NE of the most interesting and significant happenings in recent popular thinking has been the disappearance of the devil. Not so many years ago the devil was an important personage in the world's drama. For most of us, or at least for our fathers, he was one of the two leading figures in the life of the world as men construed it. God, the good, was using matter and man for good ends. The devil, the evil one, was fighting that goodness, was trying to snatch matter and man out of its control. Always, it is true, for most men the devil was the under dog, the loser in the fight; but always he was there, making the fight, giving God and man something to do. He was the villain without whom the play would have had no plot whatever, without whom, indeed, there would have been no play at all.

But to-day for most of our people, including those who frequent the churches, the devil is with Santa Claus. We have grown up; we no longer believe in him; we no longer see as little children. It is, I think, exceedingly important that we try to find out just what it is that has happened to our point of view. It may reveal for what our scholars are responsible.

If one asks why men have stopped

believing in the devil, it is very hard to get an answer. I have tried it often, and the results are very baffling. "Why do you no longer believe in the devil?" one asks. And the answer is, "Well, no one believes that

"Yes," one says,

sort of thing now." sort of thing now." "but what are the reasons which you and every one else have for discarding a notion which you have held so long?" And again, in one form or another, the answer is: "I don't know just what you mean by reasons. The plain fact is that men are nowadays freeing themselves from old superstitions such as the belief in the devil. Such notions are obviously out of date; they are not scientific; they cannot hold their ground any longer. Of course there is no devil."

And if one tries to go back one step further and asks: "But what were your reasons when you did believe in the devil? What was your evidence when you did think of him as existing and as active in human and cosmic situations?" in one form or another the same answer is given: "I don't know just what the reasons were. It is clear enough now that there were no adequate reasons, but somehow the idea was there; one found it in the common stock of human beliefs. One had no reasons for it; one just had it,

This second answer has at least one virtue: it serves to clear up the first. There is little wonder that we find it difficult to give the reasons which we have for discarding an opinion for which, it appears, we had no reasons when we believed it. Obviously enough, one cannot reason unless there is something to reason about or against. In the circumstances our question is beside the point. There is no explicit reasoning about things which are known "of course."

If the conclusion which we have just reached regarding the devil and his believers were generalized, the result would be rather terrifying. Are all ideas accepted and rejected in this way? Does belief just happen to a man, like measles or a pleasant morning? Is it a mere drift of opinion that brings to a group of men the conviction that immersion is better than sprinkling, that freedom is better than despotism, that the knife is better than the brush? Do these convictions just happen to come and happen to stay till others happen to drive them away?

Now, it is not the purpose of this paper to attempt to answer this question in all its forms or even in its fundamental form. A great deal of thinking must be done by some one before any one can do that. That men do drift into and out of ideas, and that ideas do drift into and out of men, no one can doubt, however his own mind may be drifting. But what does "drift" mean? Does it mean absence of thinking or does it mean bad thinking?

As between these two there is a very important issue which must be passed upon before our modern attempts at

ceed.

I have said, however, that our present purpose is not to attempt this fundamental explanation. May I here simply record the impression that "bad thinking" offers a more promising line of explanation than does "absence of thinking"? Minds are seldom empty. They are very often filled with thin and bad and unintelligible stuff. Our social need is not that people think; it is that they think well.

§ 2

But now, returning from explanation to fact, we observe again that with respect to the devil and many other matters of like importance the human mind drifts; it happens to have ideas; it holds beliefs "of course." What has this to do with the question, "For what is the scholar responsible?" My general answer would be that the scholar is, and ought to be far more actively than he is, the chief determining factor in fixing the drift of popular thinking. Socially speaking, it is his business to furnish the ideas by means of which the people as a whole may do their thinking.

I know that the statement just made is objectionable and dangerous, and yet, in the sense in which it is true, it is so important that, when it is relevant, one must make it. The most important social fact about our scholars is that they are commissioned to provide vehicles for our minds in very much the same sense that the motor-builders provide vehicles for our bodies. And if in either case the vehicles are lacking or are broken down, then we who use them are doomed to delay, to disappointment, and to even more serious calamities.

Before attempting, however, a general discussion of this thesis or its implications, may I turn again to the devil and his works and call attention to two results which his disappearance has brought upon our popular thinking and living?

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The first effect is a shaking and blurring of the idea of God. And the effect here, when minds are dealing with ideas as "of course," is quite natural and quite inevitable. We have had the goodness of the world gathered up on the idea of a person who contains and masters it. And in like manner the evil, too, had been gathered into a person. And each of these was constituted as the enemy, the opponent of the other, definable in terms of relationships to him. If now by some ill defined and unself-conscious process one of these persons drifts out of existence, it is inevitable that the same drift should seize upon the other. Why, if evil is to be no longer a cosmic person, should good be so regarded? Or if this statement has too much the quality of explicit reasoning, let us ask rather, How, if one of these persons cannot keep his grip upon the minds of men, will the other hold his own? And it is, I think, clear as matter of observable fact that in recent years the idea of God has lost both grip and clarity so far as the popular mind is concerned. Men are beginning to say, "Of course God is not a person as our fathers thought him and pictured him. We mean by God the goodness in the world, whatever it is; but just what it is one finds it hard to tell. And just why one should continue to call it God one also finds it hard to tell."

This is the result which I had in mind when I spoke above of the devil's revenge. To kill your enemy by his own act of slaying you, to reach up from oblivion and drag your slayer down into the pit which he has digged for you, that is a devil's trick quite worthy of the ancient master of all tricks and guiles. That is revenge indeed to please a devil. And we, I think, might be more careful how we deal with such a foe. It will not do to be too careless with him, to shut our eyes, to act and think "of course." Perhaps it is himself from whom have come these easy and casual announcements of his demise. Perhaps the rumbling that we hear throughout the world is not a cosmic groaning, but rather a cosmic chuckle so deeply hidden in the guile of things that ears that hear "of course" are fooled and quite mistake its meaning.

