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'4j^ PRINCETON, N. J. 4f, 
 
 Presented by~T='x-(S5\C^^Y-^\- \0\\-\or\ 
 
 BX 5880 .C737 1897 
 Crapsey, Algernon Sidney, 
 
 1847-1927. 
 A voice in the wilderness 
 
A VOICE IN THE WILDERNESS 
 
 BEING A PI,EA FOR THE RESTORATION OF 
 
 Primitive Christianity 
 
 ADDRESSED To THE 
 
 BISHOPS OF THE ANGLO-AMERICAN COMMUNION 
 
 AND THROUGH THEM TO THE 
 
 English-Speaking People Throughout the World 
 
 BY 
 
 AI.GERNON SIDNEY CRAPSEY 
 
 Rector of S. Andrew's Church 
 
 Rochester, new York 
 
 NEW YORK : 
 
 James Potts & Co. 
 1897 
 
Copyright, 1897, 
 
 by 
 
 Ai^GERNON Sidney Crapsey. 
 
CONTENTS. 
 
 Page 
 
 Letter Dedicatory, 5 
 
 Book First : 
 
 An Interpretation of the Quadrilateral, . . 23 
 Book Second : 
 
 The Office and Work of a Bishop in the Church 
 
 of God, ....... 97 
 
 An Argument, 152 
 
A LETTER DEDICATORY 
 
 ADDRESSED TO 
 
 Right Reverend FREDERICK DAN HUNTINGTON 
 
 Doctor ill Divinity 
 
 Doctor 171 Laws 
 
 Doctor ill the Humanities 
 
 Bishop of Central New York 
 
Letter Dedicatory. 
 
 My Dear Bishop : 
 
 In the early daj^s of book-writing and book-making 
 it was customary for an author of little note to pub- 
 lish his book under the patronage of some noble 
 and celebrated name ; hoping to overcome his own 
 obscurity by adding to it the celebrity of his patron. 
 
 Following this ancient custom, I venture to bring 
 out this little book under the cover of your distin- 
 guished name and to beg for it the patronage of your 
 high office and the support of your venerated and 
 beloved personality. 
 
 I make this appeal for help the more urgently 
 because what I do in this book may seem to savour of 
 presumption, and maj^ bring upon me the reproach 
 justly due to one who ' ' exercises himself in great 
 matters which are too high for him." 
 
 I, who am less than the least of all saints, who am 
 but a parish priest with nothing to distinguish me 
 from the thousands who hold and exercise the same 
 office, venture to speak to those who are over me in 
 the Lord. I address my words to the Bishops of the 
 Anglo-American Communion. 
 
 In so rash an undertaking it is necessary that I 
 fortify myself in everj^ possible way so that I may 
 secure a fair hearing and a just judgment. 
 
 I can think of no better method of gaining the 
 favor of those with whom I wish to plead than by 
 placing myself under the protection of some eminent 
 member of their sacred order. 
 
 I have chosen you as my sponsor because for more 
 than twenty years it has been my privilege to think 
 
of you as a father and a friend. From my earliest 
 manhood you have followed my life with affectionate 
 interest, and I have looked upon yours with reverent 
 admiration. 
 
 It is that life which has inspired me with the hope 
 that we may have with us once more Bishops in the 
 Church of God, who shall revive among us the prim- 
 itive Christian life : simple-hearted men, living simple 
 lives in the midst of a simple people ; men who care 
 least of all for their honors and their dignities and 
 most of all for the Church of God which He has pur- 
 chased with His own blood. 
 
 You have been to me and to many the ideal of 
 what such a Bishop should be : your austere life : 
 your sanctified learning : your devotion to God and 
 your sympathy for man, give hope to all who are 
 praying for the restoration of the primitive life of the 
 Church. 
 
 There is a scene in mj^ memory which I will never 
 forget. I had occasion to visit you a year or so ago. 
 It was in the winter time and the day was cold and 
 stormy. As I passed through the country I looked 
 out upon a white and desolate world. When I 
 alighted from the railway car and walked down the 
 station, I saw an old man coming toward me, bending 
 under the weight of a heavy bag. No one took notice 
 of him. My heart was full of pity for the old man 
 because he had to be abroad on such a day of wind and 
 snow. But when he came nearer pity was changed 
 to admiration, for he lifted his head and there flashed 
 over his face a smile of recognition and I saw it was 
 the Bishop of Central New York. He was coming 
 home from his northern visitation. 
 
 That sight was to me a confirmation of Faith. It 
 proved to me that the men of to-day are as devoted as 
 any men who have lived and labored in the Church of 
 
God. It assured me that we not only have Apostolic 
 succession, but that we have Apostles. 
 
 I would not dare to write such words of j^ou did I 
 not know that you have passed bej'ond the reach of 
 the praise or blame of man. ' ' For now are you ready 
 to be offered and the time of your departure is at hand ; 
 you have fought a good fight, you have finished your 
 course : you have kept the faith."* You are still with 
 us and are working for us, ' ' but it is toward evening 
 and the day is far spent, "f 
 You are no longer 
 
 ' ' With the reapers reaping early 
 In among the bearded barley," 
 
 but you are where 
 
 " By the moon the reapers weary 
 PiUng sheaves in uplands airy "J 
 
 listen and wait for the Voice that calls them home. 
 
 Already, though you know it not, there has come 
 over you that change which comes at last to all the 
 children of God : you no longer ' ' bear the image of 
 the earthy, ' ' you ' ' bear the image of the heavenly. " 1 1 
 
 Your age, your learning, your well known devotion 
 to the truth as it is in Jesus, make you of all men the 
 one whom I would have for mj^ advocate with the 
 men that are your fellows. And so, without your 
 permission and without making you responsible for a 
 single word that I say, I beg j^ou to help me with 
 your sympathy and your prayers. 
 
 And I ask this favor the more boldly because I 
 have in your sacred office the reason and the excuse 
 for all I wish to sa3^ 
 
 * II Timothy iv, 6, 7. f S. Luke xxiv, 29. 
 
 J Tennyson, Lady of vShalott. || I Cor. xv, 49. 
 
The Christian communion to which you and I 
 belong is separated from all other Christian commu- 
 nions by the fact that it is Episcopal. 
 
