Healing was later to become the chief feature of many evangelists, but in 1910 it was advertised chiefly by Christian Scientists and the New Thoughters. Sharon came to it by accident. She had regularly offered prayers for the sick, but only absentmindedly. When Elmer and she had been together for a year, during her meetings in Schenectady a man led up his deaf wife and begged Sharon to heal her. It amused Sharon to send out for some oil (it happened to be shotgun oil, but she properly consecrated it) to anoint the woman’s ears, and to pray lustily for healing.
The woman screamed, “Glory to God, I’ve got my hearing back!”
There was a sensation in the tabernacle, and everybody itched with desire to be relieved of whatever ailed him. Elmer led the healed deaf woman aside and asked her name for the newspapers. It is true that she could not hear him, but he wrote out his questions, she wrote the answers, and he got an excellent story for the papers and an idea for their holy work.
Why, he put it to Sharon, shouldn’t she make healing a regular feature?
“I don’t know that I have any gift for it,” considered Sharon.
“Sure you have! Aren’t you psychic? You bet. Go to it. We might pull off some healing services. I bet the collections would bust all records, and we’ll have a distinct understanding with the local committees that we get all over a certain amount, besides the collection the last day.”
“Well, we might try one. Of course, the Lord may have blessed me with special gifts that way, and to him be all the credit, oh, let’s stop in here and have an ice cream soda, I love banana splits, I hope nobody sees me, I feel like dancing tonight, anyway we’ll talk over the possibility of healing, I’m going to take a hot bath the minute we get home with losh bath salts—losh and losh and losh.”
The success was immense.
She alienated many evangelical pastors by divine healing, but she won all the readers of books about willpower, and her daily miracles were reported in the newspapers. And, or so it was reported, some of the patients remained cured.
She murmured to Elmer, “You know, maybe there really is something to this healing, and I get an enormous thrill out of it—telling the lame to chuck their crutches. That man last night, that cripple—he did feel lots better.”
They decorated the altar now with crutches and walking-sticks, all given by grateful patients—except such as Elmer had been compelled to buy to make the exhibit inspiring from the start.
Money gamboled in. One grateful patient gave Sharon five thousand dollars. And Elmer and Sharon had their only quarrel, except for occasional spats of temperament. With the increase in profits, he demanded a rise of salary, and she insisted that her charities took all she had.
“Yuh, I’ve heard a lot about ’em,” said he: “the Old Ladies’ Home and the Orphanage and the hoosegow for retired preachers. I suppose you carry ’em along with you on the road!”
“Do you mean to insinuate, my good friend, that I—”
They talked in a thoroughly spirited and domestic manner, and afterward she raised his salary to five thousand and kissed him.
With the money so easily come by, Sharon burst out in hectic plans. She was going to buy a ten-thousand-acre farm for a Christian Socialist colony and a university, and she went so far as to get a three months’ option on two hundred acres. She was going to have a great national paper, with crime news, scandal, and athletics omitted, and a daily Bible lesson on the front page. She was going to organize a new crusade—an army of ten million which would march through heathen countries and convert the entire world to Christianity in this generation.
She did, at last, actually carry out one plan, and create a headquarters for her summer meetings.
At Clontar, a resort on the New Jersey coast, she bought the pier on which Benno Hackenschmidt used to give grand opera. Though the investment was so large that even for the initial payment it took almost every penny she had saved, she calculated that she would make money because she would be the absolute owner and not have to share contributions with local churches. And, remaining in one spot, she would build up more prestige than by moving from place to place and having to advertise her virtues anew in every town.
In a gay frenzy she planned that if she was successful, she would keep the Clontar pier for summer and build an all-winter tabernacle in New York or Chicago. She saw herself another Mary Baker Eddy, an Annie Besant, a Katherine Tingley. … Elmer Gantry was shocked when she hinted that, who knows? the next Messiah might be a woman, and that woman might now be on earth, just realizing her divinity.
The pier was an immense structure, built of cheap knotty pine, painted a hectic red with gold stripes. It was pleasant, however, on hot evenings. Round it ran a promenade out over the water, where once lovers had strolled between acts of the opera, and giving on the promenade were many barnlike doors.
Sharon christened it “The Waters of Jordan Tabernacle,” added more and redder paint, more golden gold, and erected an enormous revolving cross, lighted at night with yellow and ruby electric bulbs.
The whole gospel crew went to Clontar early in June to make ready for the great opening on the evening of the first of July.
They had to enlist volunteer ushers and personal workers, and Sharon and Adelbert Shoop had notions about a huge robed choir, with three or four paid soloists.
Elmer had less zeal than usual
