Faith on Easy Terms

...604 THE COM | NORTH CAROLINA'S GOVERNOR N THE North there is a generally accepted portrait of any governor of North Carolina...

...Neither man has denied the importance of religion, and one has written a most impressive defense of the Christian religion...

...The hostility of southern manufacturers to organized labor has not, we are told, been decreased by recent events, although for a while the influence of the radical National Textile Workers' Union made it appear that the overtures of the United Textile Workers, attached to the American Federation of Labor would be welcomed...

...Meanwhile Dr...

...Even the elect were sometimes haunted by the visions conjured up by rationalism...

...The easiest thing in the world is surrender, and the easiest thing after that is fear that one might surrender if one got even as near the front as the heavy artillery...

...Charles Francis Potter...

...Therefore when one goes from the sanctuary, hoping that one's eye may see truth, it is not an infrequent surprise to find that realities appear before one's eyes, blossoming in answer to a quest...

...On the other hand, let us admit with concern that, in our hands, Christianity has not been able vigorously to proclaim its own sublime conception of the race...

...Not to stay away from the houses of publicans, sinners and unbelievers...

...It is this: "We cannot build a prosperous citizenship on low wages...

...The natural result is that we hear from multitudinous 'Christian pulpits,' high and low, a demand that outworn creeds shall be replaced by creeds which accord with 'modern knowledge,' or by no creeds at all...

...One thing in its favor is that southern workers are much more hospitable toward the idea of organization than they were formerly...

...It is through organization...

...In so far as a creed has in it, verily, the sap of God, it tends to unify organically--after the manner of the sublime metaphor of vine and tendrils--those who make profession of it...

...Potter apparently sees no way of salvaging these truths excepting through proclamations that the supernatural does not exist, that sin and salvation are matters of no importance and that humanity is its own chief end...

...But this and this only: to carry the lantern on firmly, even though it bloom into a cross...

...One of the attractions which the South deliberately offered industry was the chance for cheap labor...

...And what is this "humanism...

...But you cannot now separate the one from the other...

...He is a gentleman of old family...

...When one finds that its chief maxim is disinterestedness in the face of the baubles this world offers in exchange for the soul, one realizes again that this is no modern point of view...

...And because humanism does in fact isolate the human, it is always in danger of being misunderstood and palmed ott by spiritual racketeers...

...Whoever may have said that man is inherently good, it was certainly not Professor Babbitt...

...This last point is made clear by the circumstance that both Mr...

...And so it is not to be expected that we, living in an equally unsettled time, should fail to notice even spiritually, even in the depth of our hearts, the pulse of a world that is not our own...

...Faith has no greater law than that of corporate existence...

...But the place of these things is in the Church, beside other and still more redemptive realities...

...Potter was launching a "new religion," and finding that the hall in New York which he had secured for the occasion was too small to accommodate the crowd of curious, inquiring or merely trusting souls who had gathered for the occasion...

...Potter, once a minister of a Christian sect, should now foot it so contentedly in the wake of Mr...

...There awaits him only one saving choice...

...The recent books of Mr...

...Look at his program: there is not a thing in it but is shabbily restated after the model, not a recommendation which reveals this founder of a "new religion" as anything more dignified than a parrot...

...To some it may appear that part of the recent troubles might have been averted, or at least modified, if the governor had spoken out so frankly a year ago...

...We refer to these declarations primarily because October I6, I9z 9 T H E C O M M O N W E A L 605 they so strongly support the views of Mr...

...And they had more livable surroundings...

...We cannot build an efllcient labor force on extremely long hours...

...Potter referred approvingly to those apostles of humanism, Irving Bab, bitt and Paul Elmer More...

...That so lurid a mistake could be made is, nevertheless, a clue to a fundamental defect in the humanistic system of More and Babbitt...

...Why industry should have been desirable on those conditions is a question asked some time ago...

...Lewis Mumford have essayed to find a solution for the point of view here involved, and may fairly claim a certain eminence...

...He has something to say, and it is not the celebrated line...

...What a plenitude of meaning history has for us here l It tells us that precisely this consciousness of difference which the Christian entertains regarding the surrounding world is the great flail of his winnowing...

...Basically an endeavor to defend the moral and cultural realities of civilization, this system is a very able plea for the idea of man sponsored by Christendom...

...The statement that the workers in the mills are better off now than they were on their mountain farms will not bear examination...

...Woodlock...

...Thomas F. Woodlock and Dr...

...He has been worried over the ills which have accompanied the social and economic readustment, and he believes that the people of his state have suffered more than was necessary in the change from agriculture to industry...

...That man should endeavor to remove the causes of injustice and suffering is hardly a novel ethical formula...

...In several respects it is the plainest common sense, long so familiar to the central tradition of Christendom that it seems unbelievable that anybody could profess to having just hatched it out in profound meditation...

