crammed the Garden. Disgruntled and vindictive, Elija gave them all they were looking for. He was beside him self. A great city made merry over the antics of a madman. In retrospect it is pitiable. Night after night he performed, now lifting the skirts of his cassock and dancing a jig, now crawling on all fours, leering through his whiskers and snarling "Stinkpot!" at the collective adversary. It was a one-week stand. After that for a few days Dowie reviled empty seats and got casual mention in the papers. He decamped three hundred thousand dollars "in the red." The New York revival ruined Dowie. It undermined his faith in himself as a manipulator of men. Cunning and desperate, he hung on till 1905 when Voliva denounced and deposed him. His people turned against him but cleaved to the cult he had found and hailed his successor. He died in delirium two years later. Contemporary with Dowie though widely differing from him in message and method was Charles Taze (Pastor) Russell, a millennialite who, unlike William Miller, would not confess misreckonings but patched them over with amendatory prophecy. He had something in common with Joseph Smith, Jr., the Palmyra excavator, inasmuch as he discovered himself to be the prophet scheduled from the days of Daniel to come forth in the 1870's. The kindest thing to be said of him is that he evidently believed in himself and his life-long exhaustive search of the Scriptures to rectify and confirm that belief is the evidence of apparent sincerity. Be all this as it may, Pastor Russell was head and shoulders above Dowie and Smith in that he was the cleverest propagandist of the age and a business man par excellence. His evangelizing, such as it was, consisted of free lectures illustrated with vivid and quaint stereopticon slides of heaven and earth from the creation to the millennial end. But from the outset of his independent ministry in Pittsburgh, where he was born in 1852, he kept the presses spilling out tracts, pamphlets, books and continuous periodicals. And his critics alleged that the profits, invested in lead, asphalt, turpentine, coal and coke ventures, yielded him millions of dollars. This has been warmly disputed. He located his plant in Brooklyn where it is still an emporium of mail-order religion, competitor of every oldline church and disrupter of home-town parishes. The firm is the International Bible Students' Association, successor to the Watch Tower Bible and Tract Society. Saving its customers both time and money, it furnishes more citations of Scripture than all of its rivals put together. It seems that "Gentile Times" began in 606 B. C. and ended in 1914 A. D., the World War being "nation rising against nation," the Belgian starvation the "famine" and the influenza the "pestilence" fulfilling the Biblical prophecy. Meantime Christ had returned in 1874 and had been laboring in preparation of the vineyard since 1878, the very year Pastor Russell ascended his unique pulpit. Since 1914, it is averred, the world has entered the new era of a thousand years during which, at the proper time, the Lord will take over direct sovereignty with the Russellites as His special assistants to give all sinners a chance to repent. At the termination of this period the wicked will be annihilated and the holy will dwell in peace forever more. One must be patient and bide the Lord's time. For instance, the dead were supposed to start rising in 1925, Abraham, Isaac and Jacob first and then from the most recently deceased back to Abel. And it is declared that "millions now living will never die." As yet no grave yard is known to have been disturbed except to receive accessions. Still, one cannot be sure about those Hebrew patriarchs. No other signs of the "Golden Age" have been reported in the newspapers, such as the cessation of marriages, births and deaths. To the contrary, vital statistics continue to accumulate. And yet Russellism flourishes. When the Pastor died in 1916, his broadcloth mantle was picked up by Joseph F. (Judge) Rutherford, one-time Missouri lawyer of surpassing eloquence and prescience, who has put Russell's magic lantern on the shelf and gone in for the greatest radio hook-ups in the history of evangelization. No President of the United States ever had such a command of the ether as Judge Rutherford assumed for an hour and a half when he spoke in July, 1928, over a chain of ninety-six stations. In January the Dodge Motor Car Company paid forty-two thousand dollars for an hour's use of forty-seven stations. This gives some idea of the cost to Judge Rutherford, the foe of organized Christianity as the churches of the Antichrist, to broadcast his oratory. It could not be ascertained whether the outlay was borne by the International Bible Students' Association, by the judge himself or by a friendly philanthropist. In this formidable array of assorted come-outers, one meek, unselfish character is deserving of mention, another Elijah, Francis Schlatter, an Alsatian immigrant. Sometimes in jails, sometimes in asylums, when he was loose he roamed about barefoot, bareheaded in all kinds of weather preaching the love of God and peace among men, laying on hands to cure the maimed, the halt and the blind. He would take no money and often went hungry. He would accept the gift of cheap gloves and, having once worn them, would give them away as possessed with his gift of healing. At the height of his career in the nineties he disappeared and never was seen again. He left this penciled note to one Alderman Fox of Denver: "Mr. Fox-My mission is ended and the Father calls me. I salute you. Francis Schlatter. Nov. 13." CHAPTER XX CORYBANTIC CHRISTIANITY Brighten the corner where you are! Some one far from harbor you may guide across the bar, W Words by INA DULEY OGDON. Music by CHARLES H. GABRIEL. INONA LAKE is the symbol of a business that has arrived. It is the practical and spiritual headquarters of the full-fledged twentiethcentury evangel preacher and Gospel singer, tabernacle builder, advance agent, publicity and advertising expert, and committee organizer. Barnstormers no longer count and come-outers cannot make a scratch on the graphs charting seasonal and regional progress of the wholesaling of salvation. Nothing is left to chance. Routing and book ing and returns are absolutely assured. For the American revival of religion has eliminated waste, competition and barren ground and has stabilized the big industry of redemption. It is the year 1916. The better minds are in council. William Jennings Bryan has sanctified the circumambient Indiana atmosphere with an address on "Faith." Now the Rev. William Ashley Sunday, D.D., purveyor extraordinary to the great national diversion of taking delight in damnation, is expounding for the benefit of the mantled |