Ghosts Sir:

Your [contributor] from Evansville, Ind. is incensed about the decision of the Archbishop of Canterbury's commission concerning artificial insemination, which deems it at least a "Breach of Marriage" [TIME, Aug. 9].

. . . The best analogy that occurs to me is that of "ghost" writing. Many a political leader who can't write good speeches . . . lets his advisers . . . write speeches for him. Then he delivers them, as if they were really his own, and the crowd applauds. That . . . is a "breach of personality," I think. It makes a man what he is not . . .

"Ghost" siring of children by artificial human insemination (except when the husband is the donor) is of the same character. It ... turns a Christian marriage into what it is not . . . "Ghost" siring of children makes eventually for "ghost" marriages. That is why a lot of intelligent Christians are against it.

The Roman Empire in the 3rd and 4th Centuries began using mercenary troops from among the barbarians, when full-blooded Romans were running short. That was artificial insemination of their armies, of a sort. And it wasn't long after taking in these "ghost" warriors that Rome was a "ghost" empire! (REV.) Louis L. PERKINS St. John's Episcopal Church Auburn, N.Y.

It's Turpentine

Sir:

Does TIME believe in ghosts? If not, I am curious to know why you assumed that the "little man" at the tenth International Congress of Philosophy "was probably the same little man who awoke . . . convinced that while under ether he had discovered the Final Solution to the central problem of existence" [TIME, Aug. 30].

In his essay on Mechanism in Thought and Morals, Oliver Wendell Holmes reported how he experimentally took ether and, while under it, believed that he had grasped the key to all the mysteries of philosophy. Still remembering it as he came to, he scrawled on paper the all-embracing truth: "A strong smell of turpentine prevails throughout." G. P. LAYBOURN JR. Minneapolis, Minn.

P: To Reader Laybourn, TIME'S thanks for fleshing out an anecdotal wraith. -ED.

Ecclesiastical Gabfest

Sir:

Congratulations on your vivid report of the Amsterdam Conference as "No Pentecost" [TIME, Sept. 13] ...

FRANK H. CALDWELL President

Louisville Presbyterian Seminary Louisville, Ky.

Sir:

. . . Wasn't your article a bit of a hodgepodge of this & that without getting to the point? Was the article on Oxnam or the World Council? Was it critical, raising questions which the World Council did not attempt to settle, or was it reporting a "fuzzy meeting" . . . ?

(REV.) EDWARD A. PUFF

Memorial Evangelical and Reformed Church Dayton, Ohio

Sir:

I wonder if your artist realized how perfectly the bound crosses behind Bishop Oxnam's picture demonstrate the failure of many modern churches. No longer are church leaders willing to let an individual Christ on an individual cross strive to save an individual soul; rather they must concern themselves with organization . . .

J. M. FUSSELL Mobile, Ala.

Sir:

. . . The main goal of the Council, if one can use your usually accurate reports as a guide, seems to be a united Protestant church. Is this really so important or desirable as it is made out to be? ... Is not a united Protestant church a very contradiction of the basic cornerstone of Protestantism which permits individual rather than church interpretation of the Bible? Would not a single united Protestant church represent a kind of Protestant Catholicism, something which would subject and subordinate the individual to the church for the sake of organizational unity ... ? Is not disunity, at least theologically, the very heart of Protestantism? . . .

RALPH P. COLEMAN JR. Jenkintown, Pa.

Sir:

... Be advised that Bishop Oxnam of Methodists does not speak for Evangelical Christianity. Our first effort is not to alleviate anti-Semitism or to hinder racial discrimination, as is the good bishop's, but to preach the gospel of salvation through the shed blood of Christ--the message of John Wesley which many Methodists and others seem to have forgotten. John Wesley preached "Ye must be born again" (John 3:7).

ARTHUR NEETZ Emmaus, Pa.

Sir:

. . . Let us not fret overmuch at the "brekekekex koaex" of ecclesiastical discussion. What if the men who make religion their business do sound much like the men whose business is politics? They are both debating problems which have beset mankind for a long time. The U.N. diplomats are struggling with the problem of nationalism, which in our culture is only a few centuries old, and it may be solved in a few more centuries. The problems which beset religion are much older, and will be much longer in the solving.

One of the deepest of these problems was at the bottom of the conflict at Amsterdam --the problem of the Nature and Destiny of Man. Every religion divides along two poles. For the one, man is a worm. For the other, man is "a little lower than the angels."

TIME points up this controversy very clearly: "There is a great gulf between U.S. activism and continental Europe's apparently passivist theology." Oxnam represents the conviction of the New World that man can "work out his own salvation with fear and trembling" . . . Thank you for featuring the "working" Christianity of Oxnam for a change . .

DEAN KELLEY

Denver, Colo.

Sir:

In using the phrase "ecclesiastical brekekekex koaex," did your Religion editor intend to compare delegates to ecumenical conferences to 1) young gentlemen at Yale, or 2) frogs?

J. MURRAY BARBOUR East Lansing, Mich.

P: Neither. TIME used the phrase in its Aristophanic meaning, as the froggy sound of an argumentative chorus.--ED.

Roses & Ragweed

Sir:

Red roses to TIME, Sept. 13, for its classic "The Water of Arsoli." It should be read with Henry Van Dyke's beautiful story, The Source. Red roses to TIME for its illuminating, lightning-streak last sentence on the burial of Zhdanov. And a bunch of fresh Michigan ragweed for your cut of the unsuspecting Mary Pickford.

ELSE SONNE NISSEN Iron Mountain, Mich.

Disillusioned, Unscared

Sir:

I suggest that you change the title of your Science section to "Science Fiction." The cause of my disillusionment is your rebroadcast of the theory of Mr. Hugh Auchincloss ("Upset the World") Brown in TIME, Sept. 13. The location of the piece under "Science" and the scare headline put you in the position of trying to frighten a somewhat stupid child by telling him ghost stories . . . I enclose a 1-c- stamp and I suggest that you use it to start a fund to be used to buy Brown a 10-c- gyroscope . . .

ROBERT F. SHURTZ Austin, Tex.

Sir:

. . . I'm not looking for a cosmic collision in which man will be wiped out "any minute now," as you report Brown to be with his tipping world, but I would like to get a little of that free publicity from TIME or even the New York Times, for I feel that my theories are fully as spectacular and "flesh-creeping" as Mr. Brown's, and I don't want to wait until you editors go floating out the upper windows of Rockefeller Center in your striped pants.

Carlsbad, Calif. ALLAN O. KELLY

Sir:

. . We would like very much to reserve three seats on Mr. Auchincloss Brown's ark --as we assume one so farsighted as he must already be building . .

JEANNE SHALLOW

ISOBEL LAZUR

Hartford, Conn. MARIE CATUOGNO

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