Elmer Gantry

ELMER GANTRY was drunk. He was eloquently drunk, lovingly and pugnaciously drunk. He leaned against the bar of the Old Home Sample Room, the most gilded and urbane saloon in Cat...

FOR years the state of sin in which dwelt Elmer Gantry and Jim Lefferts had produced fascinated despair in the Christian hearts of Terwillinger College. No revival but had flung...

EARLY in January was the Annual College Y. M. C. A. Week of Prayer. It was a countrywide event, but in Terwillinger College it was of especial power that year because they were...

“Jiminy! You’d go way beyond me! I can see you president of the Baptist convention!” Elmer still did not like Eddie, but he was making much now of ignoring Jim Lefferts (they me...

IN the cottonwood grove by the muddy river, three miles west of Paris, Kansas, the godly were gathered with lunch-baskets, linen dusters, and moist unhappy babies for the all-da...

THE state of Winnemac lies between Pittsburgh and Chicago, and in Winnemac, perhaps a hundred miles south of the city of Zenith, is Babylon, a town which suggests New England mo...

THE Reverend Jacob Trosper, D. D., Ph. D., LL. D., dean and chief executive of Mizpah Theological Seminary, and Professor of Practical Theology and Homiletics, was a hard-faced...

THE ardor of Lulu, the pride of having his own church at Schoenheim, the pleasure of watching Frank Shallard puff in agony over the hand-car, all these did not make up to Elmer...

“Look here, Gantry, something’s got to be done. I’m not satisfied about you and Lulu. I’ve caught you looking at each other. And I suspect you’ve been talking to the dean about...

AS he tramped back to Babylon that evening, Elmer did not enjoy his deliverance so much as he had expected. But he worked manfully at recalling Lulu’s repetitious chatter, her h...

Harrows and rakes and corn-planters; red plows and gilt-striped green wagons; catalogues and order-lists; offices glassed off from dim warehouses; shirt-sleeved dealers on high...

TWO more series of meetings Sharon Falconer held that summer, and at each of them the power in the machinery world appeared and chronicled his conversion by the Gideon Bible and...

When she discharged Cecil Aylston, he said, in a small cold voice, “This is the last time, my dear prophet and peddler, that I shall ever try to be decent.” But it is known that...

SEDATE as a long married couple, intimate and secure, were Elmer and Sharon on most days, and always he was devoted. It was Sharon who was incalculable. Sometimes she was a prie...

IT was not her eloquence but her healing of the sick which raised Sharon to such eminence that she promised to become the most renowned evangelist in America. People were tired...

THOUGH to the commonplace and unspeculative eye Mrs. Evans Riddle was but a female blacksmith, yet Mrs. Riddle and her followers knew, in a bland smirking way, that she was inst...

FRANK SHALLARD had graduated from Mizpah Theological Seminary and taken his first pulpit. And now that he was a minister, theoretically different from all ordinary people, he wa...

THE Reverend Elmer Gantry was writing letters—he had no friends, and the letters were all to inquirers about his Prosperity Classes—at a small oak-desk in the lobby of the O’Hea...

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...

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 h...

WITH women Elmer had always considered himself what he called a “quick worker,” but the properties of the ministry, the delighted suspicion with which the gossips watched a prea...

A YEAR he spent in Rudd Center, three years in Vulcan, and two years in Sparta. As there were 4,100 people in Rudd Center, 47,000 in Vulcan, and 129,000 in Sparta, it may be see...

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 throug...

IT was during his inquiry about clerical allies and rivals—they were the same thing—that Elmer learned that two of his classmates at Mizpah Seminary were stationed in Zenith.

ELMER had, even in Zenith, to meet plenty of solemn and whiskery persons whose only pleasure aside from not doing agreeable things was keeping others from doing them. But the ge...

IN the autumn of his first year in Zenith Elmer started his famous Lively Sunday Evenings. Mornings, he announced, he would give them solid religious meat to sustain them throug...

ELMER, in court, got convictions of sixteen out of the twenty-seven fiends whom he had arrested, with an extra six months for Oscar Hochlauf for resisting arrest and the use of...

HIS friendship with Dr. Philip McGarry of the Arbor Church was all, Frank Shallard felt, that kept him in the church. As to his round little wife Bess and the three respectable...

HOWEVER impatient he was with Frank, Philip McGarry’s last wish was to set Elmer Gantry piously baying on Frank’s trail. It was rather an accident. Philip sat next to Elmer at a...

The building was of cheerful brick, trimmed with limestone. It had Gothic windows, a carillon in the square stone tower, dozens of Sunday School rooms, a gymnasium, a social roo...

FOR over a year now it had been murmured throughout the church-world that no speaker was more useful to the reform organization than the Rev. Dr. Elmer Gantry of Zenith. His own...

TWO evenings after Elmer’s mother had almost alienated him, he settled down in his study at home to prepare three or four sermons, with a hope of being in bed by eleven. He was...

WHEN Mr. Mannie Silverhorn awoke at ten, with a head, he remembered that he had been talking, and with agitation he looked at the morning’s _Advocate-Times_. He was cheered to s...