Part 6
But principally I admired Brother Hickok because he was the only Preacher I knew who did not proclaim incessantly that he was a Man of God and therefore entitled to the largest piece of pie, and because he was the only one who did not seem to be impressed by my relationship with Bishop Asbury. He didn’t seem to give a damn about the Bishop; his only ambition, so far as I was concerned, was to beat me at tennis, which he did. But from the others, and from the Brothers and Sisters, I got the impression that the right reverend deceased, seated at God’s right hand between Jesus Christ and St. Peter, perhaps crowding the latter a bit, had nothing to do but receive messages from the Almighty touching on my conduct, and relay them to me by whatever Preacher I happened to meet. For many years I thought that God and the Bishop had a consultation on my case every night.
I do not think that I shall ever forget Brother Lincoln McConnell, although I probably should not recognize him if I saw him to-day. I hope not. But for some eighteen long years I have cherished a compelling desire to stand him in a corner, minus his band and singers and his other aids to emotion, and then bind and gag him. After that I want to talk to him for hours and hours, embellishing my remarks with such florid words as I have acquired in various military and journalistic enterprises, and possibly inventing new ones for the occasion. He was responsible for the most miserable period of my life. But it was he, too, who definitely kept me from being a Preacher, or even a Brother, and so, perhaps, I should thank him. If he had let me alone I might at this moment be calling some other preacher Brother; I might be an intimate of God, and a walking Baedeker of Heaven; I might even be gloating over the glories of a Heaven paved with gold and populated by angels, all female, all beautiful, all amiable. Certainly I should not be given over to a life of sin; that is to say, I should not be having a pretty good time with this business of living.
Brother McConnell, as I write, is a pastor of a Baptist church in Oklahoma City, Okla., with occasional forays onto the Chautauqua platform, and is a potent force in the life of that abode of righteousness. But if reports are to be believed, there are even there those who consider him a blight. He has been the central figure in several rows that have undoubtedly redounded to the greater glory of God; he tried to prevent the citizens of his town from seeing one of the best American plays of recent years because it dealt a bit too truthfully with certain aspects of religious fanaticism, and he erected a radio broadcasting station which blanketed the city and forced the population to listen, willy-nilly, to his sermons and his ponderous pronouncements against sin.
I once wrote a magazine article in which I discussed a few of the activities of Brother McConnell, and he put me in my place in an interview which, it seems to me, shows that he has not changed a great deal since the time that I first shook hands with him as he leaned over the mourner’s bench and beseeched me to give my heart to his God. I give it here. It appeared in the Oklahoma City _News_, on January 27, 1925.
“He is a very small potato.” That was the reply of the Rev. Lincoln McConnell, First Baptist Church pastor.... “I have some doubt,” said the Rev. McConnell, “as to whether I should feel honored or otherwise by the repeated mention of my name in this article by Herbert Asbury without realizing that this writer cannot possibly have inherited anything more from his illustrious ancestry than his name.
“I confess that it is rather surprising to me that editors of a magazine could attach enough importance to such cheap drivel as this as to give it the position and the space they do.
“The natural assumption is that they believe about religion, the religion of Christ, what this poor fellow does, and therefore, actually believe that this ‘weak stuff’ is a contribution to their cause.
“I remember Farmington, Mo., very well, having been there about twenty-five years ago. I do not remember Herbert Asbury at all.
“I am not surprised that I do not, as he must have been then somewhat as he evidently is now--a very small potato--and while I would feel naturally as interested in his conversion as in anyone else, at the same time I am forced to admit that it would not be possible for a man of training and experience to list a man of his evident mentality very highly, even though he were a professed convert in his meeting.
“I am very sorry that he was not really converted. If the Editor of the _American Mercury_ cares for things of a really constructive nature, I can give him the life story of thousands of men and women whom because of the genuineness of their conversion to Christ in my own meetings, have given to the world characters of such beauty and worth as have reflected credit upon themselves and their church and have proved a blessing to society at large.
“I have never asked people to stand up if they want to go to Heaven. I think that very ridiculous.”
