"Are You God?"

"Tell God I want him here!" snapped Justice Jacob Panken, sitting last week in Manhattan's Children's Court.

A lawyer hurried to a telephone. Presently a shiny automobile rolled up to Children's Court. Out of it bustled a little black man who until that moment had ignored the Court's subpoena. He shuffled up to the bar.

"Are you God?" asked Justice Panken. "If you say 'yes' you may be cited for contempt of court."

The little black man whispered with his black lawyer. Then he said he would not incriminate himself by answering.

Justice Panken insisted: "Are you or are you not God?"

Dolefully Rev. Major J. ("Father") Divine, evangelist to whites and Negroes in New York's lusty Harlem (TIME, Dec. 25, 1933 et seq.), admitted: "No, I am not God, but millions of people think I am and I'd like them to believe it. . . ."

Pinned down for the first time to a sense-making statement of what he is, Father Divine stood crestfallen while Justice Panken observed: "You are a destroyer of children. You have taken a mother away from her child."

Typical was the case which brought the Harlem Messiah into Children's Court. A school principal had complained that a 14-year-old Negro girl had been taken by her mother to live in a Divine "Heaven" in Harlem. Justice Panken sent the child to live with a sister, sent the mother to Bellevue Hospital after she put on a typical Divinery. Writhing, gesticulating, the woman fell to the courtroom floor screaming: "Father Divine is God, he is God, he is God, he is God!"

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