3. More About Papa

The chambermaid who tidies the hotel apartment where I am living, at present, an intelligent young colored girl in her twenties, tells me she has quit going to church “because the preachers lecture on Sundays about social adjustments, civil rights and such.” Down in Texas, where she came from, they preach about Religion, she said. Up here in California, they use big, sixty-four-dollar words. She thinks she may go back to Texas. I told her she could save herself a long trip by going to hear Doctor Fagerburg. “You’ll be able to understand him,” I said; “and, besides, he’s a Baptist, like you.”

While we are on the subject of long words used when short ones might be more appropriate, they have a story out here about a prayer offered by a learned guest-preacher at the Commencement exercises in a near-by college. The petition was so ponderous with quotes from the classics, the latest on nuclear physics, and sundry scientific gobbledygook that when it ended, one amused old professor turned to a Faculty crony and whispered, “I hope God is a Ph.D.”

But, to return to my papa’s pictorial sermons, while most of his auditors listened and learned, a few of the Trustees and Elders and Deacons weren’t quite sure. They missed the sanctimonious old phrases from the pulpit and the monotonous, hypnotic drone of the Holy Scriptures which aforetime had provided the incidental music accompanying their Sunday forenoon nap.

The Bible, in their opinion, was a holy thing that you’d better handle gently. It wasn’t intended to entertain anybody. If your home was respectable, you had a massive Bible on the marble-topped table in your parlor; and when there was a birth or a death in the family the fact was recorded on the stiff pages in the back of the Book. It was a sacred memorial to God’s dealings with the saints of old, and any effort to make it seem interesting and applicable to the people of our time was pretty risky business.

And, too, a couple of the older contributors to the Hopeful Church agreed that they hadn’t heard much about Martin Luther and the German Reformation since the new preacher had taken charge.

The complaints were not severe, nor did they represent the dissatisfaction of more than a handful; but it was the handful that bossed the church. And, once the criticism had been launched, it was easy to find fault with almost anything the newcomer did. For instance, shortly after Papa began his ministry in the little church, he commended the congregation on their hearty singing of the hymns.

“But I notice,” he went on, “that only a few of you sing the ‘Amen,’ after the last verse. This brings the hymn, which had been an inspiration to us all, to a depressing finish.

“Now it doesn’t make much difference—certainly not to me—whether we sing ‘Amen.’ But let us decide what to do about it. I suggest that we take a vote on the matter. We will now arise and sing ‘Faith of Our Fathers,’ and at the end of it you may sing ‘Amen’ or not, as you prefer.”