6
It was these people who taught me of God, and who had dominion over my spiritual welfare! And not only did they instruct me to worship their conception of Him; they threatened me with eternal damnation if I didn’t, and with even more horrible punishment if I ventured to cast doubt upon the truth and holiness of the Bible. Eternal damnation meant that I should, in the life to come, hang throughout eternity on a revolving spit over a great fire in the deepest pit of Hell, while little red devils jabbed white-hot pokers into my quivering flesh and Satan stood by and curled his lip in glee. I received the impression that Satan was the only one actively concerned with religion who was ever permitted to laugh. God was not, nor His disciples, and that Satan could and apparently did was sufficient proof that laughter was wicked.
And they described God to me, and told me in minute detail of the architectural design of Heaven and the furnishings of the Mansions in the Sky. I do not know where they obtained their information. I gathered that God was an old man who wore a long white nightgown and boasted a luxuriant growth of whiskers, with a disposition compounded of the snarls of a wounded wildcat and the pleasant conceits of a _must_ elephant. He chewed tobacco--perhaps that impression was due to the fact that so many of our preachers were addicted to the vile weed--and He had an enormous head which contained an eye for every person on earth, and this eye was constantly upon its object. And it was a vindictive and jaundiced eye, peering into the innermost depths of the soul and the mind and the heart for some thought or feeling that might call for punishment.
The descriptions of Heaven and the physical appearance of the angels varied somewhat, according to whether the tale was told by a preacher or a Brother, or a Sister. But all of them talked with gusto of streets paved with gold and of clouds lined with silver, of magnificent buildings constructed of precious stones, and of angels sitting on the clouds with no worthier purpose in life than strumming a golden harp, protected from the weather by no more substantial raiment than a white nightgown, a halo and a pair of sandals. And whoever told the tale, there was always that underlying idea of sybaritic magnificence; Heaven bore no resemblance to the lowly stable in which the founder of their religion was born, and it was not a somber retreat for the further development of the soul and the cultivation of those virtues that are lost sight of upon the earth. As it was described to me in my youth, and as it is still described on those rare occasions when I can bring myself to hold converse with a Preacher, Heaven was a celestial reproduction of the palace of a Babylonian monarch. Nobody worked, and God’s House abounded with gold and silver and rubies and diamonds, and on every cloud that rolled down the street was a beautiful woman, eternally young and amiable. The Heaven that I was taught to aspire to was a motion picture set on an even grander scale than the creations of Cecil De Mille.
But even more emphasis was placed, in these tales, on feminine virginity. It seemed that Heaven was filled with virgins; I have never heard a Preacher describe an angel without mentioning the fact that the angel was a virgin, and I have never heard a Preacher describe Mary simply as the mother of Jesus. She is always the Virgin Mother, and he pronounces it all in capitals. Even as a boy I was impressed with the frequency with which the word “virgin” appeared in the discourses of our Pastor and in the lectures so freely bestowed upon me by the Brothers. It seemed to me that the word fascinated them; although I might be trembling with fear that God would strike me dead because I had not learned my Sunday-school lesson or had forgotten the Golden Text, I was so impressed that I found time to wonder at the enthusiasm with which they mouthed it.
It seemed impossible for Preachers or devout Brothers to say “virgin” as casually as they did other words; they gloated over it, toyed with it, rolled it about their tongues and tasted the full flavor of it before it slid drippingly from their lips with an amazing clarity of pronunciation. Usually they accompanied it with a doleful sigh. I thought then that the sigh was from excess of piety, and I thought that their eyes shone and their breath came a little faster from the same cause, that these things were possibly manifestations of God, and I was greatly impressed. But I am older now and I know better.
When I became old enough to understand what was meant by virginity, and to understand that it was something more than a badge of the angels, I understood also many other things that had hitherto been mysteries. I knew then what was in the mind of one of the Brothers, an extraordinarily devout man with an astounding knowledge of the wishes of God and the manners and customs of Heaven, when he stopped me on the street one day and asked me what, if anything, had happened on a recent hay ride to Blumeyer’s Ford and back by members of our social set.
“Did the boys and girls sit close together?” he asked.
“Yes, sir. We had to. We were on a hay wagon.”
“Did you boys sit right up against them?”
I told him we did, and in my youthful innocence I remarked that I had been compelled to sit so close to one girl that we could hardly tell our legs apart. The old man drew a sharp breath, sighed and his eyes glistened. He repeated the word “legs” with gusto, he gloated over it, and then he said:
“You sat so close to her that your legs touched? Your leg touched hers? Your leg was right up against her?”
“Yes, sir. I had to.”
