The Leonard Feeney Omnibus
A COLLECTION OF PROSE AND VERSE OLD AND NEW

by

Leonard Feeney, S. J.

New York
Sheed and Ward

1943

[Note: we have included here only those essays in the Omnibus which were not therein attributed elsewhere and which we do not anticipate will appear elsewhere on the site.]

Contents:

The Catholic and His Priest

Fortitudo et Laetitia

Mary Favorite

The Metaphysics of Chesterton

The Old Man

Water at Work

The Catholic and His Priest

The Catholic calls his priest: Father. “Good morning, Father!” he will say, or, “Good afternoon, Father!” And, as he says this, he raises his hat.

This combination of respectful greeting and affectionate courtesy is a delightful one, as all must agree. Frankly, our title “Father” is one which ministers of non-Catholic religions sometimes envy us. I know this because they have told me so.

I remember one day walking in New York with a very distinguished and companionable minister of a religion not mine. He was one of those ministers who wear the same kind of turned-about collar I wear, and the same general cut of clerical clothes. His black suit was not quite as black as mine because of the weave of the cloth, and my black suit was not quite as black as it should be for want of a good brushing. But, on the whole, we looked very much like two priests taking a stroll in the avenue together, and I dare say everyone who saw us thought we were two priests. But, of course, we were not two priests, we were only one priest, and one minister.

We were talking about religion, a subject to which, may I say, we clergymen invariably turn when we are together, and a subject we discuss among ourselves a bit more informally than when we are endeavoring to edify the laity with our learning or oratory. And, as we walked and talked, a man passed us, raised his hat ceremoniously, and said “Good afternoon, Fathers!”

The minister was pleased to be called Father by this passerby, and did not hesitate to say so. He said: “I wish I could be called Father all the time; except when I meet a man who is intoxicated. When an intoxicated man addresses me as Father, I am tempted to say to him, ‘You are no son of mine in that condition!’ Don’t you feel that way, too?”

“Well, no,” I said, “I do not. Naturally I do not enjoy seeing a man intoxicated. But I realize that if I do not take him drunk, I cannot have him sober. If I am to be his true father, I must be his father all the time, no matter in what condition I find him.”

And that is why one finds the Fathers of the Catholic Church going up and down the streets of the land, night and day, winter and summer, to minister to their children wherever they are needed. In hospitals, in jails, in pest houses, in burning buildings; on street corners at the scene of an accident. No matter how pitiable or regrettable is the condition of our children, we never abandon them, never disown them, or feel that there is any emergency of their lives to which we are not equal with a Father’s compassion, a Father’s reverence, and a Father’s love.

Nobody could ever deserve the affection and respect we Catholic priests receive from our people. Nobody could ever earn the title we are given by so many thousands of loving hearts. But, as far as we can, we try to deserve it, by never forgetting the preciousness of the immortal souls entrusted to our care, whether they be saint or sinner, old or young, well or ill, whether they be dining sumptuously in a mansion, or lying, bleeding and forsaken, in the gutter.

The first time the Catholic priest becomes acquainted with his spiritual child-to-be is when the child is an infant, about a week old, and is brought to the parish rectory to be baptized.

Now, all babies a week old look pretty much alike. Parents, of course, deny this, and so do fond uncles and doting aunts. A baby’s relatives, when they scrutinize him in the incubator, invariably put on some sort of invisible opera glasses that disclose an abundance of good looks, potential intelligence, shapeliness of head, or extraordinary amount of hair, not always visible to the naked eye of a neutral observer. Love always magnifies the value of its own possessions, and it is beautiful that this is so.

But to the general run of eyes, each little infant a week old looks pretty much like every other week-old infant in the world, so much so, that if you let him out of your arms for a few moments, and allowed him to be mixed with other babies, you would be at your wits’ end trying to identify your own child again, for all the supposed superiorities you thought he had before you lost him.

