guilty of witchcraft.  Another woman was about to shoot her, but this woman’s nerve failed, and the “high priest” was called in, who decreed a whipping.  The victim explained to the police that she would have deserved to be whipped had she really been a witch, but a mistake had been made—­it was another woman who was the witch.  And again in the Los Angeles “Times” I read a perfectly serious news item, telling how a certain man awakened one morning, and found on his pillow where his head had lain a perfect reproduction of the head of Christ with its crown of thorns.  He called in his neighbors to witness the miracle, and declared that while he was not superstitious, he knew that such a thing could not have happened by chance, and he knew what it was intended to signify—­he would buy more Liberty Bonds and be more ardent in his support of the war!

And this is the world in which our scientists and men of culture think that the battle of the intellect is won, and that it is no longer necessary to spend our energies in fighting “Religion!”

* * * * *

#Book two#

#The Church of Good Society#

  Within the House of Mammon his priesthood stands alert
  By mysteries attended, by dusk and splendors girt,
  Knowing, for faiths departed, his own shall still endure,
  And they be found his chosen, untroubled, solemn, sure.

  Within the House of Mammon the golden altar lifts
  Where dragon-lamps are shrouded as costly incense drifts—­
  A dust of old ideals, now fragrant from the coals,
  To tell of hopes long-ended, to tell the death of souls.

  Sterling.

* * * * *

#The Rain Makers#

I begin with the Church of Good Society, because it happens to be the Church in which I was brought up.  Heading this statement, some of my readers suspected me of snobbish pride.  I search my heart; yes, it brings a hidden thrill that as far back as I can remember I knew this atmosphere of urbanity, that twice every Sunday those melodious and hypnotizing incantations were chanted in my childish ears!  I take up the book of ritual, done in aristocratic black leather with gold lettering, and the old worn volume brings me strange stirrings of recollected awe.  But I endeavor to repress these vestigial emotions and to see the volume—­not as a message from God to Good Society, but as a landmark of man’s age-long struggle against myth and dogma used as a source of income and a shield to privilege.

In the beginning, of course, the priest and the magician ruled the field.  But today, as I examine this “Book of Common Prayer”, I discover that there is at least one spot out of which he has been cleared entirely; there appears no prayer to planets to stand still, or to comets to go away.  The “Church of Good Society” has discovered astronomy!  But if any astronomer attributes this to his instruments with their marvelous accuracy, let him at least stop to consider my “economic interpretation” of the phenomenon—­the fact that the heavenly bodies affect the destinies of mankind so little that there has not been sufficient emolument to justify the priest in holding on to his job as astrologer.