Letters: Letters, Aug. 21, 1939

• Share

(5 of 6)

During recent years I have talked to many ministers about Buchmanism and, without one exception, they had reached the conclusion that the worthy and helpful values in this manifestation were painfully outweighed by its negative and unconstructive aspects. One minister (a very eminent man, whose books are best sellers) told me that he had had to take two members of his congregation to ah asylum—so grievously had they "gone off at the deep end" through jettisoning orderly processes of judgment, mental discipline and sound common sense and substituting therefore the capricious thaumaturgical foibles of these doctrinaires. Several friends of mine became "Groupers" (they like to add the erudite "Oxford" to the label) some time back but beyond a lopsided fanaticism, a persistent proclaiming how terrifically bad they were before and how "absolutely honest, absolutely unselfish, absolutely pure and absolutely loving" they are now, one fails to detect any particular difference. At any rate, not pragmatically, although I could not venture to appraise the mystical transformation.

There is nothing particularly new about religious high-pressurism and I think one of the most perfect rejoinders to all that sort of thing was that made by St. Hilary of Poitiers, many centuries ago, when he spoke of a contemporary Buchmanite, so to speak, as having "an irreligious solicitude for God." St. Hilary went on to explain that an observer of the cosmic processes soon learns that the Almighty has His own spacious way of doing things, and that often He plans to take many thousands of years to accomplish some far-reaching purposes. . . . Cannot one venture to conclude, accordingly, that even Herr Buchman and his projected 100,000,000 adherents are not likely to stampede Jehovah into a general upset of His vast cosmic processes ?

ALEXANDER W. ARMOUR

New York City

Foul Record

Sirs:

TIME, Aug. 7 states, "For the past two years Japan has bought from the U. S. well over half the high-test motor fuel, motors, machinery, scrap metals and scrap rubber essential to her Chinese conquest."

Is it illogical to state that if Japan has wantonly slaughtered one and one half million Chinese, three quarters of a million Chinese men, women and children were murdered by the Congress and President of these States ?

If your statement is true, this country which spends half of its waking hours yowling at Hitler's persecution of the Jews and Czechs, should hang its head in shame at a foul and disgusting record.

Your statement, in the interests of National Honor, should either not have been printed or it should have been given a full-page spread and dedicated to a degenerate Congress.

HUGH WILSON O'NEILL, M.D.

Santa Ana, Calif.

Hole-In-One

Sirs:

TIME readers are writing to me, alternately criticizing and applauding my reasoning (TIME, Aug. 7) that a hole-in-one is not an accident, requesting amplification:

The problem is not sufficiently abstruse to require the services of a logician. A mere student of semasiology will recognize the employment of the word accident in this case as being entirely dependent upon the motive and intent of the golfer. . . . The result of the manner in which he uses his clubs is one of perfection or imperfection, not chance.