Preaching in New York

[THE kindness with which the readers of the Atlantic Monthly received a few pages from a diary of Preaching in London, has encouraged the writer to hope that they may be willing to share some of his impressions and experiences of New York, of which Americans know almost as little as they know of London. Returning from the City Temple in November, 1919, he began his work as minister of the Church of the Divine Paternity, New York, on the first Sunday in December; and the following diary, taking up the tale where the London diary left off, covers two years, made the more interesting by the new, strange, and almost terrifying America which he discovered on his return.

The New York of to-day is unique, peculiar, puzzling, — bewildering even to its own people, — incredibly provincial for all its cosmopolitanism; no longer the ’little Old New York,’ when Delmonico’s was on Broadway, and Tiffany’s looked out on the fountains in Union Square, and a Daly first-night was like a large family party. It is a vast, farspreading human encampment of many races; a gigantic medley of wealth and want, of palaces of pleasure and hovels of poverty; an apocalypse of America at its brilliant best and worst; at once a problem, a prophecy, and a challenge.

No doubt old New Yorkers will smile at more than one entry in this diary; but they must remember that the writer had not known our chief city before, save as a tourist and casual visitor, and that is hardly to know it at all. These impressions, observations, and reflections, such as they are, may have a certain interest, if not as interpretations, at least as a series of pictures of men and women and things.]

November 14, 1919. — Farewell, England! How lovely it looked to-day, as we rode down from London to Southampton — like a huge park, neat and well-kept; its red brick houses half-hidden by vines; a soft haze hanging over the scene, like the mist of temperament in the hearts of its people. What a wonderful people! From the battle of the Somme, well-nigh four years gone by, until to-day, I have walked with them in the Valley of Shadow; and I know of what fibre they are made. I have seen the soul of England, — quiet, heroic, incredibly courageous, unconquerably cheery, its valor brightest when the day was darkest, — and to the end of my days I shall walk more reverently because of that vision. Shadows still hang over this lovely land, like frayed clouds after a storm; but they will lift and melt away, and the story of those bitter years will become a part of the sad annals of the world. Pray God this Island Home, so beloved by a might nice, may never again be wreathed by clouds of war!

November 16. — What shall we do, and how can we do it? In Russia they have turned the world upside down, and the stokers are on top. Rut revolution never rises above the spiritual level of those who make it. Tolstoy thought that all of us ought to take our turn at stoking; and there may be something in the idea, though his example came to little. Carlyle was sure that humanity must at last stumble across the line between Nonsense and Common Sense. But common sense is not enough. We live in a common-sense world, and it looks like a Devil’s Kitchen. Something more divine, more daring, than common sense is needed, if we are to have common sense. Jesus was right, and all the facts confirm his vision: Brotherhood is the fourth dimension! So one dreams, sailing on a gray, fluffy sea from the land of day before yesterday to the land of the day after to-morrow!

November 20. — The news is that the Senate has rejected the Treaty of Peace. No wonder; it is a monstrosity — a league of idealism and a treaty of imperialism, each making the other null. Alas, one fears that the Senate rejected the idealism more emphatically than it did the imperialism. One is not surprised that Mark Twain wanted to meet the Devil, ‘ if only to see a person who for untold centuries has been the spiritual head of four fifths of the human race and political head of the whole of it, and must have executive ability of the highest order.’ At Paris he acted as president of ‘the heaven-and-hell amalgamation society,’ and his feat was nothing short of a masterpiece.

It reminds one of Joseph Parker and his famous sermon on ‘God and the Experts.’ When he told a group of young ministers what was to be the subject of his sermon, he dared them to guess what his text would be. They tried valiantly, but failed. Nor did they find out until he mounted the high pulpit and announced the words, ‘The stone which the builders refused is become the head stone of the corner.’ Then, after a dramatic pause, he thundered: ‘The builders! The men who know all about stones!’ Again, at Paris, the experts, — the statesmen who know all about states, and carry their pockets full of provinces, — having rejected the comer stone, have built a house that cannot stand.

