Arthur E. Bostwick

One of the best known librarians in America, Arthur E. Bostwick, is also editor, encyclopedist and author. White-haired, tall, powerful, kindly, he has a sense of humor that is dry, keen and tempered by years of wise study of life. Is there any better way to study life than through mankind’s approach to books? Dr. Bostwick was born in Litchfield, Connecticut. He spends his summers there now. He was graduated from Yale University, where he was also a post-graduate student, an instructor and a proctor. In his editorial capacity he has been associated with “The Forum”, “The Literary Digest” and various dictionaries. He is now chief of the St. Louis Public Library. His books are numerous. I have seen him address a large group of his fellow librarians, and he has the courage to tell stories on them as well as about them. He has been active in his interest in politics, religion and the public efforts of various communities. A serious-minded citizen whose interest in books is abiding, and whose knowledge of them is profound.

THE CHURCH AND THE LIBRARY

There was a time when to be literary was to be ecclesiastical. Ability to read was sufficient proof of exemption from the jurisdiction of the civil courts; collections of books were exclusively housed in buildings subject to ecclesiastical control—churches, monasteries, colleges. Literature owes its preservation to the church of the Middle Ages, and the church, in its turn, drew much of its vitality and influence from its connection with letters.

This state of things no longer exists. Literacy is not for the clergy alone, but for the citizen. The state teaches us to read, and it assembles and distributes books. Schools and libraries are still maintained by religious bodies, but we are agreed as never before that everybody must be able to read and that illiteracy is a disgrace to the community where it exists.

Thus the public library has become a lay concern. It has little to do with the church, and the church, with some exceptions, does not heed it. It is the great neutral public institution, storing and making accessible recorded opinions but favoring none. And the odd thing is that in so far as it ignores the church the library is nullifying in one place its latest step in advance, which is to work with, in, and for groups within the community; while by turning a cold shoulder to the public library the church is refusing to make use of one of the most powerful aids that could be offered her for the fulfilment of her mission.

The modern library began to work with groups when it began its work with children. Since that day, quite within the memory of most of us, it has taken on teachers, the foreign born, the industries, business men, hospitals, the military service, and many others. Group service has been rapidly and successfully extended until it forms a network over the whole field of the community.

Contact with groups has been facilitated both by the feeling that initiative in service could properly be assumed by the library, and by the discovery that library service by no means ends with the provision of books or even of material in print, that it is a matter of social contact. Many librarians have become so thoroughly adjusted to the social contact of the library with groups that they are almost ready to throw overboard the old name of library altogether, and consider that they are conducting community clubs, whose chief aim must be to encourage mental contacts and reactions, and to store and distribute what must always be the chief tools through which these contacts and reactions are made effective—namely, books.

The purely experimental manner in which this group service has developed is evident from the fact that no comprehensive plan of it has ever been made. The group closest in contact, and therefore the one that was pressing hardest, has always been the one to receive attention—to be given room, supplies, and service. The groups that were already fairly well able to take care of themselves did not need, of course, to exert this pressure, hence service was extended to them later, or it still remains to be extended. Now the churches have always been among our best organized groups, and they have themselves felt, equally and at the same time with the library, the impulse toward socialization. The institutional church is the response—it is an American response, just as that of the library is. The older heads are as much scandalized to see dancing and eating, and community singing and politico-social discussion going on in the churches, as they were to witness the same things in libraries. It is because the church and the library have thus moved on parallel lines, that they have been so long in coming into contact. A denominational body, however, is limited on all sides in this social effort, in a way that can never be felt by a public institution like the library. In the last analysis every man has his own religion, just as he has his own philosophy—his mind is an isolated point in the field of belief. Churches are groups of these points so near each other as to feel sympathetic attraction. Some day we may have this sympathetic nearness throughout the whole field. Until it exists, we must rely on other means to get minds and spirits into universal contact, and this means the public library is now furnishing to a greater extent than either churchmen or non-churchmen yet realize.

