Page:Elmer Gantry (1927).djvu/394

 "It's quite all right, Dr. Gantry. I know just how you feel," said Styles. "And while I'm no authority on religion, I feel the same way you do, and I guess these other gentlemen do, too. . . . Now, Shallard, you're entitled to your own views, but not in our pulpit! Why don't you just resign before we kick you out?"

"You can't kick me out! It takes the whole church to do that!"

"The whole church'll damn well do it, you watch 'em!" said Deacon William Dollinger Styles.

"What are we going to do, dear?" Bess said wearily. "I'll stand by you, of course, but let's be practical. Don't you think it would make less trouble if you did resign?"

"I've done nothing for which to resign! I've led a thoroughly decent life. I haven't lied or been indecent or stolen. I've preached imagination, happiness, justice, seeking for the truth. I'm no sage, Heaven knows, but I've given my people a knowledge that there are such things as ethnology and biology, that there are books like 'Ethan Frome' and 'Père Goriot' and 'Tono-Bungay' and Renan's Jesus, that there is nothing wicked in looking straight at life—"

"Dear, I said practical!"

"Oh, thunder, I don't know. I think I can get a job in the Charity Organization Society here—the general secretary happens to be pretty liberal."

"I hate to have us leave the church entirely. I'm sort of at home there. Why not see if they'd like to have you in the Unitarian Church?"

"Too respectable. Scared. Same old sanctified phrases I'm trying to get rid of—and won't ever quite get rid of, I'm afraid."

A meeting of the church body had been called to decide on Frank's worthiness, and the members had been informed by Styles that Frank was attacking all religion. Instantly a number of the adherents who had been quite unalarmed by what