o sit still.
This is the only mission that can to-day be effective--the mission in
which the mysterious powers latent sub-consciously in man are directed
heavenward. Instead of weak, isolated, competitive missions, if the
churches would organise home-missions after this order.... There in
Pittsburg, as in every city where men such as Gipsy Smith exercise
their ministry, the first requisite is that the churches organise to
provide the herd. Without the herd, the herd-instinct cannot operate.
First provide the crowd, and then the masters of crowd-psychology can
turn their faces heavenward. It will be a poor ruined world if the
crowd be left much longer as the monopoly of the devil. The laws of
crowd-psychology, which can crucify a Christ and turn an ancient
civilisation into carnage and animalism, can also shape humanity to the
noblest ends. By these same laws self-sacrifice, love, heroism,
idealism can make their irresistible appeal. Along this line victory
will come.

CHAPTER VII

LET US HAVE PEACE

It was to attend a Congress of Churches that I crossed the Atlantic,
but it is not listening to speeches that gives a realisation of any
country. It is when wandering about the streets, sitting in cafes,
listening in a smoking-car, or talking to a man in a hotel lounge that
one forms some impression of the atmosphere which Americans breathe.
It has been asserted, doubtless with truth, that human aberrations are
a misplaced worship. That happiness which men were created to find in
fellowship with the Highest, they seek in base and sensual forms.
Drunkenness, on this theory, is a species of misdirected worship. If
this be granted, then, Americans are of all nations the most devout.
They worship the vast in every form. At Pittsburg you could hear a man
rolling out statistics of millions of tons of steel a year; of harbour
dues, though the city is far from the sea, that put even London and
Glasgow in the shade; and as he speaks you feel that he has a thrill
approaching adoration. He is on his knees before the greatest he
knows. It is the same in everything. A town of 14,000 inhabitants in
1840 is now a city of a million. He rolls the figures as if they were
a mystic ritual. Everything with which he has to do must be the
greatest on the earth.

I

It was, however, in New York that one came to the inner shrine of
American idealism. I had stayed for two days in the academic calm of
Princeton, had he