the consideration of using egg-coal in church furnaces to the question as to what, when they weren't before their congregations and on record, they really believed about the whole thing.
That was a very dangerous and silly thing, reflected Elmer Gantry. No telling where you'd get to, if you went blatting around about a lot of these fool problems. Preach the straight Bible gospel and make folks good, he demanded, and leave all these ticklish questions of theology and social service to the profs!
Philip McGarry wound up his cheerful attack on Dr. Hickenlooper, the first morning when Elmer disgustedly encountered him, by insisting, "You see, Otto, your reforms couldn't mean anything, or you wouldn't be able to hold onto as many prosperous money-grabbing parishioners as you do. No risk of the working-men in your church turning dangerous as long as you've got that tight-fisted Joe Hanley as one of your trustees! Thank Heaven, I haven't got a respectable person in my whole blooming flock!"
("Yeh, and there's where you gave yourself away, McGarry," Elmer chuckled inwardly. "That's the first thing you've said that's true!")
Philip McGarry's church was in a part of the city incomparably more run-down than Elmer's Old Town. It was called "The Arbor"; it had in pioneer days been the vineyard-sheltered village, along the Chaloosa River, from which had grown the modern Zenith. Now it was all dives, brothels, wretched tenements, cheap-jack shops. Yet here McGarry lived, a bachelor, seemingly well content, counseling pick-pockets and scrubwomen, and giving on Friday evenings a series of lectures packed by eager Jewish girl students, radical workmen, old cranks, and wistful rich girls coming in limousines down from the spacious gardens of Royal Ridge.
"I'll have trouble with that McGarry if we both stay in this town. Him and I will never get along together," thought Elmer. "Well, I'll keep away from him; I'll treat him with some of this Christian charity that he talks so darn' much about and can't understand the real meaning of! We'll just dismiss him—and most of these other birds. But the big three—how'll I handle them?"
He could not, even if he should have a new church, outdo Chester Brown in ecclesiastical elegance or literary messages.
