Word: present
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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Episcopal Bishop William Lawrence of Massachusetts was convinced that war was "wickedness, useless and stupid." Against such teachings, Dr. William Thomas Manning wrote to the New York Times that "Our moral sense as a nation is dulled. . . . Our present lack of national spirit is due also in part to a vast amount of well-meant but mistaken and misleading and really unchristian teaching about peace." Soon Dr. Manning, Bishop Lawrence, Episcopal Layman George Wharton Pepper, Dr. Harry Emerson Fosdick and others signed a trumpeting manifesto: "Sad is our lot if we have forgotten how to die for a holy cause...
Believing that a look at the past is worth two at the present, the pacifist Christian Century (nonsectarian weekly) last week began printing a condensation of the best available study of parsons' wartime behavior - Preachers Present Arms, by Sociologist Ray Hamilton Abrams (Round Table Press). When he wrote his book six years ago, Sociologist Abrams was skeptical of clerical calm-downs between wars, pointed out that western civilization possesses "perhaps the greatest war book known to man"-the Bible...
...World War II has appeared a prototype of the most picturesque character in Preachers Present Arms: the late Dr. Newell Dwight Hillis, Brooklyn, N. Y. Congregationalist, father of Marjorie (Live Alone and Like It) Hillis. Because of U. S. "dillydallying" over entering World War I, Dr. Hillis proposed that the tortoise be substituted for the eagle as national symbol. A great Liberty Loan speaker, Dr. Hillis peddled lurid atrocity stories, some of which the Christian Century printed. One of the Doctor's favorites: "When the syphilitic German has used a French or Belgian girl, he cuts off her breasts...
...Detroit, Mich., Mrs. Frances Dodge Johnson, daughter of John F. Dodge, celebrated her 25th birthday, got a tidy present from the Dodge automobile estate: control of her $10,000,000 trust fund...
...also-and with profound consistency-a hard, circumspect, far-seeing politician and manager of men. Lincoln's speeches and writings were the work of a remarkably pure human intellect, always questioning, circumscribing the area in which he could be positive, saying once: "In times like the present, men should utter nothing for which they would not willingly be responsible through time and in eternity." His difficulties as they are unfolded in detail seem unbearable, his performance a manual of political behavior for men in any time. Two out of hundreds of instances...