Baldwin's Ape

A hypothetical ape immortalized Charles Darwin; and last week it seemed that a no less remarkable ape--a spiritual ape--might perform the same service for Stanley Baldwin, His Majesty's Prime Minister.

The ape leaped into fame and being when Mr. Baldwin said, in the course of a public address:

"War shows us that our descent has not been only from the ape, it is also from the tiger. The tiger must be not merely apprehended but eliminated if the state is to survive. The ape in us has come through history with spiritual power. The tiger has not. That is a difference worth remembering!"

While shocked or gleeful Britons were pondering these surely memorable words, good Squire Baldwin made further philosophic utterance, last week, at the 150th anniversary services in "The Little Church on City Road," famed London nucleus of some 106,000 Methodist churches which now dot the Globe.

The Prime Minister, grandson of a Methodist pastor, said of John Wesley, famed pioneer of Methodism:

"Wesley's supreme legacy was his conception of practical religion for the ordinary man and woman. I believe that you cannot understand America unless you understand Wesley. In America ten per cent of the people are Methodists. To Wesley Christianity was primarily a way of life."

Methodists know that in the standard edition of Wesley's Journal, he wrote about himself that, as a young man "I had no notion of inward holiness" but lived "habitually and for the most part very contentedly in some or other known sin." Later, honest, forthright John Wesley became a High Church Episcopalian Clergyman, finally espousing Methodism. At the apogee of his potency, Pastor Wesley traveled some 5,000 miles a year, preaching and founding Methodist churches.

Smart reporters drew from the Prime Minister an admission that he spent spare moments, last week, reading the biography of William Randolph Hearst, enjoyed it.

Finally Mr. Baldwin rounded out an unusually philosophical week by addressing a banquet in celebration of the 100th anniversary of the Spectator, famed British weekly review. Harking back to the U. S. Civil War, Orator Baldwin recalled that in 1863 the Spectator alluded to: "Mr. Lincoln's modest and somewhat vulgar but respectable statesmanship."

After putting this quaint remark thoroughly through its paces, Stanley Baldwin said that in his opinion Abraham Lincoln was "one of the greatest men produced by our race."