 We do not eat and drink at the Lord's table with 
 other Christian men and women, because we think 
 that they have no right to spread any table at all. 
 We think of them as Israel thought of Reuben and 
 Gad and the half tribe of Manasseh : * as brethren 
 who have builded altars for themselves, and who no 
 longer worship at the true altar of God. 
 
 We claim that they are separated from the Church 
 of God, which is the object of His love and to which 
 He gave the promises. We assert distinctly that He 
 ' ' has promised to be with the ministers of the Apostolic 
 succession to the end of the world, "f And we hold 
 that ours is that ministr)^ of Apostolic succession. 
 
 It is our belief in the fact of an Apostolic ministry 
 which isolates us and forbids our full communion 
 with millions round about us, who call themselves 
 Christians. 
 
 And when these separated brethren call upon us to 
 justify our isolation, and ask us what good the Apos- 
 tolic ministry has done for us, we answer much every 
 way. 
 
 In the first place, the simple fact that it is Apostolic 
 is a great blessing. It is a ministry which we did not 
 create for ourselves, but which was created for us. It 
 is a ministry ' ' which is not of men, nor by man, but 
 by Jesus Christ and God the Father who raised Him 
 from the dead."| 
 
 This ministry, as we believe, is the creation of the 
 Breath of Jesus Christ. As God of old breathed into 
 the nostrils of Adam and he became a living soul, 
 so Christ our God breathed upon His Apostles and 
 
 * Joshua xxii, 17, 18. f Office for Ordination of Deacons. 
 i Galatians i, i. 
 
— 9— 
 
 they became a living, organic body with special 
 faculties for their special work. And we hold it to 
 be self-evident, that this organic bod}^ called into 
 being by the breath of God, was gifted with that 
 wonderful power which God gives to every living 
 creature, which is the power of reprodudlion. 
 
 The ministry to which we cleave is, we believe, as 
 directly the descendant of the Apostolic ministry as 
 we ourselves are the descendants of Adam. 
 
 And this ministry has had a long and eventful his- 
 tory. It kept company with Jesus ; "beginning with 
 the baptism of John, unto that same day that He was 
 taken up from them."=i^ 
 
 As soon as the promise of Jesus was fulfilled and 
 power came upon them from on high, the Apostolic 
 ministry went forth and preached everywhere, " the 
 lyord working with them and confirming the word 
 with signs following."! 
 
 For more than three hundred years this Apostolic 
 ministry ' ' suffered persecution for the Cross of 
 Christ." It was by the verj^ fa(ft of its existence, 
 separate from sinners. It had no communion with 
 the great religions round about it. It was isolated 
 alike from Jew and Gentile. ' ' It had an altar 
 whereof they had no right to eat who served the 
 tabernacle. "J 
 
 When the Church had peace, then this Apostolic 
 ministry rose, the center of unity and the principle of 
 order in the midst of a wild and chaotic world. That 
 civilization in the midst of which we live, which we 
 call the Christian civilization, is due to the presence 
 and work of the ministers of the Apostolic succession. 
 
 We English-speaking people owe all that is best in 
 our lives to the charity of S. Gregory of Rome, to the 
 missionar}^ labors of S. Augustine of Canterbury, 
 
 * Acts i, 22. t Mark xvi, 20. X Hebrews xiii, 10. 
 
and the devotion of S. Cuthbert and his fellows of Lin- 
 disfarne, and these were all members of the Apostolic 
 ministry. 
 
 Beside these there have been a host which no man 
 can number, who have subdued kingdoms, wrought 
 righteousness, stopped the mouths of lions ; quenched 
 the violence of fire ; escaped the edge of the sword ; 
 out of weakness were made strong ; waxed valiant in 
 fight ; turned to flight the armies of the aliens.* 
 
 It is to us a controlling thought and one from 
 which we cannot turn away, that in the Apostolic 
 ministry, to say nothing of the Apostolic Church, we 
 find more than anywhere else in the world the heroes 
 of Christianity ; the men who have lived and died 
 for it ; the men who have made its history. To for- 
 sake that ministry is to cut ourselves away from our 
 own past ; it is to deny our parentage and to lose our 
 heritage. 
 
 This, then, is our first reason for holding to the 
 Apostolic ministry. We love it because it is Apos- 
 tolic, because by means of it we are of the household 
 of God, and fellow-citizens with the saints. 
 
 And to the Apostolic ministry we owe that mode of 
 of Divine worship, than which we think there is no 
 other in the world. 
 
 It is the tradition of the Church that we owe those 
 wonderful liturgies, or forms of divine worship, by 
 which to-day we approach the mercy seat, to the 
 inspired labors of S. Peter, S. James, S. John, and S. 
 Mark. But be this as it may, we certainly owe our 
 sacramental worship to the Apostolic Church, of 
 which the Apostolic ministry was the head. 
 
 And having once entered into and enjoyed this 
 worship, we can be content with no other. We find 
 in it the full satisfaction of all our spiritual desires. 
 * Hebrew xi, 33, 34. 
 
— 1 1 — 
 
 Who that has worshipped after the manner of the 
 Apostolic Church under the guidance of the Apos- 
 toHc ministry ; who that has gone the round of that 
 wonderful Christian year ; each day and hour set in 
 its place, ordered and regulated by the Presence of 
 Jesus Christ, the Sun of this world of righteousness 
 as the days of the natural year are set in order and 
 regulated bj^ the presence of the sun of the natural 
 world ; who, I sa}^, having once lived in this country 
 of spiritual beauty, with all its wonderful variety, 
 would care to forsake it for the barrenness of what 
 lies without ; to go where every Sunday is simply 
 Sunday ; where worship is at loose ends and hap- 
 hazard ; where men pray each out of his own shallow 
 heart and not as the Apostolic ministry, out of the 
 deep heart of the Church ? 
 
 For this gift of a sacramental worship, making us 
 one with Christ as he is one with the Father ; we 
 are grateful to the Apostolic ministry from whom it 
 comes. For this we will cleave to it forever. 
 
 And moreover to this Apostolic ministry we are 
 indebted for a knowledge of God, which is the light 
 of our intelligence and the stay of our souls. From 
 the very first it has been one of the great functions of 
 the Apostolic ministry to know the I^ord. 
 
 This knowledge of God in the heart of the Apostolic 
 ministry is the rock upon which rests the Church of 
 the living God. 
 