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The second result is practical. It is the effect upon morals which comes from failure of thinking. When men do not understand the situation in which they are, when they have no theory of what they are doing, action perforce loses definiteness of direction, singleness of purpose. Now, it may be said that no theory at all is better than a bad theory, that no action at all is better than action in a wrong direction. But as against this I should urge that moral indecisiveness is bad enough, whatever may be worse. And just this result, I think, has come upon us with the breaking down of our cosmic theory of good and evil. Whether or not it was true, the scheme of a struggle between God and the devil was one into which the concrete facts of human experience seemed

to fit, to which men could pretty well adjust the conduct of their lives. But to-day, for most of us, there is no scheme; evil and good are not "placed," they simply are; but why or whence, or even what they are, we do not know. No one can fail, I think, to observe the consequent lack of poise, of sanity, of balance, in the moral judgments of the time. There is no lack of moral sentiment among us; there is a terrible lack of moral judgment. The effect appears perhaps most clearly in the breaking down of what we call the "sense of sin." And many of us, I am sure, are glad to see that sentiment challenged and shaken. We have been tired and bewildered by the moral smugness of the "saved"; we were shocked and outraged by the condemnation which judges one's fellow-men to be evil and "damned" and lost, quite different from ourselves. Such cleavages appear to us too crude to fit the facts of human nature. And in the face of them we press the common fate of men, the common human quality; we trace the differences of men to differences of circumstance external to themselves.

And yet the fact remains that human life consists in just the difference between goodness and evil. Our human living is at every point a choice. "This act is good, that act is bad." Those are the most essential judgments that we make; they are the stuff of human living. And if they lose their meaning, if men become confused concerning them, then life becomes unmanageable. Men do not know what living is or what it ought to be.

In such a state, I think, we are at present. Old formulas have lost their grip; men drift away from them. And

we have nothing yet to take the place. We have no proper instruments of moral understanding. Without such instruments we cannot live as men should live. I say again, the devil is revenged. I still suspect he has a hand in what is going on.

§ 5

But now, to turn again from effects to cause, may I say that for the situation just described it is the scholar who seems to me chiefly responsible. He made the thought scheme which is breaking down; it is he who has created the "drift" before which that scheme is giving way; it is his mission to find, to make for us, a scheme of concepts by means of which the facts of experience will again receive such intelligibility and coherence as they are capable of having. It is the business of scholars to get us into such scrapes as we are now in; it is also their business to get us out of them, to get us through them as rapidly as possible.

And here, I think, one may make a railing accusation against our scholars, especially in our own country. They have not a lively enough sense of that for which they are responsible, or, if you like, of their own importance. The scholar, I know, may own no other master than the truth to which he is responsible, and yet that truth has value as an instrument of life. Men need the truth in order to live well; they need to know the world in order that it may be used for human ends; they need to know themselves in order that their better selves may have the victory over that which only seems the better. To serve these ends the scholar must provide such truth as he can get, must make it

clear and sharp, must give it to mankind as instrument to use in doing well the things it has to do.

But scholars are not always clear concerning their responsibilities. They know to whom they are responsible; they do not clearly see-sometimes they do not seem to care for what they they are are responsible. And though it be unpleasant and absurd, one cannot help rejoicing when at times an angry fate cries out to them of what they fail to do. This is, I take it, the meaning of Fundamentalism; this is what happens when a legislature, speaking for the people, says, "Here are the doctrines which men must think and teach in this our commonwealth." And very often it is this and nothing else which underlies the case when even an institution of learning decrees that some one of its teaching force does not believe the things that it believes, and hence must leave its fellowship.

What could be sillier, on the face of things, than actions such as these? They are grotesque, absurd. And yet, in terms of crude and blinded justice, the judgments are not bad. Who leads the Fundamentalists? A A college graduate concerning whom it is entered in our popular record-book, "A.B. (highest honors and valedictorian), 1881." Our colleges, our scholars, must take the consequences of what they did or failed to do for those who came to them for education.

And what are legislatures, churches, trustees, and angry parents saying beneath their intellectually awkward gestures? It is, I take it, something like this: "We had a scheme of thought by which to live; we understood our world in ways that made it possible for us to manage it. And you are

smashing, or trying to smash, that scheme. Where is our devil gone? And is God going, too? We found truth in the Bible. We knew the laws of nature and of man as well as those of God. And you deny those laws; you teach our children to hold them in contempt. What do you put in place of them? What is your scheme of thoughts? What is your world if ours has gone to smash? Can you restore as well as you destroy? Or do you give us negations and nothing else by which to live?"

Here is, I think, for all its crudity, a just complaint. Its crudeness is that it demands the acceptance of this shaken truth which came to it "of course." Its justice is that it demands some theory of the world, such understanding of man's life as can be given by those whose task it is to make an understanding. The crudeness makes one's heart ache. The justice ought to make men rise to meet responsibility.

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And so we come to what is for me a very sober conclusion for our discussion. I have not in these pages been simply playing with words, just trying to "raise the devil." I have been trying to call attention to a situation which demands attention. I have been urging that those who have that situation in their charge shall quickly do the work that must be done if we are not to have disaster.

The situation is that in those features of the world which most concern our human living our minds have lost their bearings, have gone adrift. I would not try to take them back to moorings which have been found too weak to hold them. That would be