Religion: Ave Atque Vale

The upper west side of Manhattan, an area thick with university buildings and theological seminaries, is dominated by two great churches—the towering Rockefeller-built Riverside Church and the huge, unfinished Protestant Episcopal Cathedral of St. John the Divine. Last week each made news.

Baptist Arrival. Plain-talking, liberal Harry Emerson Fosdick wanted to retire three years ago as pastor of the Riverside Church. His trustees persuaded him to wait out the war, later agreed to fix the date as his 68th birthday: May 24, 1946. Last week, with that date at hand, the congregation announced his successor, Robert James McCracken, 42, professor of church history and the philosophy of religion at Ontario’s McMaster University.

For Professor McCracken—who is as Scottish as his name—Riverside will be only his third parish, though his first this side of the Atlantic. Born in Motherwell, Lanark, and educated at Glasgow University, he had churches in Edinburgh and Glasgow, then became a lecturer in systematic theology at the Baptist Theological College of Scotland. Four years later he was called to his present chair in McMaster as assistant professor. But though this will be his first U.S. job, he is no stranger to Americans, to whom he has delivered many a lecture and sermon (three at Riverside Church).

Like his predecessor, Dr. McCracken is a Baptist, but Riverside will continue as the liberal, essentially undenominational institution that Harry Fosdick made it.

Episcopal Departure. New York’s Episcopalian Bishop, the Right Reverend William T. Manning, may sometimes have looked to laymen like a U.S. Archbishop of Canterbury, but he is too solid a churchman to make that mistake himself. * His unerring knowledge of the rules and his uncompromising adherence to them have been the admiration of his close subordinates and the discomfiture of his Episcopalian antagonists. Bishop Manning has almost always been right. That rigid position has not endeared him to his opponents—or to the public; his vigilant guardianship of orthodoxy has often made New York’s Bishop look something of a prim curmudgeon.

For a quarter-century he has cracked a sharp episcopal whip over his big (252 parishes), rich (1944 income, $4,000,000) diocese of New York. Last week the 79-year-old British-born cleric, who remained stubbornly unbudging two years ago when he Church’s General Convention voted compulsory retirement for bishops at 72′, announced that he would retire next fall.

To low churchmen, Bishop Manning seems only a split hair’s breadth this side of Rome. He campaigned to change (he might say “restore”) the Church’s name from Protestant Episcopal to “Catholic & Apostolic,” drew many an ecclesiastical brickbat for declaring in 1930: “The conception of the ministry held by the Protestant Churches is in important respects different from that held by the Episcopal Church. The Episcopal Church holds the Catholic doctrine of the priesthood. . . . The unbroken order of the episcopate coming down to us from apostolic times is the visible, living witness of God’s coming into this world in the Incarnation. . . .”

When the late Judge Benjamin Barr Lindsey had to be forcibly ejected from a Cathedral service for vociferating against Manning’s attacks on “companionate marriage.” the thin-lipped Bishop finished his benison and then called for a hymn. Said he: “Let us sing ‘Fight the Good Fight with All Thy Might.'” That hymn might have been his motto in his battles with advocates of easy divorce, isolationists, opponents of pan-Christian unity, proponents of a Presbyterian-Episcopalian merger.

The most lasting monument to New York’s embattled Bishop, the Cathedral of St. John the Divine, is still unfinished —although Bishop Manning has succeeded over the years in raising $16,000.000 for its building, largely from non-Episcopalians.

* His superior is the Presiding Bishop of the ‘rotestant Episcopal Church, lank Virginian lenry St. George Tucker, who spent 25 years as

a missionary to Japan.