Soggy Pudding

Sir:

Congratulations on your sizzling article on Eugene Dennis [TIME, April 25]. You've showed up both Dennis and the Communist Party for what they really are: Fascists . . .

CLIFFORD REEVES JR.

Boston, Mass.

Sir:

The Dennis cover and your sympathetic narration of the man's activities strengthen my steadily growing belief . that the red borders on your covers should be widened.

SARA E. CURRY

Corpus Christi, Tex.

Sir:

This tops all TIME covers for the personification of smirking complacency. Dennis resembles nothing so much as a soggy, unpalatable pudding.

JAYNE HUGHES

Drayton Plains, Mich.

Sir:

. . . My thanks, with that of myriad readers ... for the story on Frankie Waldron and the infamous cause of which he is the recognized head in this country . . .

Why, though, did you have to give us a cover bearing [his] picture . .

C. M. OLIVER

Laurel, Miss.

P: TIME brings all things.--ED.

Sir:

Your Dennis cover shows only 22 strings dangling from the closed fist. Does Artist

Artzybasheff say what's holding up the four men who have no strings attached to them?

R. R. HORNER JR. Camp Lejeune, N.C.

P: He says it's not the Four Freedoms.--ED.

Dore's Ark

Sir:

The picture of "The Ark on Ararat" [TIME, April 25] was very erroneous. I do not know how well the artist has read the Bible, but if he will turn and read Genesis 6:16, he will find that the instructions were to put the door in the side and not in the end as he has. Also I think he will find that the Ark only contained one window and not the plurality he has pictured . . . The indication is that Noah opened the (one) window.

I feel sure Noah constructed the Ark in this manner. Unfortunately, the artist did not. I think we should be as nearly exact as possible in such matters . . .

HILTON C. TERRY Abilene, Tex.

P: Reader Terry's argument is with famed Artist Gustave Dore (1832-83).--ED.

In Whamless Westborough

Sir:

Re "The Nation," TIME, May 2: Last Sunday we thrust our dinner between slices of bread, jumped into old clothes, tossed our youngest into her stroller, handed our boy the fishpoles, met two friends and took off--on foot. We walked about two miles to the local reservoir, sniffing Nature and listening to our shoes flapping happily on the old narrow road. When we got there, we spread a blanket and a lunch, and annoyed a few fish until suppertime.

Not a wham-wham-wham in the bunch. (MRS.) A. GORDON WHITNEY Westborough, Mass.

The Search for Truth

Sir:

It says in my copy of TIME that Jacques Maritain, at the M.I.T. convocation, looked for "the basis for a moral order in a process of reason about the essences of God, man, and things [TIME, April 11]," while Walter Stace looked to "the psychological laws of human behavior"--and yet that Stace is the "wooly-minded" one! . . .

DONALD C. WILLIAMS

Professor of Philosophy Harvard University Cambridge, Mass.

Sir:

To the wooly-minded TIME editor who characterized Walter Stace's attempt at a solution of the problem of moral standards as "wooly-minded," an onion. To Princeton's clear-thinking Professor Stace, an orchid.

PETER CLASSEN Saskatoon, Sask., Canada

Sir:

I attended the forum at M.I.T., and if I am any judge, the audience would not have substantiated your conclusion that "the Maritain position . . . had once more gained a growing following among troubled men searching for truth."

You state Maritain "was not confused about his convictions on the subject." His failure to answer two questions asked him would not appear to bear out your contention. Unanswered were: Why is it necessary to have an authoritarian religious institution define "religious truth," and what are the criteria by which "religious truth" may be judged ?

But he did reply to one question. Asked what happens when scientific truth conflicts with "religious truth," he replied in effect that there can be no conflict -- truth is truth. Galileo, Copernicus and a host of others, from bitter personal experience, could testify to the contrary

HAROLD R. RAFTON

Andover, Mass.

Sir:

. . . You stated that in an article in the Atlantic Monthly I had "announced my discovery that there is no God"; and further that my solution of the moral problem in our time is: "a new morality founded on psychological laws." Both these statements are incorrect and misleading.

Perhaps the passage in my Atlantic article which gave rise to your first statement is the sentence: "There is in the universe outside man, no spirituality, no regard for values, no friend in the sky." I do not think that any of us knows anything about the final mystery of the world, but if anyone pleases to call it God, I have no objection. The sentence quoted means that I do not think we have any reason anthropomorphically to attribute to it such human characteristics as spirituality, value-consciousness, or friendship.

As to your second statement, what is especially incorrect about it is that it suggests I want to invent a "new" morality. On the contrary, it is the old morality, the morality of Jesus Christ, that I believe is the sole possible salvation of the world. But I think that it can be given a basis in the laws of human personality . . .

W. T. STAGE

Princeton University Princeton, NJ.

P: Philosopher Stace's "it" -- whatever it is -- is hardly what the run of mankind means by "God."* But TIME should more accurately have said that Dr. Stace was looking to psychological laws as a modern basis for morality. -- ED.

Bunkerkoller

Sir:

. . ."But there are other types of underground Germans -- the thousands of homeless . . . who live in herds in stifling air-raid bunkers. The fits to which these cave dwellers are frequently subject have been nicknamed Bunkerkoller (bunker frenzy)" [TIME, April 4].

I have been in a good many of these bunkers and lagers, doing welfare work, and the conditions are indeed appalling. But the inhabitants are in most cases not Germans. They are ethnic Germans, Volksdeutsch, expellees from Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Yugoslavia, etc. Loyal to Germany during the war, they have been repaid for this loyalty by being herded into bunkers and lagers in filth and misery.

The local governments are not interested in improving their living conditions, and in many cases even exclude them from the re-Kef rolls, though their chances of getting work are slim, indeed, due to the discrimination against them. The occupation forces are doing much unpublicized relief work among them, which incidentally is jealously resented by many Germans.

It is typical of German callousness that this situation exists, and typical of German cleverness in turning a disgraceful situation to their own account that they draw attention to these scabrous places as proof of "German" misery.

DOROTHY R. WILSON

Stuttgart, Germany

*God -- the Supreme Being, the eternal and infinite Spirit, Creator and Sovereign of the universe. -- Webster's International Dictionary.

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