One Foot in Heaven. By Hartzell Spence. (Harrap. - 8s. 64.)
DR. SPENCE, the author's father, was a Methodist parson in Iowa. For this reason the book is an important sidelight on the.Middle West. It is also an entertaining, neatly written, often surprising biography, which the Reader's Digest thought it worth while to print in an abbreviated form. Dr. Spence was an extremely practical parson and liked a good church fight A rich old lady went over to the Baptists ; a minority, objecting to his friendliness with negroes, set out to convict him of heresy ; his son was accused of getting a girl into trouble, so that someone else might get Dr. Spence's place.- But he beat them every time ; in the second case by preaching a sermon which, when it was attacked as heretical, turned out to have been first preached by the nearest Bishop. He also raised 500,000 dollars for a Methodist college, sold a church and site for a profit to Piggly-wiggly (a grocery chain), and organised the building of a new church so that his parsonage would have to be moved and rebuilt. This political and financial wrangling occupies a lot of the book. The rest is partly a story of his family, who were not allowed cigarettes, the theatre, or a gramophone in 1910 and went to Sunday cinemas in 5935; and partly of the parson's friendly advice and assistance to congregations which were frequently- changed (with political manoeuvres) and which gave him in return a modest salary, friendship, marriage-fees (his eyes lit up at a ten-dollar one), divinity panocha and cream-soft fudge, and a good dinner on Sundays. Dr. Spence was no mystic, but he certainly was practical.
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