MY OLD MAN liked preachers.
He grouped all ministers of the gospel under that term. He knew quite a number of them back in our old home town of Pueblo and he generally addressed them all as “parson.”
He said that preachers as a rule were educated, intelligent men and worth knowing. He said that one thing about a preacher–you could carry on a conversation with him that would be free of profanity, off-color stories, petty gossip and back-biting.
I think my old man liked to talk to preachers as a relief from the light chit-chat of his usual associates. He was not a religious man himself, though he had a profound respect for religion. He said it was the only hope for the world in the last analysis.
He thought American communities made too little use of preachers. He said it was mighty silly to elevate to important public office, or to entrust with any important public mission whatever a numbskull politician or a coarse-grained professional or business man when the community might have available a polished, cultured gentleman like a preacher.
My old man thought it was sort o’wasteful to take a bright young fellow and educate him thoroughly and then confine his talents to the narrow precincts of a church parish, sometimes for most of his life, though he did not decry the importance of a man’s spiritual labors even in the most limited field.
He just said it was foolish for a community to neglect taking advantage of a clean, trained mind for employment in all phases of civic endeavor. He argued that the very fact that a man had theological training should make him all the more valuable in dealing with mundane problems, because in most cases he would apply to them the fundamental principle of honesty, which our old man contended was all that mundane problems require for propor solution.
He said communities should make it a point to draft preachers for jobs like Mayor, and Sheriff, and State Senator, and County Commissioner. He said he saw no reason why a preacher could not do a good job of sheriffing while continuing to look after his flock.
My old man had a fight one night in the turf exchange gambling house with a fellow who was squawking about a preacher who was bawling out the open gambling in our old home town. My old man said the preacher was dead right because open gambling was against public morals and it was the preacher’s job to hop on anything opposed to public morals.
The fellow said, well, here you are gambling yourself; and my old man said, yes, but he was not a preacher and public morals were none of his business; and one word led to another until finally the fellow tweaked my old man’s red goatee and hurt his feelings, and he hit the fellow in the eye with the metal box that they deal the cards out in faro bank, and it ruined a friendship.
My old man said that if he had a great raft of money he would endow preachers everywhere with annuities, so they would be sure of a good living and be independent of everybody, and then they could always go out and say what they pleased.
He said preachers were often like struggling editors who might want to say a lot of things but were deterred by reasons of business policy. He said sometimes a preacher might want to blow the roof off something, but would be restrained by the thought that it would let the rain in on some important parishioner.
My old man said he did not consider that intellectual dishonesty. He said probably the preacher himself hated his reticence, but what could he do? Maybe he had a sick wife and a batch of children at home who had to be provided for, and he could not afford to be irritating influential parishioners.
My old man said his annuities would eliminate economic fear from the minds of the preachers and enable them to go belting right and left through the land and thus improve our spiritual and mundane conditions everywhere. Of course, my old man never got any farther with his plan than just thinking of it.
My old man said that the percentage of general intellectual dishonesty among preachers was too small to be considered. He said that any man who was willing to dedicate himself over any considerable period of time to the spiritual welfare of his fellow citizens for the starvation wages paid preachers, could not in the very nature of things be dishonest-intellectually or otherwise.
He said a man smart enough to be a preacher would not long be satisfied with the pitiful emoluments of preaching, if he were intellectually dishonest. He held that the occupation required too much sacrifice of worldly comforts and pleasures to engage the protracted attention of an intellectually dishonest man.
My old man said, show him a preacher who had been at his preaching for over five years, and he would show you a 100 per cent honest man. He said a man who could stand off worldly lure that long to stick to preaching had to be honest.