His church, the Chatham Road Presbyterian, was one of the largest and
richest, one of the most oaken and velvety, in Zenith. The pastor was
the Reverend John Jennison Drew, M.A., D.D., LL.D. (The M.A. and the
D.D. were from Elbert University, Nebraska, the LL.D. from Waterbury
College, Oklahoma.) He was eloquent, efficient, and versatile. He
presided at meetings for the denunciation of unions or the elevation of
domestic service, and confided to the audiences that as a poor boy he
had carried newspapers. For the Saturday edition of the _Evening
Advocate_ he wrote editorials on “The Manly Man’s Religion” and “The
Dollars and Sense Value of Christianity,” 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.
On a December morning when the Babbitts went to church, Dr. John
Jennison Drew was unusually eloquent. The crowd was immense. Ten brisk
young ushers, in morning coats with white roses, were bringing folding
chairs up from the basement. There was an impressive musical program,
conducted by Sheldon Smeeth, educational director of the Y.M.C.A., who
also sang the offertory. Babbitt cared less for this, because some
misguided person had taught young Mr. Smeeth to smile, smile, smile
while he was singing, but with all the appreciation of a fellow-orator
he admired Dr. Drew’s sermon. It had the intellectual quality which
distinguished the Chatham Road congregation from the grubby chapels on
Smith Street.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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