done here and he could go on to whiten new fields for the harvest.
But there was still plenty of discussion before Sharon was rid of the forces of selfishness and able to get down to the job of spreading light.
Local committees were always stubborn, local committees were always jealous, local committees were always lazy, and local committees were always told these facts, with vigor. The heart of the arguments was money.
Sharon was one of the first evangelists to depend for all her profit not on a share of the contributions nor on a weekly offering but on one night devoted entirely to a voluntary "thank offering" for her and her crew alone. It sounded unselfish and it brought in more; every devotee saved up for that occasion; and it proved easier to get one fifty-dollar donation than a dozen of a dollar each. But to work up this lone offering to suitably thankful proportions, a great deal of loving and efficient preparation was needed—reminders given by the chief pastors, bankers, and other holy persons of the town, the distribution of envelopes over which devotees were supposed to brood for the whole six weeks of the meetings, and innumerable newspaper paragraphs about the self-sacrifice and heavy expenses of the evangelists.
It was over these innocent necessary precautions that the local committees always showed their meanness. They liked giving over only one contribution to the evangelist, but they wanted nothing said about it till they themselves had been taken care of—till the rent of the hall or the cost of building a tabernacle, the heat, the lights, the advertising, and other expenses had been paid.
Sharon would meet the committee—a score of clergymen, a score of their most respectable deacons, a few angular Sunday School superintendents, a few disapproving wives—in a church parlor, and for the occasion she always wore the gray suit and an air of metropolitan firmness, and swung a pair of pince-nez with lenses made of window-glass. While in familiar words the local chairman was explaining to her that their expenses were heavy, she would smile as though she knew something they could not guess, then let fly at them breathlessly:
"I'm afraid there is some error here! I wonder if you are quite in the mood to forget all material things and really throw
