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Landau's List. Out this week is another notable book dealing not with one cult but with many, God Is My Adventure by Rom Landau.† A 37-year-old Pole who wrote biographies of his eminent compatriots Ignaz Paderewski and Joseph Pilsudski, Author Landau has set out on a pioneering journey through that religious shadowland which lies between piety and eccentricity, "regions of truth that the official religions and sciences are shy of exploring." Of the nine cultists he has appraised, Author Landau credits Frank Buchman with being "the most successful and shrewdest revivalist of our time." However, Author Landau finds Buchman's movement theologically frivolous, grows sarcastic at the Oxford Group's practice of suppressing or "sublimating" the sex impulse. "Five 'sublimated' Arabs, Italians or Frenchmen," says Pole Landau, "would prove the efficacy of Buchman's sex methods more convincingly than 500 English undergraduates."
Other magnetic priests & prophets on Landau's list:
Baba. The U. S. four years ago was fascinated by the arrival of a long-haired, silky-mustached Parsee named Shri Sadgaru Meher Baba (TIME, May 2, 1932). Called the "God Man," the "Messiah," the "Perfect Master," Meher Baba never speaks. The God Man claims to have been strictly silent since 1925, carries a little alphabet board on which he deftly spells his mute revelations (see cut, p. 37), among which is the declaration that he is in an "infinite state." He became that way, he says, after kissing an ancient holy woman named Hazrat Babajan, remaining in a coma for nine months.
From his London interview with Meher Baba, Author Landau got little. But a female disciple in Manhattan gave Landau a graphic description of the holy man's entourage: "He gets up very early. . . . He takes a very hot bath, and his hair is attended to with the greatest care. . . . He then goes from room to room, stops for a while in front of every bed, looks at the sleeping person, and, no doubt, directs in his own way the life of the disciple for the rest of the day. . . . He never reads books, but he knows everything. . . . Baba does not read a paper. He just goes over the headlines."
Foursquare. In London every Easter Monday posters in front of the Albert Hall announce Easter services of the Elim Foursquare Revivalists* led by a sensitive-mouthed, curly-haired Welshman named George Jeffreys. Whipped up to hot fervor by the evangelical baritone of George Jeffreys, the audience prays, sways, sings, shouts.
Called "Principal" because he is head of an independent theological college, Jeffreys is a literal Bible-believer, practices baptism by immersion (see cut, p. 38). Years ago he suffered a facial paralysis. Studying for the Congregational ministry, he was praying one Sunday when he suddenly felt a powerful "electric shock" which cured him. In the past nine years some 160 persons have solemnly sworn that Principal Jeffreys healed them of paralysis, blindness, tumors, cancers.