Conventions

Last week:

P:The 156th General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church in the U.S.A. (2,000,000 communicants) met in Chicago's neo-Gothic Fourth Presbyterian Church. To a jampacked audience assembled to elect his successor, lean, ascetic-looking, scholarly Henry Sloane Coffin finished his term as moderator with a slam-bang speech.

Said he: "Had the church succeeded in placing all nations on the heart of her people, we should never have been bedevilled by the hideous pagan isolationism. . . . American Protestant Christianity [is] generally a one-class church. ... It is a sorry and alarming fact that Anglo-Saxon white Protestants seem to be imbued with more feeling of racial superiority and are guilty of more arrogant snobbery toward those of another color than any other people. The church has apparently not succeeded in inculcating humility in English-speaking whites."

Later Dr. Coffin explained his bluntness: "This was my swan song, so I could say what I pleased." Asked if a new moderator could not express himself similarly, he retorted: "Oh, yes. But the number of brethren who pussyfoot is large. What's the use?"

New moderator is Dr. Roy Ewing Vale, who resembles Woodrow Wilson, has been pastor of Indianapolis' Tabernacle Presbyterian Church since 1940.

P:In Atlantic City, 3,500 delegates of the Northern Baptist Convention (1,460,000 communicants) elected Mrs. Leslie E. Swain of Providence the second woman president in the Convention's 130-year history.* The Convention reaffirmed the Northern Baptist anti-war stand, but decided to give its blessing to individual Baptists taking part in the war. Said the Convention's war resolution (drawn up by Dr. Daniel A. Poling): "The church must be the church--not a recruiting agency for any government. [But] she must companion her sons and daughters wherever as conscientious Christians they may go-to the battlefront, to the ambulance corps and to the camp for objectors. . .

P:In Boston the 119th annual meeting of the American Unitarian Association (62,-000 communicants) elected Ohio's Senator Harold H. Burton as moderator to succeed Dr. Philip C. Nash, president of the University of the City of Toledo. An expected row between the right and left wing Unitarians never came off. The issue: leftist Unitarians want Unitarianism declared a non-Christian religion with the emphasis placed on humanitarianism.

*The first (1922) was Mrs. Helen Barrett Montgomery of Rochester, N.Y.

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