A master’s prestige without a master’s skill

An Episcopal clergyman, who wrote more than twenty books examining the American way of life from the point of view of Christian orthodoxy. Among his principal works are Right and Wrong after the War (1918), Beyond Agnosticism (1929), In the City of Confusion (1938), God Is Not Dead (1945), Crisis in Education (1949), and Crowd Culture (1952). In all these works, he argued that Americans were mistakenly pursuing comfort as the end of life and beginning to believe that “one may eat one’s cake and have it too, that there can be reward without quest, wages without work, a master’s prestige without a master’s skill, marriage without fidelity, national security without sacrifice.”



Bell maintained that American culture was in serious trouble. He insisted that parents and educators were largely to blame because, in failing to provide the young with a coherent, time-tested moral framework for thinking and behaving, they were failing to furnish America with the kind of leaders it needed. He thought the church, in practicing tolerance to a fault and trying to appear “up-to-date,” had become as ineffectual as families and public schools in making Americans wise and reasonable. He cautioned that churches of all denominations were paying too high a price for preferring popularity to prophecy, a price amounting to their becoming laughable as well as powerless. Bell concluded that America was doomed to wander in a state of intellectual and spiritual aimlessness until an aristocracy of character, well catechized and deliberately educated in the humane tradition, arose to guide the populace into a more meaningful existence.

When first published Bell’s books attracted considerable attention. Notable conservatives of the time read and praised them, men such as
1. Albert J. Nock (an influential United States libertarian author, educational theorist, and social critic of the early and middle 20th century),
2. T. S. Eliot (poet, playwright, and literary critic), and
3. Richard M. Weaver (an American scholar who taught English at the University of Chicago. He is primarily known as a shaper of mid- 20th century conservatism and as an authority on modern rhetoric. Ideas Have Consequences is a philosophical work by Richard M. Weaver, published in 1948. The book is largely a treatise on the deleterious effects that the doctrine of nominalism has had on Western Civilization since it gained prominence in the High Middle Ages, followed by a prescription of a course of action through which Weaver believes the West might be rescued from its decline. Nominalism is a metaphysical view in philosophy according to which general or abstract terms and predicates exist, while universals or abstract objects, which are sometimes thought to correspond to these terms, do not exist.)

Few theologians have reached as wide and diverse a public as Bell did during the first half of the twentieth century. His audience extended to England and Canada, where he frequently lectured and gave sermons.