Statistics

Urbane, but making little effort to conceal his happy mind, the Rev. Charles Stelzle, Chairman of the Church Advertising Department, International Advertising Association, last week made public with extensive comment the results of a ten-day "nation-wide" religious poll, just concluded. One hundred fifty-three city newspapers from Manhattan to Seattle had asked their readers such forthright questions as: "Do you believe in God?"/- "Do you think that religion in some form is necessary?" To the first, 91% answered yes; to the second 87% yes. In fact all the proportions were almost equally favorable to the cause, unless one excepts the 58% who do not regularly have family worship in the home.

Commentators could not help detecting one fly in the unguent, and greatly fearing another. The first, visible, was that out of the total circulation of the 153 journals, but 125,000 answered, which is about one-third the circulation of a single one of them, the New York World (309,386). The second (a natural suspicion) was that only zealots (believers and unbelievers) had gone to the trouble of marking ballots and mailing.

Irreverent readers of the published results were loud in facetious badinage. Thinking members of the church, with or without regard to these former, felt that the campaign had been injudicious -- that the wind of the spirit, blowing whithersoever it listeth, is scarcely to be gauged by a meteorological chart.

/-One pantheist lady in Schenectady, N.Y., answered: "Yes, all of them."