The Sauk Centre herald. (Sauk Centre, Stearns County, Minn.) 1886-current, 1926-08-05
BY Samuel Hardness in Christian
Century.

StHluTy.
"A casual estimate of Sinclair Lewis
would depict him as the bad boy OF
the literary world who filings novels,
instead of stones, at the hornets nests
of prejudice and provincialism, and
occasionally breaks large windows of
good taste. This estimate is con-
firmed by two incidents in his recent
visit to Kansas City; he stood in one
of the pulpits on Sunday evening,
and before two thousand people, in
Wited the God of all fundamentalists
to strike him dead; and, few days
later, he rejected the Pulitzer prize.
In spite of those combinations, con-
elusive to so many, the casual esti-
mate is wrong. Lewis is humble,
friendly man, unspoiled by his sue
cess, and possessed of an uncanny
genius that not only sees life, but sees
straight throught it. He does not see
all Of life, but what he sees, he tells
with Photographic accuracy. He does
warts on" He is the arch-enemy of
bunk, intolerance and stupidity. He
lis destructionist. He has no sub
stitute for Gopher Prairie; no sugges-
lions for Rabbit; and feels no neces-
sity to replace the preachers against
whom he is now leveling the guns of
his next novel. He is an inconoclast
the Jim Reed Of novelists.
A Strange Sunday School Class
He came to Kansas to do the pri-
liminary fashioning of a missile in
tended for bullying hornets nest.
He was perfectly frank about it. He
gathered group of preachers of all
shades of theological opinion to meet
in series of weekly luncheon con-
ferences. He demanded that the min
listers call him "Red;" he had their
first names at his tongues tip, and
graduates of the greatest schools of
religion in the old and new worlds,
who preach to some of the largest con-
gregations in the city, liked the ex-
perience so well that his suite became
a rendezvous for the strangest "Sun-
day school class" in the history of
the Christian church. These minis
tiers lent him books with such title as
"Aids to Sermon Building" Glow to
Promote a Successful Revival and
"Why am Presbyterian" and gave
him samples of the crude and incred-
IDLY silly song books used by evangel-
lists. He attended tent revivals, read
church papers and church year-books,
listened to radigcast denunciations of
himself, and then went on two
weeks trip, motoring through Iowa
and Minnesota with a former nation
al chaplain of the American Legion
that he might call on small town
preachers as book agent and get
their unguarded views. If he should
use the data he has gathered thus far
he would be more verbose than Theo-
dore Dresser. The writer was train
companion recently of a man who
said, "I am writing novel with a
Presbyterian preacher as the hero.
Will you give me little information
about the Presbyterian church 2" "A
.1ittle" satisfied him, and he made no
notes. Lewis would learn the shorter
catechism and dissect the form of
government into shreds. He gets
everything movable together and
feels it to the bone. He writes from
the 'inside."
He shakes words as a terrier wor-
ries rat. In the meetings of the
Sunday school class he probed
through the vague and platitudinous
words that preachers so often use {:
s'What is religion and the answer
is "The art of livingp' and the rest
of the pupils smile approvingly-but
not "Red." ''What do you mean by
art and life'?" and soon he has one
of the class f1oundering in a descrip-
tive morass. He demands an eXacti-
tude of definition for new conceptions
of religion without remembering that
exactitude of definition is a cause of
sectarian division and doctrinal con-
troversy. Teacher trips once in a
while, and the class laughs.
Soul Shaking Moments
Soul-shaking moments come when
Lewis speaks with the passion of an
old testament prophet, demanding,
"What sacrifices do you make? What
risks will you take to end these par
alyzing influences which you tell me
are creeping over your church? Who
will give up his wife and children,
house and bank account? Who will
literally follow Jesus into loneliness,
ridicule and death ?" Lewis has been
reading the new testament and it's
1IOu anu udiuS nave SOIISu lllIO Ills
blood. "Why do you men stay in
pulpits and use terms that mean
nothing to you, and repeat creeds you
have denied to me?" In vain he is
told that the cause of religious free
dom is best served from within the
walls Of orthodoxy.
There is sophisry in the minis
terial attitude that he scorns, and to
which he attributes the fading distinc-
ton between the church and the
world. 3Why don't you tell your
congregations that you are agnos-
tics?" he storms. "The conventional
Christ is sheer myth. Your Jesus is
the hatrack on which men have hung
their prejudices through the ages. Do
you not realize that organized Chris
tianity has had two thousand years to
conquer the mind-and has failed?
What other idea has ever had like
chance? Don't you see that no man
can be a successful preacher unless
he is fundamentalist, because dog
matte denunciation is the intellectual
gait of the people in your pews? ?" So
he filings verbal grenades into the