What different views one hears in the hum of talk on board this miniature world. Most foreigners are puzzled, not knowing what to make of it all. Americans are depressed or elated, according to party. My British friends are irritatingly serene. Every one of them ought to be in an asylum for the hopelessly sane. They never lose their heads. Of course, they miss a lot of fun by not going crazy occasionally, as we do in America; but if they could be distributed over the earth in right proportion, they would keep the whole world from going mad.

November 23. — As we near America, all its history and legend throbs in my heart, vivid and thrilling, like a sweet habit of the blood. The very air is different, as if the spirit of home has run out to meet us on a lonely sea. Yet these years of tragedy have left in me a great veneration for the land whence our fathers came, and for its people. In America they are sure to be saying ugly things about England, as in England they said nasty things about America; and I shall be hurt both ways. It is plain that I am in for a hot time from now on, like a man torn between his wife and his mother, both of whom are adepts at snippy gossip.

November 24. — Slowly our good ship crept through the gray mists of a late autumn morning, passing Lady Liberty to whom a British friend took off his hat, saying that She ought to stand with her back to a land of Prohibition — ashamed! Then, dimly at first, we saw the wonderland of the city, rising sheer from the level of the water, half-fantastic in its airy lightness, like a range of fairy mountains — only the sky line was broken with more precision than in the wild architecture of nature. Above all towered a peak which might be Matterhorn, which they told Cardinal Mercier was the spire of the ‘Church of St. Woolworth.’ The Cardinal, it is said, looked dazed, not remembering any such Saint in the calendar, but ready for any new adventure that might befall him in America. And so, home at last!

It is bewildering to pass quickly from Old London Town, with its time-stained buildings and its whity-brown atmosphere, into the brilliant streets of New York, with its newness, its youthfulness, its lucid sunlight in which everything stands out distinctly, and where the air is like champagne. Still more disconcerting is the difference in psychological climate. One is all repression, the other all expression. ‘Hush! It is so rude, don’t you know ’ — that is England. ‘Hello! Hurrah! Where do we go from here?’ — that is America, the land of talk, where people tell all they know and live with the blinds up. Meanwhile, the first letter I opened, from a great editor in the Middle West, was not very encouraging: —

Why stop in New York, if you object to living in a foreign city? It is a meaningless conglomeration of humanity, swept together from the ends of the earth; an unhealthy coating on a stone tongue in the mouth of the Hudson — a wart on the nose of civilization. Its architecture, like its confusion of tongues, has the Tower of Babel backed off the map. The Jews own it, the Irish run it, the Americans visit it in rubberneck wagons. It is bounded on the east by Blackwell’s Island, on the south by Wall Street, on the west by Greenwich Village, on the north by Babe Ruth and the Polo Grounds. Its business is chasing the dollar, its diversion the leg-show, its political symbol a Tiger. When you land, buy a ticket to America!

November 30. — Went to hear Dr. Kelman, at the Fifth Avenue Presbyterian Church, where he has just begun his ministry. It looked like a City Temple congregation, and I wondered if the preacher felt an atmosphere different from a Scottish church. He seemed restrained, as if hesitating to let himself go. I know the feeling. I had the same sense of strangeness the first six months at the City Temple, until one of the deacons said to me, with a smile, ‘Quit that pussyfooting, like a cat in a strange garret.’ Dr. Kelman begins his ministry in an evil hour of rancor and reaction; but he will win through, as much by the genuineness of his manhood, as by his genius as a preacher. The first Sunday he was here a little child was run over by a car near the John Hall Mission, and he was soon knocking at the door of that beshadowed home. Such things mean more than much eloquence. Someone called Dr. Kelman a preacher of ‘the middle register’; it may be so, but he took our minds to church. There was no flowery emptiness, no pious pap. The sermon had the ring of reality, as of a man looking straight at the truth and telling it simply and vividly, in a style both noble and chaste, without sacrificing either candor or restraint. All the way through, I seemed to be listening to an old Greek who had seen Jesus in Galilee and Judea, and had journeyed to America by way of the land of Bunyan and Stevenson, of whom he has written with such fine interpretative insight. Long may he labor among us!

