'Scores of young girls and youths were found stupefied by liquor in San Mateo county roadhouses by Federal Prohibition agents yesterday. Some of the girls were only fourteen or fifteen, the agents said, while in many cases their male companions were years older. Helpless under the influence of liquor, the girls were unable to resist the attentions of the men.'

And this from the Wilmington 'News':

'Since the enactment of Federal and State Prohibition laws... not only boys of high school age, but girls and other younger children, frequently are seen under the influence of the prohibited liquor. . . . Boys have been seen staggering on the streets, and asleep at their desks.'

Prohibition is the great achievement of the American Protestant sects. Drink and Darwin are anathema. In the South, at least, their mentality is shown by the acceptance of a crude fundamentalism, and by the Dallas trial which set the world laughing. It is with the character of this form of Protestantism and particularly with the character of its Ministers that Mr Lewis is concerned in his new novel 'Elmer Gantry,' a book which has not unnaturally been denounced from the Atlantic to the Pacific, and which it is a criminal offence to sell in Boston and Kansas City. It would ill become an English writer to suggest that there is truth where the most reputable American critics, such as Mr Robert Littell, who reviewed Mr Lewis's book in the 'New Republic,' find nothing but exaggeration and false charges. Elmer Gantry is certainly a repulsive person, an evil-living preacher, without scruples or morals, and with no gift but that of a cheap form of oratory. Mr Lewis would seem to have been misled into the mistake that Dickens made when he created Mr Stiggins and Mr Chadband. Dickens disliked the Dissenter and was convinced that he must be a humbug. Mr Lewis revolts against the narrow, unintelligent vulgarity of the Methodist and the Baptist chapels, and imagines robust -viciousness which, as a matter of fact, is probably rare within the chapel influence. If, however, Mr Lewis cannot be regarded by the foreigner as a safe guide through the intricacies of modern American religion, his friend Mr H. L. Mencken is of considerable service

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in his Americana,' a collection of extracts made from newspapers and periodicals in the year 1925. Mr Mencken is among the bitterest critics of his own people, and the cuttings have, of course, been selected with one deliberate intention; but they are none the less illuminative. Thus we are told that the Methodists of Steamboat Springs in Colorado spent one whole Sunday, starting at six in the morning and finishing at eleventhirty in the evening, reading the New Testament aloud and all through. Sixty-eight people took part in what is described as this Bible Marathon.' The minister of a church in Denver announced his intention to use a drink called 'whistle' instead of wine at the Communion Service. During the ceremony five large whistle signs and three linen banners were prominently displayed.' This Denver church is what is called institutional. It has departments of ancient history, baseball, dancing, real estate and scientific diet. Another Bible Marathon' was held at Middleton, Connecticut, where the Pastor succeeded in making something of a record by reading the new Testament aloud in thirteen hours. A Baptist minister in Washington took as the subject of his Sunday sermon, 'Why a man threw a large dinner dish and a chicken out of the window.' A cleaning company in Florida opened new premises with a religious service conducted by no less than four ministers. In a town in Georgia, at a dinner given to a Presbyterian Ministe the table was ornamented with little groups of Biblica. figures made out of sugar. At the places of the Pastor and the Elders were tiny Bibles made of candy.' In Chicago a Baptist preacher discoursed on 'the kind of girl to marry,' and exhibited five attractive young women in a frame-work of flowers and tissue paper lattice-work which had been arranged in the church in front of the Baptistry while a spot-light was turned on. A Congregational pastor in Maine has a genius for advertisement. 'Spot-lights play on the church steeple; soft yellow light floods the pulpit at sermon time, the rest of the church being dark.' The spot-light, indeed, seems a common device. Church-going in Michigan is made attractive by a free copy of a popular magazine being handed to each worshipper as he leaves the chapel In a Pennsylvania Baptist church spot-lights play upon

the minister and candidates as they stand in the pool. First the light is white, and as the candidate is immersed the colour will change to purple.' After this, to the European, there is something quite restrained in the announcement that a Methodist in Tennessee will give a funeral oration on a dead butterfly.'

