Church & State (Concl.)

In St. Mary the Virgin's Church in Oxford last Sunday, His Grace the Lord Archbishop of Canterbury did something no Primate of England had ever done before, something that the Archbishop had frostily disapproved when upon previous occasions it had been done, or proposed, by lesser Anglican churchmen. Dr. Cosmo Gordon Lang celebrated Communion at St. Mary's altar for anyone--Orthodox Russian, Swedish Lutheran, U. S. Baptist or African Methodist--who cared to partake. And many a non-Anglican from all parts of the world did partake, for this friendly gesture, coming from one ordinarily so strict ' in churchmanship, brought to a lofty end the World Conference on Church & State (TIME, July 26).

Like the League of Nations in its earlier days, the World Conference was more notable for what it was than for what it did. In many of its pronouncements there was the sort of something-must-be-done breast-beating which appears annually at U. S. denominational conferences. Yet in the reports it adopted the conference came near its goal, which was to present to the world a series of basic, minimum propositions on which all Protestantism could agree. These had been threshed out, in French, English and German, at daily meetings of five sections of the conference, comparatively small groups manned by its best minds, for whom experts in advance had prepared masses of data.

Adopting a report on the Economic Order on which labored, among others, pious Manhattan Merchant James Milliken Speers (McCutcheon's store), Assistant Secretary of State Francis Bowes Sayre and Charles Phelps Taft II, lately one of President Roosevelt's steel mediators, the conference was able to agree that the Church was as responsible as any for "economic rivalry" and "inequalities of opportunity," since her complacency had alienated masses of people from Christianity. On Peace the conference, speaking for world Protestantism, could only affirm that Peace is the Christian way, without endorsing extreme pacifism or praising the man who takes up arms for his country. To Europeans confused by relations between Church & State, the World Conference said firmly: "We do not consider the State as the ultimate source of law, but rather as its guarantor. It is not the lord, but the servant, of justice." The conference sent a message of sympathy to the German Evangelical Church, whose delegates had been denied passports to attend. This caused the only dissension of the fortnight at Oxford. A German Methodist and a Baptist, representing a mere 200,000 of Germany's 40,000,000 Protestants, jittered that such condolences could only make things worse in Germany.

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