Bishops in Evanston

Fifty years ago last week at Chicago, a triennial General Convention of the Protestant Episcopal Church prayerfully considered and at length approved a four-point formula for Christian Unity. Adopted by a Pan-Anglican Lambeth Conference in 1900, the Lambeth Quadrilateral stands today, a noble idea like the League of Nations which may some day work. Its formulators invited all Christendom to accept: " 1) the Holy Scriptures of the Old and New Testaments as revealed Word of God; 2) the Nicene Creed as the sufficient statement of the Christian Faith; 3) the two Sacraments --Baptism and the Supper of the Lord, ministered with un failing use of Christ's words of institution, and of the elements ordained by Him; 4) The Historic Episcopate locally adapted to the varying needs of the nations and peoples."

Last week, to commemorate the anniversary of the Chicago-Lambeth Quadri lateral, there gathered in suburban Evanston, at the invitation of the Episcopal Church, some 150 bishops and archbishops of the Anglican communion in the Western Hemisphere, including two primates--Toronto's Archbishop Derwyn Trevor Owen, and Archbishop Edward Hutson of the West Indies.

The Evanston gathering, whose deliberations took place in the diocesan Pro-Cathedral of St. Luke, was impressive, devout, tedious. Chief subjects considered by their excellencies of Canada, the U. S. and the West Indies were Peace and Christian Unity. Washington's Bishop James Edward Freeman opened the Pan-American Congress with this observation: "State craft has utterly failed to abolish war, and Christianity must come to the rescue or civilization and the church will perish from the earth!'' Bishop Irving Peake Johnson of Colorado disagreed. Said he: "It is impossible for the church to alter political systems. . . . The church exists to produce righteous people and that is a Herculean task." Gloomily observed Chicago's Bishop George Craig Stewart, host to the Congress: "A moral collapse is engulfing mankind . . . unification of Christian forces alone will destroy the enemies of civilization." The Congress closed day after all the bishops had gone to the Northwestern-Ohio State football game.

With considerably less self-consciousness, the annual meeting of the House of Bishops of the U. S. Episcopal Church also took place last week in Evanston. It elected three new missionary bishops: Venerable Winfred H. Ziegler, Archdeacon of Chicago, to the Wyoming post left vacant by the death of the late Bishop Elmer Nicholas Schmuck; Rev. Dr. Douglas H. Atwill of St. Paul to the North Dakota district; Dean Harry Beal of Los Angeles to the Canal Zone. The bishops settled another Episcopal matter which had long plagued the Church: whether Bishop Frank Elmer Wrilson of Eau Claire, Wis. had been justified in receiving in his cathedral as a Bishop Rev. Dr. John William Charles Toch Torok, Orthodox Catholic. The House of Bishops decided no.

If last week's two gatherings in his Pro-Cathedral accomplished nothing else they brought baldish, hawk-nosed George Craig Stewart once more to the attention of his Church. This churchman was once a bellboy in Chicago's Brevoort Hotel, whither he had fled from the home of a Scottish Presbyterian aunt in Ontario. Before that he had lived with his Scottish father, a grocer of Saginaw, Mich. In Chicago young Stewart worked in a mission, gained a scholarship in the Moody Bible Institute, earned his way through Northwestern University by preaching in a Methodist church. A final religious shift brought him, in 1904, to St. Luke's Parish in Evanston.

This he built up so ably that, even after he became bishop in 1930, he returned there to preach because the congregation could get along with no other man. The present handsome, white-stone building, housing the largest congregation (2,000) in the diocese, contains a stained glass window with the figure of a priest blessing little children, a fresco showing a youth in red pants carrying St. Luke's Church to the Lord. Both hawk-nosed figures are unmistakable likenesses, to the Bishop's quiet satisfaction, of George Craig Stewart.

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