Page:Why I am an infidel.pdf/14

 And for many days thereafter, the furore, drawing fuel into the vortex with tentacles that encircled the earth, continued unabated. Rather was it marked with increased intensity, for many things were happening after that first interview was published.

But through all the fury and the flailing of a fetid atmosphere Burbank himself remained unperturbed. The Women's Christian Temperance Union in Santa Rosa, of which he was an honorary life member, held a meeting of prayer (which only ten women attended!) for the misguided scientist—a meeting that became not so much a time of prayer as an indignation council—yet Burbank refused either to have his soul saved or to recant. They could pillory him for the leering stares of a morbid public. They could burn him, figuratively, at the stake. They could unroll eternal thunder to peal out threats of everlasting damnation, but Burbank remained inflexible on his original platform.

From the outset the storm that blew so suddenly to rattle the holy eucharist became a battle of the dictionary.

Burbank had said he was an infidel. Self-constituted apologists, as represented by the newspapers that had missed the story and by zealous ecclesiastics, insisted at once that Burbank had been misunderstood, that he had meant agnostic or something else less offensively noxious than infidel. Churchmen and newspapermen invaded Burbank's home grounds in hordes, all apparently bent on the determination to substitute a less inflammatory word.