 It was at Caesarea Philippi that the Blessed L^ord 
 Jesus sounded the heart of the Apostolic ministry for 
 the foundation of the Church. 
 
 He said, "But whom say ye that I am?" And 
 when S. Peter, speaking for the corporate body said 
 "Thou art the Christ, the Son of the living God;" 
 then Jesus rejoiced and said, " Blessed art thou, 
 Simon Bar-Jona, for flesh and blood hath not revealed 
 
-12- 
 
 it unto thee, but mj^ Father which is in heaven. And 
 I say also unto thee : thou art Peter, and upon this 
 rock I will build mj^ Church, and the gates of hell 
 shall not prevail against it.'"*^ 
 
 And from that day to this the lips of the Apostolic 
 ministry have kept knowledge. That vast body of 
 Divine truth with which we feed our intellect and 
 enrich our souls is, in a large measure, the work of the 
 Apostolic ministry, of the Bishops, the Priests and the 
 Deacons, of whom that ministry is composed. 
 
 Much work has, in these latter days, been done by 
 men outside the Apostolic ministry, and for this we 
 owe them thanks. But these workers are themselves 
 only hewers at the Apostolic quarries. 
 
 The material for their work comes from the Apos- 
 tolic ministry ; from Peter and from Paul, from 
 Clement, and from Cyprian, from Basil and from 
 Gregory, from Augustine and from Jerome, from Bede 
 and from Anselm, and from the long line of doctors 
 from Apollos down to your honored self, who have 
 confirmed the Divine word by their holiness and 
 illustrated it by their wisdom. 
 
 And, moreover, that form of sound words which 
 we call the Apostles' Creed, and which is the all-suffi- 
 cient expression of our faith and our love, we derive 
 from the Apostolic ministry. 
 
 When we think thus of our history and our heritage, 
 we say surely ours is a blessed fortune. We have 
 riches in possession. Other men have labored and we 
 have entered into their labors, and as is the habit with 
 prosperous people, we have an unconscious feeling of 
 scorn and pity for all who do not share with us in the 
 privileges of our spiritual birth. 
 
 But when we turn from the contemplation of our 
 possessions to think of the use which we make of 
 * S. Matthew xvi, 15-18. 
 
— 13— 
 
 them ; when we think of what we have and then of 
 what we do, our soul is filled with strange and sad 
 misgivings. 
 
 We have the Apostolic ministry, worship and creed, 
 and from these ought to follow the Apostolic life. 
 Having these notes of the Church, we ought to be 
 the Church of God in this land of ours. 
 
 This is indeed our claim. We like to call ourselves 
 the American Church. But our claim is not admitted 
 by the great mass of American Christians, and as we 
 have no way of enforcing our claim, it must be on our 
 lips either a boast or a prophec}^ 
 
 If we say that we, the members of the Protestant 
 Episcopal Church in the United States of America, 
 are the only Christians, the only people of God in this 
 land, then our claim is not only an idle boast, it is a 
 cruel and shameful boast. 
 
 We are in danger of falling into the sin of Pharisa- 
 ism, For upon what do we rest our claim that we are 
 the chosen of God ? Is it upon the fact that though 
 we be few in number we are great in life ? that we 
 are the most Christ-like of all the people of the land ? 
 Is it that while others are followers of God in name, 
 we are followers in reality ? 
 
 Both you and I have heard our Church likened to 
 the Apostolic Church, not only in its ministry, doc- 
 trine and worship, but also in its comparative strength. 
 The Apostolic Church was a little one ; our Episcopal 
 Church is a little one, and this resemblance is another 
 proof of our Apostolic character. 
 
 And so it would be if our membership were in 
 quality as well as in quantity like the membership of 
 the Apostolic Church. 
 
 The members of the Apostolic Church were the 
 choice and heroic spirits of their age, who were readj^ 
 to, and actuall}^ did, hazard their all upon the venture 
 
— 14— 
 
 of their faith. They were few in number, because 
 they were the chosen of God. But they were in fact 
 the greatest of all people. In them was the promise 
 of the future : thej^ were the seed of the Kingdom of 
 God. 
 
 Now if this be our character, we need not fear to 
 stand by our claim to be the people of God : His true 
 and only Church in this land. 
 
 But I have heard it said : I do not know if the say- 
 ing be true, that our Church is the church of the 
 wealthy and the fashionable of this world, and that 
 the men and women do not in any way forsake their 
 wealth or their fashion Avhen they come into the 
 Church, but bring it with them and make the very 
 House of God the scene of their pride and the place of 
 their vain display. We are told that the members of 
 the Church are in no wise to be distinguished from 
 the people of the world in the use and abuse of their 
 wealth. 
 
 I have been told, what I cannot believe to be true, 
 that we have rich and fashionable churches, churches 
 in which no poor person is ever seen, churches that 
 are the gateway to the most corrupt and fashionable 
 life in our great cities. 
 
 It is asserted that our places of worship will for the 
 most part be found in the neighborhood of the rich 
 and the well-to-do. 
 
 A distinguished priest said to me a few daj^s ago : 
 " We have never succeeded in making the poor at 
 home in our churches." 
 
 If that be true, or in any measure true, then we 
 cannot base our claim to be the people of God upon 
 the fewness of our numbers. 
 
 We are few in numbers, not because we are the 
 chosen of God, who are always the few among the 
 many, but because we are the chosen of the world, the 
 
— 15— 
 
 rich, the fashionable, the powerful, who are likewise 
 always the few among the many. 
 
 Now I do not assert that this charge against us is 
 supported by the facts, but the charge is made, and it 
 is for us to see how much of truth there is in it. 
 
 We must admit, for it is our pride and boast, that 
 we have a larger proportion of the wealthy and im- 
 portant people of the land in our churches than there 
 are in any other Christian community. 
 
 This fact of the wealth and importance of our mem- 
 bership is an immeasurable advantage, if our wealth 
 be consecrated and our importance humbled to the 
 service of Christ. 
 
 But if our wealth is used for our own ease, comfort 
 and luxury ; if we make class distinction in our very 
 churches, having churches for the rich and chapels 
 for the poor, then our claim to be the Church of God 
 in this land fails in a most important particular. We 
 have Apostolic ministry, doctrine and faith, but we 
 have not Apostolic life. 
 
