THE DRAMATIC IN THE GOSPEL— Johnson Circulation Office: 6140 Cottage Grove Avenue, Chicago. Editor ial and Advertising Office: 931 Tribune Building, New York City Copyright 2020. Archives of the Episcopal Church / DFMS. Permission required for reuse and publication. Page Two THE WITNESS July 13, 1933 ST. MARY’S HALL Faribault, Minnesota A Church School for Girls. Ideally located CHURCH in the great Church Centre at Faribault. Excellent College preparatory record. Mod­ erate rates. Sports of all kinds. KATHARINE CALEY, Principal SCHOOLS Faribault Minnesota Secondary Schools of the For 73 years Shattuck has been a leader among iscopal Church are the best church college preparatory schools in the West. Not operated for profit. Aims to develop in the country. Plan now to send HIGH SCHOLARSHIP, MANLY CHARACTER, your sons and daughters. The CHRISTIAN CITIZENSHIP. Military system trains for service and patriotism. schools listed on this page and Boys may be entered at mid-year or fall. elsewhere in this paper are ac­ Address the Rector, Shattuck School Faribault, Minn. credited Church institutions. Send for catalogues. SHATTUCK » » SCHOOL « « Copyright 2020. Archives of the Episcopal Church / DFMS. Permission required for reuse and publication. Editor ___ ____ Associate Editors Irving P. Johnson T T "nv TXT T HPIVT T P d d Frank E. W ilson Managing Editor 1 JL X £ j V V X X « J Bernard Iddings Bell W illiam B. Spofford John Rathbone Olive* Literarg Editor A National Paper of the Episcopal Church Russell Moodey Gardiner M. Day Irw in St. J. Tucker Vol. XVII No. 46_________________________ JULY 13, 1933___________________ ________ Five Cents a Copy THE WITNESS is published weekly by the Episcopal Church Publishing Company, 6140 Cottage Grove Avenue, Chicago, Illinois. The subscription price is $2.00 a year ; in bundles of ten or more for sale at the church, the paper selling at five cents, we bill quarterly at three cents a copy. Entered as Second Class Matter April 3, 1919, at the postoffice at Chicago, Illinois, under act of March 3, 1879. T h e D r a m a t i c i n t h e G o s p e l By BISHOP JOHNSON H E Gospel is irritating to the rationalist. To to read our so-called funny papers he might be par­ T the intellectual brahmins of our day those who doned if he failed to smile and he might reasonably believe in the supernatural are the untouchables. On argue that there was no humor worth laughing at. the other hand to the mystic mere rationalism is a Of course the answer is evident. The pearl of great valley of dry bones. price is no less valuable because there are many pearls The question at once arises as to what constitutes made of paste. reality. Is it the poem or the syntax; the painting or the chemicals; the symphony or the scale; the mole­ TT A L L comes back lo our fundamental conception cules or the soul; the routine drudgery of life or the of God. If every good thing and every perfect romantic enthusiasms of our ideals? The moment thing comes from the Father of us all, then it is our that the grammarian begins to dissect the poem it responsibility to differentiate the real values from ceases to be poetry. The instant that you begin to spurious ones. And God is as much the author of dissolve the paints you ruin the picture. There is humor and of art and of religion as He is. of science. no music in the scale and there is no soul when you It is inconceivable that God has a one compartment begin to dissect the body. This does not mean that mind, interested solely in mechanical processes. Un­ there is no value in analysis but merely that there less one accepts the miraculous creed of the human­ are realities which so baffle the analysist that he ists which gravely states that “ things are self crea­ denies their existence. tive” , then there must be imagination as well as in­ One wonders if personality originates in man and telligence behind the creation. Of course no one ever if when man perishes, personality ceases to exist. Is heard of a thing creating itself but it is the sole alter­ the Creator .the author of a world! that is purely native to the assertion, “ I believe in God, the Father scientific or is He also the source of art and litera­ almighty.” ture and religion? Do the objects of human interest Instead of looking at the universe as a meaning­ cease to be real because man is unable to' analyze less succession of phenomena ending in an ash pit, I them? As Eddington puts it, is there -no reality in would prefer to look upon it as a drama in which humor because a Scotchman is unable to see a joke, things are merely stage properties and men are the and is there any process by which he can be made persons who compose the caste. When I read Hamlet to have a sense of humor by analyzing jokes? The or the parable of the Prodigal Son I am not con­ moment that you commence to explain a joke, that cerned about the historical accuracy of the set-up, moment it ceases to be funny. And yet I believe a but rather with the dramatic portrayal of spiritual sense of humor is one of the most essential qualities realities. I care very little whether the prince of in man. But you kill the thing when you begin to Denmark ever lives or whether there ever was, a man dissect it. This is what St. Paul means when, speak­ in Judaea who had two sons. In this particular the ing of religion, he says, “ The letter killeth, • but the oriental mind is far superior to' the occidental which spirit giveth life.” You can no more impress the refuses to exercise the imagination until it has ex­ man without a spiritual sense of the value of religion hausted the intellect. It is incumbent upon the dram­ than you can get a smile out of the man without a atist to embody truths in personal characters and to sense of humor. You may talk into the telephone present the ideal rather than to analyze the past. but there is no receiver at the other end. If we approach the book of Genesis as a scientific Now there are good jokes and poor jokes, just as explanation of creation one is bound to be disap­ there is good1 religion and bad religion. If one were pointed because it was not written for such a purpose. Copyright 2020. Archives of the Episcopal Church / DFMS. Permission required for reuse and publication. Page Four T H E WITNESS July 13, 1933 If we 'can approach the book without prejudiced it do so as they would accept a symphony or a great theories of inspiration we shall be prepared to find work of art. It satisfies the souls of men in supply­ therein a parable of man’s search for God and for ing that for which the soul longeth, so that he that righteousness in which great moral truths are set believeth hath the witness in himself. forth. It is the drama of God’s righteousness, man’s In my youth I had the privilege of hearing Edwin need and God’s provision for that need. The religion Booth in Hamlet and it needed no argument to prove of that day was no more crude than its science and its value. It had the witness in itself. In a very real neither was hopeless because it was imperfect. It sense Jesus interprets the meaning of life to those is a long road from the crude offering of Isaac as who follow Him because He is the way, the truth a human sacrifice to the great offering of Christ on and the life, and we must grasp it as we appreciate Calvary, but it has its objective in the offering of a poem or a painting or a drama, as that which ourselves, our souls and bodies to- be a reasonable, satisfies the hunger of the human soul. living oblation unto God. From a crude beginning we find a lofty principle at the end of the trail. E R S O N A L L Y I believe in the Gospel record -con­ Pcerning Jesus Christ. It is less credulous -to ac­ The Oxford Movement cept the testimony of the evangelists than to imagine By a dramatist capable of creating the characters and WILLIAM P. SEARS JR. weaving them together into- the warp and woof of Of thè faculty of New York University history. The author of such a fiction would have been as miraculous as the Christ. A C K in the summer of 1833 and on Sunday, July However I prefer to emphasize the dramatic ap­ B 14, John Keble had come up to Oxford from peal of Christ as the great interpreter of human life. his country curacy to preach before the University. Let us note the prelude of the drama and the three It was an Assize sermon and the judges in circuit acts which compose it. The prelude includes the were to be present. The topic of the sermon was whole background of Hebrew preparation and ex­ a protest against a bill then before Parliament seek­ pectation, summed up in the words, “ Behold the Lamb ing to suppress certain Irish bishoprics. Dr. New­ of God who taketh away the sins of the world.” No man wrote thirty-one years later, “ I have ever con­ other nation could have produced a Messiah.