Free The Second Mister by Paddy FitzGibbon

T HE S TRANGE T IMES O F F ATHER
C OLLIER A ND M ORDECAI H AM
    I grew up in Listowel in a house that was like a little island surrounded by a happy sea of licensed premises. One wet winter’s night in the Mid - Fifties I was standing at our hall door when a young woman rushed out from an adjoining pub. She was sobbing and the tears on her cheeks briefly reflected the light from a nearby streetlamp. A few seconds later a rather dishevelled figure followed her. She wheeled around to face him and said: “ You don’t love me, Tomeen, you only loves porter”. Tomeen hesitated for a moment and then turned and went back in to the love of his life. The unfortunate woman went on into the night and to loneliness, or to what else I do not know.
    What I do know, is that her attitude to the unsanitary intoxi cant would have been warmly endorsed by Mordecai Ham.
    Mordecai who ? I hear you ask.
    Mordecai Fowler Ham was born in Scottsville, Kentucky on the 2 nd of April 1877. He was descended from no less than eight generations of Baptist preachers and he himself, at a relatively early age, also took on the burden of the service of the Lord. For the next forty years or so, he laid into the practitioners of every evil in sight: fornicators, atheists, Roman Catholics, drunkards, harlots, Evolutionists and modernistic theologians. When Al Smith, a Catholic, ran for the Democrats in the presidential elec tion of 1928 Ham declared: “ If you vote for Al Smith, you’re voting against Christ, and you will all be damned.” It is sad to reflect that the 15015464 Americans who voted for Smith are now, apparently, being lit and licked by flames eternal.
    Ham himself claimed that during his career he produced 303387 conversions, a figure which seems somewhat precise. Professor James A. Borland, a onetime pastor of Grace Bible Church in Madison Heights , claimed that nearly one million souls “received Christ” as a result of Ham’s efforts, but it is not clear whether or not this figure includes “ backsliders ”, so called. One of his most remarkable successes occurred in Macon, Georgia where his preaching resulted in the closing of thirteen brothels, all the whores having declared for Jesus. He was frequently assaulted while in full oratorical and holy flight and on one memorable occasion he dispatched a drunken assailant with a well aimed thump from his hefty Bible.
    Oddly different were the attempts at redemption going on at much the same time on this side of the Atlantic.
    Only fading memories now remain of the great mission conducted in Listowel by the formidable Father Collier of Limerick. He too had his list of favourite forms of sinfulness that he flayed with a vigour that would have been worthy of Ham himself. His standard stock of errors and horrors included Saturday night dancing, Friday morn ing sausages, Protestantism and Communism, “ Pagan England ” and “ Atheistic Russia ,” “ jazz music”, smoking outside the back door of the church and of course, again  and again, anything related to “ the flesh ” and its attendant and widespread occasions of sin. It is perhaps surprising that alcoholic beverages were mentioned in passing only, but then a great part of the mission’s success derived from the fact that large numbers of men took advantage of it to come to town and slake a thirst that had been building up for the previous year.
    As the days, and more importantly the nights, of the mission went by the fervour, the excitement and the incidence of extraordinary happenings increased exponentially. Little slivers of Latin were heard in likely and unlikely places: Pater noster, Ave Maria, Exultemus, Delirium Tre-mens. Visions of a wide assortment of supernatural creatures became quite common as the drink and the sermons took their cumulative toll. Somebody took a photograph of Father Collier aloft in his pulpit . As the church was dark a flash had to be used. One credulous soul, who had not seen the photographer,