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The scene was Buffalo, where he was born 52 years ago. Father Fosdick was a teacher destined to receive much local kudos as long-time high school principal and later Superintendent of Education. Son Harry was the best pupil in town. He won countless prizes, especially for oratory. Once he & friends removed the clapper from a Methodist Church bell and, baffled by the Presbyterian clapper, left it wrapped up in their clothes. But such a prank, except for indicating energy-voltage, was not typical of young Scholar-Orator Fosdick. who knew what he wanted to do and was well on the road to doing it.
Second Crisis occurred at Colgate University. Why, asked Freshman Fosdick, must the strength of Samson be literal fact if the strength of Hercules is myth merely? Two years later Junior Fosdick decided to remove God from his universe. Mean while, he had suffered such agonies of doubt as come only to those who are at once religious by nature and intellectually robust. But serenity returned when God came back stripped of obscurantist makeup. Harry Fosdick was graduated head of his class. Third Crisis was essentially physical, for never again was the Fosdick faith con founded. Dr. Fosdick's is not a brilliant mind : Dr. Fosdick achieves brilliance. No preacher can equal his combination of simplicity and polish. This he gets by working 10 to 14 hours at a sermon. As a student in Union Theological Seminary he worked 14 hours a day. Besides his regular course, he took philosophy at Columbia. He also conducted a Bowery Mission, sometimes preaching nine times a Sunday to bums and toughs who needed strong, honest medicine. And he supported himself financially. Result: collapse, melancholia, gloom. It was, in evangelical idiom, the hand of God, for in later years thousands were to be rescued from despair by his sympathy. At least one man he indubitably saved from suicide. Development. Health regained, Harry Fosdick finished his last year at Union while serving as an assistant at Madison Avenue Baptist Church to Pastor George C. Lorimer (father of Editor George Horace Lorimer of Saturday Evening Post). Then, married, he took up his first pastorate in Montclair, N. J., prosperous-to-affluent suburb, which would have no youth but the ablest. For eleven years the man and his fame developed slowly, irre- sistibly. The man grew by meeting real issues. He flayed cardplaying (bridge). He was alarmed by this new thing called movies, He flayed parents who let "boys 12 years old send flowers to little girls and go in carriages to escort them to balls." (He has now abandoned this gen- eral lire, doubtless because he finds the root-trouble is much deeper.) The man's fame grew by books, simple, devotional, polished. Largely distributed through the Y. M. C. A., The Manhood of the Master, The Meaning of Prayer and others have reached a total sale of some 1,000,000 copies in the U. S. and have been translated into all manner of languages. Known by his books, he was in great demand as a university preacher. But that which made him universally famed was, to his regret, the