ey too. All that was needed was organization. The rescue of the
unsaved could be converted into a wholesale business, unsentimentally
and economically conducted, and with all the usual aids to efficiency,
from skilful sales management to seductive advertising, and from
rigorous accounting to the diligent shutting off of competition.

Out of that new will to power came many enterprises more or less futile
and harmless, with the "institutional" church at their head. Piety was
cunningly disguised as basketball, billiards and squash; the sinner was
lured to grace with Turkish baths, lectures on foreign travel, and free
instructions in stenography, rhetoric and double-entry book-keeping.
Religion lost all its old contemplative and esoteric character, and
became a frankly worldly enterprise, a thing of balance-sheets and
ponderable profits, heavily capitalized and astutely manned. There was
no longer any room for the spiritual type of leader, with his white
choker and his interminable fourthlies. He was displaced by a brisk
gentleman in a "business suit" who looked, talked and thought like a
seller of Mexican mine stock. Scheme after scheme for the swift
evangelization of the nation was launched, some of them of truly
astonishing sweep and daring. They kept pace, step by step, with the
mushroom growth of enterprise in the commercial field. The Y. M. C. A.
swelled to the proportions of a Standard Oil Company, a United States
Steel Corporation. Its huge buildings began to rise in every city; it
developed a swarm of specialists in new and fantastic moral and social
sciences; it enlisted the same gargantuan talent which managed the
railroads, the big banks and the larger national industries. And beside
it rose the Young People's Society of Christian Endeavour, the
Sunday-school associations and a score of other such grandiose
organizations, each with its seductive baits for recruits and money.
Even the enterprises that had come down from an elder and less expansive
day were pumped up and put on a Wall Street basis: the American Bible
Society, for example, began to give away Bibles by the million instead
of by the thousand, and the venerable Tract Society took on the feverish
ardour of a daily newspaper, even of a yellow journal. Down into our own
day this trustification of pious endeavour has gone on. The Men and
Religion Forward Movement proposed to convert the whole country by 12
o'clock noon of such and such a day; the Order of