December 10. — There is something new in American life, which I feel everywhere but find it hard to understand — a wild, shuddering fear, half-hysterical in its panic. When I ask what it means, I am told that we have been sleeping over a volcano, and that it is a fiftyfifty chance of saving our institutions. What nonsense! Our people do not trust one another, and speak in a whisper. When I tell of the freedom of speech in England, I am assured that it will never do here. The melting-pot does not melt; and after fifty years of immigration we are still a heterogeneous people, with every European race and rancor represented. Free speech may be possible in England, my friends argue, where everybody knows every twist of the public mind; but it is different when an Irish Catholic policeman has to listen to an at heist Russian Jew on a soap-box at the street comer. Yet I have seen a London ‘Bobbie’ keeping order in Hyde Park, while a Red Russian anarchist spoke his piece.

No, it is all wrong. No doubt there are undigested foreign groups in America, — chiefly in our cities, —but repression is a poor aid to digestion. If our people do not understand their new neighbors, it is high time they made their acquaintance. Wholesome fear is stimulating, but this paralyzing terror is absurd.

December 21. — To-day the Buford sailed, with two hundred and fifty alien radicals, deported on charge of being anarchists; one of them was a boy eighteen — what harm has he done America? It is the war-mind gone mad, running down Reds as of old men hunted witches; but what strikes one is the absurdity of it all — like calling out the heavy artillery to bombard mosquitoes. At the same time, one hears the most rabid abuse of the President, which does more injury to our institutions than all the Reds in Redland. If there is evil propaganda among us, surely it is to be met by propaganda of the right kind. America has more to fear from the blind rage of mob-mindedness than from all the agitators. No one can really injure America but Americans; and they are in a fair way to do it by a terror-stricken intolerance to-day, followed by indifferent negligence to-morrow. Only about half of our people ever vote!

January 10. — By happy accident ran into Edwin Markham at the Club to-day. Had not seen him since five Years ago, when we waylaid him on his flight from the Far West, and detained him for three snowy days in Iowa. Whatever the weather, it is always springtime in his climate. If white winter has settled on his good gray head, it is because the summer has gone to his heart, where there is always bloom and bird-song. Walking in The Shoes of Happiness, he knows how to join the joy of youth without its silliness and the wisdom of age without its weariness. We talked of many things: of the blind spot in Whitman — as of one who went to séances where things get blurred; of t he present state of poetry in England, of a long poem he had written, the title of which did not fit; of all the world and the rest of mankind. The upshot of an argument about the nature of poetry was that he promised to come to my Recognition Service, and make an address on ‘The Poet and the Preacher.’ Thereupon, as an advance deposit on that promise, he sat down and wrote a quatrain, which, he said, sums up my faith; as indeed it does — only, alas, it makes most of us Christians of the Left Hand:—

January 12. — To-night a dinner was given in my honor, attended by fifty of the leading ministers of New York, representing all denominations. It was a fraternal hour, offering an opportunity for an account of my experiences in England as bearing upon the problem of Anglo-American friendship; and a discussion of the new function of the Christian ministry in international affairs — my experience being significant only because it is related to the larger issue. The dinner was a gracious conspiracy instigated by Dr. Frederick Lynch, one of the most useful men in the nation, and one of the most lovable — a liaison officer in the service of Christ, whose life is a ministry of reconciliation, interpretation, and strategic good-will.

Since my return I have done little else but speak in behalf of fraternity between English-speaking peoples; but I seem to be talking against the wind. My ship of good-will runs into all kinds of snags, — Irish snags, Japanese snags, naval snags, — and I do not get very far. Debt on one side, suspicion on the other, joined with lack of knowledge on both sides, make hard sailing. Whatever it is, apart from mere mischiefmaking, which has again aroused illfeeling, it is a stupendous stupidity. Surely the friends of Anglo-Saxon fellowship make a mistake in narrowing their appeal. It is not merely for the countries concerned that such unity is necessary, but for the peace and stability of the whole world; and in both countries the wider conception would do much to dissolve misunderstanding. Perhaps, in a better mood and under a clearer sky, we can at least see the snags and avoid, if not remove, them.

