VOLUME 226

NUMBER 6

I

SEE that Mrs. Aimée Semple McPherson, founder, prophetess, and business manager of The Four Square Gospel and Lighthouses, Incorporated, has set about converting England. Mrs. McPherson told a correspondent of The Evening News that she did not think it would be so very difficult. Has she not already converted Los Angeles?

I am interested, because I lived for several years in Los Angeles when the City of the Angels was not so big or so angelic - or evangelic as it is now. Nobody attempted to convert us in those days. Probably we did not need it. You see, Prohibition had not come in then. A modest horn of the old familiar juice was not a thing you had to be saved from, either by a prophetess or a stomach pump.

There were, as I recollect, a few prophetesses knocking about, of them kept the best girls' school in the State, but they were a retiring lot. They did not go after you with

whether you liked it or not. Of course the earnest seeker after conversion could find it. There were Holy Rollers and Doukhobors and other sects of whiskery primitives, who plucked brands from the burning, but they did not, as you might say, carry the war into the enemy's country. Certainly there were no million dollar temples and no monthly offerings of a modest seven thousand dollars or so for the prophetesses to keep body and soul together on. I rather think that five hundred smackers (I understand that is what the Federal Reserve Banks call them; in my day they were known as bucks, plunks, seeds, bones, simoleons or iron men would have bought up the whole supply of salvation in Los Angeles. As for San Francisco, where the stuff was really needed, I doubt if you could have collected ten dollars' worth in a week.

Is some years since I was in Los

Sunday edition of the local papers. I cannot gather from these that Los Angeles requires saving from much except Prohibition and the new city hall. Minor threats to its sanity do indeed seem to exist, but from these it is well able, I imagine, to save itself; just as in my day it saved itself from the Southern Pacific Railroad and spitting tobacco juice on the sidewalk.

UT what of this benighted isle of

Bours,

ours, the helpless prey, if the reporter understood Mrs. McPherson aright, of cocktails and petting parties, whatever they may be? We too, it seems, require to be saved from the soul-searing enticements of threepence a hundred bridge and the insidious poison of what I believe is known in the more sophisticated West as heavynecking.

Well, I am all for virtue; but the prophetess's job here has turned out to be tougher than she imagines. The trouble is that over here we are either too godly or too godless to need salvation, mostly the former. We have no Underworld, not since the dole. As for the Middle Classes, they either do not want to sin or cannot afford to, mostly the latter. There are the Wanton Rich, of course, but there

are the most emotional people in the world." Now I admit that the English are a deal more sentimental than they let on to be. Whether they are emotional, which is not at all the same thing, I am not so sure. But this I do know, that nothing on earth will get them to be emotional about their souls. Since the Reformation, and perhaps since long before that, the English have learned to treat religion as a rational and not as an emotional exercise. An emotionless austerity goes to the very essence of practically every English sect and creed. There is, I agree, the Salvation Army, but the Salvation Army secures its recruits by practical philanthropy and practical humanity. Its corybantic Christianity is but the sign in which it conquers and it conquers only the Down-and-Out.

For the rest we are most of us, as Dr. Mahaffy once expressed it, either σώθεις or σωζόμενος; either we have secured a lead pipe cinch on salvation by joining the right sect, or we are in a temporary state of rectitude from which indifference or lack of what I may call the sinews of sin prevent us departing.

N ANY case we are, in so far as reli

them that there are are too intelligent to abandon the evil they know for the purely suppositious pleasures that prance in salvation's sterile wake. But there is a more fundamental reason why Mrs. McPherson has been unable to do any particular good over here. She does not know it, yet it is illuminatingly revealed in the first words wrung from her by the assiduous news gatherer. "The English," she said, "if you can get at their hearts,

as terrapins. But other difficulties, as Mrs. McPherson soon discovered, lurk in her four square wake. In America the mass production of emotion has reached a fine art. In Britain it is hardly understood. You have only got to see our proletariat, on whom alone it is practised, listening to a Communist orator in Trafalgar Square to realize that. We are the most individualistic race in the world, and view with intense suspicion any in

vitation to get together, whether for the cooperative sale of turnips or to burn down the Houses of Parliament. There are several reasons why the English proletariat has not listened to Mrs. McPherson. Her fur coat and seven thousand dollar monthly "of. ferings" are one. Her American accent is another. That her husband, prior to divorce, was a milk roundsman, might have helped her, had she mentioned it. But the real obstacle is that our proletariat is still too primitive to take its talkings-to from a woman. Among our toiling masses woman's place, when she is not engaged in rushing the growler, is still the home.

S FOR the educated classes, Mrs.

A McPherson could not make any headway with them, for the simple reason that she is not in their class. Perhaps I should say that she is not, in the matter of education and intellect, in the class of those from whom we are

to Mrs. McPherson's assaults. Her difficulty here is that she has been competing at a disadvantage with other exponents of her own game. She has been like a man who tries to sell New York real estate in Los Angeles. For our tin chapel spellbinders, in their own English way, deal in hell fire and the personal devil and hallelujahs and all the other apparatus on which Mrs. McPherson's own technique is founded.

All the same I concede that she might have scored a success or two in the tin chapels, especially in the South Wales area. But would she be content with that? It would be small pickings, as brands from the burning go, for one who, according to her own statement, has half Los Angeles queued up outside her million dollar auditorium waiting for a chance to crowd in and repent.

ND that brings me back to the

struction and education. It must be remembered that in the smallest, remotest and least promising parish in England, be it in the slums of London or the waste places of Cornwall, the parson is a gentleman and scholar, who has taken his classical degree, generally with honors, at Oxford or Cambridge. These men are not spellbinders. Their Sundays are more likely to be Coué than Billy. Their sermons are genteel soporifics. But that is what the English, to whom Sunday morning church is a rite, like Sunday roast beef, want.

There remain the small bourgeoisie, the Lower Middle Classes, as we call them. Some of these in their tin chapels treat religion as an emotional exercise. To that extent they are laid open

tion. I want to know what it is that Greater Los Angeles is so eager to repent of. When I was an Angeleno our virtues and vices were alike of a mild, provincial order. There may have been a certain elaboration in our method of getting the incoming stranger to put his name on the dotted line, but we neither robbed banks nor lived publicly in sin.

Mrs. McPherson told the Evening News reporter that she was sure we English were "sick of card parties and cocktails." She is of course unaware that owing to the high cost of hooch an English cocktail would not make the hair stand up on a white mouse, and that our card parties are conducted entirely by middle-aged ladies of impeccable morals in the country,