Aimee Semple McPherson may wander far and build ten thousand children-churches, but her heart will always be with Angelus Temple. She says she is waiting for the Millennium when Jesus Christ will come and take and use that edifice for His very own. One wonders if even then she would leave the stage.

B

CHAPTER XXII

FUNDAMENTALISM TO THE FORE

Hallelujah! Thine the glory,

Hallelujah! Amen!

Hallelujah! Thine the glory,
Revive us again!

WILLIAM P. MACKAY.

ELIEF in the Book, howsoever it may be interpreted

or accepted with paradoxically diverse varieties

of literalism, has always been the prime requisite of any plan of salvation. Before being reborn one must believe. To escape being damned one must believe. For refuge now and heaven hereafter one must believe. Having believed, one must lead others to share the belief and the experience it affords. So germinates the perennial American Revival.

Every evangel stands like an angel in the way, like the angel that dealt with Balaam and his long-eared mount, pointing to the only Truth and the only Light. Turn about and don't look back. Remember Jonah, remember the wife of Lot. The Book is the guide and the Word is infallible. On such premises disagreement is impossible. It is useless to argue with a Fundamentalist. That is one reason why the revival survives.

Any text can be applied at any time in any part of a world fashioned and populated in six days and now less than six thousand years old. Quibble with this and a hun

dred other texts are available to back it up. All that has come to pass in the latter days was prophesied and there is nothing new under the sun that is not in the Book. Prohibition of alcoholic beverages in the United States of America, for instance, has been supplied with Scriptural foundations, though one Fundamentalist group recently looked askance at something that happened at the marriage feast of Cana.

Some evangelists, it is true, have called upon men to be reconciled to the Son of the Father, but many have warned of the wrath of a Jehovah that must needs be propitiated. The thunders of Sinai crashed one night over a New England hamlet. A two-hundred-pound son of the soil went out from the revival meeting palsied with fear and at midnight awoke a neighbor by shouting under his window: "Bonesville is a-goin' to be destroyed before morning!" The reply was emphatic. "No it ain't. Go hum and go to bed." And a safe and sane sunrise cleared the storm. In the same village, and also within the memory of this generation, the citation of a Biblical mandate to confess sins brought to the altar a weeping man and woman who regaled a crowded and interested house with the story of their adultery. The burden was cast upon the Lord while the community listened in. It is the only thing remembered of that revival.

A primitive faith naturally has primitive expression, which the revival only emphasizes, such as Pentecostal power, speaking in tongues and divers emotional and physical manifestations. Evangelism among those Negroes who still possess a racial naïveté demonstrates these elemental traits.

The pastor is likely to be a lay preacher who had dropped a hoe to wrestle it out with the Lord by his lone in the