tum as long as man shall endure. Now childishness is one of these ancestral traits, and inevitably it will be perpetuated by the same social momentum. It expresses itself even in those highly educated people who walk about with an iron ring round a finger or a raw potato in their pocket to ward off rheumatism, or who believe that a piece of red flannel has much more efficacy than a white one tied round the neck for sore throat. But are not the masses still children, and still to be amused as such? One may pass over the 'Amusements Park' at an exhibition, but for what purpose other than to attract the attention of grown-up children is all this disfiguring of cities at night with flaring electric lights, devices showing the wheels of a motorcar going round, or a glass being filled from a gin-bottle? It is a crude, largescale, visual appeal to childishness in adult life. What a commentary on civilization in Britain after two thousand years is Piccadilly Circus at night!

exist

Egregious childishness can alongside the most marvelous applications of the knowledge of the hidden forces of nature, such as are witnessed, for instance, in wireless telephony, the airplane, and the submarine boat. There is no doubt that the amount of exact physicochemical and biological knowledge diffused among the people is small: many people to-day do really believe the earth is flat and that the sun goes round it, although they do not like to admit this belief because there seems to be a general prejudice against it. One very marked mode of expressing the childishness of adults is the uncritical acceptance of the statements in advertisements of 'quack' medicines. A great many people will believe anything that is told them sufficiently often with sufficient emphasis. The quantity of impotent drugs swallowed

at the present day is enormous. No statements about their omnipotence are too absurd to be accepted, no amount of adverse criticism of their worthlessness carries any conviction.

Some years ago, while the trial involving some disputed point about a patent pill was proceeding, and while it was being demonstrated in court that the pill contained no substance of any efficacy whatever, the notices of the virtues of the panacea continued to appear in the newspapers, and the volume of the sales was scarcely diminished. It is as true to-day as the day when it was written: populus vult decipi. A very great deal of the excessive novel-reading of the present day is nothing more or less than the revival of the childish love of being 'told a story.'

The appeal made to a certain type of mind by some phases of religion and some fantastic Transatlantic 'isms' is largely because these minds have arrived at no adequate conception of cause and effect. Only to an uncritical, childish mentality can this sort of thing appeal. While there is no doubt that much good can come from the attitude of mind advocated by Monsieur Coué, yet in some quarters the practical result of his method is perfectly absurd, as when we have seen a number of hopelessly incurable general paralytics mumbling unceasingly through their anarthria, 'Every day and in every way, I am getting better.' It was pathetic in its hopelessness and puerility; it was childishness in excelsis.

A notable expression of childishness in adult life is the way in which women will follow a fashion whether it suits them or not. If the vogue is to build up the hair congenital or acquired into a pyramid, or to cut most of it off, all save a few discriminating women will follow the fashion uncomplainingly. Forty years ago the decree was to look

like a wasp; now it is to appear almost unidimensional; but whatever it is, it is adopted at the risk of discomfort, and even of pain. Perhaps the most irritating result of trying to look very thin is that no pockets are allowed in any garment, with the result that all things needful are carried in a receptacle which, not being an organic part of the costume, is apt to be lost, stolen, or mislaid with disastrous facility.

The imitative faculty so noticeable in children is responsible for the ease with which a phrase often half understood spreads through the community. Thus the words 'psychological moment,' which as a joke were originally tolerable, have been used in season and out of season until the repetition is unbearable. To some extent the phrase is illiterate, for if translated out of Greek it means 'the study-of-the-mind moment.' What Oscar Wilde intended his character to say was the critical, right, suitable, or opportune moment no more than that. 'Psychological' is not the synonym for any of these terms. Another silly phrase which has caught the fancy of our grown-up children is, 'I had a brain wave,' when all that is meant is, 'it suddenly occurred to me.' This is oftenest used by those who know little or nothing about the brain or about waves. There is a third- or fourth-rate type of mind which rejoices in phrases and proverbs such as 'the aching void,' 'the better the day the better the deed,' and other superficial non-sequiturs.

Closely allied to this sort of thing is the childishness of shibboleths which flourishes from the reciprocally reënforcing influences of childishness and snobbery. These often go hand in hand. It is well known that there is no greater snob than the schoolboy, and many adults are still in that stage. Each class has its own shibboleth; and the unreflecting acceptance of one of

these, as the final word in all that is right or fitting, is the sign of an undeveloped sense of values and of a crude mentality: it is social Peter-Panism. Many things that pass for humor are the most puerile ineptitudes. Much of the old-fashioned 'music-hall' stage humor was in itself so silly that, when separated from the comical dress, attitudes, speech, and gestures of the comedian, it became emetical. Each few years develops a new phrase indicative of the inanity of its humor, as when people keep on saying, 'Now we shan't be long,' 'Everything in the garden's lovely,' 'A little bit off the top,' and so on in an endless series of cacophonies.

