lips were set in a faint, changeless sneer. His eyes were black, gleaming, defiant. These two, then, the Diamonds and the Whittemores, are variations of the small gang which is organized for the explicit purpose of robbery by murder. Their chief difference lies in the experience of the individuals involved before they came together in a gang. So far as they affect the common scene of metropolitan life, there is not a great deal of difference between them.

VI

As the methods of the gangs have changed since the turn of the century, so have the methods of the police changed. Criminals of nowadays do not haunt particular sections of New York. It follows that there are no dangerous localities in the city, no section in which an honest man need fear to show himself. It also follows, since there is a compensating difficulty for every advantage, that the police no longer enjoy the benefits which formerly came from having criminals concentrated in a few known sections.

There are two obvious reasons for the changed aspects of New York criminal life. They are, in their effect, very closely related. The first is prohibition, and the second is reform in the matter of prostitution. In the old days there were the 'honky-tonks,' those fantastic embellishments of city life which were recognized haunts for all types of blackguards. All of them were alike establishments of glittering mirrors and long mahogany bars, of back rooms wherein wine and women and song were ever to be found. And while they existed they were the ganglia, as it were, of Manhattan's criminal life. By simply watching them, the police had a definite knowledge of the criminal population of the city. They knew names and faces and habits, and they

VOL. 141-NO. 3

could make use of that ancient tool, the stool pigeon. Thieves and murderers were forced by boredom to haunt the honky-tonks. And as long as they did, the police had a grip on them. Most of the stool pigeons were women who had been scorned, or weakling men who had suffered the taunts of the bullies. Police contact with crime was very close. The conflict between law and the lawless was direct, blunt, simple.

But those days, with all their raw gusto, their segregation of criminal populations, are gone. The underworld no longer has a habitat - it is everywhere. Prostitutes are a vastly different breed from what they once were. They do not dwell among rough thieves and scoundrels, but are scattered throughout the city. Stool pigeons are no longer of value, for they have no point of contact with the rogues they might betray. With these changes, crime has lost nearly all of that curious romance which once hung over it. They are not wild, careless, carousing fellows any more, the criminals. They have become remote from the workaday world; more secret and rather more subtle than they were in other times. They have been considered by the psychologists; and nowadays, in advanced circles, they are called unfortunate, abnormal, pathetic variations from the norm.

Perhaps the psychologists are right. The world, no doubt, is learning. But pondering upon the Kid Droppers and the Little Augies, the Diamonds and the Whittemores, the efficient Dusters, the nameless silk thieves and bond thieves, the dope peddlers and the bootleggers of our generation, one is moved occasionally to wish for one glimpse of a brawling, downright bad a husky who would bellow his contempt for law and order, and leave a trail of not too badly broken heads behind when they hauled him off to jail.

man

I DESIRE to observe the fiftieth anniversary of my birth, in a village parsonage, and the twenty-fifth anniversary of my ordination into the ministry, by documenting a few personal impressions of the present activities and apparent aims of our Nonconformist churches. The criticisms have not been conceived in petulance and brought forth in irascibility. I have had no occasion to quarrel with the Church. She has been a just and generous employer, and had I again to choose an occupation I would cheerfully work for her.

Not infrequently of late it has been clamorously announced that the Church must determine - presumably by the prompt acceptance or rejection of some programme suggested by the alarmed whether she is to survive this generation. All this is nonsense, of course, as these excited sons of Amittai would realize were their talent for interpreting history comparable to their gift of tongues. The Church is the only institution we have with us to-day that does not reek of fresh paint, hot rivets, and perspiration. All anxieties concerning her perpetuity may be reassigned to more pressing problems. The questions I am about to raise do not relate to her probable ability to survive.

One notes in the journals lending encouragement to the popular cult of 'neo-smartaleckism' that the Church is headed toward oblivion because she is unwilling and unable to keep pace with modern thought. Nonsense, again.

Scientific research has ever been a pensioner either of the churches as institutions or of avowed churchmen as individuals. If Science is disposed to doubt this, let her make the experiment of refusing further support from the church element, and pass the hat among the vocally irreligious. By next June you can have first-class microscopes and laboratory-trained bake ovens at your own price, with a few stadia thrown in for good measure. My anxiety about the churches does not lie in that quarter.

