At Edinburgh at Columbus

By His Majesty's Grace, no man in Scotland has higher rank than the Moderator of the "Auld Kirk," the Church of Scotland. Only the Lord Chancellor of Great Britain takes precedence. Last week at the General Assembly in Edinburgh a new Moderator was elected. Rev. Dr. Lauchlan MacLean Watt of Glasgow Cathedral. He presided over the Assembly while delegates disapprovingly discussed a proposal to unite with the Church of England, and while one of them called Scot Ramsay MacDonald a "Sabbath-breaker" for holding "more Cabinet meetings on the Lord's Day than any one of his predecessors."

But another Scot was more in the eye of the news and of Edinburgh. The Assembly is opened every year by a Lord High Commissioner who represents the King-Emperor and gets -L-2,000 for his work. This year the Commissioner was John Buchan, 57, famed author, third commoner and first "son of the manse" (minister's son) ever to get the appointment. Lord High Commissioner Buchan stayed at Holyrood Palace, where the town officers of Edinburgh ceremoniously gave him keys to the city (which by custom he handed back at once). Day the Assembly opened, he drove first to St. Giles's Cathedral and then to Assembly Hall, with his wife, purse-bearer, aides-de-camp, ladies-in-waiting and cavalry escort. Cannon thundered a royal salute. The Lord High Commissioner read a letter of commendation from the King. Thereafter he visited the Assembly daily, spent some of his -L-2,000 on garden parties and other functions for the delegates.

John Buchan was brought up in the old Free Church which was merged with the Church of Scotland in 1929, when the Duke of York was Lord High Commissioner. A quiet, knobbly-browed Scotsman, he has been playwright, actor, newsman, publisher, lawyer, justice of the peace, agriculturist, tax expert, Wartime propagandist, soldier, lecturer, mountain-climber, angler. He sits in Commons for the Scottish Universities, is a trustee of the National Library of Scotland. Best known of his rare bills in Commons was for greyhound racing. John Buchan is famed in Great Britain and well-known in the U. S. for his adventurous, Kiplingesque historical novels (Greenmantle, Witch Wood, The Blanket of the Dark, etc. etc.). British schoolboys read them and are given a Buchan history of the World War--sound, patriotic, safe stuff. For 25 years John Buchan has been an elder in a Scottish church in London. When informed of his appointment as Lord High Commissioner he said: "I am going to be a dour Presbyterian. . . ."

In Columbus, Ohio last week met 1,500 U. S. Presbyterians in their annual General Assembly. Fundamentalists had come bringing threats, chief among them Dr. John Gresham Machen of Philadelphia who last month stirred up the row leading to the resignation of Author Pearl Sydenstricker Buck as a mission teacher in China (TIME, May 8). Since then Dr. Machen had flayed Mrs. Buck for an "antiChristian propagandist,'' excoriated the Presbyterian Foreign Missions board for its "Yes-&-No" attitude, called everybody names including even much-revered Board Secretary Robert Elliott Speer whom, by implication, he called "dishonest" and "evasive."

Last week's Assembly effectively deflated Dr. Machen and the Fundamentalists. The delegates voted 5-to-1 their confidence in the Board. They threw out an overture gotten up by Dr. Machen which would have limited the Board to persons of known Fundamentalism. The Assem- bly elected as Moderator a safe "middle-of-the-roader," Dr. John McDowell, 62, national missions board secretary. Scottish-born, a onetime breaker boy in a Pennsylvania mine (where he lost an arm). Dr. McDowell worked his way through Mount Hermon School at East Northfield. Mass.. became a friend of Founder Dwight Lyman Moody. Rugged, bespectacled Dr. McDowell said last week: "I have no difficulty with any man if he is a Christian first, but if he is anything else first. Fundamentalist or Modernist, he is always a source of trouble.''

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