Page:Elmer Gantry (1927).djvu/390

 failure there was because he was too lofty to consider mere sickness. On the contrary, he was awfully interested in it, always healing some one—providing they flattered his vanity enough!

"What did he teach? One place in the Sermon on the Mount he advises—let me get my Bible—here it is: 'Let your light so shine before men that they may see your good works and glorify your Father which is in heaven,' and then five minutes later he's saying, 'Take heed that ye do not your alms before men, to be seen of them, otherwise ye have no reward of your Father which is in heaven.' That's an absolute contradiction, in the one document which is the charter of the whole Christian Church. Oh, I know you can reconcile them, Phil. That's the whole aim of the ministerial training: to teach us to reconcile contradictions by saying that one of them doesn't mean what it means—and it's always a good stunt to throw in 'You'd understand it if you'd only read it in the original Greek'!

"There's just one thing that does stand out clearly and uncontradicted in Jesus' teaching. He advocated a system of economics whereby no one saved money or stored up wheat or did anything but live like a tramp. If this teaching of his had been accepted, the world would have starved in twenty years after his death!

"No, wait, Phil, just one second and then I'm through!"

He talked till dawn.

Frank's last protest, as they stood on the steps in the cold grayness, was:

"My objection to the church isn't that the preachers are cruel, hypocritical, actually wicked, though some of them are that, too—think of how many are arrested for selling fake stock, for seducing fourteen-year-old girls in orphanages under their care, for arson, for murder. And it isn't so much that the church is in bondage to Big Business and doctrines as laid down by millionaires—though a lot of churches are that, too. My chief objection is that ninety-nine per cent. of sermons and Sunday School teachings are so agonizingly dull!"