Elmer Gantry quotes

Actually, they sang very well. Jim had a resolute tenor, and as to Elmer Gantry, even more than his bulk, his thick black hair, his venturesome black eyes, you remembered that arousing baritone.

He was born to be a senator. He never said anything important, and he always said it sonorously.

He could make “Good morning” seem profound as Kant, welcoming as a brass band, and uplifting as a cathedral organ.

He was born to be a senator. He never said anything important, and he always said it sonorously.

He could make “Good morning” seem profound as Kant, welcoming as a brass band, and uplifting as a cathedral organ.

It was a cello, his voice, and in the enchantment of it you did not hear his slang, his boasting, his smut, and the dreadful violence which (at this period) he performed on singulars and plurals.

he did have researches into the lovability of co-eds and the baker’s daughter; he did revere becoming drunk and world-striding. But he could not afford liquor very often and the co-eds were mostly ugly and earnest.

It was lamentable to see this broad young man, who would have been so happy in the prize-ring, the fish-market, or the stock exchange, poking through the cobwebbed corridors of Terwillinger.

Terwillinger College, founded and preserved by the more zealous Baptists, is on the outskirts of Gritzmacher Springs, Kansas. (The springs have dried up and the Gritzmachers have gone to Los Angeles, to sell bungalows and delicatessen.)

Though Elmer was the athletic idol of the college, though his occult passion, his heavy good looks, caused the college girls to breathe quickly, though his manly laughter was as fetching as his resonant speech, Elmer was never really liked.

He was supposed to be the most popular man in college; everyone believed that everyone else adored him; and none of them wanted to be with him.

They were all a bit afraid, a bit uncomfortable, and more than a bit resentful.

but Jim accurately examined every notion that came to him. Jim was selfish enough, but it was with the selfishness of a man who thinks and who is coldly unafraid of any destination to which his thoughts may lead him.

The little man treated Elmer like a large damp dog, and Elmer licked his shoes and followed.

He also knew that Jim, as quarter, was far more the soul of the team than himself as tackle and captain.

His eyes were friendly, his smile was friendly—oh, he was always friendly enough; he was merely astonished when he found that you did not understand his importance and did not want to hand over anything he might desire.

He was a baritone solo turned into portly flesh; he was a gladiator laughing at the comic distortion of his wounded opponent.

He could not understand men who shrank from blood, who liked poetry or roses, who did not casually endeavor to seduce every possibly seducible girl.

And always the three chairs that stood behind the pulpit, the intimidating stiff chairs of yellow plush and carved oak borders, which, he was uneasily sure, were waiting for the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost.

He had, in fact, got everything from the church and Sunday School, except, perhaps, any longing whatever for decency and kindness and reason.

Even had Elmer not known the church by habit, he would have been led to it by his mother. Aside from his friendship for Jim Lefferts, Elmer’s only authentic affection was for his mother, and she was owned by the church.

It was after one. Surely Jim would be asleep, and by next day there might be a miracle.

Morning always promises miracles.

He eased the door open, holding it with a restraining hand. There was a light on the washstand beside Jim’s bed, but it was a small kerosene lamp turned low. He tiptoed in, his tremendous feet squeaking.

I don’t think I’m hurting these young fellows any, but I do wish I could be honest.

Oh, Lordy, Lordy, Lordy, I wish I had a good job selling real estate!

”

… “The happiest days that ever were, we knew at old Terwillinger” on a fence fondly believed to resemble the Yale fence, or tramping by himself through the minute forest of cottonwood and willow by Tunker Creek, he expanded with the expanding year and knew happiness.

The nights were unadulterated hell.

He felt guilty that he had no Call, and he went to the president about it in mid-May.

I just wonder sometimes—All the new vocations that are coming up. Medicine. Advertising. World just going it! I tell you, Dean, in another forty years, by 1943, men will be up in the air in flying machines, going maybe a hundred miles an hour!”

“My dear fellow, if the Lord had meant men to fly, he’d have given us wings.”

