In Atlantic City

(See front cover)*

For the 51st triennial General Convention of the Episcopal Church, which at times during the next three weeks will attract as many as 40,000 people, nothing less would do than to turn the vastnesses of Atlantic City's $15,000,000 Convention Hall into "the world's largest church." This was no more difficult than to equip the hall for the racing greyhounds which preceded the Episcopalians, or for the college footballers who were to follow them.

On the huge stage was built an altar 20 ft. long. On it will rest a stone taken from a 200-year-old church and especially blessed by Bishop Paul Matthews of New Jersey, host. Overhead was hung a monster baldachin or canopy. In front stretched an altar rail at which 125 people could receive Holy Communion simultaneously. To the rear were places for 1,000 choristers who will sing while Mr. Firmin Swinnen plays on "the world's largest organ." On each side of the altar were seats for 130 Bishops. And there was a throne for the Presiding Bishop, Rt. Rev. James De Wolf Perry.

From that throne, he would survey a gathering met for a solemn purpose. In the words of Bishop Matthews' sermon last week it was not only "to devise business methods by which the Holy Spirit of God may be regulated and made efficient." The meeting was to be, above all, "a pledge of our loyalty and love to the King and to the cause." That cause was threatened on every side. Bishop Matthews saw it threatened by the hatred between the nations. He pointed also to the material ism of "mass production" which he denounced with bitter scorn. But in San Francisco last week Labor's pious President Green mounted a Congregationalist pulpit to speak of threats to the cause from still another side. He said that nothing counteracts the church's influence so much as industrial oppression; that workers cannot understand a social state in which extreme riches and extreme poverty prevail; that if a class war is to be waged "then religion and ethics have failed."

Facing a strangely troubled world, the Episcopal Church rests upon a tradition of historic dignity. A cinema depicting its history from 1579 to the present was ready for the convention. Next month brings the 150th anniversary of the consecration of its first U. S. bishop--Samuel Seabury.* To Atlantic City next week will come His Lordship of Aberdeen and Orkney, Rt. Rev. Frederic Llewellyn Deane, bearing greetings from the Episcopal Church of Scotland, where Bishop Seabury was consecrated.

Today, in every large city, the Episcopal bishop is a conspicuous figure, and the Church's 2,000,000 communicants include a large proportion of the rich, the able, the cultivated. And yet this Church stands apart from the two main forces of U. S. religious and moral history: the vast single mass of Roman Catholics on the one hand, and the diffuse but even more dominant mass of homely Methodists, Baptists, Presbyterians et al. on the other. For all of Bishop Matthews' mysticism, his church cannot today ignore finance.

Budget-- For all the proverbial wealth of its parishioners, the dioceses have failed by $1,000,000 to meet their last two years' quotas for the Church's educational and missionary work. Sloganing "Hold the Line!", Charles Phelps Taft II of Cincinnati hoped to raise an "Everyman's Offering" of $500,000 (TIME, May 28). He got less than $200,000. Remains for General Convention to retrench drastically or revise its financial methods.

Catholic? Protestant? A most noticeable fact about the Protestant Episcopal Church is that it can never make up its mind whether it is Protestant. The word "Catholic" haunts and fascinates it. To General Convention came a petition from the Philippine Islands that "Protestant" be dropped from the Church's name. Suggested substitutes: American Episcopal Church, Anglican Church in the U. S. A., American Catholic Church, Holy Catholic Church.

From the Diocese of Chicago, led by high-church Bishop George Craig Stewart, came a petition for more revision of the Prayer Book. Because General Convention in 1928 approved a thoroughgoing revision of the Book of Common Prayer, many a churchman had hoped to hear no more of it. But Chicago most alarmingly suggested such changes as that "Blessed is He that cometh" be said or sung just before Holy Communion. This implies the dogma of Transubstantiation, meaning that Christ comes physically into the bread and wine. Low churchmen recoil from the idea.