There is much childishness on a large scale in contemporary life when processions pass through the streets of a city with the leaders waving flags. Doubtless these perambulators are intended to impress the public with the importance of their cause or movement, seeing that they have employed the obvious method of muscular locomotion. The childish intolerance which decides that no man shall wear a straw hat before or after a certain day in the year is an example of childishness in adult life, as expressed in an impertinent interference in other people's affairs. From their lack of sympathetic imagination, children are very intolerant. The apparent necessity for 'rat' weeks, 'swat-the-fly' weeks, 'clean-up' weeks, pure-milk weeks, fire-prevention weeks, and so on, is another proof on a huge scale that we are all children of a larger growth, and that we cannot kill rats or flies, or keep our cellars clean, or Pasteurize milk, as individuals, but must be impelled thereto by the infectivity of a slogan or hygienic 'Fiery Cross.'

The success that attends fortunetelling, crystal-gazing, the revelations of the fashionable palmist, the predictions of gypsies, and other itinerant

strong vein of childishness that runs through the mental constitution of even the most mature of us. What is Moore's Almanac in its astrological aspect but an annual appeal to childishness? For it is supremely childish in 1926 to continue to believe in the influences of the stars, in having one's horoscope 'cast,' in lucky and unlucky conjunctions of the planets on one's birthday, in the baleful influence of comets and that sort of thing that was honestly believed when astrology had not as yet given place to astronomy, nor alchemy to chemistry. There was a day about seven hundred years ago when the first intellects of Europe believed that the heavenly bodies did really influence human destiny, when 'ill-starred' did actually refer to the stars, when 'the music of the spheres' and 'the stars in their courses' were axioms in physics, but nous avons changé tout cela, or think we have.

One expression of childishness in adult life which may actually be a serious menace to the welfare of the community is the activities of the antivaccinators. This particular form of childishness is that these people are unable to appreciate the import of the historical and statistical evidence in favor of vaccination against smallpox. The antivaccinators do not believe that the question whether there shall or shall not be universal vaccination is one for the medical expert, and not for the layman at all. These antivaccinating members of the laity are impervious to evidence, and are constantly making mistakes about cause and effect. They are the present-day representatives of that class of person who throughout the ages has opposed everything new. Edward Jenner was by no means the only promulgator of a discovery who suffered opposition and misrepresentation, for Galileo, Harvey, Simpson,

first at least, ridiculed, thwarted, and opposed. This form of childishness, as an expression of social psychological inertia, may be a very serious thing for the public health. Possibly some of the leaders of antivaccination are ineducable, which is an expression of physiological inertia.

Childishness in adult life occasionally expresses itself in morbid emotionalism, as when a whole community signs a petition to reprieve a murderer. The unreasoning and irresponsible adult childishness overlooks the fact that legal experts have considered all the aspects of the case and deliberately come to the conclusion that the prisoner is guilty of murder, and that, as the law stands, the death sentence must be carried out. But just as the child who happens to want something very much totally ignores your explanations of why he cannot have it, so a community in virtue of its childishness will brush aside the whole logical chain of reasons whereby the criminal was convicted, and simply cry out that the sentence must be commuted.

Many people never grow up. The childishness of the present-day adult may be concealed or repressed by the conventions of society, but it quickly rises to the surface when any great crisis is being passed through or momentous event witnessed. The extravagances known as 'Mafficking' are the violent uprushing through the veneer of civilization of the latent childishness deep in the emotional nature of ninetynine per cent of us. Just as the hashishpoisoned Oriental 'runs amuck' in his murderous career, so the educated adult of 1926 returns on occasions at one leap to the irrepressible violence and buffoonery of his irresponsible childhood. The Armistice was the occasion for the ebullition of emotional infantilism on a scale hitherto unknown.

Grave and reverend seniors joined in the commotion; respectable people danced on restaurant tables and deliberately threw the crockery about the

room.

Delight in the creation of sheer noise is not confined to the half-intoxicated 'bean-feasters' of Whitechapel on Derby Day; at times it can overcome the so-called educated classes. The following is the description of bringing in the New Year in New York:

The crowds on Broadway at midnight were colossal, and the noise was indescribable. The hubbub was augmented by a radio which transmitted the noise made in other towns. 'Liquor-drunk and moneydrunk' is the phrase used by the New York Tribune. Vendors of cowbells, horns, and other noise-making instruments did a roaring trade at prices double those of last

year.

