Hope Deferred

The record of the 55th triennial convention of the Protestant Episcopal Church had been better than many a pessimistic liberal churchman had expected. Merger with the Presbyterians was still distant. But delegates at Philadelphia had hammered out a brand-new marriage canon (TIME, Sept. 23). And they had elected without delay a top-drawer, liberal Presiding Bishop.

The Bishop. Henry Knox Sherrill knew what he wanted to do by the time he entered Yale at 16. Fellow classmates (1911) remember him as a quiet, hardworking student who earned his way by waiting on tables and janitor jobs, who spent his spare time with books, billiards and social work in New Haven's slums. At Episcopal Theological School in Cambridge he stood out as the most respected, though youngest, member of his class. He was ordained a priest at 24, while assisting at Boston's famed, gloomy Trinity Church, where later he became rector. In 1930, at 39, he was consecrated Bishop of Massachusetts.

Never had a Presiding Bishop been elected so quickly--the closed session of the House of Bishops lasted little more than an hour.* Exclaimed his predecessor, the Most Rev. Henry St. George Tucker: "A wonderful man for the job!" High, low and liberal churchmen alike were agreed.*

The Merger. In their long, low-ceilinged meeting room in Houston Hall, the 150-man House of Bishops sat in maple chairs before rough little tables--an impressive phalanx of white hair, black clothes and informal dignity. Into their hands last week was put the nettle of Episcopal-Presbyterian union. The lower House of Deputies had refused to grasp it, instead had gingerly pushed it aside by voting: 1) to keep for another three years the Joint Commission on Unity, and request it to draft a new basis of union; 2) to ask the Presbyterians to produce a similar document; 3) to call for a standing commission on Church Unity to be set up by the Lambeth Conference, /-

The bishops' palms were no tougher than the deputies'. In two hours of debate they passed the lower-house resolution with but one mild amendment (to ask the 1948 Lambeth Conference for "advice & counsel" instead of a new commission).

Bishop Angus Dun of Washington, a "liberal," called it "an evasion by well-meaning people."

Said he: "The solution is, refuse to get mad, refuse to quit, and hope that the people on the other [Presbyterian] side will do the same."

High churchmen, however, took a different view. To them the Joint Commission's report had looked more like a proposal for their Church's liquidation than for its union. These saw the convention's turndown as no evasion but a prerequisite for any real first step toward merger.

Ecumenical-minded Bishop Sherrill deeply regretted the convention's postponement of action on unity with the Presbyterians, confessed to "a desperate feeling" about the state of society. Said he: "For the first time in my life I don't know what kind of a world my children and grandchildren will have to live in. ... I hope in so far as possible for a united Christian approach to world problems. How can we hope for nations to cooperate when we do not cooperate religiously? I see no immediate hope for Christian unity, but the necessity for it is imperative. It is either Christianity or paganism."

Gates of Hell. As the Right Reverends, the Reverends and the churchly laymen went home, the Convention's action on the vexed question of Presbyterian union still looked to many a Christian like asking people to dinner and being surprised when they showed up. Fumed the liberal Episcopal semimonthly, The Churchman:

"During the discussion in the House of Bishops on Union with the Presbyterians, Bishop Powell of Maryland declared that 'the gates of hell shall not prevail against the Episcopal Church.' It turned out that the Bishop was overoptimistic, for the gates of hell did a good job of prevailing. The painful level of discussion in the House of Deputies was sufficient evidence --and evidence, also, that the Protestant Episcopal Church is more in need of an infusion of Presbyterian intelligence than anyone had previously suspected. . . .

"If the Presbyterian Church is still willing to continue negotiations with the Episcopal Church after that exhibition, they can well claim to represent an essence of Christianity unique in the modern world."

From the Presbyterians themselves--who, though they might have considered themselves tentatively invited, had not actually rung the Episcopal doorbell--no comment.

*Only four of the 19 previous Presiding Bishops in U.S. Episcopal history have been elected. Until 1925, they were chosen by seniority.

* The old categories--"high and crazy, broad and hazy, low and lazy"--no longer hold true. While "high" still means Anglo-Catholic, "broad" now connotes tendencies toward Unitarian heresy. Churchmen predominantly interested in the application of Christianity to social problems are called "liberal."

/- The Lambeth Conference is the meeting at London's Lambeth Palace, about every ten years, of all the archbishops and bishops of the Anglican Communion. There have been seven; the last, in 1930, had 307 bishops present. The Conference intended for 1940 was postponed because of the war.

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