AFTER an early career on Wall Street, James Truslow Adams returned to his first love of undergraduate days, the study and writing of history. His three-volume history of New England, The Founding of New England, Revolutionary New England (awarded the Pulitzer Prize for the best history of 1921), and New England in the Republic, won immediate recognition and amply justified his decision. ¶In the summer of 1925 Alice L. Williams was climbing in one of our national parks with a party of five, including her father and a lifelong friend of his. While crossing a famous divide at the direction of one of the best guides in the park, the friend lost his life and the others were caught on a narrow ledge of rock from which it was practically impossible to escape. During the two days they waited for help Mrs. Williams wrote the letters to her husband which, with the omission of a few of the most personal sentiments, we have faithfully printed. Because the tragic experience was in no way due to park authorities or to park policy, it was thought unnecessary to mention its identity, ¶Born in Denmark in 1888 and grown in the school of experience, Carl Christian Jensen realized the ambition of every boy when he ran off to sea at the age of sixteen. This adventure is the second chapter in Mr. Jensen’s epic career. The account of his youth in a Danish port appeared in the Atlantic for October.

Authors, avers Agnes Repplier, are as easy prey as an eighteenth-century stagecoach. ¶For eight generations Isabel Hopestill Carter’s family have dwelt on the Maine coast, where in Yankee fashion they have ploughed the sea for their profit. Jean Kenyon Mackenzie’s presence in Belgium at an international conference on Africa brings back happy recollections of her ‘Black Sheep,’ those vivid tales from West Africa which she wrote when a missionary and which we published in 1915-16.

Carolyn Wells, who designs more detective stories than Sherlock Holmes could solve, devoted her spare time to collecting until she had neither time, room, nor money to spare for anything else. ¶Minister of the Wellesley Hills Unitarian Church, Walter Samuel Swisher prefaced his essay with a letter from which we quote: —

I believe that one trouble with the world today is that it has too much sought the prophet. A Jewish friend says that the Jews had ‘to become their own Messiah,’ that is, put forth intelligent collective effort, ere they emerged from the wilderness. Personally I should loathe the rôle of prophet.

The author of ‘Unfinished Jobs’ was one of the first women to pioneer in Wall Street. A quarter of a century later she helped to organize the nation’s business and professional women and also served, after the war, on practically all of New York City’s unemployment committees. ¶From official and private source Hector C. Bywater, the British naval critic, has gleaned fresh data on the most discussible battle of modern history. ¶It is a pleasant editorial privilege to welcome new contributors, such as Ruth Kate Stowell, to the Atlantic. ¶A famous hunter and guide, J. M. Defosse is known by every tiger in Indo-China. By birth a Frenchman, he joined a colonial regiment and served for many years in the Orient. When the jungle called he quit the army and settled down at Gia Huynh, a grassy clearing in the very heart of the wilds, to devote himself to big game, his guns, and his family. ¶Training his searchlight on the field of corporate finance, revealing names and figures that are startling, Professor William Z. Ripley has exposed certain sources of mystification and danger long shielded from the public. As a preface to his present paper, Professor Ripley wrote—

Within a decade of 1924, electrically driven horsepower in manufactures rose from less than 9,000,000,000 to over 22,000,000,000. These are staggering figures, but they are exceeded in measure of development by the increase in the people’s ownership of utilities. By 1918 the number of shareholders, increasing under the stimulus of campaigns for consumer ownership as well as by the natural attraction of well advertised securities, was about double the number of stockholders in railroads. By 1925 there were 3,160,000 stockholders, three times as many as there are investors in railroad securities, and the end is not yet.

The relation between this vast enterprise and politics is already ominous: the disclosures in Illinois should make citizens generally uneasy. Let us remember the tortuous record of the railroads and see to it that history does not repeat itself.

Bernharo Knollenberg is a practising lawyer of New York City. Eleanor Lattimore was to accompany her husband on a hazardous journey over the ancient caravan routes to Chinese Turkestan. They joined forces at Kweihwa and there on the eve of departure their camels were commandeered, the railway cut, and themselves interned by the ‘armies’ she has described. Doctor R. C. Hutchison is the director of religious education at the American College of Teheran. He reminds us that Christian work among the Moslems is the special study for all Protestant churches during the coming year.

The magnitude of the discussion of Professor Ripley’s thesis automatically excludes it from the narrow confines of this corner of the Atlantic. For sheer volume we can recall no other editorial correspondence of like dimensions, and the argument on either side cannot be stated in the modest compass of this Column. Bishop Fiske’s very definite pronouncement on divorce has also loosed the floodgates of disputation. Perhaps we can put our finger on the divisive line between opposing camps by observing that frequent divorce is reprobated or tolerated according to the degree in which the writer feels that marriage is a civil contract where the happiness of the individual is involved or a sacrament, with its infinite religious implications. At times in the world’s history it has been considered as the one, at times as the other. To-day the debate is in the balance.

