And Frank’s fretting wearily started all over again. He reread Harnack’s What Is Christianity? Sunderland’s Origin and Nature of the Bible, James’s Varieties of Religious Experience, Fraser’s Golden Bough.
He was in the pleasing situation where whatever he did was wrong. He could not content himself with the discussions of the Liberal Club. “If you fellows believe that way, why don’t you get out of the church?” he kept demanding. Yet he could not leave them; could not, therefore, greatly succeed among the Baptist brethren. His good wife, Bess, when he diffidently hinted of his doubts, protested, “You can’t reach people just through their minds. Besides, they wouldn’t understand you if you did come right out and tell ’em the truth—as you see it. They aren’t ready for it.”
His worst doubt was the doubt of himself. And in this quite undignified wavering he remained, envying equally Rabbi Kassebaum’s public scoffing at all religion and the thundering certainties of the cover-to-cover evangelicals. He who each Sunday morning neatly pointed his congregation the way to Heaven was himself tossed in a Purgatory of self-despising doubt, where his every domestic virtue was cowardice, his every mystic aspiration a superstitious mockery, and his every desire to be honest a cruelty which he must spare Bess and his well-loved brood.
He was in this mood when the Reverend Elmer Gantry suddenly came, booming and confident, big and handsome and glossy, into his study, and explained that if Frank could let him have a hundred dollars, Elmer, and presumably the Lord, would be grateful and return the money within two weeks.
The sight of Elmer as a fellow pastor was too much for Frank. To get rid of him, he hastily gave Elmer the hundred he had saved up toward payment of the last two obstetrical bills, and sat afterward at his desk, his head between his lax hands, praying, “O Lord, guide me!”
He leapt up. “No! Elmer said the Lord had been guiding him! I’ll take a chance on guiding myself! I will—” Again, weakly, “But how can I hurt Bess, hurt my dad, hurt Father Pengilly? Oh, I’ll go on!”
Chapter XVIII
I
The Reverend Elmer Gantry was writing letters—he had no friends, and the letters were all to inquirers about his Prosperity Classes—at a small oak-desk in the lobby of the O’Hearn House in Zenith.
His Zenith classes here had gone not badly, not brilliantly. He had made enough to consider paying the hundred dollars back to Frank Shallard, though certainly not enough to do so. He was tired of this slippery job; he was almost willing to return to farm implements. But he looked anything but discouraged, in his morning coat, his wing collar, his dotted blue bow tie.
Writing at the other half of the lobby desk was a little man with an enormous hooked nose, receding chin, and a Byzantine bald head. He was in a brown business suit, with a lively green tie, and he wore horn-rimmed spectacles.
“Vice-president of a bank, but started as a schoolteacher,” Elmer decided. He was conscious that the man was watching him. A possible student? No. Too old.
Elmer leaned back, folded his hands, looked as pontifical as possible, cleared his throat with a learned sound, and beamed.
The little man kept glancing up, ratlike, but did not speak.
“Beautiful morning,” said Elmer.
“Yes. Lovely. On mornings like this all Nature exemplifies the divine joy!”
“My God! No business for me here! He’s a preacher or an osteopath,” Elmer lamented within.
“Is this—this is Dr. Gantry, I believe.”
“Why, yes. I’m, uh, sorry, I—”
“I’m Bishop Toomis, of the Zenith area of the Methodist Church. I had the great pleasure of hearing one of your exordiums the other evening, Dr. Gantry.”
Elmer was hysterically thrilled.
Bishop Wesley R. Toomis! For years he had heard of the bishop as one of the giants, one of the pulpit orators, one of the profound thinkers, exalted speakers, and inspired executives of the Methodist Church, North. He had addressed ten thousand at Ocean Grove; he had spoken in Yale chapel; he had been a success in London. Elmer rose and, with a handshake which must have been most painful to the bishop, he glowed:
“Well, well, well, sir, this certainly is a mighty great pleasure, sir. It sure is! So you came and listened to me! Well, wish I’d known that. I’d of asked you to come sit on the platform.”
Bishop Toomis had risen also; he waved Elmer back into his chair, himself perched like a keen little hawk, and trilled:
“No, no, not at all, not at all. I came only as an humble listener. I dare say I have, by the chance and circumstance of age, had more experience of Christian life and doctrine than you, and I can’t pretend I exactly in every way agreed with you, you might say, but at the same time, that was a very impressive thought about the need of riches to carry on the work of the busy workaday world, as we have it at present, and the value of concentration in the silence as well as in those happy moments of more articulate prayer. Yes, yes. I firmly believe that we ought to add to our Methodist practise some of the Great Truths about the, alas, too often occulted and obstructed Inner Divine Powers possessed in unconsciousness by each of us, as New Thought has revealed them to us, and that we ought most certainly not to confine
