“A serious and enlightened attitude towards religion” did not mean hide-bound fundamentalism, for Pine Rock under its idealistic president prided itself on the liberalism of its thought. God, for example, might be understood as “a great idea,” or “an ocean of consciousness,” instead of the usual old gentleman with the long beard—but one went to church on Sunday just the same.
In fact, in spite of all this high-sounding talk about “service,” “ideals of leadership,” and “democracy,” one could not see that it made much actual difference in the way things were. Children still worked fourteen hours a day in the cotton mills of the state. Tens of thousands of men and women and children were born, suffered, lived, and died in damnable poverty, bondage, and the exploitation of the tenant farm. One million black inhabitants of the state, about a third of the entire population, were still denied the rights of free suffrage—even though “the second greatest man since Jesus Christ” frequently declared that that right was one of the proudest triumphs of Anglo-Saxon law, and of the nation’s own great Constitution. One million black inhabitants of the state were denied the right to the blessings of the higher education—although “the second greatest man since Jesus Christ” often declared that it was for this ideal that Pine Rock College lived and had its being, and that the right of education would be denied to no fit person at old Pine Rock, “regardless of creed, color, race, or other distinction of any kind whatsoever.” In spite of the sounding phrases, the idealism, the martyred look, the inspired assurances, and all the rest of it, life went on according to the old formula, and in the old way, pretty much as it had always done. Class after class of pure young idealists marched forth from Pine Rock bearing the torch, prepared to bare their breasts and to die nobly, if necessary, at the barricades, no matter what sinister influences menaced them, or what overwhelming forces outnumbered them—in defense of monogamy, matrimony, pure sweet women, children, the Baptist Church, the Constitution, and the splendid ideals of the Democratic and Republican parties; aye, resolved furthermore, if they were challenged, so great was this, their devotion to the right, to die there at the barricades in the defense of the splendid institution of child labor, cotton mills, tenant farmers, poverty, misery, squalor, damnation, death, and all the rest of it—rather than recant for a moment, be recreant for a single second to the pure ideals that had been fostered in them, the shining star of conduct to which their youthful gaze had been directed by “the second greatest man since Jesus Christ.”
And in the idolatry of this reverence, Gerald Alsop, like his distinguished predecessor, Adhem, led all the rest.
“THE THIRD GREATEST man since Jesus Christ” was a clergyman, pastor of the Pine Rock Episcopal Church, affectionately known to the boys as “Preacher” Reed. It was a name he had encouraged them to use himself. In a way, Jerry Alsop always looked upon Preacher as one of his own private discoveries. He certainly regarded him as another proof of his own liberalism, for Pine Rock was admittedly and professionally Baptist in its sympathies, but Jerry had been big enough to leap across the wall of orthodoxy and to fold the new Messiah to his breast.
Not that Preacher would not have done very nicely for himself had he been left solely to his own devices. For his own devices were unusual ones. To the boys they seemed at first amazing, then sensational, finally enchanting—until there was hardly a student in the college who had not enthusiastically succumbed to them.
At the outset, one would have said that the odds were a thousand to one against Preacher’s getting anywhere. He was in Episcopalian—no one seemed to know quite what that was, but it sounded risky. He had just a little church, and almost no congregation. In addition to this, he was “a Northern man.” The situation looked hopeless, and yet before six months were out Preacher had the whole campus eating from his hand, and black looks and angry mutterings from every other preacher in the town.