socialists, nothing of the contemplation of Catawba, where thoughts seemed far-off stars to gaze on through the mist. Here was a violent rush of ideas, and from this rose the "Preachers' Liberal Club," toward which Frank was drawn before he had been in Eureka a fortnight.
The ring-leader of these liberals was Hermann Kassebaum, the modernist rabbi—young, handsome, black of eye and blacker of hair, full of laughter, regarded by the elect of the town as a shallow charlatan and a dangerous fellow, and actually the most scholarly man Frank had ever encountered, except for Bruno Zechlin. With him consorted a placidly atheistic Unitarian minister, a Presbyterian who was orthodox on Sunday and revolutionary on Monday, a wavering Congregationalist, and an Anglo-Catholic Episcopalian, who was enthusiastic about the beauties of the ritual and the Mithraic origin of the same.
And Frank's fretting wearily started all over again. He re-read Harnack's "What Is Christianity?" Sunderland's "Origin and Nature of the Bible," James's "Varieties of Religious Experience," Frazer's "Golden Bough."
He was in the pleasing situation where whatever he did was wrong. He could not content himself with the discussions of the Liberal Club. "If you fellows believe that way, why don't you get out of the church?" he kept demanding. Yet he could not leave them; could not, therefore, greatly succeed among the Baptist brethren. His good wife, Bess, when he diffidently hinted of his doubts, protested, "You can't reach people just through their minds. Besides, they wouldn't understand you if you did come right out and tell 'em the truth—as you see it. They aren't ready for it."
His worst doubt was the doubt of himself. And in this quite undignified wavering he remained, envying equally Rabbi Kassebaum's public scoffing at all religion and the thundering certainties of the cover-to-cover evangelicals. He who each Sunday morning neatly pointed his congregation the way to Heaven was himself tossed in a Purgatory of self-despising doubt, where his every domestic virtue was cowardice, his every mystic aspiration a superstitious mockery, and his every desire to be honest a cruelty which he must spare Bess and his well-loved brood.
He was in this mood when the Reverend Elmer Gantry
