The state of Winnemac lies between Pittsburgh and Chicago, and in Winnemac, perhaps a hundred miles south of the city of Zenith, is Babylon, a town which suggests New England more than the Middle West. Large elms shade it, there are white pillars beyond lilac bushes, and round about the town is a serenity unknown on the gusty prairies.
Here is Mizpah Theological Seminary, of the Northern Baptists. (There is a Northern and Southern convention of this distinguished denomination, because before the Civil War the Northern Baptists proved by the Bible, unanswerably, that slavery was wrong; and the Southern Baptists proved by the Bible, irrefutably, that slavery was the will of God.)
The three buildings of the seminary are attractive: brick with white cupolas, green blinds at the small-paned wide windows. But within they are bare, with hand-rubbings along the plaster walls, with portraits of missionaries and ragged volumes of sermons.
The large structure is the dormitory, Elizabeth J. Schmutz Hall—known to the less reverent as Smut Hall.
Here lived Elmer Gantry, now ordained but completing the last year of work for his Bachelor of Divinity degree, a commodity of value in bargaining with the larger churches.
There were only sixteen left now of his original class of thirty-five. The others had dropped out, for rural preaching, life insurance, or a melancholy return to plowing. There was no one with whom he wanted to live, and he dwelt sulkily in a single room, with a cot, a Bible, a portrait of his mother, and with a copy of "What a Young Man Ought to Know," concealed inside his one starched pulpit shirt.
He disliked most of his class. They were too rustic or too pious, too inquisitive about his monthly trips to the city of Monarch or simply too dull. Elmer liked the company of
