The final intent is to get the victim on his feet and make him come forward and acknowledge the fetich.  This once done the convert finds himself among pleasant companions.  His social station is improved—­people shake hands with him and solicitously ask after his welfare.  His approbativeness is appealed to—­his position is now one of importance.  And moreover, he is given to understand in many subtile ways that as he will be damned in another world if he does not acquiesce in the fetich, so also will he be damned financially and socially here if he does not join the church.  The intent in every Christian community is to boycott and make a social outcast of the independent thinker.  The fetich furnishes excuse for the hypnotic processes.  Without assuming a personal God who can be appeased, eternal damnation and the proposition that you can win eternal life by believing a myth, there is no sane reason for the absurd hypnotic formulas.

We are heirs to the past, its good and ill, and we all have a touch of superstition, like a syphilitic taint.  To eradicate this tyranny of fear and get the cringe and crawl out of our natures, seems the one desirable thing to lofty minds.  But the revivalist, knowing human nature, as all confidence men do, banks on our superstitious fears and makes his appeal to our acquisitiveness, offering us absolution and life eternal for a consideration—­to cover expenses.  As long as men are paid honors and money, can wear good clothes, and be immune from work for preaching superstition, they will preach it.  The hope of the world lies in withholding supplies from the pious mendicants who seek to hold our minds in thrall.

This idea of a divine bankrupt court where you can get forgiveness by paying ten cents on the dollar, with the guaranty of becoming a winged pauper of the skies, is not alluring excepting to a man who has been well scared.  Advance agents pave the way for revivalists by arranging details with the local orthodox clergy.  Universalists, Unitarians, Christian Scientists and Befaymillites are all studiously avoided.  The object is to fill depleted pews of orthodox Protestant churches—­these pay the freight, and to the victor belong the spoils.  The plot and plan is to stampede into the pen of orthodoxy the intellectual unwary—­children and neurotic grown-ups.  The cap-and-bells element is largely represented in Chapman’s select company of German-American talent:  the confetti of foolishness is thrown at us—­we dodge, laugh, listen and no one has time to think, weigh, sift or analyze.  There are the boom of rhetoric, the crack of confession, the interspersed rebel-yell of triumph, the groans of despair, the cries of victory.  Then come songs by paid singers, the pealing of the organ—­rise and sing, kneel and pray, entreaty, condemnation, misery, tears, threats, promise, joy, happiness, heaven, eternal bliss, decide now—­not a moment is to be lost, whoop-la you’ll be a long time in hell!