January 25. — To-night was my Recognition Service as minister of the Church of the Divine Paternity, and it was an hour of fraternal courtesy and Christian good-will. It is an old church, as we count oldness in the New World; and, like other churches, it has journeyed uptown with the years, from Pearl Street, opposite City Hall Place, to Seventy-Sixth Street, overlooking Central Park. Organized in 1838, it has had three ministers in the last seventy years, a record highly honorable alike to pulpit and pew. In 1852 its edifice stood on Broadway, near Spring Street, and there Thackeray delivered his lectures on the English Humorists. On Broadway, and later on Fifth Avenue, its pulpit was glorified by the genius of Edwin Chapin, whose eloquence made it a forum of liberty in the anti-slavery agitation, a shrine of patriotism during the Civil War, and an altar of faith until his death in 1880. Eaton and Hall each added a dimension to its history and its power.

The church to-day, built in cathedral style with a Magdalen College tower, is rich in memorials, and its chancel is one of the loveliest in America. A mosaic of ‘Christ at the Feet of His Disciples’ rises above bas-reliefs of Dr. Chapin by St. Gaudens, of Dr. Sawyer by Bickford, and a tablet to Dr. Eaton. A carved oak pulpit and an exquisite Tiffany communion altar stand between stately candelabra — which always make me think of that ‘Lamp of Poor Souls’ kept burning in the ancient cathedrals. To the right, an American flag hangs from a staff cut from a rail off the old Lincoln farm. To me the Whitfield memorial organ, with its myriad tones and echoes, is a symbol of the faith of the church, as if foretelling the triumph of a Divine Love which shall yet woo every wandering human tone into one sovereign Harmony — a time beyond time, when the nameless pathos, which haunts all earthly music whatsoever, shall be heard no more.

February 12. — Dr. Fosdick spoke at the Lincoln Night gathering of the church clubs, his topic being the future of New York — which he quickly dropped for matters nearer to his heart. Had not heard him since he came to preach for me in the City Temple during the war. While others feel dismay at the sulky, uppish mood in which America is flouting its own idealism, he is defiant, and some of his sentences flashed like zigzag lightning. Master of all the arts of speech, using jeweled phrases with inevitable ease, he made the issue of religion in our day and land startlingly vivid and compelling. Sturdy, picturesque, winsome, he is a prophet of that new note in Christianity heard by a small but gallant company of young men in all communions, who mean to preach it with gentle but relentless insistence in the days that lie ahead. He speaks as a man of insight, with the artist touch and the glow of genius. There is no fluffy prose-poetry, no perfumed and prettified art decorating a candied Christianity; but a vital mind laid against the stuff of life — virility kindled by vision and softened by that pity which is the heart of all great preaching. No man among us gives more promise of Christian leadership in a tangled time.

March 1. — Preached recently for the first time in old Plymouth Church, bringing the greetings and blessing of the City Temple, where the picture of Beecher still hangs in the lecture-room and the memory of his eloquence is a legend. Joseph Parker and Beecher were friends, and it behooves us to recall such historic ties at a time when voices of consideration are few and faintly heard. Each in his own distinction and power a supremely great preacher, — Parker a trumpet, Beecher an orchestra, — both made their pulpits, shrines not only of Christian faith but of international good-will. In Plymouth Church there sounded the wondrous voice of the greatest preacher to the people our race has known — the Shakespeare of our pulpit, whose genius seemed inexhaustible in its fertility, whose ministry marked a new date both in the religion and politics of our Republic. From that pulpit he went on his memorable ambassadorship to England, to plead the cause of Lincoln in the forum of British public opinion; and his victory was one of the noblest triumphs of the spoken word in history. Whatever may be the chances and changes of the future, Plymouth Church and the City Temple must be kept as shrines of historic memory and thrones of spiritual prophecy.

March 12. — Went the other day to a Freethinkers’ society, and heard a lecture that filled me with amazement. I had thought that species of mind extinct; but it still persists, like a rut in an abandoned road, as archaic as the crude dogmatism which it denies. Ingersoll was delightful, with his rich humanity, his rippling humor, and his radiant prose-poetry — a positive mind on the negative side of religious thought. Without his genius, ‘ rationalism ’ looks like logic-chopping pettifoggery; a thing killed and stuffed. But it can be amusing, as when the great advances of religious thought are interpreted as retreats followed up by the Rationalist Army. They are like men who have been bombarding a position and find that the enemy has long ago moved elsewhere, unaware of their existence. But to save their face they must keep up the bombardment. Make-believe championship of free thought to-day is like going over the top of an imaginary trench — futile, not to say pitiful. The old dogmatism and the old rationalism, as much alike as two of a kind, are alike obsolete. They are not refuted; they are forgotten. It reminded me of old Wallaston, in the Autobiography of Mark Rutherford, whose ideas acquired long ago had ‘never fructified in him, but were like hard stones which rattled in his pocket.’

