H.L. Mencken

Dothan Eagle/June 28, 1929

I

All the pother about Monsignor James Cannon, Jr.’s, unfortunate venture into an outhouse of Wall Street seems to be founded upon a misunderstanding of Methodist canon law. It will be admitted by everyone, I take it, that playing the board, even when a sworn ambassador of Christ is the performer, is not prohibited by the ordinary or civil law. A bishop obviously has the same civil rights as any other man, and any other man, under what remains of American freedom, is free to buy and sell stocks as he pleases. That privilege, as we all know, is one of the many thousands Americans have sought and enjoyed during the past few years, and included among them, I have no doubt, have been multitudes who now hold His Grace up to contumely, and hint broadly that he ought to be deconsecrated and unfrocked.

What lies under this demand, when simple dislike of the man is not responsible for it, is apparently a feeling that a bishop is bound by tighter bonds than other men—in other words that he must not only obey the ordinary law with great scrupulosity, but also the canon law of his church, which is assumed to be far more rigorous. The doctrine here is sound, but there is a false assumption in the application of it. That is the assumption that the canon law of the Methodist Episcopal Church, South, prohibits trading in the market. It prohibits nothing of the sort. On the contrary, a fair examination of it indicates that it actually encourages such trading, provided only that the successful speculator devotes a reasonable part of his gains to the uses of the church. 

Nowhere in the Book of Discipline of the Southern Methodists, the official lawbook of the denomination, is there any prohibition, either direct or indirect, of gambling. The Northern Methodists, to be sure, are forbidden to indulge in “such games of chance as are frequently associated with gambling,” but that is as far as it goes—and Northern Methodists are by no means to be confused with their Confederate brethren. The two churches are quite distinct, and their Books of Discipline differ radically. Many prohibitions in the Northern book are conspicuously missing in the Southern book. One is the prohibition of “buying or selling slaves.” Another is the prohibition of tobacco. Yet another is the prohibition of frequenting “misleading” movie shows, whatever that may mean. And a fourth is the prohibition of gambling.

II

The Southern Methodist discipline, in fact, is very much less harsh and rigorous than that of the Northern Wesleyans, and even on the awful subject of wine-bibbing it shows a relatively mild and civilized spirit. The Northern Methodists, for example (General Rule, 30), are forbidden to resort to “drunkenness, buying or selling spirituous liquors, or drinking them” save in cases of “extreme necessity,” whereas the Southern faithful are quite free to get drunk in cases of plain necessity, without any qualifications of extremity. Moreover, the Southern discipline lets it go at that, whereas the Northern discipline goes on to ban “all intoxicants,” whether spirituous or not, and adds “cigarettes and tobacco in all other forms” for good measure.

In the Northern church a candidate for holy orders, before he may be licensed to preach, must answer two questions satisfactorily, to wit: “Will you wholly abstain from the use of tobacco?” and “Are you in debt so as to embarrass you in the work of the ministry?” In the Southern church the first question is omitted (Ministers and Church Officers, VI, 168). As a makeweight certain others are added, for example: “Are you going on to perfection?” “Do you expect to be made perfect in love in this life?” and “Are you groaning after it?” Bishop Cannon, when he was ordained, said yes to all of these questions, but he did not promise to avoid the use of tobacco, and so he is perfectly free to smoke it or chew it today (as many of his brethren of the cloth do), just as he is perfectly free to buy or sell slaves, to go to “misleading” movies, to keep a jug in his house against a possible necessity, and to play the bucket shops until he either goes broke or is rich enough to have himself made an archbishop.

To deny him these diversions upon canonical grounds is absurd. He must, of course, avoid those that are forbidden by the civil law, e.g., trading in slaves, but beyond that he is free to do as he pleases. Even a bishop is yet a man, and even a Methodist may amuse himself within the law. I see no evidence that Monsignor Cannon has ever stepped so much as an inch outside it.