“But there are prophecies in the Book—”

But he had left off, for the day, the large opal ring surrounded by almost gold serpents for which he had lusted and to which he had yielded when in liquor, in the city of Monarch.

He walked as an army with banners, he spoke like a trombone, he gestured widely with his large blanched thick hand; and his mother, on his arm, looked up in ecstasy.

He wafted her among the crowd, affable as a candidate for probate judgeship, and she was covered with the fringes of his glory.

He disliked most of his class. They were too rustic or too pious, too inquisitive about his monthly trips to the city of Monarch or simply too dull.

Elmer liked the company of what he regarded as intellectual people. He never understood what they were saying, but to hear them saying it made him feel superior.

The group which he most frequented gathered in the room of Frank Shallard and Don Pickens, the large corner room on the second floor of Smut Hall.

“Oh, God, I can’t stand it!” he moaned.

He had no friends. He had never had a friend since Jim Lefferts.

Harry Zenz despised his brains, Frank Shallard despised his manners, and the rest of them he himself despised. He was bored by the droning seminary professors all day, the schoolboyish arguing all evening;

And she was there, the girl for whom he had been looking ever since he had come to Mizpah.

Lulu Bains was a gray-and-white kitten with a pink ribbon.

She had sat at the back of the church, behind the stove, and he had not seen her. He looked down at her thirstily.

Under him, Elmer had been learning an ever more golden (yet steel-strong) pulpit manner, learning not to split infinitives in public, learning that references to Dickens, Victor Hugo, James Whitcomb Riley, Josh Billings, and Michelangelo give to a sermon a very toney Chicago air.

Elmer’s eloquence increased like an August pumpkin.

He went into the woods to practise.

Elmer whined, “You hadn’t ought—you ought not to talk to me like that! Doesn’t it say in the Bible you ought to forgive seventy times seven—”

“This is eighty times seven. Get out!”

So the Reverend Mr. Gantry surprisingly ceased to be, for practical purposes, a Reverend at all.

“God!” prayed Elmer Gantry, and that instant his planless life took on plan and resolute purpose.

He was going to have Sharon Falconer.

Her voice was warm, a little husky, desperately alive.

She flamed at him. “

I can’t sin! I am above sin! I am really and truly sanctified!

Whatever I may choose to do, though it might be sin in one unsanctified, with me God will turn it to his glory.

as always he was humanly lonely for her and her tantrums and her electric wrath and her abounding laughter. In pulpits he felt like an impostor, and in hotel bedrooms he ached for her voice.

Worst of all, he was expected everywhere to tell of her “brave death in the cause of the Lord.”

He was very sick about it.

… you not see, do you not perceive, have not your earthbound eyes ingathered, the supremacy of the raja’s quality which each of us, by that inner contemplation which is the all however cloaked by the seeming, can consummate and build loftily to higher aspiring spheres?”

Almost any Hindu word was useful.

It seems that the Hindus have Hidden Powers which enable them to do whatever they want to, except possibly to get rid of the Mohammedans, the plague, and the cobra. “Soul-breathing” was also a good thing to talk about whenever he had nothing to say;

Daily my Subconscious shall tell me to not be content and go on working for somebody else.

They were all of them ready for a million a year except their teacher, who was ready for bankruptcy.

He got pupils enough, but the overhead was huge and his pupils were poor. He had to hire the ballroom, pay for advertising; he had to appear gaudy, with a suite in the hotel, fresh linen, and newly pressed morning coat.

This was in 1913, before the Hotel Thornleigh was built and Gil O’Hearn, with his new yellow brick tavern, was trying to take the fashionable business of Zenith away from the famous but decayed Grand Hotel.

Intellectual ballroom lectures add to the smartness of a hotel almost as much as a great cocktail-mixer, and Mr. O’Hearn had been moved by the prospectus of the learned and magnetic Dr. Elmer Gantry.

Elmer could take the O’Hearn offer on a guarantee and be sure of a living, but he needed money for a week or two before the fees should come in.

