SOUL SURGERY

It is entertaining to wonder whether the four hundred followers of the Reverend Frank Buchman found copies of the current New Yorker in the living room when they gathered on Saturday for a ten-day house party at Briarcliff Manor. The portrait of Mr. Buchman and the exposition of the strange garments in which he clothes religion, as presented in the New Yorker's columns, might have made members of "The First Century Christian Fellowship" feel rather like a little girl at the terrible moment when her birthday doll turns out to be only nasty sawdust inside.

Mr. Buchman's methods in militant religion are superficially novel, essentially age-old. He is more genteel than Billy Sunday, more subtle than Almes MacPherson. Instead of clawing the devil before thousands in temple or arena, he carries on painless soul surgery in the well upholstered living room of the rich. Here about the fire-side boys and girls "come clean" and "make their souls feel wonderful."

The stranger who dropped in on a Buchman soul-washing session might fancy that he had somehow gotten into the Sultan's palace on one of the Thousand and One Nights. But if the harsh outsider should remark that public confession of major and minor sins is called by the psychologists exhibitionism, or if anyone should suggest that the Huchman method of salvation, in its goal and in its procedure, is curiously like falling off a henhouse roof into a pile of featherbeds, that will not disturb the faithful. They will agree with a member who remarked at Briarcliff: "I cannot even resent criticism of the movement now, for I realize that to do so is pride on my part."