...And it is also, we Christians may confess to our shame, a commentary upon the impression which the chaos, the weakness and the venality of our own living makes upon an outsider...

...It is abidingly true that "modern knowledge" has shaken the confidence of millions in an "old religion," while leaving them unflinchingly convinced that the race must continue to trust and practise a moral code...

...Although the governor has had nothing to say about unions directly, he must favor organization and collective bargaining if he means anything by these words: "What we want is orderly, restrained struggle for change...

...Whenever a problem of importance is brought to his attention, he shrugs his shoulders, picks up his palm-leaf fan, puts his feet on the rail, and turns to his neighbor, the governor of South Carolina, with a reminder...

...FAITH ON EASY TERMS T IS curiously typical of the nation's "spiritual condition" that the press notices of what was said on Sunday, September zg, should include remarks as disparate in character as those uttered by Mr...

...Lippmann...

...He might have added that there is no possibility of developing a civilization where large numbers of men are required to work sixty or seventy hours every week in order to make a scanty living...

...To be accurate about such details is, however, scarcely the business of one who has been dumfounded by "modern knowledge...

...The diverse negators of the supernatural have many names, but that of More is not among them...

...What more could one admit than that Dr...

...But possibly we should not place too much faith in descriptions of company houses written by labor-minded reporters from the North...

...And the Jew who seeks to live as an individual in our at least nominally Christian world, who finds the way back into the temple obscured, inevitably surrenders that sense of "being together with others" so essential in all Hebraic history...

...It is not a slur upon, it is an explanation of, them to say that they express the spiritual dissatisfaction of the modern Jew who has been severed from his religious community...

...Not to hide the spark within him under a convenient bushel...

...He has been occupied with the really important problems of his administration in a way which suggests that his true characteristics are conscientiousness, energy and public spirit...

...But all recent correspondence from the South indicates that the American Federation MONWEAL October I6, 1929 of Labor will have a hard struggle to get established there...

...But Dr...

...Thus we come upon a fundamental problem--the problem of convincing men and women who have lost their grip upon eternal verities that strength is promised them only from within...

...He is casually interested in books and in outdoor recreations...

...We believe that some of realities are present in the thought of humanists like More and Babbitt...

...Not to barter the chrism of his own soul...

...So far there has been devised only one means for insuring labor that sort of protection...

...We have now evidence that the portrait is not a speaking likeness of the present governor, O. Max Gardner...

...Along with the right of capital to protection goes the right of the laborer to protection plus the security of safety, of freedom to move and live and work in security, whether the moving and living and working are to the ends that you and I may wish or not...

...It may be said in passing that nothing could be farther apart than the new Potterism and the writings of More and Babbitt...

...And one may surmise that even the marble-like soul of More will rock with unexpected gusts of laughter at the thought that humanism should find its apostle in the person of Dr...

...In both places they are wretchedly poor, in both they receive small return for labor, but on the farms, at least, they had a measure of independence...

...Woodlock and Dr...

...Sometimes fanatically identifying it with a specific moral desire, sometimes selling its mystery of charity for nationalistic applause, sometimes resigning from a cultural mission because of timidity or even sloth, Christians as a whole might well seem a swarm of acrid gossipers, among whom only the half-forgotten Rock of Peter looms like a worthy testimonial to immortality...

...It is an advocacy of the reason that has gone hand in hand through the ages with religion...

...You cannot demand that man save himself if, as a matter of fact, it was God who originally saved man...

...The doctrine of Walter Lippmann is, therefore, not so much a series of deductions from "science" as a very taut formula for absolute spiritual individualism...

...Addressing a Washington audience of Catholic women, Mr...

...Each afternoon, from five to six, he sits on the shady side of his veranda, and considers the affairs of state...

...The charm of gnostic and Mohammedan prophets lured whole nations away from the Church...

...Potter, who advocates a double wedding ring and who counts on radio and airships to bring glad tidings to America...

...He averred that he had started the brand-new "humanism" movement because of "a sense of dissatisfaction with existing religions, growing out of conscientious scruples at trying to twist texts and creeds to fit modern needs...

...In all centuries the Christian has been aware of the pressure of those vast portions of mankind which have followed other guides...

...and the fact that there are truths in all genuine religions was relatively familiar even to the Doctors of the Church...

...Walter Lippmann and Mr...

...It is Spinoza reappearing in the twentieth century, less isolated from social hopes, less estranged from the community, hopeful even of becoming a professor...

...Woodlock declared: "The notion that religion has been discredited and displaced by science has infiltrated the popular mind from top to bottom...

...It is a matter of suffident congratulation, we think, that he should have spoken now, no doubt to the deep amazement and most utter deep disgust of the Gastonia Gazette...

...What we want is freedom in which ideas and opinions may be advanced, and a tolerance which will permit the advancing of ideas and opinions regardless of whether they are in tune with your own thought or mine...