He was supposed to comfort the sick. But what did he know of sickness? How could he tell when he ought to pray and when he ought to recommend salts?

He was supposed to explain to troubled mankind the purposes of God Almighty, to chat with him, and even advise him about his duties as regards rainfall and the church debt.

But which God Almighty? Professor Bruno Zechlin had introduced Frank to a hundred gods besides the Jewish Jehovah, or Yahveh, who had been but a poor and rather surly relation of such serene aristocrats as Zeus.

He had learned how to assemble Jewist texts, Greek philosophy, and Middle-Western evangelistic anecdotes into a sermon.

And he had learned that poverty is blessed, but that bankers make the best deacons.

Otherwise, as he wretchedly examined his equipment, facing his career, Frank did not seem to have learned anything whatever.

He had learned how to assemble Jewist texts, Greek philosophy, and Middle-Western evangelistic anecdotes into a sermon. And he had learned that poverty is blessed, but that bankers make the best deacons.

Otherwise, as he wretchedly examined his equipment, facing his career, Frank did not seem to have learned anything whatever.

From Elmer Gantry’s relations to Lulu Bains, from Harry Zenz’s almost frank hint that he was an atheist, Frank perceived that a preacher can be a scoundrel or a hypocrite and still be accepted by his congregation.

Listening to the celebrated divines who visited the seminary and showed off to the infant prophets, he perceived that a man could make scholarly and violent sounds and yet not say anything which remained in the mind for six minutes.

He concluded, in fact, that if there was any value in churches and a ministry, of which he was not very certain, in any case there could be no value in himself as a minister.

Yet he had been ordained, he had taken a pulpit.

He might have left the ministry but for the Reverend Andrew Pengilly, pastor of the Catawba Methodist Church.

If you had cut Andrew Pengilly to the core, you would have found him white clear through.

He was a type of clergyman favored in pious fiction, yet he actually did exist.

“Maybe taint Christian to deny you one. But I happen to know all about Amy. Now if you’d go out and help poor old crippled Sister Eckstein do her washing, maybe you’d keep busy enough so’s you could get along without your daily scandal.”

He had humor, as well, Father Pengilly.

He could smile over the cranks in the congregation. And he liked the village atheist, Doc Lem Staples.

Frank became more powerful as a preacher. He went from Catawba, via pastorates in two or three larger towns, to Eureka, a camp of forty thousand brisk industrialists, and here he was picked up and married by the amiable Bess.

Bess Needham, later to be Bess Shallard, was remarkably like a robin.

She had the same cheerfulness, the same round ruddiness, and the same conviction that early rising, chirping, philoprogenitiveness, and strict attention to food were the aims of existence.

And Frank’s fretting wearily started all over again. He reread Harnack’s What Is Christianity? Sunderland’s Origin and Nature of the Bible, James’s Varieties of Religious Experience, Fraser’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.

He admitted that he hadn’t quite the creative mind. He could never rise to such originality as, say, Mrs. Riddle’s humorous oracle: “Don’t be scared of upsetting folks ’coz most of ’em are topsy-turvy anyway, and you’ll only be putting ’em back on their feet.”

Fortunately, except in a few fashionable churches, it wasn’t necessary to say anything original to succeed among the Baptists or Methodists.

He would be happy in a regular pastorate. He was a professional.

The train wandered through orchard-land and cornfields—two seedy day-coaches and a baggage car.

Hurry and efficiency had not yet been discovered on this branch line, and it took five hours to travel the hundred and twenty miles from Zenith to Banjo Crossing.

The Reverend Elmer Gantry was in a state of grace. Having resolved henceforth to be pure and humble and humanitarian, he was benevolent to all his traveling companions, he was mothering the world, whether the world liked it or not.

Pete Clark’s—the Widow Clark’s. Leave your valises here, and I’ll have my boy fetch ’em over. Well, good luck, Brother. Hope you won’t have much trouble with your church. The last fellow did, but then he was kind of pernickety—wa’n’t just plain folks.”

