For, you see, the prophet has to have food.  He has frequently got along with almost none, and with only a rag for clothing; in Palestine and India, where the climate is warm, a sincere faith has been possible for short periods.  But the modern prophet who expects to influence the minds of men has to have books and newspapers; he will find a telephone and a typewriter and postage-stamps hardly to be dispensed with, also in Europe and America some sort of a roof over his meeting place.  So the prophet is caught, like all the rest of us, in the net of the speculator and the landlord.  He has to get money, and in order to get it he has to impress those who already have it—­people whose minds and souls have been deformed by the system of parasitism and exploitation.

So the prophet becomes a charlatan; or, if he refuses, he becomes a martyr, and founds a church which becomes a church of charlatans.  I care not how sincere, how passionately proletarian a religious prophet may be, that is the fate which sooner or later befalls him in a competitive society—­to be the founder of an organization of fools, conducted by knaves, for the benefit of wolves.  That fate befell Buddha and Jesus, it befell Ignatius Loyola and Francis of Assisi, John Fox and John Calvin and John Wesley.

A friend of mine who has made a study of “Spiritualism” describes to me the conditions in that field.  The mediums are people, mostly women, with a peculiar gift; whether we believe in the survival of personality, or whether we call it telepathy, does not alter the fact that they have a rare and special sensitiveness, a new faculty which science must investigate.  They come, poor people mostly—­for the well-to-do will seldom give their time to exacting and wearisome experiments.  They come, wearing frayed and thin clothing, shivering with cold, obviously undernourished; and their survival depends upon their producing “phenomena”—­which phenomena are capricious, and will not come at call.  So, what more natural than that mediums should resort to faking?  That the whole field should be reeking with fraud, and science should be held back from understanding an extraordinary power of the subconscious mind?

Ever since we came to Pasadena, various ladies have been telling us about the wondrous powers of a mulatto-woman, a manicurist at the city’s most fashionable hotel.  The other day, out of curiosity, my wife and I went; the moment the “medium” opened her mouth my wife recognized her as the person who has been trying for several months to get me on the telephone to tell me how the spirit of Jack London is seeking to communicate with me!  The #seance# was a public one, a gathering composed, half of wealthy and cultured society-women, and half of confederates, people with the dialect and manners of a vaudeville troupe.  A megaphone was set in the middle of the floor, the room was made dark, a couple of hymns were sung, and then the spirit of Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes