Up from Methodism

1

Sunday should be a day of gladness, and of light and beauty, for it is then that the forthright religionist is closest to his God, and when he is, if ever, in communion with the Holy Spirit and presumably receives instruction with which to confound the wicked during the ensuing week. But in small communities which suffer from the blight of religion it never is, and when I was a boy in Farmington Sunday was a day of dreadful gloom; over everything hung an atmosphere of morbid fear and dejection. In the morning the whole town donned its Sunday suit, almost always black and funereal and depressing, and therefore becoming to religious practice, and trudged sorrowfully and solemnly to Sunday School and to church, there to wail doleful hymns and hear an unlearned man “measure with words the immeasurable and sink the string of thought into the fathomless;” and beseech the Lord upon the universal prayer theme of “gimme.” Then the village marched, in mournful cadence, back home for Sunday dinner. But before the meal was eaten the juvenile members of the religious household were commanded to remove their sabbath raiment, and were not again permitted to assume the habiliments of the godly until after supper, when the family clutched its Bibles and wandered forth despairingly to evening service.

These excursions, with attendance upon the various meetings of the young people’s societies and other church organizations, comprised almost the sum total of the Sunday activity of our town’s inhabitants. In recent years the young folks there appear to have gone wholeheartedly to the Devil, and are gallivanting about the country in automobiles, listening to radios, dancing, attending baseball games on the Sabbath and otherwise disporting themselves in a sinful manner, but in my youth we had to observe a very definite list of Sunday taboos, in addition to the special don’ts laid down by the more devout families, according to their fear of God and the fervor of their belief.

We could not play card games on Sunday. Regulation playing cards of course, were taboo at all times in the best and most religious families, for God, we were told, had informed the Preacher that cards were an invention of the Devil, designed to lure true believers into sin; but on Sunday we could not even play such games as Lotto, Old Maid and Authors. On week days these were considered very amusing and instructive pastimes, although in some quarters it was felt that they caused too much laughter, but if anyone so much as thought of them on Sunday he was headed for Hell.

The taboo against drinking was in effect every day in the week for the godly and their children, not on account of the possible harmful physical effects of liquor, but because God objected. And even the Town Sot hesitated to take a drink on Sunday, for he knew that every Preacher and every Brother and Sister would be howling to God to damn his immortal soul and make a horrible example out of him. And how they did love horrible examples!

No indoor games were permitted. This taboo was in force against “Drop-the-Handkerchief,” “Puss-in-the-Corner,” “Ring-Around the Rosy,” and “London Bridge is Falling Down;” in fact, it included everything the Preacher could think of except games founded on the Bible. That is, we could play games in which questions of Biblical history were asked and answered, but they had to be conducted in a very solemn and decorous manner. At the first laugh, or at the first question based on the more ribald portions of the Scriptures, such as Numbers and Deuteronomy, the game was stopped and everyone went home in disgrace. One of my young friends who once asked what happened to Laban’s household idol was soundly thrashed, as was another who requested a young lady to enumerate the ingredients of Ezekiel’s bread. The curious may learn what the Holy Prophet ate by consulting Ezekiel 4:15.

We could have no outdoor games; in many families, indeed, it was considered irreligious to go out of doors at all except to church. Restless boys were sometimes permitted to walk around the block, and once in a great while to play, if they did so quietly and remained in the back yard, where, presumably, the Lord could not see them. Anyhow, the neighbors couldn’t.

Parties and teas were forbidden, and we could not visit on Sunday, as a general rule, except among relatives. And such visits were usually turned into holy sing-songs, but since most of the hymns were either pornographic or slightly Sadistic, there were thrills galore in this sort of thing.

Walking along the main street of the town on Sunday was a sin of the first magnitude. Occasionally a group would obtain permission to stroll sedately down to Old Maid’s Springs and take kodak pictures in a refined and genteel manner, but a young man and a girl caught ambling along Columbia street were the objects of much unfavorable comment. It was generally agreed that they were no better than they should be, and often a Preacher, or a Brother or Sister, would stop them and order them to cease desecrating the Lord’s Day by such frivolous conduct.

“Go home,” they would be told, “and pray to God to forgive you.”

We could not go buggy-riding on Sunday until we were old enough to take our hope of the hereafter in our hands and tacitly admit our allegiance to Satan. Girls who did so and thus flaunted their sin were ostracised by many of our best families, and were regarded as abandoned hussies, if not scarlet women. A man had to hold a good many promissory notes for his daughter to get away with a thing like that.

The Lord did not approve of Sunday-night suppers, and so we could not have them. In the homes of the godly there was only a cold snack for the evening meal. It was considered sinful to light a fire in the cook-stove after twelve o’clock noon. One woman who moved to Farmington from St. Louis had the brazen audacity to give formal Sunday-night dinners, but she scandalized the town and nobody would attend but a few Episcopalians disguised as Presbyterians. And even they could not bring themselves to wear evening clothes. But God soon punished her; she was so severely criticised that she finally went back to the city.

Dancing on Sunday, of course, or for that matter on any other day, was the Sin of Sins. I was told, and until I was almost grown believed it, that whoever danced on the Sabbath would immediately be engulfed in a wave of Heavenly wrath, and his soul plunged into the Fires of Hell to frizzle and fry throughout eternity.

Sunday newspapers were not considered religious, although my father went to the Devil to the extent of buying them each Sunday and permitting my brothers and myself to read the comic sections. Usually we went to Pelty’s Book Store for them after church, bringing home the St. Louis Globe-Democrat, the Republic and the Post-Dispatch, together with a horde of small boys whose parents would not permit them to read anything on Sunday but the Bible, and who therefore came to our house and sprawled all over the place reading the comics and the magazine sections. My father was severely criticized for buying the Sunday newspapers, but he persisted in his wickedness. My prayerful uncle would not permit them in his house; indeed, all of his books but the Bibles remained in a locked case from Saturday night to Monday morning. But when my brothers and myself passed his home with the Sunday papers under our arms he always stopped us, and kept us waiting on the sidewalk for half an hour or more while he glanced at them and eagerly devoured the news. But he would not let us come in while we had the papers; he would meet us on the walk, and we were not old enough to object.

My father finally became very tired of this practice, and himself went after the papers. The first day he did this, my uncle was on his front porch, waiting for us to come by, and he stopped my father and reached for one of the papers. But my father would not let him have any of them.

“No, no,” he said. “You do not believe in Sunday papers.”

And thereafter my uncle did not read our Sunday papers, although he occasionally visited us in the afternoon and looked at them, after expressing his sorrow at finding them in our house. Once he found his son sprawled in our yard guffawing over the antics of the Yellow Kid when he should have been at a meeting of the Loyal Temperance Legion, lifting his childish voice against the Rum Demon. My uncle chased the lad home with threats of punishment, and then himself took up the funny section.

Baseball games were played by the ungodly on the outskirts of the town on Sunday, but the game was frowned upon by the Preachers and the Brothers and Sisters, who denounced it as a lure of Satan and predicted dire spiritual tortures for the players. Small boys who attended the games were soundly whipped, but occasionally we became so feverish with the desire to witness a contest that we slipped away from home and watched the game, pretending that we were going to visit relatives and listen to hymns played on an organ. But there were always spies of the Lord at the game to tell on us. It was this opposition to Sunday baseball that drove my younger brother out of the Methodist Sunday school, only a little while after I myself had abandoned the church. He was in the class taught by Brother Benjamin Marbury, a lawyer and an exceedingly loud and bitter antagonist of baseball. He denounced the game before his class one day, and my brother said that he could not see anything wrong with it. Brother Marbury stared at him sternly.

“Would Jesus Christ attend a baseball game on Sunday if He were here?” he demanded.

My brother said he did not know, but thought He would, and Brother Marbury immediately knelt and asked God to forgive the blasphemy. My brother was infuriated and never went back to Sunday school. His comment was: “What did he have to bring Jesus Christ into it for?”

