Mission Completed

"You are a very old man," said a solicitous Chinese general to Dr. Henry Sloane Coffin. "Go home and lie down now." The general did not know what manner of septuagenarian he was talking to. Even when 70-year-old Dr. Coffin came home last month from his seven-month junket to the Far and Middle East, he did not lie down for long. He was too busy telling his fellows Christians about his trip.

There was never much doubt about what the Lord intended for Henry Sloane Coffin. As a youngster in New York City, he used a shawl-draped set of kitchen steps for a pulpit from which to deliver a high-pitched sermon to his lawyer-father and family. From such beginnings came the clear, hard-hitting style of preaching that eventually helped to multiply attendance at his fashionable Madison Avenue Presbyterian Church from 1905 to 1926. Under his liberal leadership (1926-45), Manhattan's Union Theological Seminary moved up to top rank among U.S. divinity schools. When the Presbyterian Board of Foreign Missions began looking for a speaker for the first postwar Joseph Cook Lectures,* Preacher-Educator-Theologian Coffin was the obvious choice.

Dr. Coffin's doctor mildly advised against such a trip. His wife thought it would be fine--"provided I come along." Dr. Coffin packed. Said he: "Heaven is just as" near India as Connecticut."

Heaven watched over Dr. Coffin through India, the Philippines, China, Siam and Egypt. In 15 cities he delivered all or part of his series of five lectures on "The Self-Disclosure of God in History" --sometimes through interpreters, sometimes (as in Lahore) with History's riotous sound effects running him competition. He and equally energetic Mrs. Coffin endured a schedule that sometimes called for three or four lectures and two banquets a day; 36-hour journeys in dirty train coaches; chancy bucket-seat rides in rickety aircraft. On one occasion, engine trouble brought Dr. Coffin's plane down at a tiny Chinese town which had no Western-style accommodations, but did have a local missionary who turned out to be one of Dr. Coffin's old Union students.

Once Preacher Coffin collapsed in the pulpit with intestinal flu, causing a flurry of transpacific cables when the incident was reported in the New York Times. Once an attack of dysentery forced him to hand over his lecture script to his wife. But by & large, Dr. Coffin thinks his trip went off smoothly.

Caught in History. Christians in Asia and Egypt found Presbyterian Coffin an alert, venerable and charming American. How did he find the state of the Christian world? Said he last week:

"There is one thing all countries, including our own, seem to have in common --the sense of being caught in history and frustrated by it. And in this, perhaps, lies Christianity's special opportunity; for Christianity is deeply concerned with the historical process.

"The Philippine churches show great hope and confidence for the future. But the prestige of the U.S. has recently received a terrible blow there. To a bill granting $600,000,000 to the Philippines for rehabilitation work, somebody in Washington clumsily attached a rider stipulating that the United States is to have equal rights of 'exploitation' in the Philippines [TIME, March 24]. It will take a long, long time to repair the damage done by the word 'exploitation.'

"In China, Christianity has no competition--except secularism--among educated people. Its greatest handicap is the appalling poverty of the country. The inflation has been most ruinous to those upon whom the spread of Christianity depends.

"India was perhaps the most fascinating country of all--and the most puzzling. Among the students there is a great deal of Communism, and they see to it that their fellow Indians are very familiar with U.S. discrimination against the Negroes.

"Our missions in the Middle East are having an especially hard time. Americans as well as Moslems told me that U.S. prestige had hit an alltime low because of our official support for the Zionist position, for what seem to them to be domestic political motives."

Cost of Enterprise. "If Christians are going to carry on a successful missionary enterprise in Asia and the Middle East, three things are absolutely essential. First, we must realize that the attraction of Communism in these countries is the belief that the U.S.S.R. guarantees the poor a subsistence living. And they are poor. So we must demonstrate that our free economy works--otherwise we are beaten.

"Second, we must face up to the problem of racial discrimination in Christian America. The Hindu can say, 'My religion makes no pretense to be against racial discrimination, and yours does. Yet Jim Crowism is practiced all over your country.'

"Third, we have got to give our missionaries better financial support. The soaring cost of living we found everywhere means simply that it now costs at least three times as much to maintain the Christian enterprise. To contribute a dollar here and a dollar there is not enough. Christians must set aside a definite portion of their incomes--otherwise we shall be far behind the battle line."

* Founded in 1901 under the will of Boston Lecturer Joseph Cook, "for a lectureship to be filled by Christian scholars in defense of Christianity . . . who shall visit in succession the principal cities of China, India and Japan."

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