At dinner, which Bernal had presently with Aunt Bell and two empty seats, his companion regaled him with comments upon the development of the religious instinct in mankind, reminding him that should he ever aspire to a cult of his own he would find Boston a more fertile field than New York.

“They’re so much broader there, you know,” she began.  “Really, they’ll believe anything if you manage your effects artistically.  And that is the trouble with you, Bernal.  You appeal too little to the imagination.  You must not only have a novelty to preach nowadays, but you must preach it in a spectacular manner.  Now, that assertion of yours that we are all equally selfish is novel and rather interesting—­I’ve tried to think of some one’s doing some act to make himself unhappy and I find I can’t.  And your suggestion of Judas Iscariot and Mr. Spencer as the sole inmates of hell is not without a certain piquancy.  But, my dear boy, you need a stage-manager.  Let your hair grow, wear a red robe, do healing—­”

He laughed protestingly.  “Oh, I’m not a prophet, Aunt Bell—­I’ve learned that.”

“But you could be, with proper managing.  There’s that perfectly stunning beginning with that wild healing-chap in the far West.  As it is now, you make nothing of it—­it might have happened to anybody and it never came to anything, except that you went off into the wilderness and stayed alone.  You should tell how you fasted with him in a desert, and how he told you secrets and imparted his healing power to you.  Then get the reporters about you and talk queerly so that they can make a good story of it.  Also live on rice and speak with an accent—­any kind of accent would make you more interesting, Bernal.  Then preach your message, and I’d guarantee you a following of thousands in New York in a month.  Of course they’d leave you for the next fellow that came along with a key to the book of Revelations, or a new diet or something, but you’d keep them a while.”

Aunt Bell paused, enthusiastic, but somewhat out of breath.

“I’ll quit, Aunt Bell—­that’s enough—­”

“Mr. Spencer is an example for you.  Contrast his hold on the masses with Mrs. Eddy’s, who appeals to the imagination.  I’m told by those who have read his works that he had quite the knack of logic, and yet the President of Princeton Theological Seminary preaches a sermon in which he calls him ‘the greatest failure of the age.’  I read it in this morning’s paper.  His text was, ‘Ye believe in God, believe also in me.’  You see, there was an appeal to the imagination—­the most audacious appeal that the world has ever known—­and the crowd will be with this clergyman who uses it to refute the arguments of a man who worked hard through forty years of ill-health to get at the mere dry common-sense of things.  If Jesus had descended to logic, he’d never have made a convert.  But he appealed magnificently to the imagination, and see the result!”