Religion: Preachers Present

Episcopal Bishop William Lawrence of Massachusetts was convinced that war was “wickedness, useless and stupid.” Against such teachings, Dr. William Thomas Manning wrote to the New York Times that “Our moral sense as a nation is dulled. . . . Our present lack of national spirit is due also in part to a vast amount of well-meant but mistaken and misleading and really unchristian teaching about peace.” Soon Dr. Manning, Bishop Lawrence, Episcopal Layman George Wharton Pepper, Dr. Harry Emerson Fosdick and others signed a trumpeting manifesto: “Sad is our lot if we have forgotten how to die for a holy cause.”

That was in 1916 and 1917, before the U. S. entered World War I. Since then, some of the warlike preachers have died; some—notably Dr. Fosdick—have sworn off for life. Dr. Manning, now Bishop of New York, has kept his guns oiled, said recently: “A Christian cannot be neutral between right and wrong. . . . Right is more important than peace. . . . What our ultimate duty as a nation may be if the conflict is prolonged, no one can now say. . . .”

Believing that a look at the past is worth two at the present, the pacifist Christian Century (nonsectarian weekly) last week began printing a condensation of the best available study of parsons’ wartime behavior — Preachers Present Arms, by Sociologist Ray Hamilton Abrams (Round Table Press). When he wrote his book six years ago, Sociologist Abrams was skeptical of clerical calm-downs between wars, pointed out that western civilization possesses “perhaps the greatest war book known to man”—the Bible.

Not yet in World War II has appeared a prototype of the most picturesque character in Preachers Present Arms: the late Dr. Newell Dwight Hillis, Brooklyn, N. Y. Congregationalist, father of Marjorie (Live Alone and Like It) Hillis. Because of U. S. “dillydallying” over entering World War I, Dr. Hillis proposed that the tortoise be substituted for the eagle as national symbol. A great Liberty Loan speaker, Dr. Hillis peddled lurid atrocity stories, some of which the Christian Century printed. One of the Doctor’s favorites: “When the syphilitic German has used a French or Belgian girl, he cuts off her breasts as a warning to the next German soldier.”