Dr. Mott Retires

John R. Mott is retiring.

For the first time in 54 years U.S. Protestantism will have to get along without the active help of its most famous organizer and greatest money-raiser. John R. Mott's resignation as chairman of the International Missionary Council became effective at once, and his place is being filled temporarily by liberal, mission-wise Methodist Bishop James Chamberlain Baker of Los Angeles.

If Emerson was right in saying that an institution is but the lengthened shadow of one man. Dr. Mott has cast his shadow in all directions. In 1886, while still a Cornell undergraduate, he helped build the Student Volunteer Movement. In 1895 he sparked the World's Student Christian Federation proclaiming "the evangelization of the world in this generation." He inspired the Laymen's Missionary Movement which spurred U.S. Protestants to increase their gifts for missions. At Edinburgh in 1910 he chairmaned the great interdenominational world conference, out of which evolved in 1920 the I.M.C., which he has headed ever since.

More than any other one man, Dr. Mott is responsible for the Y.M.C.A.'s great international organization, which now numbers 2,000,000 members in some 10,000 local associations in 60 lands. He pioneered in training native-born Y. workers, saw them strengthen the Y.'s influence in such lands as China--where six members of one Chiang Kai-shek Cabinet were former Y. secretaries. He personally has raised more than $300,000,000 for his causes.

The Anglican Bishop of Ely once rightly described Dr. Mott as "this Ulysses of modern missionaries." For example, he has toured Latin America five times in the last two years. Though given to car, air-and seasickness, he has traveled more than 2,000,000 miles by train, plane and ship. "Sometimes when I wake in the morning," he says, "I have to ask my secretary what country I am in."

Secret of his organizing success is his businesslike practice of swallowing a subject whole before he goes into action. Then he sets out with a plan, returns with a going organization.

Dr. Mott's talents as a diplomat have made him welcome alike among Greek Catholics and Scotch Presbyterians. Presidents have tried to enlist him, but he has thrice declined diplomatic posts, once an ambassadorship, and twice the post of U.S. Minister to China. He has never let any blandishment lure him away from religious work.

Tall, deep-voiced and deliberate, John R. Mott, still hale at 76, has practiced self-discipline since youth. He got an en cyclopedia from his father for neither drinking, smoking nor gambling until 21. Not famed for wit or humor, he knows how to find and use facts, whip men up to enthusiasm.

For 55 years, Dr. Mott has written himself frequent memoranda containing pious advice. At Cornell, for instance, Student Mott wrote: "No worry, no excessive indulgence of the emotions, no doing two hours' work in one hour's time. . . . Have only a few intimates and those the best--for no man rises above the moral level of his intimates. Don't neglect the society of cultivated women." His favorite maxim: "Let us turn stumbling blocks into steppingstones."

Scores of serious-minded young men in school and college ha ye felt that Dr. Mott was the greatest man in the world. (One now famous Manhattan pastor expressed this conviction so firmly in prep school that he was nicknamed "John R.")

Few men in the world know more about missions than Dr. Mott. Their indefatigable booster, he has never been a blind optimist about them. In 1930 a talk he made to a lay group called together by John D. Rockefeller Jr. (who put up the requisite $675,000) led to the Laymen's Foreign Missions Inquiry and resulted in the much-debated Re-Thinking Missions--probably the severest appraisal of missions churchmen have ever penned.

Last week he repeated the comment he made in 1939 after the Madras Conference: "If Christianity should die out in Europe and America, it exists in such vitality and propagating power in the younger churches of India, China, Japan and Africa, that sooner or later it would spread from those bases and re-establish itself among us."

Troops were quartered last week in five Protestant churches of a southern California town.

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