drink, movies, politics, baseball, diversion, dress--all these are
under the jurisdiction of a continually aroused censorship. The
pulpits and editorial pages emit sonorous hymns of taboo. Every
caption writer is an Isaiah, every welfare worker fancies himself the
handwriting on the wall. Unchallenged by the vote of the masses or by
any outward evidence of mass dissent, the platitudes pile up, the
nation is filled from morning to morning with stentorian clamor.
Puritanism in a frenetic finale approaches a climax.

But, and we tiptoe towards the crux of this phenomenon, the Bacchanal
of Presbyterianism is an artificial climax. Unlike the day of the
later Caesars, the populace does not abandon itself in imitation of
its Neros and Caligulas. Instead, we have the spectacle of a populace
apathetic toward the spirit of its time.

The Puritan debauch is the logical culmination of the anti-Paganism
and backworldism launched two hundred centuries back. The Christian
ethic, to the bewildered chagrin of its advocates, has triumphed. Not
a triumph this time that offers itself as a cloak for Jesuitism,
colonization, or empire juggling. But an unimpeachable triumph
entirely beyond the control of the most adroit of the choir-Machiavellis.

In other words the body politic finds itself betrayed by its own
platitudes. A moral frenzy animates its horizon. But it is a frenzy of
idea escaped control, an idea grown too huge and luminous to direct
any longer. The moral frenzy of the war was the moral frenzy of such
an idea--virtue become a Frankenstein. This virtue--the Golden Rule,
the Thou Shalt Nots, the thousand and one unassailable maxims, adages,
old saws invented chiefly for the protection of the weak and the
solace of the inferior--this virtue has taken itself out of the hands