you th❜owed it - yo' name's wrote in it. Dat mean I have to pay d' billlak I pay f' ev'ything else roun' hyeh.' 'Dat all she say?'

'No. Say she go'n' have you 'rested fo' disturbin' d' peace. Say sump'n 'bout slander too.'

'Hmph!'

'Den she slam' d' do' in my face.' 'Maybe dat 'll help you stay 'way fum 'uh.'

'Stay 'way fo' whut?'

"'Cause she ain' got d' love o' God in huh heart, dat's fo' whut. An' neither is you. Hit's a bad combination.'

'Ain' lookin' fo' no love o' God. Lookin' fo' Wesley. Wha' he at?'

'Washin' my room winder. Let 'im 'lone.'

To Sam it was galling, derisive, contemptuous laughter, laughter of victory. Anger, epithets, blows he could have exchanged, but laughter found him defenseless. In a hot flush of rage he drew back a foot and kicked viciously at Wesley's legs.

At the moment Wesley had only one leg pressed firmly back against the wall. It was this that received the blow, and the quick sharp pain loosened its grip. In swift effort to catch himself, Wesley snatched at the bottom edge of the lower frame, but with such desperate force that it slid instantly upward, so that his hold was broken by the upper. Grabbing wildly, Sam sprang forward, frightened into contrition succeeded only in further dislodging his already unbalanced cousin. A brief mad

Only Wesley's legs were visible to Sam, entering the room. Wesley was wiping off the frosting of soap that he had allowed to dry on the pane. As he wiped, more of his body appeared through the glass thus made clear, and at last his troubled face. It showed surprise at the presence of Sam, who stood glowering accusation.

a moment's incredulous silence silence that broke with a soft and terrible thud.

Sam shrank back and threw one hand up over his mouth like a child that has heard something forbidden; wheeled, to see Mammy stiff in the doorway, staring with stricken eyes. Hysteria gripped him.

'I did n' do it - I 'clare out 'fo'

Even through intervening glass Wesley's anger was quick to respond. 'What d' hell could I tell 'uh bad enough?'

'You been puttin' me in - else she else she would n' 'a' slam' no do' in my face.' 'She slam' d' do' in yo' face?' 'Reckon you tole 'uh to do it.' Wesley's anger subsided. He repeated, with something akin to relief, eagerly,

'Say she slam' d' do' in yo' face?' 'Did n' miss it.'

Wesley threw back his head and filled the airshaft with loud laughter.

toward the window; backed off from it, crouching and trembling; faced again toward Mammy. Deprecation gave way to bravado. He whispered sharply, 'Ef you tell anybody, I'll—' Then suddenly rushed with insane menace toward her as panic rushed through his brain, reached her, stopped abruptly collapsed at her feet, shuddering with sobs.

Mammy, roused by a spirit which still hoped in the face of calamity, quickly bent down and shook the crumpled lad with sobering vigor. 'Git up, son! Make has'e! Git up! Mammy seen yuh! Seen yuh try to

The boy raised a countenance wretched with fear and doubt and weakness, but the strength and will in Mammy's eyes brought him to his

senses.

'Make has 'e, I tell yuh!'

He jumped up, his face still convulsed, and sped toward the outer door and the stairs.

IV

Again Mammy sat by her window, her fingers groping amid the thin leaves of her Bible.

Out of the airshaft sounds came to her, sounds of the land of promise. Noise of a rent party somewhere below from a tiny dwelling that had to be hired out if it was to be dwelt in at all - peculiar feature of a place where

Noise of a money quarrel somewhere above, charges, taunts, disputes fruit of a land where sudden wide differences in work and pay summoned disaster. Noise of sinful singing and dancing, pastime of Ellie's generation, breed of a city where children cursed and threatened the old and went free.

In the constant discussions about the failure of Christianity to function in the modern world, there is a usual assumption that the typical man of the moment has no religion to speak of. Therefore, it is said, either the Christian Church must be unusually stupid or its message must be hopelessly outgrown. Otherwise it would surely appeal winningly to these spiritually hungry souls. This seems a curious delusion. Our world is not spiritually empty. We are absorbed in sacrifice to gods which seem to us rich and satisfying. We may conceivably be

devotionally poisoned, but we are not spiritually starved. In point of fact, some of us are becoming positively fed up. It may be that in this last circumstance alone lies ultimately the chance for Christ and Christianity.

