“Why, yes, certainly.”
“And you feel that the churches, no matter what faults they may have, do hand out this truth of Jesus better than if we didn’t have no churches at all?”
“Certainly. Otherwise, I shouldn’t be in the church!”
“Then can you tell me why it is that nine-tenths of the really sure-enough on-the-job membership of the churches is made up of two classes: the plumb ignorant, that’re scared of hell and that swallow any fool doctrine, and, second, the awful’ respectable folks that play the church so’s to seem more respectable? Why is that? Why is it the high-class skilled workmen and the smart professional men usually snicker at the church and don’t go near it once a month? Why is it?”
“It isn’t true, perhaps that’s why!” Frank felt triumphant. He looked across at the pile of rusty horseshoes and plowshares among the mullen weeds beside the blacksmith’s shop; he reflected that he would clean up this town, be a power for good. Less snappishly he explained, “Naturally, I haven’t any statistics about it, but the fact is that almost every intelligent and influential man in the country belongs to some church or other.”
“Yeh—belongs. But does he go?”
Frank plodded off, annoyed. He tried to restore himself by insisting that Doc Staples was a lout, very amusing in the way he mingled rustic grammar with half-digested words from his adult reading. But he was jarred. Here was the Common Man whom the church was supposed to convince.
Frank remembered from his father’s pastorates how many theoretical church-members seemed blithely able month on month to stay away from the sermonizing; he remembered the merchants who impressively passed the contribution plate yet afterward, in conversation with his father, seemed to have but vague notions of what the sermon had been.
He studied his own congregation. There they were: the stiff-collared village respectables, and the simple, kindly, rustic mass, who understood him only when he promised Heaven as a reward for a life of monogamy and honest chicken-raising, or threatened them with Hell for drinking hard cider.
Catawba had—its only urban feature—a furniture factory with unusually competent workmen, few of whom attended church. Now Frank Shallard had all his life been insulated from what he gently despised as “the working class.” Maids at his father’s house and the elderly, devout, and incompetent negroes who attended the furnace; plumbers or electricians coming to the parsonage for repairs; railway men to whom he tried to talk on journeys; only these had he known, and always with unconscious superiority.