Religion: Best Brain in America

I have come to the conclusion that it will be next to impossible to directly pin anything to Bishop Cannon. I am sincere in saying that I consider him to have the best brain in America, no one excepted. He has without exception foreseen and prepared for every attack made upon him. —Publisher William Randolph Hearst, whom Bishop James Cannon Jr. of the Methodist Episcopal Church, South, is suing for $5,000,000 for "false, scandalous, defamatory and malicious libel" (TIME, Oct. 27).

Last week at Washington four ministers of Bishop Cannon's Church tried to pin four dozen accusations upon him. They too found him "prepared for any attack." The accusations dealt with the Bishop's four most vital interests—God, two women, politics and the stockmarket. Last spring at the Dallas general convention of the church he wept himself into official forgiveness for his stockmarket gambling (TIME, June 2). Two weeks later he told a U. S. Senate committee that his political lobby and market activities were none of the Senate's business and with the single crutch he was then using because of his arthritis, pried his way through a crowd which was watching for his senatorial flaying (TIME, June 16). His action defeated the Senate committee. It has not recalled him for quizzing.

The Bishop's fellow churchmen who attacked him last week were Drs. Forest Johnston Prettyman of Baltimore, I. P. Martin of Abingdon, Va., Costen Jordan Harrell and J. T. Mastin of Richmond. Particularly were they excited at newspaper reports of how the Bishop courted his traveling secretary, Mrs. Helen Hawley McCallum, whom he married (his second wife) in London last July and took to Brazil for a honeymoon. The Ministers demanded the Church equivalent of a grand jury investigation of Bishop Cannon. Perforce Bishop William Neuman Ainsworth of Birmingham, Ala., ruling Bishop of the Church, was obliged to hold a hearing. Bishop Cannon delayed action from September when the charges were filed, until last week because his arthritis became worse and worse. He has spent most of the past three months in hospitals. Last week, when the hearing finally occurred, he was using two crutches.

The grand jury consisted of twelve Methodist elders. If they found a presumption of guilt against Bishop Cannon, they would suspend him from all Church duties, including chairmanship of the Board of Temperance & Social Service, until 1934, when the next Church quadrennial convention would actually try him.

This grand jury met in Washington's Mount Vernon Place Methodist Church. Chambered with them were the four accusing ministers; Bishop Ainsworth and two other bishops who helped him umpire the proceedings, Bishop Cannon, Professor James Cannon III, Duke University religious historian,— and a friend. Brought in by the prosecution were a detective, a Hearst reporter, a school executive, quantities of documents.

Men of God or of the gods have always constituted themselves men apart. Their tribulations they insist are none of the worshippers' business. So this hearing was customarily secret and secretive. To preserve secrecy Bishop Cannon's inquisitors tried to hide their identities, went to the fantastic ruse of calling each other "Brother Smith" or "Brother Jones" when in the hearing of outsiders.