Rem gt opportunities during sickness, sorrow, marriage.
Ask jokingly why husband not oftener to church.
The course in Hymnology Elmer found tolerable; the courses in New Testament Interpretation, Church History, Theology, Missions, and Comparative Religions he stolidly endured and warmly cursed. Who the dickens cared whether Adoniram Judson became a Baptist by reading his Greek New Testament? Why all this fuss about a lot of prophecies in Revelation—he wasn’t going to preach that highbrow stuff! And expecting them to make something out of this filioque argument in theology! Foolish!
The teachers of New Testament and Church History were ministers whom admiring but bored metropolitan congregations had kicked upstairs. To both of them polite deacons had said, “We consider you essentially scholarly, Brother, rather than pastoral. Very scholarly. We’re pulling wires to get you the high honor that’s your due—election to a chair in one of the Baptist seminaries. While they may pay a little less, you’ll have much more of the honor you so richly deserve, and lots easier work, as you might say.”
The grateful savants had accepted, and they were spending the rest of their lives reading fifteenth-hand opinions, taking pleasant naps, and drooling out to yawning students the anemic and wordy bookishness which they called learning.
But the worst of Elmer’s annoyances were the courses given by Dr. Bruno Zechlin, Professor of Greek, Hebrew, and Old Testament Exegesis.
Bruno Zechlin was a Ph. D. of Bonn, an S.T.D. of Edinburgh. He was one of the dozen authentic scholars in all the theological institutions of America, and incidentally he was a thorough failure. He lectured haltingly, he wrote obscurely, he could not talk to God as though he knew him personally, and he could not be friendly with numbskulls.
Mizpah Seminary belonged to the right-wing of the Baptists; it represented what was twenty years later to be known as “fundamentalism”; and in Mizpah Dr. Zechlin had been suspected of heresy.
He also had a heathenish tawny German beard, and he had been born not in Kansas or Ohio but in a city ridiculously named Frankfort.
Elmer despised him, because of the beard, because he was enthusiastic about Hebrew syntax, because he had no useful tips for ambitious young professional prophets, and because he had seemed singularly to enjoy flunking Elmer in Greek, which Elmer was making up with a flinching courage piteous to behold.
But Frank Shallard loved Dr. Zechlin, him alone among the members of the faculty.
II
Frank Shallard’s father was a Baptist minister, sweet-tempered, bookish, mildy liberal, not unsuccessful; his mother was of a Main Line family, slightly run to seed. He was born in Harrisburg and reared in Pittsburgh, always under the shadow of the spires—in his case, a kindly shadow and serene, though his father did labor long at family prayers and instruct his young to avoid all worldly pollution, which included dancing, the theater, and the libidinous works of Balzac.
There was talk of sending Frank to Brown University or Pennsylvania, but when he was fifteen his father had a call to a large church in Cleveland, and it was the faculty of Oberlin College, in Ohio, who interpreted and enriched for Frank the Christian testimony to be found in Plautus, Homer, calculus, basketball, and the history of the French Revolution.
There was a good deal of the natural poet in him and, as is not too rarely the case with poets, something of the reasoning and scientific mind. But both imagination and reason had been submerged in a religion in which doubt was not only sinful but, much worse, in bad taste. The flair which might have turned to roses and singing, or to banners and bravado, or to pity of hopeless toilers, had been absorbed in the terrible majesty of the Jew Jehovah, the brooding mercy of Our Lord, the tales of his birth—jeweled kings and the shepherds’ campfire, the looming star and the babe in the manger; myths bright as enamel buds—and he was bemused by the mysteries of Revelation, an Alice in Wonderland wearing a dragon mask.
Not only had he been swathed in theology, but all his experience had been in books instead of the speech of toiling men. He had been a solitary in college, generous but fastidious, jarred by his classmates’ belching and sudden laughter.
His reasoning had been introverted, turned from an examination of men as mammals and devoted to a sorrow that sinful and aching souls should not more readily seek the security of a mystic process known as Conviction, Repentance, and Salvation, which, he was assured by the noblest and most literate men he had ever known, was guaranteed to cure all woe. His own experience did not absolutely confirm this. Even after he had been quite ecstatically saved, he found himself falling into deep, still furies at the familiarities of hobbledehoys, still peeping at the arching bodies of girls. But that, he assured himself, was merely because he hadn’t “gone on to perfection.”
There were doubts. The Old Testament God’s habit of desiring the reeking slaughter of everyone who did not flatter him seemed rather antisocial, and he wondered whether all the wantoning in the Song of Solomon did really refer to the loyalty between Christ and the Church. It seemed unlike the sessions of Oberlin Chapel and the Miller Avenue Baptist Church of Cleveland, Ohio. Could Solomon just possibly refer to relations between beings more mundane and frisky?
Such qualities of reason as he had, Frank devoted not to examining and banishing the doubt itself. He had it as an axiom that doubt was wicked, and he was able to enjoy considerable ingenuity in exorcising it. He had a good deal of self-esteem and pleasure among the purple-broidered ambiguities of religion.
That he should become a minister had always been assumed. He had no such definite and ecstatic Call as came to Elmer Gantry, but he had always known that he would go on nibbling at theories about the eucharist, and pointing men the way to uncharted plateaus called Righteousness, Idealism, Honesty,
