or a labor paper, about lecturing, about trying to write. Can't you make him see that he'd be just as discontented whatever he did? I'll bet you the labor leaders and radical agitators and the Charity Organization Society people aren't perfect little angels any more than preachers are!"
"Heavens, I don't expect 'em to be! I don't expect to be content," Frank protested. "And isn't it a good thing to have a few people who are always yammering? Never get anywhere without. What a joke that a minister, who's supposed to have such divine authority that he can threaten people with hell, is also supposed to be such an office-boy that he can be cussed out and fired if he dares to criticize capitalists or his fellow ministers! Anyway— Dear Bess, it's rotten on you. I'd like to be a contented sort, I'd like to 'succeed,' to be satisfied with being half-honest. But I can't. . . . You see, Phil, I was brought up to believe the Christian God wasn't a scared and compromising public servant, but the creator and advocate of the whole merciless truth, and I reckon that training spoiled me—I actually took my teachers seriously!"
"Oh, tut, tut, Frank; trouble with you is," Philip McGarry yawned, "trouble with you is, you like arguing more than you do patiently working out the spiritual problems of some poor, dumm, infinitely piteous human being that comes to you for help, and that doesn't care a hoot whether you advocate Zoroastrianism or Seventh-day Adventism, so long as he feels that you love him and that you can bring him strength from a power higher than himself. I know that if you could lose your intellectual pride, if you could forget that you have to make a new world, better'n the Creator's, right away tonight—you and Bernard Shaw and H. G. Wells and H. L. Mencken and Sinclair Lewis (Lord, how that book of Lewis', 'Main Street,' did bore me, as much of it as I read; it just rambled on forever, and all he could see was that some of the Gopher Prairie hicks didn't go to literary teas quite as often as he does!—that was all he could see among those splendid heroic pioneers)! Well, as I was saying, if instead of starting in where your congregation has left off, because they never had your chance, you could draw them along with you—"
"I try to! And let me tell you, young fellow, I've got a few of 'em far enough along so they're having the sense to leave me and my evangelical church and go off to the Unitarians
