Their public effects are constantly underestimated until it is too late. I ask no indulgence for calling attention again to the case of Prohibition. Fundamentalism, in its various forms, sneaks upon the nation in the same disarming way. The cities laugh at the yokels, but meanwhile the politicians take careful notice; such mountebanks as Peay of Tennessee and Blease of South Carolina have already issued their preliminary whoops. As the tide rolls up the pastors will attain to greater and greater consequence. Already, indeed, they well visibly, in power and pretension. The Klan, in its early days, kept them discreetly under cover; they labored valiantly in the hold, but only lay go-getters were seen upon the bridge. But now they are everywhere on public display, leading the anthropoid host. At the great outpouring in Washington a few months ago – which alarmed the absentee Dr. Coolidge so vastly that he at once gave a high Klan dignitary a federal office of trust and profit – there were Baptist mullahs all over the lot, and actually more in line, I daresay, than bootleggers or insurance solicitors.
The curious and amusing thing is that the ant-like activity of these holy men has so far got little if any attention from our established publicists. Let a lone Red arise to annoy a barroom full of Michigan lumberjacks, and at once the fire alarm sounds and the full military and naval power of the nation is summoned to put down the outrage. But how many Americanos would the Reds convert to their rubbish, even supposing them free to spout in on every street-corner? Probably not enough, all told, to make a day’s hunting for a regiment of militia. The American moron’s mind simply does not run in that direction; he wants to keep his Ford, even at the cost of losing the Bill of Rights. But the stuff that the Baptist and the Methodist dervishes have on tap is very much to his taste; he gulps it eagerly and rubs his tummy. I suggest that it might be well to make a scientific inquiry into the nature of it. The existing agencies of sociologial snooting seem to be busy in other direction. There are elaborate surveys of some of the large cities, showing how much it costs to teach a child the principles of Americanism, how often the average citizen falls into the hands of the cops, how many detective stories are taken out of the city library daily, and how many a children a normal Polish woman has every year. Why not a survey of the rustic areas, where men are he and God still reigns? Why not attempt to find out just what the Baptist dominies have drilled into the heads of the Tennesseeans, Arkansans and Nebraskans? It would be amusing – and instructive.
And useful. For it is well, in such matters, to see clearly what is ahead. The United States grows increasingly urban, but its ideas are still hatched in the little town. What the swineherds credit today is whooped tomorrow by their agents and attorneys in Congress, and then comes upon the cities suddenly with all the force of law. Where do the swineherds get it? Mainly from the only publicists and metaphysicians they know: the gentlemen of the sacred faculty. it was not the bawling of the mountebank Bryan, but the sermon of a mountain Bossuet that laid the train of the Scopes case and made a whole State forever ridiculous. I suggest looking more carefully in to the notions that such divine ignoramuses spout.
The question, “What is Faith?”, which forms the subject of the following discussion may seem to some person impertinent and unnecessary. Faith, it may be said, cannot be known except by experience, and when it is known by experience logical analysis of it, and logical separation of it from other experiences, will only serve to destroy its power and its charm. The man who knows by experience what it is to trust Christ, for example, to rest upn Him for salvation, will never need, it may be held, to engage in psychological investigations of that experience which is the basis of his life; and indeed such investigations may even serve to destroy the thing that is to be investigated.
What one mainly notices about these ambassadors of Christ, observing them in the mass, is their colossal ignorance. They constitute, perhaps, the most ignorant class of teachers ever set up to lead a civilized people; they are even more ignorant the the county superintendents of schools. Learning, indeed, is not esteemed in the evangelical denominations, and any literate plowhand, if the Holy Spirit inflames him, is thought to be fit to preach. Is he commonly sent, as a preliminary, to a training-camp, to college? But what a college! You will find one in every mountain valley of the land, with its single building in its bare pasture lot, and its faculty of half-idiot pedagogues and broken-down preachers. One man, in such a college, teaches oratory, ancient history, arithmetic and Old Testament exegesis. The aspirant comes in from the barnyard, and goes back in a year or two to the village. His body of knowledge is that of a street-car motorman or a movie actor. But he has learned the cliches of his craft, and he has got him a long-tailed coat, and so he has made his escape from the harsh labors of his ancestors, and is set up as a fountain of light and learning. 
This increasing precision and this increasing richness of doctrinal statement were arrived at particularly by way of refutation of errors as they successively arose. At first the church’s convictions about some point of doctrine were implicit rather than explicit. They were not carefully defined. They were assumed rather than expressly stated. The some new teaching arose. The church reflected on the matter, comparing the new teaching with the Bible. It found the new teaching to be contrary to the Bible. As over against the new teaching, it set forth precisely what the true Biblical teaching on the point is. So a great doctrine was clearly stated in some great Christian creed. 
We need to learn the claims of love, first, in our own individual lives. Even service, no matter how efficient and how diligent it may be, cannot take the place of the deep affection of the heart. I am not forgetting those texts of Scripture where service is celebrated in the loftiest terms. “Whosoever shall give to drink unto one of these little ones a cup of cold water only in the name of a disciple, verily I say unto you, he shall in no wise lose his reward.” “Pure religion and undefiled before God and the Father is this, To visit the fatherless and widows in their affliction, and to keep himself unspotted from the world.” Certainly service is necessary to religion; but do you think that service is all that is necesssary? I think not, my friends. I think that you will find if you read your Bible with sympathy and care that even service is not a substitute for love, but the expression of love. “And though I bestow all my goods to feed the poor, and though I give my body to be burned, and have not love, it profiteth me nothing.”
