Hotel Henderson, Aiken, S. C., Feb. 11.

Dear Mr. Canby,

Your letter has reached me here, by way of New Milford and
Columbia, S. C. I deeply appreciate your kind words and beg to
assure you that I entertain no "snooty" sentiments on the subject
of honors, titles, and degrees. I am now trying to apply to myself
a rule which I believe to be just all around: A men ought not to
join an organization unless he is willing to carry his share of
the responsibility which it owes to the public. Through the years
I have become entangled in so many organizations that my correspondence
in relation to them has become a grievous burden. When the letter
announcing my election to the Institute arrived, I was stewing over
the work of a committee to which I was appointed by another society
more or less honorary in character and I said to myself that I must
take on no additional obligations. It was for that reason that I
delined the invitation. The Institute has work to do, if it is
not to be a home where old men and women discuss the New Deal and
hardening of the arteries. If I do join it, I ought to do my
share. Now, how do you, as a season watcher of human conduct, answer
that proposition?

P. S. Also thanks for your words about Midpassage. Well, without the
Saturday Review, duly read, filed, and pored over, it could not have
been done at all.

Modern Man's Worship, by Bernard Eugene Meland. Harper & Brothers, New York,
1934. 317 pp. $ 2.00.

A former president of the Federal Council of Churches, not long ago declared that if Protestantism could not rediscover how to worship, it would in another half-century cease to exist. Professor Meland here addresses himself to that problem. He attempts to do two things: first, to describe the movements toward recovery of worship now under way in various Christian circles, in Europe and America; and secondly, to present a new philosophy of worship palatable to those who will not accept the dualism of historic Christianity. In the first effort he admirably succeeds, and gives in convenient form much valuable data; in the second, he seems to this reviewer to have failed.

For 126 pages, we pass with Dr. Meland from one to another of significant contemporary revivals of worship: the neo-Catholic High Church movement in Germany, led by the Lutheran Professor Friedrich Heiler of Marburg; the liturgical efforts of Rudolph Otto and the attempts of his followers to develop a "schweigender dienst"; the Huguenot entichment in France, the chief spokesman of which is Professor Will of Strasbourg; the Anglo-Catholic Movement that has well-nigh made over the worship of the modern Church of England and to a less degree, that of the Episcopal Church in this country, which is as yet less responsive to the impact of post-war religious thought; certain American trends---Methodist, Baptist, Congregational, even Unitarian---toward adorational recovery; and finally the powerful and wide-spread "Liturgical Movement" promoted by the Benedictines in the Roman Catholic Church. This part of the book will prove interesting to any dispassionate reader who seeks to know what is happening in Christian theology as that theology expresses itself in cultic practice. With admirable fairness the author has objectively examined the facts; and he permits the facts to speak for themselves. They show how general has been the revolt in Christian circles from the intellectualist approach to religion which was charac-

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teristic of "Modernism"; and they seem to indicate that the way to reunion
and new life in Christianity is destined to be along the pathway of liturgical
development.

But on page 127 there begins an entirely new treatise. In it Dr.
Meland labors valiantly to resist that idea of an objective and transcendant
God on which he based all the movements he has been describing with
evident admiration. He wishes to worship; but he abhors the idea of duality.
He would abandon the idea of God, and yet adore. He would eat his cake and have
it too. "It is a truism," he says, "that supernaturalism has been lost to
our age." So sure is he of this that he unhesitatingly declares that the
Roman Catholic G.K. Chesterton and the Anglo-Catholic T.S. Eliot are poetic
poseurs. He runs from a transcendant deity; but he demands something before
which to prostrate himself. Having charged up and down the arms of this
dilemma for many pages, he takes refuge, along with the late G.B. Smith and
Dr. Wieman of the University of Chicago, in what he calles "a mystic naturalism",
which turns out to be old-fashioned Pantheism under a new alias. Dr. Meland would
have us who would be religious "establish relations with the planetary process,"
with an evident assumption that "the planetary process" should be printed
with upper-case initials and adored. Like all other varieties of Pantheism, this
system lays itself open to evident philosophical attack, against which no defences
are set up.

This latter half of the book is not without its interest, however,
for in it we observe, as he compels toward a dualist theism and yet unwilling to
abandon his old-fashioned
philosophic formulae based on a monistic simplification of that which is.
The pantheistic solution often seems a refuge for mind thus troubled, though
rarely for long. Most readers will not be content to stop where now Dr. Meland
has pitched his tent. They will either accept for adoration a deity superior to

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that universe which has areated, or they will cease effort to adore at all.

The New Testament word for worship means literally " to kiss the hand." One
can hardly kiss the hand of the planetary process.

One is inclined to wish that Dr. Meland had been content to develop
the *admirable* objective study with which he began. In it he is happy and at home. The later
theorizing *seems labored and distressed*. It can do the usual reader little
or no service, however much it may have *relieved* the mind of the
author.