The Oyster and Religion

I AM under the impression — and my error, if it exists, is certainly pardonable — that the oyster has been written about extensively. A scientific gentleman not long since addressed a learned dissertation to no less august a body than the United States Fish Commission that bore the awe-inspiring title, ‘The Ciliary Mechanisms of Lamellibranchs.’ It was merely a polysyllabic description of the oyster’s manner of twiddling his gills. Our modern epicureans have written in praise of this interesting mollusk from the strictly culinary point of view; and there are sundry tomes, appropriately voluminous, which set forth its commercial value, as well as numerous manuals for the thrifty souls that seek to rear it, and to guide the first trembling footsteps of the infant oyster along the path that it should go — to market.

There remains, then, but one theme for me. I write of the religious significance of the oyster. It is a subject whose gravity will not appear to the dwellers in cities where the institution of the ‘church supper’ is unknown. Only he who has been born and bred in the small town can realize the harmonizing value of the intersectarian oyster. Only the native of the small town knows how ‘Reverend Jones’ of the Methodist Church harbors dark suspicions of lurking heresy—perhaps even of Modernism — in ‘Reverend Smith’ of the Presbyterian Church, yet how both clerical gentlemen unite in approbation of the oysters of Sister Brown as they appear at Baptist church suppers.

It is the small-town man alone who can, with the accuracy of the true connoisseur, appreciate the infinite divergence between the oysters of the warring sects. It is no exaggeration to say that a man with a true taste in oysters possesses the shortest cut to a comprehension of the theological subtleties that divide Christendom.

The Presbyterian oyster, for example, as he appears at the suppers of the First (and only) Presbyterian Church, is large and round and fried. Mark the word: fried — fried to a perfection of crisp brown exterior and succulent but smoking interior that mutely warns the heathen in other denominations of the ultimate fate of those who have never subscribed to the Larger and Shorter Catechisms. Often, at Presbyterian church suppers, in the presence of those perfect bivalves, I have suspected Calvinistic leanings in myself and have felt, dimly adumbrated within my own soul, the tenderness and beauty of the Catechisms.

As for the Baptist oyster, he is appropriately immersed in a flowing bowl that confutes forever the unregenerate who know so little Greek that they fail to distinguish between βάπτω and βαπτίζω.

The Methodist oyster is stern and severe. The vanities of this world are not for him. He may, when he appears at the church supper, be fried — but it is a more than Presbyterian frying. It is a frying in the fire whereof the revivalist rants. Sometimes he might even be called a Fundamentalist oyster — that is, he is not always a Modernist, which is a sad defect in oysters, whatever it may be in theologians.

Let us pass over the Lutheran oyster. William James would class him among the ‘tough-minded.’ He is tough with the toughness of spirit that nailed the Ninety-five Theses to the church door in Wittenberg. We may respect him — but a kind Heaven will prevent that respect from leading us to eat him.

The Episcopalian oyster is a very different mollusk. He appears upon the half shell. His pristine simplicity suggests an ancient tradition. He warns us mutely of our own original state — and he is likely to be served on ice.

In religion, then, the oyster has his merits. As a theologian our humble bivalve — Blue Point, Cotuit, Narragansett — cannot be despised. Since the Volstead Act’t is he alone that can