I have no sympathy with all this "saving" business. It's a cowardly selfish religion that makes people so anxious about their tuppence-ha'penny souls. When I think of all the illiterate lay preachers I have listened to I feel like little Willie at the Sunday School.
"Hands up all those who would like to go to Heaven!" said the teacher. Willie alone did not put his hand up.
"What! Mean to tell me, Willie, that you don't want to go to Heaven?"
Willie jerked a contemptuous thumb towards the others.
"No bloomin' fear," he muttered, "not if that crowd's goin'."
Shelley says that "most wretched men are cradled into poetry through wrong." I think that most wretched preachers are cradled into preaching through conceit. It is thrilling to have an audience hang upon your words; we all like the limelight. Usually we have to master a stiff part before we can face the audience. Preaching needs no preparation, no thinking, no merit; all you do is to stand up and say: "Deara friendsa, when I was in the jimmynasium at Peebles, a fellow lodger of mine blasphemeda. From that daya, deara friendsa, that son of the devila nevera prospereda. O, friendsa! If you could only looka into your evila heartsa...."
I note that when Revivalists come to a village the so-called village lunatic is always among the first to give his testimony. Willie Baffers has been whistling Life, Life, Eternal Life all the week, but I was glad to note that he was back to Stop yer Ticklin', Jock, to-night.
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I have introduced two new text-books—Secret Remedies, and More Secret Remedies. These books are published by the British Medical Association at a shilling each, and they give the ingredients and cost of popular patent medicines.
These books should be in every school. Everyone should know the truth about these medicines, and unless our schools tell the truth, the public will never know it. No daily newspaper would think of giving the truth, for the average daily is kept alive by patent medicine advertisements.