Gospel and Code

(Ed. Note--The Crimson does not necessarily endorse opinions expressed in printed communications. No attention will be paid to anonymous letters and only under special conditions, at the request of the writer, will names be withheld.)

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To The Editor of The CRIMSON:

Felix Frankfurter, prominent member of the Brain Trust, said in a recent interview, that in these days the simple virtues of honesty and public devotion are not enough to unravel the tangled skein of social and economic complexities which are too tied up with intricate and technical facts to be solved on the level of feeling and rhetoric.

Prof. Frankfurter despises anything simple. He was my college classmate. We are not intimate, for our natures were diametrically opposed. I was the simple rhetorical type he refers to above, whereas Frankfurter was an intimate logical machine, all his powers concentrated in a keen intellect that solved problems in higher mathematics that no other man in our class could solve. I should not be surprised if the N.R.A. and the whole government setup were planned by Frankfurter. The whole complicated system is right in his line.

But he is all wrong in thinking that simple honesty, public devotion, feeling, and "rhetoric" cannot solve our problems even without exact knowledge of technicalities of law, economics, and finance.

Jesus knew nothing of these technicalities. One searches the Gospels in vain for any blueprint, any N.R.A. code, any planned economy, any knowledge of Blackstone or Einstein. Yet Christ's simple words have made and unmade nations, determined the lives and destinies of untold millions of people, and have been the controlling influence in history for nearly 2000 years. Why? Because behind his simple words throbbed the power of a unique, unconquerable, divine spirit. Behind the veil of utter simplicity shone the glory and majesty of a deathless ideal which made men say when once they saw it, "When I and weak, then am I strong." This ideal changed slaves into masters, cowards, and weaklings into heroes, bad men into saints and martyrs. It can and will transform the world again. Charles Hooper.

Coeur d'Alene, Idaho,

Oct. 20, 1934.