The one who can assess your child at his real value, the value he has in the sight of Almighty God, is Father, the priest. And so to the priest he is brought in the very first stages of infancy. Father does not bother to ask if he be a high-born or low-born baby; if he be a peasant, an aristocrat, or one of the bourgeoisie; if he be a strong, healthy baby destined to live a score of years or a little weakling who may not survive a single season. All Father asks is that he be a baby. And with the sacred waters of Baptism, in the name of the Most Blessed Trinity, Father imparts to that little nobody identification marks which he may never lose: the redemptive Grace of Christ, the inhabitation of God’s eternal love in the person of the Holy Spirit, and a title to the Beatific Vision of All Truth, in Heaven, with God and forever. How’s that for generosity if generosity is to be taken as one of the credentials of a true father’s heart?

Father’s next association with his child is when that little boy or girl is about seven years of age, the age at which — as all Catholic children are proud to tell you — they “have reached the use of reason.” Now it is Father’s business to honor that little mind, which, after its long apprenticeship with the things it could see and hear and touch in the nursery, has at last arrived at the intangible realities of the spirit, and is now possessed of the power of making intelligent judgments, and free choices in the matter of right or wrong.

It is at this stage of his life that Father tells his child in clear, kindly, unmorbid language what his purpose in life is. Father does not hesitate to tell his child that he was not made for this world, and that out of it, sooner or later, every child must go. You may say: “Why tell a child these things at such an early age?” The answer is that a child needs to know these things at an early age, if he is to stand the strain of intelligence and conscience, both of which powers he now possesses. For at the age of seven a young mind has questions to ask about the world outside it, for which there are no answers except those which God Himself has given. And at the age of seven the child has problems to settle in his own heart, for which there are no solutions, unless they be in the acceptance of personal responsibility in the matter of what it is lawful and unlawful to do.

But, side by side with making him aware of his responsibilities at the age of reason, the Catholic priest offers the child rare privileges as well. Rarest of all these privileges comes on the morning of his First Holy Communion, when he sees Father leave the altar of Sacrifice, and come down to the altar-rail in full vestments, to put the very Holy of Holies, the Blessed Sacrament, the full Christ under the species of bread, in the child’s mouth, to be eaten as its food. The mystery of this sacred privilege no child can fathom, nor is he asked to. But the intimacy of it, no child ever misses. And the priest, who is willing to share God with the child in such sacred intimacy, is looked upon by the child as a Father, indeed.

Another lovely day in the child’s life, in his happy and holy association with the priest, is the grand day when Father proudly presents his young boy or girl to the Bishop, to receive from the head of the diocese, arrayed in mitre, crozier and solemn robes, the dedication to a life of Christian courage in the Sacrament of Confirmation.

And lo, before Father realizes it, on another beautiful morning, likely to be in June, he may find two of the infants he first met at the Baptismal font coming in the full bloom of young manhood and womanhood, to the altar, to unite romance and religion in another Sacrament, the Sacrament of Christian Love. Father dare not be absent on that morning, for it is a morning for which he has long prayed for his children, and for which he has tried so hard to make them worthy.

Sunday after Sunday his children see Father at the altar, the leading visible actor in a great Sacrifice, the Sacrifice of the Mass, preserved, week after week, year after year, sacrosanct, integral, perfect, on every Catholic altar in the world. There is nothing the human spirit craves so much as certitude and security. There is nothing a Father is asked more to give. The Catholic priest offers his children both. Father may let his children down in little things, for he is human, and sometimes forgets how human he is. But he will never let his children down in such a big thing as the Sacrifice of the Mass. Father can be counted on to offer it just as Christ offered it at the Last Supper. His children are sure of this. And that’s why they come.

As to Father’s sermon at the Mass, it is not always a terribly good one, though it is always founded on a terribly reliable text. But in the matter of mere rhetoric or oratory, Father’s sermon is likely to be fairly middling one Sunday, and perhaps not too much better the next. Sometimes when he is fatigued, or worried, or ill, Father may make a verbal mistake as he preaches. He may even split an infinitive. But one thing his children can count on Father never to do. He will never make a mistake in doctrine, or ever split a Christian truth and offer half of it to his children, by way of improving, rationing, or streamlining the Holy Gospel of Our Lord.

