II
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 boardinghouse 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 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.