Cultivated Evangelist

Reporters who were present at the arrival in Manhattan of Agnes Maude Royden, famed English evangelist, head of the London Guildhouse, were prepared to find a large woman with little conversation and a big smile. They found instead a small, mercurial, unbeautified, talkative lady, leaning on a chestnut stick. She answered their questions readily and with wit. The reporters then told Agnes Maude Royden that her prospective lectures in Boston and Chicago (sponsored by the Methodist Woman's Home Missionary Society) had been canceled because of rumors that she smoked cigarets and that she also favored companionate marriage.

At this, Agnes Maude Royden made a few brisk remarks: "Really," she said, "I don't think God has the time or the inclination to worry much about whether I smoke a cigaret or not. ... I am opposed to companionate marriage ... to any thing except permanent monogamy. . . . When a marriage has failed, divorce is the only solution." On top of this she rapidly repeated to her somewhat startled informants an apt parable to illustrate her point that religious bodies should not concern themselves with trifles. Then, tapping her chestnut stick at every step, she moved away.

Even after she had so soundly rebuked the pettiness of one criticism and removed the basis for the other, Agnes Maude Royden was not reinvited to speak in Chicago or Boston, where the women felt that "Miss Royden . . . stood for certain principles which our organization did not care to sponsor ... it might do harm to our youth.'' Detroit women characterized the criticism of Miss Royden as "absurd," but in Philadelphia, after reading the reports of her arrival, women's clubs retracted their invitations. Some women spoke sharply of "Hoyden Royden"; others, baffled by her direct and vigorous speech, took refuge in expressions of fluffy indignation. On the day after her arrival, Agnes Maude Royden gave a lecture at a Manhattan branch of the Young Women's Christian Association. Said Preacher Royden, referring to the distinction between the moral codes for male and female: "We shall see worse things before better. ... In the end we shall evolve a stable and permanent relation between men and women for the creation of children. ..." Of cigarets, Miss Royden ambiguously remarked that if a woman found that she could not exist without them she had better cut them out.

In New Haven, Conn., Agnes Maude Royden committed a few witticisms directed, in large part, not at her U. S. detractors but at the inhabitants of England. She said: "It is as easy for an Englishman to say something nice as it is for him to have a tooth pulled. ... In America, candidates 'run' for office, in England they 'stand.' . . . For my part, I pledge myself to return to England and to try to interpret the vast enterprises of your great empire, for that is what you are building up, in the certain belief that a genuine understanding can be built up between us. ... The palm may pass from us in the future. . . . But our task is in the present. Let us meet it together." After her lecture, Preacher Royden, like every other famed British visitor, was asked what she thought of prohibition. Said she: "It is a marvelous adventure. ... I wish it success."

Her audience was astonished to discover, in Agnes Maude Royden, an evangelist whose appeal was as much to the intelligence as to the emotions. Also, they were pleased to note that Miss Royden spoke with a cultivated accent and seldom made theatrical gestures. Her manner was quiet, her face sensitive, her mind alert.

They wished to know more about Agnes Maude Royden. Had they inquired, they would have discovered that she was 51 years old; that she was educated at Oxford University; that for her father, Sir Thomas Royden, a baronetcy had been created which had now descended to her brother, Sir Thomas Royden, head of the Cunard line, on one of whose boats (the Aquitania) Miss Royden had come to the U. S.; that she had visited the U. S. in 1923; that, on her present visit her manager had been compelled to refuse 400 invitations for lectures; that 18 new invitations had replaced those three which were canceled; that, after three months of lecturing* in the U. S. she will take a month's holiday; that she will then proceed to Honolulu on a proposed world tour to study the problems of youth, of feminine Christianity.

*Lecture subjects:

"Old Phrases and Old Truths"

"Psychology and Religion"

"Public Work and Public Workers"

"America and England--Can They Really Be Friends?"

"The Race Question and the Future"