Federal Council

As it does every four years, the brain and sinew of the Protestant communions of the U. S. came all together as the Federal Council of Churches of Christ in America -- this year, in Atlanta, Ga.

Officers. Robert E. Speer, retiring President, opened the convention: "The last four years, in spite of doctrinal discussions, have witnessed a steady advance in the cooperative action of the churches. . . . There is no difference in view in the churches as to their main and central business of bringing human life under the lordship of Christ."

In behalf of the delegates, a Near East Relief worker presented Dr. Speer with a gavel. The worker declared this gavel had been made by children of Nazareth in a little shop across the street from the site of Joseph's carpenter shop.

The new President elected was Samuel Parkes Cadman of Brooklyn.

An Englishman, son and grandson of Methodist ministers, Dr. Cadman devoted his scholarly efforts at Richman College, London, to Philology and the Classics. He was ordained at 26, after study at Illinois Wesleyan. In his handling of his second pastorate (at Yonkers, N. Y.), he exhibited a genius for organizing that lifted him high and brought under his hand four Manhattan churches. The Brooklyn call came in 1901, to the Central Congregational Church. He is known as a pulpit orator, widely read, hard of head, a man whose breadth of information (his specialty is the Oxford Movement) keeps abreast of his breadth of interest (his hobby is collecting antique chinaware and furniture).

Reports. The Council's Committee on Policy made its recommendations:

"The need of a great evangelistic upheaval is undeniable. Why should it not come now?"

The functions of the churches "to meet great human emergencies in their own name" had been resigned to other hands. Was this well?

The educational and research efforts of the Council should be heightened.

The coming four years would call for constant study of "the relations of our American evangelical churches to the churches of other lands"-- Asia, Latin America, Europe, The East.

The place of women in the work of the Council should be studied.

The Administrative Committee reported on its plans for a great national conference on the Christian way of life. Said Dr. John M. Moore of Brooklyn: "The idea has crossed the sea" (reference to England's conference at Birmingham last spring on Christian Politics, Economics and Citizenship known as Capec).

Addresses. The delegates lent their ears to the addresses that occupied six days of sessions, morning, afternoon and night.

P: Sir Willoughby Dickinson: "We must be ready to fight, pacifist though we may be. We have got to attack war as a sin ... It is to the simple, God-fearing people we must appeal."

P: Professor Plato C. Durham, President of the Atlanta Christian Council: "We propose to wipe out the Mason Dixon Line from the Kingdom of Heaven. We shall Christianize our race relations."

P: Bishop Warren A. Candler of Atlanta: "Evangelistic Christianity is the surety of our country and the hope of the world."

P: Cyrus E. Woods, onetime U. S. Ambassador to Japan (in a letter) : "The Japanese Exclusion Act was an international disaster of the first magnitude."

P: The Rev. Dr. Samuel M. Zwemer of Cairo: "Christianity and Islam face each other as rivals for world domination."

P: Rev. Dr. Adolf Keller of Zurich, Switzerland, and Professor Julius H. Richter of the University of Berlin ascribed the poverty of European Protestantism to disestablishment resulting from revolutions and depreciation of currencies.

P: Judge Florence E. Allen of the Ohio Supreme Court: "War must be outlawed if humanity is to survive."

P: Rev. Thornton Whaling of Louisville, Ky., moderator of the Southern Presbyterian Churches: "Christ is the solution of all moral and spiritual problems. . . . Social reforms are the results and are truly secondary to the spiritual mission of the churches."

P: Governor William E. Sweet of Colorado: "The most urgent question before the nations of the world today is the establishment of universal peace."

P: Rev. Rockwell H. Potter, chief of the National Council of Congregational Churches: "The growth of secret organizations confessing Christian purposes and seeking to effect them by un-Christian methods and so defeating their purpose, is a nemesis upon the free churches of America resulting from their failure to realize their essential unity."

Dr. Cadman, in his "official sermon" to the Council, said that, some time in the "far future," all forms of Protestantism and Roman and Greek Catholicism would be "sublimated in one great faith." . . . "The hour has struck," said he, "for the condemnation of war."

Came also William J. Bryan, made a masterly denunciation of war, submitted a peace plan.