For the Sunday after, the Chatham Road Presbyterian Church announced a sermon by Dr. John Jennison Drew on “How the Saviour Would End Strikes.”  Babbitt had been negligent about church-going lately, but he went to the service, hopeful that Dr. Drew really did have the information as to what the divine powers thought about strikes.  Beside Babbitt in the large, curving, glossy, velvet-upholstered pew was Chum Frink.

Frink whispered, “Hope the doc gives the strikers hell!  Ordinarily, I don’t believe in a preacher butting into political matters—­let him stick to straight religion and save souls, and not stir up a lot of discussion—­but at a time like this, I do think he ought to stand right up and bawl out those plug-uglies to a fare-you-well!”

“Yes—­well—­” said Babbitt.

The Rev. Dr. Drew, his rustic bang flopping with the intensity of his poetic and sociologic ardor, trumpeted: 

“During the untoward series of industrial dislocations which have—­let us be courageous and admit it boldly—­throttled the business life of our fair city these past days, there has been a great deal of loose talk about scientific prevention of scientific—­scientific!  Now, let me tell you that the most unscientific thing in the world is science!  Take the attacks on the established fundamentals of the Christian creed which were so popular with the ‘scientists’ a generation ago.  Oh, yes, they were mighty fellows, and great poo-bahs of criticism!  They were going to destroy the church; they were going to prove the world was created and has been brought to its extraordinary level of morality and civilization by blind chance.  Yet the church stands just as firmly to-day as ever, and the only answer a Christian pastor needs make to the long-haired opponents of his simple faith is just a pitying smile!

“And now these same ‘scientists’ want to replace the natural condition of free competition by crazy systems which, no matter by what high-sounding names they are called, are nothing but a despotic paternalism.  Naturally, I’m not criticizing labor courts, injunctions against men proven to be striking unjustly, or those excellent unions in which the men and the boss get together.  But I certainly am criticizing the systems in which the free and fluid motivation of independent labor is to be replaced by cooked-up wage-scales and minimum salaries and government commissions and labor federations and all that poppycock.

“What is not generally understood is that this whole industrial matter isn’t a question of economics.  It’s essentially and only a matter of Love, and of the practical application of the Christian religion!  Imagine a factory—­instead of committees of workmen alienating the boss, the boss goes among them smiling, and they smile back, the elder brother and the younger.  Brothers, that’s what they must be, loving brothers, and then strikes would be as inconceivable as hatred in the home!”