All this whirl is a carefully prepared plan, worked out by expert flim-flammers to addle the reason, scramble intellect and make of men drooling derelicts.

What for?

I’ll tell you—­that Doctor Chapman and his professional rooters may roll in cheap honors, be immune from all useful labor and wax fat on the pay of those who work.  Second, that the orthodox churches may not advance into workshops and schoolhouses, but may remain forever the home of a superstition.  One would think that the promise of making a person exempt from the results of his own misdeeds, would turn the man of brains from these religious shell-men in disgust.  But under their hypnotic spell, the minds of many seem to suffer an obsession, and they are caught in the swirl of foolish feeling, like a grocer’s clerk in the hands of a mesmerist.

At Northfield, Massachusetts, is a college at which men are taught and trained, just as men are drilled at a Tonsorial College, in every phase of this pleasing episcopopography.

There is a good fellow by the suggestive name of Sunday who works the religious graft.  Sunday is the whirling dervish up to date.  He and Chapman and their cappers purposely avoid any trace of the ecclesiastic in their attire.  They dress like drummers—­trousers carefully creased, two watch-chains and a warm vest.  Their manner is free and easy, their attitude familiar.  The way they address the Almighty reveals that their reverence for Him springs out of the supposition that He is very much like themselves.

The indelicacy of the revivalists who recently called meetings to pray for Fay Mills, was shown in their ardent supplications to God that He should make Mills to be like them.  Fay Mills tells of the best way to use this life here and now.  He does not prophesy what will become of you if you do not accept his belief, neither does he promise everlasting life as a reward for thinking as he does.  He realizes that he has not the agency of everlasting life.  Fay Mills is more interested in having a soul that is worth saving than in saving a soul that isn’t.  Chapman talks about lost souls as he might about collar buttons lost under a bureau, just as if God ever misplaced anything, or that all souls were not God’s souls, and therefore forever in His keeping.

Doctor Chapman wants all men to act alike and believe alike, not realizing that progress is the result of individuality, and so long as a man thinks, whether he is right or wrong, he is making head.  Neither does he realize that wrong thinking is better than no thinking at all, and that the only damnation consists in ceasing to think, and accepting the conclusions of another.  Final truths and final conclusions are wholly unthinkable to sensible people in their sane moments, but these revivalists wish to sum up truth for all time and put their leaden seal upon it.

In Los Angeles is a preacher by the name of McIntyre, a type of the blatant Bellarmine who exiled Galileo—­a man who never doubts his own infallibility, who talks like an oracle and continually tells of perdition for all who disagree with him.