 Nothing is more certain than that our holy relig- 
 ion came into this world as a way of life. "Go," 
 said the Holy Spirit to the imprisoned Apostles, 
 ' ' and stand in the temple and preach the way of this 
 life." 
 
 It was not the doctrine of the Church in and of it- 
 self, nor the worship of the Church alone, nor the fact 
 of an Apostolic ministry that brought about the con- 
 version of the ancient world. The great power of 
 God for the accomplishment of that work was the 
 Christian life. 
 
 That life had three marks or characteristics by 
 which it was distinguished from every other life in the 
 world. These marks were devotion to Christ, per- 
 sonal purity and brotherly love (which brotherly love 
 found its expression in social equality.) I dwell at 
 
 2 
 
— 16— 
 
 large on these elements of the Christian life in a por- 
 tion of the book that follows this letter. 
 
 I wish here to call attention to the fact that these 
 elements are related to each other by way of cause and 
 efifect. Devotion to Christ produces as its natural 
 effects personal purity and brotherly love. 
 
 The very word Christian implies personal purity 
 and brotherly love. We cannot conceive of a Chris- 
 tian character without them. 
 
 In the days of the Church's greatness, these forces 
 of devotion, purity and social charity were practical 
 and operative, and were the cause of that greatness. 
 
 The saving grace of God in Christ Jesus manifested 
 itself in turning every man from his iniquities, and 
 it swept away all artificial and worldly distinctions. 
 In the presence of the great fact of man's salvation 
 in Christ Jesus, all differences between man and man 
 were lost sight of. There were no longer rich or 
 poor, high or low, bond or free : all were one in 
 Christ Jesus. 
 
 In the first wave of Christian enthusiasm, Christians 
 that had lands or possessions sold them and laid the 
 price at the Apostles' feet and they had all things 
 common. 
 
 And while that method of expressing man's devo- 
 tion to Christ and the brethren did not, for obvious 
 reasons, long continue, yet the principle that prompted 
 it was the ruling principle of the Church during its 
 formative period, and is and ever will be an essential 
 element of the constitution of the Christian com- 
 munity. 
 
 Every Christian man and woman holds life and 
 property subject to the needs and will of the com- 
 munity. 
 
 If it was necessary for a man to die for the faith, 
 he died willingly and gladly. If the welfare of the 
 
—17— 
 
 community required the property of a man, then he 
 made of that property a willing sacrifice upon the 
 altar of his love. 
 
 The first preaching of this doctrine of fellowship 
 or community life, produced the most important social 
 revolution in the history of the world. It destroyed 
 the institution of slavery in the Roman Empire. 
 
 In the treatise which follows I have called attention 
 to the fact that the Roman world found its lost man- 
 hood in the Christian Church. 
 
 Now when we think of this great life of the Chris- 
 tian Church, with its devotion to God, its personal 
 purity, its brotherly love and its social equality, 
 we dare not boast before God or the people. 
 
 We must see that as a Church we are far gone from 
 our original righteousness. We have sinned and our 
 fathers. 
 
 If our claim be not a boast it must be a prophecy. 
 We may believe that we are in this modern world 
 what the children of Israel were in the ancient world : 
 a rebellious and stiff-necked people, and yet for all 
 that a people chosen of God to be the ministers of 
 His Providence. 
 
 Our Apostolic ministry, doctrine and worship are a 
 trust committed unto us until all His people are ready 
 to use them. 
 
 Already the people outside the Church in the great 
 Christian denominations are taking from us one by 
 one our catholic possessions. We no longer keep 
 the feasts of Christmas and of Easter alone. We 
 keep them in company not onlj^ with catholic Chris- 
 tians, but also with the vast majority of those who 
 are outside the formal pale of the Church. 
 
 Our forms of worship are commending themselves 
 every day to the devotion of all who would worship 
 decently and in order. One does not need even to be 
 
— 18— 
 
 a believer in the atonement to feel their force and 
 beauty. A woman, the wife of a Unitarian pastor, 
 once said to me, "There is nothing in the world so 
 helpful to reverence and devotion as that service in 
 your Church which you call the Holy Communion." 
 
 And if we had the Primitive and Apostolic episco- 
 pate we would find the world almost ready to receive 
 it. " We feel painfully the need of a Bishop," said a 
 Presbyterian pastor to me a few days ago. 
 
 Now if we can only give with Christian doctrine, 
 worship and ministry the Christian life, then that 
 Christian unity, for which we all pra}^ will come 
 quickly to pass. 
 
 And there are signs of the times which indicate 
 that out of this Church, which has been the Church 
 of the wealthy, the cultured, and if you please, the 
 fashionable, is to come forth a force for the con- 
 verting of the modern English world. 
 
 It is no longer true of us, if it was ever true, that 
 we are indifferent to the people. We are the first in 
 all this land to insist that the House of God must be 
 free to all the people of God, and open always for 
 prayer, public and private. More than eighty per 
 cent, of our churches are free and open churches. 
 
 And those parishes, against which the charge of 
 wealth, fashion and exclusion might be brought, are 
 spending their wealth most freely in works of charitj^ 
 and devotion. 
 
 We think much remains to be done before we come 
 to Christian perfection. We cannot rest satisfied 
 until "the poor are at home" in all our churches. 
 But that also is coming. In our great cities 
 some of the strongest churches are the homes of the 
 poor. 
 
 And may we not think it providential that we have 
 in our communion so large a proportion of this world's 
 
—19— 
 
 wealth ? Does not God mean that wealth to be con- 
 secrated by us to spiritual uses ? 
 
 As we preach the doctrine of Christ more perfectly ; 
 as through the operation of our ministry, the influ- 
 ence of our worship, the power of our doctrine, men 
 and women become more and more devoted to Christ ; 
 then will they come again and lay the price of their 
 possessions at the feet of the apostles. 
 
 This is not simply a prophecy, it is a measure, a 
 fact. 
 
 Already we are beginning to feel the first drops of 
 that refreshing rain which God is about to send upon 
 his inheritance " when it is weary." 
 
 Never have more princely gifts been given to God 
 and to humanity than have been given by christians 
 of our times and by churchmen and churchwomen. 
 
