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We would appreciate very much an extended answer to this letter, showing the basis for the statement in quotation marks. There are always a few radicals doing or saying extreme things, but to believe that the leadership of religious thought in the U. S. is Socialist needs real proof. . . .
R. H. GENTRY Los Angeles, Calif.
Last fortnight Preacher-Publicist Kirby Page of Long Island City, N. Y. made public the results of a questionnaire on economic and social beliefs he sent to 100,000 Protestant ministers and Jewish rabbis. Of 20,870 replying, 88% chose a "cooperative commonwealth" as the economic system nearest the ideals of Jesus and the Hebrew prophets. To achieve this, 51% were for "drastically reformed Capitalism," 28% for Socialism. Among the 5,879 favoring Socialism: Author Charles Monroe Sheldon (In His Steps); Managing Editor Paul Hutchinson of The Christian Century; Professor Reinhold Niebuhr of Union Theological Seminary; Methodist Missionary Eli Stanley Jones; Episcopal Bishops Edward Lambe Parsons of San Francisco, Arthur Conover Thomson of Norfolk, Va. and Paul Jones of Yellow Springs, Ohio (dioceseless); Methodist Bishops Francis John McConnell of Manhattan and James Chamberlain Baker of San Francisco; Bishop Arthur Raymond Clippinger of the United Brethren Church; Unitarians John Haynes
Holmes of Manhattan and John Rowland Lathrop of Brooklyn; Methodists Halford Edward Luccock of New Haven, Conn. and Ernest Fremont Tittle of Evanston 111.; Baptist Douglas Clyde Macintosh of New Haven; Congregationalist John Ryland Scotford of Manhattan; Episcopalian Walter Russell Bowie.—ED. Vanderbilt Funeral Sirs:
I must protest pp. 40 and 41 of TIME, May 7. that real connection is there between Religion and the funeral of a rich old woman pompous and churchly though it be?
ROBERT MERRITT Wolfeboro, N. H.
Sirs: Although (because I am also a certified P.E.) believe that the officiating clergy, and hope that the mourners, were altogether sincere in their reading and hearing of the late Mrs. Vanderbilt's funeral service, yet I am troubled not by Mrs. V's death, not by your reporting it at length, but by the headine under which you placed the news.
To some of those present, and to many of those absent, Business & Finance might have seemed a more suitable heading for Mrs V's funeral than Religion. And for a very large number of your readers Sport might have been still better. . . .
WINSLOW AMES
New London, Conn.
From prehistoric times among all peoples, religious rites have attended the disposal of the dead. Of the great world religions—Buddhism, Judaism, Christianity, Confucianism and Mohammedanism —none buries its dead without priests. prayers and ceremonies. TIME considered it newsworthy that the matriarch of the Vanderbilts, noted for piety during her lifetime, was put away among good and bad members of her family in a mausoleum as large as many a small church.—ED. Dartmouth's Michelet Sirs:
May I thank you for the perfectly written account of Robert Henry Michelet, "Dartmouth's [TIME, April 30]. A few more such articles instead of your usual type and this old world would be a better place to live in.
ELEANORA S. MORGAN
Pomfret, Conn.
Sirs: