Religion: Something Marked Personal

The well-to-do families of Chicago's broad-lawned suburb, Winnetka, Ill., turned out this week at the red brick community church* to honor the man who has been baptizing them, marrying them and preaching to them for 20 years —and loving it.

The Rev. Samuel Dacke Harkness, 66, grew up in a background where theology was orthodox and strict. The son of a Scottish Presbyterian minister, young Sam earned a doctor's degree from Missouri Valley College and was ordained a Presbyterian minister in 1908. But his experiences in the ministry soon began to jar loose some of the orthodox rivets in his Presbyterianism.

Natural Law. In South Dakota he was once called to a farmhouse where the father of five children had died while convalescing from typhoid. To the widow's tearful question, "Why did God take my husband?", Harkness made the stock answer: it was the will of God to which all must submit. But on the drive back to town, the doctor turned to the minister to ask: "Why did you tell her that nonsense about the will of God? Against my strict orders she gave her husband a meal of fried pork, and it killed him." Then, says Harkness, "I realized that God does not interfere with the operation of natural law from cause to effect."

Later he was summoned to visit an 18-year-old vagrant who was dying of tetanus. Much to his surprise he heard himself telling the boy: "You have just as good a chance with God as I have. You will be with Him soon, and I'll stay with you till you get there." Explains Harkness: "Gone was my previous thinking about the awful justice of God which demanded confession of sin and acceptance of the atonement of Christ on the cross. I only knew that the love of God is broader than the measure of man's mind." He gradually came to feel, he says, that the infallibility of the Scriptures is secondary to their value in the disclosure of truth in everyday life.

"Forever Creative." Such views soon tagged him as a liberal: Fundamentalist William Jennings Bryan once unsuccessfully opposed Harkness' appointment to a high office in the Presbyterian General Assembly as "a dangerous heretic." But Dr. Harkness revels in his unorthodoxy. With his wife he is planning a book to be titled The Confessions of Two Conscientious Hypocrites. Said he recently: "I don't think anyone can give you a religion ... I think anyone's religion, to be real and workable, has to be self-originating, forever creative. The church is merely a tool to be used—first, to measure our lives against the best we may know, and second, to accomplish with others what we cannot accomplish alone.

"Also, I believe the church in recent years has spent so much time telling men how to run their business, and has neglected to make them sufficiently moral to do it ... To me, the Gospel of Christ is marked 'personal,' and I try to make my ministry informal and human."