 Not only do men and women give their property, 
 they give themselves ; men and women are follow- 
 ing the lyord Jesus ; as He left His heavenly home 
 and came to keep company with sinners, so these 
 have left their earthly homes of ease and luxury to 
 live with and for the poor, keeping company with 
 them. 
 
 And here is our opportunity. Now is the time for 
 the bishops and the priests of the Church to show 
 themselves the very first in this movement to bring 
 in a higher and a better form of Christian life than 
 the world has ever seen before. 
 
 It is for us to lay aside all thought of worldly great- 
 ness or social pre-eminence, to be seen and known as 
 simple men, brothers among brethren, ourselves the 
 equals of all men, greater than the greatest, less than 
 the least. 
 
 If we are not careful, the people will go before us 
 in this great movement to bring in the kingdom of 
 God. 
 
— 20 — 
 
 It is because I believe we are at the turning of the 
 tide that I am so anxious that we be ready to take 
 it at the flood. 
 
 The forces that have made the world what it is are 
 spent. The desire for division is now giving place to 
 a longing for unity. Worldly wealth is ready to 
 devote itself to sacred uses, and a knowledge of nature 
 is seeking for a higher synthesis in a knowledge of 
 God. 
 
 And this Church of ours, with its history and its 
 heritage, may, if it will, lead this movement and guide 
 it to a happy and a prosperous conclusion. 
 
 And it is for this I plead. I want this Church to 
 be at once what it claims to be, the Church of the 
 people, not waiting for the people to come to it, but 
 going itself to the people. 
 
 And if any man ask who I am, you may answer : 
 "I am a voice crying in the Wilderness, prepare ye 
 the way of the lyord." 
 
 And I ask of you who have stood so long and so 
 bravely in the forefront of this movement, and who 
 are now so near to your rest and your reward, to pray 
 for us, that we may go on with the work, and be as 
 brave and strong and devoted in our day and gener- 
 ation as you have been in yours. 
 
 Assuring you of my reverent affection, I remain 
 
 Yours in Christ Jesus, 
 ALGERNON SIDNEY CRAPSEY. 
 
BOOK FIRST. 
 
 AN INTERPRETATION 
 
 OF THE QUADRILATERAL 
 
 A SCHEME FOR THE REUNION OF THE CHURCH OFFERED BY THE 
 
 BISHOPS OF THE ANGIvO-AMERICAN EPISCOPATE TO THE 
 
 VARIOUS COMMUNIONS OF CHRISTENDOM, 
 
 BEING A LECTURE 
 
 DEI^IVERED BEFORE THE CONNECTICUT CHURCH CLUB IN TRINITY 
 CHURCH, NEW HAVEN, FEBRUARY 1 7, 1 897. 
 
 CONTENTS. 
 
 Page 
 
 Chapter I. 
 
 The Problem of the Church, 23 
 
 Chapter II. 
 
 The Voice of God, . . . * 35 
 
 Chapter III. 
 
 The Faithful in Christ Jesus, 48 
 
 Chapter IV. 
 
 The Power of Holiness, 61 
 
 Chapter V. 
 
 The Strength of Brotherhood, 75 
 
The I^ecturer desires to acknowledge the courtesy 
 of the Connecticut Church Club for the permission to 
 use this lyccture in this book. 
 
NOTE. 
 
 Lest he should be misunderstood, the writer of the Lecture desires 
 to reaffirm the vows which he made at the time of his ordination. 
 
 He professes his beHef in the inspiration (not necessarily in the 
 infallibility) of the Holy Scriptures, and holds them to be the Word 
 of God. 
 
 He professes his belief, explicit and implicit, in the Apostles' and 
 Nicene Creeds as setting forth in language, the best that man can 
 speak, the truth as it is in Jesus. 
 
 He professes his use and veneration of the Sacraments as the means 
 of union between the soul and God. 
 
 He is ready, confessing past failure, to follow, with a glad mind, the 
 Bishops and others who are set over him in the Lord. 
 
 But he begs also to affirm, as the strongest conviction of his soul, 
 that Scriptural inspiration wdthout personal inspiration, that intel- 
 lectual creed without faithfulness of heart, that sacraments without 
 holiness, and episcopates without oversight are but dead and useless 
 things that hinder the work of the Spirit of God in the Soul of Man. 
 
THE QUADRILATERAL. 
 
 CHAPTER I. 
 
 THE PROBLEM OF THE CHURCH. 
 
 It is with gratitude, gentlemen of the Connecti- 
 cut Churcli Club, that I come to speak before you 
 this night. 
 
 Your kindness has given me a time and a place 
 when I may, with propriety, give expression to a 
 thought and a feeling which it has long been in my 
 heart to utter. What I have to say will, I trust, not 
 only interest 3'OU, who are called laymen, and all 
 faithful men and women who, like you, have the 
 welfare of the Church of God at heart, but I hope 
 also to gain the ear of men who, like myself, are 
 priests of God and ministers of His Word and 
 Sacraments. 
 
 And I have a wish even more daring than this. 
 In all humility and as one speaking under correc- 
 tion, I address my words more especially to the 
 Bishops of the Anglo-American Communion, who 
 are soon to assemble in Synod under the presi- 
 dency of the Archbishop of Canterbury to take 
 counsel concerning the spiritual interests of the 
 English-speaking race. 
 
 It is to the honor of that Episcopate that it has 
 
2^ A Voice in the Wilderness. 
 
 seen a great evil in the present state of Christen- 
 dom and has offered a remedy for that evil. 
 
 The Bnglish Communion is the only Commu- 
 nion of Christians that has laid seriously to heart 
 " our unhappy divisions," and the Anglo-American 
 Episcopate is the only influential body of men that 
 has made any definite proposal, having for its end 
 the re-establishment of the peace of the Church. 
 
 It is of that proposal that I wish to speak to you 
 to-night, and through you to the great body of men 
 with whom that proposal originated, and who are 
 most deeply interested in its acceptance by the 
 Christian world. 
 
 What I shall have to offer will be in the way of 
 interpretation, I shall endeavor to make clear to 
 all men the terms of that treaty which our fathers 
 have offered to a divided and suffering Christendom. 
 And I will try to show our Fathers that if they will 
 themselves hold and live the terms of their treaty, 
 the peace of the Church will follow as a necessary 
 consequence of their thought and action. 
 
