making his first campaigns in the country districts will recall the figure of the slender youth with the Grecian profile and the fair hair who used to stand there under the flaring light and speak of fundamental democracy. They, or those of them who were accessible to such impressions, caught something of the spirit of youthful idealism that was in the young man; if they did not, his presence and personality gave them reassurance, for attendance on one of Tom Johnson's meetings in those days was, in Ohio, an enterprise to impart the thrill of a spicy and dangerous adventure. Time flies, and time has flown fast in this last decade, and the political ideas that Herbert S. Bigelow was helping Tom Johnson to disseminate, though they were flouted and scorned then as heretical, insane, and wicked, have since become, by the inevitable and monotonous operation of the universal law of progress, conventional, respectable, orthodox, and popular.
Herbert Bigelow was then not many years out of Lane Theological Seminary—strange spectacle in Ohio, that of a minister addressing Democratic meetings!—and he was pastor of the Vine Street Congregational Church, in Cincinnati. Vine Street Congregational Church was in itself an instance of the operation of the old law. Before the Civil War it was a hotbed of abolition when abolition was unpopular and unorthodox even in Ohio, though everybody in Ohio is an abolitionist to-day, and, if he is old enough, claims to have been so then. But after the war the Vine Street Church became respectable, with a cold and formal atmosphere of black walnut and musty cushions of a magenta shade, and when Herbert Bigelow began to preach a somewhat too literal application of the social ethics of Jesus, not to Hankow or Kordofan, but to Cincinnati, there was a disconcerting rustle in the pews, the tendency of that doctrine being to decrease the revenues of the church in an inverse ratio to the increase in the number of human beings in the congregation.
It is an interesting story, not to be told here in detail, of how Herbert Bigelow struggled, of how they tried to get him out of his pulpit, and of how he worked for a long time without salary, until Daniel Kiefer devised means of financing the institution, so that it lost its ecclesiastical atmosphere, became a People's Church or forum for free speech, and moved into a theater where radicals preach their various and conflicting heresies on Sunday afternoons, after moving pictures have illustrated the progress of the species.
