Books: Faith and Democracy

AMERICAN FAITH—Ernesf Sutherland Bates—Norton ($3.75).

THE COURSE OF AMERICAN DEMOCRATIC THOUGHT—Ralph Henry Gabriel—Ronald Press ($4).

Ernest Sutherland Bates finished his book last December, less than an hour before he died. It is the appropriate testament of a man who made his scholarship useful (as editor of the Dictionary of American Biography, The Bible Designed to be Read as Living Literature). Badly titled, American Faith bears no resemblance whatever to a Fourth of July oration. It is the best layman's history of U. S. Protestantism yet published; it is also an illuminating interpretation of early...