Religion: Robbins to Ohio

The Diocese of Southern Ohio is considered “broad.” Broad was its recently-resigned Bishop Boyd Vincent; broad its Bishop-Coadjutor, now full Bishop Theodore Irving Reese. But more than broad, altogether too latitudinarian for most Episcopal tastes, is Bishop Paul Jones, “the bishop without a diocese,” called last fortnight to Southern Ohio to carry on during Bishop Reese’s illness (TIME, Nov.11). A pacifist, Bishop Jones is looked on by broad churchmen as Liberals eye a Red. Last week broad and high churchmen heaved sighs of relief when the diocesan convention of Southern Ohio elected Howard Chandler Robbins, onetime Dean of Manhattan’s famed Cathedral of St. John the Divine, as Bishop-Coadjutor.

No Red is Dean Robbins. Though he was both too broad and too independent for the liking of his erstwhile superior, high-church Bishop William Thomas Manning of New York, he went last spring from his resigned deanship to teach in Manhattan’s orthodox General Theological Seminary, principal training school of the Episcopal Church (TIME, Jan. 14).

Born in Philadelphia nearly 53 years ago, Bishop-elect Robbins was a Presbyterian until his late 20’s. Then he went to Princeton Theological Seminary (Presbyterian), found its Calvinism too narrow, looked for broader horizons. In 1904 he was ordained an Episcopal clergyman. He had parishes at Morristown and Englewood, N. J., went to the Church of the Incarnation in Manhattan in 1911. Six years later he was elected Dean of the Cathedral of St. John the Divine.

Tall, good-looking, social, Bishop-elect Robbins has no worries about an old-age pension or about living on the salary of a Bishop-Coadjutor ($7,500). About the time he resigned his deanship last spring he was left by a bachelor uncle a legacy of $1,100,000.