At Geneva

There used to be Sunday mornings in fair-lawned Montclair, N. J. when prosperous commuters, resting from their labors, dallied over the name of Harry Emerson Fosdick. He was queer, discussible, young.

Members of the First Baptist Church, especially the men, began to be proud of him. He knew a lot. His sermons were not merely repetitions of abstract nouns and pious adjectives. When he preached, he set his verbs to work, pulling facts, incidents, aphorisms, from Classical History, Renaissance, Art, Modern Business.

Some Baptist women wondered whether their church was entirely fortunate. Certainly young Mr. Fosdick was nothing to look at --his face was paunchy, his black knitted* hair gave an unkempt appearance. His voice, too, retained the flat tones, the slightly nasal twang of upstate New York. There was nothing about his person suggesting the aesthete. These, however, were trifles. There were more serious causes of offence--for example, he was perpetually stepping on the toes of U. S. sentimentality. And he often refused to come to the .telephone when he had retired to his study. But much was forgiven him for his bride's sake. She was utterly sympathetic. It was impossible not to like her.

All this was 20 years ago, when the newly ordained , graduate of Union Theological Seminary and his bride settled down in pleasant and pretty Montclair.

Last week Importance bustled along the quays and streets of Geneva, Switzerland (see LEAGUE OF NATIONS Page 11). The great the ex-great, the near-great crowded its hundred hotels. Gibble-gabble yielded place to political economy. Sight-seeing became people-seeing. The world was micrographed. On Sunday morning Importance climbed a narrow road up the steep central hill toward church. It went to hear the League of Nations sermon preached by an American, whom a famed Jew, Rabbi Stephen S. Wise, had described as "Fosdick--the least hated and best loved heretic that ever lived." That a heretic should also be the most widely acclaimed pulpit-orator of his generation was (to the Geneva cosmopolites) one of those magnificent Americanisms which added flavor to the most solemn occasion.

He spoke. His beginning:

"All they that take the sword shall perish with the sword." (Matthew xxvi. 52.1)

"When the Master said that, it could not possibly have seemed to be true . . . But today that insight of the Master comes to its own . . . Reliance on violence is self-defeating: war is suicidal, civilization itself cannot survive it.

"That fact has been written in fire across the world until not seers alone, but multitudes of plain people of every tongue, tribe and na- tion under Heaven are beginning to see the truth once so incredible."

His ending:

"The Church has come down through history too often trying to carry the cross of Jesus in one hand and a dripping sword in the other, until now when Christians look out upon the consequence of it all, this abysmal disgrace of Christendom making mockery of the Gospel, the conviction rises that we would better go back to our first traditions, our early purity, and see whether those first disciples of the Lord were not nearer right than we have been.

"We cannot reconcile Jesus Christ and war--that is the essence of the matter. That is the challenge which today should stir the conscience of Christendom.

"War is the most colossal and ruinous social sin that afflicts mankind: it is utterly and irremediably unchristian; in its total method and effect it means everything that Jesus did not mean and it means nothing that He did mean; it is a more blatant denial of every Christian doctrine about God and man than all the theoretical atheists on earth ever could devise.

"Here today, as an American, under this high and hospitable roof, I cannot speak for my Government, but both as an American and as a Christian I do speak for millions of my fellow-citizens in wishing your great work, in which we believe, for which we pray, our absence from which we painfully regret, the eminent success which it deserves. . ."

For the next year, Dr. Fosdick will be traveling--to Egypt in November, to Greece in December, in the spring to Palestine. A man who has little liking for the press, and less for personal publicity, it is unlikely the U. S. will hear much of its most notable religionist until he returns in October, 1926, to assume the pastorate of an "inclusive church" which John D. Rockefeller Jr. is building.

Yet, wherever he may be in the flesh, it has become henceforth difficult to discuss religion without using Fosdick as a landmark, definition, implication. Why is this? What happened between the youthful suburban pastorate and the pinnacle of middle-aged fame?

Ecclesiastical preferment had nothing to do with the Fosdick ascendency. He was a Baptist -- and the Baptist Church contains no ecclesiastical ladder. The simple facts are that from 1904 to 1915, Fosdick remained in Montclair. He began to give a few lectures at Union Theological Seminary, Manhattan, and finally removed, in 1915, bag and baggage to the Seminary to become Professor of Practical Theology.

Philosophical or scholarly originality had nothing to do with Fosdick's fame. All of his ideas have been expressed before. His modern approach to the Bible is based on the scholarship of others.

Nor has Dr. Fosdick tumbled into leadership by sheer weight of "personality." He is not a Moody, nor a Billy Sunday, nor a Roosevelt. Dignity and reason and gentleness clothe him.

Dr. Fosdick is first of all a student. He has come as near as any man to making the whole world of knowledge his own. He is then a teacher--eager to pass on to others what he himself has learned.

As student and teacher, Dr. Fosdick soon discovered that a great many people were sidetracking Christianity. Either they ignored it altogether, or else they kept it strictly apart from their practical everyday lives. This Dr. Fosdick analyzed as the chief cause of their unhappy discontent.

Studying, teaching, Dr. Fosdick became more convinced as years passed that intellectual objections to Christianity were without foundation. Jesus never said he was born of a virgin. Jesus may have believed the Biblical account of creation, but he never said that Genesis was inerrant. Jesus promised resurrection but he never guaranteed that a man with blue eyes on earth would have the same blue eyes in heaven. In short, Dr. Fosdick found nothing in the religion of Jesus which is not as worthy of belief today as it was in Jesus' time.*

So Dr. Fosdick accepted the pulpit of the First Presbyterian Church. There he confronted a restless, skeptical, materially minded world with the ancient and eternal verities of religion.

At this point the fundamentalists attacked him. The issue was joined between an "inclusive" and a "divisive" church. Dr. Fosdick has become the hero of the former, holding out to thousands the hope that as soon as they earnestly seek God, they are already "not far from the Kingdom of God."

*Years later, at a great banquet, a bald-headed toastmaster referred to this personal feature. Replying to the introduction, Dr. Fosdick pleaded that hair that was knitted was better than hair that was nit.

*"In minor ways, of course the imitation of Jesus is today impossible. His clothes, his Aramaic dialect, such things as these, and others deeper still in which his modes of thought and speech were necessarily conformed to the customs of his country and time, we cannot follow. But his character is so universal that even Renan cries: 'Whatever the surprises of history, Jesus will never be surpassed.' Men of all generations find in his trust in God, his loyalty to his Cause, his love of men, his quenchless hope, in these timeless and universal qualities suffused by his divine spirit, their unsurpassable and complete Ideal."--From Manhood of the Master, one of the books by Dr. Fosdick which has taken his "circulation" well beyond the million mark.