Religion: Misappropriated Name

In Common Pleas Court in Philadelphia last week, President Judge Frank Smith forbade a zealous, rebellious little group of Presbyterians ever again to call themselves ”the Presbyterian Church of America.” or ever to take any name “similar to or imitative of or contractive of the name Presbyterian Church in the United States of America.” The latter organization had brought action against the former, which split off from it in 1936 under the leadership of the late Dr. John Gresham Machen after a lengthy Modernist-Fundamentalist squabble (TIME, June 7 et ante). The contention of the Machenite Fundamentalists, that the parent church had abandoned its historic doctrines, did not interest Judge Smith. Ruled he: “A court in equity has no jurisdiction in examining into the merits of two respective doctrines, any more than it would look into the merits of commercial products after it had concluded that one concern had misappropriated the long-established trade name of another.”

To many a Presbyterian last week the long-established trade name of the Presbyterian Church in the U. S. A. (Northern) still looked mighty like the trade name of the Southern denomination, Presbyterian Church in the U. S. Whether the nameless Machenites would choose a new Presbyterian designation or appeal Judge Smith’s ruling, they did not last week decide.