"Hell of a Time"

In the Church as well as in Industry, hard times draw class lines taut. In the words of an anonymous informant of Dr. Benson Young Landis, writing in the National Conference of Jews & Christians News Service this week: "The liberal clergy are having a hell of a time." In New Jersey a pair of pastors who made much of their liberalism last week were having their hellish time right out in public.

In Morristown for the year past, a ruddy-faced, 32-year-old Union Theological Seminary graduate named Richard A. Morford has been acting pastor of First Presbyterian Church, whose members proudly claim that George Washington once worshipped there. Presbyterian Morford went to First Church in 1931 as Minister of Christian Education, made himself popular with the young people. He made no bones of the fact that he is a Socialist. Year ago he helped bring Norman Thomas to Morristown, introduced that amiable onetime Presbyterian minister and Presidential candidate to his listeners. Abruptly last week Socialist Morford announced his resignation, declined to comment. A trustee of "Old First" said that its older members had feared Mr. Morford would "inculcate Socialist doctrines in the minds of the young people."

In Palisade, across the Hudson River from Manhattan, members of a nondenominational Union Church last week dismissed their spectacular pastor, Rev. Vincent Godfrey Burns, 42, ostensibly for having called them "cutthroats, skunks, snobs, greedy aristocrats." Pastor Burns has an equally spectacular brother, Robert Elliott Burns, who fled from a Georgia work camp, wrote a book about it (I Am a Fugitive From a Georgia Chain Gang), three years ago persuaded Governor Moore of New Jersey not to send him back. Year ago, toward the close of the trial of Bruno Richard Hauptmann in Flemington, N.J., Preacher Vincent Burns leaped-up in the courtroom, babbled something about a man having confessed the Lindbergh kidnapping to him. Rushed out of court, Mr. Burns tried unsuccessfully to sell a 10,000-word account of the "confession" to the Press. Said he: '"I am not a seeker of publicity." Two days later he turned up successively in three theatres in Queens, N. Y., performed a marriage on the stage of each, made a speech about the Hauptmann case.

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