“Oh, I’m just plain folks, and mighty happy, after the great cities, to be among them!” was Elmer’s amiable greeting, but what he observed as he walked away was “I am like hell!”

Altogether depressed now, he expected to find the establishment of Brother Benham a littered and squalid crossroads store, but he came to a two-story brick structure with plate-glass windows and, in the alley, the half-dozen trucks with which Mr.

If in a small way Nathaniel Benham had commercial genius, it did not show in his aspect.

He wore a beard like a bath sponge, and in his voice was a righteous twang.

“I’m Reverend Gantry, the new pastor.”

He had found his work, his mate, his future.

Virtue, he pointed out, certainly did pay.

He had two days to prepare his first sermon and unpack his trunk, his bags, and the books which he had purchased in Zenith.

His possessions were not very consistent.

He had a beautiful new morning coat, three excellent lounge suits, patent leather shoes, a noble derby, a flourishing top hat, but he had only two suits of underclothes, both ragged. His socks were of black silk, out at the toes.

He was bored by Banjo Crossing.

The life of a small-town preacher, prevented from engaging even in the bucolic pleasures, is rather duller than that of a watchman at a railroad-crossing.

Elmer hadn’t, actually, enough to do. Though later, in “institutional churches” he was to be as hustling as any other business man, now he had not over twenty hours a week of real activity.

Be a big residential boom in Old Town. It’s near enough in to be handy to the business section, and far enough from the Union Station so’s they haven’t got any warehouses or wholesalers. Good buy, Reverend.”

“Oh, I’m not buying⁠—I’m just selling⁠—selling the gospel!” said the Reverend

, and he went to inform Bishop Toomis that after prayer and meditation he had been led to accept the pastorate of the Wellspring Church.

“Oh, I’m not buying—I’m just selling—selling the gospel!” said the Reverend, and he went to inform Bishop Toomis that after prayer and meditation he had been led to accept the pastorate of the Wellspring Church.

So, at thirty-nine, Caesar came to Rome, and Rome heard about it immediately.

He did not stand by the altar now, uplifted in a vow that he would be good and reverent.

He was like the new general manager of a factory as he bustled for the first time through the Wellspring Methodist Church, Zenith, and his first comment was “The plant’s run down⁠—have to buck it up.”

He was accompanied on his inspection by his staff: Miss Bundle, church secretary and personal secretary to himself, a decayed and plaintive lady distressingly free of seductiveness; Miss Weezeger, the deaconess, given to fat and good works; and A. F.

… God, what a frump that Bundle woman is! One of these days I’ll have a smart girl secretary—a good-looker. Well, hurray, ready for the big work! I’ll show this town what high-class preaching is!”

Not for three days did he chance to think that Cleo might also like to see the church.

Though there were nearly four hundred thousand people in Zenith and only nine hundred in Banjo Crossing, Elmer’s reception in the Zenith church-basement was remarkably like his reception in the Banjo basement.

“Now that’s what I’d vote for,” said Rigg. “That’s what gets ’em.

Nothing like a good juicy vice sermon to bring in the crowds.

Yes, sir! Fearless attack on all this drinking and this awful sex immorality that’s getting so prevalent.” Mr. Rigg meditatively mixed a highball, keeping it light because next morning in court he had to defend a lady accused of running a badger game. “You bet.

… He was always testy. … His children were afraid of him, even when he boisterously decided to enact the Kind Parent for one evening and to ride them pickaback, whether or no they wanted to be ridden pickaback.

They feared God properly and kept his commandments, did Nat and Bunny, because their father so admirably prefigured God.

When Cleo was busy with meetings and clubs at the church, Elmer blamed her for neglecting the house; when she slackened her church work, he was able equally to blame her for not helping him professionally.

With Mr. Webster and Mr. Wink removing most of the church detail from him, Elmer became not less but more occupied. He no longer merely invited the public, but galloped out and dragged it in.

He no longer merely scolded sin. He gratifyingly ended it.

When he had been in Zenith for a year and three-quarters, Elmer formed the Committee on Public Morals, and conducted his raids on the red-light district.

