Religion: European Colloquies

This summer has become a notable one for Christian colloquies in Europe. Last week the International Congregational Council met at Bournemouth, pleasure resort on the English Channel, for its fifth decennial meeting. In London bishops of and affiliated with the Church of England assembled for their month-long seventh decennial Lambeth conference. Last week Pope Pius XI ended his jubilee year (see p. 58), which included the Eucharistic Congress at Carthage (TIME, May 19). Last month Lutherans began at Augsburg, Germany, a whole summer’s celebration of the Augsburg Confession’s 400th anniversary. (TIME, June 30.)

Forthcoming are: World’s Christian Endeavor Union at Berlin; World Student Christian Federation Executive Committee at Waldenburg, Silesia; World Alliance for International Friendship at Mürren, Switzerland; World Conference for International Peace Through Religion Executive Committee at Berne, Switzerland; World Conference on Faith & Order Continuation Committee at Mürren, Switzerland; International Christian Social Institute at Mürren; Universal Christian Conference on Life & Work Continuation Committee at Vevey, Switzerland; celebration of the 900th anniversary of St. Olaf, Patron Saint of Norway, throughout Norway. The Neo-Christian Theosophists are now assembling at Ommen, Holland, to hear their sage J.* Krishnamurti, just arrived there.

At Bournemouth, David Lloyd George, onetime Prime Minister of Great Britain, said: “Let us have brotherhood. It is only the Christian churches that can do it.” Said Dr. John Daniel Jones of Bournemouth, elected moderator of the International Congregational Council to succeed Dr. James Levi Barton of Boston: ”This would be a vile and beastly world if it ceased to believe in God.” Said Dr. William Horace Day of Bridgeport, Conn.: “Despite Prohibition in America, lawlessness abounds as it should not.” Said Dr. Jason Noble Pierce of Washington: “This is an amazingly old people’s council, an old man’s program. Among the 56 speakers listed, I believe not ten are under 50 years old. American youth hardly will be interested.”

Just before the Lambeth Conference opened in London, Anglo-Catholics conducted an open-air high mass in a London football field. It was frankly a theatrical demonstration to show how vigorously high church communicants want the ritual and the symbolism of the Church of England to approximate those of the Roman Catholic Church. Low-church men tried in vain to stop the service by appeals to Prime Minister James Ramsay MacDonald and the Bishop of London. Some 25,000 Anglo-Catholics thronged into the field. They were met and jostled by mobs of low-church men and women who flaunted banners inscribed: “No Popery.” The hecklers thrust out pamphlets, threw about handbills, hooted through megaphones. Grimly the celebrants proceeded with their mass.

One topic was to be common with the Anglican Bishops at Lambeth* and the Congregationalists at Bournemouth, 107 miles away: church union in India. The handicap of Christian missionaries in India as well as elsewhere is that the heathen cannot understand the competition between Christian denominations. In India there are now a South India United Church (formed by Congregational, Presbyterian and Reformed converts), a Wesleyan Methodist Church of South India, an Anglican (Episcopalian) Church of India, Burma & Ceylon. The hope of these three Christian churches in India merging soon is good, because their vested interests are neither old nor extensive, because they are forced to a friendliness by their isolation in the vast prairies of Hinduism, Buddhism, Mohammedanism.

*J. is for Jiddu, Indian locality where he was born “30 or 35 years ago.”

* They include a U. S. delegation led by the Rt. Rev. James De Wolf Perry, presiding bishop of the Protestant Episcopal Church.