Bad Bishop Brown

As men marched impatiently across the last years of the 19th Century, while Titanic voices prophesied the glory of a bigger, brighter, better age to come, an Episcopal clergyman, vital, imaginative, brilliant, went forth to serve God in Arkansas. Vision and power were his. He felt the kingdom of Heaven was not impossible of fulfillment in America. He became Bishop. Let men love one another and praise God!

The 20th Century came and eternal harmonies continued to vibrate in the mind of the Bishop. He could not fully utter them. His talk became a little wild. Men did not love one another utterly. His talk became wilder, and began to grate upon vestrymen and other bishops with bank accounts. At a general meeting, in Boston, he was nearly mobbed. Finally his health broke, and in 1912 he resigned, went to live in Galion, Ohio, the Rt. Rev. William Montgomery Brown, ex-Bishop of Arkansas.

Then suddenly, across a dangerous ocean and a continent of war, his aging eyes hehld a great nation being born from the womb of a great theory --Russia, the first-born of Communism. Like old Simeon he cried: "A light to lighten the Gentiles," but with more vitality than the Biblical patriarch he proceeded to write a book. He called it Communism and Christianity.

Of course it was heretical. He was charged with heresy before the House of Bishops. They decided not to try him, but to endeavor to get him to subside peacefully. But the old man proved difficult. The matter dragged.

Last week it became known that Bishops Hall of Vermont, Francis of Indiana and Gravatt of West Virginia, had formally charged him with heresy and he would be brought to trial. The reason for this action was simply that the Protestant Episcopal Church cannot allow an old man to go about uttering communistic and other wild doctrines in the name of an Episcopalian prelate.

The action has nothing whatever to do with the modernist controversy. Bishop Brown's trouble is more pathological than theological. He is a nuisance which the Bishops feel they must efficiently and speedily dispose of.

Some of the passages from Bishop Brown's book:

Gods in the skies--Jesus, Jehovah, Allah and Buddha--are all right as subjective symbols of human potentialities and attributes and of natural laws, even as the Stars and Stripes on a pole, Uncle Sam in the capital and Santa Claus in a sleigh are all right as such symbols; but such rods are all wrong. . .

I place the Brother Jesus of the Christian religion and the Uncle Sam of the American polities on the same footing with each other and with others of their kind as subjective realities. . .

. . .The birth, death, descension, resurrection and ascension of all the savior-gods, not excepting Jesus, are versions of the sun myth. . .

As an objectivity there is no such divinity --meaning the Triune God, Father, Son and Holy Spirit--He is a subjectivity existing in the imagination of orthodox Christians. . . .

Bishop Brown, in Galion, Ohio, shows signs of fight. The church is full of heretics, says he, and he will not get out until the other heretics get out. Then he makes the crack which is intended to smart in high places: "Is it my theology or my economics that is being attacked?" It is, of course, his economics, which even the Modernist handles with care.

One of the great plays now "on Broadway" is G. B. Shaw's Saint Joan. A central scene is a conversation between the Bishop of Beauvais and the Earl of Warwick. The Bishop objects to Joan of Arc because in her passion for God, she overlooks the respect which is a Bishop's due. The Earl objects to her because, in her passion for France, she overlooks the respect due to a Feudal Earl. Bishop and Earl join hands to burn her.

And thus, for differing reasons, every normal American objects to the aged and mentally warped Brown of Galion, Ohio.