-lack of religion in those countries. In former times this indifference or hostility to Christianity was noted only among the men of the more cultured classes; now it is spreading to the educated women and in a large degree to the workingmen in the cities. As Prof. G. H. Blakeslee says: "However the religious question is to be settled, it remains today the greatest problem of South America. Until it is solved every South American republic is likely to witness from time to time such scenes as those recently enacted in Chile, where crowds of its best educated young men marched night after night through the streets of its capital city deriding, mocking and insulting the Church to which the nation belongs."

The demonstration to which reference is here made is that in Santiago and Valparaiso where the university students went on strike against the activities of the Papal Nuncio. For almost a week they kept those cities in a ferment, completely disorganizing university arrangements by their refusal to attend classes and by other acts of protest. The object of the agitation was to bring pressure on the government to send the Pope's representative out of the country. Joining with the students, a crowd of citizens estimated as high as 50,000 gathered in Santiago and petitioned the President of Chile for the deportation of the Nuncio. Each night during this somewhat hectic week witnessed parades of protest or mock processions and ceremonials ridiculing religious rites. This extension of the people's enmity from the person of the Nuncio to the Church itself was easily accomplished in the tense state of public feeling. In one of these mock processions two large figures were carried by the marchers representing in no flattering way a monk and a nun. Other processions were made up of students robed as priests, carrying swinging censers and followed by a crowd of young men dressed as penitents, with lighted tapers in their hands. So realistic was this latter feature that one observer reports seeing old women kneeling to them in the streets, unaware of the real character of the marchers. Banners and transparencies attacking the Papal representative, the local hierarchy and the Church itself were carried in most of these processions.

The public clamor over the matter reached into the Chilean Congress, where it was the subject of lively debate. Strange to say, one of the impelling causes of this outbreak lay in the economic strain under which the South American countries have labored since the close of the war, the specific charge against the Nuncio being that he was sending money realized from the sale of Church property out of the country. Radicals in Chile claim that within the last five years Church officials in Chile have sent to Rome more than a million and a quarter dollars in anticipation of the possible separation of Church and State in that country. This particular charge has precipitated a general scrutiny of the wealth of the established Church. In Santiago alone its property is valued at more than 100 million dollars and there are some who claim that the income of the Church in Chile is greater than that of the government itself.

While this outbreak came with considerable suddenness out of an atmosphere of almost complete subservience to ecclesiastical authority, it had long been brewing. -For years there has been a latent hostility to the Church and the clergy in the minds of educated men in Chile, although it has always been politically and socially expedient to conceal this animosity as much as possible. With this recent agitation it has broken out into the open.

If visitors to Hispanic American countries speak often of the lack of religion in those lands, their own writers almost universally condemn the established Church. Among the numerous references of García Calderón to the subject the following may be cited from his book, "The Creation of a Continent":

"We do not find in Latin America either an elegant skepticism, a puritan religion, or even a mysticism like the Spanish. Her Catholicism is a limited and official religion. We are witnessing the decadence of traditional religion. The Church is being converted into a bureaucratic institution. Its convents attract only those of the inferior classes. The robustness of creative convictions, which is the strength of the Biblical men of North America, the deep interest in human destiny, the stern sense of duty, the realization of

the seriousness of life, do not disturb Latin American Catholicism, sensual and lymphatic.

**

"In the political and economic order our religious indifference is the cause of indecision in opinions, of hatred of ideas, and of immorality. *** These different republics lack a creed. Their ancient life was linked to a severe religion. The abandonment of Catholicism in democracies without moral culture means retrogression to barbarism. *** In the United States puritanism is the perpetual defense against the plutocratic immorality. In the Latin South only a renovated and profound faith can give to accumulated riches a national sentiment. An American servant of Caliban, without clear ideals, coldly atheistic because of mental laziness or indifference, would be an immense mediocre continent that could submerge, as did Atlantis, without leaving in human annals the memory of a secret unrest, a hymn to the gods, or even a passionate skepticism and tragic doubt."