It is to be observed that much agitation agitation is manifest among the more militant of the conservatives lest Christianity be imperiled, if not extinguished, by the yelping infidelities of an increasingly incautious group disinterested in such traditions as the inerrancy of the Scriptures, the historical validity of miracles, and a few other controversial items customarily listed in this invoice of riddles. More nonsense. These debates only deepen the interest of the contentious in their respective theories, inspiring a commendable zeal to justify their metaphysics by their capacity to recall that sixteen ounces make a pound; besides temporarily engaging forensic talents which might be put to much worse employment.

Modernism is quite incapable of destroying the churches, even were it bent upon doing so, which it is not; and Fundamentalism, however smugly vain of the cold thumb wherewith it valiantly plugs the dogmatic dike, could

not rescue the churches were they in jeopardy. Both of these tendencies have been too self-conscious, vastly overrating the importance of the issue which absorbs their attention. Most of what passes for 'modernism' in the pulpit amounts to nothing more serious than the desire of an overworked parson to add incandescence to his Sunday morning essay by presenting fresh facts from the laboratories, information not arrived at through his own diligent scholarship, but hastily abstracted from the bedtime stories of Messrs. Wiggam, Slosson, Kellogg, and other journeyman-scientists now praiseworthily engaged in the installation of better guideboards along the road to the higher wisdom.

While not personally covetous of the Fundamentalist's rating in the esteem of the intellectuals, I confidently believe it takes more brains, at this hour, to command respect as a Fundamentalist than to achieve a local reputation for modernity. The layman's race memory is an institution mortgaged to the shingles by the old religious traditions. The Fundamentalist preacher who expounds these well-known dogmas must mind his step and make sure he stays on the reservation. The Modernist preacher, on the other hand, is quite too well aware that the average layman, disavowing any clear knowledge of scientific affairs, is unable to bring his pastor to book for whatever intellectual misdemeanors he may commit in that field. With such feeble censorship from the pew, the iconoclastic apostle of modernity is with great difficulty kept back from presumptuous sins, and is prone to lapse into a state of mental slovenliness most distasteful to the occasional informed wayfarer questing spiritual refreshment at this fountain.

The most unfortunate feature of the warfare between the conservative and

progressive forces is the apparent necessity of their engagement at a strategic salient which happens to lie quite remote from contemporary interests. Under normal conditions, the Fundamentalist would make a wide detour around the Garden of Eden, aware that it is a bit of landscape appearing to much better advantage when reproduced in oil, by one of the old masters, than on a cinema film shot at high noon in the second quarter of the twentieth century. But circumstances have required him to encamp there and withstand a siege. Upon the recent renascence of scientific knowledge concerning man's place in Nature, the Fundamentalist set off hurriedly with his entire host, horse, foot, and artillery, for the Garden, where he dug himself in: and where the Modernist means he shall stay for some time to come. It is a very anachronistic rumble that the motor lorries make as they go careening across the pontoons which span the River Pison, laden with fresh munitions for the besieged ensconced in the old bdellium quarries behind the orchard as the Modernists have facetiously observed with an infuriating, tongue-in-cheek ridicule which has driven the Fundamentalists into a state of pardonable exasperation. To put the case gently, the water of life has been issuing, lately, in a very slim trickle, from both the conservative and the progressive springs, while their custodians have been employed as indicated above. But the criticisms I have to present do not relate to these polemics, however tragic they may seem to lovers of concord or ridiculous to the unconcerned.

The churches are neither failing nor slated to fail of maintaining a certain grip upon the imagination and loyalty of their own natural constituencies. They are building larger auditoriums, collecting more money, staging more

impressive conventions, and apparently doing more business than ever before.

My contention is that they might easily and quickly rise to an unquestioned position of confidence and respect in the opinion of the general unchurched public by doing adequately the things for which they were manifestly intended, and finding time and energy for these things by abandoning the pursuit of a group of endeavors for which they have small talent and in which they have had but little success. The very points of apparent strength, wherein they have vaunted themselves in their yearbooks and periodical literature, are, when carefully analyzed, disquieting weaknesses. The enterprises to which they are devoting the major part of their time and zeal are, for the most part, identical with similar endeavors of agencies entirely secular as to organization and merely humanitarian as to motive. Meantime they are minifying the distinctive mission for which they are exclusively responsible. Their weaknesses, in my opinion, may be catalogued as follows.

I

They are too noisy. The chief charm of the original Galilean culture is its ability to fill out and complete life at the points of its most urgent need. To make life 'more abundant' is the prime errand of the gospel. Whatever the 'one thing thou lackest,' Christianity stands ready with a prescription. Beyond question, the greatest need in contemporary American life is for the recovery of a lost serenity. The churches have the capacity, but not the disposition, to meet that demand. No other institution has either the disposition or the capacity.

