The Profits of Religion, Fifth EditionSinclair, Upton
Religion
The Profits of Religion, Fifth Edition
Sinclair, Upton
Christianity -- Controversial literature
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 world's goods, asks me have I seen
the hermit. "Hermit?" I say, and she replies, "Didn't you know there
was a hermit? He lives on a mountain, in a cave, and never has
anything to do with the world. He has no books; he contemplates
spiritually." I picture my friend with her large limousine, a rolling
palace full of ladies, drawing up at the door of this hermit's cave.
"He received you?" I ask. "Yes, he was quite polite." "And what was
your impression of him?" "Oh, how he stank!" I answer that this is the
odor of sanctity, and my friend thinks that I am enormously witty; I
have to explain to her that I am not jesting, but that there are
definite physiological phenomena incidental to the ecstatic life.
#The Book of Mormon#
Or let us take a trip to Salt Lake City, the headquarters of a still
stranger cult.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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