Top Universalist

Those hard-working freethinkers, the Universalists, learned last week that they were soon to get a new General Superintendent. After 15 years in the office, the nearest a Universalist can come to being a bishop, Dr. Robert Cummins, 55, announced that he was retiring because "it has always been my custom to leave a church while I am still cherished." His suc cessor: peppy, Brooklyn-born Dr. Brainard Frederick Gibbons.

Universalist Gibbons, 51, began as a Manhattan lawyer, served in the firm of the late Chief Justice Charles Evans Hughes, and eventually set up his own practice. In 1936 he quit "to do something for society rather than just make money out of its difficulties," and went to St. Lawrence University's theological school. Dr. Gibbons' parish since 1942 has been a small one, the First Universalist Church at Wausau (pop. 30,414), Wis., but he has attracted plenty of attention with the vigorous anti-orthodoxy of his speeches around the country.

Dr. Gibbons will preside over a critical new chapter of Universalist history. By this summer, his 64,000-member church may be ready for a federal union, long discussed, with U.S. Unitarians (membership: 80,000).

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