e Science God was helping man become more perfect. Even now, men were
much more accurate and systematic than they had been a hundred years
ago; men's lives were ordered and rhythmic, like natural laws, not like
the chaotic emotions of beasts and savages.

Somehow, he soon dropped out of the attention of the great mass of the
public. Of course, he did so intentionally, when his ideas began to
crystallize and his plans for his future organization began to form. At
first he had a sort of church in Birmingham, called The Church of the
Scientific God. There never was anything cheap nor blatant about him.
When he moved his church from Birmingham to the Lovett Branch Valley in
northern Virginia, he was hardly noticed. But with him went seven
thousand people, to form the nucleus of the Science Community.

* * * * *

Since then, some feature writer for a metropolitan Sunday paper has
occasionally written up the Science Community, both from its physical
and its human aspects. From these reports, the outstanding bit of
evidence is that Rohan believes intensely in his own religion, and that
his followers are all loyal worshippers of the Science God. They
conceive the earth to be a workshop in which men serve Science, their
God, serving a sort of apprenticeship during which He perfects them to
the state of ideal machines. To be a perfect machine, always accurate,
with no distracting emotions, no getting off the track--that was the
ideal which the Great God _Science_ required of his worshippers. To be a
perfect machine, or a perfect cog in a machine, to get rid of all
individuality, all disturbing sentiment, that was their idea of supreme
happiness. Despite the obvious narrowness it involved, there was
something sublime in the conception of this religion. It certainly had
nothing in common with the "Christian Science" that was in vogue during
the early years of the twentieth Century; it towered with a noble
grandeur above that feeble little sham.

The Science Community was organized like a machine: and all men played
their parts, in government, in labor, in administration, in production,
like perfect cogs and accurate wheels, and the machine functioned
perfectly. The devotees were described as fanatical, but happy. They
certainly were well trained and efficient. The Science Community grew.
In ten years it had a million people, and was a worldwide wonder of
civic planning and organization; it containe