Elmer Gantry (24 page)

Though to the commonplace and unspeculative eye Mrs Evans Riddle was but a female blacksmith, yet Mrs. Riddle and her
followers knew, in a bland smirking way, that she was instituting an era in which sickness, poverty, and folly would be
ended forever.

She was the proprietor of the Victory Thought-power Headquarters, New York, and not even in Los Angeles was there a more
important center of predigested philosophy and pansy-painted ethics. She maintained a magazine filled with such starry
thoughts as “All the world’s a road whereon we are but fellow wayfarers.” She held morning and vesper services on Sunday at
Euterpean Hall, on Eighty-seventh Street, and between moments of Silent Thought she boxed with the inexplicable. She taught,
or farmed out, classes in Concentration, Prosperity, Love, Metaphysics, Oriental Mysticism, and the Fourth Dimension.

She instructed small Select Circles how to keep one’s husband, how to understand Sanskrit philosophy without
understanding either Sanskrit or philosophy, and how to become slim without giving up pastry. She healed all the diseases in
the medical dictionary, and some which were not; and in personal consultations, at ten dollars the half hour, she explained
to unappetizing elderly ladies how they might rouse passion in a football hero.

She had a staff, including a real Hindu swami—anyway, he was a real Hindu—but she was looking for a first assistant.

The Reverend Elmer Gantry had failed as an independent evangelist.

He had been quite as noisy and threatening as the average evangelist; to reasonably large gatherings he had stated that
the Judgment Day was rather more than likely to occur before six A.M., and he had told all the chronic anecdotes of the
dying drunkard. But there was something wrong. He could not make it go.

Sharon was with him, beckoning him, intolerably summoning him, intolerably rebuking him. Sometimes he worshiped her as
the shadow of a dead god; as always he was humanly lonely for her and her tantrums and her electric wrath and her abounding
laughter. In pulpits he felt like an impostor, and in hotel bedrooms he ached for her voice.

Worst of all, he was expected everywhere to tell of her “brave death in the cause of the Lord.” He was very sick about
it.

Mrs. Evans Riddle invited him to join her.

Elmer had no objection to the malted milk of New Thought. But after Sharon, Mrs. Riddle was too much. She shaved
regularly, she smelled of cigar smoke, yet she had a nickering fancy for warm masculine attentions.

Elmer had to earn a living, and he had taken too much of the drug of oratory to be able to go back to the road as a
traveling salesman. He shrugged when he had interviewed Mrs. Riddle; he told her that she would be an inspiration to a young
man like himself; he held her hand; he went out and washed his hand; and determined that since he was to dwell in the large
brownstone house which was both her Thought-power Headquarters and her home, he would keep his door locked.

The preparation for his labors was not too fatiguing. He read through six copies of Mrs. Riddle’s magazine and, just as
he had learned the trade-terms of evangelism, so he learned the technologies of New Thought; the Cosmic Law of Vibration; I
Affirm the Living Thought. He labored through a chapter of “The Essence of Oriental Mysticism, Occultism, and Esotericism”
and accomplished seven pages of the “Bhagavad–Gita”; and thus was prepared to teach disciples how to win love and
prosperity.

In actual practise he had much less of treading the Himalayan heights than of pleasing Mrs. Evans Riddle. Once she
discovered that he had small fancy for sitting up after midnight with her, she was rather sharp about his bringing in new
chelas—as, out of “Kim,” she called paying customers.

Occasionally he took Sunday morning service for Mrs. Riddle at Euterpean Hall, when she was weary of curing rheumatism or
when she was suffering from rheumatism; and always he had to be at Euterpean to give spiritual assistance. She liked to have
her hairy arm stroked just before she went out to preach and that was not too hard a task—usually he could recover while she
was out on the platform. She turned over to him the Personal Consultations with spinsters, and he found it comic to watch
their sharp noses quivering, their dry mouths wabbling.

But his greatest interest was given to the Prosperity Classes. To one who had never made more than five thousand a year
himself, it was inspiring to explain before dozens of pop-eyed and admiring morons how they could make ten thousand—fifty
thousand—a million a year, and all this by the Wonder Power of Suggestion, by Aggressive Personality, by the Divine Rhythm,
in fact by merely releasing the Inner Self-shine.

It was fun, it was an orgy of imagination, for him who had never faced any Titan of Success of larger dimensions than the
chairman of a local evangelistic committee to instruct a thirty-a-week bookkeeper how to stalk into Morgan’s office, fix him
with the penetrating eye of the Initiate, and borrow a hundred thousand on the spot.

