This morning, as Frank scampered down Vermont Street, Lem Staples called to him, “Fine day, Reverend. Say! In a hurry?”
“I’m—No, not especially.”
“Come sit down. Couple o’ questions I’m worried about.”
Frank sat, his neck prickling with embarrassment.
“Say, Reverend, old Ma Gherkins was telling me about your sermon yesterday. You figger that no matter what kind of a creed a fellow’s got, the one thing we can all bank on, absolute, is the teaching of Jesus?”
“Why, yes, that’s it roughly, Doctor.”
“And you feel that any sensible fellow will follow his teaching?”
“Why, yes, certainly.”
“And you feel that the churches, no matter what faults they may have, do hand out this truth of Jesus better than if we didn’t have no churches at all?”
“Certainly. Otherwise, I shouldn’t be in the church!”
“Then can you tell me why it is that nine-tenths of the really sure-enough on-the-job membership of the churches is made up of two classes: the plumb ignorant, that’re scared of hell and that swallow any fool doctrine, and, second, the awful’ respectable folks that play the church so’s to seem more respectable? Why is that? Why is it the high-class skilled workmen and the smart professional men usually snicker at the church and don’t go near it once a month? Why is it?”
“It isn’t true, perhaps that’s why!” Frank felt triumphant. He looked across at the pile of rusty horseshoes and plowshares among the mullen weeds beside the blacksmith’s shop; he reflected that he would clean up this town, be a power for good. Less snappishly he explained, “Naturally, I haven’t any statistics about it, but the fact is that almost every intelligent and influential man in the country belongs to some church or other.”
“Yeh—belongs. But does he go?”
Frank plodded off, annoyed. He tried to restore himself by insisting that Doc Staples was a lout, very amusing in the way he mingled rustic grammar with half-digested words from his adult reading. But he was jarred. Here was the Common Man whom the church was supposed to convince.
Frank remembered from his father’s pastorates how many theoretical church-members seemed blithely able month on month to stay away from the sermonizing; he remembered the merchants who impressively passed the contribution plate yet afterward, in conversation with his father, seemed to have but vague notions of what the sermon had been.
He studied his own congregation. There they were: the stiff-collared village respectables, and the simple, kindly, rustic mass, who understood him only when he promised Heaven as a reward for a life of monogamy and honest chicken-raising, or threatened them with Hell for drinking hard cider.
Catawba had—its only urban feature—a furniture factory with unusually competent workmen, few of whom attended church. Now Frank Shallard had all his life been insulated from what he gently despised as “the working class.” Maids at his father’s house and the elderly, devout, and incompetent negroes who attended the furnace; plumbers or electricians coming to the parsonage for repairs; railway men to whom he tried to talk on journeys; only these had he known, and always with unconscious superiority.
Now he timidly sought to get acquainted with the cabinetmakers as they sat at lunch in the factory grounds. They accepted him good-naturedly, but he felt that they chuckled behind his back when he crept away.
For the first time he was ashamed of being a preacher, of being a Christian. He longed to prove he was nevertheless a “real man,” and didn’t know how to prove it. He found that all the cabinetmakers save the Catholics laughed at the church and thanked the God in whom they did not believe that they did not have to listen to sermons on Sunday mornings, when there were beautiful back porches to sit on, beautiful sporting news to read, beautiful beer to drink. Even the Catholics seemed rather doubtful about the power of a purchased mass to help their deceased relatives out of Purgatory. Several of them admitted that they merely “did their Easter duty”—went to confession and mass but once a year.
It occurred to him that he had never known how large a race of intelligent and independent workmen there were in between the masters and the human truck-horses. He had never known how casually these manual aristocrats despised the church; how they jeered at their leaders, officers of the A.F. of L., who played safe by adhering to a voluble Christianity. He could not get away from his discoveries. They made him self-conscious as he went about the village streets trying to look like a junior prophet and feeling like a masquerader.
He might have left the ministry but for the Reverend Andrew Pengilly, pastor of the Catawba Methodist Church.
III
If you had cut Andrew Pengilly to the core, you would have found him white clear through. He was a type of clergyman favored in pious fiction, yet he actually did exist.
To every congregation he had served these forty years, he had been a shepherd. They had loved him, listened to him, and underpaid him. In 1906, when Frank came to Catawba, Mr. Pengilly was a frail stooped veteran with silver hair, thin silver mustache, and a slow smile which embraced the world.
Andrew Pengilly had gone into the Civil War as a drummer boy, slept blanketless and barefoot and wounded in the frost of Tennessee mountains, and come out still a child, to “clerk in a store” and teach Sunday School. He had been converted at ten, but at twenty-five he was overpowered by the preaching of Osage Joe, the Indian evangelist, became a Methodist preacher, and never afterward doubted the peace of God. He was married at thirty to a passionate, singing girl with kind lips. He loved her so romantically—just to tuck the crazy-quilt about
