Elmer Gantry by 1885-1951 Sinclair Lewis Page A

dashed into the president’s house; he shouted from the door, erect, while they knelt and looked up at him mousily,
“It’s come! I feel it in everything! God just opened my eyes and made me feel what a wonderful ole world it is, and it was
just like I could hear his voice saying, ‘Don’t you want to love everybody and help them to be happy? Do you want to just go
along being selfish, or have you got a longing to—to help everybody?’”
    He stopped. They had listened silently, with interested grunts of “Amen, Brother.”
    “Honest, it was awful’ impressive. Somehow, something has made me feel so much better than when I went away from here.
I’m sure it was a real Call. Don’t you think so, President?”
    “Oh, I’m sure of it!” the president ejaculated, getting up hastily and rubbing his knees.
    “I feel that all is right with our brother; that he has now, this sacred moment, heard the voice of God, and is entering
upon the highest calling in the sight of God,” the president observed to the dean. “Don’t you feel so?”
    “God be praised,” said the dean, and looked at his watch.
    3
    On their way home, they two alone, the oldest faculty-member said to the dean, “Yes, it was a fine gratifying moment.
And—herumph!— slightly surprising. I’d hardly thought that young Gantry would go on being content with the mild blisses of
salvation. Herumph! Curious smell of peppermint he had about him.”
    “I suppose he stopped at the drug-store during his walk and had a soft drink of some kind. Don’t know, Brother,” said the
dean, “that I approve of these soft drinks. Innocent in themselves, but they might lead to carelessness in beverages. A man
who drinks ginger ale—how are you going to impress on him the terrible danger of drinking ALE?”
    “Yes, yes,” said the oldest faculty-member (he was sixty-eight, to the dean’s boyish sixty). “Say, Brother, how do you
feel about young Gantry? About his entering the ministry? I know you did well in the pulpit before you came here, as I more
or less did myself, but if you were a boy of twenty-one or —two, do you think you’d become a preacher now, way things
are?”
    “Why, Brother!” grieved the dean. “Certainly I would! What a question! What would become of all our work at Terwillinger,
all our ideals in opposition to the heathenish large universities, if the ministry weren’t the highest ideal—”
    “I know. I know. 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—”
    “Those refer purely to spiritual and symbolic flying. No, no! Never does to oppose the clear purpose of the Bible, and I
could dig you out a hundred texts that show unquestionably that the Lord intends us to stay right here on earth till that
day when we shall be upraised in the body with him.”
    “Herumph! Maybe. Well, here’s my corner. Good night, Brother.”
    The dean came into his house. It was a small house.
    “How’d it go?” asked his wife.
    “Splendid. Young Gantry seemed to feel an unmistakable divine call. Something struck him that just uplifted him. He’s got
a lot of power. Only—”
    The dean irritably sat down in a cane-seated rocker, jerked off his shoes, grunted, drew on his slippers.
    “Only, hang it, I simply can’t get myself to like him! Emma, tell me: If I were his age now, do you think I’d go into the
ministry, as things are today?”
    “Why, Henry! What in the world ever makes you say a thing like that? Of course you would! Why, if that weren’t the
case—What would our whole lives mean, all we’ve given up and everything?”
    “Oh, I know. I just get to thinking. Sometimes I wonder if we’ve given up so