Babbit eBook

which were printed in bold type surrounded by a wiggly border.  He often said that he was “proud to be known as primarily a business man” and that he certainly was not going to “permit the old Satan to monopolize all the pep and punch.”  He was a thin, rustic-faced young man with gold spectacles and a bang of dull brown hair, but when he hurled himself into oratory he glowed with power.  He admitted that he was too much the scholar and poet to imitate the evangelist, Mike Monday, yet he had once awakened his fold to new life, and to larger collections, by the challenge, “My brethren, the real cheap skate is the man who won’t lend to the Lord!”

He had made his church a true community center.  It contained everything but a bar.  It had a nursery, a Thursday evening supper with a short bright missionary lecture afterward, a gymnasium, a fortnightly motion-picture show, a library of technical books for young workmen—­though, unfortunately, no young workman ever entered the church except to wash the windows or repair the furnace—­and a sewing-circle which made short little pants for the children of the poor while Mrs. Drew read aloud from earnest novels.

Though Dr. Drew’s theology was Presbyterian, his church-building was gracefully Episcopalian.  As he said, it had the “most perdurable features of those noble ecclesiastical monuments of grand Old England which stand as symbols of the eternity of faith, religious and civil.”  It was built of cheery iron-spot brick in an improved Gothic style, and the main auditorium had indirect lighting from electric globes in lavish alabaster bowls.


“At this abundant harvest-time of all the year,” Dr. Drew chanted, “when, though stormy the sky and laborious the path to the drudging wayfarer, yet the hovering and bodiless spirit swoops back o’er all the labors and desires of the past twelve months, oh, then it seems to me there sounds behind all our apparent failures the golden chorus of greeting from those passed happily on; and lo! on the dim horizon we see behind dolorous clouds the mighty mass of mountains—­mountains of melody, mountains of mirth, mountains of might!”

“I certainly do like a sermon with culture and thought in it,” meditated Babbitt.

Project Gutenberg
Babbit from Project Gutenberg. Public domain.
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