Religion: Northern Baptists

The Northern Baptists, before they concluded their convention at Cleveland last week sent a notice to the Presbyterians at Cincinnati that they were praying for them. But little did the Baptists want immediate union with another denomination. Two years ago they and the Disciples of Christ made overtures towards merger. Last year the Disciples voted favorably. Last week the Baptists rejected them.

Money was the argument for the Baptists weakening their strength, slightly, in the University of Chicago. The university has assets of $100,000,000. It wants to double them. To do so it must get contributions from others than Baptists. Great donors will not give if their denominations are not strongly represented in the university’s board of trustees. The board numbers 30, of whom 18 have been obliged to be Baptists. The convention last week decided that at least 18 must belong to Christian churches and of those 18 at least ten must be Baptists.

The new president of the Northern Baptist Convention, Dr. Albert William Beaven, was obliged to hasten from its final sessions to deliver the commencement address at Peddie School, Hightstown, N. J., whence his only son Robert Haddow Beaven was graduating.

Dr. Beaven, 48, has been president of Colgate-Rochester Divinity School the past year. For 20 years he was pastor of Rochester, N. Y.’s Lake Avenue Baptist Church, a congregation which has furnished three presidents of the Northern Baptist Convention—Dr. Beaven, Mrs. Helen Barrett Montgomery (daughter of a onetime minister of that church), Dr. Clarence Augustus Barbour (Dr. Beaven’s predecessor as minister of the church and president of Colgate-Rochester, now president of Brown University) (TIME, Oct. 28).