auctioneer--the blandishments of the bookmaker--the sleek, smooth ways
of the professional spieler.

With this troupe of Christian clowns is one Chaeffer, who is a
specialist with children. He has meetings for boys and girls only, where
he plays tricks, grimaces, tells stories and gets his little hearers
laughing, and thus having found an entrance into their hearts, he
suddenly reverses the lever, and has them crying. He talks to these
little innocents about sin, the wrath of God, the death of Christ, and
offers them a choice between everlasting life and eternal death. To the
person who knows and loves children--who has studied the gentle ways of
Froebel--this excitement is vicious, concrete cruelty. Weakened vitality
follows close upon overwrought nerves, and every excess has its
penalty--the pendulum swings as far this way as it does that.

These reverend gentlemen bray it into the ears of innocent little
children that they were born in iniquity, and in sin did their mothers
conceive them; that the souls of all children over nine years (why
nine?) are lost, and the only way they can hope for heaven is through a
belief in a barbaric blood bamboozle, that men of intelligence have long
since discarded. And all this in the name of the gentle Christ, who took
little children in his arms and said, "Of such is the Kingdom
of Heaven."

This pagan proposition of being born in sin is pollution to the mind of
a child, and causes misery, unrest and heartache incomputable. A few
years ago we were congratulating ourselves that the devil at last was
dead, and that the tears of pity had put out the fires of hell, but the
serpent of superstition was only slightly scotched, not killed.