Prejudices, fourth seriesMencken, H. L. (Henry Louis)
History
Prejudices, fourth series
Mencken, H. L. (Henry Louis)
American essays -- 20th century; American literature -- History and criticism; Literature -- History and criticism
Fifth avenue rectors with shining morning faces, preaching on Easter
to pews packed with stockbrokers, defendants in salacious divorce
suits, members of the Sulgrave Foundation and former Zionists....
Evangelists of strange, incomprehensible cults whooping and bawling
at two or three half-witted old women and half a dozen scared little
girls in corrugated iron tabernacles down near the railroad-yards....
Mormon missionaries pulling door-bells in Wheeling, W. Va., and Little
Rock, Ark., and handing naughty-looking tracts to giggling servant
girls.... Baptist doctors of divinity calling upon John the Baptist and
John D. Rockefeller to bear witness that the unducked will sweat in
hell forevermore.... Methodist candidates for the sacred frock, sent
out to preach trial sermons to backward churches in the mail-order
belt, proving magnificently in one hour that Darwin was an ignoramus
and Huxley a scoundrel.... Irish priests denouncing the Ku Klux
Klan.... Rabbis denouncing Henry Ford.... Presbyterians denouncing Flo
Zeigfeld.... Fashionable divines officiating at gaudy home weddings,
their ears alert for the popping of corks.... Street evangelists in
Zanesville, O., trying to convince a cop and five newsboys that no
man will be saved unless he be born again.... Missionaries in smelly
gospel-shops along the waterfront, expounding the doctrine of the
atonement to boozy Norwegian sailors, half of them sound asleep....
Cadaverous high-church Episcopalians.... Little fat Lutherans with
the air of prosperous cheese-mongers.... Dunkards with celluloid
collars and no neckties.... Southern Methodists who still believe
in slavery.... Former plumbers, threshing-machine engineers and
horse-doctors turned into United Brethren bishops.... Missionaries
collecting money from the mill children in Raleigh, N. C., to convert
the Spaniards and Italians to Calvinism.... Episcopal archdeacons
cultivating the broad English _a_.... Swedenborgians trying to explain
the “Arcana Cœlestia” to flabbergasted newspaper reporters.... Polish
clergymen leaping out of the windows at Polish weddings in Johnstown,
Pa., hoping that the next half-dozen beer-bottles won’t hit them....
Methodists pulling wires for bishoprics.... Quakers foreclosing
mortgages.... Baptists busy among the women.
3
_Bilder aus schöner Zeit_
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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