had normally drawn less than forty people, but there were a hundred tonight, when, fumblingly, Elmer broke away from old-fashioned church practise and began what was later to become his famous Lively Sunday Evenings.
He chose the brighter hymns, "Onward, Christian Soldiers," "Wonderful Words of Life," "Brighten the Corner Where You Are," and the triumphant pæan of "When the Roll Is Called up Yonder, I'll Be There." Instead of making them drone through many stanzas, he had them sing one from each hymn. Then he startled them by shouting, "Now I don't want any of you old fellows to be shocked, or say it isn't proper in church, because I'm going to get the spirit awakened and maybe get the old devil on the run! Remember that the Lord who made the sunshine and the rejoicing hills must have been behind the fellows that wrote the glad songs, so I want you to all pipe up good and lively with 'Dixie'! Yes, sir! Then, for the old fellows, like me, we'll have a stanza of that magnificent old reassurance of righteousness, 'How Firm a Foundation.'"
They did look shocked, some of them; but the youngsters, the boys and the girls keeping an aseptic tryst in the back pews, were delighted. He made them sing the chorus of "Dixie" over and over, till all but one or two rheumatic saints looked cheerful.
His text was from Galatians: "But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace."
"Don't you ever listen for one second," he commanded, "to these wishy-washy fellows that carry water on both shoulders, that love to straddle the fence, that are scared of the sternness of the good old-time Methodist doctrine and tell you that details don't mean anything, that dogmas and the discipline don't mean anything. They do! Justification means something! Baptism means something! It means something that the wicked and worldly stand for this horrible stinking tobacco and this insane alcohol, which makes a man like a murderer, but we Methodists keep ourselves pure and unspotted and undefiled.
"But tonight, on this first day of getting acquainted with you, Brothers and Sisters, I don't want to go into these details. I want to get down to the fundamental thing which details merely carry out, and that fundamental thing— What is it?
