“It certainly ought to! I don’t think I’m cruel,” shouted Dr. Zahn, the Lutheran, “but if I had my way, I’d burn the proprietor of that joint at the stake!”
All of them had incidents of shocking obscenity all over the place—all of them except Father Smeesby, who sat back and smiled, the Episcopal Dr. Tate, who sat back and looked bored, and Mr. Tillish, the healer, who sat back and looked chilly. In fact it seemed as though, despite the efforts of themselves and the thousands of other inspired and highly trained Christian ministers who had worked over it ever since its foundation, the city of Zenith was another Sodom. But the alarmed apostles did not appear to be so worried as they said they were. They listened with almost benign attention while Dr. Zahn, in his German accent, told of alarming crushes between the society girls whom he knew so well from dining once a year with his richest parishioner.
They were all, indeed, absorbed in vice to a degree gratifying to Elmer.
But at the time for doing something about it, for passing resolutions and appointing sub-committees and outlining programs, they drew back.
“Can’t we all get together—pool our efforts?” pleaded Elmer. “Whatever our creedal differences, surely we stand alike in worshiping the same God and advocating the same code of morals. I’d like to see this Committee as a permanent organization, and finally, when the time is ripe—— Think how it would jolt the town! All of us getting ourselves appointed special police or deputy sheriffs, and personally marching down on these abominations, arresting the blood-guilty wretches, and putting them where they can do no harm! Maybe leading our church-members in the crusade! Think of it!”
They did think of it, and they were alarmed.
Father Smeesby spoke. “My church, gentlemen, probably has a more rigid theology than yours, but I don’t think we’re quite so alarmed by discovering the fact, which seems to astonish you, that sinners often sin. The Catholic Church may be harder to believe, but it’s easier to live with.”
“My organization,” said Mr. Tillish, “could not think of joining in a wild witch-hunt, any more than we could in indiscriminate charity. For both the poverty-laden and the vicious—” He made a little whistling between his beautiful but false teeth, and went on with frigid benignancy. “For all such, the truth is clearly stated in ‘Science and Health’ and made public in all our meetings—the truth that both vice and poverty, like sickness, are unreal, are errors, to be got rid of by understanding that God is All-in-all; that disease, death, evil, sin deny good, omnipotent God, life. Well! If these so-called sufferers do not care to take the truth when it is freely offered them, is that our fault? I understand your sympathy with the unfortunate, but you are not going to put out ignorance by fire.”
“Golly, let me crawl too,” chuckled Rabbi Amos. “If you want to get a vice-crusading rabbi, get one of these smart-aleck young liberals from the Cincinnati school—and they’ll mostly have too much sympathy with the sinners to help you either! Anyway, my congregation is so horribly respectable that if their rabbi did anything but sit in his study and look learned, they’d kick him out.”
“And I,” said Dr. Willis Fortune Tate, of St. Colomb’s Episcopal, “if you will permit me to say so, can regard such a project as our acting like policemen and dealing with these malefactors in person as nothing short of vulgar, as well as useless. I understand your high ideals, Dr. Gantry—”