“All who want to go to Heaven stand up!”
Naturally, everybody stood up. He told them to sit down; they obeyed, for he held them in the hollow of his hand.
“All Christians stand up!”
Everybody stood up except my sister, and as I think things over after the lapse of years I know that was what first caused me to suspect that she was, and is, a remarkably intelligent woman. She said afterward that she resented Brother McConnell’s holier-than-thou attitude, and thought he was an old windbag. She could not swallow his repeated assertion that he was a representative of God, and that the Lord had sent him to gather Farmington into the fold. She had, better than anyone else there, control over her emotions; she could not be stampeded. But for several years thereafter she was the target of a great deal of missionary zeal; even the Catholics tried their hands with her after it had become obvious that she would not subscribe to the beliefs of the Methodists, but all of it was unsuccessful. They could not feaze her even when they pointed her out as “that Asbury girl who wouldn’t say she was a Christian.”
Half the men and women in the church were sobbing while the band played, the choir sang its dismal tunes and Brother McConnell swayed back and forth in the pulpit and pleaded with them to get right with God and confess their sins.
“Oh, Brothers, come to Jesus!” he cried. “Let God enter your heart this night! Give your heart to Jesus!”
At the beginning of the moaning and groaning the Brothers and Sisters who were to act as procurers for the Lord scattered over the church, and as the services went on they picked out the ones who seemed to be most upset emotionally and therefore ripest for glory. They hung over these poor creatures, sniveling down their necks, exulting in their misery, exhorting them to march down the aisle and see God. These Brothers and Sisters, of course, had been converted many years before and were O.K. with the Lord.
“Oh, Brother!” they pleaded. “Come to glory! Give your heart to Jesus! Jesus died that you might be saved! He died on the cross for you! Brother, come to Jesus!”
And so on ad nauseam, with their continual repetition of Jesus and glory, glory and Jesus. There was no attempt at sensible argument, no effort to show the prospective converts that the Christian religion was better than the Mohammedan religion or the religion of Zoroaster; there was nothing but a continual hammering at emotional weaknesses. And finally the bewildered brains of the victims sagged under the strain and they stumbled into the aisles and were hauled and shoved and pushed down to the mourners’ bench, and presumably into the presence of God as embodied in His earthly representative, Brother Lincoln McConnell.