But always he longed for Sharon, with a sensation of emptiness real as the faintness of hunger and long tramping. He saw
his days with her as adventures, foot-loose, scented with fresh air. He hated himself for having ever glanced over his
shoulder, and he determined to be a celibate all his life.

In some ways he preferred New Thought to standard Protestantism. It was safer to play with. He had never been sure but
that there might be something to the doctrines he had preached as an evangelist. Perhaps God really had dictated every word
of the Bible. Perhaps there really was a hell of burning sulphur. Perhaps the Holy Ghost really was hovering around watching
him and reporting. But he knew with serenity that all of his New Thoughts, his theosophical utterances, were pure and
uncontaminated bunk. No one could deny his theories because none of his theories meant anything. It did not matter what he
said, so long as he kept them listening; and he enjoyed the buoyancy of power as he bespelled his classes with long,
involved, fruity sentences rhapsodic as perfume advertisements.

How agreeable on bright winter afternoons in the gilt and velvet elegance of the lecture hall, to look at smart women,
and moan, “And, oh, my beloved, can you not see, do you not perceive, have not your earth-bound eyes ingathered, the
supremacy of the raja’s quality which each of us, by that inner contemplation which is the all however cloaked by the
seeming, can consummate and build loftily to higher aspiring spheres?”

Almost any Hindu word was useful. It seems that the Hindus have Hidden Powers which enable them to do whatever they want
to, except possibly to get rid of the Mohammedans, the plague, and the cobra. “Soul-breathing” was also a good thing to talk
about whenever he had nothing to say; and you could always keep an audience of satin-bosomed ladies through the last
quarter-hour of lecturing by coming down hard on “Concentration.”

But with all these agreeable features, he hated Mrs. Riddle, and he suspected that she was, as he put it, “holding out
the coin on him.” He was to have a percentage of the profits, besides his thin salary of twenty-five hundred a year. There
never were any profits and when he hinted that he would like to see her books—entirely out of admiration for the beauties of
accountancy—she put him off.

So he took reasonable measures of reprisal. He moved from her house; he began to take for himself the patients who came
for Personal Consultations, and to meet them in the parlor of his new boarding-house in Harlem. And when she was not present
at his Euterpean Hall meetings, he brought back to Victory Thought-power Headquarters only so much of the collection as,
after prayer and meditation and figuring on an envelope, seemed suitable.

That did it.

Mrs. Evans Riddle had a regrettable suspiciousness. She caused a marked twenty-dollar bill to be placed in the collection
at vespers, a year after Elmer had gone to work for the higher powers, and when he brought her the collection-money minus
the twenty dollars, she observed loudly, with her grinning swami looking heathenish and sultry across the room:

“Gantry, you’re a thief! You’re fired! You have a contract, but you can sue and be damned. Jackson!” A large negro
houseman appeared. “Throw this crook out, will you?”

He felt dazed and homeless and poor, but he started out with Prosperity Classes of his own.

He did very well at Prosperity, except that he couldn’t make a living out of it.

He spent from a month to four months in each city. He hired the ballroom of the second-best hotel for lectures three
evenings a week, and advertised himself in the newspapers as though he were a cigarette or a brand of soap:

$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$
$                                                 $
$      THE WORLD OWES YOU A MILLION DOLLARS!      $
$            WHY DON'T YOU COLLECT IT?            $
$                                                 $
$  What brought millions to Rockefeller, Morgan,  $
$ Carnegie?  WILL POWER!  It's within you.  Learn $
$  to develop it.  YOU CAN!  The world-mastering  $
$   secrets of the Rosicrucians and Hindu Sages   $
$   revealed in twelve lessons by the renowned    $
$                   Psychologist                  $
$                                                 $
$          ELMER GANTRY, PH.D., D.D., PS.D.       $
$                                                 $
$  Write or phone for FREE personal consultation  $
$                                                 $
$                 THE BOWERS HOTEL                $
$                 MAIN & SYCAMORE                 $
$                                                 $
$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$

His students were school-teachers who wanted to own tearooms, clerks who wanted to be newspapermen, newspapermen who
wanted to be real estate dealers, real estate dealers who wanted to be bishops, and widows who wanted to earn money without
loss of elegance. He lectured to them in the most beautiful language, all out of Mrs. Riddle’s magazine.

He had a number of phrases—all stolen—and he made his disciples repeat them in chorus, in the manner of all religions.
Among the more powerful incantations were:

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.

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 of Baptist preachers.

