Dr. Fitch's Return

It is an exaggeration to state that boys in eastern preparatory schools are thrilled to read that the Park Avenue Presbyterian Church of Manhattan last week asked Dr. Albert Parker Fitch to return East as their pastor and that, therefore, he will be able to resume a broken practice. Headmasters, however, were definitely pleased.

Lately Dr. Fitch has been teaching religious history at Carleton College, upstanding Congregational institution at Northfield, Minn. That is not far from Madison, Wis., where Dr. Fitch's good friend from Amherst College, Dr. Alexander Meiklejohn is experimenting with a theory that students can teach themselves by sufficient contact with instructors, books and laboratories. His school is part of the University of Wisconsin. When Dr. Meiklejohn was president of Amherst College, Dr. Fitch taught Biblical literature there. When President Meiklejohn would not cater to the conservative dictation of Amherst trustees and resigned (TIME, June 25, 1923 et seq.), Dr. Fitch, his doughty partisan, resigned also. He had been in the same position himself, as president of Andover Theological Seminary at Cambridge. When told to go among the Philistines & plebians to collect money for the institution, he resigned (in 1917).

After the Amherst fuss, Dr. Meiklejohn for two years developed the idea of the school now functioning at Wisconsin. Dr. Fitch secured a professional post immediately--at Carleton. There in a college of liberal arts for the past three years he has led a quiet professorial life. Summers he went East to preach in churches whose pastors were on vacation. That is how the elders of Park Avenue Presbyterian Church learned to know him.

Last summer he preached in churches near Manhattan. Park Avenue Presbyterian elders, scouting for a successor to Tertius T. van Dyke,* heard his musical voice and liked his lively, energetic manner of preaching. Last week they unanimously called him for pastor. But he will not quit Carleton College until his present semester is ended, in February.

*Who abandoned them for the First Congregational Church at Washington, Conn. He was named Tertius because third in a line of preachers become famed. His grandfather was the Reverend Henry Jackson van Dyke; his father is Henry van Dyke. He calls his small son Quartus, i.e., Fourth.