JACKSONPORT, WIS. DEAR ATLANTIC,-
May I add to Bishop Fiske’s article in September, on ‘Marriage — Temporary or Permanent?’ the following quotation from a sermon by John Henry Newman, preached at St. Mary’s, Oxford, ninety-one years ago —
(REVEREND) JOHN E. IIODSON ‘ I cannot fancy any state of life more favorable for the exercise of high Christian principle, and the matured and refined Christian spirit (that is, where the parties really seek to do their duty), than that of persons who differ in tastes and general character being obliged by circumstances to live together, and mutually to accommodate to each other their respective wishes and pursuits. And this is one among the many providential benefits (to those who will receive them) arising out of the Holy Estate of Matrimony; which not only calls out the tenderest and gentlest feelings of our nature, but, where persons do their duty, must be in various ways more or less a state of self-denial.’ (REVEREND) JOHN E. HODSON

CONNEAUT, OHIO DEAR ATLANTIC,-
It is unfortunate that there should be a conflict of opinion between Christians who unite in abhorrence of the prevalent evils of divorce; but it does not help morals or justice to pass unquestioned the misleading statements of Bishop Fiske in the September Atlantic, that the ‘law of Christ is plain,’ and that to accept Christ’s ’law’ as a moral ideal, subject to inevitable practical qualifications, is to deny that His teaching has divine authority.
As a matter of fact, from the time of their first utterance, all authorities, including the Apostles and Bishop Fiske, have been forced to treat Jesus’ sayings in regard to divorce as an ideal standard, impossible of perfect embodiment in law, either civil or ecclesiastical.
According to Matthew and Luke the words of Jesus were originally applied only to the arbitrary power of a Jewish husband to divorce his wife without consideration for any claims she might have for herself or in her children. Mark, having the Roman practice in mind, amends Jesus’ saying to apply also in the case of a wife divorcing a husband, which, as an application, is logical enough, but not the Taw as Jesus taught it.
In Mark and Luke the ‘law’ of Jesus does not suggest any exception. In Matthew adultery on the part of the wife is sufficient ground for an exception, but not on the part of the husband. It is only fair to Jesus to add that modern critical scholarship acquits Him of having perpetrated such a crude moral blunder. Only from the point of view that a wife is personal property does adultery acquire a peculiar preëminence over other offenses equally destructive of ideal marriage.
The Episcopal Church officially accepts the right of remarriage of the innocent party to a divorce upon the ground of adultery, but permits its priests to deny that right upon their individual responsibility, a distressing example of the consequences of attempting to reduce the Gospel to ecclesiastical law.
As reported by Matthew and Luke, Jesus forbids remarriage of the innocent woman who has been divorced. Mark omits reference to the innocent party and substitutes the case in which, under the Roman law, the woman herself obtains a divorce.
The Apostle Paul makes a distinction in regard to separation and remarriage as between married believers and those who are married to unbelievers.
The Roman Church permits divorce and remarriage when one of the parties is unbaptized, and also for special reasons in other cases.
Finally, Bishop Fiske admits that there is doubt whether the teaching of Jesus does or does not allow remarriage of the innocent party in the case of divorce for adultery, a doubt which raises a question fatal to the authority of Jesus’ teaching regarded as ’law’: namely, whether there are not, in fact, many other honest doubts as to its literal interpretation.
There are not a few Christian ministers who accept the divine authority of Jesus’ teaching, and who will not condone manifest fraud or scandal, yet do not feel called upon to act as censors of other people’s consciences, or to accept eccesiastical legalism; who, in view of the fact that there never has been, nor can be, agreement as to the legal application of Jesus’ teaching, consider it their duty to give the benefit of honest doubt to those who come to them in good faith with the legal right of remarriage.
Nevertheless, let it not be understood that Jesus’ ideal of marriage, as an individual moral ideal, is either dubious or impotent. Millions accept it implicitly and obey it loyally. It has raised civilization out of unspeakable bestiality. The new paganism has, indeed, attacked the Christian ideal of marriage with some success, but so much the more surely will our paganism sting itself to death.
J. H. RANKIN Minister, First Congregational Church

Liberty or death.
SAN RAFAEL, CAL. DEAR ATLANTIC,-
When reading the article entitled ‘Animals and Death,’ by Sir W. Beach Thomas, in the September issue, I was reminded of a further illustration in regard to the deliberate self-sacrifice of animals. Most fur bearers inhabiting freshwater streams and lakes will invariably drown themselves rather than submit to capture in a steel trap. One of the first rules of the trap line (I believe it to be a required law in some states) provides that the trap shall be placed near a sufficient depth so that the victim may perish under water rather than die a slow and tortured death.
In many cases it is imperative if the fur catcher wishes to hold his victim. A muskrat if caught by one foot can nearly always twist about, break the bone of the leg, and swim away with a visible excuse for his late return. But if the water within the length of the chain be deep enough to submerge his body completely the rat will deliberately choose drowning, of his own volition, within a very short time of capture.
Hardly can it be said that they die through fear. Rather a grim resolution to perish rather than to submit to imprisonment. Who could be a greater martyr to liberty?
Very truly yours,
BOYD H. DUNBAR

With the clearest convictions this reader urges the negation of science at the command of faith.