Under Prohibition, Fundamentalism and the complex ideals of the Klan there runs a common stream of bilge: it issues from the ghostly glands of the evangelical pastors of the land. The influence of these consecrated men upon the so-called thinking of the American people has been greatly understimated by fanciers; in fact, most of the principal professors of such forms of metabolism overlook it altogether. Yet it must be obvious that their power is immense, and that they exert it steadily and with great gusto. It was not primarily the Christian faithful of the backwoods who fastened Prohibition upon us; it was the rustic cures working upon the Christian faithful, whose heat, in turn, ran the State legislators amok. If the cures, clinging to 1 Timothy 5:23, had resolved to spare light wines and beer, we’d have them today, not behind the arras but in the full glare of rectitude. Here, as always in our moral Republic, scriptural exegesis preceded the uplift, and gave it its punch. While the agents of the brewer and distillers were fatuously bribing legislatrs, and paying higher and higher prices as session succeeded session, the Prohibitionists were out in the Bryan Belt organizing the country ecclesiastics. Once the latter had steam up the rest was only a matter of choosing the time. It came conveniently in the midst of war’s alarms, at a moment of mystical exaltation. If history says that William H. Anderson, Wayne B. Wheeler and company turned the trick then history will err once more. It was really turned by a hundred thousand Methodist and Baptist pastors.
The effort to jail her has disingenuousness in it, and the more civilized Angelenoas all sympathize with her, and wish her well. Her great success raised up two sets of enemies, both powerful. One was made up of the other town clergy, who resented her raids upon their customers. The other was composed of the town Babbitts, who began to fear that her growing celebrity was making Los Angeles ridiculous. So it was decided to bump her off, and her ill-timed morganatic honeymoon with the bald-headed and wooden-legged Mr. Ormiston offered a good chance.
Formerly when men had brought to their attention perfectly plain documents like the Apostles’ Creed or the Westminster Confession or the New Testament, they either accepted them or else denied them. Now they no longer deny, but merely “interpret.” Every generation, it is said, must interpret the Bible or the creed in its own way. But I sometimes wonder just how far this business of interpretation will go. I am, let us say, in a company of modern men. They begin to test my intelligence. And first they test me on the subject of mathematics. “What does six times nine make?” I am asked. I breathe a sigh of relief; many questions might place me very low in the scale of intelligence, but that question I think I can answer. I raise my hand hopefully. “I know that one, ” I say. “Six nines are fifty-four.” But my complacency is short-lived. My modern examiner puts on a grave look. “Where have you been living?” he says. ” ‘Six nines are fifty-four’ – that is the old answer to the question.” In my ignorance I am somewhat surprised. “Why,” I say, “everybody knows that. That stands in the multiplication table; do you not accept the multiplication table?” “Oh, yes,” says my modern friend, “of course I accept the multiplication table. But then I do not take a static view of the multiplication table; every generation must interpret the multiplication table in its own way. And so of course I accept the proposition that six nines are fifty-four, but I interpret that to mean that six nines are are a hundred and twenty-eight.” And then the examination gets in to the sphere of history. The examiner askes me where the Declaration of Independance was adopted. That one, also, I think I know. “The Declaration of Independence,” I say, “was adopted at Philadelphia.” But again I meet with a swift rebuke. “That is the old answer to the question,” I am told. “But,” I say, “everyone knows that the Declaration of Independence was adopted at Philadelphia; that stands in all the history books; do you not accept what stands in the history books?” “Oh, yes,” says my modern friend, “we accept everything that stands in the history books – hundred per cent Americans we are. But then, you see, we have to interpret the history books in our own way. And so of course we accept the proposition that the Declaration of Independence was adopted at Philadelphia, but we interpret that to mean that it was adopted at San Francisco.” And then finally the examination turns (though still in the sphere of history) to the department of history that concerns the Christian religion. “What do you think happened,” I am asked, “after Jesus was laid in that tomb near Jerusalem about nineteen hundred years ago?” To that question also I have a very definite answer. “I will tell you what I think happened,” I say; “He was laid in the tomb, and then the third day He arose again from the dead.” At this point the surprise of my modern friend reaches it height. The idea of a professor in a theological seminary actually believing that the body of a dead man really emerged from the grave! “Everyone,” he tells me, “has abandoned that answer to the question long ago.” “But,” I say, “my friend, this is very serious; that answer stands in the Apostles’ Creed as well as at the centre of the New Testament; do you not accept the Apostles’ Creed?” “Oh, yes,” says my modern friend, “of course I accept the Apostles’ Creed; do we not say it every Sunday in church? – or, if we do not say it, we sing it – of course, I accept the Apostles’ Creed. But then, do you not see, every generation has a right to interpret the creed in it own way. And so now of course we accept the proposition that ‘the third day He arose again from the dead, ‘ but we interpret that to mean, ‘The third day He did not rise again from the dead.’ “
