RELIGIO LAICI

Homer Croy, author of "West of the Water Tower" and the recent published "Fancy Lady", has spoken of modern religion with an agreeable un-assertiveness in an interview published yesterday in the Herald. Sounding the death knell of the clergyman and predicting the early disappearance of what he calls the "Sunday School kind of religion. Mr. Croy is the herald of a replacing social philosophy. This theory is especially interesting when he declares that Sinclair Lewis is not the only thinker to share it: rather, almost all the young American intelligentsia, even including members of the clergy like a John Haynes Holmes and Wakefield Sinten, are his comrades.

If Mr. Croy is correct in accrediting such views to these men, the movement --for such it must then be called--is directly flying in the face of an opposite one in Europe. There the young thinkers of the universities are said to have abandoned the thoughts of the social philosophers for a complete and blind surrender to faith. Whether the Americans are one step ahead or behind remains where all decisions of this kind have remained--with the individual. At least Mr. Croy avoids dogmatism in his own code, a novelty in a day when inventors and manufacturers are become the most downright of theologians.