2

We arose at the usual hour on Sunday morning, perhaps a little later, and immediately after breakfast began to get ready for Sunday school. There was hair to comb, shoes to polish in the kitchen, cravats to tie around necks that had become enlarged and reddened by various activities on the playing fields, and there were nickels to secrete for the collection boxes. Worse, there were Sunday-school lessons and Golden Texts to learn, and the catechism to memorize. Dressed in our Sunday suits, our hair slicked moistly to our heads and Sunday-school pamphlets in our hands, my two brothers and I went solemnly down to Newman’s corner, turned into the unnamed street that ran past Elmwood Seminary and then into Columbia Street and so to the Southern Methodist church.

Ordinarily a trip downtown was a great deal of fun; we tripped each other, poked each other in the ribs or had two or three fights en route, varying with the warmth of our friendship for other boys we met upon the way. But on Sunday we went solemnly and fearfully, first Emmett, then myself and then Fred, according to age and stature. We met other similar groups, arrayed as we were in their Sunday suits and clutching their lesson pamphlets, and our greetings were subdued and formal. We converged upon the church, and all over town the bells tolled and the faithful marched to hear God’s intimates explain His written word, and tell us calmly and definitely what He meant by the most obscure passages in His Book.

We sat in church for an hour and a half listening to various versions of the Hebraic fairy tales. In our church the Sunday-school room was set apart from the main auditorium, but occasionally the attendance was so large that it overflowed into the church proper. To most of us Sunday school was torture, and I have no doubt that it is still torture to most children. It may be that I did not learn a great deal about the Bible in Sunday school, but I do know that it was in Sunday school that I first began to doubt the Book. I was naturally curious and inquisitive, and even then, young as I was, I could not swallow the miracles of Jonah and the whale, and the idea of the virgin birth of Jesus I considered absurd, because in common with most small-town boys I had a very definite knowledge of the procedure employed in bringing babies into the world. Up to the age of seven or eight I thought the doctor brought them in his suitcase, or that they grew on bushes in the back yard and were plucked when ripe, but after I began to loaf around the livery stable and the Post Office building I acquired more correct information. Nor could I believe that Noah’s Ark would have held two of every living thing then upon the earth. But the Preachers and Brothers and Sisters insisted that these things were literally true; they denounced anyone who doubted and sought for symbolical meaning as an unbeliever and a blasphemous son of Satan.

My sister, at the age of ten, was the object of special prayers and solemn conferences because, for no other reason than that she wanted to be contrary, she expressed a doubt of the Virgin Birth. She was in Mrs. Judge Carter’s Sunday-school class at the time, but she did not like Mrs. Carter and disagreed with her when she thought she could do so without subsequent punishment. Mrs. Carter frequently told her pupils, all little girls about eight or ten years old, of the marvelous manner in which Christ came into the world, but she told it so vaguely that none of them had any real understanding of it. One Sunday morning, after Mrs. Carter had read something about the Virgin Birth, my sister said flatly that she did not believe it.

“Don’t believe what?” asked Mrs. Carter.

“Virgin birth,” said my sister. “I think it’s foolish.”

Unfortunately, she made this observation at a time when the whole Sunday school was quiet save for the mumbling of the catechism in various classes, and her thin little voice reached every corner of the room. And instantly there was a horrified silence, broken after a moment by someone who said: “It’s that blasphemous little Asbury girl.” Mrs. Carter was stunned; the effect upon her was the same as if God had walked in the door and announced that Buddha, or Zoroaster, and not Jesus Christ, was His son. She stared for a moment at this brash child who had defied religion and, in effect, denounced the Holy Book.

“Mary!” she said terribly. “Do you realize what you have done?”

My sister’s conception of virgin birth, or of any sort of birth, was decidedly hazy. She thought Virgin Birth meant that Christ had been born in a stable, and she knew perfectly well that no nice child would be born in such a place. Anyhow, she had heard so much about it that she had become quite bored by it, and she felt it incumbent upon her to deny it. But from Mrs. Carter’s attitude she knew that she had said a terrible thing; at first she thought of recanting, but she looked about and felt of herself, and when she did not see any avenging angels entering and could find no sign that she had been stricken, she stuck to her guns.

“Well,” she said, “I just don’t believe it.”

“Mary!” said Mrs. Carter. “Go home and pray!”