There is one valuable piece of work that can be done by church and library together, and that is to labor for Christian unity. I do not mean by this a state of things where all Christian bodies think alike or do alike, much less an organic union, but a condition of affiliation, acknowledged or not, where they are willing to work side by side. There are not wanting plenty of practical evidences that this kind of unity is already here in some degree, and that more of it is on its way. There is the University of Toronto, an aggregation of denominational colleges—Roman Catholic, Episcopalian, Baptist, Methodist—each a residential and teaching institution, while the university itself gives all the degrees and instructs in purely non-religious subjects such as mathematics or logic. There are the religious houses going up in connection with many of our western universities. Originally social in their nature, a combination of dormitory and club house, these are beginning to assume also teaching functions, with the consent and approval of the universities. For example, Wesley House at Urbana, Illinois, an admirable and beautiful collegiate structure, is about to offer religious or semi-religious courses, for which the University of Illinois will give credits. The war drives, in which Catholic and Protestant bodies took part jointly, will occur to all. The library cannot afford to be left behind in such a movement, and indeed it has itself been a pioneer in some localities. The New York Public Library has several branches that originated as church libraries—both Catholic and Protestant—and sensibly no effort has been made to remove the religious element. Why should we not cater to strong regional church groups as well as to regional groups of industrials or scholars? In St. Louis one of our sub-branches is the Catholic Free Library, given over to our care by the Archbishop himself. I see no reason why branches should not specialize in Methodist or Unitarian literature. They do in Jewish literature, through the accident that the Jews are a racial and to some extent a linguistic as well as a religious group. One cannot well purchase a Hebrew collection without buying works on Jewish faith and practice. This is to a lesser extent true of other linguistic groups in which the overwhelming majority are of one faith, as with the Greeks, the Russians, the Italians, or the Spanish.

The odd, the almost unbelievable thing is, that most religious groups in this country seem to be as unaware of the public library as we are of them. I will make but two exceptions—the Roman Catholic and the Christian Scientists. The Roman Catholics have been active in public library matters ever since I have known anything about public libraries. They have operated public libraries of their own and they have not hesitated to affiliate with tax-supported libraries, or to become merged in them. There are Roman Catholics who shun the public library or who look askance at it, but of those who seek it and work with it, as I have known them, I must say that their attitude has been liberal. They object to violent or scurrilous attacks on their faith, and ask to have books containing these removed from the shelves. I do not blame them. But they do not want a purely religious collection.

The Christian Scientists apprehend the library intensively in limited directions. They have committees whose business it is to see that all libraries are well supplied with “Science and Health”, and they encourage the purchase of some other books. I have never known them to protest against the presence in a library of attacks on their faith, although there are some pretty stiff ones. But they are very persistent in their objections to the classification of such attacks under Christian Science. There is something to be said in favor of such a view, but so long as we put critiques of Comte under positivism and agnostic treatises under religion, we shall have to treat all controversial books in the same way. Occasionally a high-church Episcopalian will object to our use of the word “Catholic”, or to our treating pre-Reformation liturgical material as if it belonged only to the Roman branch of the church.

Outside of these evidences of religious interest, I have never known, from my library contacts with readers, whether they were Baptists or Mohammedans, Buddhists or Methodists. I account this a fault of my own. It is strange that the religious group is the only body that the librarian has not gone out to seek with some activity. We long ago ceased to blame plumbers, or manufacturers of textiles, or Hungarians, or business men, if they did not use the library. We are recognizing that such failure is our failure. It may be theirs too; but we can mend our own ways rather more quickly than other people’s, and so we soon learned to go out after these gentry and to return with more or less willing bunches of them. But who ever heard of a librarian going out after a Methodist, or a United Presbyterian, or a Congregationalist? The very suggestion makes one smile; and yet some of these are quite as good game as engineers, or aviators, or students of Gaelic.