March 14. — Somehow I have a curious feeling about the Drinkwater play, Abraham Lincoln. It handles the supreme figure of our history reverently; but, though he loved the theatre, it is hardly fair to put the least theatrical of men on the stage. Something deep in me protests against it as a sacrilege. The play did good in London, as an interpretation of Lincoln to the English people, albeit not without error. The servants were too much like English servants, and the negro dialect was more like North American Indian dialect. Also, the drinking proclivities of General Grant were exaggerated. No doubt these defects have been removed; but I doubt if anyone ever called Lincoln ‘Abe,’ even behind his back. We may be a nation of back-slappers, but there are some men with whom we take no liberties. The first act, except for one moving moment, — when Lincoln is alone, looking at a map of his country, — has too much spurious prophecy. Yet the figure does grow portentously, and in a world of flesh and blood and spirit. Hook, the fictitious member of the Cabinet, embodying the distrust of Lincoln, is a happy stroke. What reception would the play have had if it had been the work of an American artist? As it is, a play from London, like a hat from Paris, is the thing.

March 20. — Some reporter caught a flying paragraph from my sermon to the Sons of the American Revolution; and now I am flooded with letters telling me what is wrong with the Church. Everything is wrong with it, apparently. Seven men take pains to tell me that religion is a narcotic, and the Church an ‘organized fake founded upon myth and mystery.’ Conservatives think it is infected with radicalism, and radicals denounce it for its ‘abject, cowardly obeisance to organized and endowed injustice.’ One man thinks it useful only as a nursery, an ambulance, or an undertaker. A long essay tells me how and why, if the pulpit adopted the gospel according to Henry George, the churches would be filled with eager multitudes. Some hold that the plight of the Church is due to its loss of the great expectancy of the speedy and dramatic coming of Christ; and others that it preaches a truncated gospel, bereft of the power of healing. Numbers of letters tell of failure to meet ordinary obligations, lack of neighborliness, trickery, fraud, and scandal on the part of church people — it makes me sad to read about it. One woman insists that there is more ’honest-to-God religion’ outside the Church than inside, and that it would be just as well to close the churches, and in their stead to print a placard to be hung in schools, railway stations, and the post office, bearing the words of Jesus: ‘Thou shall love the Lord thy God with all thy mind and all thy heart, and thy neighbor as thyself.’ Besides, it would be less expensive.

So it goes, leaving me bewildered, until I remember that the Church is just ourselves, with the faults of humanity, and will not be better till we have better material. Most of these letters affirm that economic issues are replacing theological questions in the mind of to-day; a man from Detroit states it plainly: ‘Men are thinking today of the means of living, not of the meaning of life.’ What we are confronted with is not, specifically, indifference to religion, but indifference to nearly everything outside the circle of the Cult of Comfort. Shifting the emphasis from theology to sociology will only mean a a new sectarianism in place of the old, — a radical church on one corner, a conservative on the next, — and the last state will be as bad as the first. Amateur sermons on economics make a terrifying prospect!

Of course, the preachers come in for a hard hammering, and, as the late Dean Hodges used to say, ‘It is richly deserved by those who deserve it.’ Much of it is deserved, by reason of the conditions under which ministers work. They are an underpaid, overworked, heroic set of men, and the demands upon them are so exacting, so exhausting, that they have little time to be preachers, much less prophets. They have no easy task, trying to bring high truth home to moving-picture minds, in a day of moral chaos and paprika cleverness. The keyboard of the modern mind is new, and they have not yet learned to play on it. But the realities remain, and the ancient needs of the heart; and if we interpret them in terms of our time, — not using a violin as if it were a ’cello, — there will be ears to hear. The Church is dead! Long live the Church!

