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Ambassadors of Christ
Fifth avenue rectors with shining morning faces, preaching on Easter to pews packed with stockbrokers, defendants in salacious divorce suits, members of the Sulgrave Foundation and former Zionists.... Evangelists of strange, incomprehensible cults whooping and bawling at two or three half-witted old women and half a dozen scared little girls in corrugated iron tabernacles down near the railroad-yards.... Mormon missionaries pulling door-bells in Wheeling, W. Va., and Little Rock, Ark., and handing naughty-looking tracts to giggling servant girls.... Baptist doctors of divinity calling upon John the Baptist and John D. Rockefeller to bear witness that the unducked will sweat in hell forevermore.... Methodist candidates for the sacred frock, sent out to preach trial sermons to backward churches in the mail-order belt, proving magnificently in one hour that Darwin was an ignoramus and Huxley a scoundrel.... Irish priests denouncing the Ku Klux Klan.... Rabbis denouncing Henry Ford.... Presbyterians denouncing Flo Zeigfeld.... Fashionable divines officiating at gaudy home weddings, their ears alert for the popping of corks.... Street evangelists in Zanesville, O., trying to convince a cop and five newsboys that no man will be saved unless he be born again.... Missionaries in smelly gospel-shops along the waterfront, expounding the doctrine of the atonement to boozy Norwegian sailors, half of them sound asleep.... Cadaverous high-church Episcopalians.... Little fat Lutherans with the air of prosperous cheese-mongers.... Dunkards with celluloid collars and no neckties.... Southern Methodists who still believe in slavery.... Former plumbers, threshing-machine engineers and horse-doctors turned into United Brethren bishops.... Missionaries collecting money from the mill children in Raleigh, N. C., to convert the Spaniards and Italians to Calvinism.... Episcopal archdeacons cultivating the broad English a.... Swedenborgians trying to explain the “Arcana Cœlestia” to flabbergasted newspaper reporters.... Polish clergymen leaping out of the windows at Polish weddings in Johnstown, Pa., hoping that the next half-dozen beer-bottles won’t hit them.... Methodists pulling wires for bishoprics.... Quakers foreclosing mortgages.... Baptists busy among the women.