The highways and hedgerows of the U. S., as well as the fashionable avenues, have been combed to find a bishop coadjutor for the Episcopal diocese of Pennsylvania. Four were asked, four refused. Rector Henry Knox Sherrill of Boston's Trinity Church preferred to stay in Boston. Bishop Edward Makin Cross of Spokane, who was supposed to have relations in Philadelphia who would make that city attractive to him, preferred to stay in Spokane. Rector Russell Bowie of Grace Church, Manhattan, declined next, and then Dean William Scarlett of Christ Church Cathedral, St. Louis. The situation was beginning to suggest that Irish-born Bishop Thomas James Garland of Pennsylvania, a fibrous old gentleman of 62, was a man with whom other, younger men, were not eager to work. Bishop Garland parried this suggestion with a wry suggestion of his own. "They all seem to be afraid of hard work," he said. "It rather amuses me" (TIME, March 11).
Last week convening clergy and laymen of the Pennsylvania diocese, by no means desperate but evidently spurred by their necessity, announced the election of yet another man. Turning again to New England, they had singled out, for their fifth choice, Headmaster (Dr.) Samuel Smith Drury of famed, old-established St. Paul's School at Concord, N. H., largest Episcopal private school in the U. S.
St. Paul's alumni were surprised if not shocked to hear the news. To be Pennsylvania's bishop coadjutor is a great thing, they thought, but does it compare with being headmaster of St. Paul's? So large does Dr. Drury loom in the minds of St. Paul's men that to them it seemed almost presumptuous of the Pennsylvania Episcopalians to offer him the Number Two position in their State. Even more disquieting was this thought: suppose Dr. Drury should feel that his duty lies in Pennsylvania! What then would become of St.Paul's?
Comfort to St. Paul's men was their knowledge that in 1921 Dr. Drury had been offered the rectorship of Trinity Church, Manhattan. No man before him had ever refused that election. But Dr. Drury did not hesitate to refuse it. At that time he explained that he would not, could not, leave his boys. Three-quarters of a century old, possessed of a rare tradition in its first headmaster, the late, great Dr. Henry Augustus Coit, St. Paul's is excelled by no U. S. school, emulated by many, equalled by only two or three. Although St. Paul's stresses democracy few of its alumni are not in Social Registers. They are peculiarly loyal, family-bound alumni.
Dr. Drury delayed his reply to the Pennsylvanians.
In marked contrast to Episcopalian difficulties in Philadelphia was last week's Roman Catholic news there. Needing an auxiliary bishop for the diocese, Pope Pius simply appointed 34-year old Monsignor Gerald P. O'Hara of Philadelphia, now secretary to Philadelphia's Denis J Cardinal Dougherty.