“You have lived the church. You would probably be lonely without it. Maybe you should stay in it … to destroy it!”
“But you wouldn’t want it destroyed? Even if some details of dogma aren’t true—or even all of ’em—think what a consolation religion and the church are to weak humanity!”
“Are they? I wonder! Don’t cheerful agnostics, who know they’re going to die dead, worry much less than good Baptists, who worry lest their sons and cousins and sweethearts fail to get into the Baptist heaven—or what is even worse, who wonder if they may not have guessed wrong—if God may not be a Catholic, maybe, or a Mormon or a Seventh-day Adventist instead of a Baptist, and then they’ll go to hell themselves! Consolation? No! But—Stay in the church. Till you want to get out.”
Frank stayed.
III
By Senior year he had read many of Dr. Zechlin’s bootlegged books: Davenport’s Primitive Traits in Religious Revivals, which asserted that the shoutings and foamings and twitchings at revival meetings were no more sanctified than any other barbaric religious frenzies, Dods and Sunderland on the origin of the Bible, which indicated that the Bible was no more holy and infallible than Homer; Nathaniel Schmidt’s revolutionary life of Jesus, The Prophet of Nazareth, and White’s History of the Warfare of Science with Theology, which painted religion as the enemy, not the promoter, of human progress. He was indeed—in a Baptist seminary!—a specimen of the “young man ruined by godless education” whom the Baptist periodicals loved to paint.
But he stayed.
He clung to the church. It was his land, his patriotism. Nebulously and quite unpractically and altogether miserably he planned to give his life to a project called “liberalizing the church from within.”
It was a relief after his sophistries to have so lively an emotion as his sweet, clear, resounding hatred for Brother Elmer Gantry.
IV
Frank had always disliked Elmer’s thickness, his glossiness, his smut, and his inability to understand the most elementary abstraction. But Frank was ordinarily no great hater, and when they went off together to guard the flock at Schoenheim, he almost liked Elmer in his vigorous excitement—beautiful earthy excitement of an athlete.
Frank considered Lulu Bains a bisque doll, and he would have cherished her like any ten-year-old in his Sunday School class. He saw Elmer’s whole body stiffen as he looked at Lulu. And there was nothing he could do.
He was afraid that if he spoke to Mr. Bains, or even to Lulu, in the explosion Elmer might have to marry her, and suddenly the Frank who had always accepted “the holy institution of matrimony” felt that for a colt like Lulu any wild kicking up of the heels would be better than being harnessed to Elmer’s muddy plow.
Frank’s minister father and his mother went to California for Christmas time, and he spent the holiday with Dr. Zechlin. They two celebrated Christmas Eve, and a very radiant, well-contented, extremely German Weinachtsabend that was. Zechlin had procured a goose, bullied the osteopath’s wife into cooking it, with sausages for stuffing and cranberry pancake to flank it. He brewed a punch not at all Baptist; it frothed, and smelled divinely, and to Frank it brought visions.
They sat in old chairs on either side of the round stove, gently waving their punch glasses, and sang:
Stille Nacht, heilige Nacht,
Alles schläft, einsam wacht
Nur das traute hochheilige Paar,
Holder Knabe im lokkigen Haar
Schlaf in himm’lischer Ruh,
Schlaf in himm’lischer Ruh.
“Ah, yes,” the old man meditated, “that is the Christ I still dream of—the Child with shining hair, the dear German Christ Child—the beautiful fairy tale—and your Dean Trospers make Jesus into a monster that hates youth and laughter—Wein, Weib und Gesang. Der arme! How unlucky he was, that Christ, not to have the good Trosper with him at the wedding feast to explain that he must not turn the water into wine. Chk! Chk! I wonder if I am too old to start a leetle farm with a big vineyard and seven books?”
V
Elmer Gantry was always very witty about Dr. Bruno Zechlin. Sometimes he called him “Old Fuzzy.” Sometimes he said, “That old coot ought to teach Hebrew—he looks like a page of Yid himself.” Elmer could toss off things like that. The applause of Eddie Fislinger, who was heard to say in hallways and lavatories that Zechlin lacked spirituality, encouraged Elmer to create his masterpiece.
Before Exegesis class, he printed on the blackboard in a disguised hand:
“I am Fuzzy Zechlin, the gazabo that knows more than God. If Jake Trosper got onto what I really think about inspiration of the Scriptures, he’d fire me out on my dirty Dutch neck.”
The assembling students guffawed, even ponderous Brother Karkis, the up-creek Calvin.
Dr. Zechlin trotted into the classroom, smiling. He read the blackboard inscription. He looked incredulous, then frightened, and peered at his class like an old dog stoned by hoodlums. He turned and walked out, to the laughter of Brother Gantry and Brother Karkis.
It is not recorded how the incident came to Dean Trosper.
He summoned Elmer. “I suspect it was you who wrote that on the blackboard.”
Elmer considered lying, then blurted, “Yes, I did, Dean. I tell you, it’s a shame—I don’t pretend to have reached a state of Christian perfection, but I’m trying hard, and I think it’s a shame when a man on the faculty is trying to take away our faith by hints and sneers, that’s how I feel.”
Dean Trosper spoke snappishly: “I don’t think you need worry about anybody suggesting new possibilities of sin to you, Brother Gantry. But there is some justification to what you say. Now go and sin no more. I still believe that some day you may grow up and turn your vitality into a means of grace for many, possibly including yourself. Thaddeldo.”
Dr. Bruno Zechlin was
