the minister and candidates as they stand in the pool. First the light is white, and 'as the candidate is immersed the colour will change to purple.' After this, to the European, there is something quite restrained in the announcement that a Methodist in Tennessee will give 'a funeral oration on a dead butterfly.'

The accumulative impression from these extracts is of soul-destroying vulgarity-the surrender by Puritanism of its austerities and its reticence, the gleeful borrowing of all that is flashy and cheap from the theatre and the cinema. While still professing unqualified acceptance of the Bible, the teaching of religion would seem to have given place to a determination somehow or the other to attract people into church and to make religion a going concern. The spot-light on the steeple of the Methodist chapel is only one more indication of that worship of success which is not unnatural, and, indeed, may be regarded as inevitable in a nation that enjoys a widespread material prosperity unparalleled in the history of the world. Almost every American workman owns a Ford car. Practically every American home has its radio set. To the American, America is obviously the Promised Land, the land flowing with milk and honey, and he is sure that, if the American had appeared earlier in the world, human history must have been vastly different. If Moses had been a Rotarian, it has been gravely said, the children of Israel would have reached the Promised Land in forty days instead of in forty years. While from another gentleman comes the assurance: Joseph, the lad who wore the coat of fifty-seven varieties of colours, was the first life-insurance agent; he provided during the seven years of plenty for the following seven lean years.' And this proves that a writing of life insurance is next in importance to the preaching of the Gospel.' With all this, too, there is a widespread scorn of intellect and culture. A Methodist pastor denounced Grand Opera: 'No one can understand and if they did it would do them no good.' And the continuance of the worst side of Puritanism finds its evidence in the prohibition in a southern city of 'Sunday golf, billiards and dominoes.'

It is always difficult for the rich man to enter into the Kingdom of Heaven and a wealthy Church is almost inevitably spiritually inert. It is therefore not surprising Vol. 249,-No. 493.

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that the soul of American Puritanism has been besmirched by American prosperity. In his History of American Literature,' Dr Leon Kellner says: 'Calvinism is the natural theology of the disinherited; it never flourished, therefore, anywhere as it did in the barren hills of Scotland and in the wilds of North America.' The Calvinism of the early American colonists has become, so to speak, Fordised and standardised into the religion at which Mr Sinclair Lewis jeers in Elmer Gantry,' and which finds its expression in uplift talks and blatant advertisements. But while Calvinism as a living faith has so obviously disappeared, it has left as a legacy a prevailing 'moral' fervour and an overmastering desire to interfere with other people's habits, which made Prohibition possible, and compel the average American to pretend that a dinner party and even a flask of bootleg whiskey have a definite moral value and significance. The Puritan is still predominant in American religion, in American politics, and in American social life, though his influence does little to prevent graft in politics, vulgarity in religion and multiple divorce.

To-day the thinker and the artist are struggling for emancipation and will surely succeed, but in the past American Puritanism deadened down the man of genius to its own level. America has produced few greater men than Mark Twain. His 'Huckleberry Finn,' says Mr Waldo Frank, must go down in history not as the expression of a rich national culture like the books of Chaucer, Rabelais, Cervantes, but as the voice of American chaos, the voice of a pre-cultural epoch.' That is perhaps true, but Huckleberry Finn' is a great book, the work of a genius, and so great that nearly everything else that Mark Twain wrote is, by comparison with it, almost pathetically bad. Whitman retained his soul because he was never the slave of national ideals; while-I again quote Mr Waldo Frank- Mark Twain did not believe in his soul, and his soul suffered. Mark Twain believed with his fellows that the great sin was to be unpopular and poor, and his soul died.' As Mr Mencken has said: He could not get rid of the Puritan smugness and cocksureness, the Puritan mistrust of new ideas, the Puritan incapacity of seeing beauty as a thing in itself.'

American Puritanism is no longer ascetic. The Puritan

is eager to slay with the sword of the Lord and of Gideon, but he has not the smallest intention of going into battle wearing a hair shirt. In brief,' says Mr Mencken, 'Puritanism has become bellicose and tyrannical by becoming rich.' And there probably is the explanation of the whole bewilderment as it appears to the European. A religion and a culture that suited a poor and struggling people who, while they remained poor and struggling, had dignity and even a rather harsh beauty, have lost all spiritual value and quality. One looks from afar and is bewildered, saddened, and apprehensive. But to-day is to-day, and to-morrow must come. 'We are sweating,' says Mr Mencken, 'through our 18th century, our era of sentiment, our spiritual measles.'

