Hidden Dynamo

Many religiously-minded moderns believe that unless organized religion stops seeking old, elusive gods and identifies itself with scientific humanism in an attempt to improve Man, it is doomed to perish from the earth. Five able pedagogs subscribed to this belief in a letter which they sent last week to many a U. S. scholar, author, teacher, scientist. The letter began by stating that the Society of Friends (Quakers) is one body in which modern thinking and religious impulses may be reconciled. Excerpts:

"It is not, however, our primary interest to induce people to join the Quakers. . . . People should take full responsibility, after thought and discussion, for their own truth and right. . . . The trend of our time is scientific. . . . The great organized churches are insisting on at least formal acceptance of a lot of medieval superstitions . . . are giving only lip service to the ideals of humility, simplicity and friendliness which are characteristic of Jesus. . . . Here and there one finds an exception where a courageous leader, such as Harry Emerson Fosdick, John Haynes Holmes or Rabbi Wise takes a public stand and rallies a group of like-minded folk about him. But we cannot afford to wait for enough great leaders to go around. Most of the work of the world has to be done by second and third raters, anyway, and we of the lower order should get busy for ourselves. . . .

"While the imperial Deity, seated on a throne and demanding worship and flattery is a myth, the Super-Self of our own nobler nature, the Hidden Dynamo within mankind, can and does lead man from primitive society to the State, to the Democracy, and on to that which does not yet appear. . . .

The signers of this letter: Jesse Herman Holmes, Quaker, Professor of the History of Religion and Philosophy (Swarthmore); Dean Roscoe Pound of the Harvard Law School; Joseph Russell Smith, Professor of Economic Geography (Columbia); Thomas Atkinson Jenkins, Professor of the History of the French Language (University of Chicago); Albert Taylor Mills, Professor of History and Political Science (James Millikin University), Decatur, Ill.

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