wine, and the pent-up hatred against the old State Church broke out in a flaming tirade:

'Snuff-pinchers! They make the sign of the cross with thumb and two fingers! Cowards! They could n't compete with the true faith and they put seals on our altars. Liars! They founded their religion on deceit. So they betray everybody, even those who confess to them. Why, if someone confessed to me that he killed the Tsar, it would be my secret forever. Police spies, charlatans, wolves—'

In contrast with such extremists Vlas is a modernist and has departed far from the faith of his fathers. The strictest Old Believers will not touch tea and sugar, nor potatoes, for they were unknown before the days of Nikon. But to Vlas all food is good. The strictest Old Believers, holding that false religion defiles a man in body and soul, keep themselves sternly aloof from the 'worldly' as unclean. In the villages zealots often refused to shake the hand I proffered, and the bowl I ate from as I found later was the one from which the cat was fed. Any other dish I defiled would have to be broken or thrown away. When I told Vlas of this, he only laughed, and to prove that he had no such prejudices made me drink from the same bowl with him.

--

The Revolution has done much damage to Vlas's observance of the ancient customs and conventions. Even for those to which he conforms he gives secular and not religious reasons.

The strictest Old Believers lay no razor to their face, for the beardless may not enter Heaven. Bandits once waylaid Old Believers with the demand, 'Your money or your beard!' If the beard was severed, it was gathered up to be buried with its owner lest at the

gates of Paradise he be unrecognized. When I asked Vlas why he does n't cut his whiskers off, he shook his head and said: 'Do I want to look like a dog?'

The strictest Old Believers use no tobacco. It was unknown before Nikon, and the Scriptures say: 'Not what entereth into the mouth, but what cometh out, defiles a man.' Vlas bases his abjuration of smoking on purely physiological grounds: it would cut down his weight. 'Do I want to look like a weasel?'

To Vlas sheer size and bulk are virtues in themselves. He is proud of his big self, his big daughters, his big ikons, his big cross with the legend, 'Vladika! Ward off my enemies.' Proudest of all of his enormous Nomakanon, the Laws and Scriptures in archaic red and black Slavonic script. To Vlas a magic spell lies in its great dimensions and in its great age than three hundred years, he boasts. The very reading of it has healing power.

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This Vlas was doing in a loud voice when I went to say good-bye. The room oven-hot, the ikon lamps alit, a sizzling samovar, haunches of pork and beef and pies on the table; and the old man, barefooted, in his black caftan, vodka pouring into him, sweat pouring out of him, was singsonging a prayer out of this holy book.

'Just curing myself of a cold,' said Vlas apologetically.

Good health to Vlas! Hoch to Vlas! Maybe, long after the ascetic Bernard Shaw has finished his meatless, wineless days, this voracious, flesheating, vodka-drinking, Bible-reading, Union-carded Old Believer will continue to stand, a bulwark of his ancient faith, refuting all the laws of physiology and hygiene and some of the tenets of Marxism.

THE doctrine of the union of Church and State is evidently in a parlous condition. After a long and fairly honorable history it is about to pass, to use Archbishop Dowling's phrase, into 'the limbo of defunct controversies.' Catholics fear to pay their respects to it. Protestants spurn it.

It is not difficult to understand why the doctrine has few adherents in America to mourn its demise. In its historic Christian form it called for the solidarity of the State with the Roman Catholic Church. One of the characteristic features of the doctrine was that it accorded to that Church a preferred position before the law and placed the State under obligation to proscribe the public exercises of those forms of religion not in harmony with the established cult. In modern America, with our religious heterogeneity and with only a small minority of our people within the fold of the Roman Church, that feature was a serious liability. To Catholics it seemed an insuperable handicap in the struggle for social recognition. To Protestants it was a sinister anachronism.

And yet, now that the doctrine seems to be approaching dissolution, may we not discern virtues of a rather substantial character under a form of thought so forbidding to the contemporary mind?

The most casual student of the doctrine discerns in it a protest - a protest

against the absolute State, against the arrogance of a secular nationalism, which our generation needs to hear. We need to know that the State is not above the moral law and that there are elementary human rights which, under God, the State is bound to respect. Italy and Russia both illustrate how brutally indifferent to those rights the State may be. No fiction of absolute sovereignty in an interdependent world can exempt the State from its obligations to mankind. The State which bullies a weak nation is just as guilty in the eyes of God as the man who takes advantage of a helpless neighbor. The gravest danger to individual liberty in our time, moreover, does not come from any threatened invasion of the rights of the State by the Church. It comes from an impudent Cæsarism which maintains that the State can do no wrong, that it is above criticism, that all its wars are righteous - claims which are blasphemous to religious men regardless of denominational affiliation. The State can be and is a grievous sinner and needs to repent. The Roman Catholic Church has taught this truth for centuries, and it is to be hoped that it will keep on teaching it. We Americans have a day of National Thanksgiving. Every modern State might well establish a day of National Repentance and Atonement for its collective sins.

