I can be whatever I will to be; I turn my opened eyes on my Self and possess whatever I desire.
I am God’s child, God created all good things including wealth, and I will to inherit it.
I am resolute—I am utterly resolute—I fear no man, whether in offices or elsewhere.
Power is in me, encompassing you to my demands.
Hold fast, O Subconscious, the thought of Prosperity.
In the divine book of achievements my name is written in Gold. I am thus of the world’s nobility and now, this moment, I take possession of my kingdom.
I am part of Universal Mind and thus I summon to me my rightful Universal Power.
Daily my Subconscious shall tell me to not be content and go on working for somebody else.
They were all of them ready for a million a year except their teacher, who was ready for bankruptcy.
He got pupils enough, but the overhead was huge and his pupils were poor. He had to hire the ballroom, pay for advertising; he had to appear gaudy, with a suite in the hotel, fresh linen, and newly pressed morning coat. He sat in twenty-dollar-a-day red plush suites wondering where he would get breakfast. He was so dismayed that he began to study himself.
He determined, with the resoluteness of terror, to be loyal to any loves or associates he might have hereafter, to say in his prayers and sermons practically nothing except what he believed. He yearned to go back to Mizpah Seminary, to get Dean Trosper’s forgiveness, take a degree, and return to the Baptist pulpit in however barren a village. But first he must earn enough money to pay for a year in the seminary.
He had been in correspondence with the manager of the O’Hearn House in Zenith—a city of four hundred thousand in the state of Winnemac, a hundred miles from Mizpah. This was in 1913, before the Hotel Thornleigh was built and Gil O’Hearn, with his new yellow brick tavern, was trying to take the fashionable business of Zenith away from the famous but decayed Grand Hotel. Intellectual ballroom lectures add to the smartness of a hotel almost as much as a great cocktail-mixer, and Mr. O’Hearn had been moved by the prospectus of the learned and magnetic Dr. Elmer Gantry.
Elmer could take the O’Hearn offer on a guarantee and be sure of a living, but he needed money for a week or two before the fees should come in.
From whom could he borrow?
Didn’t he remember reading in a Mizpah alumni bulletin that Frank Shallard, who had served with him in the rustic church at Schoenheim, now had a church near Zenith?
He dug out the bulletin and discovered that Frank was in Eureka, an industrial town of forty thousand. Elmer had enough money to take him to Eureka. All the way there he warmed up the affection with which a borrower recalls an old acquaintance who is generous and a bit soft.
Chapter XVII
I
Frank Shallard had graduated from Mizpah Theological Seminary and taken his first pulpit. And now that he was a minister, theoretically different from all ordinary people, he was wondering whether there was any value to the ministry whatever.
Of what value were doggerel hymns raggedly sung? What value in sermons, when the congregation seemed not at all different from people who never heard sermons? Were all ministers and all churches, Frank wondered, merely superstitious survivals, merely fire-insurance? Suppose there were such things as inspiring sermons. Suppose there could be such a curious office as minister, as Professional Good Man; such a thing as learning Goodness just as one learned plumbing or dentistry. Even so, what training had he or his classmates, or his professors—whose D.D. degrees did not protect them from indigestion and bad tempers—in this trade of Professional Goodness?
He was supposed to cure an affliction called vice. But he had never encountered vice; he didn’t know just what were the interesting things that people did when they were being vicious. How long would a drunkard listen to the counsel of one who had never been inside a saloon?
He was supposed to bring peace to mankind. But what did he know of the forces which cause wars, personal or class or national; what of drugs, passion, criminal desire; of capitalism, banking, labor, wages, taxes; international struggles for trade, munition trusts, ambitious soldiers?
He was supposed to comfort the sick. But what did he know of sickness? How could he tell when he ought to pray and when he ought to recommend salts?
He was supposed to explain to troubled mankind the purposes of God Almighty, to chat with him, and even advise him about his duties as regards rainfall and the church debt. But which God Almighty? Professor Bruno Zechlin had introduced Frank to a hundred gods besides the Jewish Jehovah, or Yahveh, who had been but a poor and rather surly relation of such serene aristocrats as Zeus.
He was supposed to have undergone a mystic change whereby it was possible to live without normal appetites. He was supposed to behold girls’ ankles without interest and, for light amusement, to be satisfied by reading church papers and shaking hands with deacons. But he found himself most uncomfortably interested in the flicker of ankles, he longed for the theater, and no repentance could keep him from reading novels, though his professors had exposed them as time-wasting and frivolous.
What had he learned?
Enough Hebrew and Greek to be able to crawl through the Bible by using lexicons—so that, like all his classmates once they were out of the seminary, he always read it in English. A good many of the more condemnatory texts of the Bible—rather less than the average Holy Roller carpenter-evangelist. The theory that India and Africa have woes because they are not Christianized, but that Christianized Bangor and Des Moines have woes because the devil, a being obviously more potent than omnipotent God, sneaks around counteracting the work
