III
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:
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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., P.S.D.
Write or phone for Free personal consultation
The Bowers Hotel
Main & Sycamore
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His students were schoolteachers 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.