Nature has given us a virgin continent, a clean slate upon which
to write what we will. And what are we writing? What is our
intellectual life? I came to the far West, which I had been
taught by novelists and poets to think of as a place of freedom.
I came, because I like freedom; I am staying because I like the
climate. I find that what freedom means in the West is the
ability of ignorant and fanatical persons to start some new,
fantastical quirk of scriptural interpretation, to build a new
cult around it, and earn a living out of it.
My first contact with that sort of thing was when I went to the
Battle Creek Sanitarium to investigate hydrotherapy, and found
myself in a nest of Seventh-day Adventists. Three generations or
so ago some odd character hit upon the discovery that the
Christian churches had let the devil snare them into resting on
the first day of the week, whereas the Bible states distinctly
that the Lord "rested on the seventh day". So here is a million
dollar establishment, with a thousand or two patients and
employees, and on Friday at sundown the silence of death settles
upon the place, and stays settled until sundown of Saturday, when
everything comes suddenly to life again, and there is a little
celebration, like Easter or New Year's, with what I used to call
"sterilized dancing"--the men pairing with men and the women with
women.
They are decent and kindly people, and you learn to put up with
their eccentricities; it is really convenient in some ways,
because, as not all the city shares their delusions, there are
some stores open every day of the week. But then you discover
that the Sanitarium is training "medical missionaries" to send to
Africa, and is teaching these supposed-to-be-scientists that
evolution is a doctrine of the devil, and not proven anyhow!
You get the shrewd little doctor who is running this
establishment alone in his office, and he will smile and admit
that of course it is not necessary to take all Bible phrases
literally; but you know how it is--there are different levels of
intelligence, and so on. Yes, I know how it is. You have an
institution founded upon a certain dogma, and run by means of
that dogma, and it is hard to change without smashing things. It
is especially convenient when servants and nurses have a
religious upbringing, and do not steal the pocket-books of the
patients. People will come from all over the country, and pay
high prices to stay in such a sanitarium; you can make
vegetarians of them, which you think more important than teaching
abstract notions about their being descended from monkeys. Also
you can manufacture vegetarian foods for them, and build up an
enormous business--so obtaining that Power which is the thing
desired of men.
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.