“No, no,” he said. “You do not believe in Sunday papers.”
And thereafter my uncle did not read our Sunday papers, although he occasionally visited us in the afternoon and looked at them, after expressing his sorrow at finding them in our house. Once he found his son sprawled in our yard guffawing over the antics of the Yellow Kid when he should have been at a meeting of the Loyal Temperance Legion, lifting his childish voice against the Rum Demon. My uncle chased the lad home with threats of punishment, and then himself took up the funny section.
Baseball games were played by the ungodly on the outskirts of the town on Sunday, but the game was frowned upon by the Preachers and the Brothers and Sisters, who denounced it as a lure of Satan and predicted dire spiritual tortures for the players. Small boys who attended the games were soundly whipped, but occasionally we became so feverish with the desire to witness a contest that we slipped away from home and watched the game, pretending that we were going to visit relatives and listen to hymns played on an organ. But there were always spies of the Lord at the game to tell on us. It was this opposition to Sunday baseball that drove my younger brother out of the Methodist Sunday school, only a little while after I myself had abandoned the church. He was in the class taught by Brother Benjamin Marbury, a lawyer and an exceedingly loud and bitter antagonist of baseball. He denounced the game before his class one day, and my brother said that he could not see anything wrong with it. Brother Marbury stared at him sternly.
“Would Jesus Christ attend a baseball game on Sunday if He were here?” he demanded.
My brother said he did not know, but thought He would, and Brother Marbury immediately knelt and asked God to forgive the blasphemy. My brother was infuriated and never went back to Sunday school. His comment was: “What did he have to bring Jesus Christ into it for?”
2
We arose at the usual hour on Sunday morning, perhaps a little later, and immediately after breakfast began to get ready for Sunday school. There was hair to comb, shoes to polish in the kitchen, cravats to tie around necks that had become enlarged and reddened by various activities on the playing fields, and there were nickels to secrete for the collection boxes. Worse, there were Sunday-school lessons and Golden Texts to learn, and the catechism to memorize. Dressed in our Sunday suits, our hair slicked moistly to our heads and Sunday-school pamphlets in our hands, my two brothers and I went solemnly down to Newman’s corner, turned into the unnamed street that ran past Elmwood Seminary and then into Columbia Street and so to the Southern Methodist church.
Ordinarily a trip downtown was a great deal of fun; we tripped each other, poked each other in the ribs or had two or three fights en route, varying with the warmth of our friendship for other boys we met upon the way. But on Sunday we went solemnly and fearfully, first Emmett, then myself and then Fred, according to age and stature. We met other similar groups, arrayed as we were in their Sunday suits and clutching their lesson pamphlets, and our greetings were subdued and formal. We converged upon the church, and all over town the bells tolled and the faithful marched to hear God’s intimates explain His written word, and tell us calmly and definitely what He meant by the most obscure passages in His Book.
We sat in church for an hour and a half listening to various versions of the Hebraic fairy tales. In our church the Sunday-school room was set apart from the main auditorium, but occasionally the attendance was so large that it overflowed into the church proper. To most of us Sunday school was torture, and I have no doubt that it is still torture to most children. It may be that I did not learn a great deal about the Bible in Sunday school, but I do know that it was in Sunday school that I first began to doubt the Book. I was naturally curious and inquisitive, and even then, young as I was, I could not swallow the miracles of Jonah and the whale, and the idea of the virgin birth of Jesus I considered absurd, because in common with most small-town boys I had a very definite knowledge of the procedure employed in bringing babies into the world. Up to the age of seven or eight I thought the doctor brought them in his suitcase, or that they grew on bushes in the back yard and were plucked when ripe, but after I began to loaf around the livery stable and the Post Office building I acquired more correct information. Nor could I believe that Noah’s Ark would have held two of every living thing then upon the earth. But the Preachers and Brothers and Sisters insisted that these things were literally true; they denounced anyone who doubted and sought for symbolical meaning as an unbeliever and a blasphemous son of Satan.
My sister, at the age of ten, was the object of special prayers and solemn conferences because, for no other reason than that she wanted to be contrary, she expressed a doubt of the Virgin Birth. She was in Mrs. Judge Carter’s Sunday-school class at the time, but she did not like Mrs. Carter and disagreed with her when she thought she could do so without subsequent punishment. Mrs. Carter frequently told her pupils, all little girls about eight or ten years old, of the marvelous manner in which Christ came into the world, but she told it so vaguely that none of them had any real understanding of it. One Sunday morning, after Mrs. Carter had read something about the Virgin Birth, my sister said flatly that she did not believe it.