Happy Man

The Rev. Dr. Paul Hutchinson was a rare and happy man; he knew what he wanted to do, and he had the talent to do it with offhand distinction. A minister of the Methodist church, Paul Hutchinson brought the lively and articulate intellect of an exceptionally able journalist to his selected task: "Communicating and commending the Christian Gospel to this age." He was still vigorously communicating when he died last Sunday in Beaumont, Texas of a ruptured aorta at 65.

No single church could confine Paul Hutchinson. Born in Madison, N.J., educated for the ministry at Garrett Biblical Institute and De Pauw University, he made journalism his pulpit, edited the

China Christian Advocate in Shanghai for five years, later (in 1924) changed to the nondenominational Protestant Christian Century. Through its pages, he took as his congregation all men who shared his faith that Christian ideals still make sense in the 20th century.

Far from a Bible-thumping fundamentalist, Editor Hutchinson had no patience for the pallid, suburban moralism that he saw replacing old-fashioned evangelism in so many Protestant communities. In the pages of the Christian Century, he spoke out fearlessly as a religious and political liberal. He abhorred the "psychosis" of McCarthyism; he railed against any tendency toward clerical bureaucracy. Though Christian Century Editor Hutchinson worked tirelessly for some sort of union between the divided denominations of Protestantism, he still found time to write a spate of books (Storm over Asia, World Revolution and Religion, The New Leviathan) and contribute to other magazines.

One standout article: December's LIFE Magazine piece, "The Onward March of Christian Faith," a lucid and moving history of Christianity.

Even when he stepped down from his job as editor of the Christian Century last winter, Paul Hutchinson had no thought of retiring from his ministry. There were still more books that he wanted to write, uncounted lectures yet to deliver. His trip through the South was only partly vacation. Worried over the current crisis of desegregation, his host in New Orleans, a Protestant minister, tried to convince him that his only job was to throw oil on troubled waters. Dr. Hutchinson was adamant. Said he: "I am going to praise the Roman Catholic Archbishop of New Orleans for the stand he has taken--the archbishop is in serious trouble because of it--and I am going to relate U.S. problems to the long-range missionary interest of all churches, Protestant and Catholic." Until the day he died, Hutchinson lived in the faith that Christianity need never retreat.

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