So my sister went home, but I do not think that she prayed. Mrs. Carter and the Preacher called that afternoon and told my father and mother what had been said and done that day in God’s house, and there was a considerable to-do about it, both Mrs. Carter and the Preacher dropping to their knees and praying, and insisting, that my sister pray also for forgiveness. But my father and mother took the attitude that since my sister did not know what she was talking about, she probably had not sinned to any great extent. But it was a good many years before she again had courage to express a doubt as to the Virgin Birth. And if she goes to Heaven she will probably find that Mrs. Carter and the Preacher have instructed St. Peter to catechize her about it, and not to admit her until she has atoned fully for her heinous offense at the age of ten.

3

Some of our families in which there was an unfortunate excess of girls permitted them to have callers on Sunday afternoon, but such affairs were conducted in a prim and prissy manner. Holiness was the motif. The boy, if he had been a good lad all week and had done nothing to affront God or the Preacher, was dressed in his Sunday suit, and the young lady wore the frock that was kept in reserve for weddings, funerals and baptizings, and those cannibalistic exercises called the Lord’s Supper. And it was definitely understood that if a boy called on a girl on a Sunday, he was courting her, and intended to propose marriage. They could not talk; they must converse, and their conversation must be on subjects both inspiring and uplifting. These bons mots that are now known as wise cracks were frowned upon, and a repetition of them resulted in the young gentleman being shown the door.

The piano and the phonograph, in those houses which possessed such wonders, were under lock and key and covered over with draperies to hide them, for it was God’s day and God wanted no foolishness. The girl’s father sat in various strategic places about the house, moving from one to another as his suspicions of the boy’s intentions arose and subsided, and her mother moved solemnly to and fro in her best crinkly silk dress. There was nothing of joy in the hearts of a boy and girl who underwent the torture of the Sunday-afternoon call; to paraphrase the immortal song of Casey, God had struck them out.

The first, and almost the last, young lady upon whom I called on a Sunday afternoon lived near the waterworks, and her father and mother, rocking solemnly upon the front porch and doubtless reflecting gloomily upon the wickedness of the race, presented such a forbidding spectacle that I walked four times around the block before venturing in. But at length I did, and the then idol of my heart greeted me at the front door. Ordinarily she would have seen me coming, and she would have poked her head out of the window and yelled: “Hey! I’ll be out in a minute.” Then we would have piled side by side into the lawn swing and begun swapping trade-lasts, and the air would have been thick with appreciative squeals and “he saids” and “she saids.” But this was Sunday, a day given over to the glory that is religion, and so she met me at the door with a prim and pretty curtsy. Her father gave me a gentle but suspicious greeting, because to the religious parent every boy thinks of a girl only in terms of seduction, and her mother stopped her rocking chair long enough to inquire:

“Did you go to Sunday school to-day, Herbie?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“What was the Golden Text?” she demanded, suspiciously.

I told her and she asked:

“Did you stay to church?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“Brother Jenkins preached such a beautiful sermon.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

And then she smiled a gentle smile, sighed a dolefully religious sigh and told her daughter that she could take me into the parlor, that holy of holies which was darkened and unused during the week, but opened on Sundays for callers and on other special occasions such as funerals and weddings. The room was extraordinarily gloomy, because the curtains were never raised enough to let in a great deal of light, and it smelled musty from being closed all week. And invariably the gloom was added to by a crayon portrait of the head of the house, a goggle-eyed enlargement of a very ordinary photograph by Trappe, which stood on an easel in a corner.

I had considered this call an occasion, and with the aid of my elder sister who was visiting us from Memphis, I had made an elaborate toilet and had been permitted to wear my Sunday suit. But I did not have a good time; I had known this girl a long time and admired her intensely, but she seemed suddenly to have changed. She sat stiffly on one side of the room near a window, hands folded demurely in her lap, and I sat as stiffly on the other. We inquired coldly concerning each other’s health, and I had prepared in my mind a suitable and, indeed, quite holy comment on certain aspects of our school life and was about to deliver it when her mother called gently from the porch:

“Don’t play the piano, dear: it’s Sunday.”

