“I don’t approve of that,” sez Elder Wessel. “The church of the Most High is too sacred to use for such purposes.”
“A minister said that once to Elder White,” sez Arvilly, “and he answered ’em with that warm meller smile of hisen, ‘Where are my boys and girls more welcome and safe than at home, and this is their Father’s house,’” sez he.
“Using that holy place for recreation is very wrong,” sez Elder Wessel.
Sez Arvilly, “I told you that he used it to re-create anew to goodness and strength. He has music, good books, innocent games of all kinds, bright light, warmth, cheerful society, good lectures, and an atmosphere of good helpful influences surroundin’ ’em, and he has sandwiches and coffee served in what wuz the pastor’s study, and which he uses now, Heaven knows, to study the big problem how a minister of the Most High can do the most good to his people.”
“Coffee,” sez Elder Wessel, “is all right in its place, but the common workman hankers after something stronger; he wants his beer or toddy, the glass that makes him forget his trouble for a time, and lifts him into another world.”
“Well, I spoze the opium eater and cocaine fiend hanker after the fool paradise these drugs take ’em into, but that’s no sign that they ort to destroy themselves with ’em.”
“Coffee, too, is deleterious,” sez Elder Wessel. “Some say that it is worse than whiskey.”
I spoke up then; I am a good coffee maker, everybody admits, and I couldn’t bear to hear Ernest White talked aginst, and I sez: “I never hearn of a workman drinkin’ so much coffee that he wuz a danger to his family and the community, or so carried away with it that he spent his hull wages on it. Such talk is foolish and only meant to blind the eyes of justice and common sense. Elder White’s Mutual Help Club, as he calls it, for he makes these folks think they help him, and mebby they do, is doin’ sights of good, sights of it. Young folks who wuz well started towards the drunkard’s path have been turned right round by it, and they save their wages and look like different men since they have left the Poor Man’s Club, as you call it, and patronize hisen.”
“And Elder White has showed,” sez Arvilly, “by his example just what the Church of Christ could do if it wanted to, to save men from the evil of this present time and git ’em headed towards the Celestial City.”