A want of conformity might quite possibly expose him to aggressive criticism and ridicule among his accustomed fellows. I never found it so myself in the country, where I always went to church in working clothes because I had no others, for never once was I made to feel the least embarrassment, while many times I wondered at the gracious courtesy which met me. But I was always a stranger, and had never to face companions of long standing. And so, as in many phases of my experiment, the unreality of my position marred, in large measure, the value of the result.
In Chicago, however, the circumstances were not so clearly against me, and they served to give to my own experience something of a normal character. In entering a church door on Sunday mornings, I was objectively in no other station than that of any workingman who may have wished to worship there. The treatment which I received is, therefore, a fair gauge of the reception which another worker might expect.
If it were a single instance I should not mention it, and I venture to offer no generalization, although I am speaking of tests which covered many Sundays and included all the principal churches of the town. All that can be said, I think, is that the uniformity of result is some evidence of what a like-conditioned workingman might count upon in the way of treatment at the hands of fashionable churches.
I was sure, in the first venture or two, that the circumstances were exceptional, and that I had chanced upon churches which, although most evidently of the rich, were yet watchful for every opportunity of welcoming the poor. It was not until I had made the rounds of many churches of many denominations that I realized how general and how sincere among them is the spirit of hospitality to the working poor.
In the vestibules, I always found young men who acted as ushers, and who were charged with the duty of receiving strangers. Never once did I fail of a friendly greeting. With every test I felt increasingly the difficulties of the situation for these young men, and my wonder grew at their graceful tactfulness. A touch of the patronizing in their tone or manner would have changed the welcome to an insult, and any marked effusiveness of cordiality would have robbed it as effectually of all virtue. It was the golden mean of a man’s friendly recognition of his fellow-man, with no regard for difference in social standing, which was the course so successfully followed by these young ushers.