“The weight of scholarship sustains the theory.”
“Well, my idea is, if it’s true, the less said about it the better. And then you lack dignity out of the pulpit.”
“Even so, Deacon, the most dignified man I ever saw was a dead man—a dead New Yorker. What we need in the church is life.”
“But you have departed from the faith of our fathers.”
“Perhaps,” Gordon said, with a twinkle in his eye, “if you mean our famous fathers who ‘landed first on their knees and then on the aborigines.’”
Van Meter ignored the remark.
“You said one day that in America we had but two classes, the masses and the asses. That sentence cost the church a thousand dollars in pew-rents. I think such assertions blasphemous.”
“Well, it’s true.”
“I don’t think so; and if it were, it don’t pay to say such things.”
“Am I only to preach the truths that pay?”