FOR a decade and a half there has been a growing awareness in the English-speaking world, at least in its more fortunate and self-conscious upper regions, of a fresh stirring of the Christian evangelical movement. Those who have not come in actual contact with the Oxford Groups have certainly heard tidings of the new ’Apostle to the Twentieth Century’; and ‘ Buchmanism,’ the embodiment of Dr. Frank N. D. Buchman’s spiritual message, has become a term almost familiar enough to appear in the next supplement to the Oxford Dictionary. In Henry P. Van Dusen the Atlantic has an informed appraiser of so important a movement. ‘ It was in the autumn of 1919,’he writes, ‘exactly at the time when I became related to the work of the Princeton Christian Association, that Mr. Buchman began his first drive upon the American colleges. For two years I was very intimately associated with him and the others in that work. During the recent phenomenal growth of the Movement’s influence I have made it a point to keep indirectly in touch with developments, both in this country and in Britain.’ Dr. Van Dusen is Associate Professor and Dean of Students at Union Theological Seminary. Margaret Chanter introduces herself so gracefully in ‘Roman Spring’ that we allow the reader the privilege of meeting her there, if he does not already know her as Mrs. Winthrop Chanler, friend and contemporary of ‘the shining ones’ since the Age of Innocence. ▵ Another of ‘the shining ones,’ Albert Jay Nock is a perpetual wonder to younger and more jaded spirits. One who had just read ’The Gods’ Lookout ’ commented on its essential Nockism, the formula for which, he pointed out, is ‘one part paradox against two parts of rare and pleasant distillations.’

William Wister Haines is a younger writer —in fact, ’Just Plain Nuts’ is his first published story. Born in 1908, graduated from the University of Pennsylvania in 1931, he began line work (work on wood-pole and steel-tower transmission as well as railroad electrification) in the summer of 1927. He worked at it intermittently while he was going through college and steadily after college, with the exception of a few weeks spent convalescing from an accident, until the end of 1932, when he quit to write Slim, a novel about linemen which will be published in August by the Atlantic Monthly Press. Nora Waln’s romantic sojourn in China, as set forth in The House of Exile, accounts at least in part for these exquisite ‘Fragments from a Flower Diary.’ ▵ Even more adventurous has been Owen Lattimore’s Chinese experience. His knowledge of the frontiers of China is unsurpassed, bringing such recognition as the Elisha Kent Kane Gold Aledal of the Philadelphia Geographical Society. ‘Open Door or Great Wall?‘ is written with the authority which characterizes his numerous books, including the recent Mongols of Manchuria. He is editor of Pacific Affairs. ▵ ‘Invisible Kingdom’ brings Freda C. Bond, companion in poetry of Humbert Wolfe and Richard Church in the British Ministry of Labor, once more to our pages.

Ruth Faison Shaw is known to readers of New York newspapers, parents of ‘progressive school’ children, patrons of modern art, chiefly as the inventor of a new medium of expression known as ’finger painting’ by which children and grown-ups have achieved results hitherto undreamed of. A large and fortunate group of parents in Rome, Paris, and New York, however, know her also as a teacher ‘whose psychological approach to the study of the child amounts to something close to genius.’ Certainly her method of teaching can produce something close to genius, as the stories ‘Out of the Mouths of Babes’ aptly demonstrate. Further elaboration of her work will appear in book form this fall. ▵ As president of Antioch College, as president of the Dayton-Morgan Engineering Company, and as head of the Tennessee Valley Authority, Arthur E. Morgan enjoys a strategic position from which to survey ‘Government in Business.’ Charles Adam Jones, in ’Pink Hignins, the Good Bad Man,’ continues the story of his life ‘On the Last Frontier.’ ▵ The writer of ‘A Courageous Letter’ prefers to remain anonymous. ▵ ’A Long-Retarded Spring’ is one of Robert Hillyer’s lirst utterances since he received the Pulitzer award lor poetry this year. ▵ From his home in Tahiti James Norman Hall sent us ’The Last Leg’ of his journey, after he had arrived exactly as this exciting narrative recounts, to the relief and joy of all his friends. Peggy von der Goltz (‘The Water Hazard’) has been working steadily with animals since 1925, establishing the first free clinic for birds in New York. While she has written many strictly factual articles, this is her first story — and at that, Old One-Eye, the Sunfish, was a friend of hers. ▵ ‘War and the League of Nations’ is the Phi Beta Kappa oration delivered as part of the Commencement exercises at Harvard this June by the University’s distinguished President Emeritus, A. Lawrence Lowell. He was Chairman of the Executive Committee of the League to Enforce Peace during almost the whole of its existence. Josephine W. Johnson (‘The Quiet Day’) has just won a coveted scholarship to the Bread Loaf School of English this summer.

