Religion: Nays & Ayes

Whosoever shall put away his wife, saving for the cause of fornication, causeth her to commit adultery: and whosoever shall marry her that is divorced, committeth adultery.

So, according to St. Matthew, said Jesus Christ in his Sermon on the Mount (Matthew : 5:32). Last week in Cincinnati members of the Protestant Episcopal Church were, in the words of Rector Frank Howard Nelson of Cincinnati’s Christ Church, “trying to interpret the mind of Our Lord” on marriage and divorce, for before the triennial Episcopal General Convention was a proposal to liberalize the Church’s divorce canon (TIME, Oct. 18).

Intellectual leader of the liberalizing party was Dean Frederick Clifton Grant of Seabury-Western Theological Seminary (Evanston, Ill.), who believes that Jesus no more laid down rigid laws about marriage than he did about exacting interest or walking a second mile with one who asks you to walk the first. Furthermore Dean Grant cited for Episcopalians a number of sad cases of worthy people who deserved divorces but could not obtain them in the Church. When the House of Deputies got around to considering the matter last week, up jumped a lay deputy to put the case on just such a personal basis. He was Dr. Clarence Cook (“Pete”) Little, director of Jackson Memorial Laboratory for Cancer Research in Bar Harbor, Me.

Cried Deputy Little: “I am probably the only deputy here who has had the unfortunate experience of having been unhappily married for some 17 years, divorced for causes other than adultery on my wife’s part or my own, remarried outside the Church and received back into the Church with my second wife. . . . For seven years I have been happily married. As a scientist I know that there are many biological and psychological reasons for divorce. . . . The Bible says that Neither life nor death nor angels—nor ecclesiastics—shall be able to separate me from the love of God that is in Jesus Christ Our Lord. I see in that a godly attitude which is more close to the life and attitude of Our Lord than that which can dig out a few words which seem to me contrary to all that He stood for. I hope for the sake of those who will be making mistakes for many years to come that you will find it in your hearts to liberalize the canons so that they may remain within the Church in which they were born.”

For all Dr. Little’s eloquence, most of the House of Deputies could find in their hearts only a feeling that divorce is a confused subject, that since civil divorce laws are so many and so varied, the Church had better keep her skirts clear of them. The House voted down liberalization, 99½ to 33¼. There was thus no need for the upper Episcopal House of Bishops to act.

Meanwhile the bishops had been deliberating over the status of the Church’s presiding bishop. Of the proposals advanced to make this dignitary more truly the head of the church, the bishops had no inclination at all to set him up as an “Archbishop,” or to give him a “primatial see” such as one carved out of the diocese of Washington. But the bishops agreed to make the presiding bishop head of the Church’s missionary and educational work with life tenure subject to retirement at 68.

When three bishops were put in nomination for this strengthened post, it was immediately apparent that one, the incumbent Presiding Bishop James De Wolf Perry, now 66, would have to retire before the next triennial convention (he has furthermore been in poor health), while of the other two, Bishop William Bertrand Stevens, 52, of Los Angeles, or Bishop William George McDowell Jr., 55, of Alabama, either if elected would serve for more than a decade. Last-minute lobbying for a presiding bishop who would be in the saddle a little more briefly, produced, when the bishops gathered to vote behind closed doors, numerous other names. Of these write-in candidates, one 63-year-old showed such strength on the first ballot that he received a majority on the second, was then elected unanimously by both bishops and deputies. His name: Rt. Rev. Henry St. George Tucker, Bishop of Virginia.

Member of a famed Virginia family, Bishop Tucker is, a low churchman whose experience with foreign missions will give the presiding bishopric a new, vigorous missionary bent. From 1899 until 1923, save for a period when he was a major in the A. E. F., he served in the Orient, part of the time as Episcopal Bishop of Kyoto, Japan, and president of St. Paul’s College, Tokyo. In 1923 he succeeded his brother, Rev. Beverley Dandridge Tucker Jr., as theology professor at Virginia Theological Seminary, was elected Virginia’s bishop coadjutor in 1926. Said he, surprised at his election last week: “I do hope we may all unitedly go forward to the equalization of the great missionary task which Our Lord has entrusted to this Church. The only hope for overcoming the turmoil which at the present time is being manifested in so many parts of the world is in the spirit of brotherhood. . . .”