Coates, A blue flame on the forehead

Artikel: A blue flame on the forehead / Eine blaue Flamme auf der Stirn

Artikel aus der Zeitschrift "New Yorker" 11.September 1943 von Robert M. Coates

Englisch: A blue flame on the forehead

Seite 58
A REPORTER AT LARGE
ATTENDANCE at metropolitan churches, although it has risen somewhat since the war began, is still short, ministers complain, of what is desired. You can go into almost any church of orthodox denomination in town, of a Sunday, and find empty pews. The same complaint can hardly be made by the pastors of certain other congre-gations. They are the men who pre-side over what might be called the informal, or unorthodox, churches, and their number, as well as the size of their congregations, has been growing rapidly in recent years. You'll find many of these churches listed Saturdays in the column of church announcements the Times runs on its religious page, and they range from such fairly wellestablished organizations as Baha'i, Unity, and New Thought, through such newer ones as the Church of the Healing Christ and the Church of the Absolute Center, on to various practitioners in Vedantism, Hinduism, Spiritualism, and so on. Several of these groups use the word "church" rather loosely, for the meetings are as likely to occur in a hotel ballroom as in a conventional place of worship. Some of the pastors are merely orators who dispense with all ecclesi-astical paraphernalia and simply offer regular Sunday lectures, or sermons, in which they expound their philosophies.

In general, these "churches" are built around a man with an agreeably im-pressive manner and an ability to mingle old-fashioned Bible teaching with bor-rowings from psychoanalysis, faith heal-ing, mental telepathy, auto-suggestion, and, occasionally, voodooism. The one characteristic common to all of them is that they are doing fine. Dr. Emmet Fox, for instance, who conducts the Church of the Healing Christ, regularly fills the Manhattan Opera House, which has a seating capacity of four thousand, at his Sun-, day-morning services. His doctrine is so close to that of Christian Science that, to the layman at least, they are practical-ly indistinguishable. He believes that if a person will indulge in a period of what he calls "healing meditation," all false growths in the body, such as tumors, can be done away with, diseases can be cured, and missing parts of the body can even be made to replace themselves or, as he puts it, be "gestated," and in nine months' time be recreated. Dr. Fox is probably the most successful of these practitioners, if success in such matters is calculated in the number of followers. But the workings of faith are incalculable, and it would be a hardy soul indeed who would maintain, mere-ly on arithmetical grounds, that the

weight of Dr. Fox's teaching is any more formidable than that, say, of Joseph De Vincent, whose Church of the Absolute Center (eight-fifteen Sunday evenings, Room 1001, Steinway Hall) boasts an average at-tendance of no more than fifty or sixty communicants. I have been casting about in such waters as these for some time, seeking, if not truth, at least some understand-ing of the appeal that attracts so many followers. I think I came nearest to that understanding one Sunday not long ago when I listened to an address by Neville Goddard. Mr. Goddard (with a certain stateliness, he ordinarily refers to himself merely as "Neville") speaks Sundays at 8 P.M. in the auditori-um of the Union Methodist Episcopal Church, on West Forty-eighth Street, at an admission charge of twenty-five cents.

MR. GODDARD, or Neville, Commands no such audiences as does Dr. Fox, and his teachings are not as extreme as those of some of the oth-ers. In both these respects his position is fairly middle-of-the-road. The night I attended there were perhaps two hun-dred persons present to receive the mes-sage. The auditorium of the Union Church is small and fan-shaped, with rows of pews narrowing toward a lec-tern on a small dais which serves as pulpit, and the crowd filled it comfortably. Men, I noticed, were outnumbered at least six to one by women, and since it was warm a good many of the men sat with their coats off. Though an organist in the loft was fingering softly through that mixture of deep chords and fragments of hymn tunes which usually precedes a service, there was an air of,, informality in the atmosphere that suggested a theatre before curtain time. People waved to friends in other pews or got up to join them in little chats. When the organist finished his selection, there was even a round of scattered applause. Then a woman with startling-ly bright red hair stood up in the organ loft and in a soprano voice of some power sang George B. Nevin's "Ave Ma-. fie There was another round of applause when she had fin-ished. A moment later Neville

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