Here I may anticipate an interruption: “How about the Sunday Schools?” We have long been treating Sunday Schools as groups, but not as religious groups. The old Sunday School library was a joke. In my boyhood, “Sunday School book” meant unreadable, mock-pious stuff of the variety turned out by the ton from the mills of the Society for the Promotion of Christian Knowledge in London, and from other similar ones in our own fair land. This type of library is not yet extinct—more’s the pity—but it has been altered or greatly modified, largely, I believe, by the influence of the public library. In some cases the part of the library devoted to general reading has been abandoned, the children being sent to the public library. In others, the type of book distributed has been improved. So far, however, the influence of the public library has been away from religious instruction rather than in aid of it. I see no reason why the Sunday School group should not be given the aid that is not withheld from other groups, and why a branch library should not contain a small collection of instructional religious works. These would include general titles and also books for the special use of the denominations whose churches are in the immediate vicinity. This might well form part of a general effort to supply more books on denominational subjects.

Our libraries are generally deficient in religious reference books. We buy lists of English peers and of American dealers in plumbing supplies, but we neglect the official clergy lists of our churches. Every library of good size should include what I may call the official literature of each church—its yearbook with a list of its clergy, its fundamental law, whatever that may be termed in each case, its statement of doctrine, its liturgy if it has any, and its authorized book or books of hymns. If extended to all the principal denominations this collection alone would constitute a very respectable library; its limits, of course, will be determined by the necessities of the case. Most of it may be bought once for all; the annuals should be purchased as they appear. To these should also be added, however, considerable unofficial material: the history of the denomination, the lives and chief works of its principal divines, plans and descriptions of some of its noteworthy church buildings, and so on.

Much of this will introduce the librarian to men, doctrines, and events that he never heard of before, although probably they are no more remote from his ordinary life than the contents of Maxwell’s “Electricity” or a grammar of the Gaelic tongue. We buy these, not because we know and appreciate them ourselves, but because somebody else does. When we think that the religious groups are worth attracting and attaching as well as the electricians and the philologists, we shall at least divide our attention.

All these things will be parts of the library’s contribution toward Christian unity, as I understand that much abused term and as I am using it here. The first thing that we need, here as elsewhere, is a survey of faith and order; and with all the work done toward unification of Christianity, I cannot see that this has ever been touched, perhaps not even sensed as a necessary element. Yet how can we reconcile Presbyterian and Baptist, Protestant and Catholic—nay, look abroad and ask how we can bring together Buddhist and Mohammedan, Tao and Shinto, unless we know what now separates them? Much of this is on record, but it is nowhere assembled. What Christian bodies believe in justification by faith? Which have more than one order in the ministry? Which are Congregational in government? Which have bishops? Which believe in the apostolic succession? Do all accept the Apostles’ Creed exactly as most of us recite it? I need not go on. The fact is that no one Christian body knows exactly how near or how far it is from others. It fails to recognize its closest neighbor.

The first step toward a general, intelligent recognition of points of agreement and difference is the assemblage of material, and it is such an assemblage that the library would be making, if it should proceed as I advise. I do not advise for this purpose filling the shelves with controversy, and buying works intended to convert Protestants to Catholicism and Unitarians to Methodism; but I do think that we ought to have the facts. It is a fact that a body of persons believe in a stated thing, whether that thing is true or not; and for purposes of record, of survey, these facts we must and should have somewhere.

Of the inspirational literature of religion, I need scarcely speak. We are less derelict in our duty here, probably, than in any other branch of the subject. Much of it is not denominational—it is merely Christian. It is in the realm of feeling rather than in that of reason that men first get together. Here we have already the Christian unity of the spirit. “The Imitation of Christ”, “The Pilgrim’s Progress”—these and a hundred other religious classics we have on our shelves already. Yes; and what do we do with them? Will the librarian who recommends to a reader the “Journal of John Woolman”, of which she herself never heard until we knew that dear old President Eliot liked it, recommend also “De Imitatione Christi”? If not, why not? Did any librarian ever urge anyone to read the Bible? Must we not force ourselves to realize that religion is qualified to bear a larger part in the lives of most of our readers than even the Theory of Groups or the fate of the Lost Digamma? Even Mr. Wells, who thinks the American Civil War of only sufficient world significance to warrant the expenditure of a paragraph, and Abraham Lincoln as not worth mention, spends many a page on Buddha, and Mohammed, and even on Jesus Christ. No, religion is still a world force! Librarians cannot be the universal educators—the union of social forces—that they aspire to be, without working with it and toward it. If there is

the library must perforce move with it.