The harmless, necessary comma.

Dear Atlantic,—
Being a conservative in matterS of punctuation, and also a constant reader of the Atlantic, I was startled to find recently in a pupil’s composition the sentence, ‘In an invalid chair sat Aunt Eva who was paralyzed reading the Atlantic Monthly.’ At firsl it looked like a case for the censor; yet I had myself read the magazine for years without experiencing any such disastrous result. Was I of coarser clay than Aunt Eva? But a second glance, at the sentence showed me that I was merely remiss in my classroom duties. Teachers are sometimes accused of being ‘comma-Chasers’; but surely one is justified in trailing a pair of fugitive commas when their recapture saves the reputation of one’s favorite magazine!
HAZEL B. POOLE
Orange, New Jersey

Again the comma.

Dear Atlantic, —
In the course of an opinion on an election suit involving the absence, of a comma. Judge O’Brien of the New York Court of Appeals wrote: — ‘It is related of an eminent member of the British House of Commons that once in the heat of debate he called one of his fellow members a scoundrel. This was held unparliamentary language and the speaker, or perhaps the House, ruled that the offending member must apologize, and the latter submitted to the decision and tendered the apology in these words without punctuation: “ I called the honorable gentleman a scoundrel it is true and I am sorry for it.”
‘Thus conveying either one of two meanings, one utterly the reverse of the other, depending entirely upon the punctuation,’
JACOB MARKS
New York County Court House

On being an aunt.

Dear Atlantic, —
There is one advantage of spinsterhood which I think the author of ‘ A Spinster I’ in your May issue might well have mentioned, and that is the joys of unalloyed aunthood.
The joys of motherhood are naturally more intense, but so are the sorrows — and the two are much more evenly balanced than is the case with aunts. Aunts, being primarily responsible for neither manners nor morals, can afford to be amused and intrigued by quirks which mothers feel morally bound to frown on. When children do something to be proud of, aunts can puff out their chests and shamelessly brag about ‘our children’; when they suddenly revert to savagery, aunts can assume the completely detached air of being connected only by the accident of birth. Aunts don’t have to be policemen, courts of inquiry, or executioners; therefore they are safe for startling and delightful confidences. Aunts can buy ice cream when mothers must he buying toothbrushes; they can treat to movies instead of a trip to the dentist; they can give red neckties and pink ribbons when mothers are buying undies and flannel pajamas. In other words, they can outrageously curry favor, and enjoy that favor with a not too guilt conscience.
ELIZABETH LIVINGSTON
Washington, D. C.

’The ageless qualities of a classic.‘

Dear Atlantic, —
Not of often does one read a piece which has the ageless qualities of a classic. In James Hilton’s ’Good-bye, Mr,(Thips!’ Hindihecolor,teali 1 v,and philosophic disl Fiction Of a mast erpiece. A certain mellow quality seems to be an essential ingredient in stories of the schoolman and the bookman.
An old teacher of mine once remarked that one. of the modern essayists had become mellow before he was ripe. Hilton’s style should be mature enough for any critic.
RAYMOND B. PITTENGER
Cleveland, Ohio