A professor of sociology asked me not long ago if I had ever noted that the Christian religion has usually made strong appeal only to rural, simple, and Arcadian peoples or else to those who were urbane, sophisticated, and disillusioned. The more one thinks about this interesting generalization, the more nearly true it seems. 'Observe,'

he went on, 'the day into which your religion was born. Compared with it every succeeding age seems a bit crude. Into its making had gone centuries of Greek thought, Egyptian mysticism, and Roman political efficiency. Travel was easy and general. The externalities of life were highly civilized. Men were mature, wise, shrewd. They had tried almost everything once. This blasé order in almost no time was worshiping a new god nailed to a gibbet. But before it found that new god the old gods had been tried out and discarded.'

'You mean Pan?' I ventured.

'Pan? No!' he thundered. "The Græco-Roman world was not pagan, had not been for centuries. To be a pagan one must be a poet. I mean the gods worshiped by successful citizens of the world with common sense. It was these which had been found nonsensical. A world very grown up gave the Apostles their chance. But,' he concluded, 'Jesus has no appeal to a new civilization. Its deities are more obvious.'

Whatever may be the faults or virtues of our social order, no one can deny that it is new and that not merely in America. Every summer hundreds of thousands of our countrywomen and a somewhat less number of our countrymen sail to the Old World in search of lost romance. Since most of them rush about so rapidly that they see Europe not as it is but of necessity as their imaginations make it, perhaps they gain the desired emotional release. They see the Tower and Westminster Abbey, but rarely Brixton or Manchester. They visit Eisenach or steam down the Rhine, but never notice the Ruhr. They are so absorbed in Potsdam that they fail to observe industrial Berlin. They see Rome in terms of the Cæsars, Florence in terms of the Medici, and Venice in terms of

the Doges; and ignore the industrialism of Mussolini. They look the Parthenon over and overlook modern Athens. The real Europe of to-day is not old or urbane, but almost as young and crude as we ourselves. The culture that grew through the ages has, for good or evil, been paralyzed by the power machine. Our social structure, in philosophy, motivation, and method, is only about a century old. Our Occidental culture is indeed new.

We are also new-rich. Despite the wasteful riot of the war, it remains true that even in Europe the thing that would most astonish one who might rise from the grave of a past generation and look about him to-day would be the astounding wealthiness of everybody. If the resurgent soul saw America, this feature of life would strike him deaf, dumb, and stupefied. Never was a time when so many people had so much money.

New-rich ages are apt to be like new-rich individuals. Indeed 'an age,' 'a civilization,' 'a period,' are all merely ways of talking. The reality lies in the constituent individuals. We as a new-rich culture are making the same two characteristic blunders that the new-rich always make. Almost every man who very rapidly makes a great deal of money supposes that his mere possession of wealth is an index of his worth. He also is apt to imagine that he can with his means buy for himself happiness. These mistakes commonly seem folly to an oldrich man, one who was born to property, whose father was bred with it. He knows that merely because he or his friends have it they may not be worth it, but are quite commonly the contrary; and he has learned through experience that money is not really very valuable stuff. Happiness, which is what all men desire, cannot be purchased, but is an illusive something not

for sale. The old-rich know these things well enough, but the new-rich never discover them, except by miraculous interposition of the grace of God, until they too have grown accustomed to their possessions.

Ours is an age of new-rich people, crass, crude, well-washed, all dressed up, sure that certain easily perceived goods will make life full and satisfying, and ready to pay heavily for their attainment. It is unintelligent to call such an age godless. A god is a way of talking about a good. We may not propitiate our gods adequately in words; but we sacrifice to them our lives and our children. For what more can any gods ask? Ours are not new gods. We are not really an original or imaginative people. Our deities are very, very old. The Christian Church ought not to find them very puzzling. She has been dealing with our pantheon so long that she has stereotyped names for those who sit upon its altars. We worship the World, the Flesh, and the Devil. To say this is not to be a bigot or a Fundamentalist or a Puritan or a Victorian or a mediævalist or any other dreadful bogieman. It is merely to describe, calmly and with charity, in terms of motivation, our scrambling hurly-burly of a century.

