Religion: Protagonist

“Preach damnation!” Dr. Henry Sloane Coffin was emphatic. He was quoting “General” William Booth, founder of the Salvation Army: “The best preaching is damnation with the Cross in the midst of it.” Dr. Coffin was addressing the students of Union Theological Seminary at the opening of the present school year. Regarded by Fundamentalists as their friendly but most effective enemy, Dr. Coffin is proud to make the historic phrases of an ageless Christianity his own. The Cross has always been in the midst of his preaching. High in his Manhattan Church suspended has been an object rarely found in evangelical churches: a great gilded unadorned cross. Last week, without repetition of the Boothian text, he explained himself more fully.

The miniature chapel of Union Theological Seminary, long famed training school for divines,* was most reverently crowded. Upstairs, in a room on the second floor, was an overflow of people, radio-attentive. As the organ struck into “The Church’s One Foundation,” a flashing, gleaming pageant advanced in academic rhythm, most steps firm, assured, a few a trifle embarrassed by glory, to the chancel. There were hoods of scarlet, hoods of green, hoods of orange, purple, blue, set off by touches of spotless white, the whole toned down to harmony by the austere background of a white granite pile. Among the robe wearers were 40 university, college and seminary presidents, including two women, Mary E. Woolley (Mt. Holyoke), and Ellen F. Pendleton (Wellesley). In a gown a cardinal hue, symbol of University of Glasgow honors, was the Reverend Henry Sloane Coffin, D. D. (N. Y. U., Yale, Harvard, Columbia, Princeton, Glasgow), who was there to be inaugurated as President. Whence came he to this post of eminence and ecclesiastical danger?

From Yale, in 1897, a brilliant youth of 20 was graduated. Of prosperous and socially impeccable Manhattan parentage, he did not forsake his youthful religious enthusiasm, but committed himself at once to the ministry. He was urbane, witty, talkative, diplomatic —even then having something of the Giorgione monk in his deep eyes and strange eyebrows. A gypsy, for less than a quarter, might easily have predicted for him an easy path to a Manhattan bishopric. But the gypsy could not have guessed how passionately Presbyterian he is —this modern liberal; and the radical honesty of the man would sooner lead him to be anything but Society’s parson. He became (1905) pastor of Madison Avenue Presbyterian Church, Manhattan. Since then it has overshadowed many a more imposing home of prayer. It had, and still has, wealthy parishioners of influence. Dr. Coffin invited in residents of neighboring gum-chewing Third Avenue, not to exclude, but go hand in hand, with Madison Avenue. Certain parishioners left. Thrice as many more financially and otherwise distinguished ones came. Col. E. M. House, for example, new from Texas, chose it as his church.

Dr. Coffin liked children. If he did not originate, then he made famous the three-minute sermon to children, before the longer, deeper effort. Many of the elders liked the children’s sermons best. Once the subject was “The Man that Swallowed Himself.” (” . . . the lips of a fool will swallow up himself.” Ecclesiastes X:12). “How would you like to be thought of as just a mouth?” the Pastor asked the children, defining fools as boys and girls who bragged, told tales, lied,

But Dr. Coffin was having things to say to parents, too; forceful things, revealing, for a layman, an extraordinary acquaintance with current science, literature, philosophy. His sermon on the amphibian is classic. Are we to be sprawlers, floppers, drifters, no better than our amphibian ancestors? Let there be precise, controlled movement. Can you do what you ought, when you ought, whether you want to do it or not? Amphibians . . . the parable, under an orator’s magic, progresses.

If the distinguished visiting educators of last week were hoping to hear things of good repute about the ministry, they were partially mistaken: “The intellectual level of the ministry of our American churches is pathetically low. Recent controversies could hardly have arisen had our pulpits beer filled with men abreast of current thought and seriously teaching then people. The number of college professors and leaders in the professions who show no interest ir the Church is an alarming sign of the inability of our clergy to grip the minds and stir the imaginations of many of our educated people. A rift between teachers of religion and foremost thinkers . . . constitutes a grave national peril.”

But Dr. Coffin sees no necessity for “scrapping the churches now a work.” Rather is the call for bet ter preparation of men to minister in them. “A man who is no ‘mighty in the Scriptures’ is likely to be feeble and of brief service in a position of Christian leader ship. . . The trouble-maker in the Church, whether he be reactionary or radical, is the man without perspective of the course of Christian history, so that he repeat: ancient blunders and is unenriched by past discoveries.” Such a man must acquire “a theology which conserves all the Christian experience of the centuries, utilizes the gains of current philosophy and the sciences, and utters itself in convictions which grip the heart and constrain the conscience of sinner and saint, of educated and illiterate.” And: “This seminary has been a protagonist for the freedom of the Christian mind.”

But Dr. Coffin does not seek “the lowest common denominator, a minimum creed and worship to which none can object.” Said he: “Anarchy is not an open question with the teachers and students in a school of law. . . . Christian Science is not an open question with the faculty of a college of physicians and surgeons. . . . Union Theological Seminary is committed to the cause of Jesus Christ, to His faith and His purpose and His redeeming power, to training men and women to spread His Gospel. . . . His supremacy as the revelation of God and the Savior of the world is not an open question with us.”

In line with his own history and practice was Dr. Coffin’s concluding point that Union Seminary had been founded in the heart of the greatest community in the U. S., because there it could give “wholesome practical training” in benevolence and pastoral labors. “No man,” said he, “can study Christian theology in vacuo. ”

A dinner to President Coffin, at the Hotel Biltmore, followed. There it was told that when Dr. and Mrs. Coffin first visited the president’s house to which they have moved, they expressed the desire for a more adequate pantry; being, as the toastmaster said, persons who were “given to hospitality.” With their desire to entertain students, they wanted a pantry so large that it could not be built inside of the house and “had to be set up on stilts and in the yard adjoining the house, with a door cut through the wall.”

Future seminary-student-raids upon the pantry, abetted by President Coffin, are likely to affect the character of Protestant churchmanship for a generation.

*In Manhattan, founded 1836, by Presbyterians, but independent of church control, and open to all Protestant denominations. It occupies a double block near Columbia University, with which, however, it is unconnected save in neighborly association. Its supporters have included such potent Presbyterians as Mrs. Andrew Carnegie, Arthur Curtiss James, Edward S. Harkness.