April 1. — Five Socialists were expelled from the New York Legislature to-day, after a long trial. All Fool’s Day was an appropriate time for such a proceeding; the deed fits the day. America must have lost its sense of humor. I am not a Socialist, nor the son of a Socialist; but surely a man has a right to be a Socialist in America, and to hold office as such, if fairly elected. Anything else makes our whole system a farce. Once men were burned for their ideas; now we ought to burn the ideas and let the men live. Unless, indeed, we are afraid of ideas, as we seem to be. Respect for minorities, no matter how small, is a first principle of democracy. It is better to let folk blow off steam; it prevents explosion. If we tolerate only those who agree with us, what virtue is it? Even tyrants and bigots do the same.

April 4. — Easter Day! When an old civilization was dying and another was coming to birth, it was the Christian vision of the Eternal Life that gave relief and renewal; and that vision we must recapture for our troubled time. The idea of immortality current to-day is far removed from the faith by which the new, uprising Christianity grasped the crumbling classic world and reshaped it. Indeed, we think only of a future life, — ‘a series of moments snipped off at one end, but not at the other,’ — whereas Jesus saw each life as part of one great Life, which moves and cannot die. It is a day not for arguments, but for anthems!

April 10. — While in England I was often asked about Frank Harris; but I knew him only in such books as The Bomb, a volume of his Portraits, and his study of Shakespeare — which made me mad in five spots at once. So I went recently to hear him lecture on Wells; but he told me little that was new, — except some personal reminiscences, — and he seemed less happy than usual in his power of depicting personality. There was a fine line about John Morley whom he followed as editor of the Fortnightly: ‘The bleak face lighted up with a glint of wintry sunshine.’ It reminded me of the description of Roosevelt by Wells years ago: ‘The friendly peering snarl of his face, like a man with the sun in his eyes.’ With his moustache, his unreadable eyes, and his heavy voice, the lecturer looked more like a fighter of the Middle Ages than a modern man of letters. He has that rare and precious thing called genius; but my impression was puzzling, as of a man at odds with himself, or with the world; a proud, sensitive man, thwarted if not lacerated. Either he has had a bear fight with himself, or he has been the sport of ill fate. If, as I have heard, he is writing an autobiography, perhaps it will tell us the secret of his enmity to England, which so many regret. There is something haunting in him, something wild, untamed, quixotic, but lovable withal; like a man ready to throw a bomb loaded with — pity!

April 14. — Religious work of a Protestant kind on Manhattan Island is an adventure these days, since only a little more than seven per cent of its population are of that persuasion. Neighborhoods shift swiftly, baffling the shrewdest forecast; and a church often finds itself a lonely island in an alien sea. Old families break up or move away, and the young people seek the suburbs to rear their families. Homes give way to hotels, apartments, and boardinghouses, — poor substitutes, — making the tie between home and church tenuous. Many who come from smaller communities, not finding the old informal fellowship in the city, abandon the Church, or else become ‘ church tramps.’ Vacations lengthen and the church year shortens. The glitter of the city fascinates, its rush and hurry wear the nerves — making the ‘ dear City of God’ seem dreamlike and remote. What will be the fate of our city churches — except those that stand on old foundations — is hard to know. No ordinary methods of work apply, yet the need of spiritual fellowship in the ‘crowded loneliness’ of city life is appalling. Some of our customs try me, especially the funerals at night, as if in our neckand-neck race for the nickel we did not have time to pay respect to our dead. No wonder Jesus wept over a city, knowing its brutality, its black wickedness, its nameless possibilities, and its aching pathos!

April 18. — Dr. Holmes thought that preachers are in danger of becoming heathens for lack of religious instruction; and, as the old country preacher said of St. Paul, ’I fully agree with him.’ Anyway, I make it a point to hear preaching, and one of my shrines is the ‘Skyscraper Church,’ as the Broadway Tabernacle is called. There, for more than twenty years, one of the greatest living preachers has kept the light of God aglow amid the glitter of Broadway. Dr. Jefferson distrusts oratory, — he so fears unreality, — yet he is one of the noblest of orators, if one stops to think about it, having an amazing gift of lucid, fitly colored, persuasive speech. At first, he gives one an impression of austerity; but as he begins to speak, his rugged face is illumined by an inner brightness, and one forgets everything, — even the preacher himself, — and remembers only the Master. He takes us captive unawares, showing us the beauty of the Gospel and the meaning of our fleeting lives, our duty for to-day, and our hope for the morrow. It is an unique eloquence, simple, soft-spoken, searching; and if the ear is sensitive, one hears an undertone of pathos — as of one in whom faith and hope dwell at peace with pity and acquaintance with grief. What a ministry for this gay and giddy-paced city — rich in culture, lofty in ideal, tender in comfort, valiant for righteousness! If some great Angel could gather the testimonies of its influence, what a record it would be!

