Election of a Leader

To one of U.S. Protestantism's most celebrated ministers last week came an honor long past due. Affable, handsome, internationally known Dr. Henry Sloane Coffin, 66, president of New York's Union Theological Seminary, was elected Moderator of the Presbyterian Church in the U.S.

In Detroit's Masonic Temple, 450 commissioners attended the church's 155th General Assembly. After listening to speeches for Dr. Coffin and for his rival, Dr. George H. Talbott, pastor of the First Church of Passaic, N.J., they voted: Coffin 291; Talbott 159.

Fish Market. Son of a wealthy Manhattan family (merchants and philanthropists). Coffin went to Yale ('97, Skull and Bones, Phi Betta Kappa, now a fellow of Yale's Corporation), studied further in Scotland and Germany. Back in the U.S. he went to Union, was ordained a Presbyterian minister in 1900. His first parish was a room over a Bronx fish market. There he preached "damnation with the Cross in it," displayed such zeal that his congregation vowed the odor of sanctity overcame the odor of fish.

Five years later, he went to take over run-down midtown Madison Avenue Church. The rich came to the church, the poor East Siders went to the chapel which the church supported. Coffin abolished the chapel, brought the two congregations together. He abolished pew rents (a daring innovation in those days), got new parishioners by following moving vans in the neighborhood, ringing the bell before the family got settled. He regularly took his folding reed organ to tenement houses at 2 in the morning to hold a service for neighborhood street railway workers arriving home from the night shift.

Freedom for Schoolmen. Coffin's fame spread to England and Scotland, where he was often a preacher. He declined a call to Edinburgh's Free St. George's Church, Scotland's leading parish. He received twelve honorary degrees (five Doctorates of Divinity), including one from the Jewish Theological Seminary, one from the Faculte Libre de Theologie Protestante, Paris.

In 1926 Coffin became Union's president. The onetime Presbyterian seminary (it became interdenominational 51 years ago) appealed to him as a place "to turn out men of adventurous spirit, unfettered by tradition." No one was surprised that he administered a ticklish job with complete fair-mindedness. He took both radical students and faculty members, notably Methodism's Harry F. Ward, in his stride, refused to oust Ward. Said he:

"They are at liberty to join whatever organization they wish. One hopes that men in responsible positions will act with Christian discretion."

Students who refused to register for the draft drew his rebuke, also the warning that Union would not become "a haven for draft dodgers." No admirer of Communism (he said Union could not be made "the guinea pig for some future Soviet"), he admires the Russian people enough to be vice president of Russian War Relief. Through his efforts, Union's board last year elected a Negro minister to membership, first major U.S. seminary to do so.

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