A HOT-GOSPELLER

Dominion, Volume 22, Issue 53, 26 November 1928, Page 12

A HOT-GOSPELLER

AMERICA TRIES TO CONVERT LONDON

aimee mcpherson at the albert HALL

(By Nellie M. Scanlan.) Dominion Special Service.

London, October 12. Sister Aimee McPherson is easier to look at than to listen to. No film star, no stunt politician ever arrived with more effective publicity than heralded Sister Aimee McPherson, the “Hot-Gospeller” from California. While the Bishops of the Church of Englund, in earnest conference, were trying to heal its wounds and compose its differences, Sister Aimee McPherson descended upon London. She threatened to “drive the devil out of England in six weeks.” Tlie newspapers gave the Bishops a paragraph, while Aimee had a page.

This handsome, golden-haired woman is head of the “EUm Four-Squu.o Gospel Alliance,” in Los Angeles, where she has a million-dollar temple, a choir of sixty angel harpists (whiterobed girls), spotlight and amplifiers. The evangelist adroitly side-steps reference to inconvenient questions. When anyone stands up and asks an awkward question, the choir bursts into song. Mrs. McPherson is a magnetic personality. She seemed to hypnotise most of the newspaper men who inter-

viewed her. But the 10,000 people who waited long hours to hear her opening sermon in the Albert Hall were stone cold. It was a ghastly failure. England does not respond readily to religious stunts. When the Gospel story failed to stir them the first day, she tried her own love story next day, but tlie audience greeted this with a stony silence. The third day she tried humour. She was funny, truly funny, but still no converts came. Next day she tried bui’.fling an altar of chairs—each convert to come up and bring his or her chair. The altar was a failure, too. I remember, when in Washington, going to a meeting held in the ballroom of a big hotel by a Russian Prince, who had started a new religion, the Torch-bearers he called it. Tales of his marvellous oratory had stirred my curiosity. Men and women, strange men and women they seemed to me, were wandering round the hall. “Have you developed the consciousness?” they were asking each other. At least six asked me. Finally, I asked one woman how she got it. Then she explained that you only got it at the private sessions—“ They are only sixty dollars, and well worth the money.” Though her first meeting did not begin until 6 p.m., the earliest arrivals to hear Sister McPherson were at the Albert Hall soon after breakfast. The audience for Heifetz’s recital had a hard task to fight its way through the crowds at 3 p.m. At 4.30, when I arrived, the entire building was surrounded, and queues ten-deep, twisted across tlie courtyards and along neighbouring footpaths like great pythons, controlled by mounted and foot police. Who were they? Everybody. Curiosity had been thoroughly aroused. Actors, film stars, theatrical managers, society men and women, people of heavy-ton-nage titles, men on sticks, women on crutches, middle age, middle class, youths and girls, whole families, East End, West End, town and country. Never before has such a mixed audience been assembled inside the vast Albert Hall, nor waited in queues outside. The hall was packed. Thousands were turned away; thousands waited outside, hopeful to get a vacated seat. At 6 o’clock a choir of Four-Square Gospellers started a perfect riot of

hymns, cheerful, jaunty hymns, withi plenty of pep, and a dash of jazz. A strident American male voice cama through the amplifiers, leading the hymns. . “Hymn 31 . . . no, once again, all together ... tlie last verse . . . now sisters only will sing . . . now everybody.” . It is a turn used successfully ill vaudeville, getting the audience tq* join in the chorus. Nearly an hour passed in a vain effort to beat up some warmth and enthusiasm before Sister McPherson appeared. Her golden hair was elaborately curled, and her white satin frock: bore a badge on the breast, a 4 on aj cross, embroidered in blue. From her shoulders hung a full cape of black satin, lined with white, which, when her arms were outstretched, had the appearance of wings. She said a few words —hearty American words: “I am vurry, vurry happy to be here, friends.” More hymns, then the collection. The crowd . was getting impatient. The collection was taken up most thoroughly in ironbound bags. This was not game of “put and take.” The iron grip enabled . you to put, but not take.

We were urged to say “Amen.” We were told to shout “Hallelujah 1” We were ordered to put up our hands, *to close our eyes, to bow our heads. We did nothing of the kind. When finally she asked everyone to “put on your best Sunday Christian smile, and shake hands with the three people nearest to you and say “God bless you,’ ” I found the rows of aloof Englishmen and women around me wearing that “Don’t you dare” expression. England does not encourage these spontaneous familiarities. Irritation grew to desperation, when a little man with a nasal voice sang another long, loug hymn, all alone. The cry “Ambulance!” for a fainting woman cheered the crowd a little. It was a diversion. . At last, after nearly an hour and a half of hymns and exhortations, the Hot-Gospeller, as she is called, began to preach. A hundred ’ reporters sat at little tables in front of her; a battery of cameras faced her; her sermon was punctuated with flashes, as the photographers took her in some new pose. Sister McPherson is undoubtedly handsome, well dressed, a fluent speaker, and, of course, one does not like to challenge the sincerity of anyone’s faith. But she is not convincing. Of her claim to a gift of tongues, her gift of healing, we saw nothing. What we heard you can hear any night from the Salvation Army on the street corner—at its best; the rest was musichall stunt Yet her coming had obscured all else. She was the subject of conversation in back alleys, in Mayfair, in night clubs. 1 She had come to drive the devil out of England. Whatever may liecompliish that, it will certainly not be an American religious stunt. Nor will she find it as profitable as in California. Even the big crowd at her opening sermon yielded up only £BO, and the Albert Hall costs £2OO a night

Those who have read “Elmer Gantry,” the Sinclair Lewis book which deals with these revivals, will understand how foreign such demonstrations are to the restrained English, the sophisticated Londoner. The state of “spiritual ecstasy” which leaves the congregation trembling like palsy, and down on their hands and knees, barking like dogs, is not easily generated in that critical, arctic atmosphere, the Albert Hall.