Many times in the course of their lives, his children will have met Father in the Confessional, where defects, faults, even willful and serious sins may be, if one is truly repentant, forgiven and forgotten, because the surety of Father’s absolving power and the infinite mercy of Christ.

And when a lifetime has passed, as lifetimes will, more rapidly than one could ever suppose, the last time you will see Father and his child together in this world is at the hour of death. If Father has not been warned to come in time to the deathbed of his child, he will never believe he has come too late. When the doctor has given the patient up and says he can do no more for him, and the nurse says he is in a coma and will not regain consciousness, even then will Father come. As long as there is a spark of life in his child’s body, it is not too late for Father to arrive; and often through the fogs of fever, the ravings of delirium, or the last wanderings of the human mind at the threshold of eternity, his child will hear Father praying, still trying to reach him with the graces of the Sacraments, never willing to leave him until his soul has departed for another world.

And when the soul of his child has at last gone, for sure, Father will expect that the body be brought to the Church, and Mass said over it, and blessings showered on it, and prayer poured all around it, knowing that it was, in life, the sacred temple of an immortal soul.

Father must even go to the grave to see where his child is buried, and bless the very dirt and grass that covers the remains of his loved one.

And, the morning after the funeral, back at the altar, when there is not a shred left on this earth of what was once Father’s child, you will find him still praying: praying to a saint in Heaven, or at least for — a soul in Purgatory.

Father will never admit that any soul to whom he has ministered is lost — never — until he hears Christ say so on the day of Last Judgment — a judgment which will be more merciful to Father’s child than any of the cruel judgments made about him in this world.

And so, as we go along the streets of the land, “Good morning, Father! Good afternoon, Father!” a nice lady will say as she nods her head reverently; a little girl will say as she makes a curtsey; a poor old beggar will mutter as he raises his hat.

This is the Catholic and his priest.

Fortitudo et Laetitia

No army could be more fortunate than the one that enlists in its ranks the Catholic soldier.

The Catholic soldier not only fights for the right cause, he knows how to fight for it in the right way.

The Catholic makes a good soldier. Every general will tell you that; every captain and corporal. So will every draft board when the eligibles for service are being conscripted. So will every war citation when the heroes in battle are being counted.

The call to be a soldier comes to the Catholic boy with less surprise, less shock, less need for psychological adjustment than it does to most. For even in the days of peace, he has always been a soldier, always at war. The Bishop made him a soldier when he was a little boy. The Bishop anointed him with oil, signed him with the Sign of the Cross, even gave him a slight blow on the cheek, to remind him firmly in Sacrament that he must be — and had the Grace to be — a strong and perfect Christian and a soldier of Jesus Christ.

If anyone thinks this warfare of the spirit, waged to preserve the Christian certitudes and moralities in the face of a hostile opposition, is not a soldier’s task, let him have tried it from childhood and see.

Nobody bothers very much with your Christianity if you confine it to a few pleasant, aesthetic opinions about Christ. But once you dare to phrase it in the adamantine truths of the Apostles’ Creed, you find yourself under siege, a soldier, and at war.

Even the simple certitudes of a prayer as innocently and essentially Christian as the Hail Mary will expose your theology to attack, turn you into Our Lady’s defender, and surround you with foes. I do not refer to our small foes, either: the sceptics, the sophisticates, and the snobs. I refer to our large enemy: Lucifer and the Powers of Darkness.

You may say: are not all men — and not merely Catholics — at war with the Powers of Darkness? And the answer is: all men are. But what will you say of making a strong fight against an enemy you do not believe exists? Suppose the generals of the United Nations, deceived by the effectiveness with which Hitler sticks to his hideouts, should persuade themselves that no Hitler exists. How would they go on from there?

“Holy Archangel Michael, defend us in the battle!” is the prayer every Catholic boy says, on his knees, with his priest, at the end of the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass. He always knows he is at war, and with whom.

And even when the Catholic soldier falters — even when his sins are grievous — he takes both the shame for them and the blame for them. He believes that Heaven — God’s beautiful home “where the forgiven meet” — is a city to be taken by storm. He does not believe it is a refuge for irresponsibles who are allowed no share in their own victory.

