"This Is Religion"

The winter wind whistled round the grey ramparts of the Tower of London and lashed the crowd of office and warehouse workers on Tower Hill. But they only hunched deeper into their mufflers and munched on the lunchtime cheese sandwiches they fished from their pockets. They were listening to a big, cheerful man who stood on the high ground where England's traitors and martyrs were once executed, talking loud and hard into the wind, which whipped his thin mackintosh and ruffled his grey hair.

He was talking about divorce. "I believe a Christian shouldn't kill his fellow man, but if his fellow man is dead, I don't believe that he shouldn't bury him. It's the same with marriage. When a marriage is dead, it should be buried." A moment later, someone from the crowd set him talking about old-age pensions. It is a sign of a civilized country, he said, that it looks after its old people. A heckler interrupted. "Why don't you talk religion instead of politics?'' he shouted.

"This is religion," the big man answered. "All of us are children of God, and whatever our age, we are entitled to just as full a life as anyone else."

After 90 minutes of it, as he was pushing his way through the crowd, a sailor who had been one of his most persistent hecklers offered him a box of throat lozenges. " 'Ere, guv'nor," he said. " 'Ave one. I bet yer need it after that." "Thanks, chum," replied the Rev. Donald Soper, president of the Methodist Church in Britain.*

Low-Calorie Diet. After his regular open-air session on Tower Hill last week, Dr. Soper grabbed a quick lunch and a train for Walton-on-Thames to conduct a Communion service at 4 p.m., address a rally of church supporters, then deliver an evening sermon to a packed congregation. He was already suffering from a bad cold, caught at nightly outdoor meetings in the South Wales ports of Cardiff and Swansea and in the uplands on the English-Welsh border.

For Dr. Donald Soper, 51, such strenuous witness is the only hope of Christianity and Methodism. When he was elected president of the British Methodist Church last July, he called, in his acceptance speech, upon his fellow Methodists for "greater adventure in open-air evangelism . . . lively, informed, joyous . . . work and worship." He continued the lunch-hour meetings at Tower Hill, where he has been preaching his vigorous version of socialist-pacifist Christianity for the past 26 years, and did his best to follow founder John Wesley's example of making all England his parish.

But Methodism, which has had far more of an influence on British socialist policies than Marxism ever had, is hard put to stir up the old fervor in these days of the welfare state. Methodism's great 19th century battles on behalf of the over worked, the overcrowded and the under paid in the lusty turmoil of the Indus trial Revolution have now been won in the sooty cities of the Midlands, on the docksides of the Tyne and in the slag-heaped valleys of Wales. And Methodist zeal for social betterment is left with such low-calorie crusades as temperance, the discouragement of gambling and the abolition of vulgar postcards from sea side shops.

"They've Got Too Much." Hard-hitting, ubiquitous Dr. Soper knows how to make headlines for the cause by keeping his uncompromising, nonconformist brand of Christianity close to the day's news.

He publicly disapproves of the Queen's Sunday jaunts to the races, of the Duke of Edinburgh's Sunday polo, of the government's foreign policy ("Why don't we welcome Russian soldiers on our territory? We have Americans here. We're not at war with Russia . . ."). And he can take comfort from a modest rise in Methodist membership rolls: from 741,596 in 1951 to 743,590 in 1952.*

But, as one veteran Methodist trade-union leader says: "It's not like it used to be. The days of the Penitence Bench are over. Nobody could rouse an audience these days to the fervor we used to see when Moody and Sankey were in their heyday. They've got too much; they're too well off."

* British Methodism knows no bishops. In 1788, four years after the Methodist Episcopal Church was founded in America. Founder John Wesley heard that his American "Superintendent," Francis Asbury, had permitted himself to be called bishop. Wesley expressed his feelings in no uncertain terms. "Men may call me a knave or a fool, a rascal, a scoundrel, and I am content," he wrote Asbury. "But they shall never by my consent call me bishop." Two years later, however, Asbury formally assumed the title and established the tradition. * The Methodist church in Britain ranks fourth in membership, after the Anglican, Roman Catho lic and Presbyterian churches.

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