The accumulative impression from these extracts is of soul-destroying vulgarity-the surrender by Puritanism of its austerities and its reticence, the gleeful borrowing of all that is flashy and cheap from the theatre and the cinema. While still professing unqualified acceptance of the Bible, the teaching of religion would seem to have given place to a determination somehow or the other to attract people into church and to make religion a going concern. The spot-light on the steeple of the Methodist chapel is only one more indication of that worship of success which is not unnatural, and, indeed, may be regarded as inevitable in a nation that enjoys a widespread material prosperity unparalleled in the history of the world. Almost every American workman owns a Ford car. Practically every American home has its radio set. To the American, America is obviously the Promised Land, the land flowing with milk and honey, and he is sure that, if the American had appeared earlier in the world, human history must have been vastly different. If Moses had been a Rotarian, it has been gravely said, the children of Israel would have reached the Promised Land in forty days instead of in forty years. While from another gentleman comes the assurance: Joseph, the lad who wore the coat of fifty-seven varieties of colours, was the first life-insurance agent; he provided during the seven years of plenty for the following seven lean years.' And this proves that a writing of life insurance is next in importance to the preaching of the Gospel.' With all this, too, there is a widespread scorn of intellect and culture. A Methodist pastor denounced Grand Opera: 'No one can understand and if they did it would do them no good.' And the continuance of the worst side of Puritanism finds its evidence in the prohibition in a southern city of 'Sunday golf, billiards and dominoes.'

It is always difficult for the rich man to enter into the Kingdom of Heaven and a wealthy Church is almost inevitably spiritually inert. It is therefore not surprising Vol. 249.-No. 493.

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that the soul of American Puritanism has been besmirched by American prosperity. In his 'History of American Literature,' Dr Leon Kellner says: Calvinism is the natural theology of the disinherited; it never flourished, therefore, anywhere as it did in the barren hills of Scotland and in the wilds of North America.' The Calvinism of the early American colonists has become, so to speak, Fordised and standardised into the religion at which Mr Sinclair Lewis jeers in Elmer Gantry,' and which finds its expression in uplift talks and blatant advertisements. But while Calvinism as a living faith has so obviously disappeared, it has left as a legacy a prevailing 'moral' fervour and an overmastering desire to interfere with other people's habits, which made Prohibition possible, and compel the average American to pretend that a dinner party and even a flask of bootleg whiskey have a definite moral value and significance. The Puritan is still predominant in American religion, in American politics, and in American social life, though his influence does little to prevent graft in politics, vulgarity in religion and multiple divorce.

To-day the thinker and the artist are struggling for emancipation and will surely succeed, but in the past American Puritanism deadened down the man of genius to its own level. America has produced few greater men than Mark Twain. His 'Huckleberry Finn,' says Mr Waldo Frank, 'must go down in history not as the expression of a rich national culture like the books of Chaucer, Rabelais, Cervantes, but as the voice of American chaos, the voice of a pre-cultural epoch.' That is perhaps true, but 'Huckleberry Finn' is a great book, the work of a genius, and so great that nearly everything else that Mark Twain wrote is, by comparison with it, almost pathetically bad. Whitman retained his soul because he was never the slave of national ideals; while I again quote Mr Waldo Frank—' Mark Twain did not believe in his soul, and his soul suffered. Mark Twain believed with his fellows that the great sin was to be unpopular and poor, and his soul died.' As Mr Mencken has said: 'He could not get rid of the Puritan smugness and cocksureness, the Puritan mistrust of new ideas, the Puritan incapacity of seeing beauty as a thing in itself.'

American Puritanism is no longer ascetic. The Puritan

is eager to slay with the sword of the Lord and of Gideon, but he has not the smallest intention of going into battle wearing a hair shirt. In brief,' says Mr Mencken, 'Puritanism has become bellicose and tyrannical by becoming rich.' And there probably is the explanation of the whole bewilderment as it appears to the European. A religion and a culture that suited a poor and struggling people who, while they remained poor and struggling, had dignity and even a rather harsh beauty, have lost all spiritual value and quality. One looks from afar and is bewildered, saddened, and apprehensive. But to-day is to-day, and to-morrow must come. 'We are sweating,' says Mr Mencken, 'through our 18th century, our era of sentiment, our spiritual measles.'

The chapel has an immense influence in American local politics. In his rather unpleasant autobiography Up from Methodism,' Mr Herbert Asbury says:

'It was essential for any man who wanted to hold public office to profess religion and be seen at church, and usually the more noise he made in religious gatherings, the greater his chances of success at the polls. If any candidate dared to hold views contrary to those of the godly, a vile whispering campaign was started against him, and his personal life was raked over and bared with many gloating references to the Christian duty of the people to punish this upstart. Occasionally the ungodly or anti-religious element elected a mayor or what not, but generally religion triumphed and thanks were offered to God, and then throughout his term the office-holder was harassed by pious hypocrites seeking favours and special privileges. My father, as county surveyor and city clerk, was constantly being checked up to determine if he remained steadfast in the faith.'

And the lot of the ministers themselves is not to be envied. Mr Asbury relates that one minister was hounded out of his town because his wife regularly went to sleep after the midday meal. The preachers are not well paid, and are demoralised by the conditions of their lives.

'They were inveterate beggars, and all of them had fine, highly developed noses for chicken and other dainties; it was seldom that a family could have a chicken or turkey dinner without the preacher dropping in. It is true that their salaries were not large, but they had free use of the