The Church Times, 118 (20 Aug 1937) 184 1
Sir, – Having been away in a rather remote part of the country, I have only just seen your issue of August 6, and apologize for the following comment being a week overdue.
In your first leading article you say, “Mr. Eliot points out that the Life and Work Conference was dominated by American Protestants.” 2 This is not quite what I was trying to convey. I said that there were too many Americans (indeed I think that there were too many delegates altogether), but this is not the same thing. So far as I was aware, the few Americans who could be called “dominant” owed their position, like the representatives of other countries, to their individual abilities; the Conference was very much in debt to Professor Reinhold Niebuhr, among others. 3 But the policy of statesmen has to be shaped according to the temper of the majority of the people whom they have to rule. What I fear for such assemblies in the future is the insensible influence of the mass; and there appeared to be a larger mass of American liberal Protestantism than of anything else. I doubt whether a Conference can be “oecumenical” and at the same time “democratic.”
t. s. eliot 24, russell square, w.c. 1
