It is not, perhaps, a remarkable fact that a good deal of that talk should have been concerned with the woes of Negroes. Well, and if Neil had heard a good deal of it before, he had also repeatedly heard everything that Mr. Prutt and Mr. Denver had to say about the woes of bankers and Rod Aldwick about the woes of serious lawyers and duck-hunters.

The liveliest topic tonight was the Reverend Dr. Jat Snood, who was probably the nastiest piece of goods in Grand Republic.

With the drifting of the great denominations, the Methodists and Baptists and Presbyterians, from moaning and hallelujahs to indirectly-lighted Gothic and pulpit book-reviews, the job-tortured masses in America had dribbled into new churches which promised that they should have salvation if they could not have larger paychecks, and which encouraged them to howl publicly at the Devil, the Pope, and Wall Street, in recompense for not daring to howl publicly at the Boss. In lofts and empty store-buildings there had been organized such wondrous new creeds as The Church of God in Christ Through Bible Salvation, and The Assembly of the Divinely Appointed Saints, which signified ten tired men and women, eight hymn-books, and four benches.

With true American enterprise, spiritual leaders who in less cultivated days would have been Indian-medicine showmen or itinerant lady milliners had seen that they could make a tidy living by appointing themselves ministers or even bishops, renting a hall and setting up a church, with no annoying work except yelling loud and mourning low, and taking up three collections at every meeting.

Among these latter-day Barnums in Grand Republic was one Jat Snood, who had not finished high school but who was a Doctor of Divinity. He was the owner and chief ballyhooer of a vast shed down on South Champlain Avenue and East Winchell Street, in the South End, and he had romantically named it “God’s Prophecy Tabernacle: Founded on the Book: Christ for All and All for Christ.”

It is true that the Reverend Doctor had never been able to stay in any one town for more than five years, because he knew only fifteen sermons and fifty vaudeville tricks, and even his faded and gnarled and gum-chewing audiences got sick of him. But while it lasted, he did very well financially, because he titillated his crowds with ginger and hell-fire and made Swedish hired girls and German grocery-clerks and Yankee linemen feel that if they could not meet Hiram Sparrock at the Federal Club, they could meet God and His angels and the souls of the elect at God’s Prophecy Tabernacle: contributions voluntary (but frequent). Jat screamed at them, in high-toned polysyllables flavored with jazz and slang, that if they were ill-used by the snobs among the Old Americans, still they could be snobs themselves, and he invited them to look down, contemptuously, upon all Jews, Negroes, Catholics, and Socialists.