ring, and gave a pleasant suggestion of vaudeville. Nor were they too sanctimonious. They slapped one another's backs, they used first names, they shouted, "I hear you're grabbing off all the crowds in town, you old cuss!" and for the manlier and more successful of them it was quite the thing to use now and then a daring "damn."
It would, to an innocent layman, have been startling to see them sitting in rows like schoolboys; to hear them listening not to addresses on credit and the routing of hardware but to short helpful talks on Faith. The balance was kept, however, by an adequate number of papers on trade subjects—the sort of pews most soothing to the back; the value of sending postcards reading "Where were you last Sunday, old scout? We sure did miss you at the Men's Bible Class"; the comparative values of a giant imitation thermometer, a giant clock, and a giant automobile speedometer, as a register of the money coming in during special drives; the question of gold and silver stars as rewards for Sunday School attendance; the effectiveness of giving the children savings-banks in the likeness of a jolly little church to encourage them to save their pennies for Christian work; and the morality of violin solos.
Nor were the assembled clergy too inhumanly unboastful in their reports of increased attendance and collections.
Elmer saw that the Zenith district superintendent, one Fred Orr, could be neglected as a creeping and silent fellow who was all right at prayer and who seemed to lead an almost irritatingly pure life, but who had no useful notions about increasing collections.
The Methodist preachers whom he had to take seriously as rivals were four.
There was Chester Brown, the ritualist, of the new and ultra-Gothic Asbury Church. He was almost as bad, they said, as an Episcopalian. He wore a clerical waistcoat buttoned up to his collar; he had a robed choir and the processional; he was rumored once to have had candles on what was practically an altar. He was, to Elmer, distressingly literary and dramatic. It was said that he had literary gifts; his articles appeared not only in the Advocate but in the Christian Century and the New Republic—rather whimsical essays, safely Christian but frank about the church's sloth and wealth and blindness. He had been Professor of English Literature
