For a New Noah's Ark
FOR A NEW NOAH'S ARK THE quest for dictators continues. Part of the zest of the chase comes, no doubt, from the exceedingly elusive habits of the worthwhile dictator. You have no sooner closed upon...
...The Protestant, for his part, no longer knows what Protestantism is...
...It is, perhaps, not hazardous to say that the Church as a moral agent stands or falls by what it has done for relations between men and women through the matrimonial sacrament...
...Is not the law on the side of the angels more resolutely than ever before in history...
...Marriage is surely one of the primary moral creations of the Christian faith...
...Herr Ludwig need not even quote his references correctly, provided he can supply a "new" Lincoln...
...What, one must surely ask in perplexity, is the right thing...
...These longings might evoke real activity if we thought of it in practical terms...
...If reputable authorities in every form of intellectual endeavor took a little time weekly to excoriate and expose some half-baked exposition of "new learning" they would render society a service to which it is entitled...
...according to thirst for beauty or unawareness of the ugly...
...While the national understanding of the Testaments was incomplete and incorrect in not a few respects (a fondness for the Hebraic letter sometimes getting ahead of regard for the Christian spirit) the United States was unified by its communal veneration of Holy Writ to an extent which even evoked the surprise and acclaim of foreign observers...
...Today this is no longer an object, and the school board is frequently an assemblage of canny fellows whom opinion churns round and round like rowboats on a gale-racked sea...
...Today the Catholic apologist, unless he be a specialist in a given type of controversy, addresses his normal argument for the Church to an audience with which he has practically no intellectual connection apart from a rather vague allegiance to reason and rectitude...
...And one reason why all this is so is surely the multiplication of books...
...John L. Tildsey, reporting public school education in New York City riddled with politics and in a bad way generally, declares that the one thing needful is to find a man as big as Mr...
...Lincoln's trust in Providence was a nation's trust...
...The idea of the elected education board has long since been out of date...
...Hartley Burr Alexander's, or to a frankly Erastian modernization in which timidity and boldness are neatly blended...
...The first is often pardonable, since the age is rich in discovery and all worthwhile findings deserve to be recorded...
...In our time things are so changed that the community may be said to favor abandonment of, at least, the implications of holy matrimony...
...During several generations America was ruled intellectually by the English* Bible and one or two commentaries on that...
...But the second...
...In 1930 we are certainly no longer a people of one book, one philosophy, one faith...
...We shall merely continue to be swamped...
...Daniel Webster's esteem of the Sermon on the Mount was accurately representative of his countrymen...
...We are divided according to a belief in principle or a belief in expediency...
...It served no other wise purpose than to give the tax-payer a chance to limit expenditures...
...if two people can live together with moral profit without having children-then what the Christian Church has said regarding marriage is plainly wrong or bound up with passing historical circumstances...
...And it follows that when every incentive is given to produce something undreamed of before, the whole emphasis is placed upon the non-traditional and the chimerical...
...The new is always news...
...We were a people of one book, just as older and homogeneous civilizations-of China, India and mediaeval Europe-have been civilizations of one book...
...Or for a new Noah's Ark, in which to saunter away from the deluge...
...We note with interest that Dr...
...Seriously regarded, it is a mosaic compounded with disconcertingly monotonous cleverness out of materials gathered helter-skelter from life, philosophy and history...
...Quite apart from this or sundry other local phenomena, the problem of what might be termed intellectual dictatorship is now exceedingly actual...
...The product is no better than its creators-who are often enough crude, time-serving, unprincipled and illiterate...
...Granted that our administration of finance is unsteady when the savings of thousands are wiped out through unsound advice or poor management...
...If unblessed sex union is ever desirable ethically...
...Owen D. Young or Dr...
...But this assurance appears to be without a very firm foundation...
...We moderns are not infrequently given to admire our achievements-widespread ability to read, libraries at everyone's disposal, chemical and medical workshops in which the care of the body is charted with steadily increasing definiteness...
...What most distinctly characterizes both sections of the literary deluge, however, is that originality is both the motive and the recipe for success...
...You have no sooner closed upon him than he begins to look like every other human being, and through this perfect mimicry disarms you...
...This grotesque acceleration of the writing urge must be attributed to two factors: the increase of knowledge scientifically arrived at, and the prodding of the imagination by the circumstance that reading is one way in which millions can use up their leisure hours...
...We see the result most clearly in the moral realm...
...It would be easy to map out the startling growth of the supply, which now includes so many thousands of volumes annually that all thought of surveying literature has gone...
...The fact remains (we are assured) that society is impelled, as never before, by a communal desire to do the right thing...
...The lack of unity thus revealed in the moral order will be found, after a little investigation, to extend throughout the whole domain of the intellect and the will...
...One longs, pardonably enough, for some dictator capable of putting down sternly the folly and venality of literary politics...
...If some competent individual were selected to control the educational business, he would doubtless benefit us all and would, moreover, be carrying on in the pristine American tradition according to which a "representative" was supposed to be something more than a pinhead on a pinwheel...
...Such boons are, doubtless, too much to ask for...
...And who knows but what millions of minds are being fashioned in this mold-twisted into implements for registering thrills instead of being made antennae for the reception of beauty...
...If a concert of critics set to belaboring indecent and vapid excursions into fiction and poetry with half the energy which music judges now expend upon contraltos and pianists, the world might drive some pretense under cover...
...In any case, however, he will surely feel that the world has lost a good deal of even its former certainty about any intellectual or spiritual declaration...
...Brunner, or to some fervently idealistic interpretation like Dr...
...if marriage is only an agreement, to be dissolved at will...
...But the hunt goes merrily on, occasionally seeming a practical enterprise...
...Americans did not always do the right thing, they were sometimes unaware of what the right thing was, but there remained a central body of doctrine to which they adhered...
...Practically none would have failed to endorse the Christian view, even if a Protestant might have held that infidelity was sanctioned as a basis for divorce by the Gospel...
...according to worship of things or regard for the mystic's vision...
...Even the Catholic population bowed to this authority and became a Scripture-quoting group...
...Catholics of a hundred years ago often made vigorous defenses of their beliefs against Protestant attacks, but both sides knew there was no argument about a substantial nucleus of truths held in common...
...Granted that the mechanism of industry is defective when it throws crowds out of work through no fault of their own...
...Practically no American of two generations ago would have missed seeing this point...
...He may subscribe to an intensely spiritual, Barthian version of the Reform as presented by Dr...
...And though we admit the social and political shortcomings of our time, we are comforted by the thought that injustice is now less strident and cruel than it was in olden times...
...Nicholas Murray Butler to supervise the schools and, when necessary, make them over...
...Conceive and bring forth a revolutionary morality and thousands will admire your virtuosity...
Vol. 11 • February 1930 • No. 17
