Religion: Incarnation's Reincarnation

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A famed old Manhattan parish gave up its own life last week to make its $1,500,000 endowments available to the East Side chapel it founded 55 years ago. It was the Episcopal Church of the Incarnation on once-fashionable Murray Hill, among whose communicants is Mrs. James Roosevelt, the President's mother.

Other Murray Hill churches, watching staid brownstone mansions give way to office buildings and apartment houses, have moved or merged. But eloquent, liberal, Georgia-born Dr. John Gass decided Incarnation should reincarnate instead, submitted his own resignation as rector to facilitate the change.

Services at the mother church will end on May 1. But backed by its endowments, the daughter Church of the Incarnation will continue not only to hold services on the teeming East Side but run clubs, clinics, a day nursery.