The chapel has an immense influence in American local politics. In his rather unpleasant autobiography 'Up from Methodism,' Mr Herbert Asbury says:

'It was essential for any man who wanted to hold public office to profess religion and be seen at church, and usually the more noise he made in religious gatherings, the greater his chances of success at the polls. If any candidate dared to hold views contrary to those of the godly, a vile whispering campaign was started against him, and his personal life was raked over and bared with many gloating references to the Christian duty of the people to punish this upstart. Occasionally the ungodly or anti-religious element elected a mayor or what not, but generally religion triumphed and thanks were offered to God, and then throughout his term the office-holder was harassed by pious hypocrites seeking favours and special privileges. My father, as county surveyor and city clerk, was constantly being checked up to determine if he remained steadfast in the faith.'

And the lot of the ministers themselves is not to be envied. Mr Asbury relates that one minister was hounded out of his town because his wife regularly went to sleep after the midday meal. The preachers are not well paid, and are demoralised by the conditions of their lives.

'They were inveterate beggars, and all of them had fine, highly developed noses for chicken and other dainties; it was seldom that a family could have a chicken or turkey dinner without the preacher dropping in. It is true that their salaries were not large, but they had free use of the

parsonage, and they were not in dire circumstances at all.
Yet they always had their hands out, grasping; they were
ecclesiastical tramps begging for a donation. In our town
we used to give showers for them; many families made
periodical donations to the pastor, and sometimes there were
surprise parties, when the preacher and his wife were led
into a room and shown piles of old clothing, food and dis-
carded furniture, all of which was sent next day to the
parsonage. The preacher was always pathetically grateful
for these things; he would kneel in the midst of them and
offer a prayer for the souls of the good people who had thus
given him the clutterings of their cellars and attics, which
they had no further use for. He seldom had enough self-
respect to refuse them.'

Mr Waldo Frank suggests that America is the land
of buried cultures. The Anglo-Saxon, the German, the
Latin, the Celt, the Slav and the African re-act on each
other and disappear as integral worlds in the vast
puddling of our pioneering life,' and the original Puritan
culture has gone with the rest. Roger Williams and
Jonathan Edwards have degenerated into the Reverend
Billy Sunday. Mr Waldo Frank writes:

'If, in whatever part of the United States you are, you
wish to make the personal acquaintance of this buried culture,
go to a meeting of the Reverend Billy Sunday. Sunday him-
self, for all his gesticulations, savours of the grave. He is a
wiry, nervous fellow, with the nose of a fox-terrier and the
voice of a damaged phonograph. He was once a professional
baseball player. Now he is America's most renowned
evangelist. The town to which he comes with his strident
message builds him a Tabernacle that seats ten thousand.
And Mr Sunday fills it two times daily. The Protestant
churches of the city-with certain illustrious exceptions-
cower to his doorstep and beg him to refill their pews. He
does so.
His methods are a long cry from the evangelism of
John Wesley. But in this they are in the direct succession:
the old exhorters gave to the people what they wanted, and so
does Mr Sunday. He gives them vaudeville, acrobatics, pro-
fanity, and the suggestion of lascivious subjects, Disguised,
of course, beneath the semblance of a sermon.'

Mr Waldo Frank sagely says that the European
cultures, swept to America and there buried, were
half killed by the mere uprooting.' The same idea is

suggested by Prof. Siegfried when he writes: The old European civilisation did not really cross the Atlantic, for the American re-awakening is not as generally supposed simply a matter of degrees and dimensions, it is the creation of new conceptions.' Both writers agree that the War was an event of the first importance in the history of America and American culture. It was the beginning of an overwhelming prosperity, and in consequence of the prosperity, of a revolt which at present only finds its expression in the writings of a few men, contemptuously dismissed as Radicals, against materialism and its soul-deadening accompaniments.

The whole of America is intent on the problem of production, and a maximum production has been attained by intelligent and courageous organisation and still more by standardisation, and in the process of standardisation the individual workman has himself become standardised, The result is the loss of individuality, the loss of any general standard of taste, the sacrifice of everything intangible and not to be represented in monetary terms, on the altar of efficiency. The American is apt to translate everything into dollars. Colonel Lindbergh's Atlantic flight was the fine heroic achievement of a courageous boy; but no sooner had he landed in France than a cable arrived from New York announcing the fact that when he returned home he would receive two hundred thousand pounds from the cinema, the radio and the newspaper. Fame was at once vulgarised into notoriety. The greater part of the large number of American universities are concerned with the equipment of their students for a successful career. Their idea is not to teach how to live but to teach how to make a living. Is it remarkable that with this obsession, with success and with the career that ensures a comfortable competence, the home, the basis of Christian civilisation, has ceased to be regarded as of much account? It is impossible to read American newspapers without realising that it is the club, the Y.M.C.A., the institutional church, or even the newspaper which is the unit of society, and no longer the family. So it has come about that a nation which has made the drinking of a glass of beer a penal offence, and which prosecutes for the heinous sin of playing a game of dominoes on Sunday afternoon, affords