Love, Life Work | Page 6

does not prophesy what will become of
you if you do not accept his belief, neither does he promise everlasting
life as a reward for thinking as he does. He realizes that he has not the
agency of everlasting life. Fay Mills is more interested in having a soul
that is worth saving than in saving a soul that isn't. Chapman talks
about lost souls as he might about collar buttons lost under a bureau,
just as if God ever misplaced anything, or that all souls were not God's
souls, and therefore forever in His keeping.
Doctor Chapman wants all men to act alike and believe alike, not
realizing that progress is the result of individuality, and so long as a
man thinks, whether he is right or wrong, he is making head. Neither
does he realize that wrong thinking is better than no thinking at all, and
that the only damnation consists in ceasing to think, and accepting the
conclusions of another. Final truths and final conclusions are wholly

unthinkable to sensible people in their sane moments, but these
revivalists wish to sum up truth for all time and put their leaden seal
upon it.
In Los Angeles is a preacher by the name of McIntyre, a type of the
blatant Bellarmine who exiled Galileo--a man who never doubts his
own infallibility, who talks like an oracle and continually tells of
perdition for all who disagree with him.
Needless to say that McIntyre lacks humor. Personally, I prefer the
McGregors, but in Los Angeles the McIntyres are popular. It was
McIntyre who called a meeting to pray for Fay Mills, and in proposing
the meeting McIntyre made the unblushing announcement that he had
never met Mills nor heard him speak, nor had he read one of his books.
Chapman and McIntyre represent the modern types of
Phariseeism--spielers and spouters for churchianity, and such are the
men who make superstition of so long life. Superstition is the one
Infamy--Voltaire was right. To pretend to believe a thing at which your
reason revolts--to stultify your intellect--this, if it exists at all, is the
unpardonable sin. These muftis preach "the blood of Jesus," the dogma
that man without a belief in miracles is eternally lost, that everlasting
life depends upon acknowledging this, that or the other. Self-reliance,
self-control and self-respect are the three things that make a man a man.
But man has so recently taken on this ability to think, that he has not
yet gotten used to handling it. The tool is cumbrous in his hands. He is
afraid of it--this one characteristic that differentiates him from the
lower animals--so he abdicates and turns his divine birthright over to a
syndicate. This combination called a church agrees to take care of his
doubts and fears and do his thinking for him, and to help matters along
he is assured that he is not fit to think for himself, and to do so would
be a sin. Man, in his present crude state, holds somewhat the same
attitude toward reason that an Apache Indian holds toward a
camera--the Indian thinks that to have his picture taken means that he
will shrivel up and blow away in a month. And Stanley relates that a
watch with its constant ticking sent the bravest of Congo chiefs into a
cold sweat of agonizing fear; on discovering which, the explorer had
but to draw his Waterbury and threaten to turn the whole bunch into
crocodiles, and at once they got busy and did his bidding. Stanley
exhibited the true Northfield-revival quality in banking on the

superstition of his wavering and frightened followers.
The revival meetin' is an orgie of the soul, a spiritual debauch--a
dropping from sane and sensible control into eroticism. No person of
normal intelligence can afford to throw the reins of reason on the neck
of emotion and ride a Tam O'Shanter race to Bedlam. This hysteria of
the uncurbed feelings is the only blasphemy, and if there were a
personal God, He surely would be grieved to see that we have so
absurd an idea of Him, as to imagine He would be pleased with our
deporting the divine gift of reason into the hell-box.
Revivalism works up the voltage, then makes no use of the current--the
wire is grounded. Let any one of these revivalists write out his sermons
and print them in a book, and no sane man could read them without
danger of paresis. The book would lack synthesis, defy analysis, puzzle
the brain and paralyze the will. There would not be enough attic salt in
it to save it. It would be the supernaculum of the commonplace, and
prove the author to be the lobscouse of literature, the loblolly of letters.
The churches want to enroll members, and so