Heart First

After the Sunday morning service at Manhattan's Fifth Avenue Presbyterian Church, the boys of the congregation would escape from their parents, if they could, and play as boisterously as was possible on a Presbyterian Sunday in the 1880s. But one of them had his own kind of Sunday game. Over a set of kitchen steps he would drape one of his mother's shawls. Then he would mount his make-believe pulpit and preach.

Henry Sloane Coffin grew up to be one of the great clergymen of his day--and it was a day when clergymen were rarely listened to. But Dr. Coffin spoke out so that almost everyone had to hear. He preached on everything from labor legislation (he was for it) to prohibition (though a teetotaler, he was against it) to female clergy (he was for it). In his sermons he was apt to quote The New Yorker as well as the Bible. He preached quietly, but with an actor's skill, and in a voice so rich and delicate that board chairmen and bored charwomen alike would come back again and again for more.

Fish & Sanctity. The first church that young Dr. Coffin took over (he was fresh out of Manhattan's Union Theological Seminary) was near a Bronx fish market; in time, "the odor of sanctity overcame the odor of fish." Later, he moved to the Madison Avenue Presbyterian Church. When he found that the church maintained a chapel for poorer parishioners who could not afford to rent pews in the church proper, Dr. Coffin closed the chapel, abolished the pew rents and merged the two congregations. He often took a portable organ to tenement districts to hold services for workers who came home at 2 a.m. "You do not go into religion head first," he once said. "You must go in heart first, and the head will go later."

In 1926 Dr. Coffin became president of Union Theological Seminary. "Uncle Harry," as his students called him, campaigned for the great liberal causes that are safe and almost old-hat today, but which then still suggested the revolutionary's bonnet: internationalism, equality among the races, unity among Protestant sects, a common spiritual front among Protestants, Jews and Roman Catholics. Sometimes he went to extremes (e.g., he favored euthanasia), but he served to show that religion was not reactionary or doctrinaire or dead.

Sin & Self-Sufficiency. In 1945 Dr. Coffin retired as head of Union, but kept on preaching and writing. Last week, at 77, still a light to lighten that race of "men of adventurous spirit" he had pledged himself to foster at Union, he died--on Thanksgiving Day.

The U.S. might well remember a Thanksgiving Day sermon Dr. Coffin preached ten years ago. Americans, he said, were always "self-reliant, not to say cocky," but only "penitent, pardoned and therefore truly humble Americans" would do any good in the world. It was a favorite theme of his: "Selfsufficiency is the very essence of sin ... What a lot of rubbish has been written about being masters of our fate and captains of our soul! We have not realized that in threescore years and ten, man does not pass much beyond the kindergarten stage . . . Let a man be aware that he is and has nothing of himself, and the doors of his spirit are open Godward."

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