Religion: Sugared Pills

“EATING ALLOWED” announced a sign tacked up last fortnight on the Anglican parish church in Kingston-on-Thames, near London. The Bishop of Stepney, invited to deliver the first of a series of lunch-hour talks organized by the vicar, Rev. T. B. Scruton, preached soberly to 200 people, half of them young white-collar workers, who munched apples, nuts, sandwiches, peppermints. Said a schoolteacher afterward, brushing off his crumbs: “I would not be here unless I were able to eat during the service.”

U. S. preachers have often been criticized because they devise spectacular, worldly ways of getting apathetic Christians into church. British parsons now sometimes go them one better. Motion pictures are packing British churches on Sunday nights, largely because of the relatively good films produced by the Religious Film Society, backed by rich Methodist Miller Joseph Rank (TIME, Feb. 14). By last week, 200 British churches had been equipped for sound pictures, new installations were being made at the rate of one or two a day. To familiar objections against such “pill-sugaring,” an executive of the Film Society, Rev. Stanley M. Edwards, replied: “If the pill does a good work, why not have it sugared?”

Not all British church films are the work of the society. A U. S. commercial film, Magnificent Obsession, in which Robert Taylor as a drunken playboy becomes devoted to a girl he has caused to be run over and blinded, has also made the rounds. To show all the public what church movies were like, the London Daily Express promptly pictured the scene. In Liverpool Actor Taylor proved too sugary a pill. There the picture was shown in two parts, filling the church for the first, practically emptying it for the second.