ly in one of its largest
churches, but when I arrived I found them in a wrangle over the pastor
who had just left and by whose recommendation I was to fill the
pulpit. I arrived in the city on a Sunday morning and went from my
hotel to the church prepared to preach. I stood for a few minutes in
the vestibule, and what I heard led me to go straight out again, never
to return.

My first impression of the city was that it contained more vital
democracy than any city I had ever been in. It takes an Old World
proletarian a long time to outgrow a sense of subserviency. As a
missionary and almoner of the rich in New York, this sense was very
strong in me. In the West I felt this vital democracy so keenly and
saw the vision of political independence so clearly, that my very
blood seemed to change. Politically, I was born again.

CHAPTER XIII

LIFE AND DOUBT ON THE BOTTOMS

While studying the social conditions of this city, I took a residence
on the banks of the river among the squatters. There were about
fifteen hundred people living in shacks on this "no man's land." My
residence was a shack for which I paid three dollars a month. It was
at the bottom of a big clay bank, and not far from where the city
dumped its garbage. There was neither church nor chapel in this
neglected district, and the people were mostly foreigners; but the
children all spoke English.

During the early part of my stay in that shack, I entered my first
great period of doubting--doubt as to the moral order of the universe,
doubt on the question of God. I had gone through some great soul
struggles, but this was the greatest. It was for a time the eclipse of
my soul. For weeks I lived behind closed doors--I was shut in with my
soul. But the community around me called in a thousand ways for help,
for guidance, for instruction, and I opened the door of my shack and
invited the children in. I organized a Sunday School and taught them
ethics and religion. I got up little entertainments for them. I
procured a stereopticon, gave them lectures on my experience in Egypt,
and lectures on art, biography and history. I had a peculiar method of
advertising these lectures. I informed the little cripple boy on the
corner. He whispered the information to a section of the huts, at the
farthest end of which a golden-haired courier informed another
section; so that by the time the lecture was scheduled to begin, my
audience was ready, and most of them slid dow