Word: coffining
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...austere background of a white granite pile. Among the robe wearers were 40 university, college and seminary presidents, including two women, Mary E. Woolley (Mt. Holyoke), and Ellen F. Pendleton (Wellesley). In a gown a cardinal hue, symbol of University of Glasgow honors, was the Reverend Henry Sloane Coffin, D. D. (N. Y. U., Yale, Harvard, Columbia, Princeton, Glasgow), who was there to be inaugurated as President. Whence came he to this post of eminence and ecclesiastical danger...
...radical honesty of the man would sooner lead him to be anything but Society's parson. He became (1905) pastor of Madison Avenue Presbyterian Church, Manhattan. Since then it has overshadowed many a more imposing home of prayer. It had, and still has, wealthy parishioners of influence. Dr. Coffin invited in residents of neighboring gum-chewing Third Avenue, not to exclude, but go hand in hand, with Madison Avenue. Certain parishioners left. Thrice as many more financially and otherwise distinguished ones came. Col. E. M. House, for example, new from Texas, chose it as his church...
...Coffin liked children. If he did not originate, then he made famous the three-minute sermon to children, before the longer, deeper effort. Many of the elders liked the children's sermons best. Once the subject was "The Man that Swallowed Himself." (" . . . the lips of a fool will swallow up himself." Ecclesiastes X:12). "How would you like to be thought of as just a mouth?" the Pastor asked the children, defining fools as boys and girls who bragged, told tales, lied...
...Coffin was having things to say to parents, too; forceful things, revealing, for a layman, an extraordinary acquaintance with current science, literature, philosophy. His sermon on the amphibian is classic. Are we to be sprawlers, floppers, drifters, no better than our amphibian ancestors? Let there be precise, controlled movement. Can you do what you ought, when you ought, whether you want to do it or not? Amphibians . . . the parable, under an orator's magic, progresses...
...Coffin sees no necessity for "scrapping the churches now a work." Rather is the call for bet ter preparation of men to minister in them. "A man who is no 'mighty in the Scriptures' is likely to be feeble and of brief service in a position of Christian leader ship. . . The trouble-maker in the Church, whether he be reactionary or radical, is the man without perspective of the course of Christian history, so that he repeat: ancient blunders and is unenriched by past discoveries." Such a man must acquire "a theology which conserves all the Christian experience...