DEAR ATLANTIC,-
The title of Dr. Parrish’s article, ‘ From Authority to Experience,’in the September Atlantic, suggests a rather startling reversal of the logical course of Christian religious development, which has always begun with experience and ended in authority because of the experience. The experience was conversion. The authority was the consensus of opinion of those who had had the experience.
Conversion is unfortunately a word of some vulgar connotation in modern life, but its Scriptural authority is undoubted. The development proposed by Dr. Parrish would seem to substitute for the experience of conversion a certain sophistication in the affairs of the secular world, arising, he says, from the consideration of ‘the origin of ideas, of inventions, of discoveries, the growth of civilization,’ and so forth. But the Christian religion is bound by its founders to the antecedent experience of conversion: Except ye be converted, and become as little children, ye shall not enter into the kingdom of heaven.
It is conversion with its demand for faith in lieu of knowledge that seems unreasonable to the disciples of knowledge. ‘The one thing,’ says Dr. Parrish, ‘that is perfectly clear is that in any conflict between arbitrary dogma, whether Biblical or ecclesiastical, and the established facts of science, men will invariably and justly give the preference to the latter. It is only peasants and the undeveloped mind of childhood that can any longer be imposed upon.’ But Christian believers are bound by the Gospel to hold and by experience to know that spiritual facts and scientific facts belong to different categories; to realize that the wisdom of God, which Saint Paul declared was to Jewish scribe a stumblingblock and to Greek Epicurean foolishness, is to the modern man of science nonsense — or terra incognita, according to his humility of mind. It goes without saying that unconverted souls will, for lack of the experience, give the preference to the established facts of science, but this is quite without significance to converted souls who have had the experience. Christ’s mission was to peasants and to little children, as well as to scientists, whom they greatly outnumber. Shepherds knelt first in the Presence of Incarnate God. The wise men came later.
Everyone will agree with Dr. Parrish that peasants and children should not be imposed upon. But does the Church impose upon them when she teaches them the Bible, in view of Dr. Parrish’s express recognition of ‘the moral and spiritual values enshrined there’? If, under such teaching, peasants and children grasp a somewhat materialistic or carnal understanding of spiritual terminology or theological formulas, as compared with the wisdom of the wise, it still remains to be proven that they are any further from the essential truth than are the wise. According to Jesus, they are nearer. The story of Mary will convey to the peasant mind, according to its standards, the same truth that the formula of the Nicene Creed conveyed to the learned men at Nicæa: Jesus, God of God, Very God of very God; and it would seem that there is not much use in claiming that the story of Mary imposes on peasants and children unless one is prepared to assert that the formula of Nicæa imposes on the wise. The one is no more improbable or impossible than the other. If one goes, pari passu both should go.
We wish to be fair. If Dr. Parrish means only that the expression of the truths of faith in the Scriptures is not scientific and not to be taught as science, we shall agree. There would be nothing new in the claim. Cardinal Cajetan made it in the sixteenth century in his treatise on the Book of Genesis, which he taught was a treatise of metaphysical truth of the cosmic struggle of good and evil, and not a geological or astronomical treatise. The Cardinal died in orthodoxy and the Pope declared him to have been the Lamp of the Church. Peasants and children, wise men too, have learned the story of sin from Genesis as they would not have learned it from zoölogy or through sophistication in the material world. Yet, Dr. Parrish says: ‘It has long been realized by the theologians themselves that such doctrines as rest upon the Biblical account of creation and the fall of man, though still preached at Dayton and to the hill billies of the remote mountain districts, are regarded by the educated as mere poetical folk lore.’ Many of us are thus eliminated from the ranks of the educated, but how can Dr. Parrish regard the Old Testament as mere poetical folk lore when in this same article he says it enshrines moral and spiritual values?
Preachers often preach unwisely at Dayton and elsewhere, but so long as they preach from a record enshrining moral and spiritual values the Church may feel reasonably safe. The ‘hill billies of the remote mountain districts’ may have a way of getting at the truth through the Scriptural expression just as the hill billies of Judæa got at the truth when Jesus preached of Jonah and the whale.
If we are to have a religion, the great truth of Catholic doctrine must be recognized: that the wise can and must, in the humility that is born of faith, accept that Scriptural expression of truth and that terminology of religion that peasants, children, and hill billies — as well as the wise — can understand.
It was Pasteur who in the splendor of his scientific achievements recorded his acceptance of Catholic dogma and affirmed that the faith of a Breton peasant was the ideal faith of the converted soul.
CHARLES C. MARSHALL

The austerity and dignity of the English press are so often cited to point criticism of our own that we venture to print a few haphazard cuttings sent us by a friend in London. In spite of climate, clothes, and culture, the Briton still has temperament.

