Tidings

> The Christian Boys' Brigade was outraged. The British Scouts Association bristled. Minds were boggled, said London's Daily Telegraph, "in every Anglican home." The cause of the outcry was a speech by Dr. John Robinson, formerly the Anglican Bishop of Woolrich. The age of consent in sexual relations, he said, should be lowered from 16 to 14. The change, the bishop argued, would make teen-agers more rather than less responsible for their actions, and it would facilitate counseling by removing the onus of criminality. Robinson seemed unperturbed by the fuss over his speech. As the author of the controversial 1963 book Honest to God, he has been through it all before. "I was raising the point," he explained in a letter to the Times of London, "how most effectively do we protect the young? Is it by the blunt instrument of declaring all early teen-age sex criminal, then discrediting the law by not enforcing it? This does not seem to be very successful in preventing sex relations among young people."

> For the late Adam Clayton Powell Jr., the pulpit at Harlem's Abyssinian Baptist Church served as a launching platform for an often influential, always controversial 24-year career in Congress. Now the believers at Abyssinian have elected a new pastor, but he vows to succeed Powell only in the pulpit. "I have no political ambitions," says the Rev. Dr. Samuel Proctor, 51. "A church needs care from a dynamic pastor who has the membership at heart." Proctor, however, has a few involvements of his own. He plans to keep his professorship at Rutgers University (philosophy of education, Afro-American and urban education), drawing only a part-time salary from Abyssinian. At the same time the Virginia-born educator promises to preach three Sundays a month at the church and shore up its sagging administration. Abyssinian, the oldest major black Baptist church in the North, could use some reinvigoration. It was no secret to anyone that Adam Powell preferred sunning in the Bahamas to sweating it out in Harlem. As Powell's political fortunes and popularity waned during his last years, the membership at Abyssinian plummeted from an alltime high of 14,000 to 6,000 at his death.

> It hardly looks like the usual equipage for a bishop who was a slum priest and marched at Selma: a 70-ft., three-bedroom, three-bath cabin cruiser anchored in San Francisco Bay, its brass-filigreed bow and mahogany-planked deck gleaming in the sun. But for California's boat-loving C. Kilmer Myers, the Daring will serve as a year-round home--and Myers is paying the reported $50,000 price out of his own pocket. When Myers was elected to the see of California in 1966, after the resignation of the late James A. Pike, he inherited a 19-room mansion that the diocese, at Pike's request, had bought for more than $100,000. Bishop Myers requested that the residence be sold and the money used for a better cause. He and his family set up quarters in a more modest San Francisco apartment. They plan to move aboard the Daring on Aug. 1.

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