The incipient Committee on Public Morals sat about a long narrow table in bentwood chairs, in which they were always vainly trying to tilt back. Their table did not suggest debauchery and the demon rum. There were only chilly and naked-looking goblets of ice water.

They lunched, gravely, on consommé, celery, roast lamb, which was rather cold, mashed potatoes, which were arctic, Brussels sprouts, which were overstewed, ice cream, which was warm; with very large cups of coffee, and no smoking afterward.

Elmer began, “I don’t know who is the oldest among us, but certainly no one in this room has had a more distinguished or more valuable term of Christian service than Dr.

Father Smeesby spoke. “My church, gentlemen, probably has a more rigid theology than yours, but I don’t think we’re quite so alarmed by discovering the fact, which seems to astonish you, that sinners often sin.

The Catholic Church may be harder to believe, but it’s easier to live with.

”

“When I was a young man here, four of us used to play every Saturday evening—Bach we played, and Brahms—Gott weiss we played terrible, but we liked it, and we never made others listen. Now, wherever you go, this jazz, like a St. Vitus’s.

Jazz iss to music what this Reverend Gantry you read about is to an old-time Prediger.

I guess maybe he was never born, that Gantry fellow—he was blowed out of a saxophone.”

“Dot’s a damned lie! Always when you let me, I handle Eitelbaum’s beer, the finest in the state, and since den I make my own beer. It is good! It is honest! ‘Hellish beverage!’

Dot you should judge of beer⁠—dot a pig should judge poetry!

Your Christ dot made vine, he vould like my beer!”

Elmer had become so distinguished that the Rotary Club elected him to membership with zeal.

The Rotary Club was an assemblage of accountants, tailors, osteopaths, university-presidents, carpet-manufacturers, advertising men, millinery-dealers, ice-dealers, piano salesmen, laundrymen, and like leaders of public thought

, who met weekly for the purposes of lunching together, listening to addresses by visiting actors and by lobbyists against the recognition of Russia, beholding vaudeville teams in eccentric dances, and indulging in passionate rhapsodies about Service and Business Ethics.

Frank sat deep in a chair smoking a pipe—he could never quite get over looking like a youngish college professor who smokes to show what a manly fellow he is. McGarry wandered about the room.

He had a way of pointing arguments by shaking objects of furniture⁠—pokers, vases, books, lamps⁠—which was as dangerous as it looked.

“Oh, I was rotten at prayer-meeting tonight,” Frank grumbled. “Darn it, I can’t seem to go on being interested in the fact that old Mrs. Besom finds God such a comfort in her trials. Mrs. Besom’s daughter-in-law doesn’t find Mrs.

Well, cheer up! From what I know of her, she’ll be married again within six months, and if I do a good job of priesting tomorrow, maybe I’ll get the fee!

Oh, Lord, Phil, what a job, what a lying compromising job, this being a minister!

”

And it isn’t so much that the church is in bondage to Big Business and doctrines as laid down by millionaires—though a lot of churches are that, too.

My chief objection is that ninety-nine percent of sermons and Sunday School teachings are so agonizingly dull!

”

… in which his subordinates—the aged virgin at the inquiry desk, the boss of the woodyard, the clerk at the lodging-house, the young lady who asked the applicants about their religion and vices—treated the shambling unfortunates as criminals who had deliberately committed the crime of poverty.

They were as efficient and as tender as vermin-exterminators.

In this acid perfection, Frank longed for the mystery that clings to even the dourest or politest tabernacle. He fell in the way of going often to the huge St.

“

The Roman Catholic Church is superior to the militant Protestant Church. It does not compel you to give up your sense of beauty, your sense of humor, or your pleasant vices. It merely requires you to give up your honesty, your reason, your heart and soul.

”

“But I don’t think so much of this street. I always heard it was a famous one, but these stores—why, say, we got a dozen streets in Zenith, say nothing of N’ York, that got better stores. No git up and git to these foreigners.

Certainly does make a fellow glad he’s an American!

”