The New Cradle Song
THE NEW CRADLE SONG "WHAT a lot of embarrassment it would save to VV Catholics and Protestants alike," writes Winfred Ernest Garrison, reviewing the published volumes of the Calvert Series in...
...It is also easy to declare, with the writer quoted above, that the church ought not to identify its authority with such problems...
...What the sincere traditional Protestant in the United States is facing (together with, to some extent at least, his Catholic fellow-citizen) is a prevalent intellectual atmosphere similar to what is termed laicism in France...
...Indeed, the Arkansas state senate got rid of the matter only by cunningly circumventing a vote...
...Certainly, people have never worried greatly over quite equally vital characteristics of the earth's structure or the nature of matter...
...But they know also that the day upon which Protestantism really dies in this country will be ominous indeed...
...It is said that at least six other states will ring with debates on "monkey business," even though hostility toward what is termed "unenlightened legislation" is growing...
...Originally identified with Tennessee, the controversy has spread until at present six states have, by legislative enactment, condemned the teaching, in public schools, of scientific theories "not supported by the Bible...
...The tragedy of Protestantism is that long since it has acted practically upon Mr...
...The only thoroughgoing solution would be the establishment of a denominational school-system, within the limits of which each creed would be free to teach in its own way...
...They are aimed, moreover, at a tenable theory itself rather than at the method used to discuss that theory...
...It is true that little can be hoped for from legislative enactments...
...The latest report indicates that there are now over twenty-seven millions of American children, nominally Protestant, not enrolled in any Sunday school...
...Possessing these things, one is always sure to find that there is no real conflict between scientific truth and religious truth, regardless of little days of darkness that hover over the scene...
...If those who feel that much contemporary whacking away at the limitations of Protestantism is doing good are in earnest, let them consider whether they should prefer to place their children in the company of a man who devoutly professes the Christian creed, with whatever narrow anarchies, or in the company of illuminati who have long since tossed the Bible and the Fathers into a handy waste-basket...
...Meanwhile, the states of Arkansas, Missouri, and North Carolina have officially rejected anti-evolution measures, in some instances by very small margins...
...And if it be the mission of philosophy to prepare the reason of man for the reception of grace, then the surrender of that mission by Christian thought would gravely belie the apostolic purpose which that thought is commissioned to upold...
...The Southern Methodist Episcopal Church, for instance, officially declared that interference with the proper teaching of science in American schools and colleges is "futile and can serve no good...
...Bryan marked their type once and for all—the type of sincere but limited Bible reader, conscious of certain dangerous emancipations now characteristic of youth...
...Catholics may rejoice in the fact that an educational system, built up at great cost and through heroic sacrifice, largely safeguards their children from the comforts of materialism...
...Garrison's principle—that in lieu of philosophy it fostered contact with legislation, reliance upon public opinion, which must inevitably lead to death...
...Up to the 'eighties the statistical curve had shown a steady increase...
...The Sunday school, now called the church school, has become the despair or the joke of the Protestant ministry almost everywhere...
...In the late 'eighties it began steadily to decline...
...Our danger now lies in the influence for cynicism wielded by a myriad deserters from the ranks of faith—deserters whose romantic halos cater to the instinct for irreverence, carelessness, and denial...
...Unfortunately, that cannot be thought of at present...
...It is easy to deride the literalism, the intolerance, the insufficient scientific preparation of many representatives of religion who have entered this great educational fight...
...The indifference of religion to such matters as scientific theory is impossible, for the simple reason that the bases of all philosophy, both Thomistic and modern, are scientific...
...But not all the harm would be undone thereby...
...It can guide a few people right...
...THE NEW CRADLE SONG "WHAT a lot of embarrassment it would save to VV Catholics and Protestants alike," writes Winfred Ernest Garrison, reviewing the published volumes of the Calvert Series in the Christian Century, "if all the churches would realize that it is not their business to put behind any scientific theory whatever the weight of their ecclesiastical authority...
...Public opinion is our great democratic force, revealing itself as far more effective in the domain of morals than in the sphere of government...
...One suspects that although the historical Galileo episode was the occasion for this remark, it was dictated rather by the controversy over evolution which has so violently disturbed certain districts of the United States...
...American Christianity, whether Catholic or Protestant, cannot be indifferent to them and their dogmas...
...What has always mattered about the teaching of evolutionary doctrine is the teacher...
...Perhaps, were Protestants to agree upon a somewhat more intelligent attitude toward modern science than is sponsored by ultra-fundamentalism, some good might be done...
...In the final analysis, it really makes very little difference whether one believes the human body to have been prepared by various antecedent organisms, or if one thinks of it as having grown suddenly out of the earth, like a flower...
...It may, in the end, even convince some parents that "historical and scientific facts" are not so completely on the side of cleverness as has so frequently been supposed...
...The fate of Protestantism has been to depend upon education by public opinion, rather than upon education under the direction of ecclesiastical authority...
...and when this opinion gradually rubs out all the sturdy old Christian concepts and writes over them bright upto-date but materialistic shibboleths, the churches can no more be indifferent toward it than they can smile tolerantly at the world, the flesh, and the devil...
...If this be something like an accurate description of the situation, one can only deplore while accepting it...
...In an article on The Break-Up of Protestantism, contributed to the current number of the Atlantic Monthly by Dr...
...If the appendage of religion to the regular educational curriculum be merely a makeshift, something at least must come of it...
...Meanwhile, let Catholics and Protestants stand together, as they have done in many places, for the week-day religious school...
...When Spinoza had "explained" the plague of locusts by means of a weather forecast, he may innocently have imagined that he was disproving the intervention of God in cosmic processes...
...It has fallen rapidly ever since...
...Such enactments must always be the product of public opinion, not of religious opinion as such...
...And the plain truth is, very few of the people who so glibly harangue are anything but empty little cast-offs from an antiquated army of "enlighteners...
...Nor has the week-day school of religion yet met the case...
...Americans are still so largely under the spell of "public opinion" as the great energy which is to form the nation into something very new and beautiful, that nothing short of calamity could ever startle them out of the pose...
...Surely," said Cardinal Hayes, in an address advocating the cooperation of all faiths in giving religious instruction, "the American people do not intend to seal up the great Book of Revelation from their children...
...The first evidence of this was in Sunday-school attendance...
...They will win out because there is nobody to oppose them...
...Herbert Parrish (an article with the rash liberal generalizations of which we are certainly not in agreement) sums up the practical effects of this situation very pertinently: "Protestant enthusiasm weakened...
...But having done all that, you are still miles away from the heart of the matter...
...Our era must witness, regardless of a wide-spread contemporary interest in the person of Christ and in certain aspects of religious philosophy, a still further veering of public opinion toward the standards of "enlightenment...
...This death could only add further to the strength of the "enlightenment" which is so contagious all about us...
...But surely he might have considered God capable of employing weather ! The point of great consequence is simply whether one has an earnest, simple faith in God, and confidence in the authority of Christian religion...
...Parents, persuaded that the Bible as a document of historical and scientific facts is under fire, are no longer insistent upon sending their already weary children to such dull exercises...
Vol. 5 • March 1927 • No. 19
