a letter from Bishop William F. Anderson, distinguished prelate of the Methodist Episcopal communion, and Professor William Adams Brown's recently issued volume on "The Church in America," a volume that is encyclopedic in its information and refreshingly constructive in its discussion of the function of the church in modern life.

With the first as a cue and the second as a source book of data, I want to take advantage of this opportunity to answer some of the many queries raised in the minds of churchmen, here and in England, by the discussions I have been carrying on in these columns since last June discussions of the spiritual outlook for Western civilization, of the relative probability of a new Dark Ages or a new Renaissance, and particularly of the direction in which we may look for signs of that moral renewal of the Western world which I have ventured to predict as possible, provided our leadership, both secular and ecclesiastical, uses wisely the spiritual raw materials that now lie about us in confusion and challenge.

I am sorry that Bishop Anderson's letter is not at hand as I write, so that I might quote from it verbatim. Its essence, however, lies clear in my

some of the issues raised in these discussions, Bishop Anderson wrote that, upon a first reading of these papers, he found himself asking whether I had given adequate consideration to the part organized religion should and can play in the realization of such a renaissance. He asserted that he was keenly aware of the doubts that a study of the past might raise in one's mind, but that he was convinced by his current daily experience that the church is in a better position than ever in its history to assume its rightful and imperative responsibility in the leadership of any such renewal of our common life.

If at any point in these discussions I have seemed to minimize the importance of religion in this needed renaissance of Western civilization, it has been due to my faulty statement rather than to my intention. I am convinced that any reformation, any revolution, any renewal, or any renaissance that is to mean more than a mere reëstablishment of the old order of things under new names must be, in the deepest sense of the word, a religious movement. It must deal with the roots of life, not merely polish and pack in new and fancy containers the fruits of life. Anything less will be only an adventure in what Mazzini

called "the petty skirmishes for interests and rights." I am sure that Mazzini was right when he said that "there has never been a single great Revolution that has not had its source outside material interests. We know of riots, of popular insurrections, but of none that has been crowned with success, or transformed into a Revolution. Every Revolution is the work of a principle which has been accepted as a basis of faith. If a Revolution did not imply a general reorganization by virtue of a social principle if it did not secure a moral unity we should believe it our duty to oppose the revolutionary movement with all our power. The true instrument of the progress of the peoples is to be sought in the moral factor."

I have said that, in my judgment, the next great spiritual renewal would rest upon a bringing together into a new synthesis of all the new spiritual values that have been thrown up as by-products of modern thought and investigation in biology, psychology, sociology, economics, political science, and related quests of the modern mind. I do not believe that the impulse to this new synthesis is going to arise spontaneously out of our laboratories, our factories, or our political headquarters. We must look to some general leadership, animated by a genuinely religious passion for the unity and richness of life, to light the fires of this renaissance. Now, this may seem at first glance to be a coldly secular proposal, a substitution of the test-tubes of a laboratory for the stone tables of Mount Sinai, but it is at heart religious, just as Mazzini's political adventures were as truly adventures in religion as were

the ministries of the prophets of Israel.

The things I have suggested as sources of the projected renaissance are not things to take the place of religious leadership; they are the raw materials with which religious leadership must, as I see it, work. In every time of grand scale readjustment a lot of raw material for religious enrichment is unearthed. The tragedy frequently is that religious leadership fails to see it for what it is. The war was such a time. Never were there as many people fumbling for God, and in too many instances the chaplain was more "good fellow" than guide. In a little book called "Disenchantment," C. E. Montague, with rare insight and rare felicity of phrase, has painted a picture of the lost opportunity the war gave to religious leadership. He says:

"When you want to catch the Thames gudgeon you first comb the river's bed hard with a long rake. In the turbid water thus caused the creatures will be on the feed, and if you know how to fish you may get a great take. For our professional fishers of men in the army the war did the raking gratis. Imagine

the religious revival that there might have been if some man of apostolic genius had had the fishing in the troubled waters, the plowing and sowing of the broken soil."

He gives in detail typical conversations of men in trench and camp, and with the poignancy and hunger of them in the reader's mind, he goes on to say: "Thus would these inexpert people hang unconsciously about the uncrossed threshold of religion. With minds which had recovered in some degree the penetrative simplicity of a child's, they disinterred this or that

unidentified bone of the buried God from under the monumental piles of debris which the learned, the cunning, and the proud priests and kings, churches and chapels, had heaped up over the ideas of perfect love, of faith that would leave all to follow that love, and of the faithful spirit's release from mean fears of extinction. In talk they could bring each other up to the point of feeling that little rifts had opened here and there in the screens which are hung round the life of man on the earth, and that they had peeped through into some large outer world that was strange only because they were used to a small and dim one. They were prepared and expectant. If any official religion could ever refine the gold out of all that rich alluvial drift of 'obstinate questionings of sense and outward things,' now was its time. No figure of speech, among all these that I have mixed, can give the measure of the greatness of that opportunity."

Now, as Mr. Montague says, "the clumsy fumblings of uninstructed people among things of the spirit might, one imagines, be just such stuff as a skilled teacher and leader in this field might have delighted to come upon and to inspirit and marshall." But the war was ended, and the opportunity, this particular opportunity, went begging, and the whole Western world was caught in the sweep of a vast crescendo of hatreds, victim of a resurgence of jungle ethics.

The point I have been trying to emphasize in these discussions is that the spiritual leadership of the world faces a similar opportunity to-day. There are raw materials, perhaps finer than those of war-time, lying all about, waiting to be utilized by the leadership

that knows religious values even when they are unlabeled. For the last fifty years especially our scientists and our scholars, as Mr. Montague says of the soldiers, have been digging out of themselves, not knowing what it was, the clay of which the bricks are made with which religions are built. Instead of the pathetic and irreligious bombardment of scholarship and scientific findings by certain groups in the churches, it is the duty of religious leadership to infuse scholarship and the findings of science with spiritual meaning. The conscious control of civilization is at last within our grasp if we can heal the age-old schism between the leaderships of our secular and our religious life.

I agree with Bishop Anderson that the church should and can assume its rightful and imperative share in the leadership of the new renaissance which we must realize unless we want to surrender our hopes and enter a new Dark Ages. I believe that opposition and blindness to the spiritual significance of modern thought and science are confined to a belligerent minority in religious leadership. And I do not think it is a question of the pulpit always lagging far behind the pew. For every minister who is failing to translate religion into terms of the modern adventure, we may be sure that in some church up the street we laymen are sitting, fat bodied and fat brained, in stubborn opposition to that Christianizing of Christianity which is the passion and program of the more prophetic type of ministers who are more and more coming to places of leadership in the various denominations.

The greatest religious advance will be brought about by the religious leadership which takes all of life for its