VIII
When he found that he liked the Charity Organization Society and his work in that bleak institution no better than his work in the church, Frank laughed.
“As Bess said! A consistent malcontent! Well, I am consistent, anyway. And the relief not to be a preacher any more! Not to have to act sanctimonious! Not to have men consider you an old woman in trousers! To be able to laugh without watching its effect!”
Frank was given charge, at the C.O.S., of a lodging-house, a woodyard at which hoboes worked for two hours daily to pay for lodging and breakfast, and an employment bureau. He knew little about Scientific Charity, so he was shocked by the icy manner in which his subordinates—the aged virgin at the inquiry desk, the boss of the woodyard, the clerk at the lodging-house, the young lady who asked the applicants about their religion and vices—treated the shambling unfortunates as criminals who had deliberately committed the crime of poverty.
They were as efficient and as tender as vermin-exterminators.
In this acid perfection, Frank longed for the mystery that clings to even the dourest or politest tabernacle. He fell in the way of going often to the huge St. Dominic’s Catholic Church, of which the eloquent Father de Pinna was pastor, with Father Matthew Smeesby, the new sort of American, state-university-bred priest, as assistant pastor and liaison officer.
St. Dominic’s was, for Zenith, an ancient edifice, and the coal-smoke from the South Zenith factories had aged the gray stone to a semblance of historic centuries. The interior, with its dim irregularity, its lofty roof, the curious shrines, the mysterious door at the top of a flight of stone steps, unloosed Frank’s imagination. It touched him to see the people kneeling at any hour. He had never known a church to which the plain people came for prayer. Despite its dusky magnificence, they seemed to find in the church their home. And when he saw the gold and crimson of solemn high mass blazing at the end of the dark aisle, with the crush of people visibly believing in the presence of God, he wondered if he had indeed found the worship he had fumblingly sought.
He knew that to believe literally in Purgatory and the Immaculate Conception, the Real Presence and the authority of the hierarchy, was as impossible for him as to believe in Zeus.
“But,” he pondered, “isn’t it possible that the whole thing is so gorgeous a fairytale that to criticize it would be like trying to prove that Jack did not kill the giant? No sane priest could expect a man of some education to think that saying masses had any effect on souls in Purgatory; they’d expect him to take the whole thing as one takes a symphony. And, oh, I am lonely for the fellowship of the church!”
He sought a consultation with Father Matthew Smeesby. They had met, as fellow ministers, at many dinners.
The good father sat at a Grand Rapids desk, in a room altogether businesslike save for a carved Bavarian cupboard and a crucifix on the barren plaster wall. Smeesby was a man of forty, a crisper Philip McGarry.
“You were an American university man, weren’t you, Father?” Frank asked.
“Yes. University of Indiana. Played halfback.”
“Then I think I can talk to you. It seems to me that so many of your priests are not merely foreign by birth, Poles and whatnot, but they look down on American mores and want to mold us to their ideas and ways. But you—Tell me: Would it be conceivable for an—I won’t say an intelligent, but at least a reasonably well-read man like myself, who finds it quite impossible to believe one word of your doctrines—”
“Huh!”
“—but who is tremendously impressed by your ritual and the spirit of worship—could such a man be received into the Roman Catholic Church, honestly, with the understanding that to him your dogmas are nothing but symbols?”
“Most certainly not!”
“Don’t you know any priests who love the Church but don’t literally believe all the doctrines?”
“I do not! I know no such persons! Shallard, you can’t understand the authority and reasonableness of the Church. You’re not ready to. You think too much of your puerile powers of reasoning. You haven’t enough divine humility to comprehend the ages of wisdom that have gone to building up this fortress, and you stand outside its walls, one pitifully lonely little figure, blowing the trumpet of your egotism, and demanding of the sentry, ‘Take me to your commander. I am graciously inclined to assist him. Only he must understand that I think his granite walls are pasteboard, and I reserve the right to blow them down when I get tired of them.’ Man, if you were a prostitute or a murderer and came to me saying ‘Can I be saved?’ I’d cry ‘Yes!’ and give my life to helping you. But you’re obsessed by a worse crime than murder—pride of intellect! And yet you haven’t such an awfully overpowering intellect to be proud of, and I’m not sure but that’s the worst crime of all! Good day!”
He added, as Frank ragingly opened the door, “Go home and pray for simplicity.”
“Go home and pray that I may be made like you? Pray to have your humility and your manners?” said Frank.
It was a fortnight later that for his own satisfaction Frank set down in the notebook which he had always carried for sermon ideas, which he still carried for the sermons they would never let him preach again, a conclusion:
“The Roman Catholic Church is superior to the militant Protestant Church. It does not compel you to give up your sense of beauty, your sense of humor, or your pleasant vices. It merely requires you to give up your honesty, your reason, your heart and soul.”