ld return to this institution regularly every week
unless he abandoned his godless habit of playing tennis on a private
club court on Sunday; he only escaped the painful punishment by making
the discovery that at the Wilmington Country Club it was the custom of
the leading officials of the city and state to play golf every Sunday,
and by threatening to employ detectives and have these mighty ones
arrested and sent to their own prison. Which shows again the
importance of understanding this relationship of Superstition and Big
Business!

* * * * *

#BOOK SIX#

#The Church of the Quacks#

They may talk as they please about what they call pelf,
And how one ought never to think of one's self,
And how pleasures of thought surpass eating and drinking--
My pleasure of thought is the pleasure of thinking
How pleasant it is to have money, heigh ho!
How pleasant it is to have money.

Clough.

* * * * *

#Tabula Rasa#

Nature has given us a virgin continent, a clean slate upon which to
write what we will. And what are we writing? What is our intellectual
life? I came to the far West, which I had been taught by novelists and
poets to think of as a place of freedom. I came, because I like
freedom; I am staying because I like the climate. I find that what
freedom means in the West is the ability of ignorant and fanatical
persons to start some new, fantastical quirk of scriptural
interpretation, to build a new cult around it, and earn a living out
of it.

My first contact with that sort of thing was when I went to the Battle
Creek Sanitarium to investigate hydrotherapy, and found myself in a
nest of Seventh-day Adventists. Three generations or so ago some odd
character hit upon the discovery that the Christian churches had let
the devil snare them into resting on the first day of the week,
whereas the Bible states distinctly that the Lord "rested on the
seventh day". So here is a million dollar establishment, with a
thousand or two patients and employees, and on Friday at sundown the
silence of death settles upon the place, and stays settled until
sundown of Saturday, when everything comes suddenly to life again, and
there is a little celebration, like Easter or New Year's, with what I
used to call "sterilized dancing"--the men pairing with men and the
women with women.

They are decent and kindly people, and you learn to put