The uniqueness of the Christian message may be said to be founded

upon the conviction that life is good, acceptable, livable; not to be resisted, rebelled against, groaned over, or antagonized, but calmly appropriated. A 'militant church' is as absurd as a blistering twilight. The Galilean ethic, in its original form, comprehended a theory of nonresistance quite startling in its proposals of quick and expensive settlements out of court, the cheerful volunteering of a second mile, the submissive offer of the other cheek - all in the interest of a tranquillity to be had only at the price of refusing to contend with adversaries. In its unadulterated form, Christianity is as quiet as yeast. Its energy is that of catalysis. No distinction could have accrued to Jesus had he shouted, ‘Join me, and we will go to war!' He set his cultus apart from every other inspirational appeal when he said, 'Come unto me . . . and I will give you rest.' This is an alluring promise; never more so than now. It is strange that the churches, possessed of an inducement so intriguing to the human imagination, and maintained in their exclusive keeping, should have stowed it away, preferring to fill their windows with poor imitations of such gaudy delectables as other institutions are infinitely better equipped to display and distribute. It is an incomprehensible state of mind that leads our churches to conceal the one benefit of which they have an undisputed and enviable monopoly.

At this hour, while scores of selfordained prophets in every city conduct overflowing classes in psychology as it relates to personal poise, contentment, and spiritual nurture, obviously endeavoring to point distracted people to mental ways of peace and steadiness, the churches, in imitation of commerce and industry, patter the lingo of the market place, mistakenly believing the public unresponsive to any

the huckster.

There is a certain sedative quality in Christianity which our churches decline to recognize, much less administer. They are ashamed to admit that they have it. They lack the faith to abandon their frail and ludicrous attempts to outyell the theatres, the department stores, the automobile manufacturers, and the realtors, and quietly offer to this harassed, jaded, noisepummeled public a sanctuary insulated against the raucous squawk of the saxophone, the blink of illuminated billboards, and the monotonous bleat of that legion who clamor for the reform of this, the abolition of that, and the putting over of something other.

Increasingly every appeal to the good impulses of the public has been in the nature of a stimulant. For the vast majority of Protestant-born Americans, there is now no institution inviting them to find, by a quiet inspection of their own hearts, a motive and a reason for believing and practising Christian altruism. No matter what agency of good works happens to be shrieking, the summons is an irritant. The individual is fused into the pack, and his 'charity' is literally snatched out of his hand. The appeal laid before him rarely rises beyond the shallow lure of a tribal vanity. Notwithstanding the charter of Christianity had advocated a process of charity so unostentatiously carried on that the donor's left hand would be unaware of the gift dispensed by the right hand, the improved method boasts of the brazen publicity accruing to our group should we exceed our quota and points with alarm to the shame we must feel if we fail to come across.' The American business man has come to identify Christian altruism with mob hypnotism. The technique is always the same, essentially, whatever may be the

time, or the place. More 'pep'! More push! More punch! And now, folks, while the pledge cards are being passed among you, if you will temporarily put aside your pie, our own beloved song leader, Mr. Grimace, will direct us. .. Attaboy, folks! Are we happy? Y-e-a, Bo! Say it! Now, turn in the goodole songbook to Num-berrr Thirrrty-thrrree! You all know this one, folks. "Under the Soft Pale Moon We Sit and Spoon." Now, snap into this, folks! All-togetherrr - sing!'

Let no sequestered sister, incredulously lorgnetting the above, bear down too heavily on the antepenult when declaiming 'Impossible!' You flatter us, madam, in that you think this impossible. Nevertheless, this is the approved method of teaching and administering the Golden Rule, today, in every hamlet, town, and city of our land. This technique of inspiring interest and unity of purpose originated during the days of our mental dishevelment when we were attempting, by any process whatsoever, to raise and equip an army on short notice. It quickly came to be recognized as the standard formula for encouraging the public to resolve, amiably, unselfishly, and concertedly, upon the mass performance of good works.

To say that the large majority of even approximately intelligent men and women are disgusted with this moronic blather which has become the liturgy of altruism, and all the other rackety tactics of get-togetherism corollary thereunto, is to state the case with cool reserve. Were the churches better informed as to public sentiment on this subject, instead of imitating this cheap claptrappery of luncheonclub fellowship and altruistics, as they do to the limit of their capacity, they might be courageous enough to resort to the measures of appeal bequeathed