Bread, Stones & Toynbee
Sir: For that marvelous review [Oct. 18] of Arnold J. Toynbee's A Study of History: thank you! (THE REV.) ALBERT E. JENKINS St. Matthias Episcopal Church Whittier, Calif.
Sir: Your reviewer should be told to go paddle his own "audacious canoe." Who is he to call a great man a "crypto-Herod" and to reject so didactically coexistence, a solution to the world problem that is being advocated not only by Sir Winston Churchill but also many other prominent, intelligent people? He must have very little faith in democracy and Christianity to believe that coexistence would result in the Herodian swallowing up by Communism of all other ways of life . . ." (Sgt.) JOHN V. MUNROE JR. Fort Richardson, Alaska
Sir: ". . . The idol Leviathan might still be triumphantly defied and defeated by souls contending for the liberty of Conscience and risking martyrdom for the glory of God . . ." This is Toynbee at his lyrical best. On the sentimental and the sanctimonious, the learned professor's hymnic prose may exercise a great emotional appeal, but to the agnostic majority it remains nothing but pretty phrases . . . The Study is probably the most fascinating book of the last half-century, and will be the more fascinating to future ages because it so clearly reflects the fear, the timidity, the uncertainty, the wishful theorizing and barren intellectualism of our time of troubles. K. J. KRUSE Oslo, Norway
Sir: . . . Toynbee wants a Christian revival, yet he thinks that to be a Christian—to believe that Christianity is the only true religion—is a sin. We must hope that in his analysis of the past, Toynbee is more consistent than in that of the present. GEORGE A. FLORIS London
Sir: Re your inspiring review: Has Toynbee been misquoted in your statement of his be lief that "Communism . . offers 'a stone for bread' "? In his Reith Lectures, delivered in 1952 and published as The World and the West, Toynbee asserted that in offering the non-Western world a piece of our culture (our technology divorced from our religion), it is we who offer them "a stone instead of bread," while the Russians, in offering them Communism—a creed which is an indictment of the Christian society's failure to live up to its economic and social principles, but a creed, nevertheless—offer them "bread of a sort . . . that contains . . . some grain of nutriment for the spiritual life without which Man cannot live . . ." MARTHA MOON ROSCHER Crawfordsville, Ind.
¶ Historian Toynbee, not TIME, juggled his metaphors between volumes. —ED.
Sir: . . . The only hope of the Western world, Toynbee says, is a militant, dynamic Christianity. Then he lends his support to a watered-down version of Christianity which makes it almost indistinguishable from Buddhism. How can one get enthusiastic over a vague religious eclecticism that amounts to little more than belief in God? It seems to me that our civilization was built by intolerant, aggressive men like St. Francis Xavier, whose faith was narrow, intense, and utterly singleminded. We forget that Christ established a Church to perpetuate His teachings, and that He said: "He who is not with Me is against Me . . ." DONALD MOORE Bellwood, Ill.