For Pagans

In a homely Methodist Church on Manhattan's upper west side, audiences of homely Christians listened quietly last week to the warm words of an oldtimer evangelist. "Gypsy" Rodney Smith had visited the U. S. 35 times in the past half-century, but this visit was different. He had been hired this time by the Greater New York Federation of Churches to do something about New York City's 4,000,000 pagans.

Gypsy Smith was born in England, 79 years ago, in a tent under a hornbeam tree. Until he was 18, he never slept in a house. A peddler of clothespins which his father, a Christianized gypsy, carved of hornbeam wood, Rodney Smith taught himself to read from a Bible and a dictionary. Under the hornbeam tree he preached his first faltering homily. To the same tree he returned four years ago, a falterer no longer, to preach to 12,000 people. By that time, he estimated, 40,000,000 had heard him--as a Salvation Army recruit under William Booth, a Y. M. C. A. man during World War I, a barnstorming trouper on many a world tour. Countless souls he had won for Jesus. One he remembers well. As he knelt with his convert and asked him, searchingly: "Arthur, what's it mean?", "Gypsy, it's for keeps," replied England's late, beloved Laborite Arthur Henderson.

Gypsy Smith began evangelizing New York last month in The Bronx, delivered 13 sermons in rich, old Fifth Avenue Presbyterian Church, moved uptown again last fortnight. He winds up his engagement this week in no less august a fane than the Cathedral of St. John the Divine, with Bishop William Thomas Manning presiding. To his audiences, Gypsy Smith's black eyes have seemed as keen as ever, his voice mellow, his frame limber. (Only last year he married for the second time: a 26-year-old to whom he had long been "my hero.") Never a ranter, Gypsy Smith preaches of Christ Crucified, rambling as evangelists do. He has told audiences: "You are my manuscript. I look into your faces and wait for God to tell me what to say." He sings hymns in a sweet tenor, solo and with the congregation. He threatens no hell fire, for he believes that "it's no good to scold poor sinners. I know now it's better to love them."

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