Gore and Lawrence

The Bishop of Massachusetts mistook the ex-Bishop of Oxford. It was Haley Fiske, President of the Metropolitan Life Insurance Co., who stumbled upon the mistake.

The Bishop of Massachusetts, William Lawrence, published a little book (TIME, Jan. 14). Liberals in the Episcopal Church reviewed it with joy. Insurance President Fiske sent a copy of the book to his old friend, the Rt. Rev. Charles Gore (Bishop of Oxford from 1911 to 1919, famed High Churchman of the Church of England) because the book quoted Dr. Gore in support of its thesis. Dr. Gore replied:

"You are quite at liberty to publish this letter if you wish. I cannot understand how Dr. Lawrence, the Bishop of Massachusetts, can have said that ... I had come to the conclusion 'that there is no essential connection between the belief in the Virgin birth and a belief in the incarnation. . . . The fact of the virginal conception of Christ was no sooner heard than it was welcomed by the Church and taken up into its creed. It has seemed to all successive generations that the belief in the incarnation was so congruous with belief in the Virgin birth that the former could hardly have taken place in any other manner. It has also seemed that the birth of the New Man must have involved something discontinuous as well as something continuous with the old sinful humanity. . . . In fact, men have not in fact believed in the incarnation (with very few exceptions) who disbelieved the Virgin birth."