When he turns his energies from a spiritual to a material war, the Catholic soldier completely disavows in his heart those two well-exploited, but thoroughly unmilitary sentiments: hatred and fear. Hatred and fear are weaknesses. Hatred and fear are oratorical emotions. But wars are not won on the radio.

Let us put the matter in its simplest terms. Suppose you do make the enemy “bleed and burn.” Suppose you even boil him in oil! Do you thereby unbleed, unburn and unboil the millions of innocent lives he has already destroyed?

Vengeances of such a kind were best left to God, Who alone is equal to the task of vengeance with dignity.

Hatred and fear are for the unconfident. The soldier’s task is not a butcher’s job. It requires a mind, and nerves, and a technique as clear, cool and collected as those of a surgeon. The soldier’s assignment is not to avenge his enemy, but to outsmart him by completely destroying his opportunities.

And when victory comes — as it is sure to come, eventually, to those who are without hatred and without fear — the soldier retires from his triumph as gloriously and gracefully as he entered it. He goes back to a civilian’s life still civilized. His mother, his sweetheart, his wife, his little daughter, find him undegenerated by the sentiments of a savage: hatred and fear.

Bad nerves, hysterics, high blood-pressure — these may be the symptoms of epilepsy, but they are not the signs of patriotism. How many victories do they achieve, even when provoked by propaganda? A mouthful of expletives to hurl at your foe! Are these as fine — or effective — as a good gun in your hands and a good song in your heart?

Fortitudo et laetitia. Courage and gaiety. These are the soldierly emotions. Who tells us so? David, the royal psalmist does, constantly, in his one hundred and fifty Psalms, those divinely inspired songs written to motivate a soldier for any kind of war life has to offer.

Fortitudo et laetitia. I started to count, the other day, the number of times these two words, or their equivalents, go together in the Book of Psalms. And the number was so great, I stopped counting.

Courage and gaiety. The soul must have its resources in time of war, just as the body must have its food and drink. Courage and gaiety are the soul’s best resources. They are — among the realities of the spirit — like brother and sister, full of striking resemblances. They are more. Courage and gaiety are like bridegroom and bride.

Fortitudo et laetitia. When they wed and become one, in the holy citadel of a soldier’s soul, they bear fruits, not the least of which is to give war — all war — a meaning and a memory. A meaning of what it is for. And a memory of — for whom.

Mary Favorite

1

Michael Costello is a young author who is always on the verge of writing a book. It is a pity he doesn’t write one, because some of his ideas are stimulating. But, as is often the case with young authors, Michael has so many theories on writing they get in the way of his performance. He spends far too much time being displeased with the way other writers write.

Let us take, for instance, his criticism of John Galsworthy, the great English novelist.

John Galsworthy, so Michael maintains, died of exhaustion, from having tried to be in sex, singularity and sentiment every member of the Forsyte family. No artist, according to Michael, should attempt to be so fatuously vicarious.

A poet, willing to submit his observations, sympathies and insights to the purifying disciplines of meter and rhyme, might have given us the whole of the Forsyte saga in a few discreet stanzas. A dramatist, grouping the family on the stage, and arranging them around a central incident capable of eliciting a sufficiently varied and valuable number of human responses, might have settled their complications and told us all we ever needed to know about the Forsytes in less than three hours of acting time. But the novelist by whom the family was fabricated required hundreds and hundreds of pages, sequel after sequel, in order to show us that he could eat, walk, sleep, dream, even bathe like one of his characters.

Michael insists that all personality, even in literature, resists such intrusions. For personality is the principle of uniqueness in us that will allow us to savor in detailed experience no ego but our own. How one of the Forsytes felt when he looked up at the stars, or listened to his mother’s voice, or was told some very bad news, even Shelley or Shakespeare might have guessed. But what he was thinking of when he picked his fingernails, gargled his throat, or digested his dinner, nobody else ever realized, not even Mr. Galsworthy. And so his death marked the end not only of his fiction, but also of his pretense.

