classes and the intelligent artisans will more and more desert the
Christian creed, and there will probably be left nothing but the dregs
and the scum, for whom Salvationism is exactly suited. Christianity
began among the poor, ignorant, and depraved; and it may possibly end
its existence among the very same classes.

In all these movements we see a striking illustration of what the
biologists call the law of Atavism. There is a constant tendency to
return to the primitive type. We can form some idea of what early
Christianity was by reading the Acts of the Apostles. The true believers
went about preaching in season and out of season; they cried and prayed
with a loud voice; they caused tumult in the streets, and gave plenty
of trouble to the civil authorities. All this is true of Salvationism
to-day; and we have no doubt that the early Church, under the guidance
of Peter, was just a counterpart of the Salvation Army under "General"
Booth--to the Jews, or men of the world, a stumbling-block, and to the
Greeks, or educated thinkers, a folly.

Early Christians were "full of the Holy Ghost," that is of wild
enthusiasm. Scoffers said they were drunk, and they acted like madmen.
Leap across seventeen centuries, and we shall find Methodists acting
in the same way. Wesley states in his Journal (1739) of his hearers at
Wapping, that "some were torn with a kind of convulsive motion in every
part of their bodies, and that so violently that often four or five
persons could not hold one of them." And Lecky tells us, in his "History
of the Eighteenth Century," that "religious madness, which from the
nature of its hallucinations, is usually the most miserable of all
the forms of insanity, was in this, as in many later revivals, of
no unfrequent occurrence." Now Salvationism produces the very same
effects. It drives many people mad; and it is a common thing for men
and women at its meetings to shout, dance, jump, and finally fall on
the floor in a pious ecstacy. While they are in this condition, the
Holy Ghost is entering them and the Devil is being driven out. Poor
creatures! They take us back in thought to the days of demoniacal
possession, and the strange old world that saw the devil-plagued swine
of Gadara drowned in the sea.

The free and easy mingling of the sexes at these pious assemblies, is
another noticeable feature. Love-feasts were a flagrant scandal in the
early Church, and women who returned from them virtuous must h