sermon. He said it before at least four hundred people, as against the hundred who had normally been attending.
He himself was a stranger in Zenith, and he had gone forth and he had been "appalled—aghast—bowed in shocked horror" at the amount of vice, and such interesting and attractive vice. He had investigated Braun's Island, a rackety beach and dance-floor and restaurant at South Zenith, and he had found mixed bathing. He described the ladies' legs; he described the two amiable young women who had picked him up. He told of the waiter who, though he denied that Braun's Restaurant itself sold liquor, had been willing to let him know where to get it, and where to find an all-night game of poker—"and, mind you, playing poker for keeps, you understand," Elmer explained.
On Washington Avenue, North, he had found two movies in which "the dreadful painted purveyors of putrescent vice"—he meant the movie actors—had on the screen danced "suggestive steps which would bring the blush of shame to the cheeks of any decent woman," and in which the same purveyors had taken drinks which he assumed to be the deadly cocktails. On his way to his hotel after these movies three ladies of the night had accosted him, right under the White Way of lights. Street-corner loafers—he had apparently been very chummy with them—had told him of blind pigs, of dope-peddlers, of strange lecheries.
"That," he shouted, "is what one stranger was able to find in your city—now my city, and well beloved! But could he find virtue so easily, could he, could he? Or just a lot of easy-going churches, lollygagging along, while the just God threatens this city with the fire and devouring brimstone that destroyed proud Sodom and Gomorrah in their abominations! Listen! With the help of God Almighty, let us raise here in this church a standard of virtue that no stranger can help seeing! We're lazy. We're not burning with a fever of righteousness. On your knees, you slothful, and pray God to forgive you and to aid you and me to form a brotherhood of helpful, joyous, fiercely righteous followers of every commandment of the Lord Our God!"
The newspapers carried almost all of it. . . . It had just happened that there were reporters present—it had just happened that Elmer had been calling up the Advocate-Times on