Some critics would call this vulgarity; but healthy children love noise, and the nursery is its place: here we have an

atavistic return to the nursery or to the monkey-tree on a very large scale. Those who thus saw the New Year in were still acting as children; when they became men they had not put away 'childish things.'

Just as under the placid surface of conventional morality and respectability the psychoanalyst tells us there are vast submerged complexes of immoral and criminal tendencies, so under the educated, civilized exterior of the adult man and woman of to-day there is a great substratum of pure childishness. 'Scratch the Russian and you find a Tartar'; but it does not require very much emotional scarification of the adult to reveal the unchanged child within. Just as the Great War undoubtedly brought to the surface much of the self-denial, heroism, and hardihood fortunately still latent in many men and women, so certain times of peculiar stress may reveal the not very deeply hidden childishness that lurks in the mental make-up of most of us.

[THE following article is summarized from a translation of an unsigned letter by a responsible Russian, whose identity it is necessary to keep secret for his own safety, published in Put, or "The Way,' a Russian religious journal established in Paris last year and edited by a distinguished group of Russian Christian scholars.]

THE Russian Church is now passing through a period of expiring perse

cution. Passionate class-hatred has abated somewhat, and an acute but equally passionate craving for pleasure not restrained by religious or social claims has come to the fore. Pilfering of private and State revenues by those in authority, betrayal of their true convictions by the intellectuals, depravity in the younger generation, gross materialism in the masses, the negation of Church, God, and any form of religion, characterize our present society

- a society that is perfectly heathen in its new way. And arraigned against these conditions we see the Church, weakened in numbers, but strengthened by the fires of persecution.

Our antireligious Government has evidently relinquished the intention of destroying the Church by physical violence. The Church has proved stronger than her persecutors, who find themselves obliged to make concessions to the masses, who still value the Church and will not give her up. Priests are no longer executed, and religious worship is subjected to few restrictions. This does not mean that it is quite free. Church processions are still forbidden, and church buildings are closed from time to time, 'by the demand of the working classes.' At present, when almost daily trains carry hundreds of exiled students, soldiers, merchants, intellectuals, and even Marxists and Zionists, to Siberia, it would be strange if priests as well were not exiled. But already many bishops and priests, having finished their term of 'punishment,' are returning to their former dioceses and parishes. They have come back to strengthen the vacillating and to gather together the faithful, bringing with them a spirit of dauntless loyalty to the Church.

Our Communist authorities still regard their struggle against God as one of their chief objectives, but they prefer to kill the spirit, not the body. They do this in the schools, in literature, in official atheistic publications, in the theatre. Their advantage lies in their remarkably extensive propaganda organization and their complete control of all cultural institutions. To scoff at things sacred is still looked upon as proof of political enlightenment, but the disgusting public processions of the Comsomol are recognized as harmful, and the authorities are trying to suppress these hooligans. The desecration

of graves and cemeteries is no longer encouraged; and Bukharin himself recently declared in a public address: 'Let no one think that because he defiles the doorstep of a priest he is leading in antireligious propaganda.'

The so-called 'Living,' or Sovietized, section of the Church no longer troubles us as it did at first. Its leaders have failed to enlist either the support of the masses or the sympathy of the idealists. The former resist them with their ritualistic conservatism; the latter can forgive neither the blood they have spilled nor their friendship with the godless. But few church buildings are in their hands, although cathedrals in the capital and the provincial towns have been turned over to them, and those they possess are empty. The only sections of the clergy that have allied themselves with this movement are those who seek selfish advancement or those who are too frightened and cowed to have a will of their own; the only laymen who attend their services are those who are too indolent to change their parish and simply go to the church nearest their homes, consoling themselves with the idea that disputes between the clergy are no concern of theirs. Moreover, services in the Soviet Church for the most part follow the old ritual, and its priests as a rule do not preach revolution, but merely obedience to the authorities, 'who are from God.' In other words, the Living Church is not in essence revolutionary, but a revival of the old State Church of Tsarist days, with its unprincipled, bureaucratic spirit.

I believe the Soviet Government feels reassured in certain respects regarding the Russian Church as a whole. It no longer fears plots among the clergy or political propaganda from the pulpit. Furthermore, the Church's present abstention from politics is more than precautionary and tactical. It is due to