nd spreading it over half the known world.

The ancient Greeks, in despair over the frailties of human emotion and
the unbecomingness of worldly conduct, which their brilliant minds
enabled them to recognize clearly but which they found themselves
powerless to subdue, endowed the gods, whom they worshipped, with all of
their own passions and weaknesses, and thus the foolish behavior of the
gods consoled them for their own obvious shortcomings. So it goes
throughout all of the world's religions.

In the middle of the twentieth century there were in the civilized
world, millions of people in whose lives Christianity had ceased to play
any part. Yet, psychically--remember, "psyche" means "soul"--they were
just as sick and unbalanced, just as much in need of some compensation
as were the subjects of the early Roman empire, or the Arabs in the
Middle Ages. They were forced to work at the strained and monotonous
pace of machines; they were the slaves, body and soul, of machines; they
lived with machines and lived like machines--they were expected to _be_
machines. A mechanized mode of life set a relentless pace for them,
while, just as in all the past ages, life and love, the breezes and the
blue sky called to them; but they could not respond. They had to drive
machines so that machines could serve them. Minds were cramped and
emotions were starved, but hands must go on guiding levers and keeping
machines in operation. Lives were reduced to such a mechanical routine
that men wondered how long human minds and human bodies could stand the
restraint. There is a good deal in the writings of the times to show
that life was becoming almost unbearable for three-fourths of humanity.

* * * * *

It is only natural, therefore, that Rohan, the prophet of the new
religion, found followers more rapidly than he could organize them.
About ten years before the visit of Dr. Hagstrom to his friend Benda,
Rohan and his new religion had been much in the newspapers. Rohan was a
Slovak, apparently well educated in Europe. When he first attracted
attention to himself, he was foreman in a steel plant at Birmingham,
Alabama. He was popular as an orator, and drew unheard-of crowds to his
lectures.

He preached of _Science_ as God, an all-pervading, inexorably systematic
Being, the true Center and Motive-Power of the Universe; a Being who saw
men and pitied them because they could not help committing inaccuracies.
Th