Mayfair Ministei

For six days, Timothy Wentworth Beaumont is the very model of a modern Mayfair gentleman. He gathers writers and politicians the way other men collect stamps, entertaining 30 or 40 at dinner each week in his opulent London town house. He has used his fortune lavishly to bankroll England's recent Liberal revival, and is chairman of the Cities of London and Westminster Liberal Association. He owns a small but influential string of magazines. He is an avid follower of the track, and his wife races a filly named High and Dry.

But never on Sunday. That is when Beaumont, 33, puts on his clericals and drives to St. Stephen's Church in Westminster to deliver the sermon or officiate at Holy Communion. For the man-about-Mayfair is also an Anglican priest, and the richest clergyman in England.

Prism & Wonderland. One of five curates at St. Stephen's, Priest-Publisher Beaumont--thanks to an "understanding" vicar--has no duties except on Sunday, a privilege shared by some Anglican "worker priests" in British industrial cities who labor weekdays in factories, preach and worship on Sunday in mission chapels. Beaumont is currently in the midst of tidying up his communications interests. For "a nominal sum," he recently sold the weekly magazine Time & Tide, which he saved from extinction in 1960 and turned into one of England's liveliest but most unprofitable journals of opinion (he lost $1,400 a week on it). Now he is at work planning a new magazine that he hopes to see on the stands by next February: an unnamed monthly, to be a mixture of the styles of FORTUNE and Encounter, aimed at a business audience. Beaumont has no intention of forsaking his other publishing ventures: the highbrow Anglican monthly Prism, another monthly of news about the Liberal Party, a religiously oriented children's weekly called Wonderland, a church news sheet that is syndicated to parish magazines.

Heir to a fortune in shipping and industrial shares (W. R. Grace & Co.), Beaumont discreetly left Eton before he was expelled ("I pinched things," he explains), lazed his way through Oxford as a student of agriculture and founded a club dedicated to reviving the lusty ways of 19th century Regency bucks. Shortly after he came down from Oxford, he decided to become a priest. "I can't explain why," he says. "God seems to call one, but not until one is halfway there does one really realize that he has." "

The Real Struggle." No dandy, Beaumont likes to wear a sweater and crumpled slacks. His nails are grimy, and a shoelace is often untied. He gives heavily but anonymously to charity and is quite unembarrassed by his wealth. "My chief job as a Christian is to use my money wisely," he says. "Having lots of money and a big house like this can be very useful, you know, and it is the inner life that really matters. It is there that the real struggle must take place."

Much of Beaumont's fortune has gone toward promoting his radical views about church reform. "We need a revolution," he says. "We need a revision of the Prayer Book. We need to purge the Gospels of out-of-date accretions and produce an act of worship in modern idiom. The church spends its funds wrongly too. Church money should be used to feed the hungry, clothe the naked, and preach the Gospel."

More often than not, Beaumont's own preaching shocks his predominantly middle-class congregation. On a recent Sunday, for example, he tore out at religious hypocrisy, and though he disagrees with the Communists and pacifists, argued that churchgoing Christians have much to learn from both.

Such talk is not likely to elevate Beaumont in the church hierarchy, and he confidently expects that he will never be made a bishop. "I regard it," he says, "as so unlikely that it is not worth thinking about at all. Would you like to be a bishop? I think it would be absolute hell."

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