farther than ever away from the field of the light airplane. The purchase price was too high and the cost of operation excessive for the ordinary man who ought to own and fly his 'personal airplane".

By private owner I mean the man who operates an airplane for his own convenience or pleasure rather than as a pilot flying "for hire or reward". In the West the country is naturally adapted to the use of airplanes because there are great distances to be covered, perfect weather is the rule rather than the exception, and every field is fit for an emergency landing. There many farmers and ranchers already own and fly planes, while at airports throughout the country private individuals who fly for sport have become familiar during this last summer.

HERE is another phase of AmerTica's new air consciousness that new assures the air "flivver" a permanent place in the aëronautical sun. This is the fact that the boys, and for that matter many of the girls, of today are air-minded by virtue of having grown up with the airplane, just as my generation grew up with the automobile. Nothing is going to keep them from flying. And they will learn to handle a plane much more easily than those of us who were introduced to it as an entirely new and somewhat terrible thing. I know. I have taken up youngsters of twelve to sixteen who "got the hang" of flying in a very few minutes. It often takes hours of perspiring and despairing effort on the part of an instructor before an adult acquires the same knowledge. My father had a terrible time learning to run his car.

I picked up the knack without any. one to teach me and, like nearly every other boy, soon excelled my father as a driver. The same thing is being reenacted with the airplane. The boys of today are learning to fly with the minimum of instruction and will continue to use planes as naturally as the generation ahead of them used automobiles. This is the flying age and it is begetting a flying people.

Too much mystery, I think, has been thrown about the question of who can and who cannot fly. The facts are that any normal, healthy boy who can learn to ride a bicycle and skate, doesn't need to worry about his ability to become a flyer. He may be short and fat or tall and skinny, black haired, red headed, freckle faced, bow legged, left handed or tongue tied, but none of these things will prevent him from learning how to handle an airplane. He might fall down on some of the highly specialized tests required of those who are selected for training as military aviators in the Army or Navy, but if he has a sound body and a clear brain there is no reason why he cannot learn to fly his own airplane and to fly it well.

HE man who wants to use a plane as he would an automobile Tas - to go somewhere quickly and comfortably needs no more special physical qualifications than are required to drive an automobile. He ought to be able to see and hear and judge distances, but so should the man behind a steering wheel. In these days of congested traffic it is a question if the man handicapped on any of these scores is not better off in the air than on the ground. During

the war candidates for aviation training were put through a rigorous physical examination which eliminated the vast majority of those who wanted to be flyers. Probably not more than ten or twelve per cent. of the original applicants ever got as far as winning their wings. This would seem to contradict what has just been said, but no more convincing proof of the assertion that almost anyone can learn to fly is needed than statistics prepared recently by the Air Division of the United

States Department of Commerce. These show that the physical examinations required for commercial pilots' licenses strikingly more lenient than the old wartime re

quirements, but far from lax in themselves - have been passed by nearly 93 per cent. of the applicants.

PRACT

RACTICALLY any healthy person, then, can learn to fly; small ships will soon be available at no greater cost than a fine car; technical improvements making for greater safety are under way; airports are springing up like mushrooms; skilled instruction is readily available and will soon be cheaper; and, most important of all, our youngsters have grown airminded. From all of which the conclusion seems to me inevitable that the day of the family plane, privately operated like the automobile for business and recreation, is at hand.

PPROXIMATELY four centuries

ellingly its bidding, and life for great

tain German princes at the Council of Spires were denouncing the decree of the majority, which involved a virtual submission to the complete authority of the Roman Catholic Church. It was to these princes, who were friendly to the views represented by the Reformation, that the term "Protestant", which came finally to attach to all who embraced the principles and common system of doctrines taught by Martin Luther, was first applied.

The rise of Protestantism, which just four centuries ago was in process of birth, could not have been otherwise than swift, because it was more the product of revolution than of evolution. For centuries the rule of the Roman Catholic Church was virtually absolute. It told men what to do, to say, to think. And not only some men, but all: from kings and emperors, from princes and statesmen, it exacted the same implicit obedience as from the masses. It increased constantly the degree of its dominion over soul, body and mind, until the highest did grov

Intellectual aspiration was stifled. The noble pursuit of truth-ever the main avenue of man's escape from moral, mental and physical stagnation and degeneracy - was rigorously ob

the important scientific discoveries of the Fifteenth Century, Protestantism spread swiftly, and rapidly amassed great strength. In the vigor of its rebellion against ancient and circumscribing dogmas it gave tremendous impetus to science and invention, and thus to man's conquest and control of his physical environment. In breaking

aroused or unleashed by Protestantism manifested much of its vigor in the endeavor to apprehend those principles of practical truth, the application of which has enabled man to carry to a high degree his control - if not, always, his understanding-of the physical universe.

sharp encouragement to commerce and business, and thus played its no small part in promoting the rise of nations to wealth and power. In its attitude of sheer defiance of many of the "nays" of Catholicism may perhaps be found the principal reason for its favoring some of the more radical proposals and attempts of the men of science to increase the measure man's comprehension and control of of the material world.