My observation went unuttered, and we sat for some little time in an embarrassed silence broken only by the crunch of her mother’s rocking chair and the crooning melody of a hymn, each wishing to Heaven that the other was elsewhere. I yearned to hear the piano, but this instrument, with its delightful tinkle and its capacity for producing ragtime, was generally regarded as a hellish contraption; in fact, any sort of fast music was considered more or less sinful. If there had been an organ in the house, the young lady would have been permitted to play it, and we could have sung from the family hymn book, provided we did so in proper humility. But there was only a piano, and it was taboo. Presently the mother spoke again:

“Don’t play the phonograph, dear; it’s Sunday.”

This admonition was modified later by permission to play an organ record of the hymn, “Face to Face,” and we played it over five times before the mother got tired of hearing it. She said, “You’d better stop now, dear; it’s Sunday.” Then she suggested that we turn to other means of entertainment.

“Perhaps Herbie would like to look at the album, dear. Would you, Herbie?”

“Yes, ma’am,” I said.

So we looked at the album, stiffly and in silence, the sacred book held on our knees, but we were very careful that our knees did not touch. We dared not giggle at the sight of the bushy-whiskered members of the young lady’s family, and made no comment on their raiment, which we rightly considered outlandish. We turned the pages and stared, and the girl explained.

“That’s Uncle Martin.”

“Taken when he went to Niagara Falls on his honeymoon, dear,” said her mother. “Uncle Martin was a great traveler.”

“Yes, ma’am,” I said, feeling that comment was expected.

“Wouldn’t you like to travel, Herbie?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“Well, be a good boy and read your Bible and maybe some day God will make you a great traveler.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“But don’t travel on Sunday, Herbie.”

“No, ma’am.”

And crunch went the rocker and we turned another page, to find Aunt Ella smiling gently at us through a mass of glorious flounces and trains and switches. We learned from the mother that Aunt Ella had been converted, at an extraordinarily early age, during a revival near Hazel Run, and had lived a singularly devout and godly life. Then we looked through the stereopticon at various places of interest, murmuring our awe when the mother swished gently into the room and pointed out, in a view of Niagara Falls, the exact spot where Uncle Martin had stood. It was, she explained, one of God’s rocks.

To my knowledge this family had some very comical stereopticon views, scenes depicting the life of an unfortunate tramp who was kicked heartily and effectively at every place he applied for nourishment, but we did not see them on Sunday afternoon. They were Saturday-night stuff. Saturday night was nigger night in Farmington, and the whole town let down the bars somewhat. That was the night when those who drank got tight, and when those who bathed got wet, and when those who had amorous intentions did their best to carry them out. Had I called on Saturday night I should have been permitted to enjoy the adventures of the unfortunate tramp, but not on Sunday. They had been put away, under lock and key in the writing desk, and would not be brought out until Monday. They were not calculated to promulgate a proper respect for the Lord’s Day; they were considered downright wicked one day a week and funny the other six.

Even in my infatuated condition an hour or so of this was quite enough. Ordinarily this girl and I had much in common; at that time I ranked her high among the beautiful flowers of God, and had I stopped at her house on a week day we would have had gleeful and uproarious converse, although even then we would have been liable to religious instruction and catechism from every snooping Brother and Sister who saw us. But the taboos that this Christian family had raised on its holy day stood between us and could not be broken down; we were horribly uncomfortable in each other’s presence, and we never got over it. She was never afterward the same girl. And when I took myself and my Sunday suit into the sunlight of the porch her mother stopped rocking and crooning hymns long enough to demand.

“Are you going to church to-night, Herbie?”

“Yes, ma’am,” I replied. “I got to.”

And so I went out of the gate and away from there.

This sort of thing in the homes of Farmington drove all of the boys to more or less open revolt as rapidly as they reached an age at which they felt able to defy parental and churchly authority. By the time I left the town the Sunday-afternoon callers, except those who made unavoidable duty calls, were to be found only in the homes of the ungodly, where there was music and pleasure and gayety, where the parlor was wide open seven days a week and the phonograph blared and the piano tinkled whenever anyone wanted to hear them. To these houses also went the girls from the devout families for clandestine meetings with their sweethearts; they could not entertain anyone in the dismal mausoleums into which their fathers and mothers had transformed their homes. Many a small-town romance has been blighted by the Sunday-afternoon call.