Josef Hromadka was a man of controversy his whole life long. A quarter of a century ago, as the second world war was nearing its end, a refugee from his native land and a professor at Princeton Theological Seminary in the U.S.A., he published a testament and a prophecy for Western bourgeois civilization under the title Doom and Resurrection. The world had reason to be cautiously optimistic in these last days of 1944. The first atomic bomb had not yet exploded. The wartime partnership between the Soviet Union and the Western Allies was in full emotional swing; "cold war" and "iron curtain" were still unknown concepts. D-Day was a fact; the Nazi armies were in retreat; the United Nations had been conceived, if not yet born. Against the terrible darkness of the previous years, the future gave promise of a new and better world.

A recent letter to the editor of one of the newspapers I read suggested that our present era should go down as the Age of Apprehension rather than the Age of Aquarius. The writer went on to list thirty "crises"—ranging from Russia to a higher rate of V.D.—that depress the minds of the citizenry. He then concluded: "And just in case any reader refuses to get drowned by these, there's always the H-bomb hanging over our heads." The news, to be sure, is rarely good these days. But it is more than a question of bad news. A letter of this sort rather vividly and even pathetically expresses the widespread sense of malaise that characterizes these times. We seem indisputably to be living through one of those periods of cultural collapse that periodically overtakes history, a time when the human estate is at low ebb, only tenuously connected to the sources of its replenishment.

Words are like people; they have many relatives and companions. When you decide to marry a word to your particular purpose, it is thus well to make clear in advance that it is the word you want and not the whole family of associations. "Myth," of course, is a much-used and well-battered word. But in spite of varied usage, "myth" remains in linguistic currency and, if carefully defined, can be serviceable.