When they were permitted, the workers were to go from desk to desk, talking to each victim about the secret sins he was comfortably certain to have. And both men and women workers were to visit the humbler homes and offer to kneel and pray with the floury and embarrassed wife, the pipe-wreathed and shoeless husband.
All the statistics of the personal work—so many souls invited to come to the altar, so many addresses to workmen over their lunch-pails, so many cottage prayers, with the length of each—were rather imaginatively entered by Elmer and the Director of Personal Work on the balance-sheet which Sharon used as a report after the meetings and as a talking-point for the sale of future meetings.
Elmer met daily with Adelbert Shoop, that yearning and innocent tenor who was in charge of music, to select hymns. There were times when the audiences had to be lulled into confidence by “Softly and Tenderly Jesus Is Calling,” times when they were made to feel brotherly and rustic with “It’s the Old-time Religion”—
It was good for Paul and Silas
And it’s good enough for me—
and times when they had to be stirred by “At the Cross” or “Onward, Christian Soldiers.” Adelbert had ideas about what he called “worship by melody,” but Elmer saw that the real purpose of singing was to lead the audience to a state of mind where they would do as they were told.
He learned to pick out letters on the typewriter with two fingers, and he answered Sharon’s mail—all of it that she let him see. He kept books for her, in a ragged sufficient manner, on check-book stubs. He wrote the nightly story of her sermons, which the newspapers cut down and tucked in among stories of remarkable conversions. He talked to local church-pillars so rich and moral that their own pastors were afraid of them. And he invented an aid to salvation which to this day is used in the more evangelistic meetings, though it is credited to Adelbert Shoop.
Adelbert was up to most of the current diversions. He urged the men and the women to sing against each other. At the tense moment when Sharon was calling for converts, Adelbert would skip down the aisle, fat but nimble, pink with coy smiles, tapping people on the shoulder, singing the chorus of a song right among them, and often returning with three or four prisoners of the sword of the Lord, flapping his plump arms and caroling “They’re coming—they’re coming,” which somehow started a stampede to the altar.
Adelbert was, in his girlish enthusiasm, almost as good as Sharon or Elmer at announcing, “Tonight, you are all of you to be evangelists. Every one of you now! Shake hands with the person to your right and ask ’em if they’re saved.”
He gloated over their embarrassment.