Humanism and America

[25] Recently I attended on successive Sundays an extremely Catholic and an extremely Protestant celebration of the Holy Communion. The solemnity of the former was injured by the priest’s sermon, which evinced the pumping process, the “defence-mechanism,” referred to above. At the other service, the mound of bread-cubes that appeared on the table below the pulpit, alongside a pitcher of grape-juice, was suggestive, I fear, of the above mentioned junk-heaps. For the minister interrupted his readings from old sacramental liturgies to explain how much the ceremony rightly meant to his sect, and how much it wrongly meant to the Catholics.

[26] Luke IV, 9–13.

[27] This word is borrowed from the late Baron Friedrich von Hügel, in whose life and writings the truth of it is powerfully and beautifully illustrated.

[28] His crucial period in early maturity, his “temptation in the wilderness,” is examined in my article “On Emerson’s ‘Grace’ and ‘Self-Reliance’” in the New England Quarterly, Vol. II, No. 1, 1929.

[29] See the essays on Newman, Arnold, and Huxley in Robert Shafer’s Christianity and Naturalism, 1926.

[30] See the chapter on him in Norman Foerster’s American Criticism, 1928.

[31] An interesting critique bearing on this subject is “The Modern Distemper” by Professor Ralph Barton Perry in the Saturday Review of Literature, June 1, 1929.

[32] Spenser’s Faerie Queene, Book I, canto 4. This great poetic fable would be studied in our schools and colleges with deeper emotion if its application to modern pride were not screened off by modern pride itself.

[33] From Parochial and Plain Sermons, 1880, Vol. II, No. XXXI.

[34]A Preface to Morals, p. 326.

[35] From a review of my book The Cycle of Modern Poetry in the Times Literary Supplement (London), June 20, 1929.