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THE PROBLEM 7
ductive of charlatans and dark superstition, a state of things that leaves the public a prey to abject fear, and clouds the mind with confusion that obscures the hope of spiritual rebirth.
If we closely examine the picture of the present wide-spread religious mood we shall detect a noteworthy thing. There are signs of a return to the Bible for guidance and inspiration, no longer in the old theological way, but in the new humanistic one. The Bible is now seen to have attributes by which it is possible to interpret the present by the past. It is accepted as a record of discovery. "It is a travel journal of the road to spiritual truth, and at times the explorers are down in the swamps, and sometimes they are on the hillside, and sometimes they dip again into jungles, and then again they climb."1 The Cinema explorers are on the point of climbing.
The comparison of the Two Seeds, — Satan's and the Woman's — to the Two Purposes of the Cinema is a simple and instructive one. The things compared are different in kind, but they possess a similarity that makes the one illustrative of the other. On the one hand there is the Evil Seed setting Man on the downward path with its culmination in Armageddon and its outcome the birth of a new race of men. On the other there is Bad Purpose setting the Cinema on the downward path with its present culmination in the Battle of the Giants and its promised outcome the triumph of the Good Purpose.
But to make the comparison intelligible to the generality of human beings material facts must be made to resemble each other. The resemblance should turn on a current relevant circumstance. That circumstance is the mad scramble for gold. If we study the Bible carefully we shall learn that greed and avarice have been universal ever since Satan began selling Hell to Eve. Indeed the more we look into this matter the more convinced we shall be that Satan was a sort of Croesus whose object was to make a hireling of Man as Solon. Probably he was the first gambler. He put Hell on the market and invited
1 The Evening News, October 2G, 1929.