In an interesting book, "The Plow, the Pen and the Sword," Señor Huerta, of Paraguay, in discussing national problems, has this to say:

"How distinct has been the rôle of religion in Spanish America from that it has played in North America! Since the time of the conquest, when the priests were in such a hurry to administer the sacrament of baptism to the Indians, until the present, religion has not exercised the amplitude of its noble mission outside of the Church building and the congregation.

"Mixing in politics has brought about many evils in the Republic, which has had to suffer the acts and propaganda of the clericals whose fruit has been nothing more than the discrediting of worship and the skepticism of the masses, with grave injury to the young society and its government. It would be easy to cite many honorable and patriotic actions of the Catholic Church and its many educational activities, but as a moral entity it has not been able to escape the materialistic spirit of government with which it has been so closely associated.

"In Ecuador or Colombia it is impossible to know whether the government is served by the clergy or the clergy is a model for the government. The religious influence has not the merit of aiding the development of these countries, pacifying the ardor of the political parties, but has the effect of exciting them with intolerance and exclusiveness. If, as is the case in the United States and as the psychologists believe, religion is a powerful force for the transformation of human groups into nationality, religion is destined to play a great part in the Spanish American republics."

That the student class is leading the attack on the Church signifies that it is in the college and university centers of South America that religious indifference is most marked and sentiment toward the Church most hostile. For the benefit of North Americans who may be inclined to dismiss the whole matter as a mere student agitation, it must be pointed out that in Latin America, as in continental Europe, the university students are an important political factor and nearly always form the backbone of progressive movements and are active politically. The students, too, have been directed to some extent by political leaders who preferred to remain in the background and not openly appear as leaders in an attack upon the clergy.

A great religious reform is greatly needed in South V America. Some of her keenest critics-several of them among her own sons-believe that lack of a strongly developed moral sense is the main thing that stands between the South American and a great future of world leadership and world service. This vital lack shows itself not only in the realm of religion, but in the attitude of the people toward their work, in their political life, and in their social relationships, particularly in the relations between the sexes. A spiritualized Church should surely do something to bring to these peoples a stronger sense of duty and right and a greater stimulus toward allowing this sense to govern their lives.

It remains, then, for these southern nations to discover a religion that is compatible with true democracy and modern scientific knowledge, which will at the same time build

up personal and national character and furnish those spiritual ideals without which no permanent cultural edifice can be built. What form shall this religion take? Many believe with García Calderón that it must be a reformed Catholicism. He says:

"Protestantism is not, however, the religion suited to these democracies, submitted to a three-century Catholic discipline. The race has lost its ancient individualism which inclines toward Protestantism, and austere Calvinism or Puritanism is out of the realm of tropical imagination and Castilian sensuality. The religious renaissance can only be realized within Catholicism, a traditional religion, mother of ideas and customs, a powerful force that cannot be escaped by either the servile Indian or the Spanish hidalgo."

On the other hand, there are not lacking other great Latin Americans who believe that the simple, democratic Evangelical Christianity is the greatest need of the south. Agustin Alvarez says:

"Thus liberal Protestantism, leaving to men his best aptitude and amplitude for lay progress, has formed he colonizing races which, by their greater resources dominating nature and exploiting the soil, have enriched and extended themselves to all continents. In the same way Catholicism, repudiating profane science, and captured by attention to public worship, has separated the best energies of man, has withdrawn him from improved methods of agriculture, commerce and industry, from personal cleanliness and public sanitation, from earthly justice and civil morality.

"The mother country did us greater harm by prohibiting in America the cultivation of ideas and the sentiments of tolerance than it did by prohibiting the cultivation of the vine and the olive. If the primary cause of the progress of man is the thought which modifies his sentiments and forms his character, a man limits his progress to the degree to which he limits his thought. So the fundamental cause of the backwardness of Spanish America, and of Spain itself, is the restriction of thought by an absurd religion.

"Thus narrow and superstitious Catholicism, the open