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The matters in hand seemed to grow most vivid through the personality of Dr. Hocking, the ruddy-faced, stubbly-mustached 59-year-old Harvard philosopher who chairmanned the Commission. No great orator, he spoke intensely, earnestly. A cool-minded stalker of religion in his books (best-known: The Meaning of God in Human Experience), Dr. Hocking wrote the first four chapters of Re-Thinking Missions, the groundwork of the whole discussion. Last week he got his laugh when he was asked to answer somebody's question: "If it be accepted that a culture, as distinguished from a mood or a tendency, must be informed by one great unifying conception, can it be said, with any degree of realism, that in our modern world, in which are found fundamentally divergent viewpoints in regard to every basic conception, something exists on a world scale to which can be given the name of culture? If such a culture exists or is emerging, a culture of which, as the report suggests, Christianity should be made the spiritual buttress, what is the basic idea which inspires it?"
"Yes!" cried Dr. Hocking quickly.
He also said: "If there is anything about this report that suggests a jauntiness of criticism, I pray that God will forgive us. The criticisms which we have uttered, we have uttered with groanings of the spirit. . . .
"I think that what we have tried to do is this : we have tried to recognize that the work of God is the work of God, and that it is too holy to be touched and judged by our feeble intellects."
*Harpers, $2.