990 THE K I N G ' S B U S I N E S S “ Elder Hays Is a grand little man, and his aspiration is beautiful to see, but a bit under-engined. The movies will not clean up-—not much. The trouble with the .movies is not with the producers or the actors, nor-even with the distributors. The movies are wrong because men and women who go to the movies are enter tained by them, get mental pabulum from them, genuinely enjoy them, and night after night, month after month, year after year, want nothing better. Given the moron audience and the moron picture, the moron actor and the moron director are inevitable. You can’t clean up the movies without giving them voice, color, character, wisdom and distinction. • . “ And the minute intelligence is injected into the movies, the movie audience wanders away bored to a crisp and delicious brown. The movie is dirty because it is a low order of entertainment, appealing to one sense only, requiring merely action to carry its message. And action makes an appeal to the mind that reduces reasoning to its lowest terms. “ The theatre may be improved. The saloon might possibly have been saved with wisdom on the part o f the brewers. The scarlet lady of Babylon had her better moments. Cain had some justification. But to clean up the movies is like going at the leopard with kalsomine.” ...i It is rather pathetic to consider ’ that the truth must be brought to church officials, in this sterling, sensible way, by a secular paper that does not profess to have any spiritual insight into conditions in our land ' —T. C. H. SHALL THE WORLD OR THE CHURCH MAKE KNOWN THE TRUTHS OF THE BIBLE? Here is something interesting and pathetic. The pulpit is departing from the Bible and the secular press is championing the Bible. It is the business of the church to make known the Word of God because it is the “ pillar and ground of the truth,” (I Tim. 3:15), but in these days many editors of secular papers are giving a far more positive testimony for the Bible than many pulpits. Here is a good example from The Times, one of the most prominent daily papers on the Pacific coast. The writer com mends “ The Gideons” .for placing the Bibles in hotel rooms and then says, “ No doubt many a man has become really acquainted with the Bible for the first time in his life by reading it in his room at a hotel. Maybe he read it only because he happened to have nothing else to read, or was sleep less and wanted to kill time in bed. He would, perhaps, have preferred a novel, a newspaper or magazine, but not having these, he picked up the Bible that the Gideons had left for him. Anything, to read was better than nothing. And, if such a man then shall read any one page of the Bible he cannot have failed to have been struck by the fact that he was reading the most marvelous book ever written. The most interesting, the most fascinat ing, the most informing and the most comforting of all books. And the rea son is that God wrote the Bible. That is to say, He inspired the men who wrote it. They wrote at God’s dictation, the same as your stenographer writes at your dictation. And of this there is not the slightest doubt. “ Wherefore, in the face of all this, is it not strange that so compara tively few men read the Bible although it is within the easy reach of every man? And, is it not still more strange that men have been engaged, and are still engaged, writing books that they vainly suppose will supplant the Bible or do in its stead? It is a fact—an indisputable fact—that the guide the world needs is the Bible. If its teachings and its precepts were fol-
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