Many of these great religious enterprises, indeed, soon
lost all save the faintest flavour of devotion--for example, the Y. M.
C. A., which is now no more than a sort of national club system, with
its doors open to any one not palpably felonious. (I have drunk
cocktails in Y. M. C. A. lamaseries, and helped fallen lamas to bed.)
But while the war upon godlessness thus degenerated into a secular sport
in one direction, it maintained all its pristine quality, and even took
on a new ferocity in another direction. Here it was that the lamp of
American Puritanism kept on burning; here, it was, indeed, that the lamp
became converted into a huge bonfire, or rather a blast-furnace, with
flames mounting to the very heavens, and sinners stacked like cordwood
at the hand of an eager black gang. In brief, the new will to power,
working in the true Puritan as in the mere religious sportsman,
stimulated him to a campaign of repression and punishment perhaps
unequalled in the history of the world, and developed an art of militant
morality as complex in technique and as rich in professors as the elder
art of iniquity.
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