National Affairs: Protestant Spokesman

When the Pope or some mighty cardinal issues a statement, the world knows that it represents the opinion of the Roman Catholic Church. But who is the spokesman of the populous Protestant churches? Not, for example, the Methodist Board of Temperance, Prohibition and Public Morals, which represents only one sect. There is an organization, however, whose pronouncements are few and carefully, prepared; it is the nearest approach to a Protestant opinion interpreter in the U. S.; its name is the Federal Council of Churches of Christ in America and its president is Dr. Samuel Parkes Cadman, merry, easy-to-understand Brooklyn pastor, who answers questions for the New York Herald Tribune readers.

Lacking the voice of pomp, and judiciously unsensational, the Council's words are little heard by the mass of U. S. citizens. But it has for its utterances, almost certainly, one constant reader: Calvin Coolidge.

Statement of Council-President Cadman last week: "Loose talk of military intervention, either in Nicaragua or in Mexico, finds no support among any of the church groups with which I am familiar.

"Now is the time for the United States to give concrete reality to the prophetic utterance of President Coolidge in his Omaha address in 1925, when he declared that 'our country has definitely relinquished the old standards of dealing with other countries by terror and force and is definitely committed to the new standard of dealing with them through friendship and understanding.'

"This principle of peaceful settlement of disputes is doubly imperative in the case of our relations with Mexico, because of the existence of a treaty between the two countries calling for arbitration in case of disputes."

And people said that President Coolidge's personal attitude is not likely to differ widely from that of the Federal Council,