ATHLETICS IN CHURCH

It wasn't so very long ago that a certain actor wandered about New York City looking for a clergyman who would consent to honor Joseph Jefferson, the Rip Van Winkle of a thousand stage productions, with the funeral rites of the Church. In at least two large cities of the East, there is no baseball played on Sunday, because the people remember the Fourth Commandment. In some places small loys still scatter and leave their marbles when the village parson walks down the street on Sunday afternoon.

Fortunately, these relics of an attitude that divorced worldly amusements from any contact with religion or religious men are now in the class of museum pieces. In the minds of modern men the jarring elements in religion and daily amusement have become reconciled into harmony. There has arisen a recognition of how each may supplement the other.

On last Sunday afternoon, in the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in New York, there took place a significant ceremony. Representatives of American sport, professional as well as amateur, marched to the high altar to hear Bishop Manning formally assign the "sports bay" in the new Cathedral.

In this procession were a number of personages known to readers of sporting pages by familiar nicknames that lend themselves readily to the usages of headline writers. Each delegation carried the banner of its sport. At the high altar rail stood Baseball, and Boxing, and Horse Racing and the rest--and no fire came from heaven.

One entire bay of the nave of the Cathedral which is now rising was built by contributions from the sporting world. In token of that service stained glass windows in that bay will depict the finish of a horse race, two boxers squaring off at the gong, the follow-through at the end of a single to center field, and other episodes in a score of athletic fields.

The farsightedness and the breadth of vision that brought about such a step is one of the most encouraging aspects of contemporary affairs. In them two fundamental elements of human life, long opposed to one another, have been wedded. Each should benefit from the new association.