Michael Costello warns his readers-to-be that when he writes his book, he will make no novelist’s effort in it. And if he dies before it is finished, it will be of his own diseases, not of his heroine’s hypertension or his hero’s heart-trouble. Every single thought expressed in Michael’s book is going to be his own. And if he agrees, as he does, with Aristotle’s dictum that each individual soul is somehow all things (anima est quodamodo omnia) Michael insists on the somehow, lays stress on the quodamodo, even wanting to include in this disclaimer the strength of the Latin sound.

There follows a brief account of how Michael almost wrote one of his books.

2

“I beg your pardon!” said Michael to an attractive young girl who was coming out of Symphony Hall in Boston at the close of a concert by its celebrated orchestra.

It was late afternoon in April, very near to the end of the official season of full programs, chief conductor and complete personnel. The young lady was twenty years old, or thereabouts. She was tall and marvelously molded. She had a sure head, an abundance of unhindered hair, a notable neck, conspicuous elbows, and feet large enough to be worth standing on. Hers was that unique mixture of majesty and athletics made famous by the almost mythological daughters of the first families of Boston. She was dressed in blue and white, with the first touches of summer in her attire. She wore a suitable hat. Her ears, and eyes, were filled with music as she walked out of Symphony Hall, only to have her reverie rudely interrupted by the voice of a male stranger, saying to someone whom the circumstances demanded to be herself:

“I beg your pardon! Are you a Unitarian?”

She stopped and put her hand to her head, as if to discover with which of her powers she might cope with this situation. Finding it to be a problem of insolence, pure and simple, and beyond the reach of her lighter social graces, she dropped her long arm to her side, stretched herself to full height, and proceeded to give her questioner a sustained, devastating, aristocratic stare.

“I know your name,” he went on quickly and nervously, “because I heard someone say it as you went in for the concert. Your name is Mary Favorite. I think it is the loveliest name I ever heard. I was wondering about your religion. Because yours is a name just made for religion. Its religious overtones are tremendous. I am interested in such things because of the nature of my religious training. I am also a writer, and I sometimes fancy I can do a lot with a good idea if I ever get one. And you are a wonderful idea: you and your name. I am going to write a book about you. I do not need many details in order to do so, because an artist likes to create a person rather than copy one. But it would help if I knew your religion. I am making a guess that you are a Unitarian. Are you a Unitarian?”

She listened to this long apostrophe while breathing deep, indignant breaths. It must have seemed to her that it was some weird coda added to the concert, and that she had left the hall before the program inside was finished.

After another long stare, full of legitimate resentment and exquisite reserve, in which she fully established her credentials as a lady by not even letting it occur to her to call a policeman, she averted her head and stepped aside into the stream of exiting music-lovers pouring out of Symphony Hall. She departed, not by way of her limousine, which had been jacked up in a garage, as part of her contribution to the War effort of 1943. Instead, she walked resolutely, patriotically along the sidewalk, and disappeared in a nearby subway.

Michael has not seen or heard from her since.

And so his book, from there on, had to go on being a book about a supposed Mary Favorite, instead of about a real one.

But the slightest, most fleeting remembrance of the real Mary Favorite was going to be preserved in it, so Michael said.

For an artist, unlike God, cannot create out of nothing.

3

When Mary Favorite, in a state of calm consternation, took leave of Michael at the door of Symphony Hall, frankly he had no way of following her. To be sure, he had now seen her at close range, and would recognize her again in any crowd. To be sure, he had often traveled in the subway into which she had descended, and during the rush hours too. To be sure, he knew what it was like not to be able to find a seat, to hang on a strap, and, while making a vertiginous study of street-car advertisements, to be jostled by the swaying of the other passengers. He was even familiar with the route she would take: down to Park Street, and back again to Kenmore Station. Could he not throw all these disparate experiences together and make one imaginary journey: that of accompanying Mary Favorite home the evening he had asked her that very pertinent, impertinent question?