We need such a day all the more

now that Nationalism has become the real religion of great masses of the population in both Europe and America. No other religion has ever asked so much of its adherents. As Lucien Romier suggests, 'it is the only religion which requires immediate and gratuitous human sacrifice and which imposes and obtains such a sacrifice without discussion.' But this, the prevailing religion of our time, has no day of Repentance and Atonement because the establishment of such a day would mean an acknowledgment that there was a Will above the will of the nation. It would mean a confession of national sins. In time of war such a confession would break the morale of the people. In time of peace no ruler could make such a confession and be reëlected. With popular governments it is more convenient for rulers to confess the sins of their predecessors.

Under the old régime of the union of Church and State, contrition and confession on the part of the State, through its responsible officials, were possible. There was a God with whose will and law the actions of the State should conform. That will and law, above all conflicting national ambitions, hatreds, and prejudices, was symbolized in a manner effective in impressing the mind of the humblest citizen, by one who sat in Peter's Chair at Rome.

What substitute has the religion of Nationalism provided for the confession at Peter's Chair of the sins of the State against a supernational moral order? Confession on the part of States there must be if we are to maintain our collective sanity. Perhaps the trouble with the modern world is that, in default of the purging experience of repentance and penance on the part of great States, they have become the victims of nationalistic paranoia. The psychological causes of war may be more subtle than we think.

Before this old doctrine of the union of Church and State passes finally from the realm of practical considerations, may we not recall also that it embodies a religious social philosophy? The Church of the Middle Ages did have a theory which covered the whole of life. There was a separation of powers, civil and ecclesiastical, but no separation anywhere from divine obligation. Christianity was, in truth, a way of living. Men pursued their careers, public as well as private, under the eye of God. the eye of God. The readers of Troeltsch and Tawney know how desperately the Church tried to expand its theory to meet new conditions. With the development of trade in the later medieval period, and with the religious and commercial revolutions of the sixteenth century, the areas of social intercourse where the voice of the Church could be heard effectively grew smaller and smaller. The Church stood finally like a beleaguered city with bandits and revolutionaries ranging over her formerly peaceful pastures outside the city wall. But there were no abatements of her claims of sovereignty. Man's life and man's property, though for the time being the prey of brigands whom the Church could not control, belonged to God. Eventually the representatives of God would reclaim these areas of thought and activity which had been secularized by evil forces.

Puritanism took over the essential elements of this mediæval theory of life as a divine vocation. And Puritanism is the only self-respecting and logically consistent social philosophy Protestants have ever had. Puritanism substituted religious assemblies and consistories for popes and bishops. The Puritan Church had constantly to steady the ark of the State. The Puritan system, having been brought to this country, dominated New England.

It generated a temper of mind as inimical to the 'godless' State as any theory of Roman Catholicism. Vestigial action patterns created by Puritanism are with us still. When someone proposes that the State dispense liquor according to Canadian or Swedish plans, the cry goes up that 'it would be immoral to place the State in alliance with the unholy traffic.' The theory of the 'godly' State gets under way once more. In legislative issues which concern personal vices, marriage, divorce, and Sabbath observance, our inherited Puritanism still asserts itself.

Protestants, for the most part, have abandoned Puritanism and now find themselves without any religious social philosophy at all. Their religion is confined to private virtues, ritualistic observances, institutional practices and associations, and mystical energies. Specialized recreational, philanthropic, and educational functions are ‘acquired characteristics.' Without are business, politics, international relations, education in the broadest and most effective sense, and general philanthropy. In every one of these spheres the Church, Catholic and Puritan, once had a social philosophy. Protestantism now covers them all with bland exhortations to practise the brotherhood of man and the golden rule.

The eclipse of religious social theory, however, does not mean the passing of all philosophy from these vast secularized areas of the modern world. Far from it. Nature abhors a vacuum in thought as well as in space. The area vacated by religion has been occupied by Militarism, Imperialism, and Capitalism, and on the Continent, where the masses have become estranged from Catholic teaching, by Socialism and Communism. The churches, Protestant and Catholic, behold at a distance the development of a secularized ethic whose principle is simply the

prudential adjustment of conflicting impulses within the individual and of competing interests within society. The State according to this principle is an institution of power fashioned by the dominant elements within the social group to enable them to settle their own difficulties and to control the weaker members with as little friction as possible. The view that life, personal and collective, is the fulfillment of a divine vocation is utterly alien to this world of thought. 'Business' and 'politics' assert their complete independence of religious guidance and ignore even the suggestion that religious ideals are at stake in their respective spheres.

When the Church does undertake to express a collective interest in or judgment concerning any problem of public ethics, she seems 'out of character.' The activities of the Church in promoting Prohibition, for instance, are resented because they have no foundation in her social theory. If the churches are concerned with the Volstead Act, why are they not also concerned with the enactment and enforcement of a hundred other laws and with other political issues just as vital to human progress? The interest of the churches in the Eighteenth Amendment is an aspect of their vestigial Puritanism. If the churches would develop a Christian social philosophy and lay it alongside the ideal and practice of the modern State, they would find enough divergence to frighten them by the magnitude of their task.

Without a social philosophy, the churches are doomed ultimately to ethical impotence. The religious life cannot be lived in a social vacuum. Everywhere it is conditioned by the concrete situations of the modern world, for dealing with which 'business' and 'politics' claim sole responsibility. Farsighted men in the churches see the