimes committed by clergymen—that is those who got caught—since the eighties, and note the percentage of sex offenses—rape, incest, bigamy, enticing young girls—oh, a lovely record!”
Elmer was yawning, “Oh, God, I do get so sick of you fellows yammering and arguing and discussing. All perfectly simple—maybe we preachers aren’t perfect: don’t pretend to be; but we do a lot of good.”
“That’s right,” said Eddie. “But maybe it is true that—The snares of sex are so dreadful that even ministers of the gospel get trapped. And the perfectly simple solution is continence—just take it out in prayer and good hard exercise.”
“Oh, sure, Eddie, you bet; what a help you’re going to be to the young men in your church,” purred Harry Zenz.
Frank Shallard was meditating unhappily. “Just why are we going to be preachers, anyway? Why are you, Harry, if you think we’re all such liars?”
“Oh, not liars, Frank—just practical, as Elmer put it. Me, it’s easy. I’m not ambitious. I don’t want money enough to hustle for it. I like to sit and read. I like intellectual acrobatics and no work. And you can have all that in the ministry—unless you’re one of these chumps that get up big institutional outfits and work themselves to death for publicity.”
“You certainly have a fine high view of the ministry!” growled Elmer.
“Well, all right, what’s your fine high purpose in becoming a Man of God, Brother Gantry?”
“Well, I—Rats, it’s perfectly clear. Preacher can do a lot of good—give help and—And explain religion.”
“I wish you’d explain it to me! Especially I want to know to what extent are Christian symbols descended from indecent barbaric symbols?”
“Oh, you make me tired!”
Horace Carp fluttered, “Of course none of you consecrated windjammers ever think of the one raison d’être of the church, which is to add beauty to the barren lives of the common people!”
“Yeh! It certainly must make the common people feel awfully common to hear Brother Gantry spiel about the errors of supralapsarianism!”
“I never preach about any such a doggone thing!” Elmer protested. “I just give ’em a good helpful sermon, with some jokes sprinkled in to make it interesting and some stuff about the theater or something that’ll startle ’em a little and wake ’em up, and help ’em to lead better and fuller daily lives.”
“Oh, do you, dearie!” said Zenz. “My error. I thought you probably gave ’em a lot of helpful hints about the innascibilitas attribute and the res sacramenti. Well, Frank, why did you become a theologue?”
“I can’t tell you when you put it sneeringly. I believe there are mystic experiences which you can follow only if you are truly set apart.”
“Well, I know why I came here,” said Don Pickens. “My dad sent me!”
“So did mine!” complained Horace Carp. “But what I can’t understand is: Why are any of us in an ole Baptist
