Unity, Communion

When Jefferson Davis was President of the Southern Confederacy, he and Robert E. Lee were accustomed to attend services in St. Paul's Protestant Episcopal Church, Richmond, Va. The most fashionable church in the South, its pews were filled every Sunday with arch, starched ladies, who often took only a perfunctory interest in the services, and elaborately gallant grandees who, with some show of munificence, dropped their confederate greenbacks into the collection plate. St. Paul's is still a fashionable church. Its rector, the Rev. Dr. Beverley Dandridge Tucker Jr., last week pleased most of his parishioners, surprised some of them, as he surprised many other Episcopalians, by announcing that in future he would receive into communicant membership, without the rite of confirmation, members of other Christian denominations.

The rubrics of his church provide that no person be given Holy Communion until confirmed or desirous of being confirmed. Said Dr. Tucker: "... I am only doing openly and permitting persons of other denominations to do .habitually what has been done sub rosa and occasionally for many years."

A similar innovation had been made the week before by the Rev. Dr. Peter Ainslie, pastor of the Christian Temple in Baltimore. The essential purpose which prompted Dr. Tucker and Dr. Ainslie to such action was well expressed by the former: "The first step in a unity of Christian peoples is for the Protestant sects to get together. There can be no real discussion of a union as long as Rome is forced to deal with numerous sects, all holding divergent beliefs."

A less individual move toward Protestant unity was detailed in the final report of the World Conference on Faith and Order, held at Lausanne, Switzerland, last summer. Formulated by a committee of which Peter Ainslie was one of the members, the report was made public last week by Bishop Charles H. Brent of the Episcopal Diocese of Western New York. It pointed out that "unity" of faith did not necessarily imply "uniformity" in the expression of faith; that co-operation in foreign mission fields, and the willingness of many Christians to join "without regard for denominational differences" in the sacrament of the Lord's Supper were evidences of church union.