up with their
eccentricities; it is really convenient in some ways, because, as not
all the city shares their delusions, there are some stores open every
day of the week. But then you discover that the Sanitarium is training
"medical missionaries" to send to Africa, and is teaching these
supposed-to-be-scientists that evolution is a doctrine of the devil,
and not proven anyhow!

You get the shrewd little doctor who is running this establishment
alone in his office, and he will smile and admit that of course it is
not necessary to take all Bible phrases literally; but you know how it
is--there are different levels of intelligence, and so on. Yes, I know
how it is. You have an institution founded upon a certain dogma, and
run by means of that dogma, and it is hard to change without smashing
things. It is especially convenient when servants and nurses have a
religious upbringing, and do not steal the pocket-books of the
patients. People will come from all over the country, and pay high
prices to stay in such a sanitarium; you can make vegetarians of them,
which you think more important than teaching abstract notions about
their being descended from monkeys. Also you can manufacture
vegetarian foods for them, and build up an enormous business--so
obtaining that Power which is the thing desired of men.

This is but one illustration of a sort of thing of which I could cite
a hundred. The city in which I live is headquarters of another sect,
the "Pentecostal Church of the Nazarene"; primitive Methodists,
Bible-worshippers not content with the King James version, but going
back to the Sinaitic MS. They have a "University", located in one of
the most beautiful spots that Nature ever made; an institution with
seventy-five students. A couple of years ago I happened to meet the
"president," who was a preacher with grease on the ample expanse of
his black broadcloth waistcoat, and a speech full of the commonest
grammatical errors, such as "you was" and "I seen". The past year
witnessed a split, and the founding of a brand new church and
"University"--because one of the preachers insisted upon preaching so
much that the students got no chance to study; also because he sent
home a rich man's daughter whose shirt-waists revealed too much of her
fleshly nature.

And there is an even stranger phenomenon in the locality, taking you
back to the Libyan desert and the time of Thais. A lady friend of
mine, generously blessed with this wo