MANY FAITHS UNITE IN BROTHERHOOD PLEA
Religions of East and West Represented in a Peace Meeting at Community Church.
Peace and brotherhood were discussed by adherents of various religious faiths at a meeting of the Fellowship of Faiths last night at Community Church, Park Avenue and Thirty-fourth Street, held under the auspices of the League of Neighbors and the Union of East and West of 152 West Forty-second Street.
The meeting marked the introduction in New York of the Fellowship, which was organized with the expressed aim of promoting not only toleration but mutual understanding and appreciation among all faiths. According to a leaflet distributed at the gathering, the sponsoring organization "bridges dangerous gulfs between races, nationalities, classes and creeds, and is national as well as international."
Over a thousand people attended the meeting at which George E. Roberts presided. The musical program was in keeping with the diversity of faiths represented on the platform. There was a Sanskrit peace chant, sung by Kedar Nath Das Gupta; Afro-American spirituals, sung by Mrs. Charlotte Murray; the Twenty-third Psalm was chanted in Hebrew by a cantor, Nathan G. [Meltzoff], and there was also community singing.
The Rev. Rudolph Grossman, rabbi of Temple Rodeph Sholom, who headed the program as a speaker for Judaism, defined religion as the parent of hope and happiness, while bigotry brought only blight and bitterness. "We are of one common humanity," he said, "and sons and daughters of one universal Father."
The two speakers for Christianity were the Rev. Edmond B. Chaffee, a Protestant and director of the Labor Temple of this city, and Julies Bois, a Catholic and French poet. The Rev. Mr. Chaffee spoke against war and Mr. Bois paid a tribute to the spirituality of America, which he pictured as being supported by two columns, the Bible and Conscience.
B. P. Wadia from India, of the United Lodge of Theosophists, brought a message from the Far East, and Miss Villa Faulkner Page, in telling of the New Thought movement, declared that "human hearts are crying out in their hunger for God as never before."
Alfred W. Martin, leader of the New York Society for Ethical Culture, said in his address that "just as fast as men and women everywhere come to feel that spiritual freedom means more to them than slavish adherence to any tradition or creed, so fast will the world be lifted above all differences of caste, color, creed and race into that sublime religious fellowship which has been the dream of every age and of every race."
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