As a general method of employing our time we advise you, 1. As often as possible to rise at four. 2. From four to five in the morning and from five to six in the evening to meditate, pray, and read the Scriptures with notes.
Extirpate out of our Church buying or selling goods which have not paid the duty laid upon them by government. … Extirpate bribery—receiving anything, directly or indirectly—for voting at any election.
Elmer became a model in all these departments except, perhaps, avoiding lightness and jesting; conducting himself in complete prudence with women; telling everyone under his care what he thought wrong with them—that would have taken all his spare time; arising at four; and extirpating sellers of smuggled goods.
For his grades, to be examined by the Annual Conference, he wrote to Dean Trosper at Mizpah. He explained to the dean that he had seen a great new light, that he had worked with Sister Falconer, but that it had been the early influence of Dean Trosper which, working somewhat slowly, had led him to his present perfection.
He received the grades, with a letter in which the dean observed:
“I hope you will not overwork your new zeal for righteousness. It might be hard on folks. I seem to recall a tendency in you to overdo a lot of things. As a Baptist, let me congratulate the Methodists on having you. If you really do mean all you say about your present state of grace—well, don’t let that keep you from going right on praying. There may still be virtues for you to acquire.”
“Well, by God!” raged the misjudged saint, and, “Oh, rats, what’s the odds! Got the credentials, anyway, and he says I can get my B.D. by passing an examination. Trouble with old Trosper is he’s one of these smart alecks. T’ hell with him!”
X
Along with his theological and ecclesiastical researches, Elmer applied himself to more worldly literature. He borrowed books from Cleo and from the tiny village library, housed in the public school; and on his occasional trips to Sparta, the nearest sizable city, he even bought a volume or two, when he could find good editions secondhand.
He began with Browning.
He had heard a lot about Browning. He had heard that he was a stylish poet and an inspiring thinker. But personally he did not find that he cared so much for Browning. There were so many lines that he had to read three or four times before they made sense, and there was so much stuff about Italy and all those Wop countries.
But Browning did give him a number of new words for the notebook of polysyllables and phrases which he was to keep for years, and which was to secrete material for some of his most rotund public utterances. There has been preserved a page from it:
incinerate—burn up
Merovingian—French tribe about AD 500
rem Golgotha was scene crucifixn
Leigh Hunt—poet—1840—n.g.
lupin—blue flower
defeasance—making nix
chanson (pro. Shan-song)—French kind of song
Rem: Man worth while is m. who can smile when ev thing goes dead wrong
Sermon on man that says other planets inhabited—nix. cause Bible says o of Xt trying to save them.
Tennyson, Elmer found more elevating then Browning. He liked “Maud”—she resembled Cleo, only not so friendly; and he delighted in the homicides and morality of “Idylls of the King.” He tried Fitzgerald’s Omar, which had been recommended by the literary set at Terwillinger, and he made a discovery which he thought of communicating through the press.
He had heard it said that Omar was non-religious, but when he read:
Myself when young did eagerly frequent
Doctor and Saint, and heard great argument
About it and about: but evermore
Came out by the same door wherein I went,
he perceived that in this quatrain Omar obviously meant that though teachers might do a whole lot of arguing, Omar himself stuck to his belief in Jesus.
In Dickens Elmer had a revelation.
He had not known that any literature published previous to the Saturday Evening Post could be thrilling. He did not care so much for the humor—it seemed to him that Mr. Dickens was vulgar and almost immoral when he got Pickwick drunk and caused Mantalini to contemplate suicide—but he loved the sentiment. When Paul Dombey died, Elmer could have wept; when Miss Nickleby protected her virtue against Sir Mulberry Hawk, Elmer would have liked to have been there, both as a parson and as an athlete, to save her from the accursed society man, so typical of his class in debauching youth and innocence.
“Yes, sir, you bet, that’s great stuff!” exulted Elmer. “There’s a writer that goes right down to the depths of human nature. Great stuff. I’ll preach on him when I get these hicks educated up to literary sermons.”
But his artistic pursuits could not be all play. He had to master philosophy as well; and he plunged into Carlyle and Elbert Hubbard. He terminated the first plunge, very icy, with haste; but in the biographies by Mr. Hubbard, at that time dominating America, Elmer found inspiration. He learned that Rockefeller had not come to be head of Standard Oil by chance, but by labor, genius, and early Baptist training. He learned that there are sermons in stones, edification in farmers, beatitude in bankers, and style in adjectives.
Elmer, who had always lived as publicly as a sparrow, could not endure keeping his literary treasures to himself. But for once Cleo Benham was not an adequate mate. He felt that she had read more of such belles-lettres as “The Message to Garcia” than even himself, so his companion in artistic adventure was Clyde Tippey, the Reverend Clyde Tippey, pastor of the United Brethren Church of Banjo Crossing.
Clyde was not, like Elmer, educated. He had left high school after his second year, and since then he had had only one year in a United Brethren seminary. Elmer didn’t think much,
