The Modern Elijah.

Manawatu Herald, 21 May 1904, Page 3

The Modern Elijah.

Dr W. H. Fitchett is not an unkindly critic, and his sketch o£ Mr John Alexander Dowie must be taken as a fair estimate of the gentleman who has just flown Zionward from the inhospitable shores of the Commonwealth. This modern Elijah, he says, ia a little, bald-headed, obese map, with a crocked voice, no manners, and the foulest tongue outside Billingsgate. His pockets are full of money he has not earned, and be lives at the best hotels, feeding fat on the best he can buy. The ptfjture does not suggest much like-nesjiir-o the venerable prophet, but apparently it is justified by Mr Dowie’s description of himself. “ They say Zion is poor!” he shouted to one of his Melbourne audiences. “Why I stand hero representing twenty five million dollars. Do I look starved ? Why, 1 live like a turkey cock. Don’t I overseer?” “ I guess you do, sir,” promptly responded the American gentleman who accompanied him in his Australian travels. “ I have carriages and horses, proceeded Mr Dowie, “ I have mortgages, and I spend, how do I spend ! Spend! Don’t I spend, overseer?” “I guess you do just spend,’again assented the American gentleman. Talk like this naturally refreshed the memories of some of Mr Dowie’s forgotten creditors, and in Melbourne and Adelaide these disagreeable people actually had the audacity to present their little bills. “ Elijah,” it seems, has been so busy improving the morality of the United States that he has quite omitted the homely virtue of paying his debts in Australia. “It is somewhat disconcerting,” Dr Fitchett says, “ for a prophet who is accusing one audience after another of being mere gangs of thieves, to be suddenly required to pay his own debts with compound interest; but this is only one element of unconscious humour in the comedy of Mr Dowie’s career.” But there wan be no doubt that this strange man does exercise some mysterious influence over a large number of people. Long before be made his appearance in Australia, to be ridiculed out of the country by an unsympathetic public, scores of people in this country were subscribing in one way or another to his work in America. His particular brand of faith healing probably has some real virtue at its base, and it requires only one or two apparent cures to secure any quack a multitude of patients. His manners, at anyrate, cannot have contributed much to his success. In Australia he called his audiences “ dogs,” “ thieves,” “ stinkpots ” and many other disreputable things, and appeared surprised when they did not fall down and worship at his shrine. He is probably carrying a terrible account of their iniquities to bis friends in “Zion."