Even the enterprises that had come down from an elder and less expansive
day were pumped up and put on a Wall Street basis: the American Bible
Society, for example, began to give away Bibles by the million instead
of by the thousand, and the venerable Tract Society took on the feverish
ardour of a daily newspaper, even of a yellow journal. Down into our own
day this trustification of pious endeavour has gone on. The Men and
Religion Forward Movement proposed to convert the whole country by 12
o'clock noon of such and such a day; the Order of Gideons plans to make
every traveller read the Bible (American Revised Version!) whether he
will or not; in a score of cities there are committees of opulent
devotees who take half-pages in the newspapers, and advertise the
Decalogue and the Beatitudes as if they were commodities of trade.
Thus the national energy which created the Beef Trust and the Oil Trust
achieved equal marvels in the field of religious organization and by
exactly the same methods. One needs be no psychologist to perceive in
all this a good deal less actual religious zeal than mere lust for
staggering accomplishment, for empty bigness, for the unprecedented and
the prodigious.
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