“I’m sorry,” I said, “but I too, like Willys, am a realist. I have learned much from the master realists of my time—I mean the salesmen. I have learned, when I wish to make a religious appeal to man, to appeal to him on the basis of the things in which he really believes. If a man’s real belief is small and mean, you’ve got to begin mean and small. If he believes only in his pocketbook, I must appeal to his pocketbook. If he believes in his children, I can appeal to him through his children.”
“Excuse me,” said Cornelia, rising, “it’s nearly time for the children to come home. I will telephone down to the office to have them send away your taxi.” When she returned from giving the message at Oliver’s desk-telephone, she picked up her Vogue again, and seated herself outside our circle, near the tall windows looking on the street. We readjusted our positions by the fire so that our backs should not be turned to her, and I continued:—
“The real business of religion is to reconcile us to our necessities. According to the powerful drive of Oliver’s economic argument, the outstanding necessity to which the average American has now got to be reconciled, is prohibition. That is a rather hard selling-proposition. I don’t think it can be put over except under pressure of some sustained religious emotion, or as Willys calls it, ‘excitement.’ Now don’t you see how important it is to know what the average American sustains a religious emotion about—what he really does believe in?”
“Yes, that’s all right,” said His Excellency. “What next?”
“Well,” I said, “if the average American registers no emotion about the Apostolic Church, we can’t use that in a case like this, can we? We’ve got to fall back on our really common bonds of union—like our common belief in modern plumbing, health, youth, the athletic life, education, publicity, automobiling.”
“Popular elements, anyway,” said Willys. “Automobiling as a substitute for which of the Thirty-nine Articles, Professor?” I glanced to see if Cornelia were listening; but she was plucking at a holly wreath in the window and seemed intent on the street.
“It is a vital element of our popular religion,” I insisted, “and by no means so absurd a substitute as you suppose. One has got to take together, you see, this whole group of genuine popular beliefs. Next one asks every honest average man if he doesn’t agree that these things are what he wants and believes in, and that the group of them expresses what our modern civilization wants and believes in. Then one turns on the average man and says: ‘This, sir, is your effective Shorter Catechism; and you’ve got to junk whiskey as your national drink, because it is just flatly incompatible with the general distribution of the objects of your religion.’ That’s the way his religion reconciles him to his necessity.”
“I had a hunch, Professor,” said Willys, who had long since grown weary of serious argument, “that automobiling and drinking went together.”
“They have hitherto,” I said, “but—”