Religion: Polite Convention

An unwritten dogma of the Protestant Episcopal Church commands the observance of the tenets of good taste. When the President & Mrs. Coolidge walked to the dais for the opening of the 49th triennial General Convention of the Church, they picked their way through a lane of approving smiles, nor was there handclapping, for the beating of palm upon palm, except as a signal to acolytes, is neither rubric nor good taste at a church ceremony. When it came time for the House of Deputies (lower legislative house of the convention) to elect a president, only three ballots were necessary to affirm the election of the Rev. Dr. Ze Barney Thorne Phillips, chaplain of the Senate, rector of Washington’s Epiphany. Dr. Phillips is a liberal evangelical, is a compromise president, for he is pleasing to the liberal (quasi-Roman) high church & to the evangelical (Methodistic) low church. When it came time to take up the proposed exclusion of the 39 articles of prayer, a bad-taste controversy loomed. High churchmen did not want the articles; low churchmen wanted them, because their inclusion prevented even the kinship of resemblance to the Church of Rome. A controversy was averted by uncompromising retention of the articles, with the active approval of the House of Deputies & the House of Bishops, the passive acquiescence of the high churchmen. Good taste, it seemed, had triumphed.

When it came time to do something about the highly controversial subject of divorced persons and their status in the Church a commission was appointed to give ten years’ study to divorce in general. For a decade, at least, official (and perhaps antagonizing) action was deferred thereby. This was in good taste.

Good taste, however, needed defense in the debate on the question of authorizing the Commission on Evangelism to cooperate with the United Commission on Evangelism of the Federal Council of Churches of Christ in America. This authorization, it seemed to some who were opposed to official contact with the Council, would have brought the Episcopalians very close to the Council. Said onetime (1922-27) Senator-from-Pennsylvania George Wharton Pepper, of the House of Deputies: “The advantages of membership in this council are, to my mind, highly exaggerated.”

Said George Woodward Wickersham, of the potent law-firm Cadwalader, Wickersham & Taft, onetime (1909-13) U. S. Attorney-General: “It is unfortunate that Senator Pepper in the course of his political career—”

From the listeners: “Unfair! Sit down! Vote! Hear!”

“—that the Senator has had some unpleasant relations in his political career with some of the members of the board of the Federal Council of Churches. . . . It is unfortunate, with our great movement for church unity under way that we are plunged into a controversy like this. We might just as well say to the other Protestant churches: ‘We won’t take a step to meet you; you must come all the way to meet us.’ ” The pro-council faction won the question.

Meanwhile there were the amenities of all conventions: such as the discussion of the Master prayerbook, which will be printed at an estimated expense of $100,000 (to be borne by John Pierpont Morgan as had his father before him), and turned over to the Rev. Dr. Lucien Moore Robinson, of Philadelphia, custodian of the Master book.