Best-Selling Preacher

The pool champion of Council Bluffs (Iowa) is the Rev. Jacob R. Perkins, 66, pastor of Council Bluffs' First Congregational Church. For 25 years, white-haired Pastor Perkins has been baptizing, marrying and burying Council Bluffs' Congregationalists. He has also become one of the town's best known and best loved citizens. He eats lunch and plays bottle pool at the Elks Club, joins the town's sportsmen on fishing expeditions on which his Job-like patience is legendary.

Last week Pastor Perkins had won new fame. His second novel, Antioch Actress, a chiaroscuro tale of early Christian heroism v. degenerate Roman paganism, was made the April choice of the Religious Book Club.

Antioch's actress is Cynthia Mamuta, who had "a magnetic beauty which could attract, creating intense desire; but could not hold, for within that magnificent body lurked a spirit easily stirred, which sometimes repelled one." Together with her handsome scriptwriter, Marcus Macer, she was sent by the Emperor Trajan to Antioch to satirize the growing sect of Christians out of existence. After 263 pages of intrigue, violence and lust, the story erupts in a holocaust of earthquake and conversion. The earth literally swallows up Marcus, while Cynthia does a quick change from a lubricous actress to a contrite Christian.

Early to Rise. Neither Marcus nor Cynthia is as interesting as their creator. Successively a stagehand and super in St. Louis theaters, then a semi-pro short-stop on Missouri baseball teams, Pastor Perkins went to Drake University, then to California's Berkeley Bible Seminary, became a minister at 22.

His literary life began in 1910, when, to stimulate attendance at his church in San Francisco, he wrote a 50,000-word Biblical novel called The Emperor's Physician and read it, a chapter at a time, to his congregation. With the beginning of World War II and the growing audience for books with a Christian theme, Author Perkins resurrected the manuscript, rewrote and expanded it, got it published. The People's Book Club (operated by Sears, Roebuck) selected it for Christmas 1944, plugged its sales to nearly 250,000 copies.

Pastor Perkins makes time for his writing (he also drafted International Rotary's Code of Ethics) by getting up early, cutting down on pastoral calls. His congregation would rather meet him in church, or at the Elks Club, or fishing.

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