In Atlantic City (Concl.)

For a U. S. President to send polite greetings to every large gathering of U. S. Jews, Catholics or Protestants is a routine amenity usually executed by a White House secretary. But to the sist triennial General Convention of the Protestant Episcopal Church, meeting during the past three weeks in Atlantic City, went no word, polite or otherwise, from Episcopalian Franklin D. Roosevelt. Last week General Convention, winding up its affairs, came within an ace of reciprocating in kind.

Both its House of Deputies and House of Bishops had passed resolutions to send a "suitable message" to the President. But General Convention adjourned and it took a newshawk to remind Presiding Bishop Perry of the Bishops and Ze Barney Thorne Phillips of the Deputies that nothing had been done about the message. Dr. Phillips turned to Dr. Perry: "I'll write it and you sign it." "No," countered the Presiding Bishop, "you sign it and I'll write it." "No," parried Deputy Phillips, chaplain of the U. S. Senate, "You sign it. I'm too close down there." Thereupon Dr. Perry and Dr. Phillips retired to a hotel, jointly composed and signed a letter assuring the President of his Church's "prayers for God's guidance in the administration of your high office."

Theologically the 51st General Convention was stoutly low church. Sociologically it was, in the words of liberal delegates, "yes--but." Rancor flared only briefly during its good-humored deliberations, and just before adjourning Low Churchman Roswell Page of Virginia joined with High Churchman Clifford P. Morehouse of Milwaukee in leading the House of Deputies in "Blest Be the Tie That Binds." Then the delegates drifted off home, leaving only a scattered 800 to gather in vast Convention Hall to hear the Pastoral Letter which always ends an Episcopal Convention.

Representing the mind of the House of Bishops, this document was written and read by Washington's Bishop Rt. Rev. James Edward Freeman. Ranging over a number of social and economic matters, the Pastoral found in the world all manner of unholy ills: "greed . . . indecency . . . degeneracy . . . corruption . . . selfishness . . . unrest . . . hunger . . . despair . . . civil strife . . . indulgence . . . vulgarity . . . ambition . . . infamy . . . hatred . . . suspicion . . . disillusionment . . . privation . . . wickedness . . . misfortune . . . folly." But Bishop Freeman waxed most indignant in contemplating that institution which most plagues his Church--divorce. Tolerant as it has been in some respects, the Episcopal Church has never temporized in its battles against divorce and the remarriage of divorced persons. What has made the problem painfully thorny for the Church is the fact that, more than any other single denomination, it is made up of a body of wellborn, well-to-do communicants who are particularly addicted to divorce. Thus Bishop Freeman voiced the genuine alarm and anger of his colleagues in declaring:

''No consideration of this matter can ignore the violence that has been done to our domestic and family life by the increasing looseness in marital relations and the scandals that are given legal sanction by certain of our courts. The menace of Reno and the appeal to foreign courts have made us a byword among the nations, and given us an unenviable distinction quite without parallel, even among so-called pagan peoples.

"Child life is blighted and its future obscured and darkened by broken homes, broken in many instances by the selfish ness and lust of conscienceless and godless parents. This unchecked and growing evil, largely indulged in by people of wealth and position, destroys the sanctity of marriage and gives to it the character of legalized prostitution. A wicked and adulterous generation makes no reckoning of the disasters and misfortunes that inevitably attend its evil and lustful ways."

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