Another of our Brothers, a very prominent member of one of our Protestant churches, kept a store in the business district not far from the Court House. He was waiting on a customer the day that the first woman to ride astride in our town cantered down Columbia Street, and his performance was a town scandal for many years. He caught a glimpse of the girl through the window, and he abandoned his customer and rushed to the street, in company with half the county officials who had been dozing with their feet on their desks, and all of the town loafers. The Brother followed her for several blocks, missing no detail of her costume, which was rather bizarre and daring for those days, and then he went back to his store and his customer.
He stood for a while wrapped in contemplation.
“She was riding like a man!” he said. “Her legs—her legs——”
My experiences in these matters, of course, were principally with Preachers and Brothers, but I had occasional contacts with the Sisters. They, too, described God and Heaven, but they did not conceive God as being quite so old and feeble as the Being worshipped by the Brothers, and for the most part they populated Heaven with handsome, stalwart young men, presumably virgins. I recall one exceedingly devout Sister who expressed the belief that there were no female angels in Heaven, and I have heard her praying with extraordinary fervor to God, in effect, to make an exception in her case. Whether she was justified in this optimistic opinion of herself I never knew, but I assume that she and the other Sisters, in their discussion of the virginity of angels, experienced the same sort of vicarious pleasure that seemed to mean so much to the Preachers and the Brothers.
7
I did not go to many camp meetings; ours was not a camp-meeting country. We went in more for protracted meetings, and for the stirring revivals of professional evangelists, held in comfortable church buildings. Usually I went to camp meeting only because some girl in whom I was interested had to go. But they were very popular with a certain type of young man about Farmington, who knew that religious emotion is very akin to secular emotion; the line of demarcation is very thin, and most men who have been around religious women very much know that one emotion can quickly be transformed into the other. Young girls are much easier prey after they have been overwhelmed by religion, their nerves upset and their brains whirling with emotion, and they are then easily persuaded that the Lord will forgive, even though His earthly agents will not. Of course such a statement could not be proven, but it is quite likely that more seductions have occurred at camp meetings, and en route to and from them, than on all the front porches and lawn swings that were ever manufactured, although in Farmington for many years a lawn swing was regarded as a lure of Hell. Even while the service was in progress the buggies around the meeting tent were filled with men and women petting, or, as we called it then, spooning.
Strange things happened at these camp meetings, and at the other gatherings as well, when a forthright religionist saw the light. At one such holy conclave an old woman, for many years a thorn in the flesh of the godly, suddenly bounced to her feet and shouted:
“Praise the Lord! My corn hurts! Praise the Lord!”
And this, because it embodied physical suffering and a great deal of mental torture as well, was accepted as an infallible sign that God had at last entered her soul. She had been converted, and all the rest of her life she was a prying, sanctimonious old pest. She used to stop me on the street and inquire as to the condition of my soul, and ask me whether I said my prayers at night, and whether I read the Bible, and she would grab me by the arm and pinch me and demand the Golden Text of the last Sunday-school lesson. And if by any chance I had forgotten or did not know, she scolded me and predicted dire things for me in the life to come. Incidentally, she knew all about the life to come; it seems that God had appeared to her in a vision, and had described Heaven to her.
At all of these meetings extraordinary efforts were made to ensnare the children and convert them to Christianity; the workers for the Lord were not at all concerned with the fact that the children did not know what it was all about, that they had no opportunity to choose their own religion, and with the further and obvious fact that they succumbed to nothing but fright and a great surge of emotion. That method persists. The Church still obtains its converts by noise and appeals to primitive emotion, and by threats, rather than by intelligently implanting a true and deep-seated conception of God and the heavenly wonders. But to the religionists a convert is a convert, no matter how obtained; I have known boys to be thrashed because they would not profess religion.