“The leg of a young virgin!” mused the old devil. “That was wicked. It is wicked to think of the legs of a virgin. God will punish you.”
He went away muttering to himself. I was disgusted, not at his ideas, because I had practically the same thought about virgins that he did, and so did most of the other boys of the town, but at his manner. Here was an old man who had set himself up as a mundane representative of the Lord, who told me whom to worship and how to worship Him, who held daily communion with God and received messages from Him touching on my conduct, gloating and trembling because a boy had sat with his leg against the leg of a girl in the forced confinement of a hay ride. God knows what is happening to him if he is alive in these days of short skirts and silk stockings.
Another of our Brothers, a very prominent member of one of our Protestant churches, kept a store in the business district not far from the Court House. He was waiting on a customer the day that the first woman to ride astride in our town cantered down Columbia Street, and his performance was a town scandal for many years. He caught a glimpse of the girl through the window, and he abandoned his customer and rushed to the street, in company with half the county officials who had been dozing with their feet on their desks, and all of the town loafers. The Brother followed her for several blocks, missing no detail of her costume, which was rather bizarre and daring for those days, and then he went back to his store and his customer.
He stood for a while wrapped in contemplation.
“She was riding like a man!” he said. “Her legs--her legs----”
My experiences in these matters, of course, were principally with Preachers and Brothers, but I had occasional contacts with the Sisters. They, too, described God and Heaven, but they did not conceive God as being quite so old and feeble as the Being worshipped by the Brothers, and for the most part they populated Heaven with handsome, stalwart young men, presumably virgins. I recall one exceedingly devout Sister who expressed the belief that there were no female angels in Heaven, and I have heard her praying with extraordinary fervor to God, in effect, to make an exception in her case. Whether she was justified in this optimistic opinion of herself I never knew, but I assume that she and the other Sisters, in their discussion of the virginity of angels, experienced the same sort of vicarious pleasure that seemed to mean so much to the Preachers and the Brothers.
7
I did not go to many camp meetings; ours was not a camp-meeting country. We went in more for protracted meetings, and for the stirring revivals of professional evangelists, held in comfortable church buildings. Usually I went to camp meeting only because some girl in whom I was interested had to go. But they were very popular with a certain type of young man about Farmington, who knew that religious emotion is very akin to secular emotion; the line of demarcation is very thin, and most men who have been around religious women very much know that one emotion can quickly be transformed into the other. Young girls are much easier prey after they have been overwhelmed by religion, their nerves upset and their brains whirling with emotion, and they are then easily persuaded that the Lord will forgive, even though His earthly agents will not. Of course such a statement could not be proven, but it is quite likely that more seductions have occurred at camp meetings, and _en route_ to and from them, than on all the front porches and lawn swings that were ever manufactured, although in Farmington for many years a lawn swing was regarded as a lure of Hell. Even while the service was in progress the buggies around the meeting tent were filled with men and women petting, or, as we called it then, spooning.
Strange things happened at these camp meetings, and at the other gatherings as well, when a forthright religionist saw the light. At one such holy conclave an old woman, for many years a thorn in the flesh of the godly, suddenly bounced to her feet and shouted:
“Praise the Lord! My corn hurts! Praise the Lord!”
And this, because it embodied physical suffering and a great deal of mental torture as well, was accepted as an infallible sign that God had at last entered her soul. She had been converted, and all the rest of her life she was a prying, sanctimonious old pest. She used to stop me on the street and inquire as to the condition of my soul, and ask me whether I said my prayers at night, and whether I read the Bible, and she would grab me by the arm and pinch me and demand the Golden Text of the last Sunday-school lesson. And if by any chance I had forgotten or did not know, she scolded me and predicted dire things for me in the life to come. Incidentally, she knew all about the life to come; it seems that God had appeared to her in a vision, and had described Heaven to her.
At all of these meetings extraordinary efforts were made to ensnare the children and convert them to Christianity; the workers for the Lord were not at all concerned with the fact that the children did not know what it was all about, that they had no opportunity to choose their own religion, and with the further and obvious fact that they succumbed to nothing but fright and a great surge of emotion. That method persists. The Church still obtains its converts by noise and appeals to primitive emotion, and by threats, rather than by intelligently implanting a true and deep-seated conception of God and the heavenly wonders. But to the religionists a convert is a convert, no matter how obtained; I have known boys to be thrashed because they would not profess religion.
