government than government is worth. In an article contributed the other day to the New York Evening Post, he said:

The need of "government," though unquestionably real, is not the primary need of mankind, and all attempts to make it so are doomed to defeat themselves to the end of time. Man's primary need is for light, and until this is recognized, and made into a new basis of human relationship, the world will continue to advance from bad to worse on the path of confusion and strife.

It is a familiar charge that man has always put on woman all the drudgery he could. The vote was to emancipate her, but, perhaps, after all, man, when he handed it to her with so polite a bow, was merely up to his old tricks of putting off on her something he was tired of doing himself, and something that had ceased to be of first importance. Perhaps man is secretly and instinctively of Doctor Jacks's opinion about government that it is not so important as some other things, and expects gradually to put it off on the sex that is strongest in dealing with details, and go off himself after those other things, and especially, as Doctor Jacks suggests, after light. The trouble about that is that a large proportion of the new light seems to come through women-that it appears not to be intended that man should get anywhere by himself. Where there is a Dante there is a Beatrice. It is not recorded who filled that office for Roger Bacon, who seems to have got an unusual line of information from some source or other, and apparently out of his own head. But Beatrice was most helpful to Dante after she had died, and that leaves a door open for assistance to Roger Bacon, which might not be less feminine because it was invisible. And there was Joan of Arc through whom help came to France, working for the most part through very stupid men.

But now again about the girls. Accepting the hypothesis that they are disorderly, what is the cure for it? Is it the trouble that the mothers are neglecting

their duties that discipline is slack? It may very well be in the more extreme cases that the mothers are no better than they should be, and have, themselves, relaxed standards of morality or decorum, and it may be in some cases that good mothers, who knew their duty toward their daughters, have not been able to do it because the license of the times ran too strong against them. In all things the spirit of these times is against compulsion. The war brought an immense enlargement of liberty. In this country it sent thousands of the best born and the best brought-up girls out into comparatively unguarded public service-in many cases beyond the seas. There had been no like emancipation of young women from restraint since our fathers migrated to this country. Affairs were running strong toward increased liberty for young women for years before the war. The girls' colleges were nurseries of that movement. When the war came it fairly went over the top, and the girls that came along immediately after the war are thoroughly infected with it. People who think that mothers will regain the control of daughters which they had a generation ago must anticipate a much greater reaction in things in general than most of us can see the signs of. Government by mothers is important, just as all government is important, but as to domestic government, the case is much the same as very with political government, which Doctor Jacks says is not so important as it seems because the vital need is the need of light. The thing that is going to help the girls is not so much rules and authority, though some of them need both, as understanding of life. If they can be helped to that, the help will amount to something.

That, I take it, is the light which Doctor Jack calls for understanding of life. The whole world needs it; the girls need it because they are a part of the contemporary world and subject to its impulses and distresses. Being at a time.

of life when emotion runs strong and experience has not yet gathered much power of regulation, they show more visibly than older people the symptoms of the world disease, and, being girls, their deviations from decorum seem to observers more scandalous and disquieting than if they were men. Yet the men, the gunmen, for example, show even more astonishing deviations. In their remarkable behavior the girls are seekers after understanding of life-the same quest that Doctor Jacks would put us all on when he says that the world's great need is light. The light it needs is something that will illuminate our adventure on earth and help us to understand it and to handle it better, with more intelligence and with more success. When one says that what the world needs is religion, that is the same story in different words. It means that we need a truer understanding of life and it directs us to religion to get it. If we do not get it out of religion, then religion does not help us.

Winston Churchill, the American novelist, who has devoted three years to efforts to come to a better understanding about life, and has begun to disclose his findings, says, "Religion must give you creative energy or it is nothing." His quest is to get something out of religion that will give people increased power over their own lives, over their behavior, over their happiness. That is the most important quest that human minds are following to-day, and many of them are pursuing it, and not without promise of arriving somewhere. That serious observer, Herbert Croly, the leading editor of the New Republic, contributed a long discourse to that paper in February on "Behaviorism in Religion," the gist of which was that the world must have a better understanding of human life. and that it was likely to get it through religion if religion and science could be induced to work together. Science, he thought, had at last come far enough toward understanding what sort of a creature man is, and what his ingredi

