Elmer Gantry (Unabridged). Sinclair Lewis

I wouldn't have made any more than I do now. But if I could — Suppose I could've been a great chemist? Wouldn't that (mind you, I'm just speculating, as a student of psychology) — wouldn't that conceivably be better than year after year of students with the same confounded problems over and over again — and always so pleased and surprised and important about them! — or year after year again of standing in the pulpit and knowing your congregation don't remember what you've said seven minutes after you've said it?"

      "Why, Henry, I don't know what's gotten into you! I think you better do a little praying yourself instead of picking on this poor young Gantry! Neither you nor I could ever have been happy except in a Baptist church or a real cover-to-cover Baptist college."

      The dean's wife finished darning the towels and went up to say good-night to her parents.

      They had lived with her since her father's retirement, at seventy-five, from his country pastorate. He had been a missionary in Missouri before the Civil War.

      Her lips had been moving, her eyebrows working, as she darned the towels; her eyebrows were still creased as she came into their room and shrieked at her father's deafness:

      "Time to go to bed, Papa. And you, Mama."

      They were nodding on either side of a radiator unheated for months.

      "All right, Emmy," piped the ancient.

      "Say Papa — Tell me: I've been thinking: If you were just a young man today, would you go into the ministry?"

      "Course I would! What an idea! Most glorious vocation young man could have. Idea! G'night, Emmy!"

      But as his ancient wife sighingly removed her corsets, she complained, "Don't know as you would or not — if I was married to you — which ain't any too certain, a second time — and if I had anything to say about it."

      "Which is certain! Don't be foolish. Course I would."

      "I don't know. Fifty years I had of it, and I never did get so I wa'n't just mad clear through when the ladies of the church came poking around, criticizing me for every little tidy I put on the chairs, and talking something terrible if I had a bonnet or a shawl that was the least mite tasty. ''Twa'n't suitable for a minister's wife.' Drat 'em! And I always did like a bonnet with some nice bright colors. Oh, I've done a right smart of thinking about it. You always were a powerful preacher, but's I've told you — "

      "You have!"

      " — I never could make out how, if when you were in the pulpit you really knew so much about all these high and mighty and mysterious things, how it was when you got home you never knew enough, and you never could learn enough, to find the hammer or make a nice piece of corn-bread or add up a column of figures twice alike or find Oberammergau on the map of Austria!"

      "Germany, woman! I'm sleepy!"

      "And all these years of having to pretend to be so good when we were just common folks all the time! Ain't you glad you can just be simple folks now?"

      "Maybe it is restful. But that's not saying I wouldn't do it over again." The old man ruminated a long while. "I think I would. Anyway, no use discouraging these young people from entering the ministry. Somebody got to preach the gospel truth, ain't they?"

      "I suppose so. Oh, dear. Fifty years since I married a preacher! And if I could still only be sure about the virgin birth! Now don't you go explaining! Laws, the number of times you've explained! I know it's true — it's in the Bible. If I could only believe it! But —

      "I would of liked to had you try your hand at politics. If I could of been, just once, to a senator's house, to a banquet or something, just once, in a nice bright red dress with gold slippers, I'd of been willing to go back to alpaca and scrubbing floors, and listening to you rehearsing your sermons, out in the stable, to that old mare we had for so many years — oh, laws, how long is it she's been dead now? Must be — yes, it's twenty-seven years —

      "Why is that it's only in religion that the things you got to believe are agin all experience? Now drat it, don't you go and quote that 'I believe because it is impossible' thing at me again! Believe because it's impossible! Huh! Just like a minister!

      "Oh, dear, I hope I don't live long enough to lose my faith. Seems like the older I get, the less I'm excited over all these preachers that talk about hell only they never saw it.

      "Twenty-seven years! And we had that old hoss so long before that. My how she could kick — Busted that buggy — "

      They were both asleep.

      CHAPTER V

       Table of Contents

       1

      In the cottonwood grove by the muddy river, three miles west of Paris, Kansas, the godly were gathered with lunch-baskets, linen dusters, and moist unhappy babies for the all-day celebration. Brothers Elmer Gantry and Edward Fislinger had been licensed to preach before, but now they were to be ordained as full-fledged preachers, as Baptist ministers.

      They had come home from distant Mizpah Theological Seminary for ordination by their own council of churches, the Kayooska River Baptist Association. Both of them had another year to go out of the three-year seminary course, but by the more devout and rural brethren it is considered well to ordain the clerics early, so that even before they attain infallible wisdom they may fill backwoods pulpits and during week-ends do good works with divine authority.

      His vacation after college Elmer had spent on a farm; during vacation after his first year in seminary he had been supervisor in a boys' camp; now, after ordination, he was to supply at the smaller churches in his corner of Kansas.

      During his second year of seminary, just finished, he had been more voluminously bored than ever at Terwillinger. Constantly he had thought of quitting, but after his journeys to the city of Monarch, where he was in closer relation to fancy ladies and to bartenders than one would have desired in a holy clerk, he got a second wind in his resolve to lead a pure life, and so managed to keep on toward perfection, as symbolized by the degree of Bachelor of Divinity.

      But if he had been bored, he had acquired professional training.

      He was able now to face any audience and to discourse authoritatively on any subject whatever, for any given time to the second, without trembling and without any errors of speech beyond an infrequent "ain't" or "he don't." He had an elegant vocabulary. He knew eighteen synonyms for sin, half of them very long and impressive, and the others very short and explosive and minatory — minatory being one of his own best words, constantly useful in terrifying the as yet imaginary horde of sinners gathered before him.

      He was no longer embarrassed by using the most intimate language about God; without grinning he could ask a seven-year-old-boy, "Don't you want to give up your vices?" and without flinching, he could look a tobacco salesman in the eye and demand, "Have you ever knelt before the throne of grace?"

      Whatever worldly expressions he might use in sub rosa conversations with the less sanctified theological students, such as Harry Zenz, who was the most confirmed atheist in the school, in public he never so much as said "doggone" and he had on tap, for immediate and skilled use, a number of such phrases as "Brother, I am willing to help you find religion," "My whole life is a testimonial to my faith," "To the inner eye there is no trouble in comprehending the threefold nature of divinity," "We don't want any long-faced Christians in this church — the fellow that's been washed in the blood of the Lamb is just so happy he goes 'round singing and hollering hallelujah all day long," and "Come on now, all get together, and let's make this the biggest collection this church has ever seen." He could explain foreordination thoroughly, and he used the words "baptizo" and "Athanasian."

      He would, perhaps, be less orchestral, less Palladian, when he had been in practise for a year or two after graduation and discovered that the hearts of men are vile, their habits low, and that they are unwilling to hand the control of all those habits over to the