Religion: Muste to Temple

U. S. Presbyterians are less famed for radical zeal than Methodists or Congregationalists. Last week conservative members of the presbytery of New York, which 25 years ago founded and still pays most of the expenses of Labor Temple in seething 14th Street, learned with consternation that they now were identified with a lean, Netherlands-born preacher who only lately had ceased believing in revolution by violence. Labor Temple, meeting place for workers of all faiths, had chosen Rev. Abraham J. Muste to be its director, succeeding the late Rev. Edmund Bigelow Chaffee (TIME, Sept. 28).

Schooled mainly in Reformed theology, Abraham Muste held Reformed and Congregational pulpits, was head of Brookwood Labor College 1921-33, has been secretary of the Amalgamated Textile Workers, has spent nights in jail (for “agitating”). Though he has recanted the barricades, he is still vaguely Marxian, vaguely Trotskyite, mostly ”Musteite”— as other sectarian radicals call his followers of the American Workers’ Party. Preacher Muste now has enough taste for organized religion to say: ”The Church, weak and imperfect as it may be, exists, and it seems to me that after the example of Jesus, we have to take our place within it and work from that point.”