As with the Catholic Church, the unspoken and always denied slogan of the Methodists and of the other Protestant sects is “Catch ’em while they’re young,” but unlike the Catholics the Protestants cannot hold them. For one thing, they do not put on a good enough show; they do not understand lighting, and they have no uniforms and no Latin chanters. A Catholic priest covered by a surplice or what not, and his voice rising and falling sonorously in the chanting of a bit of Latin, is a very impressive spectacle, and his appearance lends dignity to his words. The gentle stare that most of them wear is also effective. As soon as an embryo Methodist becomes intelligent enough to visualize the sort of Heaven that the Brothers are preparing for him, he shudders and forthwith goes to the Devil, while the Catholics fill their converts with such fear of God and the Pope, or the Pope and God, to put them in the order of their importance, that very few get away. A renegade Catholic is almost as rare as a Methodist Preacher who does not think he is sprouting wings, and that his voice is truly the Voice of God.
A BAD BOY COMES TO JESUS
1
It is clear, then, that not only was my ancestral background religious, but that I lived in an atmosphere heavy with religious feeling. Religion and the Church dominated the whole of my early life. Among all of my relatives I do not recall one whose home was not oppressed, and whose life was not made miserable and fretful, by the terrible fear of a relentless God whose principal occupation seemed to be snooping about searching for someone to punish. Religion was poured down my throat in doses that strangled me and made me sick of soul. There was simply too much of it. God was fed to me morning, noon and night, and He did not taste good; I was hounded from pillar to post by a pack of baying, sanctimonious hypocrites beseeching me to get right with Jesus, and to read and believe that collection of Hebrew fairy tales called the Bible.
I came finally to think of God as I did of castor oil, and the flavor that He left in my mouth was just as frightful. He and His religion were personified by the dour-faced men and women who went sliding about the town; rubbing their hands together, scraping the skin from their souls but not from their palms. They were irritatingly gentle, and they sighed soulfully and mouthed platitudes with enormous gusto; they called each other Brother and Sister and poked their messy, prying fingers into every bit of fun that anybody tried to have; they fed their little shriveled souls with scandal and smeared dirt over everything that was amusing. They regarded all young men as professional seducers, and for the greater glory of God ruined the reputations of young girls who went buggy-riding and seemed to enjoy it--and nothing can be so completely and irrevocably ruined as the reputation of a young girl in a small town.
But despite the feelings of disgust and revolt which the labors of these servants of the Lord evoked in me, I did not definitely align myself on the side of the non-believers and the sinners until after I had been “converted.” I began on that night to hate the Church and its religion, and all of its prying, messy hypocrisy and sanctimony. And especially I hated the preachers and the Brothers and Sisters. I still do; they give me a pain in the neck. I felt that I had been betrayed; I knew that the spirit of God was not working in me, but I was told that it was and dared to deny it. I was told that I must “get right with the Lord,” whatever that may be. I felt that the Brothers and Sisters and the evangelist had taken an unfair advantage of my emotions; there was a band at the revival, and under the influence of music I will do anything. It compelled me to do something that I did not want to do; it humiliated me in my own eyes, and nothing that has ever happened to me since has made me so miserable and ashamed.
I had reached the ripe old age of fourteen or fifteen when the hand of the Lord, operating through the agency of Brother McConnell and a horde of wailing Brothers and Sisters with religious fervor breaking out upon them like boils, reached out and plucked me from the burning. But it was not their fault that I had not been converted earlier; they had tried often enough. One of my earliest recollections is of a Preacher asking me why I did not profess religion and join the Church, and why I had not given my heart to God, as he called it. I was occasionally singled out at protracted meetings and at revivals and made the object of special prayers, but until Brother McConnell came with his improved technique and circus methods I had always held out.
2
My own church, of course, was the Southern Methodist, but the revival meeting at which I was converted was a union gathering in the Northern Methodist edifice, which was about a block from Braun’s saloon and an even shorter distance from the county jail. We called it the Rock church because it was constructed largely of granite blocks. Its members were considered good enough people in their way, but they were hardly among the socially elect, for many of them lived south of the Post Office among the Catholics and the Lutherans, and in some circles it was suspected that they held, at times, intercourse with the Devil. Nevertheless, they were Methodists and Christians and first-class politicians, and by this time they have probably assumed control of the town.