He had learned, in theory, the ways of raising money through church fairs; he had learned what he was to say on pastoral
visits. He had learned that Roger Williams, Adoniram Judson, Luther, Calvin, Jonathan Edwards, and George Washington were
the greatest men in history; that Lincoln was given to fervent prayer at all crises; and that Ingersoll had called his
non-existent son to his death-bed and bidden him become an orthodox Christian. He had learned that the Pope at Rome was
plotting to come to America and get hold of the government, and was prevented only by the denunciations of the Baptist
clergy with a little help from the Methodists and Presbyterians; that most crime was caused either by alcohol or by people
leaving the Baptist fold for Unitarianism; and that clergymen ought not to wear red ties.

He had learned how to assemble Jewist texts, Greek philosophy, and Middle–Western evangelistic anecdotes into a sermon.
And he had learned that poverty is blessed, but that bankers make the best deacons.

Otherwise, as he wretchedly examined his equipment, facing his career, Frank did not seem to have learned anything
whatever.

From Elmer Gantry’s relations to Lulu Bains, from Harry Zenz’s almost frank hint that he was an atheist, Frank perceived
that a preacher can be a scoundrel or a hypocrite and still be accepted by his congregation. From the manners of Dean
Trosper, who served his God with vinegar, he perceived that a man may be free of all the skilled sins, may follow every rule
of the church, and still bring only fear to his flock. Listening to the celebrated divines who visited the seminary and
showed off to the infant prophets, he perceived that a man could make scholarly and violent sounds and yet not say anything
which remained in the mind for six minutes.

He concluded, in fact, that if there was any value in churches and a ministry, of which he was not very certain, in any
case there could be no value in himself as a minister.

Yet he had been ordained, he had taken a pulpit.

It was doubtful whether he could have endured the necessary lying had it not been for Dean Trosper’s bullying and his
father’s confusing pleas. Frank’s father was easygoing enough, but he had been a Baptist clergyman for so many years that
the church was sacred to him. To have had his son deny it would have broken him. He would have been shocked to be told that
he was advising Frank to lie, but he explained that the answers to the ordination examination were after all poetic symbols,
sanctified by generations of loving usage; that they need not be taken literally.

So Frank Shallard, pupil of Bruno Zechlin, said nervously to an examining cleric that, yes, he did believe that baptism
by immersion was appointed by God himself, as the only valid way of beginning a righteous life; that, yes, unrepentant
sinners would go to a literal Hell; that, yes, these unrepentant sinners included all persons who did not go to evangelical
churches if they had the chance; and that, yes, the Maker of a universe with stars a hundred thousand light-years apart was
interested, furious, and very personal about it if a small boy played baseball on Sunday afternoon.

Half an hour after the ordination and the somewhat comforting welcome by veterans of the ministry, he hated himself, and
ached to flee, but again the traditional “not wanting to hurt his father” kept him from being honest. So he stayed in the
church . . . and went on hurting his father for years instead of for a day.

It was a lonely and troubled young man, the Frank Shallard who for his first pastorate came to the Baptist Church at
Catawba, a town of eighteen hundred, in the same state with Zenith and the Mizpah Seminary. The town liked him, and did not
take him seriously. They said his sermons were “real poetic”; they admired him for being able to sit with old Mrs. Randall,
who had been an invalid for thirty years, a bore for sixty, and never ill a day in her life. They admired him for trying to
start a boys’ club, though they did not go so far in their support as to contribute anything. They all called him
“Reverend,” and told him that he was amazingly sound in doctrine for one so unfortunately well educated; and he stayed on,
in a vacuum.

Frank felt well about his fifth sermon in Catawba; felt that he was done with hesitations. He had decided to ignore
controversial theology, ignore all dogma, and concentrate on the leadership of Jesus. That was his topic, there in the
chapel with its walls of glaring robin’s-egg blue—the eager-eyed, curly-headed boy, his rather shrill voice the wail of a
violin as he gave his picture of Jesus, the kindly friend, the unfailing refuge, the gallant leader.

He was certain that he had done well; he was thinking of it on Monday morning as he walked from his boarding-house to the
post office.

He saw one Lem Staples, a jovial horse-doctor who was known as the Village Atheist, sitting on a decayed carriage seat in
front of the Fashion Livery Barn. Doc Staples was a subscriber to the Truth Seeker, a periodical said to be infidel, and he
quoted Robert Ingersoll, Ed Howe, Colonel Watterson, Elbert Hubbard, and other writers who were rumored to believe that a
Catholic was as good as a Methodist or Baptist. The Doc lived alone, “baching it” in a little yellow cottage, and Frank had
heard that he sat up till all hours, eleven and even later, playing cribbage in Mart Blum’s saloon.