 That the evil which the Bishops deplore is a real 
 evil nobody can deny. 
 
 Except the personal immorality of Christian men 
 and women there is nothing which so hinders the 
 spread of the gospel and the growth of the king- 
 dom of God as the present distracted state of the 
 Christian Church. Christendom to-day is a house 
 divided against itself; the City of God is rent 
 by factions ; the forces of the kingdom are wasted 
 in internecine strife. 
 
A Voice in the Wilderness. 25 
 
 This warfare of Christians among themselves is 
 the stumbling-block in the way of all progress ; 
 the ever-present scandal that gives assurance to the 
 unbeliever and grieves the heart of the faithful. 
 It is an argument hard to meet against the truth of 
 our holy religion. It is a deadly sin against the 
 fundamental law of the Christian life ; the law of 
 love. It is, as long as it lasts, a denial of God, a 
 dishonor to Christ, a rejection of His Holy Word. 
 It is one of the baleful effects of that hardness of 
 the human heart which does so much to kill the 
 joy and wither the hope of human life. 
 
 Nothing but custom and use, which reconciles at 
 last to every present evil, could lead us to endure a 
 sight which is seen in any American village on 
 any Sabbath day. 
 
 We see the people of that village, who all the 
 week long have lived in perfect love and peace 
 together ; who in all social and business relations 
 are a united people, working together for common 
 ends ; we see them, I say, coming forth on Sun- 
 day morning from their houses to attend upon the 
 public worship of God. 
 
 They walk side by side until they come to the 
 public square, and then instead of going on as one 
 great force of life into a common house of wor- 
 ship, to oiler a united act of praise, they separate 
 at their church doors, and, without force and power, 
 dribble off a dozen insignificant companies into a 
 dozen desolate, half-empty buildings. And in these 
 dreary places of so-called worship the meagre 
 
26 A Voice in the Wilderness. 
 
 members sit, Sunday after Sunday, vainly striving 
 to blow tbe gray ashes of a dead schism into some 
 faint and feeble glow of life. 
 
 In this village there can be no noble worship of 
 God, no true and loving work for man. The whole 
 force of Christianity is spent in the maintenance 
 of a dozen outward forms of worship, for the most 
 part so nearly alike that the closest observer can 
 hardly tell them apart ; and forms of worship in 
 themselves so scant and mean that they starve the 
 soul of their devotees with spiritual cold and hun- 
 ger. To keep alive their wretched differences 
 Christian people sacrifice every power they have to 
 do good to man, every possibility of glorifying God. 
 
 And when we turn from the village to the city, 
 the sight is not more reassuring to the Christian 
 observer. In the village the church accommodation 
 is ten times too great for the people, in the city it is 
 apt to be ten times too little. Vast sections of our 
 great cities, where hundreds of thousands of men 
 and women and children live and die, are as nearly 
 devoid of any opportunity for Christian worship, 
 as nearly desolate of the consolations and helps 
 of the Christian religion, as if they were in the 
 heart of the African desert. 
 
 The expense consequent upon the support of a 
 dozen forms of Christian polity ; the confusion and 
 cross purposes entailed by a dozen independent 
 organizations doing the same kind of work in the 
 same field, prevent anything like a wise ordering 
 to produce an efficient result. 
 
A Voice in the Wilderness. 2y 
 
 The necessity of securing material support leads 
 the various denominations to plant their best 
 churches among the wealthy and the well-to-do, 
 so that in such regions we have the same conges- 
 tion that we find in the village : a dozen churches 
 where one is enough. 
 
 The Christian churches, at least the Protestant 
 churches, seem no longer to be with Christ our God 
 in the Ark of Salvation, going out over the waters 
 of life seeking to save the clean and the unclean ; 
 but they seem to be in the ship Argo under the 
 lead of Jason, sailing forever toward the setting 
 sun, in search of the golden fleece. 
 
 And when we turn from the work of the Church 
 in Christian lands to the work of the Church in 
 heathen lands, we behold a sight even more dis- 
 tressing. 
 
 Not content with airing our quarrels among our- 
 selves, we must carry them abroad to scandalize the 
 heathen. 
 
 Future ages will, I think, see in this fact, more 
 than in any other, the crudeness of our Christian 
 intelligence ; the coldness of our Christian love. 
 They will wonder why we did not see the folly of 
 trying to teach others a doArine, which after years 
 of instruction, we ourselves did not seem to com- 
 prehend with sufficient clearness to be able to agree 
 among ourselves as to what that doctrine really 
 was. 
 
 They will marvel also that we should try to lead 
 others into a way of life, which we ourselves did 
 
28 A Voice in the Wilderness. 
 
 not follow, a way of life which we all professed to 
 consider very true and very beautiful, but which we 
 held also to be very unwise and very unpractical. 
 
 They will wonder why it did not occur to us to 
 say " Physician, heal thyself,"* 
 
 They will wonder, not so much at our wickedness 
 as at our stupidity, when they see us taking our 
 quarrels, out of which all anger is gone ; quarrels 
 that no longer separate man from man in the ordi- 
 nary affairs of life ; quarrels of which the great 
 majority have utterly forgotten the cause and the 
 occasion ; quarrels that no one considers it worth 
 while any longer to quarrel about ; and carrying 
 these with us, to hinder our work as we go forth to 
 preach the gospel to the heathen. 
 
 Our children will be astonished that we should 
 have tried to convert men to the love of God, by 
 showing to them the hatreds of men. 
 
 Is it not an awful fact that the Christian world is 
 to-day spending millions of treasure to sow the 
 seeds of Christian discord in heathen lands ? 
 
 Hvery denomination is carrying in its hand not 
 the great Chrism of the Lord, but some paltry ism of 
 its own. " Compassing seas and land to make one 
 proselyte, and when he is made, making him two- 
 fold more the child of hell than themselves, "f 
 
 This evil cry of the Church has reached the 
 ears of the Fathers of the Anglo-American Com- 
 munion, and they have tried to answer that cry and 
 to deliver the Church out of her distress. 
 
 * S. Luke iv, 23. t S. Matthew, xxiii, 15. 
 
A Voice in the Wilderness. 2^ 
 
 From the very first there has been in the heart 
 of the Anglican Church a yearning for unity. 
 
