Signs of the Times

with contributions from L. C. Little, Lee J. Levinger

[L. C. Little in Chicago (Ill.) News]

John Jordan is quite right in saying that the way to Americanize America is to send children to the public schools. He omits a rather important detail, though. The public schools must themselves be Americanized first. They must be restored to their old ideal function. They must be institutions of learning, places where children gather to be taught, educated, developed; not places where they are herded to be handled, examined, vaccinated, turned into clinical material.

Public schools have ceased to be public the last few years; they have come to be owned by a school of medicine; they open on its signal; they close at its command. Every child in them is under absolute control of medical officials who probably have no title to be officials, in the first place, if the laws were searched and correctly construed. In the second place, these officials do not belong to the teaching force, and if they have duties anywhere, they are not in the schoolroom.

De-Germanizing is what the public schools now sadly need. The American who is brought up with no sense of the sacredness of the person of a freeman ceases to be a freeman; he is on the way to serfdom and to submission, after a few generations, to the knout of his master.

[San Jose (Calif.) Mercury Herald]

In the great spiritual universe God works in silence. And the words "spiritual universe" are here not meant to designate the life in the next world or in some other state of existence, but are intended to refer to the spiritual life as distinguished from the material—the mere physical existence—here or elsewhere in creation. God's real messages come to the spirit of man noiselessly, not by spoken word or even the printed page, but directly to the individual heart and conscience. The message that will call men away from evil and elevate and purify their hearts, that can heal them body and soul, and can transform their lives from the inharmonious, aimless, sinful, almost useless things which they are, into beauty, harmony, purposeful strength, happiness, and heaven, will come in no Sinaian thunders. Such messages come silently to the soul straight from the infinite, spiritual, sentient life of the creator.

[Rabbi Lee J. Levinger in The Biblical World]

To those of us who have had the privilege of serving with the United States Army abroad, religious unity, cooperation between denominations, is more than a far-off ideal. We know under what circumstances and to what extent it is feasible, and just how it deepens and broadens the religious spirit in both chaplain an soldier. We have passed beyond the mutual tolerance of the older liberalism to the mutual helpfulness of the newer devoutness. Our common ground is no longer the irreducible minimum of doctrine which we share; it is the practical maximum of service which we can render together.

[Waterloo (Iowa) Courier]

At the Monday night meeting this question was asked: "What would happen to business if men ran their business as they do their religion?" That's a fair question; it ought to be answered. If there is any virtue or substantial basis for the Christian religion then it is worth being used rather than made merely an incidental convenience. If there is nothing in it, why spend money on it? Either the Christian religion is the biggest thing in the world or it is a fake; there can be no argument on that proposition. If it is a fake, then why spend hundreds of millions of dollars yearly in keeping alive and functioning a fallacy? If it is something real, vital, potential, helpful, in the name of all that is logical and rational, why not give it a chance to produce results and dividends? The church is in the last ditch. It's got to shake itself, get into the game and produce, or else get out of the way and give something else a chance.

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