Virgin Birth "Beautiful and Satisfying" Says Straton; Hits Grant and Fosdick

"They are novelties," said Dr. John Roach Straton when a CRIMSON reporter asked him to comment on the teachings of Dr. Percy Stickney Grant and Dr. Harry Emerson Fosdick, prominent New York Modernist clergymen. "They appeal to curiosity and to vanity. They tell their congregations that everything is all right. Instead of rebuking sin, they soft-soap. What is the use of a preacher if everything is all right?

"I had the greatest respect for Bob Ingersoll," he continued, "and use to go and hear him. I admired him as a man whose strength of conviction would not permit him to remain in a church with whose policies he was not strictly in accord. But these two men remain in parishes which were built to uphold certain doctrines, and deliberately tear them down.

Grant Position Paradoxical

"Dr. Grant is in the peculiar position of actively opposing the divorce laws of his church at the same time he is trying to marry a woman who has two living husbands. Dr. Fosdick opposes one of the fundamental precepts of the Presbyterian church, the virgin birth of Christ. I don't respect, I can't respect men like these, who stay in the church at the same time they are tearing down the faith of the church."

Dr. Fosdick said that while he did not believe in compulsory religion, he believed that at Harvard there should at least be one general assembly each day, preferably in chapel. He is a graduate of Mercer University, Georgia, and hopes to send each of his four sons there to study. As an educator, and as a clergyman he has been prominently identified with students for the past twenty-five years. He believes that the reason young men do not attend church regularly is because religion has become too formal.

"I would like to see a virile type of Christianity brought within reach of students," he said. "If religion was the right thing, students would be the first to attend services, I have been to services that I don't see how people sat through. I believe we need apostolic Christianity. If we could have a slice of New Testament religion anywhere near Harvard, I think the men would go. I don't wonder they balk at much that is handed them today."

Asked to define the beliefs of the Modernist, Dr. Straton replied: "The average Modernist preacher could put on the point of a pin what he does believe but it would take a ten ton truck to hold the things he does not believe. What they should do is get out of their present churches, and establish churches of their own, converting people to their beliefs if they can, instead of standing still, and knocking to pieces the very foundations of the Christian religion.

"I believe that the college man, as well as the working man, has enough faith in the supernatural, in the miraculous, to credit the virgin birth of Jesus Christ," he continued. "The quarrel that I have with some of the hypotheses of science is the treatment of dogmatic evidence as though it were proven fact. The divinity and virgin birth of Christ are two of the most beautiful and satisfying thoughts of Christian religion, but since they are founded on faith alone, they have been attacked."

Has Flourishing Church

Dr. Straton is pastor of one of the most flourishing of Baptist parishes in New York City. He had to combat dissension on all sides when he first took up his work there, because he preached the religion that reached directly at every member of the congregation. Secret meetings of prominent vestrymen were held in an effort to oust him, but he had become so firmly entrenched, and the congregation had increased in size so remarkably, that instead of Dr. Straton leaving, the wealthy vestrymen were forced to go.

Every Sunday Dr. Straton's church is filled to overflowing, a fitting testimonial to the man's personality and magnetism.