God and Man at Brooks House

Fifty-two ago, the guiding lights of Phillips Brooks House were advised to "stop talking Christianity and start practicing it." Since then, settlement work and student services have dislodged prayer meetings and Bible classes from the core of the Brooks House program. Although religious groups get meeting rooms and grants of money from PBH, they are independent and secondary in the entire Brooks House scheme. In hammering the social Gospel ideas of Bishop Phillips Brooks into a kind of social service program every religion preaches, PBH has succeeded in stripping itself of denominational character.

Because of this, a good number of PBH members are disturbed by the announcement that the new University Professor of Christianity will chart Brooks House policy to a much larger extent then the Chairman of the PBH Advisory Board did in past years. Partly, this furrowing of brows is the natural suspicion of any change. But it is also a sincere, though somewhat automatic, response to a seemingly added dose of the denominational in the Brooks House.

Now, it is silly to predict glumly the demise of secularism at PBH. The new Professor has not even been chosen. If the high standards of the terms of his selection can be met, he will not be a dogmatist, but will stand as a teacher as high above his own religion as stands another University Professor, Zechariah Chafee, above the dogmatic liberals. And the selection committee, including as it does Bishops Oxnam and Knox and Dr. Niebuhr, is certainly qualified to find such a man, of he exists.