Love, Life Work | Page 5

then the promise of eternal life.
The final intent is to get the victim on his feet and make him come
forward and acknowledge the fetich. This once done the convert finds
himself among pleasant companions. His social station is
improved--people shake hands with him and solicitously ask after his
welfare. His approbativeness is appealed to--his position is now one of
importance. And moreover, he is given to understand in many subtile
ways that as he will be damned in another world if he does not
acquiesce in the fetich, so also will he be damned financially and
socially here if he does not join the church. The intent in every
Christian community is to boycott and make a social outcast of the
independent thinker. The fetich furnishes excuse for the hypnotic
processes. Without assuming a personal God who can be appeased,
eternal damnation and the proposition that you can win eternal life by

believing a myth, there is no sane reason for the absurd hypnotic
formulas.
We are heirs to the past, its good and ill, and we all have a touch of
superstition, like a syphilitic taint. To eradicate this tyranny of fear and
get the cringe and crawl out of our natures, seems the one desirable
thing to lofty minds. But the revivalist, knowing human nature, as all
confidence men do, banks on our superstitious fears and makes his
appeal to our acquisitiveness, offering us absolution and life eternal for
a consideration--to cover expenses. As long as men are paid honors and
money, can wear good clothes, and be immune from work for
preaching superstition, they will preach it. The hope of the world lies in
withholding supplies from the pious mendicants who seek to hold our
minds in thrall.
This idea of a divine bankrupt court where you can get forgiveness by
paying ten cents on the dollar, with the guaranty of becoming a winged
pauper of the skies, is not alluring excepting to a man who has been
well scared. Advance agents pave the way for revivalists by arranging
details with the local orthodox clergy. Universalists, Unitarians,
Christian Scientists and Befaymillites are all studiously avoided. The
object is to fill depleted pews of orthodox Protestant churches--these
pay the freight, and to the victor belong the spoils. The plot and plan is
to stampede into the pen of orthodoxy the intellectual unwary--children
and neurotic grown-ups. The cap-and-bells element is largely
represented in Chapman's select company of German-American talent:
the confetti of foolishness is thrown at us--we dodge, laugh, listen and
no one has time to think, weigh, sift or analyze. There are the boom of
rhetoric, the crack of confession, the interspersed rebel-yell of triumph,
the groans of despair, the cries of victory. Then come songs by paid
singers, the pealing of the organ--rise and sing, kneel and pray, entreaty,
condemnation, misery, tears, threats, promise, joy, happiness, heaven,
eternal bliss, decide now--not a moment is to be lost, whoop-la you'll
be a long time in hell!
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