By the World, Christianity has always meant, not the glorious creation of sea and field and mountain and sky, not the beautiful relationships of men and women and children in homes or in creative labor, but rather the sordid nonsense of supposing that externalities possessed ennoble the owners, that a full fist is index of a fine spirit. That this egregious nonsense is believed today, that for the most part we sacrifice to it ourselves and our progeny, needs little demonstration. A casual perusal of some of our most widely circulated periodicals will reveal it. Therein and from our daily press and over the radio

sometimes, one regrets to say, in the pulpit, too-sound forth the beating of the big bass drum and the blare of the trumpet in glorification of the man with money. All the wealthy are good, and all good little boys will be wealthy. Beauty, quiet, serenity, poise, a sense of humor- let us sell them all and purchase this pearl of great price, the Cash. It would take a man incurably sentimental to deny that we are worldly.

Most of us are. Some of us are getting a little tired of it. This moneyworship, this kowtowing to the successful man,

by which we mean the wealthy man, seems not so much wicked as merely a bore. To none does it seem more wearisome than to many a wealthy man, tired of being regarded as a perambulating pocketbook, lonesome for human affection. Some of us are becoming at least a little bit like Saint Francis. We have not quite the courage to embrace Our Lady Poverty; but we find Our Lady Riches a most unstimulating spouse.

Our second deity is the Flesh. Her worship among us takes two formsthe apotheosis of appetite and the cult of comfort.

All appetites are mighty, says our modern world, and to be sacrificed unto; but chief of all the appetites is sex. We are so naïvely delighted in having discovered that the Eternal made us male and female that we sometimes seem to be forgetting that He made us anything else. Our stage, our music, our dancing, our books and magazines, our billboards, our dress, strike strenuously the note of sex appeal. We positively rejoice in nudity and naughtiness. The advertising sections of our most popular periodicals contain columns of advice to women about how, for a small sum, they may become beautiful and fascinating enough to attract male attention. Occasionally there is an advertisement

telling men how to become handsome and garrulous enough to be popular with women. We have even devised a popular moral philosophy based upon the supposition that if one refuses to submit to his appetites he will contract a dread horror known as 'a complex' and be in danger of the madhouse. Of course no reputable psychiatrist gives any such advice to his clients; but we go for our psychology not to him but to the editor of the tabloid newspaper and the erudite creator of spicy fiction. Increasingly we are soaked in sex; and the people love to have it so.

But not all of us. There are those, some older in years, and many not so old, in whom imagination supplies the place of experience, who have arrived a little beyond the peep-show morbidity of adolescence. We do not yet, perhaps, embrace the way of the Virgin, but we find Astarte very stale.

As for comfort, we twentieth-century people are soothingly immersed in it. Ours is a steam-heated, well-lighted, cunningly upholstered, warm-bathed era. With almost incredible ingenuity we ward off the bumps, plane the sharp corners, 'escalate' the heights. From twilight-sleep birth to narcotized death we insist upon ease. It is that without which all else is intolerable. Only to exceptional people has it yet occurred that the whole cult is petty, ignoble, unworthy of human nature. Few have as yet asked whether it can be possible that, since our primeval ancestors millions of years ago crawled from the slime of the sea, first the animal world and then the human race have struggled on, at the cost of pain and travail and tears and death, merely that we may sit down and be comfortable. There are some who are in revolt against this enervating softness, demanding hard things to be endured, crying out for a god who loves not padding; but they are few.

The last of the greater gods is the Devil. It does not matter much how we picture this demonic deity; whether or not we think there is actually such a person. In the Devil, religion presents the epitome of pride. In the old legend Satan, for pitting his small brain and will against the infinite intelligence of the Omnivolent, was expelled by Michael's host from the courts of heaven, whereupon he came down to vex the gullible citizens of earth. It is hardly arguable that, if Satan is the personification of conceit, ours is an age of Devil-worshipers.

The cult of cleverness is so developed that often one prays fervently that one may meet a man contentedly dull. Like those proud ancients, the Greeks, we are exceedingly witty and almost wholly void of humor. The difference between the two is that the witty man is conceited and the humorous man is humble. See, also, what we have done with æsthetic criticism. It should be in the hands of reverent men who realize that in estimating the arts they are criticizing those activities whereby man would clamber from the beasts to play among the gods; but we have given it over predominantly to groups of clever young persons who in avowedly clever weekly papers attempt as cleverly as possible to talk about one another's cleverness. Most serious of all, what can be said about that which passes for the scientific method of arriving at truth save that it too lacks the saving salt of sane humility? The reference is not to the thought and activity of the dwellers on the scientific Olympus, but to that more characteristic phenomenon, science as understood by the man of the street, the man who says, 'I will believe in nothing which I cannot understand and prove,' and thinks that thereby he has shown himself the soul of modern wisdom. Who would