Michael supposed he could; and by a judicious use of literary tricks he might make it seem that everywhere that Mary went her author was sure to go. But these detective tactics, other than to unearth what murders she had committed or what money she had stolen, would reveal very little of her intrinsic character. The problem Michael proposed to himself, once he decided to launch Mary Favorite in literature, was to get inside her mind, listen with her ears, and see with her eyes, and try to discover why she was avoiding the celestial implications of her pretty name.

Identification of spirit with another Michael knew to be impossible. But union of spirit with another was achievable, it was said, through love and, he often felt, through prayer. Perhaps prayer, and the mutual amity of Michael’s and Mary Favorite’s Guardian Angels (neither of whom could fail to be interested in this fantastic, momentary meeting of their charges) might establish lines of communication between their thoughts, and turn them, for at least the space of a book, into a satisfactory heroine haunted by an author. Perhaps was all Michael could be sure of. But relying on that perhaps he was prepared to go on, in his own fashion, with the rest of her story.

4

And so, when Mary Favorite deposited her dime in the automatic turnstile through which one makes entrance to Symphony subway station, she did not hear the mysterious click of another little dime dropped in an instant later by Michael. It was a shame, thought Michael, to charge himself admission to his own subway, operating entirely in his own memory, built out of the masonry of his own mind. But even in matters of the imagination Michael felt it was better to observe all the routine procedures so as to keep the worlds of fact and fancy as closely allied as possible.

The platform on which they both stood in the subway station was packed. And so was the Park Street car when it came in. By dint of being pushed into it, they both got on. And, in the manner of vertical sardines, incarcerated in their own dimensions, pressed on all sides by various shoulders, elbows and shoes, they rolled, in a state of semi-suffocation, through a long tunnel of darkness held up by steel girders.

There was nothing to look at outside the window. Inside, one had a good view of a cross-section of someone’s back, a portion of someone’s chin, a number of bobbing, perspiring foreheads, and the rim of a lady’s hat trying to protrude itself into one’s eye.

Whatever else this journey was the time for, it was not the time for creative observation. And so Michael closed his eyes, held on to a strap for dear life, and proceeded to utilize the time till they got to Park Street, and thence till they reversed their direction in the forked route that leads back to Kenmore Station, by indulging in a serious and somewhat surgical reverie, calculated to pierce the religious smoke-screens which divided their cultures, his and Mary Favorite’s, and which kept him from seeing his heroine clearly focused in the light of her divine destiny. It was fair business, Michael thought, for an author to do this objectively, honestly, and in the open; not insinuate it in a story, as a novelist would, and let it be all mixed up with emotional trivialities and petulant details. For Heaven comes clear when it comes at all. There are no nostalgias so great as those caused to a nation by religious confusion. And there is no loneliness so poignant as to be aware of an admired one who does not believe in your God.

5

The generic religion of the United States of America is meeting-house Christianity. Its ritual requires three items: a pew, a pulpit, and a preacher. Add to that a small organ, to assist in its single devotional indulgence: a hymn.

The meeting-house itself is a sacred edifice which looks something like a church, partly like a library, and a little like a bank. It is often covered with ivy, and in more cultivated sections of our country, as in New England, is usually rich in historical reminiscences.

Meeting-house Christianity discourages an intellectual outlook on the subject of salvation, and thrives on sincerities rather than on certitudes. Its theories in the field of Christian Doctrine are so diverse that its disciples have fairly run out of hyphens trying to link them all together. This program leaves it with a confused Christology, and even with a theology which is sometimes a matter of conjecture. The lifework of a devout meeting-house parishioner is to be a perpetual seeker after truth, whose proper chastisement comes from never being permitted to find it. Such asceticism, especially in the rural areas, has been responsible for untold heroisms: witness those shy-eyed farmers and sweet-visaged housewives, with countenances full of deep spiritual appeal, whose joyless humility and resolute resignation Grant Wood, the artist, has patiently commemorated in portraits as haunting as they are instructive.