And yet another point involving the Catholic question is whether Deaconesses may be married. Since a committee was ready this week to report that they may not, low churchmen were alarmed lest "celibacy of the clergy" might come next. But this year there was a new and even more exciting question to argue. Shall the Church have an

Archbishop? On this matter Dr. Perry has remained becomingly silent, for if the Church decides to have an Archbishop it may simply turn the Presiding Bishop into one, giving him some such see as Washington. Born 63 years ago in Germantown, Pa., Bishop Perry is a grandson of Capt. Oliver Hazard Perry, War of 1812 hero, a grandnephew of Commodore Matthew Calbraith Perry who opened Japan to the world. Educated at the University of Pennsylvania and Harvard, he was an able high-jumper and as senior Red Cross chaplain during the War startled soldiers by leaping fences with suitcase in hand. After occupying several New England parishes he married Edith Weir, miniature painter and amateur violinist. In 1911 he became Bishop of Rhode Island, to many of whose old families he is related. In 1930 during a blizzard in Chicago, 84 bishops of his Church elected him Presiding Bishop.

The Primacy of the Episcopal Church is a responsible job which wore out two of Bishop Perry's predecessors. Dr. Perry is also president of the Church's business-doing body, the National Council. Nationally busy though he is, he has ecclesiastical jurisdiction only in Rhode Island, where he has little time to be. Most often he is in Manhattan, where he must get leave from his friend Bishop Manning even to officiate in the Church Missions House chapel near his office. And when he has a weighty pronouncement to make, Bishop Perry has no all-embracing pulpit from which to make it. Thus, the practical reasons for an archbishopric.

But many an Anglo-Catholic desires an archbishop simply for the dignity and exaltation of the Church. However exalted it might be inwardly, the Church would nevertheless be obliged to accept the outward trappings of an archbishop--call him "Your Grace," give him a primatial cross, add a ten-tasseled heraldic hat and pallium to the insignia of his see, surround him with ten deacons of honor, swing a censer nine times at him in church and officially call him "Most Reverend" instead of "Right Reverend"--the last a practice which Anglo-Catholics long ago adopted.

Chief objection to all this was stated by Dr. John R. Crosby in the Churchman. His main point: that unless the Episcopal Church sets up a true archbishopric it erects "a bedizened scarecrow that will be the laughing stock of every church in Christendom." And a true archbishop would wield powers which many a U. S. bishop would be loath to give him.

Nevertheless if the Episcopal Church overrides such objections and makes an archbishop of James De Wolf Perry it will be because he is in many ways the man for the job. Rich, tactful and diplomatic, he is a true scholar whose great specialty has been Church Unity and who has been neither too downright Catholic for the Protestants nor too thoroughgoingly Protestant for the Catholics. He has a background such as might at once lend to a U. S. Archbishopric the character acquired by the Anglican ones through the centuries. He has a home in Providence full of antiques and paintings, a large library, a summer home in Massachusetts, and a costly cope (capelike ecclesiastical vestment) which excited much comment at last year's Catholic Congress in Philadelphia, whither he had it shipped in an enormous packing case (TIME, Nov. 6). Bishop Perry is an enlightened, cultured divine whose genial oratory makes him especially welcome at public dinners. He is also the first Presiding Bishop to hold office since, in 1930, the mother Church of England recognized the U. S. Church as its first colonial branch and promoted its head from last (16th) place in the Anglican hierarchy to the seventh. Thus might the Episcopal Church make Dr. Perry an archbishop for no other reason than that it would make him feel more at home when he marches in an Anglican procession ahead of nine archbishops and behind six including Their Lordships of Canterbury and of York.

*Painted for TIME by Jerry Farnsworth.

*Samuel Seabury (1729-96) went to Yale (Class of 1748), became a missionary in New Brunswick, N. J., a rector in Jamaica and Westchester, N. Y. a stanch Tory, he pamphleteered against the U. S. Independence in a series of "Farmer's Letters," was imprisoned in Connecticut for six weeks in 1775. Chosen bishop by ten Connecticut churchmen, he was consecrated in 1784 in Aberdeen, Scotland because he could not properly take the British oath of allegiance. An able organizer and a strict churchman, he signed himself "Samuel Bp. Connect."

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