St. Paul's Nash

The Rev. Dr. Norman Burdett Nash, rector of 91-year-old St. Paul's School (Concord, N.H.), looked his part. His close-cropped mustache, his energetic briskness, his ready laugh, seemed to fit the schoolmaster more than the top-rank churchman. Yet among graduates of haughty, hockey-playing St. Paul's it has been no secret that the school and Headmaster Nash have not been an ideal couple.

Last week Dr. Nash surprised no one by accepting his election as Bishop of Massachusetts* to take the place of the Rt. Rev. Henry Knox Sherrill, Presiding Bishop-elect of the Protestant Episcopal Church.

A broad churchman like Bishop Sherrill, 58-year-old Norman Nash, son of an Episcopal clergyman, was graduated from Harvard and Episcopal Theological School in Cambridge (Mass.). He studied at Cambridge (England), and was ordained in time to serve as a chaplain in World War I. After the war he returned to Episcopal Theological School, where for 19 years he taught New Testament and Christian social ethics, built a reputation for encyclopedic knowledge and crisp, closely reasoned lectures.

When he went to St. Paul's in 1939, intimates wondered how he would take to its cloistered tyrannies and traditions. Some faculty members soon found Headmaster Nash's dynamic forthrightness hard to take and some of his proposed changes even harder; most such masters have now left the school. Though St. Paul's and its headmaster could part with some relief, the Bishop-elect took his time about making up his mind.

Said the Bishop-elect last week: "I reached my decision after a fortnight of hard thinking and real praying. . . . The decision was made extremely difficult because I feel the work of a church school and the ministry of its head ... is of great importance."

* Not to be confused with the diocese of Western Massachusetts, the see of the Rt. Rev. William A. Lawrence.

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