Bundle, No Bundle

U. S. Baptists would be the largest Protestant denomination in the land (10,000,000 members) if their five bodies could only get together.* As it is, they are the most sectarian of sects. Their local congregations distrust creeds, abhor ecclesiastics, are not bound by anything the Conventions say or do. Last week the Southern Baptist Convention, concluding its meeting in Oklahoma City, remained equally independent toward interchurch unity. Baptist John Benjamin Lawrence spoke for his brethren when he deplored the "vast enveloping movement which aims to tie Baptists up in a bundle with other bodies with which they have no ecclesiastical affinity." The Convention shelved for at least a year a proposal to join the slowly growing World Council of Churches.

Meantime in Cleveland the 151st General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church in the U. S. A. got out the brown paper and string, showed itself ready & willing to make a neat bundle: itself, the Presbyterian Church of the U. S. (Southern) and the Protestant Episcopal Church. Aggregate membership of this big bundle: about 4,500,000. The Assembly formally invited the Southern Church, split off by slavery in 1861, to rejoin it. It approved a concordat, drawn up last year by Presbyterian and Episcopal commissions, for cooperation between the two churches, beginning in local congregations (TIME, Feb. 6). As Moderator of the Presbyterian Church the Assembly elected a man from the foreign mission field, where the urge toward church unity is strongest. Dr. Sam Higginbottom, third layman to head the Church, is president of India's Allahabad Christian College, and rated the ablest agricultural missionary in the world.

Born in England, educated at Mount Hermon School (under Dwight Lyman Moody) and at Princeton, Sam Higginbottom was sent to India in 1903 as an "unordained experiment." Since then he has never had time to take five years off to become a U. S. citizen. (But in 1928, Princeton classmates paid his passage to their 25th reunion, when Princeton gave him its first degree of Doctor of Philanthropy.) Sam Higginbottom began Allahabad College under a tree, taught husbandry, erosion control which he himself learned as he went along. To replace the sticks with which India's farmers scratched the soil, he produced a cheap, deep-cutting plow, still called the "Wah-wah plow" from the exclamations of surprise it causes. In spite of Hindu religious prejudices, Sam Higginbottom put sacred cows on a paying basis, encouraging farmers to put them on forage grass instead of feeding them from their meagre stocks of provisions.

* Largest: the new Methodist Church, with some 8,000,000 members.

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