“Well, probably he was!”
“Of course. Probably your burglar was a model of courage, and your gambler a model of kindness to everybody except the people he robbed, but I don’t like being hired to praise burglars and gamblers and respectable loan-sharks and food-hounds like Henry Semp, and encourage youngsters to accept their standards, and so keep on perpetuating this barbarous civilization for which we preachers are as responsible as the lawyers or the politicians or the soldiers or even the school-masters. No, sir! Oh, I am going to get out of the church! Think of it! A preacher, getting religion, getting saved, getting honest, getting out! Then I’d know the joys of sanctification that you Methodys talk about!”
“Oh, you make me tired!” Bess complained, not very aggressively. She looked, at forty-one, like a plump and amiable girl of twenty. “Honestly, Phil, I do wish you could show Frank where he’s wrong. I can’t, and I’ve been trying these fifteen years.”
“You have, my lamb!”
“Honestly, Phil, can’t you make him see it?” said Bess. “He’s—of course I do adore him, but of all the cry-babies I ever met— He’s the worst of all my children! He talks about going into charity work, about getting a job with a labor bank or a labor paper, about lecturing, about trying to write. Can’t you make him see that he’d be just as discontented whatever he did? I’ll bet you the labor leaders and radical agitators and the Charity Organization Society people aren’t perfect little angels any more than preachers are!”
“Heavens, I don’t expect ’em to be! I don’t expect to be content,” Frank protested. “And isn’t it a good thing to have a few people who are always yammering? Never get anywhere without. What a joke that a minister, who’s supposed to have such divine authority that he can threaten people with hell, is also supposed to be such an office-boy that he can be cussed out and fired if he dares to criticize capitalists or his fellow ministers! Anyway— Dear Bess, it’s rotten on you. I’d like to be a contented sort, I’d like to ‘succeed,’ to be satisfied with being half-honest. But I can’t. . . . You see, Phil, I was brought up to believe the Christian God wasn’t a scared and compromising public servant, but the creator and advocate of the whole merciless truth, and I reckon that training spoiled me—I actually took my teachers seriously!”
“Oh, tut, tut, Frank; trouble with you is,” Philip McGarry yawned, “trouble with you is, you like arguing more than you do patiently working out the spiritual problems of some poor, dumm, infinitely piteous human being that comes to you for help, and that doesn’t care a hoot whether you advocate Zoroastrianism or Seventh-day Adventism, so long as he feels that you love him and that you can bring him strength from a power higher than himself. I know that if you could lose your intellectual pride, if you could forget that you have to make a new world, better’n the Creator’s, right away tonight—you and Bernard Shaw and H. G. Wells and H. L. Mencken and Sinclair Lewis (Lord, how that book of Lewis’, ‘Main Street,’ did bore me, as much of it as I read; it just rambled on forever, and all he could see was that some of the Gopher Prairie hicks didn’t go to literary teas quite as often as he does!—that was all he could see among those splendid heroic pioneers)! Well, as I was saying, if instead of starting in where your congregation has left off, because they never had your chance, you could draw them along with you—”
“I try to! And let me tell you, young fellow, I’ve got a few of ’em far enough along so they’re having the sense to leave me and my evangelical church and go off to the Unitarians or stay away from church altogether—thus, Bess darling, depriving my wife and babes of a few more pennies! But seriously, Phil—”
“A man always says ‘But seriously’ when he feels the previous arguments haven’t been so good yet!”
“Maybe. But anyway, what I mean to say is: Of course my liberalism is all foolishness! Do you know why my people stand for it? They’re not enough interested to realize what I’m saying! If I had a successor who was a fundamentalist, they’d like him just as well or better, and they’d go back a-whooping to the sacred hell-fire that I’ve coaxed ’em out of. They don’t believe I mean it when I take a shot at the fear of eternal punishment, and the whole magic and taboo system of worshiping the Bible and the ministry, and all the other skull-decorated vestiges of horror there are in so-called Christianity! They don’t know it! Partly it’s because they’ve been trained not to believe anything much they hear in sermons. But also it’s my fault. I’m not aggressive. I ought to jump around like a lunatic or a popular evangelist, and shout, ‘D’ you understand? When I say that most of your religious opinions are bunk, why, what I mean is, they’re bunk!’ I’ve never been violently enough in earnest to be beaten for the sake of the Lord our God! . . . Not yet!”