Henry C Link
the Return to Religion
McMillian Hardback Dust Cover included but tattered
see photos of dustcover

front board has owners label
181 pages McMillian 1936 45th print 1953



Henry Link was a psychologist who in the 1930s joined the psychology and religion bandwagon

this must have been a very popular book to reprint 45 times

This book is not on anybodys aa list but I found it very interesting and inspiring, and also in the same literary vein as many of the AA spiritual books

Link was director of the Psychology Service of NY NY
He pioneered the idea of Employment Psychology He authored the Personality Quotient a measure of the extent to which a person has acquired by practice the skills and habits which interest and serve other people. He wrote a sequel to Return to Religion called the Rediscover of Man

Chapters Include
My Return to Religion
I go to Church
The Achievement of Happines
Fools of Reason
Wine At Weddings
Children Are Made
Love and Marriage
Social Planning
Vice of Education
The Abundant Life


Link Quotes While one person hesitates because he feels inferior, another is busy making mistakes and becoming superior.

Henry Emerson Fosdick Friend of AA writes about Henry Link:

think that Jesus has already turned out to be the supreme realist of history. For example, a leading psychologist of my generation, Dr. Henry C. Link, was alienated from the church for twenty-five years, but he came back again because in his practice he kept running into the realistic truth of Jesus’ insights into man’s inner life. A great variety of incidents, he wrote, gradually forced me to realize that the findings of psychology in respect to personality and happiness were largely a rediscovery of old religious truths. No one ever really believes in Jesus until, one way or another, he has that kind of experience. He thinks of Jesus as lovely, alluring, appealing to man’s highest ideals and all that, and then someday he runs head-on into a fact, an incontrovertible fact and a law of life that visibly operates, and there comes to him the surprised but inescapable conviction: Jesus is right! What he said is realistically true! This teaching of his is not wishful idealism, but a fact which man neglects or denies at his peril! Theology or no theology, it is then that a man really believes in Christ.



the great 1930s religious Writer Georgia Harkness writes about Henry Link: Psychology and Prayer We have maintained throughout that the psalmist had the right perspective when he wrote, I have set the Lord always before me. Prayer must be God-centered, or it is not prayer. There are many forms of self-examination and psychotherapy that do good -- some of them great good -- but they are not prayer and ought not to be confused with it. The main reason, therefore, for putting a psychological analysis late in the discussion is to keep the emphasis and sequence true. Nevertheless, we ought to understand ourselves, and anything that can be learned from psychology ought to be gratefully welcomed. Since this is one world, anything that is true in psychology must also be true in theology and religion. It is partial truths, or untruths, that appear to clash. There is great loss to the public in the fact that religious leaders have so often fought shy of psychology while psychologists in turn have viewed religion with disdain. Fortunately, there are signs within the past few years of a much closer meeting. (Among these signs are the great vogue some ten years ago of Henry C. Link’s The Return to Religion and now Joshua Loth Liebman’s Peace of Mind. Within this period a considerable number of excellent books dealing with the relations of religion to mental health have appeared. The clinical training of ministers has taken long steps forward, and most of the seminaries now give courses in counseling.
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Q - How do you justify calling alcoholism an illness, and not a moral responsibility? A - Early in A.A.'s history, very natural questions arose among theologians. There was a Mr. Henry Link who had written The Return to Religion (Macmillan Co., 1937). One day I received a call from him. He stated that he strongly objected to the A.A. position that alcoholism was an illness. This concept, he felt, removed moral responsibility from alcoholics. He had been voicing this complaint about psychiatrists in the American Mercury. And now, he stated, he was about to lambaste A.A. too. Of course, I made haste to point out that we A.A.'s did not use the concept of sickness to absolve our members from moral responsibility. On the contrary, we used the fact of fatal illness to clamp the heaviest kind of moral responsibility on to the sufferer. The further point was made that in his early days of drinking the alcoholic often was no doubt guilty of irresponsibility and gluttony. But once the time of compulsive drinking, veritable lunacy had arrived and he couldn't very well be held accountable for his conduct. He then had a lunacy which condemned him to drink, in spite of all he could do; he had developed a bodily sensitivity to alcohol that guaranteed his final madness and death. When this state of affairs was pointed out to him, he was placed immediately under the heaviest kind of pressure to accept A.A.'s moral and spiritual program of regeneration -namely, our Twelve Steps. Fortunately, Mr. Link was satisfied with this view of the use that we were making of the alcoholic's illness. I am glad to report that nearly all theologians who have since thought about this matter have also agreed with that early position. While it is most obvious that free will in the matter of alcohol has virtually disappeared in most cases, we A.A. 's do point out that plenty of free will is left in other areas, It certainly takes a large amount of willingness, and a great exertion of the will to accept and practice the A.A. program. It is by this very exertion of the will that the alcoholic corresponds with the grace by which his drinking obsession can be expelled. (N.C.C.A. 'Blue Book', Vol.12, 1960))