Frank disliked him, and did not know him. He was prepared to welcome honest inquiry, but a fellow who was an avowed
athetist, why, Frank raged, he was a fool! Who made the flowers, the butterflies, the sunsets, the laughter of little
children? Those things didn’t just HAPPEN! Besides: why couldn’t the man keep his doubts to himself, and not try to take
from other people the religion which was their one comfort and strength in illness, sorrow, want? A matter not of Morality
but of reverence for other people’s belief, in fact of Good Taste—

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 cabinet-makers 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.

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 her was poetry, and her cowhide shoes were to him
fairy slippers—he loved her so ungrudgingly that when she died, in childbirth, within a year after their marriage, he had
nothing left for any other woman. He lived alone, with the undiminished vision of her. Not the most scandalmongering Mother
in Zion had ever hinted that Mr. Pengilly looked damply upon the widows in his fold.

Little book-learning had Andrew Pengilly in his youth, and to this day he knew nothing of Biblical criticism, of the
origin of religions, of the sociology which was beginning to absorb church-leaders, but his Bible he knew, and believed,
word by word, and somehow he had drifted into the reading of ecstatic books of mysticism. He was a mystic, complete; the
world of plows and pavements and hatred was less to him than the world of angels, whose silver robes seemed to flash in the
air about him as he meditated alone in his cottage. He was as ignorant of Modern Sunday School Methods as of single tax or
Lithuanian finances, yet few Protestants had read more in the Early Fathers.

On Frank Shallard’s first day in Catawba, when he was unpacking his books in his room at the residence of Deacon Halter,
the druggist, the Reverend Mr. Pengilly was announced. Frank went down to the parlor (gilded cat-tails and a basket of
stereopticon views) and his loneliness was warmed by Mr. Pengilly’s enveloping smile, his drawling voice:

“Welcome, Brother! I’m Pengilly, of the Methodist Church. I never was much of a hand at seeing any difference between the
denominations, and I hope we’ll be able to work together for the glory of God. I do hope so! And I hope you’ll go fishing
with me. I know,” enthusiastically, “a pond where there’s some elegant pickerel!”

Many evenings they spent in Mr. Pengilly’s cottage, which was less littered and odorous than that of the village atheist,
Doc Lem Staples, only because the stalwart ladies of Mr. Pengilly’s congregation vied in sweeping for him, dusting for him,
disarranging his books and hen-tracked sermon-notes, and bullying him in the matters of rubbers and winter flannels. They
would not let him prepare his own meals—they made him endure the several boarding-houses in turn—but sometimes of an evening
he would cook scrambled eggs for Frank. He had pride in his cooking. He had never tried anything but scrambled eggs.

His living-room was overpowering with portraits and carbon prints. Though every local official board pled with him about
it, he insisted on including madonnas, cinquecento resurrections, St. Francis of Assisi, and even a Sacred Heart, with such
Methodist worthies as Leonidas Hamline and the cloaked romantic Francis Asbury. In the bay window was a pyramid of wire
shelves filled with geraniums. Mr. Pengilly was an earnest gardener, except during such weeks as he fell into dreams and
forgot to weed and water, and through the winter he watched for the geranium leaves to wither enough so that he could pick
them off and be able to feel busy.

All over the room were the aged dog and ancient cat, who detested each other, never ceased growling at each other, and at
night slept curled together.

In an antiquated and badly listed rocking-chair, padded with calico cushions, Frank listened to Mr. Pengilly’s ramblings.
For a time they talked only of externals; gossip of their parishes; laughter at the man who went from church to church
fretting the respectable by shouting “Hallelujah”; local chatter not without a wholesome and comforting malice. Frank was at
first afraid to bare his youthful hesitancies to so serene an old saint, but at last he admitted his doubts.

How, he demanded, could you reconcile a Loving God with one who would strike down an Uzza for the laudable act of trying
to save the Ark of the Covenant from falling, who would kill forty-two children (and somewhat ludicrously) for shouting at
Elisha as any small boy in Catawba today would shout? Was it reasonable? And, if it wasn’t, if any part of the Bible was
mythical, where to stop? How would we know if anything in the Bible was “inspired”?