In any event, many of the taboos and restrictions which had precluded or impeded inquiry and investigation were in considerable measure vitiated; and, within the limitations of the times, men everywhere were encouraged to explore and chart the realm of human knowledge.

something more than a religion. It was always a potent instrumentality of physical progress. Note the rapid acquisition of wealth and power by those nations that embraced Protestantism; the corresponding degree of decline of those that adhered to Catholicism. And Protestantism was always something less than a religion. For religion has its seat in the emotions, and fundamentally Protestantism has always been an intellectual, not an emotional, thing. Its appeal has ever been to the head, not to the heart.

Emotionalism, stifling the intellectual processes, had forged chains for mankind. So argued Protestantism. Reason, it contended, the employment unhampered of the intellectual processes, would break these chains. Emotionalism had incarcerated truth. Intellectualism would raze the walls prisoning the mind; would liberate truth and place it, with reason, on a pedestal where all men might see, and, seeing, worship them. Not what is beautiful, but what is reasonable; that would be Protestantism's shibboleth.

Conquer it did under that sign. The triumph of modern democracy-exalting "progress", deifying materialistic equality-is the mark of its conquest. It is likewise the mark of its defeat. For, as has happened so often to conquerors, Protestantism made

the conquest only to lose the power by which it conquered. Essentially a democratic enterprise, it was incapable (as contrasted to aristocratic institutions) of comprehending that power, to endure and to be made of effective and wise use, must be kept in the possession of a qualitative and therefore necessarily numerically restricted leadership.

NCE given into the hands of the many, power is either dissipated by the absorption of mass inertia, or employed for such a variety of contrary purposes as to become totally ineffective; or, finding lodgment with charlatans, is engaged to promote unsalutary and frequently even base ends. Protestantism was unable to comprehend this; and within the last quarter of a century the power it generated has gotten more and more out of hand. Its proprietorship of the formulas and processes wherewith the pursuit of practical truth was encouraged, has been steadily dissipated. Its patents on these processes and formulas have expired, and they may now be (and are) used by anyone; and without paying royalties to the concern under whose influence they were developed and which once exclusively controlled them, and which now, in a kind of involuntary but unescapable atavism, fruitlessly endeavoring to regain their control, employs methods that partake of the same tyranny responsible for the break with Catholicism.

Thus Protestantism stands today shorn of its exclusive control of the formulas and processes of practical truth-seeking. The "rule of reason which it fathered and championed, having long since escaped the parental roof, now returns only to assail and

beleaguer. Intellectualism, the metal it uncovered, and out of which it fashioned its implements of conquest, now has been forged into weapons that are effectively turned against it. Science, which Protestantism nurtured, directly or indirectly, stands now on its own firm feet and, armed with steadily increasing power of its own, vigorously assails attempts of the Protestant establishment to regain its original control.

The emotional barrenness of Protestantism has already been alluded to. So long, however, as control was retained of the formulas of practical truth-seeking and the methods of progress and prosperity, this barrenness was little noticed and made small difference. But now that these have passed almost passed almost entirely into other hands, Protestantism's emotional emptiness is become a glaring thing.

HERE is abundant evidence of the wide effect of this. Thousands of Protestants, escaped from the spell cast by fear of hell fire, complain bitterly of the ugliness of the average Protestant church. Man is made of many needs, and one of these, it seems, is beauty. And so it may even be that such absurd and untoward movements as the Ku Klux Klan, revivified, are in part a revolt against the depressing ugliness of naked Protestantism. Indeed, it may even be that the wide response to the gaudy ceremonial and blatant mysteriousness of the Klan testifies to an unwitting but earnest effort to graft on the Protestant tree new branches whose leaves will in part conceal the unbeautiful trunk.

In discussing the causes that have contributed to Protestantism's decline,