As with the Catholic Church, the unspoken and always denied slogan of the Methodists and of the other Protestant sects is “Catch ’em while they’re young,” but unlike the Catholics the Protestants cannot hold them. For one thing, they do not put on a good enough show; they do not understand lighting, and they have no uniforms and no Latin chanters. A Catholic priest covered by a surplice or what not, and his voice rising and falling sonorously in the chanting of a bit of Latin, is a very impressive spectacle, and his appearance lends dignity to his words. The gentle stare that most of them wear is also effective. As soon as an embryo Methodist becomes intelligent enough to visualize the sort of Heaven that the Brothers are preparing for him, he shudders and forthwith goes to the Devil, while the Catholics fill their converts with such fear of God and the Pope, or the Pope and God, to put them in the order of their importance, that very few get away. A renegade Catholic is almost as rare as a Methodist Preacher who does not think he is sprouting wings, and that his voice is truly the Voice of God.
A BAD BOY COMES TO JESUS
1
It is clear, then, that not only was my ancestral background religious, but that I lived in an atmosphere heavy with religious feeling. Religion and the Church dominated the whole of my early life. Among all of my relatives I do not recall one whose home was not oppressed, and whose life was not made miserable and fretful, by the terrible fear of a relentless God whose principal occupation seemed to be snooping about searching for someone to punish. Religion was poured down my throat in doses that strangled me and made me sick of soul. There was simply too much of it. God was fed to me morning, noon and night, and He did not taste good; I was hounded from pillar to post by a pack of baying, sanctimonious hypocrites beseeching me to get right with Jesus, and to read and believe that collection of Hebrew fairy tales called the Bible.
I came finally to think of God as I did of castor oil, and the flavor that He left in my mouth was just as frightful. He and His religion were personified by the dour-faced men and women who went sliding about the town; rubbing their hands together, scraping the skin from their souls but not from their palms. They were irritatingly gentle, and they sighed soulfully and mouthed platitudes with enormous gusto; they called each other Brother and Sister and poked their messy, prying fingers into every bit of fun that anybody tried to have; they fed their little shriveled souls with scandal and smeared dirt over everything that was amusing. They regarded all young men as professional seducers, and for the greater glory of God ruined the reputations of young girls who went buggy-riding and seemed to enjoy it—and nothing can be so completely and irrevocably ruined as the reputation of a young girl in a small town.
But despite the feelings of disgust and revolt which the labors of these servants of the Lord evoked in me, I did not definitely align myself on the side of the non-believers and the sinners until after I had been “converted.” I began on that night to hate the Church and its religion, and all of its prying, messy hypocrisy and sanctimony. And especially I hated the preachers and the Brothers and Sisters. I still do; they give me a pain in the neck. I felt that I had been betrayed; I knew that the spirit of God was not working in me, but I was told that it was and dared to deny it. I was told that I must “get right with the Lord,” whatever that may be. I felt that the Brothers and Sisters and the evangelist had taken an unfair advantage of my emotions; there was a band at the revival, and under the influence of music I will do anything. It compelled me to do something that I did not want to do; it humiliated me in my own eyes, and nothing that has ever happened to me since has made me so miserable and ashamed.
I had reached the ripe old age of fourteen or fifteen when the hand of the Lord, operating through the agency of Brother McConnell and a horde of wailing Brothers and Sisters with religious fervor breaking out upon them like boils, reached out and plucked me from the burning. But it was not their fault that I had not been converted earlier; they had tried often enough. One of my earliest recollections is of a Preacher asking me why I did not profess religion and join the Church, and why I had not given my heart to God, as he called it. I was occasionally singled out at protracted meetings and at revivals and made the object of special prayers, but until Brother McConnell came with his improved technique and circus methods I had always held out.
2
My own church, of course, was the Southern Methodist, but the revival meeting at which I was converted was a union gathering in the Northern Methodist edifice, which was about a block from Braun’s saloon and an even shorter distance from the county jail. We called it the Rock church because it was constructed largely of granite blocks. Its members were considered good enough people in their way, but they were hardly among the socially elect, for many of them lived south of the Post Office among the Catholics and the Lutherans, and in some circles it was suspected that they held, at times, intercourse with the Devil. Nevertheless, they were Methodists and Christians and first-class politicians, and by this time they have probably assumed control of the town.
All of the Protestant congregations of Farmington chipped in to pay the $600 demanded by Brother McConnell for his week’s work for the Lord. This was a goodly fee, but it was not considered exorbitant, as Brother McConnell was a professional devil-chaser with a national reputation, and it was felt that he, if anyone, could put Farmington on the right side of the heavenly ledger. There was considerable rivalry among our good people as to who should entertain the evangelist and pay for his fried chicken and other delicacies, and I do not recall who finally drew the plum. But the family whose bed and board he graced was considered very fortunate; it had practically assured itself of ultimate salvation, since the emissaries of the Devil would not dare to invade such a sanctuary of God.