VII
Elmer was as friendly as ever with Bishop Toomis.
He had conferred early with the bishop and with the canny lawyer-trustee, T. J. Rigg, as to what fellow-clergymen in Zenith it would be worth his while to know.
Among the ministers outside the Methodist Church, they recommended Dr. G. Prosper Edwards, the highly cultured pastor of the Pilgrim Congregational Church, Dr. John Jennison Drew, the active but sanctified leader of the Chatham Road Presbyterian Church, that solid Baptist, the Reverend Hosea Jessup, and Willis Fortune Tate, who, though he was an Episcopalian and very shaky as regards liquor and hell, had one of the suavest and most expensive flocks in town. And if one could endure the Christian Scientists’ smirking conviction that they alone had the truth, there was the celebrated leader of the First Christian Science Church, Mr. Irving Tillish.
The Methodist ministers of Zenith Elmer met and studied at their regular Monday morning meetings, in the funeral and wedding chapel of Central Church. They looked like a group of prosperous and active business men. Only two of them ever wore clerical waistcoats, and of these only one compromised with the Papacy and the errors of Canterbury by turning his collar around. A few resembled farmers, a few stonemasons, but most of them looked like retail shops. The Reverend Mr. Chatterton Weeks indulged in claret-colored “fancy socks,” silk handkerchiefs, and an enormous emerald ring, and gave a pleasant suggestion of vaudeville. Nor were they too sanctimonious. They slapped one another’s backs, they used first names, they shouted, “I hear you’re grabbing off all the crowds in town, you old cuss!” and for the manlier and more successful of them it was quite the thing to use now and then a daring “damn.”
It would, to an innocent layman, have been startling to see them sitting in rows like schoolboys; to hear them listening not to addresses on credit and the routing of hardware but to short helpful talks on Faith. The balance was kept, however, by an adequate number of papers on trade subjects—the sort of pews most soothing to the back; the value of sending postcards reading “Where were you last Sunday, old scout? We sure did miss you at the Men’s Bible Class”; the comparative values of a giant imitation thermometer, a giant clock, and a giant automobile speedometer, as a register of the money coming in during special drives; the question of gold and silver stars as rewards for Sunday School attendance; the effectiveness of giving the children savings-banks in the likeness of a jolly little church to encourage them to save their pennies for Christian work; and the morality of violin solos.
Nor were the assembled clergy too inhumanly unboastful in their reports of increased attendance and collections.
Elmer saw that the Zenith district superintendent, one Fred Orr, could be neglected as a creeping and silent fellow who was all right at prayer and who seemed to lead an almost irritatingly pure life, but who had no useful notions about increasing collections.
The Methodist preachers whom he had to take seriously as rivals were four.
There was Chester Brown, the ritualist, of the new and ultra-Gothic Asbury Church. He was almost as bad, they said, as an Episcopalian. He wore a clerical waistcoat buttoned up to his collar; he had a robed choir and the processional; he was rumored once to have had candles on what was practically an altar. He was, to Elmer, distressingly literary and dramatic. It was said that he had literary gifts; his articles appeared not only in the Advocate but in the Christian Century and the New Republic—rather whimsical essays, safely Christian but frank about the church’s sloth and wealth and blindness. He had been Professor of English Literature and Church History in Luccock College, and he did such sermons on books as Elmer, with his exhausting knowledge of Longfellow and George Eliot, could never touch.
Dr. Otto Hickenlooper of Central Church was an even more distressing rival. His was the most active institutional church of the whole state. He had not only manual training and gymnastics but sacred pageants, classes in painting (never from the nude), classes in French and batik-making and sex hygiene and bookkeeping and short-story writing. He had clubs for railroad men, for stenographers, for bellboys; and after the church suppers the young people were encouraged to sit about in booths to which the newspapers referred flippantly as “courting corners.”
Dr. Hickenlooper had come out hard for Social Service. He was in sympathy with the American Federation of Labor, the I.W.W., the Socialists, the Communists, and the Nonpartisan League, which was more than they were with one another. He held Sunday evening lectures on the Folly of War, the Minimum Wage, the need of clean milk; and once a month he had an open forum, to which were invited the most dangerous radical speakers, who were allowed to say absolutely anything they liked, provided they did not curse, refer to adultery, or criticize the leadership of Christ.
Dr. Mahlon Potts, of the First Methodist Church, seemed to Elmer at first glance less difficult to oust. He was fat, pompous, full of heavy rumbles of piety. He was a stage parson. “Ah, my dear Brother!” he boomed; and “How are we this morning, my dear Doctor, and how is the lovely little wife?” But Dr. Potts had the largest congregation of any church of any denomination in Zenith. He was so respectable. He was so safe. People knew where they were, with him. He was adequately flowery of speech—he could do up a mountain, a sunset, a burning of the martyrs, a reception of the same by the saints in heaven, as well as any preacher in town. But he never doubted nor let anyone else doubt that by attending the Methodist Church regularly, and observing the rules of repentance, salvation, baptism, communion, and liberal giving, everyone would have a minimum of cancer and tuberculosis and sin, and unquestionably arrive in heaven.
These three Elmer envied but respected; one man he envied and loathed.
