Dr. Otto Hickenlooper of Central Church was an even more distressing rival. His was the most active institutional church of the whole state. He had not only manual training and gymnastics but sacred pageants, classes in painting (never from the nude), classes in French and batik-making and sex hygiene and bookkeeping and short-story writing. He had clubs for railroad men, for stenographers, for bell-boys; and after the church suppers the young people were encouraged to sit about in booths to which the newspapers referred flippantly as “courting corners.”
Dr. Hickenlooper had come out hard for Social Service. He was in sympathy with the American Federation of Labor, the I. W. W., the Socialists, the Communists, and the Nonpartisan League, which was more than they were with one another. He held Sunday evening lectures on the Folly of War, the Minimum Wage, the need of clean milk; and once a month he had an open forum, to which were invited the most dangerous radical speakers, who were allowed to say absolutely anything they liked, provided they did not curse, refer to adultery, or criticize the leadership of Christ.
Dr. Mahlon Potts, of the First Methodist Church, seemed to Elmer at first glance less difficult to oust. He was fat, pompous, full of heavy rumbles of piety. He was a stage parson. “Ah, my dear Brother!” he boomed; and “How are we this morning, my dear Doctor, and how is the lovely little wife?” But Dr. Potts had the largest congregation of any church of any denomination in Zenith. He was so respectable. He was so safe. People knew where they were, with him. He was adequately flowery of speech—he could do up a mountain, a sunset, a burning of the martyrs, a reception of the same by the saints in heaven, as well as any preacher in town. But he never doubted nor let any one else doubt that by attending the Methodist Church regularly, and observing the rules of repentance, salvation, baptism, communion, and liberal giving, every one would have a minimum of cancer and tuberculosis and sin, and unquestionably arrive in heaven.
These three Elmer envied but respected; one man he envied and loathed.
That was Philip McGarry of the Arbor Methodist Church.
Philip McGarry, Ph. D. of the University of Chicago in economics and philosophy—only everybody who liked him, layman or fellow-parson, seemed to call him “Phil”—was at the age of thirty-five known through the whole American Methodist Church as an enfant terrible. The various sectional editions of the Advocate admired him but clucked like doting and alarmed hens over his frequent improprieties. He was accused of every heresy. He never denied them, and the only dogma he was known to give out positively was the leadership of Jesus—as to whose divinity he was indefinite.
He was a stocky, smiling man, fond of boxing, and even at a funeral incapable of breathing, “Ah, sister!”
He criticized everything. He criticized even bishops—for being too fat, for being too ambitious, for gassing about Charity during a knock-down-and-drag-out strike. He criticized, but amiably, the social and institutional and generally philanthropic Dr. Otto Hickenlooper, with his clubs for the study of Karl Marx and his Sunday afternoon reception for lonely traveling-men.
“You’re a good lad, Otto,” said Dr. McGarry—and openly, in the preachers’ Monday meetings: “You mean well, but you’re one of these darned philanthropists.”
“Nice word to use publicly—’darned’!” meditated the shocked Reverend Elmer Gantry.