the Church. A hymn, a paraphrase, the form of a prayer, the
posture at worship, a vestment--anything, everything, was good enough
for the devil's purpose. By these he achieved his ends. The crowd was
no longer to be found in one sanctuary. Here, where I write, in the
days of my boyhood the folk assembled in the open air for their great
Christian festival on the second Sunday of August. It was a moving
spectacle to see a couple of thousand people in the hearing of the sea,
with the hills brooding over them, raise a psalm to heaven. But that
crowd has been broken up into four fragments. There is no longer a
crowd. The devil has secured its overthrow. On the wave of an emotion
generated by a thousand hearts no soul shall again be wafted heavenward
in that green place. For the devil has seen to it that the thousand
hearts shall be no longer there.

V

There is a hopeful side to all this if only Christians will learn
wisdom. Instead of allowing the devil to break up congregations into
fragments, as he has done for a hundred years, what the Church must do
now is to provide the crowd which will exercise the powerful attraction
of the herd-instinct on the side of righteousness. The spectacle
presented in a poor and crowded district of a great city by competing
missions--Primitives, Wesleyans, Presbyterians, Catholics, Salvation
Army, and so on--each weak and ineffective--is heart-breaking. There
are so many of them that there can be a crowd at none of them. The day
of home-mission activities as now conducted is at an end.... At
Pittsburg I was taken to a meeting in a great auditorium, seated for
8000 people, where Gipsy Smith was carrying on a mission. The place
was crowded. There was a massed choir of a few hundred voices. After
a great volume of praise rolled heavenward, there came an atmosphere
vibrant with the sense of the Divine as prayer was offered. I never
heard Gipsy Smith before, and I was not prejudiced in his favour. But
his simplicity, his directness, his power of speaking straight home to
the heart, made me captive. Here was a master of crowd-psychology.
The Jesus whom this man preached was the elder brother, the lover of
men, the saviour from self. When the preacher asked those who desired
to follow and obey Jesus to stand up, they rose in hundreds. It almost
seemed as if the whole congregation were on their feet. The difficulty
when every force seemed to lift one up was in continuing t