His
enthusiasm was not for repentance, but for what he began to call
service. In brief, the national sense of energy and fitness gradually
superimposed itself upon the national Puritanism, and from that marriage
sprung a keen _Wille zur Macht_, a lusty will to power.[42] The American
Puritan, by now, was not content with the rescue of his own soul; he
felt an irresistible impulse to hand salvation on, to disperse and
multiply it, to ram it down reluctant throats, to make it free,
universal and compulsory. He had the men, he had the guns and he had the
money too. All that was needed was organization. The rescue of the
unsaved could be converted into a wholesale business, unsentimentally
and economically conducted, and with all the usual aids to efficiency,
from skilful sales management to seductive advertising, and from
rigorous accounting to the diligent shutting off of competition.
Out of that new will to power came many enterprises more or less futile
and harmless, with the "institutional" church at their head. Piety was
cunningly disguised as basketball, billiards and squash; the sinner was
lured to grace with Turkish baths, lectures on foreign travel, and free
instructions in stenography, rhetoric and double-entry book-keeping.
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