Baptist Bogey-Man

To the bogeymen with which the Soviet press scares Russians was added, last week,* a potent U. S. citizen 89 years of age, gaunt, and frail with parchment skin and eyes that seem always sunken behind dark-lensed spectacles. A searing editorial in Besbozhnik (The Godless), famed anti-religious organ of the Soviet State, revealed, as horrid fact, that 65.000 "Baptist Bibles" have recently been printed in Russia. Since someone must have paid for them, and since John Davison Rockefeller Sr. is rich, philanthropic and Baptist, Editor Shpitzberg of Besbozhnik pointed accusingly across the Atlantic at Rockefeller Sr., while indicating John Davison Rockefeller Jr., as the actual source of cash. Since several Baptist weeklies are appearing unmolested in Russia, the tirade of last week against "Rockefeller Bibles" seemed pointless, hysteric. Nonetheless it formed one of two major features in a new Soviet campaign to stamp out Religion, a thing so detested by the late founder of the Soviet State, LENIN, that he caused to be displayed in Soviet churches for years the slogan : RELIGION is OPIUM FOR THE PEOPLE The second feature of last week's new anti-religious campaign was to release a series of articles by the most famed and heeded woman in Soviet Russia, a woman known simply as KRUPSKAYA. She, a widow, would be called in other lands, "Mrs. Lenin." Last week Relict Krupskaya wrote: "The need is imperative that the State resume systematic anti-religious work among children. We must make our school boys and girls not merely non-religious but actively and passionately antireligious. . . . "The home influence of religious parents must be vigorously combated. . . . Skill and persuasion must be used. I do not approve the overzealous methods of some school teachers who make a practice of tearing off every crucifix which they espy on a child's neck. . . . Such methods are not efficacious. ... I also doubt the wis dom of instructing advanced classes in anti-religion by the method of dissecting before them the remains of so-called saints or other fetishes. The shock with which such demonstrations impinge upon latently religious minds often produces, in my experience, a negative result. We must be more subtle." ^

*Favorite bogeymen, often savagely cartooned and burned in effigy include British Foreign Secretary Sir Austen Chamberlain, and President Coolidge.