III

Both branches of Methodism are extremely fond of (and hence respectful to) money, and their clergy are business men quite as much as they are priests. Open any Methodist paper at random, and the chances are at least five to one that you will light upon a call for more funds: such calls, many of them couched in peremptory terms, always greatly outnumber the treatises on the saving of souls. The two churches of the church support immense staffs of collectors, and they are hard at work all the time. For a Methodist to attend divine service without being besought to cough up for this or that great cause would be so surprising that it would probably strike him as almost miraculous. He is taught frankly that getting into Heaven costs money, and that his chances run with his liberality.

This attitude of mind naturally makes the well-heeled Babbitt a powerful personage in the church. He is in many parishes the de facto if not the de jure superior of the pastor, and can turn one pastor out and bring another in as he pleases. This is true, in particular, in the South, where the generality of the faithful are poor, and the prosperity of a given church depends upon the generosity of a few rich individuals. In the cotton-mill towns of the Carolinas two-thirds of the churches are supported by the mill magnates, and the clergy are as much their employees as the slaves in their mills. What this control amounted to was shown during the recent strike down there, when the local Methodist papers, otherwise ever eager to horn into “moral” causes, were magnificently about the exploitation and ill usage of the poor morons at the hands of their pious masters. There was plenty of space for denouncing the brutes hired by the mill-owners to put down the strike.

Thus Methodism is anything but Socialistic. On the contrary, it is all for the capitalistic system, and is perhaps the only church existing today which makes a belief in that system a cardinal article of faith. (Southern Book of Discipline, Sec. III, 30; Northern, Division I, 24.) Getting money, by its code, is not only not sinful; it is positively virtuous. The one thing that is forbidden is laying it up. It must be “systematically administered for the kingdom of God,” i.e., for the high uses and occasions of the rev. clergy. Well, Dr. Cannon is himself a clergyman.

IV

There is nothing in either Discipline, or in any other canonical text that I am aware of, which indicates that getting money by speculation is held to be less moral than getting it in any other way. If it were, then some of the most eminent Methodist laymen in the South would be lying under danger of excommunication. I avoid embarrassing the living by pointing to one now safe in Heaven: the late Asa G. Candler, inventor of Coca-Cola. The Hon. Mr. Candler, while he lived, was unquestionably the most eminent Methodist south of the Potomac. The church got millions out of him, and showed its appreciation by making his younger brother a bishop. Was his money all made by simple trading? Hardly. A good deal of it also came out of a speculative rise in the stocks he was interested in, and in the fruits of that rise many another Southern Methodist shared.

I can recall no objection to this being business. On the contrary, Dr. Candler was anointed so lavishly in all the Methodist papers that he ran goose-grease almost like the Hon. Buck Drake, of Durham, N. C., another consecrated man who was lucky in the market, and did not forget the pastors when the money rolled in. Buck made his basic millions out of cigarettes—a fact that explain the absence of a prohibition of them in the Southern Book of Discipline—but he increased his load enormously in Wall Street. When he died he left $60,000,000 to a Methodist “university” at Durham, set up to counteract Darwinian wickedness at the State University at Chapel Hill, and more millions to a fund for underpaid Methodist preachers. He is a saint in Heaven today, though while he lived was a gambler and a wine-bibber. To denounce him at any Methodist camp meeting in the South would be as gross an indecorum as to denounce St. Patrick at an oyster roast of the Knights of Columbus.

For all these reasons—and I could adduce many more—I incline to think that Monsignor Cannon is being badly used. God knows, I am not one of his partisans, but even a bishop deserves justice. To hint that his venture into high-pressure go-getting disqualifies him to bind and loose by the Wesleyan rite is as absurd as to argue that he would be disqualified if he were caught pulling the cat’s tail, lifting jam from the pantry, or telling a lie. Methodist bishops are not so easily busted. So long as they avoid necking, morphine and going to mass they are safe. Even murder is within their prerogative—that is, provided they merely applaud it, and do not undertake it personally.