as she was; and whenever he found a woman parishioner who was willing to comfort him, or whenever he was called on important but never explained affairs to Sparta, he had no bold swagger of satisfaction, but a guilt, an uneasiness of sin, which displayed itself in increasingly furious condemnation of the same sin from his pulpit.
"O God, if I could only have gone on with Sharon, I might have been a decent fellow," he mourned, in his sorrow sympathetic with all the world. But the day after, in the sanctuary, he would be salving that sorrow by raging, "And these dance-hall proprietors, these tempters of lovely innocent girls, whose doors open to the pit of death and horror, they shall have reward—they shall burn in uttermost hell—burn literally—burn!—and for their suffering we shall have but joy that the Lord's justice has been resolutely done!"
Something like statewide fame began to cling about the Reverend Elmer Gantry during his two years in Sparta—1918 to 1920. In the spring of '18 he was one of the most courageous defenders of the Midwest against the imminent invasion of the Germans. He was a Four-Minute Man. He said violent things about atrocities, and sold Liberty Bonds hugely. He threatened to leave Sparta to its wickedness while he went out to "take care of our poor boys" as a chaplain, and he might have done so had the war lasted another year.
In Sparta, too, he crept from timidly sensational church advertisements to such blasts as must have shaken the Devil himself. Anyway, they brought six hundred delighted sinners to church every Sunday evening, and after one sermon on the horrors of booze, a saloon-keeper, slightly intoxicated, remarked "Whoop!" and put a fifty-dollar bill in the plate.
Not to this day, with all the advance in intellectual advertising, has there been seen a more arousing effort to sell salvation than Elmer's prose poem in the Sparta World-Chronicle on a Saturday in December, 1919:
WOULD YOU LIKE YOUR MOTHER TO GO BATHING WITHOUT STOCKINGS?
