J. Gresham Machen Bibliography

IN THE PULPIT Skyscrapers And Cathedrals BY J. GRESHAM MACHEN

Reviewed by REV. JOSEPH FORT NEWTON

D R. MACHEN is the President of the new Westminster Theological Seminary of Philadelphia, which split off from the Princeton Seminary as a result of the great debate in the Presbyterian Church provoked by “the Fosdick Case.” His book some years ago, Christianity and Liberalism, inspired a symposium of discussion in the “British Weekly” of London, as did the book which followed it, What is Faith?—by far his best book—and more recently his great volume on The Virgin Birth. An outstanding conservative scholar and thinker, whatever he writes is read all over the Christian world. In the sermon here reviewed, addressed to the graduating class of the Seminary, he looks out upon “a drab and empty age,” forgetful of God and the slave of greed and passion, its towering architecture a symbol of its spiritual bankruptcy. “About one week ago,” said Dr. Machen, “I stood on the one hundred and second story of the Empire State Building in New York City. From there I looked down upon a scene like nothing else upon the earth. I watched the elevated trains, which seemed from that distance to be like caterpillars crawling along the rails; I listened to the ceaseless roar of the city ascending from a vast area to that great height. It is a strange city, created on Manhattan Island within the last five or ten years —gigantic, bizarre, magnificently ugly. It seemed like some weird, tortured imagination of things in another world; I came down from that building greatly impressed. “There came to my mind the memory of other buildings that I had contemplated in the course of my life. I thought of an English cathedral, rising from the infinite green of some quiet cathedral close, above the ancient trees. I thought of the west façade of a Continental cathedral, produced at a time when Gothic architecture was not what it is today, imitative and cold and dead, but a living expression of the human soul; when every carving in every [Turn to page 118]