Religion: Chronic Hell’s Gadfly

Chubby little Dean Milo Hudson Gates of Manhattan’s Cathedral of St. John the Divine last month recommended to Protestants the practice of saying their prayers with a rosary. To those who find this too “Romish” he suggested the use of a knotted string. Quick to approve was the clergy of Manhattan’s Episcopal Church of St. Mary the Virgin, which has long out-Romanized the Romans. Said its monthly bulletin Ave: “Good for the Dean! . . . Perhaps we shall now be able to say our beads in the Cathedral without interruption. The last time we ventured to use our rosary in one of the unfrequented chapels behind the high altar, a verger quickly approached and asked if we had seen the lacquer cupboards which the King of Siam had given to the Cathedral. We felt duly rebuked for our excess of devotion.”

There might have ended the Gates Bead & String Movement but for a doughty defender of things Protestant, The Chronicle of Poughkeepsie. N. Y. Last week The Chronicle rasped: “It occurs to us that a person who is so little interested in what he has to say to God that he must be artificially prompted would best withdraw from the Divine Presence. It also suggests itself that one might get rid of the rosary and its knotted string imitation by tying strings on his fingers to the number of limes he wished to pray. . . . The only objection would be that it might seem strange to see people coming to Church with both hands all tied up. Then of course there is the possibility one might see the strings when in Church but forget why one put them there. . . . There are all sorts of suggestive stimuli which might be employed. Such for example might be a notched stick or prayer wheel. . . .” The Chronicle is edited by Dr. Alexander Griswold Cummins, 64, rector of Poughkeepsie’s Christ Church, a strapping angler and huntsman who looks like a country squire, seldom wears clerical garb. In a church noted for its urbanity and jocularity he has been called “Gadfly Cummins” and his journal the “Chronic Hell.” Dr. Cummins detests Anglo-Catholicism, helped found the Protestant Episcopal Church League to combat it. When his name was suggested as suffragan to New York’s high-church Bishop Manning, Dr. Cummins announced he would be “errand boy” to no bishop (TIME, May 19, 1930). “Gadfly” Cummins has long sought to introduce “referendum and recall” in the Episcopal Church, currently aiming his proposal against Presiding Bishop James De Wolf Perry. In the early days of The Chronicle, Editor Cummins fought soberly and solemnly. He now fights with satire and whimsy, aided by his literary wife, Evelyn Atwater, whom he married 18 years ago. Most Episcopalians are unsympathetic with Dr. Cummins’ notions, unimpressed by the horrors he cries up. But they read the “Chronic Hell” with delight, enjoying the loving care with which copes & mitres, red zucchettas, masses, rosaries and the beard of King Charles I are castigated.* Some bishops apprehensively toe the Protestant line when Dr. Cummins, on one of his many preaching excursions, appears in their dioceses.

* Venerated as a Defender of the Faith, King Charles has often been regarded as a Church of England saint. Some years ago the Holy Cross monks (Episcopal) in St. Andrews, Tenn., held a service in which a hair from King Charles’s beard was exhibited on a pillow. The Chronicle called it a “hirsute comedy.”