D

The Fallacies of Dr. Frank Crane

REV. GEORGE CRAIG STEWART, D.D., L.H.D.

R. Frank Crane likes to tell this story on himself:"A man," he says, "once stopped me on the street and said with enthusiasm, 'Crane, I read nearly all your stuff, these little daily messages you publish in the newspapers.' 'Do you,' I answered, and how do you like them?' 'Well,' he replied, 'they remind me of the cigars my father used to smoke. Farines they were called, as I remember it; they were awfully cheap, but once in a while you hit a good one." And the Doctor chuckles appreciatively as he tells the story.

The Century in its August number presented an article by Dr. Crane entitled "The Four Immoralities of the Church." I should hesitate to appraise it as either "Colorado" or "Colorado maduro." "It is not an attack upon the Church." At least the author assures us it is not in his opening sentence. He is simply, as it were, an angel on some high place of Broadway opening the seals and revealing to a horror stricken world these new four horsemen of his very latest apocalypse. Here are the immoralities: exclusiveness, respectability, cheapness and aggressiveness. The Church is condemned

First for being an organization at all, for recognizing a non-membership, for having boundaries, for seeking or claiming to embody Christianity in any definite social form;

Second for being respectable, a serious charge indeed in these days of emancipation from traditional ethical tabus; Third for being inexpensive. (The author holds a strange economic theory that twenty-five cents admission to the church for each worshipper would remove this

stigma and crowd the churches, at present, I suppose, assumed to be empty);

Fourth for consciously seeking to improve personal morals and social conduct instead of just sitting around and "loafing" as Jesus did (not of course according to the Evangelists, but according to Dr. Crane).

These are the heinous crimes charged against the Church. Let us consider these so-called immoralities one by one.

1. The charge of exclusiveness.

"Christianity," says the critic, "is essentially unorganizable." To organize it is "to change a living spirit into a dead steam-roller." "The whole organization idea of the Church," he goes on, "is antiquated; it fits the time when men believed in a world-carpentry of seven days, each twenty-four hours long, and evolution was denounced as a heresy." To all of which I reply, this is what might be called the scientific fallacy of one who has apparently failed to grasp the meaning of the creative method called evolution, which deals alone with the organization of life. An unorganized Christianity would be simply no Christianity at all, just as that lovely and luminous spirit known as Frank Crane would be helplessly inarticulate were it not mediated by a very intricate organism known as the body of Crane, including certain bundles of ganglia called brains, and a hand to hold his deft and eloquent pen. That all these physical embodiments of Crane are the product of long ages of evolution from paleolithic man, and even from M. Pithecanthropus himself, derogates not at all from the dignity and worth of that lively spirit which organizes and uses them. Now Christianity is thus embodied in the Church which, as St. Paul delights to say over and over again, is nothing less than the mystical body of Jesus Christ Himself. There is surely nothing absurd in such an embodiment of the highest and holiest life. It cannot

justly be called immoral. Is music essentially unorganizable? Is it unethical to catch an evasive spirit of melody and embody it in a song? Is beauty unorganizable? Are sculpture, painting, architecture criminal procedures? Is steam unorganizable, or light or sound, or patriotism or law? All of life is sacramental. Every spiritual reality in this world must be embodied to be available, transferable, effective. This then is Dr. Crane's first fallacy.

The second might be called the historical fallacy. Dr. Crane confuses "the Church" and "the Churches.' The former is in his title alone; what he proceeds to attack are "the Churches" which "as we find them today," he says, "are organizations in the same category as political parties, lodges, clubs and orders." With such organizations this reply has nothing to do. They are not under discussion. The Church of the New Testament, the Church of all Christendom for at least a "chiliad" as Dr. Crane would say, the Church of two-thirds of Christendom today, in short the historic Holy Catholic Church was founded by Jesus Christ Himself. Doctor Crane denies this, but the words of Jesus Himself are quite explicite: "Upon this Rock I will build My Church and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it!" Bernard Shaw may remark that "He founded it upon a pun," but even Bernard Shaw must admit that He founded it. To say as Dr. Crane does that "the twelve apostles were no club but merely His chosen friends" is grossly-I had almost said immorally—untrue. According to the Gospel records Jesus did not do what Dr. Crane says he did, send the twelve out to preach a "gospel of contagious friendship." He spent at least three years training them in the principles of "the Kingdom of God," appointed them "to sit on twelve thrones judging the tribes of Israel," solemnly said, "Whose soever sins ye remit they are remitted unto them, and whose soever sins ye retain, they are retained," and commissioned them to go into

all the world to disciple all nations, baptizing them into the Name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Ghost. He bade them wait till the signal came and then to begin their propaganda. Judas fell, but they met and elected his successor at once,-(that looks like definite organization, doesn't it?)—and "when the day of Pentacost was fully come" they committed what to Dr. Crane is a gross immorality, by going out into the streets of Jerusalem to convert men by calling upon them to repent and be baptized, and that very day according to the record "three thousand souls" were by baptism initiated into the Body of Christ, that Church which St. Paul describes as the "fulness of Him that filleth all in all.”

If Christianity is corrupt because it is embodied in the Church, it was corrupted at its source and Dr. Crane is assailing not only the authors of the New Testament Epistles and Gospels but the divine founder of Christianity Himself.

Now there is a third fallacy in this first point and that I shall call the fallacy of the provincial mind. Dr. Crane may perhaps be pardoned for it on atavistic grounds. He was formerly a Methodist minister, and later a Congregational pastor, passing easily to and fro as a preacher from one Protestant denomination to another. That he eventually faded out of the active ministry of any of these bodies may be because he found them too narrow, too exclusive. But this is no argument against the historic Church which bears for its very title the most inclusive of all words "Catholic." One does not join that like a lodge for social reasons. One is born into it by baptism. It was so in the days of the Apostles. It is so today. And that baptism is in Christian countries a corollary of birth, a second birth as the Church calls it which follows upon the the first with a certain inevitableness. Has the distinguished critic never visited Italy or Spain or Greece or

Russia or England? And does he not know that in these countries practically every human being is also in the Church? This may mean,-of course it does mean,-that there are plenty of immoral members of the Church, but it is most certainly an effective answer to the charge of exclusiveness. Dr. Crane has simple missed the mark. He has been guilty of egregious provincialism. He has set out to describe spots on the sun and has missed the sun entirely, falling into that peculiar lunacy which confuses the moon with the live and luminous body from which it draws its light. He has been saying "Church" and thinking "Churches"; saying "Church" and thinking of little American sects of which we believe there are some one hundred and sixty-four, each with its own credal shibboleth, while the Catholic Church fills the earth, et securus judicat orbis terrarum.

2. Which brings us to the second immorality,-respectability.

Dr. Crane once lived in Chicago. Did he ever attend Mass say in St. Stanislaus Church? (There are, I believe, over twenty thousand souls in this "exclusive" North Shore parish, and the church is filled five or six times for masses on a Sunday morning). Did that congregation offend him by its respectability? Did he feel as if he were at Palm Beach? Was the air heavy with the noxious fumes of Djerkiss and Azurea? Did he rise up in wrath and hurry through Little Hell shuddering over the respectability of the worshippers? Did he? Yet he maintains that ecclesiastical authority and immoral respectability go arm in arm. As a matter of easily ascertainable fact, the Church that is reaching the masses, the common people who heard Jesus so gladly, is exactly the Church which lays the greatest emphasis upon the note of ecclesiastical authority. Dr. Crane may have identified the Church with "bourgeois prosperity or suburban respectability";