 When in the course of Divine Providence the 
 Knglish nation annulled the jurisdiction of the 
 Bishop of Rome within the limits of the king- 
 dom, and the English Church adjusted herself to 
 the new conditions, the adjustment was not made 
 upon lines of exclusion but upon lines of compre- 
 hension. 
 
 The English Church is the great compromise. 
 She holds fast with one hand her ancient, catholic 
 polity, faith and worship, Avhile with the other she 
 grasps modem post-reformation thought and life. 
 
 At her capacious bosom she has always nursed her 
 twin schools of thought, her school of veneration 
 and her school of penetration. 
 
 While unwisely at times trying to compel men to 
 stay in her communion, she has never cast out a 
 single soul. Her separation from the churches of 
 the Continent has alwaj^s been a pain and grief to 
 her. 
 
 Having, then, as her very heart's blood this long- 
 ing for unity, it was natural that she should be 
 the first to propose a plan for the reconciliation of 
 the Church ; the first to hold out an olive branch 
 to offended and alienated brethren. 
 
 The plan of reunion which has been devised by 
 the Bishops, has in view modem Protestant Chris- 
 tendom, rather than the ancient churches of Greece 
 and Rome. 
 
 And as it is Protestant Christendom that is most 
 
JO A Voice in the Wilderness. 
 
 sadly divided, so it is Protestant Christendom that 
 most sadly needs unification. 
 
 The scheme of the Anglo-American Episcopate 
 for the readjustment of the Church is known as 
 the Quadrilateral. It consists of four propositions. 
 The Anglo-American Church offers perfect peace 
 and full communion to all who will accept the 
 Scriptures of the Old and New Testament as the 
 Revealed word of God ; who will profess the Nicene 
 Creed as the essential faith ; who will receive the 
 two Sacraments ordained by Christ, and who will 
 submit to the Historic Episcopate locally adapted 
 to different Christian nations. 
 
 I am not at this time concerned with the history 
 of the Quadrilateral. That can be read in the New 
 York Church Club lectures of 1895 and in the 
 Union Theological Seminary le(?tures of 1896. 
 
 What I am concerned with is not the history but 
 the present status of the Quadrilateral. 
 
 I wish to call the attention of the Bishops to the 
 remarkable fact that this proposition has been 
 before the world for more than ten years, and yet 
 it is not so much as known by the great mass 
 of Churchmen, not to say the great mass of 
 Christians. It has been discussed by scholars and 
 by doctors. The people have never heard of it. It 
 has sent no thrill of hope to a sect-ridden, sect- 
 weary nation. 
 
 And I venture the prediction that if it were read 
 by proclamation in the squares of every city, on the 
 green of every village and at every cross-road, it 
 
A Voice in the Wilderness. 31 
 
 would attract hardly a passing thought, rouse hardly 
 a passing emotion. 
 
 The people would see in it no prospect of better 
 things. In spite of all protests to the contrary, the 
 plain common sense of men would think it a scheme 
 to make everybody an Episcopalian, and as things 
 are now they would see no particular reason for 
 that. So the heart of the people is and will be 
 forever cold to such a proposition. 
 
 But the heart of the people is the test of truth. 
 What does not reach and move that heart must have 
 in it some fatal weakness. 
 
 And if the Bishops will pardon me, I will make 
 bold to tell them that their plan is not effective 
 and never can be effective, because it is based upon 
 a fundamental error in thought. The Bishops have 
 mistaken effects for causes. 
 
 The error was a simple and natural error. Look- 
 ing back at that wonderful creation of God, the 
 Holy Catholic Church, as she was in the days of 
 her separation, her purity and her strength ; behold- 
 ing her as she comes forth from her obscurity into 
 the clear light of history, seeing her in the dawn 
 of her new life, as " she looketh forth as the morn- 
 ing ; fair as the moon, clear as the sun, terrible as 
 an army with banners,"* we see her as she goes 
 into all lands, reading out of the Holy Scriptures for 
 the edification of her people, reciting her great 
 creed, professing an unfaltering faith in God the 
 Father, Son, and Holy Ghost, washing her chil- 
 
 * Solomon's Song, vi, 10. 
 3 
 
32 A Voice in the Wilderness. 
 
 dren in tlie waters of Baptism for the remission of 
 their sins and feeding them with the Body and 
 Blood of the Lord ; as we see the people ever3rwhere 
 under the eye of the Bishop and guided by that 
 eye, we think naturally that we have here the 
 secret of the Church's unity. 
 
 It was Her Scriptures, Her Creed, Her Sacra- 
 ments, Her Bishops that made her one. 
 
 And here, if I mistake not, is the error that 
 vitiates all our reasoning. 
 
 These are not the causes of the Church's unity, 
 they are the consequences of that unity. They are 
 not the Church's life, they are simply the organs 
 of that life. 
 
 The organs of a man's body, his head, his hands, 
 his feet, are not the causes of the unity of a man's 
 body, they are the effects of that unity. The unity 
 of the body is the effect of something infinitely 
 greater than these. 
 
 It is the mysterious aw^ul life-principle which 
 builds up the body, differentiates the organs and 
 makes them the instruments by which it works its 
 will in the world. 
 
 So the unity of the Church is created not by the 
 Scriptures, nor by the Creed, nor by the Sacra- 
 ments, nor by the Bpiscopate, nor by all these 
 together ; but by the great life-principle of the 
 Church, which is passionate love and devotion to 
 God through Jesus Christ our Lord. It is this life- 
 principle of the Church that builds up the body, 
 differentiates its organs of Scripture, of Creed, of 
 
A Voice in the Wilderness. jj 
 
 Sacrament aud of Episcopate, and makes these the 
 instruments by which it works its will in the world. 
 
 Now these organs are connected with the Body 
 of Christ by a most beautiful and delicate spiritual 
 mechanism. And it is man's violation of that con- 
 nection, his meddling with that mechanism which 
 is the cause of all our woes. 
 
 The Quadrilateral of the Bishops has no inde- 
 pendent existence. Neither it nor any proposition 
 of it can be offered to man for his acceptance. 
 
 The Quadrilateral rests in and derives all its 
 force from somewhat greater than itself. The 
 basis of the four propositions of the Bishops is 
 found in four words of S. Paul. 
 
