Conferences

While 40 bishops of the Methodist Episcopal Church, in annual conference at Washington (TIME, May 17), decided to revivify dry propaganda among vacillating collegians and in cottages; sent "loving greetings and prayers from your brother bishops" to Bishop Anton Bast under cloud in Denmark ;

While clergy and laymen of the Methodist Episcopal Church, South, in quadrennial conference at Memphis, Tenn. (TIME, May 17), considered a constitution to replace their restrictive regulations of government; considered buying a tuberculosis hospital at Tucson, Ariz.;

While Baptists from 18 states, representing some 3,000,000 coreligionists (Southern Baptist Convention at Houston, Tex.), called beer and light wines the "inveterate enemies of the human race"; proclaimed unswerving loyalty to the 18th Amendment and hostility to any changes in the Volstead Act; resolved to reject "every theory, evolution or otherwise," which teaches that man is not the "especial creation of God";

While the Quakers (the Society of Friends), in yearly meeting at Philadelphia, thought about abandoning their traditional uniformity of dress (now not rigidly insisted upon) for a greater emphasis on uniformity in spiritual life;--

While all this was going on last week, a calm-souled, religiously-minded group of people in Manhattan were quietly celebrating a 50th anniversary. They were the loosely organized followers of Dr. Felix Adler.

A half century ago Dr. Adler (he was then the 25-year-old, brilliant professor of Hebrew and Oriental literature at Cornell) came to realize, as so many academic gentlemen have, that an instructor, raised aloof on his dais, has little influence on the ethical conceptions of his students. He had developed a conception of human conduct which asserted "the supreme importance of the ethical factor in all the relations of life --personal, social, national and international--apart from any theological or metaphysical consideration." But his class duties hampered him in the propagation of this ideal. So with rather unprofessorial audacity he abandoned his chair, went to Manhattan and organized his first Ethical Cultural Society (in 1876).

This and its daughter societies here and abroad have no creed, no polity, no church, no ritual. Members meet as freely cooperating individuals who respect their own persons and ideals and those of others.