Word: exalts
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Steinbeck has chosen for this theme the sort of treatment that must succeed splendidly or not at all. In an effort to universalize his characters, he has made them successively circus folk, farmers, seafarers. To exalt them further, he has made them as full of mysticism as philosophers, as lavish with metaphor as poets...
Among the prisoners, Andros merely exchanges quiet talk. His mystifying power to exalt them (and to check the violence of the Japanese guards) seems to lie less in what he says than in the gentleness with which he says it. Reports spread that he has effected miraculous cures of paralyzed soldiers. To the senior British officer, this seems "queer, unorthodox . . . creepy," but to Padre Choyce it seems evidence of "the hand of God." Profoundly humbled, the chaplain begins to live by Andros' quiet exhortation: "Open the gates of that citadel, your heart, and don't be afraid when...
Christians, says Canon Bell, have a tendency not only to exalt the Church as the end rather than the means of their religion, but "to make of it a covert in which to hide from Christ." All too many, he says, use the Church to cushion the impact of Christianity, as a small boy about to be spanked stuffs napkins in the seat of his pants. "Or, to change the comparison, we may seek to be inoculated against Christianity with a churchly solution of one part Christianity to 99 parts respectability and good-fellowship. Good-fellowship and respectability...
...Social Club. Such "churchianity," says Bell, has been an especially besetting sin of Episcopalians: "The Episcopal Church, by and large, has tended too much to exalt itself and minimize God." The disease, as Canon Bell describes it, was partly inherited from the nation's founders, who, in Virginia and other colonies, treated the Church as "a conventional meeting place of the better-off landowners." The 19th Century waves of non-English immigrants, he feels, only made matters a little worse, because in the mixed society that resulted the Episcopalians soon came to regard themselves as patricians...