THE LIFE-LINE

He preaches, he prays, he saves, and in the midst of thousands recruited from all levels, he sends forth his message of light. His life reads like fiction, for he has adventured upon every field aside from the platform. Gipsy Smith, "the world's best known evangelist" packs the Boston Garden, packs the Tremont Temple.

Eighteen thousand people can't be wrong. His is an adventure that has fast become obscured by dogmatic controversy. If one can appear in the midst of a warfare of creeds, rituals, and symbols, bringing a sincere fascination to a body of listeners, many of whom are incurious to investigate the intricacies of twentieth century faith,--if this is true, then at least a vestige of imagination and idealism prevails.

With shifting standards, with biographies professing to plumb the true nature of certain familiar heroes, there have been few figures left to epitomize the standard virtues. In the intense fervor of the present day writers to make realism vivid in its bloodiest detail, a little old-fashioned evangelism is, strangely enough, valuable if not essential. And if this evangelism can be made free of mysticism and endowed with the sincerity of a commanding personality, it supplies, despite its glamor of notoriety, an anchor-stone to many drifters on the modern sea of social and economic uncertainty.