His fame increased with the ardour of his faith. Suspicion was disarmed, and great and small paid him homage. Out of touch as he was with modern thought, and reading nothing but the prophets, he attained to a condition of ecstasy which at last led him to announce that he was Christ come down from heaven to save his fellow-men. Having lived so long on the footing of a son of God, he now was convinced of his direct descent, and his hearers going still further, were filled with expectation of some great event which should astonish all unbelievers.
Under the influence of this general excitement he proceeded to undergo a forty days' fast. He announced this to his followers, who flocked to see the miracle, preceded by the inevitable reporters; and while fasting he still continued to heal the sick and give them his blessing, attracting ever greater crowds by his haggard visage and his atmosphere of religious exaltation.
Then, having spent forty days and forty nights in this manner, he sat down at table to replenish his enfeebled forces, and the beholders gave voice to enthusiastic expressions of faith in his divine mission.
But the famished Schlatter attacked the food laid before him with an ardour that had in it nothing of the divine. The onlookers became uneasy, and one of them went so far as to suggest that his health might suffer from this abrupt transition.
"Have faith," replied Schlatter. "The Father who has permitted me to live without nourishment for forty days, will not cease to watch over His Son."
The town of Denver formed a little world apart. Miracles were in the air, faith was the only subject of conversation, and everyone dreamed of celestial joys and the grace of salvation. In this supernatural atmosphere distinctions between the possible and the impossible were lost sight of, and the inhabitants believed that the usual order of nature had been overthrown.
For instance, James Eckman of Leadville, who had been blinded by an explosion, recovered his sight immediately he arrived at Denver. General Test declared that he had seen a legless cripple walk when the saint's gaze was bent upon him. A blind engineer named Stainthorp became able to see daylight. A man named Dillon, bent and crippled by an illness several decades before, recovered instantaneously. When the saint touched him, he felt a warmth throughout his whole body; his fingers, which he had not been able to use for years, suddenly straightened themselves; he was conscious of a sensation of inexpressible rapture, and rose up full of faith and joy. A man named Welsh, of Colorado Springs, had a paralysed right hand which was immediately cured when Schlatter touched it.
All New Mexico rejoiced in the heavenly blessing that had fallen upon Denver. Special trains disgorged thousands of travellers, who were caught up in the wave of religious enthusiasm directly they arrived. The whole town was flooded with a sort of exaltation, and there was a recrudescence of childishly superstitious beliefs, which broke out with all the spontaneity and vigour that usually characterises the manifestation of popular religious phenomena.
What would have been the end of it if Schlatter had not so decisively and inexplicably disappeared?
It would be difficult to conceive of anything more extraordinary than the exploits of this modern saint, which came near to revolutionising the whole religious life of the New World. The fact that they took place against a modern background, with the aid of newspaper interviews and special trains, gives them a peculiar cachet. Indeed, the spectacle of such child-like faith, allied to all the excesses of civilisation, and backed up by the ground-work of prejudices from which man has as yet by no means freed himself, is one to provide considerable food for reflection for those who study the psychology of crowds in general, and of religious mania in particular.