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ents are, and what are the influences that affect him, to verify and illuminate the conception of man and of human relations that appears in the sayings of Christ in the New Testament. “Modern civilization," Mr. Croly said, “is cracking for want of a religious truth which can earn the allegiance of men by its ability, if voluntarily accepted, to liberate and integrate human life. Christianity claims to possess this virtue and might possess it if the Christian ministry can reach a common interpretation of their faith. . . . Formidable as the task is, we believe the Christian ministry can undertake it with a sufficient. chance of success if only they will adjust their minds to its necessity. Their chance of success is born of the profound congruity between the conception of human nature revealed by Jesus Christ two thousand years ago and the conception of human nature which is now obtaining year by year, as the result of scientific investigation, increasing authority and acquiescence.'

That is almost as much as to say that science has almost discovered that the Sermon on the Mount is a practical treatise on human relations, which is comforting as far as it goes, and interesting, too. What is not so comforting is the suggestion that the power of Christianity to liberate and integrate human life is dependent on the ability of the Christian ministry to reach a common interpretation of their faith. If Christianity can't operate until its ministers get together it's a bad case, and fit to persuade stock operators to sell the market. But why wait for them? Did gravitation wait for concurrence of scientists with Newton's theory? Gravitation is a law that works without regard for contemporary opinion, but people who understand it have an advantage over people who don't. If Christianity also is a law, that will work also without much regard to the opinions of ministers, and people who understand it and use it. will benefit by it without deference to the ministers' feelings. No one has a

patent on Christianity. The world, after some centuries of hesitation, has pretty much accepted that position, and actions for infringement are no longer dangerous.

Mr. Croly seems to hope to see religion so exhibited that the scientific mind can grasp and understand it, and to see science so expounded that the religious mind may get out of it a confirmation of what it has received by spiritual intelligence. That seems very much what Winston Churchill is driving at. "We can," he says, "with the help of modern science, in biology and psychology, reach a theory as to the nature of the mind that will account for man's dualism, the conflict between emotions. Each of us has a body that is torn by mental conflicts. The problem is to resolve them. We are on the way toward finding out what the source of all our neuroses is to-day, and when we have done that we will liberate powers undreamed of. Morality has crumbled simply because we do not understand what religion really means. We are entitled to a scientific explanation of the forces operating in us, and there has been none. But I am sure that it can be put in terms of modern science, and when that has been done we will know how to put an end to the mental conflicts that now rage in everyone's being, crippling the power that exists in each of us, and will learn how to use our mental energy as we should."

These are still obscure matters about which most of us have very limited understanding. We pick up an idea here and an idea there, and the most that most of us have learned as yet is that there is something to be found out. which, if we can discover it, will be helpful to human conduct, to international politics, to the behavior of girls, and the dealings of nations one with another. Compulsion, as said, is pretty

well recognized as a broken reed in human affairs. It accomplishes only momentary things. If it dams a flood the waters run over the top of the dam, or if they do not it merely puts things back and postpones solutions that are due. The world maintains its police forces to keep things from getting too much out of hard, and that seems right, but it never looked so little to compulsion for solutions. In that particular it seems to be getting around to the New Testament view of human life and the way to deal with it-the view that Mr. Croly says the scientists begin to see the point of. The hope of the world nowadays is not in armies or in navies, not even in the elimination of war by chemistry; it is in thought and the better understanding of life; in the acceptation of knowledge and the infusion of credibility into many things that have been incredible. That is the job of science-to make the incredible credible; to make the incomprehensible understandable; to increase belief, especially in scientists, and confirm the religious people in all the truth they have and detach them from such error as is mixed with it. If you think all that is going on while we wait, it makes the prospects of this troubled world seem a good deal better, and encourages everyone to live on a few years more and see how things work out, whereas for folks who feel that the very difficult complications that the Great War has left in its wake must all be brought to solution without any new helps to thought or action, the prospect must be considerably enveloped with haze. Happily for our world, it is full of forward-looking people who expect it to outlast all its troubles, and whom the recognition of difficulties only confirms in confidence in the ability of man to overcome them, and in faith that all the power he needs to that end exists and is waiting for him to recognize and use it.