Endorser Up & Out

"There's no question, Mr. Waterman, that a person buying a fountain pen will find it decidedly advantageous to make the Waterman's 7-point Test, especially if he or she values genuine writing comfort and the aid that the right point contributes to fluent expression of thought."

That was what bag-jowled Dr. Samuel Parkes Cadman, voluble Brooklyn Congregationalist, was supposed to be saying in an advertisement which appeared in The Literary Digest and the Christian Herald last month. Photographed with Penman Frank Dan Waterman, he appeared to have sampled seven different pen-points and selected the "flexible-medium."

The sight of the sententious doctor apparently commercializing the cloth in such an advertising campaign vexed, pained and annoyed many a good Congregationalist. What made it worse was that at the forthcoming biennial meeting of the Congregational & Christian Churches, Dr. Cadman was slated for election as moderator. So certain did his selection seem that Dr. Jay Thomas Stocking of St. Louis declined to let his friends even suggest his name as a rival candidate.

Last week the meeting was under way at Oberlin College in Ohio and so was the anti-Cadman movement. Its members had accomplished the precedent-breaking step of postponing elections from the first to the last day. But they feared they could not beat Dr. Cadman -- until they remembered something. Then it was easy. On election day the Congregationalists and Christians unanimously acclaimed Dr. Cadman as their honorary moderator, an up-and-out post created for and held by Calvin Coolidge from 1923 to 1929. For actual working moderator the delegates chose Dr. Stocking, a 64-year-old preacher noted for his sermons to children and college students.

With fine consistency the delegates then passed as strongly liberal a set of resolutions as any church group has since liberal resolutions became the fashion. Aware that the combined names of the two merged churches are cumbersome, they entertained proposals to adopt a new one, to be acted upon two years hence. Most likely suggestion: "Pilgrim Church," after the colonists who brought Congregationalism to America.

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