yourselves into the self-abnegating glory of a hot campaign for souls? I know all you have to say—as a matter of fact, you've forgotten to mention your expenses for watchmen, extra hymn books, and hiring camp-chairs!
"But you haven't the experience to appreciate my expenses! I have to maintain almost as great a staff—not only workers and musicians but all my other representatives, whom you never see—as though I had a factory. Besides them, I have my charities. There is, for example, the Old Ladies' Home, which I keep up entirely—oh, I shan't say anything about it, but if you could see those poor aged women turning to me with such anxious faces—!"
(Where that Old Ladies' Home was, Elmer never learned.)
"We come here without any guarantee; we depend wholly upon the free-will offering of the last day; and I'm afraid you're going to stress the local expenses so that people will not feel like giving on the last day even enough to pay the salaries of my assistants. I'm taking—if it were not that I abominate the pitiful and character-destroying vice of gambling, I'd say that I'm taking such a terrible gamble that it frightens me! But there it is, and—"
While she was talking, Sharon was sizing up this new assortment of clergy: the cranks, the testy male old maids, the advertising and pushing demagogues, the commonplace pulpit-job-holders, the straddling young liberals; the real mystics, the kindly fathers of their flocks, the lovers of righteousness. She had picked out as her advocate the most sympathetic, and she launched her peroration straight at him:
"Do you want to ruin me, so that never again shall I be able to carry the message, to carry salvation, to the desperate souls who are everywhere waiting for me, crying for my help? Is that your purpose—you, the elect, the people chosen to help me in the service of the dear Lord Jesus himself? Is that your purpose? Is it? Is it?"
She began sobbing, which was Elmer's cue to jump up and have a wonderful new idea.
He knew, did Elmer, that the dear brethren and sisters had no such purpose. They just wanted to be practical. Well, why wouldn't it be a good notion for the committee to go to the well-to-do church-members and explain the unparalleled situation; tell them that this was the Lord's work, and that