Mr. Pengilly was not shocked, nor was he very agitated. His thin fingers together, far down in his worn plush chair, he
mused:

“Yes, I’m told the higher critics ask these things. I believe it bothers people. But I wonder if perhaps God hasn’t put
these stumbling blocks in the Bible as a test of our faith, of our willingness to accept with all our hearts and souls a
thing that may seem ridiculous to our minds? You see, our minds don’t go far. Think—how much does even an astronomer know
about folks on Mars, if there are any folks there? Isn’t it with our hearts, our faith, that we have to accept Jesus Christ,
and not with our historical charts? Don’t we FEEL his influence on our lives? Isn’t it the biggest men that feel it the
most? Maybe God wants to keep out of the ministry all the folks that are so stuck on their poor minds that they can’t be
humble and just accept the great overpowering truth of Christ’s mercy. Do you—When do you feel nearest to God? When you’re
reading some awful’ smart book criticizing the Bible or when you kneel in prayer and your spirit just flows forth and you
KNOW that you’re in communion with him?”

“Oh, of course—”

“Don’t you think maybe he will explain all these puzzling things in his own good time? And meanwhile wouldn’t you rather
be a help to poor sick worried folks than write a cute little book finding a fault?”

“Oh, well—”

“And has there ever been anything like the Old Book for bringing lost souls home to happiness? Hasn’t it WORKED?”

In Andrew Pengilly’s solacing presence these seemed authentic arguments, actual revelations; Bruno Zechlin was far off
and gray; and Frank was content.

Equally did Mr. Pengilly console him about the intelligent workmen who would have none of the church. The old man simply
laughed.

“Good Heavens, boy! What do you expect, as a preacher? A whole world that’s saved, and nothing for you to do? Reckon you
don’t get much salary, but how do you expect to earn that much? These folks don’t go to any Christian church? Huh! When the
Master started out, wa’nt anybody going to a Christian church! Go out and get ’em!”

Which seemed disastrously reasonable to the shamed Frank; and he went out to get ’em, and didn’t do so, and continued in
his ministry.

He had heard in theological seminary of the “practise of the presence of God” as a papist mystery. Now he encountered it.
Mr. Pengilly taught him to kneel, his mind free of all worries, all prides, all hunger, his lips repeating “Be thou visibly
present with me”—not as a charm but that his lips might not be soiled with more earthly phrases—and, when he had become
strained and weary and exalted, to feel a Something glowing and almost terrifying about him, and to experience thus, he was
certain, the actual, loving, proven nearness of the Divinity.

He began to call his mentor Father Pengilly, and the old man eluded him only a little . . . presently did not chide him
at all.

For all his innocence and his mysticism, Father Pengilly was not a fool nor weak. He spoke up harshly to a loud-mouthed
grocer, new come to town, who considered the patriarch a subject for what he called “kidding,” and who shouted, “Well, I’m
getting tired of waiting for you preachers to pray for rain. Guess you don’t believe the stuff much yourselves!” He spoke up
to old Miss Udell, the purity specialist of the town, when she came to snuffle that Amy Dove was carrying on with the boys
in the twilight. “I know how you like a scandal, Sister,” said he. “Maybe taint Christian to deny you one. But I happen to
know all about Amy. Now if you’d go out and help poor old crippled Sister Eckstein do her washing, maybe you’d keep busy
enough so’s you could get along without your daily scandal.”

He had humor, as well, Father Pengilly. He could smile over the cranks in the congregation. And he liked the village
atheist, Doc Lem Staples. He had him at the house, and it healed Frank’s spirit to hear with what beatific calm Father
Pengilly listened to the Doc’s jibes about the penny-pinchers and the sinners in the church.

“Lem,” said Father Pengilly, “you’ll be surprised at this, but I must tell you that there’s two-three sinners in your
fold, too. Why, I’ve heard of even horse-thieves that didn’t belong to churches. That must prove something, I guess. Yes,
sir, I admire to hear you tell about the kind-hearted atheists, after reading about the cannibals, who are remarkably little
plagued with us Methodists and Baptists.”

Not in his garden only but in the woods, along the river, Father Pengilly found God in Nature. He was insane about
fishing—though indifferent to the catching of any actual fish. Frank floated with him in a mossy scow, in a placid backwater
under the willows. He heard the gurgle of water among the roots and watched the circles from a leaping bass. The old man
(his ruddy face and silver mustache shaded by a shocking hayfield straw hat) hummed “There’s a wideness in God’s mercy like
the wideness of the sea.” When Father Pengilly mocked him, “And you have to go to books to find God, young man!” then Frank
was content to follow him, to be his fellow preacher, to depend more on Pengilly’s long experience than on irritating
questions, to take any explanation of the validity of the Bible, of the mission of the church, the leadership of Christ,
which might satisfy this soldier of the cross.

Frank became more powerful as a preacher. He went from Catawba, via pastorates in two or three larger towns, to Eureka, a
camp of forty thousand brisk industrialists, and here he was picked up and married by the amiable Bess.