May 3. — Attended a meeting designed to discuss the religious training of the young for an hour on a week day. Such meetings make the cynic rise in me, asking whether it is because the Angel of Wisdom has been so busy on some other planet that religious education has gone so awry here below. There is a type of training which Dr. Holmes fitly described as pathological piety, rich in tuberculous virtues. There is the merely mechanical variety, enforced by discipline without joy, and thrown off as soon as passing years make a way of escape. There is the opposite error of too great vagueness; not over-feeding, but under-nutrition. As between old-fogyism and new-faddism, we flounder. Yet there must be some way of giving our children the truths that make us men, — simple as the speech of home, sweeping as the contour of the sky, — bringing memory, habit, and example to the nurture of the highest life. Surely this is the one eternal education; and yet we fall short of it both in content and in method.

October 15. — It is always a joy to hear Dr. Felix Adler who, for more than forty years, has been a seeker after ‘the secret of the good life,’ both as to its philosophy and its practice. Bred in the austerities and depths of Hebrew faith, he fell under the spell of the ethics of Kant touched by the teachings of Jesus, and the result was a fine, firm, ethical mysticism, worth more to his country than many battleships. His system is now set forth in a stately volume entitled, An Ethical Philosophy of Life, aglow with a passion for righteousness, rich in spiritual gleanings, surveying the whole field of human relations. It is a new version of the Golden Rule: ‘So act as to elicit the unique personality in others and thereby in thyself.’ Still, it is a philosophy, not a gospel; the will to religion, without the power of reconciling duty and joy. There is struggle, discipline, and moral passion, but not the emancipating vision.

October 18. — Went to hear a lecture on ‘How to Control the Subconscious Mind,’ and learned many things. From what I can gather, after reading Freud and Jung, we do need a policeman in the basement. Once only a storeroom, the Subconscious has become the seat of morality, the custodian of health, and the arbiter of fate. Whether friend or fiend, is uncertain; it knows no rest and does it works while we sleep. Though apparently omniscient, it has curious streaks of stupidity. The way to control it, according to the lecturer, is by auto-suggestion; that is, by saying a thing over and over, — like beating a tom-tom, — until the subconscious mind gets the idea. As Punch once put it, —

What fads people will take up, willing to turn themselves into automata rather than undergo the effort and discipline needed to organize the inner life. Surely it is not the Subconscious, but the Divine Conscious, of which we must lay hold, if we are to live in ‘the glory of the lighted mind.’

October 20. — As I listened last night to Mr. Root on the League of Nations, the words of Roosevelt were in my mind: ‘ The greatest man that has arisen on either side of the Atlantic in my lifetime.’ It was a large remark, and must not be taken too literally, like his estimate of himself as ‘a mediocre intellect highly energized.’ It was a very impressive scene — a little gray man, speaking in quiet, measured words, and a vast audience listening as to an oracle. It used to be a saying in New York: ‘If you loot, see Root, before you scoot’; which was a tribute to his acumen as an attorney. Since then he has had great causes and whole nations for his clients; but he is still an attorney — having all the handicaps that go to make up wisdom, but lacking the seerlike mind. Yet it means much to have a mind of such gravity, sanity, and clarity devoted to the public service. For thirty years or more he has lived at the centre of affairs, without yielding to cynicism. Time has mellowed his spirit, making him more magnanimous; but one misses in him a rare thing not easily defined. Manner, magnetism, wit? Call it, rather, the spiritual quality, the poetic touch, the haunting accent that moves the heart. Men admire Elihu Root; they loved John Hay.