PERSONAL

TO MY DEAR HUSBAND. — It all rests with you. A little less literature, a little more love, and who knows what the effect might be?

LADY wishes ADVICE as to best and quickest , method of TRAINING her FIGURE in view of the threatened return of small-waisted fashions next year. — E.L.P., 6647, ‘Morning Post.’

AUTHOR, about to publish BOOK of great interest and benefit to all, desires to SELL HALF-SHARE. Enormous financial possibilities. —Write Box 74238, Samson Clark and Co., Ltd., 57, Mortimer-st.

HAUNTINGS. — INFORMATION (gratis) earnestly desired by ‘Ghost Circle’ re Haunted Houses near London. — H. 5920, ‘Morning Post.’

Don’t give up the ship!

September 21, 1926
DEAR ATLANTIC,-
Several letters and articles have appeared during the last few months from persons suffering from incurable diseases. This from me you may use or not as you wish. It is written as a warning to any who may be slipping down as I slipped about a year ago.
Those who have physical diseases are fortunate compared with those who have abnormal mental states. I had an enviable professional position and thought I loved my work. But I allowed myself to think I was overworked and at last to think that I could not work or think because I was tired and sleepless. Now I know that I only worked in wrong, strained ways, and that many people work hard who sleep little. I followed advice to take a rest, took endless nerve tonics, went to sanitariums, had treatments, and the more I had of all this medical and therapeutic care the more incapable I got of doing or deciding anything. Essentially what I did was to give in. If I had known what I was doing, I think I could have kept up. It was the first giving in that was the fatal mistake. Maude Royden’s article is true, that courage and honesty have to be at the foundation of character. But another virtue is even more fundamental — industry. When that goes, courage, faith, and honesty do not tarry long behind.
Now I can eat, sleep, talk if anyone will listen, walk about aimlessly, drive myself with the greatest difficulty to the simplest tasks, fret because my money has been thrown away after the things which are unseen and eternal had departed. I cherish the hope, or wish, or delusion, that I’ll be better to-morrow, but I know of no reason why I should be unless I follow the advice that eminent physicians and friends and relatives all give me to help myself. I say to myself that I am going to do so, and so far every day is worse than the last. Only intelligence is left to me. Industry and character seem gone, I say ‘seem’ because I hate to write ‘are.’
If I could change this hellish state for any physical disability known, with courage I would: smallpox, cancer, paralysis, tuberculosis, or all of them together.
I have prayed day and night, thinking that God would help and save. The praying is done amiss, or there would be a result. Those who pray with faith, and work too, get help. All the maledictions of the Bible appear to belong to me, none of the promises. But at first I tried to lean on the promises, as I did in my former life, before I came to have my place in hell. Whatever else hell may be, it is a state of mind.
To those who think of giving in to nerves or weariness, I say don’t do it. Live or die, but don’t quit. That is the worst dishonor and, if one has intelligence enough to know it, the lowest hell.
This is a genuine statement, but for obvious reasons I do not sign my name. I have never written an unsigned letter in my life before, and never until this came upon me had anything to hide that I was conscious of. Now I want to keep back from everyone, not to see friends who want to come to see me, not to go on the street, just to stay in the house and talk about my needs to two faithful ones who love me and who listen for a time and then tell me to try to help myself.
I envy the woman who wrote that she has cancer but keeps at her work. I envy everyone who can keep at work in spite of difficulties — any work, even dishwashing, scrubbing, digging, anything. And how high and marvelous those appear who direct and plan and think out things, as I used to do! It seems so strange to me that I can still read and write, when everything of value is gone from life.
At first I thought I must be going insane, but I am not. It is only giving in, an insidious self-indulgence that crept on and on and on.

We have ever noted that there are a great many more claimants in the world than there are claims. But should one know of a vacant title, here is a chance for an amicable arrangement.

Editor, the Atlantic Monthly
DEAR SIR-
I have heard that there are great fortunes in England awaiting distribution among heirs that are scattered about over the world. Would you kindly advise me to whom to write to get some accurate information about this.
MRS. H. R. ROBERTS 951 ODD FELLOW STREET GAINESVILLE, FLA.