“Then when they tore down old St. John’s and began building the new church, she said she’d build a church after her own ideas. She spent twenty-five thousand dollars building that church you noticed in Water Street and she called it ‘The Church For Honest Sinners.’ She meant to put a minister in who had some of her ideas about religion, but right there came her first blow. As her church wasn’t tied up to any of the denominations she couldn’t find a man willing to take the job. I suppose the real trouble was that nobody wanted to mix up with a scheme like that; it was too radical; didn’t seem exactly respectable. It’s easy, I suppose, when there’s a big whooping crowd--Billy Sunday and that sort of thing--and the air is full of emotionalism, to get people to the mourners’ bench to confess that they’re miserable sinners. But you can see for yourself that it takes nerve to walk into the door of a church that’s for sinners only--seems sort o’ foolish! “I shouldn’t be telling you about this if I hadn’t seen that you had the same idea the builder of that church had: that there’s too much of the saint business and general smugness about our churches, and that a church that frankly set out to welcome sinners would play, so to speak, to capacity. You might think that all the Cains, Judases, and Magdalens would feel that here at last was a door of Christian hope flung open for them. But it doesn’t work that way--at least it didn’t in this case. I suppose there are people in this town right now, all dressed up to go to church, who’ve broken all the Ten Commandments without feeling they were sinners; and of course the churches can’t go after sin the way they used to, with hell and brimstone; the people won’t stand for it. You’ve been thinking that a church set apart for sinners would appeal to people who’ve done wrong and are sorry about it, but it doesn’t; and that’s why that church on Water Street’s boarded up--not for repairs, as you imagined, but because only one person has ever crossed the threshold. It was the idea of the woman who built it that the door should stand open all the time, night and day, and the minister, if she could have found one to take the job, would have been on the lookout to help the people who went there.” This was rather staggering. Perhaps, I reflected, it is better after all to suffer the goats to pasture, with such demureness as they can command, among the sheep. “I suppose,” I remarked, “that the founder of the church was satisfied with her experiment--she hadn’t wholly wasted her money, for she had found the answers to interesting questions as to human nature--the vanity of rectitude, the pride of virtue, the consolations of hypocrisy.” He looked at me questioningly, with his frank innocent eyes, as though estimating the extent to which he might carry his confidences.