Blessed Lunatics

The League for Safeguarding the Fixity of the Sabbath Against Possible Encroachment by Calendar Reform is not the only opponent of the kind of change in the Church Year which was favorably discussed last fortnight at the meeting of the Federal Council of Churches (TIME, Dec. 17). Last week the Episcopal Churchman published the following comment by Rev. Dr. William Norman Guthrie, voluble, mystical rector of Manhattan's Church of St. Mark's-in-the-Bouwerie:

"Are we sure that the churches of Christ are all really favoring a mechanized calendar? . . . Should any, past the time when the moon means much to them, be allowed to remove this happy last irregularity from our lives? . . . Long since, the noble signs of the zodiac were ignored by the bespectacled time-meters, and they are by this near two weeks out of our monthly reckoning. Now Easter Day is to have the full moon resplendent no more in her sky. . . . It is pretty bad. We're going to stop being lunatics after all. The moon is to be evicted from her last retreat, the Paschal Date. For my part, if they standardize Easter for the sake of Trade (as Christmas is lost in rubicund sales ads) what will remain? Only lovers in rural lanes will hereafter lift their eyes through glittery foliage and salute the orb. . . . A standardized calendar will do away with our last vestigial connection to a real heaven. So the urban business mind decrees. But some of us will continue to praise the moon, living and dying blessed lunatics, along with Orientals and other respectable conservatives!"

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