was based. Through assiduous reading
he familiarised himself with medical science, as well as with
hypnotism, telepathy and suggestion, his aim being to organise and
direct a crusade against medicine as practised by the faculty. He
gathered together materials for a declaration of war against the
medicos, attacking them in their, apparently, most impregnable
positions, and showing up, often through their own observations, the
fatal inanity--in his eyes--of their therapeutics. At the same time he
managed to acquire experience of commerce, finance and administration,
and, thus equipped, he opened his campaign. Thaumaturgy, science,
occultism, eloquence, knowledge of men and of the world--all these he
brought into play. The prestige he gained was remarkable, and of
course the unimpeachable truth of Bible prophecy was sufficient to
establish the fact of his identity with the expected Elias!

"Logic itself commands you to believe in me," he said in his official
manifesto. "John the Baptist was the messenger of the Alliance (which
is the Scotch Covenant), and Elias was its prophet. But Malachi and
Jesus promised the return of the messenger of the Alliance, and of
Elias the Restorer. . . . If we are deceived, it is God who has
deceived us, and that is impossible. For the office with which we are
charged is held directly from God, and those who have helped us in
founding our Church, and who have given us their devotion, testify that
they have been instructed to do so by personal revelations."

All the believers in Dowieism affirmed that John Alexander Dowie was
Elias the Second, or Elias the Third (if John the Baptist were
considered to be the Second), but Dowie himself went further still. He
was too modern to base his influence on religion alone, and he actually
had the cleverness to become not only a banker, manufacturer,
hotel-keeper, newspaper proprietor, editor and multi-millionaire, but
also the principal of a college and the "boss" of a political party
which acknowledged him as spiritual and temporal pope and numbered over
sixty thousand adherents. He had ten tabernacles in Chicago, and ruled
despotically the municipal affairs of one of the suburbs of the city.

II

It is interesting to study closely the way in which Dowie gradually
attained to such a powerful position. Up to his arrival in Chicago,
and even for some years after it, his career differed little from that
of the ordinary open-air evangelis