When the Worm Turns
WHEN THE WORM TURNS IT HAS been fine weather for what is called tolerance. Senator Borah was moved to mourn over the vagaries of an inexhaustible brother from Alabama. Speaking to his...
...If any have in mind a program of thorough indoctrination of the children through the Sunday schools, it might be suggested that they try it on the clergy first...
...To anyone who has been profoundly grateful for all of fervent Christian belief and virtue that has abided in the Methodist body, it is really very shocking to learn that this body now accepts, as its sole creed, one of the less effective moral mandates of Mohammed...
...Wilson may be the more effective in its austerity...
...His declaration that the Catholic Church maintains a Washington headquarters similar to the Methodist Board is misleading...
...That is a succinct creed, surely...
...One may disagree heartily with some measures adopted by the Conference or the Council...
...But Dr...
...And the reply raises two questions difficult to answer: Why did the Senator remain silent so long, and why has he spoken now ? We are not concerned with formulating a response to either...
...Wilson's message is absorbing for two reasons...
...Its erroneousness becomes even more apparent when one examines the paragraph in which Senator Copeland is read out of the church to which he professes to belong...
...That the Methodist Board of Temperance, Prohibition and Public Morals has been out to keep Congress safe for drought...
...We present them ready-made, in order that the creed of Dr...
...But even more ominous is the suspicion, which will not down, that the followers of John Wesley have gone completely off the Christian track...
...Now and then a feeling assails us that the constitution and the legal tradition of the United States give us permission to unfurl our spiritual sails in such water as we prefer...
...but one can hardly read anything into the record of either except a sincere wish to serve religion and the country...
...Perhaps the most interesting thing about Senator Copeland's letter is its assertion that the author, like a worm, has turned...
...Now it so happens that, in its issue of May 1, The Christian Century (interdenominational, Chicago) analyzes Professor George H. Betts's new book, The Beliefs of 700 Ministers...
...While both have sometimes attempted to de30 THE COMMONWEAL May 15, 1929 fend rights to which their constituencies were entitled, their object was primarily the education of the social conscience...
...Wilson...
...Undoubtedly," he says, "I did wrong not to speak long ago, but now, certainly, a decent self-respect, as well as a growing conviction that this business must end, demands that I record my protest...
...No church can successfully, or legitimately, or even honestly, teach as essentials of Christian faith what its own ministry does not believe...
...The tenor of the protest is not startlingly novel...
...These conclusions, sad though they be, have not been invented by us...
...But all this is as nothing compared with the letter addressed by Senator Royal S. Copeland to certain ecclesiastical authorities (and to his constituency) deploring that as a Methodist he was forced to witness the political maneuvers—verily even the "lobbying"—of his church...
...that its agents have claimed credit for "getting" votes, including Senator Copeland's own...
...The Bishop himself rose nobly to the occasion by applauding the shooting of a Washington lad by prohibition agents...
...that the things of God and of Caesar have been hectically mixed in Washington—these are charges the like of which have been buzzed abroad for years...
...The proper counterpart of the National Catholic Welfare Conference is the Federal Council of the Churches of Christ...
...Both organizations grew out of a wartime desire to realize the social efficacy of the Christian faith...
...He could have paid no greater tribute to the "noble experiment," which has done so much to soften the minds and harden the hearts of reformers...
...The editors state that the evidence leads to conclusions like this: "There seems to be the smallest degree of doctrinal uniformity among the Methodists, who could muster only 80 percent in agreement upon only eleven of the fifty-six items" (which items, we may remark, were such trifling matters as belief in God, the Divinity of Christ and a future life) ; "There was not a single proposition in the whole list upon which the in Methodist preachers agreed unanimously except that there is a God who may properly be thought of as a Father, and that Jesus was tempted...
...Wilson's analogy is, therefore, quite inaccurate and unfair...
...Clarence True Wilson's reply on behalf of the Board denies the specific allegations, and proceeds very neatly to read the Senator out of Methodism into Tammany Hall...
...Hoover's recent addresses...
...Speaking to his Protestant Episcopal congregation in New York City, the Reverend J. A. Maynard severely castigated Bishop Cannon and attributed to that astute politician qualities no less grave than "ignorance" and "pharisaism...
...The symbol of the cross has, in all truth, made room for a highly symbolic camel...
...It is a religion of drought, which absorbs its "thou shalt nots" from the Eighteenth Amendment, the Volstead Act and Mr...
...Senator Copeland stands with Tammany Hall on all these matters...
...Our church is dry and he is wet," writes Dr...
...The only difficulty connected with the matter is that here is a church to which some of us may not care to belong...
...The Methodist Church stands back of the Eighteenth Amendment and the Volstead Act and back of President Hoover's program for its enforcement...
Vol. 10 • May 1929 • No. 2
