Page:Elmer Gantry (1927).djvu/382

 the fee! Oh, Lord, Phil, what a job, what a lying compromising job, this being a minister!"

It was their hundredth argument over the question.

McGarry waved a pillow, discarded it for Bess' purse, while she tried not to look alarmed, and shouted, "It is not! As I heard a big New York preacher say one day: he knew how imperfect the ministry is, and how many second-raters get into it, and yet if he had a thousand lives, he'd want to be a minister of the gospel, to be a man showing the philosophy of Jesus to mankind, in every one of 'em. And the church universal, no matter what its failings, is still the only institution in which we can work together to hand on that gospel. Maybe it's your fault, not the church's, young Frank, if you're so scared of your people that you lie at funerals! I don't, by Jiminy!"

"You do, by Jiminy, my dear Phil! You don't know it. No, what you do is, you hypnotize yourself until you're convinced that every dear departed was a model of some virtue, and then you rhapsodize about that."

"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