Portraits of Preachers

What manner of man is the U. S. preacher? He may be Liberal, Moderate or Fundamentalist, poet, teacher or mystic. He is less the scholar-theologian than his brothers in England and Scotland; more the pastor-executive-publicist. He is entertaining and vivacious, but restrained in comparison with the thunderers of half a century ago. He speaks over the radio. He publishes as many volumes of sermons in a year as were published in a decade prior to 1890. He is about 54 years old. "It is doubtful if there has been another period in American history so opulent in the number of strong and brilliant preachers as our own." Thus, in presenting a book on U. S. preachers,* writes Edgar De Witt Jones, Detroit minister (Disciples of Christ, Central Woodward Church). A onetime president of his church's international body, onetime Detroit Newsman, at present a correspondent for the Christian Century, Author Jones knows his preachers well. He portrays 32 of them, chosen after careful consultations among fellow-preachers. Excerpts: P: Frederick Bohn Fisher of Ann Arbor. Mich, is the Mahatma Gandhi's most impassioned U. S. devotee. A Methodist missionary in India, he was made a bishop in 1920, resigned in 1930 because his job was "too much burdened with administration and too little harnessed to definite spiritual functions." Of him St. Gandhi has said: "Bishop Fred Fisher first came to visit me on a Monday. He talked all day. I couldn't even get a word in anywhere. All I could do was listen. I kept my mouth shut and let the Bishop talk. The rest did me so much good that I have ever since kept Monday as a day of silence." Dr. Fisher is famed for the way he ends his prayers, looking toward heaven and saying firmly: "For JESUS' sake, Amen."

P: Methodist William Leroy ("Bill") Stidger, now of Boston's Church of All Nations, has been criticized as "sensational" and "vaudevillian." He is "frisky as a calf, playful as a puppy, and if need be, billicose as a bull in a beauty shop . . . a combination of Walt Whitman, 'Buffalo Bill' and Theodore Roosevelt." West Virginia-born, he studied at Allegheny College, Brown, and Boston University. He claims he told Author Sinclair Lewis to "write a book about a preacher." Author Lewis settled in Kansas City where "Bill" Stidger was preaching, got him and other local ministers to help him with Elmer Gantry. But Dr. Stidger "most certainly did not have in mind the kind of a preacher book that Lewis wrote." P: Tall, highbrowed, pink-cheeked Reinhold Niehbuhr, Socialist, is "the most popular speaker among college groups on the American platform today." Editor of World Tomorrow, he teaches at Manhattan's Union Theological Seminary. Unlike that other preacher-to-the-young, Daniel Alfred ("Dan") Poling (whom Author Jones does not include among his chosen 32), Niehbuhr is "recusant, an independent, a pathfinder. . . . Niehbuhr loves to shock the complacent; Poling to inspire the indifferent. . . . Poling is a lesser Bryan; Niehbuhr a more intellectual Debs."

P: White-crowned Dr. Peter Ainslie of Baltimore's Christian Temple "would have made a famous cardinal." A stout-hearted warrior for Peace and Church Unity, Virginia-born, he once made a Virginia audience squirm by telling them how, in a Jim Crow car, he asked a Negro woman to sit by him and cried down the other passengers when they sought to have her ousted. P: Author Jones asked two Methodists who is their ablest preacher. Both named Dr. Ernest Fremont Tittle of Evanston, Ill., who last spring was hounded as a Communist by a group calling themselves "Paul Reveres" (TIME, March 27). Said one Methodist: "He leaves me cold but he has the goods: brains, courage and an extraordinary gift of adapting the old Gospel

to present conditions . . . Tittle is

Methodism's best gift to the university circles."

P: Editor Charles Clayton Morrison of the Christian Century "needs plenty of time if he is to achieve the best results oratorically." In one church where he was to "supply" for several Sundays, a clock was placed in the pulpit with a sign: "Preach not over 30 minutes." But "when Dr. Morrison preaches he preaches and a little thing like a clock and an inscription warning him to stop in 30 minutes is as futile as a snowball in the tropics."

*American Preachers of Today (Bobbs-Merrill, $2).

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