Mr. Buchan at Edinburgh Mr. John Buchan is among the
relatively few speakers of today who can always be counted on to say something worth listening to, and his address to the Church of Scotland on Tuesday deserves the attention of a much larger public than the audience to which it was imme- diately delivered. Nothing could be more pertinent than his analysis of the prevalent psychology of today, with its " danger of a revolt against freedom, not for the love of manly discipline but out of sheer failure of nerve." What Mr. Buchan calls " the impulse to huddle together and seek salvation in herds " is the mark of more than one political, as well as of more than one religious, movement, and in so far as it involves a surrender of the freedom of the individual spirit it is inevitably a retro- gression. The Church of Scotland, to which Mr. Buchan was speaking, was made great by men who adventured in thought and deed, and like other churches it can best serve humanity by rejecting the dictates of tradition and convention and exploring fearlessly the possibilities —it may be through new forms of expression—of com- bining individual liberty with corporate unity. It is the attempt to impose unity at the expense of liberty that has split, where it has not emasculated, the Protestant Church in Germany.
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