That was Philip McGarry of the Arbor Methodist Church.
Philip McGarry, Ph. D. of Chicago University in economics and philosophy—only everybody who liked him, layman or fellow-parson, seemed to call him “Phil”—was at the age of thirty-five known through the whole American Methodist Church as an enfant terrible. The various sectional editions of the Advocate admired him but clucked like doting and alarmed hens over his frequent improprieties. He was accused of every heresy. He never denied them, and the only dogma he was known to give out positively was the leadership of Jesus—as to whose divinity he was indefinite.
He was a stocky, smiling man, fond of boxing, and even at a funeral incapable of breathing, “Ah, Sister!”
He criticized everything. He criticized even bishops—for being too fat, for being too ambitious, for gassing about Charity during a knockdown-and-drag-out strike. He criticized, but amiably, the social and institutional and generally philanthropic Dr. Otto Hickenlooper, with his clubs for the study of Karl Marx and his Sunday afternoon reception for lonely traveling-men.
“You’re a good lad, Otto,” said Dr. McGarry—and openly, in the preachers’ Monday meetings: “You mean well, but you’re one of these darned philanthropists.”
“Nice word to use publicly—‘darned’!” meditated the Reverend Elmer Gantry.
“All your stuff at Central, Otto,” said Dr. McGarry, “is paternalistic. You hand out rations to the dear pee-pul and keep ’em obedient. You talk about socialism and pacifism, and say a lot of nice things about ’em, but you always explain that reforms must come in due time, which means never, and then only through the kind supervision of Rockefeller and Henry Ford. And I always suspect that your activities have behind ’em the sneaking purpose of luring the poor chumps into religion—even into Methodism!”
The whole ministerial meeting broke into yelps.
“Well, of course, that’s the purpose—”
“Well, if you’ll kindly tell me why you stay in the Methodist Church when you think it’s so unimportant to—”
“Just what are you, a minister of the gospel, seeking except religion—”
The meeting, on such a morning, was certain to stray from the consideration of using egg-coal in church furnaces to the question as to what, when they weren’t before their congregations and on record, they really believed about the whole thing.
That was a very dangerous and silly thing, reflected Elmer Gantry. No telling where you’d get to, if you went blatting around about a lot of these fool problems. Preach the straight Bible gospel and make folks good, he demanded, and leave all these ticklish questions of theology and social service to the profs!
Philip McGarry wound up his cheerful attack on Dr. Hickenlooper, the first morning when Elmer disgustedly encountered him, by insisting, “You see, Otto, your reforms couldn’t mean anything, or you wouldn’t be able to hold onto as many prosperous money-grabbing parishioners as you do. No risk of the workingmen in your church turning dangerous as long as you’ve got that tightfisted Joe Hanley as one of your trustees! Thank Heaven, I haven’t got a respectable person in my whole blooming flock!”
(“Yeh, and there’s where you gave yourself away, McGarry,” Elmer chuckled inwardly. “That’s the first thing you’ve said that’s true!”)
Philip McGarry’s church was in a part of the city incomparably more rundown than Elmer’s Old Town. It was called “The Arbor”; it had in pioneer days been the vineyard-sheltered village, along the Chaloosa River, from which had grown the modern Zenith. Now it was all dives, brothels, wretched tenements, cheap-jack shops. Yet here McGarry lived, a bachelor, seemingly well content, counseling pickpockets and scrubwomen, and giving on Friday evenings a series of lectures packed by eager Jewish girl students, radical workmen, old cranks, and wistful rich girls coming in limousines down from the spacious gardens of Royal Ridge.
“I’ll have trouble with that McGarry if we both stay in this town. Him and I will never get along together,” thought Elmer. “Well, I’ll keep away from him; I’ll treat him with some of this Christian charity that he talks so darn much about and can’t understand the real meaning of! We’ll just dismiss him—and most of these other birds. But the big three—how’ll I handle them?”
He could not, even if he should have a new church, outdo Chester Brown in ecclesiastical elegance or literary messages. He could never touch Otto Hickenlooper in institutions and social service. He could never beat Mahlon Potts in appealing to the well-to-do respectables.
Yet he could beat them all together!
Planning it delightedly, at the ministers’ meeting, on his way home, by the fireplace at night, he saw that each of these stars was so specialized that he neglected the good publicity-bringing features of the others. Elmer would combine them; be almost as elevating as Chester Brown, almost as solidly safe and moral as Mahlon Potts. And all three of them, in fact every preacher in town except one Presbyterian, were neglecting the—well, some people called it sensational, but that was just envy; the proper word, considered Elmer, was powerful, or perhaps fearless, or stimulating—all of them were neglecting a powerful, fearless, or stimulating, and devil-challenging concentration on vice. Booze. Legs. Society bridge. You bet!
Not overdo it, of course, but the town would come to know that in the sermons of the Reverend Elmer Gantry there would always be something spicy and yet improving.
“Oh, I can put it over the whole bunch!” Elmer stretched his big arms in joyous vigor. “I’ll build a new church. I’ll take the crowds away from all of ’em. I’ll be the one big preacher in Zenith. And then—Chicago? New York? Bishopric? Whatever I want! Whee!”