Aesculapian God

WHAT GOD MEANS TO ME--Upton Sinclair -- Farrar & Rinehart ($1).

Many conservatives and many radicals have long been annoyed by Upton Sinclair. One of the things that annoys both of them (for different reasons) is that he says he believes in God. Last week, in a little (140 page) book he told anyone who cared to listen all about the "practical religion" he has created to meet his own everyday needs. "It is book number 54 in my list; and that is a long time to have let God wait." Unsympathetic readers closed No. 54 with the feeling that Author Sinclair had once more had his say but that God was still waiting.

Born and half-bred an Episcopalian (he taught Sunday School, went to church every day in Lent), Upton Sinclair soon graduated into a more intense life as a puritan in Greenwich Village. Readers accustomed to his calves-foot-jelly style may raise an eyebrow when he says that he still has the cadences of the New Testament and the prayer-book running through his head, judges his own sentences by that echo. An optimist from the word go -- enemies say he even jumped the gun -- Author Sinclair early joined battle with his life-long foe, Determinism. Xo philosopher nor theologian but a prophet of sweetness & light, he thus bids Apollyon scat : "It leaves you flat, and it leaves every human being flat, and the thing for us to do is to go ahead and forget it as a piece of silly nonsense. . . . The only thing you can do with an unchangeable sequence of causes and effects is to let it alone."

Is there Free Will? Absolutely yes! says Upton Sinclair. Is there a God? "I can't prove to you by reason that there is a God, and I can't explain His ways to you--all the cruelties and blind waste of this universe. But this I can surely say: that it is better to be happy than sad, better to be active than impotent." He admits that he has taken a good deal on faith: "I have made my ethical code out of the hunger and thirst after social righteousness. Such a formula makes life comparatively simple, and it makes religion simple. I took God's help for granted in the work I was doing." A pragmatist who believes that the proof of the pill is in the action, he defines truth as "ideas which aid us to build more capable minds and bodies." A hard worker, never strong, with an equally high-strung wife, he has naturally been drawn to Aesculapian cults, to the seamstress side of religion. Both his wives were interested in Christian Science, his second is telepathic.

Though he remains an unorthodox agnostic, for all his optimistic idealism, Upton Sinclair thinks there is much good in Coueism and Christian Science, much that is unfathomable in spiritualism. From Coue he evolved his own cure for insomnia, an endlessly repeated: "God is here, and God is now. God is alive, and God is real. God is all, and God is love. God is my Father, and God is my Friend. God is keeping me, and God is helping me." Though the Christian Science Monitor effectively opposed him in last year's California campaign, he tells how a Christian Science healer once saved his life when he was dying of hiccups. Coue technique cured his wife's varicose veins. Sinclair deplores the lapse of the Church's healing powers, remarks feelingly: "Many people feel that it is beneath the dignity of an inspired religion like Christianity to concern itself with people's bunions and piles. I used to feel that way myself, but I changed my mind when I had suffered a great deal."

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