• U.S.

Religion: All Charged Up

2 minute read
TIME

“A church without the Holy Ghost is like an automobile without gasoline. Oh, Lord, let there be an outpouring of the Holy Ghost. . . .

“When I come into a meeting sometimes I feel just like a sponge, dripping with honey and milk. I just give everything I’ve got. I’m weak when I come out. But I go and pray to Jesus and get all charged up like a battery.” Thus spoke alluring Aimee Semple McPherson in Manhattan last week when she began her conquest of sin there. Said an oldtimer: “I’ve heard ’em all … She’s the only one of the lot can touch Henry Ward Beecher.”

She attacked evolution: “It nearly ruined me and now it’s trying to ruin America. It is making our young men murderers.”

She worked up a frenzy telling about her love-conversion by Robert Semple: “He had curly brown hair and a beautiful face and he upset me.” She wrote to him. He came back, married her and they preached their way to China, where he died. . . .

From Manhattan, Mrs. McPherson headed for Syracuse, Rochester, then Florida, then California.

The same week a rival revivalist, the kindly Billy Sunday, arrived in Atlanta, Ga., with a few practical interpretations of the Scriptures. He commented that Dr. Harry Emerson Fosdick and his “pack of pretentious, pliable, mental perverts [Modernists] are dedicated to the destruction of religion and one and all are lia,rs, so labeled by the authority of Almighty God.” He called for the expulsion of President Nicholas Murray Butler of Columbia University.

Meanwhile the New York City Y. M. C. A., beloved bedfellow of the A. E. F., announced that it would relinquish the camp-meeting methods of religious instruction and try to depend on logic where emotionalism failed.

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