FUNDAMENTALISM ABROAD

While religious controversy ebbs--between the sides in Tennessee and Texas, it inundates Old England. Modernists how fight their battles across the front pages of London newspapers--the same newspapers which insistently called for more copy on the Scopes trial because it was so "quaintly ludicrous". An English bishop in a speech reported by the Associated Press, expressed his opinion during the Scopes affair, that America is "fifty to seventy-five years behind us in cultural development."

Now the Englishmen seem to have forgotten all about backward America in the fury of their religious wars. Ten famous English writers, including Arnold Bennett and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle were inveigled into writing their religious thinking, into the headlines of the London Daily Express under the title "What I Believe."

Since then things have hummed; the fundamentalists have risen in arms; they have seen those authors as

'poor benighted heathen,

though first class writing men."

Not only has the press been inundated with correspondence, but the religious weeklies are battling royally. As C. F. G. Masterman describes these debates, they have been wages, "It must be confessed, with a ferocity and bitterness which offers a dismal contrast to the testimony of these amiable and eminent men, not credible to Christian apologists."

How familiar it all sounds! And there is another interesting touch contributed by Mr. Masterman: "The chief opposition rally has been made by the fundamentalists, who, to counter the lubrications of successful authors, have been enlisting successful business men. Thus we read of the manager of a drygoods store asserting that If she Bible is not true we are done for!; and the manager of the southern railway affirms his belief in Fundamentalism in words that might have been used by the late William J. Bryan."

What is happening here? Is England on a cultural tobbogan sliding to the level designated for the United States; or has the lid come off when the pot started boiling, exposing the fact that the ingredients are much the same the world over? Perhaps the question will be debarred in the London papers, as an after-thought.

All sympathy is due the Britishers; may they see England's plight as humorously as they saw America's but the law of laughter says the best laugh is American--at lest for the present.