The service did my heart and I hope my soul some good. It had been long since I heard such an approach. It is our practice now, at least in the large cities, to find from our psychiatric priesthood that our sins aren't really sins at all but accidents that are set in motion by forces beyond our control. There was no
such nonsense in this church. The minister, a man of iron with
tool-steel eyes and a delivery like a pneumatic drill, opened up with
prayer and reassured us that we were a pretty sorry lot. And he was
right. We didn’t amount to much to start with, and due to our own tawdry
efforts we had been slipping ever since. Then, having softened us up,
he went into a glorious sermon, a fire-and-brimstone sermon. Having
proved that we, or perhaps only I, were no damn good, he painted with
cool certainty what was likely to happen to us if we didn’t make some
basic reorganizations for which he didn’t hold out much hope. He spoke
of hell as an expert, not the mush-mush hell of these soft days, but a
well-stoked, white-hot hell served by technicians of the first order.
This reverend brought it to a point where we could understand it, a good
hard coal fire, plenty of draft, and a squad of open-hearth devils who
put their hearts into their work, and their work was me. I began to feel
good all over. For some years now God has been a pal to us, practicing
togetherness, and that causes the same emptiness a father does playing
softball with his son. But this Vermont God cared enough about me to go
to a lot of trouble kicking the hell out of me. He put my sins in a new
perspective. Whereas they had been small and mean and nasty and best
forgotten, this minister gave them some size and bloom and dignity. I
hadn’t been thinking very well of myself for some years, but if my sins
had this dimension there was some pride left. I wasn’t a naughty child
but a first rate sinner, and I was going to catch it.
I felt so revived in spirit that I put five dollars in the plate, and afterward, in front of the church, shook hands warmly with the minster and as many of the congregation as I could. It gave me a lovely sense of evil-doing that lasted clear through till Tuesday. I even considered beating Charley to give him some satisfaction too, because Charley is only a little less sinful than I am. All across the country I went to church on Sundays, a different denomination every week, but nowhere did I find the quality of that Vermont preacher. He forced a religion designed to last, not predigested obsolescence.
