VII
The second church meeting was postponed. It looked to Elmer as though Frank would be able to stay on at Dorchester Congregational and thus defy Elmer as the spiritual and moral leader of the city.
Elmer acted fearlessly.
In sermon after sermon he spoke of “that bunch of atheists out there at Dorchester.” Frank’s parishioners were alarmed. They were forced to explain (only they were never quite sure what they were explaining) to customers, to neighbors, to fellow lodge-members. They felt disgraced, and so it was that a second meeting was called.
Now Frank had fancied a spectacular resignation. He heard himself, standing before a startled audience, proclaiming, “I have decided that no one in this room, including your pastor, believes in the Christian religion. Not one of us would turn the other cheek. Not one of us would sell all that he has and give to the poor. Not one of us would give his coat to some man who took his overcoat. Every one of us lays up all the treasure he can. We don’t practise the Christian religion. We don’t intend to practise it. Therefore, we don’t believe in it. Therefore I resign, and I advise you to quit lying and disband.”
He saw himself, then, tramping down the aisle among his gaping hearers, and leaving the church forever.
But: “I’m too tired. Too miserable. And why hurt the poor bewildered souls? And—I am so tired.”
He stood up at the beginning of the second meeting and said gently, “I had refused to resign. I still feel I have an honest right to an honest pulpit. But I am setting brother against brother. I am not a Cause—I am only a friend. I have loved you and the work, the sound of friends singing together, the happiness of meeting on leisurely Sunday mornings. This I give up. I resign, and I wish I could say, ‘God be with you and bless you all.’ But the good Christians have taken God and made him into a menacing bully, and I cannot even say ‘God bless you,’ during this last moment, in a life given altogether to religion, when I shall ever stand in a pulpit.”
Elmer Gantry, in his next sermon, said that he was so broad-minded that he would be willing to receive an Infidel Shallard in his church, providing he repented.