Books: Faith of Our Fathers

PURITANISM AND DEMOCRACY—Ralph Barton Perry—Vanguard ($5).

What is America? What does it mean to be an American? What is the essential faith of America? Today, by their very presence on distant battlefields, Americans raise these questions anew. This closely reasoned, lucid, lengthy (688-page) book is an effort to provide an answer. The work of a distinguished 68-year-old Harvard philosophy professor (whose Thought and Character of William James was a Pulitzer Prizewinner in 1935), it is a rigorous scrutiny of the foundations of American belief.

The Challenge. Today, says Philosopher Perry, the faith of our...