World Citizen

When a living man is made the subject of a 461-page biography, he is likely to be a person of consequence. When he is a churchman and his biography is subtitled "World Citizen," his identity is not far to seek. The Pope of Rome could be so called, but only in a spiritual sense. The Archbishop of Canterbury sometimes goes yachting with J. P. Morgan in the Mediterranean, but he does not wield much power outside his own Anglican world. Presiding Bishop Perry of the U. S. Episcopal Church and Presbyterian Moderator McDowell are not international figures. But Dr. John Raleigh Mott is. For his work as an organizer and inspirational leader in foreign missions he is famed from the Oasis of Helwan in Egypt to Herrnhut in Germany. As an active Y. M. C. A. man his influence has been felt from Finland to Jerusalem. Called "this Ulysses of modern missionaries" by the Bishop of Ely, Dr. Mott needs a good big book to move around in. Such a biography was published last month, a respectful "official" one by Basil Mathews, British religious journalist and Y. M. C. A. man.*

Born of sturdy stock in Sullivan County, N. Y. in 1865, John R. Mott grew up in Postville, Iowa. When he was five, he mistook a white-bearded bishop for God. Brought up in piety, he got an encyclopedia from his father for neither drinking, smoking nor gambling until 21. He went to Upper Iowa University at 16, to Cornell at 20. More interested in law than in religion, he changed his mind during his first year at Cornell. Thereafter John R. Mott's work was for Christ. He began Y. M. C. A. work as Cornell vice president in 1885. By 1915 he was holding the topnotch job of international general secretary. He helped build the Student Volunteer Movement (for foreign missions), is the only man alive who has attended each & every one of its conferences since the first pre-organization meeting under Dwight Lyman Moody in 1886 at Mt. Hermon, Mass. At Vadstena Castle in Sweden in 1895 he helped organize the World's Student Christian Federation. Busy with missions, he got up the International Missionary Council in 1920, unwittingly fathered the Laymen's Foreign Missions Inquiry when in 1930 he addressed a group convened by John D. Rockefeller Jr.

Nearing 70, John R. Mott is tall, clear-eyed, square-faced, husky, a deliberate, disciplined worker, a restrained speaker. Though Biographer Mathews attempts to discount it, Dr. Mott is not famed for wit or humor. His great power is his ability to make his facts march into battle and win, to whip up men to enthusiasm, to pick able associates and subordinates. Biographer Mathews estimates Dr. Mott has raised $300,000,000 for his causes. Though given to car and seasickness, he has traveled 1,700,000 mi., the equivalent of 68 times around the world. Woodrow Wilson wanted Dr. Mott to be his Minister to China. Princeton asked him to take its presidency. Yale Divinity School offered him a deanship. The Federal Council of Churches would have made him its secretary.

No mystic sense of sin, no dark preoccupation with the soul, no confessions of failure appear in Dr. Mott's books and speeches. A resolutely practical churchman, he is solid to the point of saying: "Always plan your leisure." While at Cornell, Student Mott wrote out advice to himself which he has since followed: "No worry, no excessive indulgence of the emotions, no doing two hours' work in one hour's time. . . . Have only a few intimates and those the best--for no man rises above the moral level of his intimates. Don't neglect the society of cultivated women."

Dr. Mott's favorite maxim: "Let us turn stumbling-blocks into stepping-stones."

*John R. Mott, World Citizen (Harper, $3).

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