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 evangelist with long hair and vague theories, such as may be seen at the street-corners of so many English and American towns. In New South Wales his excessive ardour at temperance meetings in the public squares caused such disorder that he was twice imprisoned, and he came to the conclusion that Melbourne would offer better scope for his mission. He went there to establish a "Free Christian Tabernacle," but almost immediately an epidemic of fever broke out, and he became popular through his intrepidity in visiting the sick, whom he claimed to be able to cure by a secret remedy, the use of which, as a matter of fact, only resulted in augmenting the lists of dead. But to his religious propaganda the Australians turned a deaf ear, and after persevering for ten years he gave up, partly because the authorities had intimated that he had best pitch his camp elsewhere, partly, perhaps, because he was glad to leave what he later referred to as "that nest of antipodean vipers." We find him in San Francisco in 1888, preaching his new religion at street-corners, and once more causing almost daily disturbances by the vigour of his eloquence. Here again his hopes miscarried, and from thenceforward he fixed his eyes on Chicago, where he should "meet the devil on his own ground."