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Of all the people Bunny knew, it appeared just now that only one was perfectly successful and completely happy, and that was Eli Watkins, prophet of the Third Revelation. For the Lord had carried out to the letter the promise revealed to the runners of the Bible Marathon; he had caused a great banker, Mark Eisenberg, who ran the financial affairs of Angel City, to reflect upon the importance of Eli’s political influence, and to put up a good part of the money for the new tabernacle. Now the structure was completed, and was opened amid such glory to the Lord as had never been witnessed in this part of the world.
Southern California is populated for the most part by retired farmers from the middle west, who have come out to die amid sunshine and flowers. Of course they want to die happy, and with the assurance of sunshine and flowers beyond; so Angel City is the home of more weird cults and doctrines—you couldn’t form any conception of it till you came to investigate. To run your eye over the pages of performances advertised in the Sunday newspapers would cause you to burst into laughter or tears, according to your temperament. Wherever three or more were gathered together in the name of Jesus or Buddha or Zoroaster, or Truth or Light or Love, or New Thought or Spiritualism or Psychic Science—there was the beginning of a new revelation, with mystical, inner states of bliss and esoteric ways of salvation.
Eli had advantages over most of these spiritual founders. In the first place, he had been a real shepherd of flocks and herds, and there are age-old traditions attaching to this profession. Also it was symbolically useful; what Eli had done to the goats he was now doing to the human goats of Angel City, gathering them into the fold and guarding them from the cruel wolf Satan. He had taken to carrying a shepherd’s crook on the platform, and with his white robes and the star shining in his yellow hair, he would call the flocks, just as he had done upon the hills, and when he passed the collection plate, they would do the shearing of themselves.
Eli possessed a sense of drama and turned it loose in the devising of primitive little tableaux and pageants, which gave rapture to his simple minded followers. When he told how he had been tempted of the devil, the wicked One came upon the scene, hoofs, horns and tail, and with a red spotlight on him; when Eli lifted up the cross on high, the devil would fall and strike his forehead on the ground, and the silver trumpets would peal, and the followers would burst into loud hosannas. Or perhaps it would be the command, “Suffer little children to come unto me”; there would be hundreds of children, all robed in white, and when Eli lifted his shepherd’s crook and called, they came storming to the platform, their fresh young voices shouting, “Praise the Lord!” And of course there was the regular mourners’ bench, and the baptisms in the marble tank. You were never allowed to forget that you had a soul, and that it was of supreme importance to you and to Jesus and that you were having it saved by Eli’s aid. You were always being called upon to do something—to stand up for the Lord, or to clap your hands for salvation, or to raise your right hand if you were a new-comer to the tabernacle.
But the great advantage Eli had over the other prophets was the pair of leathern bellows he had developed out on the hills of Paradise. Never was there such an electrifying voice, and never one that could keep going so long. All day Sunday it bellowed and boomed—morning, afternoon, evening; there were week-day services every evening but Saturday, and in the mornings and afternoons there were prayer meetings and Bible schools and services of song and healing blessings and baptismal ceremonials and thank offerings and wholesale weddings and Bride of the Lamb dedications—you just couldn’t keep track of all that was going on in the many rooms and meeting-halls of this half million dollar tabernacle.
Science had just completed a marvelous invention; the human voice became magnified a hundred million-fold, it could be spread over the whole earth. The population of America had gone wild over radio, and everybody had rushed to get a set. The first great public use made of this achievement in Angel City was to open a new three million dollar hotel for the pleasure of the very rich, and the opening ceremonies were broadcasted, and the newspapers were full of the wonder of it; but it proved to be dreadful, because everybody in the hotel got drunk, and the manager of the institution placed himself in front of the microphone and poured out a stream of obscenities such as farmers’ wives from Iowa had never dreamed in all their lives. So it was felt that the new invention needed to be sanctified and redeemed, and Eli proceeded to install one of the biggest and most powerful broadcasting stations. Through the Lord’s mercy, his words were heard over four million square miles, and it was worthwhile to preach to audiences of that size, praise Jesus!
Eli’s preaching had thus become one of the major features of Southern California life. You literally couldn’t get away from him if you tried. Dad had been told by his doctor that he needed more exercise, and he had taken to walking for half an hour before dinner; he declared that he listened to Eli’s sermons on all these walks, and never missed a single word! Everybody’s house was wide open in this warm spring weather, and all you had to do was to choose a neighborhood where the moderately poor lived—and 90 percent of the people were that. You would hear the familiar bellowing voice, and before you got out of range of it, you would come in range of another radio set, and so you would be relayed from street to street and from district to district! In these houses sat old couples with family bibles in their hands and tears of rapture in their eyes; or perhaps a mother washing her baby’s clothes or making a pudding for her husband’s supper—and all the time her soul caught up to glory on the wings of the mighty prophet’s eloquence! And Dad walking outside, also exalted—because, don’t forget that he was the man who had started this Third Revelation—he had invented all its patter, that day he had tried to keep old Abel Watkins from beating his daughter Ruth!