Atonement

And in the seventh month, on the first day of the month, ye shall have a holy convocation; ye shall do no servile work: it is a day of blowing the trumpets unto you. (NUMBERS, 29:1.)

Thus spake the Lord to Moses. Last week, in the dimness of innumerable U. S. tabernacles, the shofar* sounded, reminding the Jews that the world was created by God out of void and a howling darkness 5,686 years ago. The horn rang at sundown, and at that hour candles, sombre and fierce, like thin yellow hands up-pointed in prayer, shone in the synagogues and wagged incongruously above the mahogany grain of apartment breakfast-room suites where prosperous Jews kept the feast of Rosh Hashonah (the New Year), after their own fashion. Telegraph wires crackled with messages of good cheer. In The American Hebrew appeared a symposium on "Liberalism -- the Gospel of the Open Mind" with articles by Governor Smith, William Allen White, Dr. Nicholas Murray Butler, Dr. A. Lawrence Lowell, and many another famed educator or politician.

Orthodox Jews prepared for ten days of prayer and meditation, which culminate in the Day of Atonement--Yom Kippur.

On that day all will pause to contemplate their sins and repent them. In temples the repentance will be decorous; in synagogues, vigorous. Men will beat their chests and proclaim conventional errors. The very orthodox will pray with covered heads and unshod feet in their humiliation. Children will play with apples spiked with cloves; men will sniff snuff; women will surreptitiously hold vials of heart-strengthening aromatics to noses. Behind screens, separated from the men, will sit the women of orthodox congregations. After their day of fast they must go home to cook the evening meal. (In synagogues of modified orthodoxy women are not screened off; in reformed temples families sit together.)

Candles will burn in home and synagogue and temple, and in forlorn rented rooms, in memory of the dead.

The next important holiday that will hold the attention of so many will be Passover--March 30, 1926.

In Wall Street

In Manhattan for 25 years, a preacher has exhorted Wall Street crowds to the practice of honor, tolerance and good will. He, the Reverend William Wilkinson, "the Bishop of Wall Street," has made a daily appearance in the financial district at noon, when sky-assaulting buildings dribble out humanity, let it eddy about for an hour, and suck it in again. The Bishop, attired in the decent cloth of his office, taking station outside the Morgan office, the Sub-Treasury building, or the Stock Exchange, has harangued tolerant gatherings of bottle-nosed clerks, pasty runners for brokerage houses, gentlemen's stenographers.

Last week these harangued ones arranged a ceremony for their "Bishop," presented him with a flag, a Bible. Judge Elbert H. Gary shook his hand. Secretary of State Kellogg, Owen D. Young sent telegrams. Said Wilkinson: "Men of Wall Street and Minnesota, men like Mr. Gary and Mr. Morgan, street-sweepers and passersby, I thank you very kindly, one and all."

Christ's Tomb

Historians have long wrangled about the site of the tomb of Christ. Tradition for some 1,500 years has indicated the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem, and although certain unnecessarily logical scholars of the past century pointed out that the disposition of the walls of that city make it impossible that this could have been the place, popular sentiment has, quite justly, overruled them. It is, at all events, difficult to be sure, because one of the only positive things that is known about the tomb that is thought to be Christ's, is that it was, during the reign of the Emperor Hadrian, the cellar of a temple to Venus. Last week British engineers announced that the marble slabs over the sepulchre which Christendom generally accepts as the tomb of its Founder were bulging ominously. "Steps must be taken," they warned, "against collapse."

Propaganda

In Manhattan, W. E. Harmon gave $50,000 to endow a cinema company--the Religious Motion Picture Co., which will produce films to be used as religious propaganda. No scenario, studio, actors or plan of action has yet been chosen. These things will come in time," said Mr. Harmon. "We have the money. That is the important thing."

Again, Straton

In Manhattan, loud, vituperative John Roach Straton told a vast throng that crowded the Calvary Baptist Church what he had beheld one morning in Chicago. Two holdups, no less--two foul crimes had Dr. Straton witnessed on a sunny morning while riding through the streets of Chicago. This statement was too much for some of the citizens of that fantastic city who averred that Dr. Straton must have come upon a family argument, or mistaken the antics of some street ragamuffin for a crime. It was too much for the Chicago Evening Post, which promptly offered the Baptist preacherman $100 if he could definitely establish the date and location of the crimes he had observed. Replied Dr. Straton:

"I was driving in the car of Dr. Stumpf, the Secretary of the Illinois Fundamentalist Association ... I did not see the beginning of the first holdup, but when I looked up there were two women, apparently drunk, who had been in the grasp of two men. The women had broken away, and, as I watched, the two men ran up an alley and disappeared . . . About two blocks farther I saw a man who had been pinioned by two other men. One of them was behind him and had hold of his wrist, and the other had a hand in the man's pocket. . A woman came running up, and as the hold-up men disappeared she took the victim away. I haven't got the exact dates and places, but I will have and I will claim that $100 and give it to the Illinois Fundamentalist Association."

*Ram's horn.