Lacking system, even in its morals, meeting-house Christianity was bound to have an explosion of pride somewhere in its ranks, and it had one about a hundred years ago in the State of Massachusetts, by way of an eccentric doctrine known as Unitarianism. The Unitarians, many of whom were men of abstemious habits and great wealth, finding the Christianity they were experiencing too complex to be a reflection of God, delved into Deism and discovered a God too fastidious to become man. As a result, the divinity of Christ went overboard in Boston as lightly as tea had gone overboard in an earlier revolt. But the genius of Christ, like the excellence of the flavor of tea, has never been questioned there. In Boston, Christ continues to be quoted by Unitarians, more at tea parties than in church, and not for what He said but for what He “put so well.”

Having unburdened itself of this lofty heresy, meeting-house Christianity went on at Biblical levels to evangelize the upper and lower middle-classes of our nation. But it was noticeable henceforth that its clergymen assumed their vocation to be less for the task of teaching than for the arts of preaching and edification. Texts from the Old and New Testament were chosen for their slogan value rather than for their inspired content, and if possessed of sufficient rhetorical resonance and literary allure, were mingled in sermons indiscriminately with the moralizings of good men. The hagiographer, the poet, the essayist, the historian and the statesman, all combined to supply the meeting-house minister with spiritual enthusiasm, and in communities in which there has been continuity and some sense of tradition, the result has been the best written and spoken English ever produced in our land.

In the more exclusive churches of middle-class Christianity, the meeting-house exhortation offered at Sunday Service has, during the last half century, differed so slightly from the academic instruction offered daily at some nearby sectarian college that there have been mistaken vocations among parsons and professors, and satisfactory exchanges made later in life to the benefit of both pulpit and lecture platform. And whereas many a college curriculum has thereby been loaded with more disguised religion courses than it bargained for, many a congregation has reaped the reward of a much more liberal education than it contracted to receive in return for the slight tuition fee of a coin dropped on a collection plate.

Of liturgy, meeting-house Christianity (with the exception of one decorative outburst which is its own explanation) has none. Its liturgy has entirely escaped into subsidiary fraternal organizations, some with impressive names like the Knights of Pythias; some with curious names like the Odd Fellows; and others, under a more secular ritual, with nomenclatures held over from the hunting season: e. g., the Moose, the Elks and the Lions. One such movement went completely aboriginal and called itself the Red Men. But the majority of these sash-and-sword enterprises, being unreliably religious and therefore not effectively fraternal, have disintegrated into mere groups of good-fellowship, and many of them are now on the verge of becoming extinct.

The last loud echo of meeting-house liturgy subsiding among the elements can be heard in the splashes of athletic Christians nakedly swimming in pools constructed in Young Men’s Christian Association buildings where Bible classes are held; or in the open-air cornet solos of over-coated evangelicals standing on street corners in the middle of winter and summoning the world to repentance.

Among remaining Americans, and on an indiscriminate basis, a collective effort to revive the liturgical impulse of Christianity was made some years ago in several semi-civic, semi-convivial crusades, whose members were invited to dine in community once a week, greet each other vigorously, and submit to being called by their Christian names. The recent War effort has somewhat curtailed the routine of these brotherhoods. Their spirit remains undaunted; their members continue to be fond of one another; but the caterers are complaining that they do not lunch as often as they used to.

6

“At what point in your thoughts did you give up all further quest of Mary Favorite?” Michael was asked by one of a group to whom he had been expatiating.

“At Copley Station, two stops before Kenmore. I decided it was no use to go on. So I got out at Copley, and went over to the public library. And there, under one of the green reading lamps, I settled with Mary Favorite for a poem. Would you like to hear it?”

We said we would. And Michael took a paper out of his coat pocket, his inside one, and read:

Mary Favorite gives one the impression

That God is both good and gay,

But how she does it, or with what expression

Is more than my mouth can say,

But infinitely less than my mind can see

Whenever I am in Mary Favorite’s company.

Thought after thought in beautiful interpretation

Of human hardship and human frailty,

Store upon store of exquisite sensation

In things that are pure and free,

Have textured in Mary Favorite’s eyes

Something I had no word for, were I wise.

“That girl haunts you, doesn’t she, Michael?” said one of his listeners.