 As the life-principle of a man manifests itself 
 variously in his various organs, his intelligence in 
 his head, his affection in his heart, his skill in his 
 hands, his motion in his feet ; so in the Church 
 there is a four-fold manifestation of the one great 
 life-power. It is this that gives a four-fold charac- 
 ter to the Christian life. 
 
 This manifestation of the Spirit was so clear and 
 strong that it gave to the early Christian a four- 
 fold name. He did not call himself a Christian at 
 the first ; that name came to him from without. 
 If asked concerning himself, who and what he 
 was, he would have answered, I am of the called, 
 I am of the faithful, I am of the saints or holy 
 ones, I am of the brethren. 
 
 When S. Paul addresses the Christian churches 
 he uses this four-fold name. He speaks of them as 
 
j^ A Voice in the Wilder )iess. 
 
 the k\7]toI, as the wiarol and as the d<ylol and as the 
 aS€\(f)oi and it is this four-fold manifestation of the 
 Spirit of God in the soul of man which has been the 
 creative energy that has constructed the organs of 
 the Church's life in the world. 
 
 Out of the force that makes men KkrjTol or called 
 comes all scriptures. 
 
 Out of the force that makes men iriarot or faith- 
 ful comes all creeds. 
 
 Out of the force that makes men d^iol or holy 
 comes all sacraments. 
 
 Out of the force that makes men aSeXtj^ol or 
 brethren comes all episcopates. 
 
 And now let us put off our shoes from off our 
 feet, for the place whereon we stand is holy ground. 
 And let us reverently examine these inward prin- 
 ciples in relation to their outward manifestations. 
 
CHAPTER II. 
 
 THE VOICE OF GOD. 
 
 In writing his letter to the Romans, S. Paul 
 addresses them as the KXtitol ; those who were 
 called. He speaks to the men and women in 
 Rome who had heard the Voice of God. 
 
 It was natural that S. Paul should think first of 
 all of this fact of their calling, for he himself had 
 been called of God. He remembered a certain day 
 in his life when he had heard a Voice speaking 
 unto him in the Hebrew tongue, and saying unto 
 him " Saul, Saul, why persecutest thou me ?" "' 
 
 And that day the hol}^ Apostle considers ever 
 afterward as his birthday ; the day when he was 
 new born unto God. The Voice from heaven 
 speaking in his soul called him out of darkness 
 into the light of the glory of God in the face of 
 Jesus Christ. 
 
 The conversion of S. Paul is so perfect an in- 
 stance of the true relation between the Voice of 
 God speaking in the soul and the outward written 
 Word as it is read in the churches, that it will be 
 well for us to dwell for a moment upon that remark- 
 able and important event. 
 
 S. Paul from his youth up had been learned in 
 the Scriptures. He had not only read them, he 
 had studied them. He had gone to the most 
 famous teachers of his day that he might learn 
 
 * Acts of Apostles, xxvi, 14. 
 
j6 A Voice in the Wilderness. 
 
 from them tlie interpretation of these oracles of 
 God. But for all this S. Paul was not satisfied. 
 His heart was yearning after a truth which he 
 could not find in the written Word. He went to 
 Jerusalem and sat at the feet of Gamaliel ; but this 
 wise master in Israel could not take away the vail 
 that was upon the face of the Scripture. He only 
 obscured the Scripture with endless comment. He 
 could give the young man from Tarsus nothing to 
 help him to a better knowledge of the law of God. 
 He could only tell him what Hillel had said and 
 what Zadok had said. It was the voice of man and 
 not the Voice of God which was heard in that school. 
 
 With such husks as these the ardent soul of 
 Saul had to be satisfied. He adopted the doctrines 
 of his teachers and gave to them the passionate 
 devotion of his loyal nature. 
 
 For their sake he did violence to the natural 
 tenderness of his heart, and became a persecutor of 
 his brethren, haling them to prison and consenting 
 unto their death. 
 
 But all the while his soul was uneasy ; his con- 
 science was kicking against the pricks. 
 
 At last God had pity on him and spoke to his 
 bewildered spirit, directly from heaven. 
 
 When S. Paul heard that Voice in his soul 
 speaking to him, he was converted to the truth. 
 That Voice was the truth itself, making known to 
 him the meaning of the Scriptures : revealing to 
 him mysteries which had been hid from the founda- 
 tion of the world. 
 
A Voice in the Wilderness. jy 
 
 S. Paul had at last found his teacher. It was 
 God Himself. God, who in time past had spoken 
 to the prophets, had now spoken to him. God was 
 not only speaking to him, but through him and by 
 him. Saul also was among the prophets. 
 
 There is a very interesting psychological fa(5l 
 brought out in this history of the conversion of 
 S. Paul. He tells us that this Voice spake unto 
 him in the Hebrew tongue. 
 
 Now S. Paul was by culture a Greek. The 
 Greek language was the language of his ordinary 
 conversation and of his ordinary thought. When 
 he had occasion to write he wrote in Greek. 
 
 But in this hour of supreme emotion he did not 
 hear the language which he had acquired in the 
 schools ; he heard the language which he had in- 
 herited from his fathers. It was not the speech of 
 the market and the court ; it was the speech of 
 the temple and the place of prayer. His religious 
 experience found expression in the language of 
 religion. 
 
 It was that great race language which for all 
 practical purposes had been forgotten ; which was 
 not heard in the street : a tongue which had been 
 mute for four hundred years ; which spake out of 
 its living past to the soul of this bewildered man 
 in his living present. 
 
 Is this not a beautiful psychological fact ? show- 
 ing us that the soul of man is full of hidden treas- 
 ure ; not only is his own individual past laid up in 
 store for him, but the past also of his family, of his 
 
J 8 A Voice in the WtlderJicss, 
 
 race, of humanity, of all the creation, is hidden 
 away in his nature to be called out into living 
 activity when occasion conies. 
 
 This fact in the life of S. Paul is an instance 
 of that wonderful law of continuity which runs 
 through all the works of God. 
 
 It was no new thing for God to speak in the 
 Hebrew tongue. He had been speaking in that 
 tongue for more than two thousand years. 
 
 The Hebrew people were separated from all the 
 people of the earth because they were a God-hear- 
 ing people. Their nation owed its separate exis- 
 tence to the Voice of God. 
 
 Abraham, the Hebrew, heard the Voice of God 
 calling to him and saying, " Get thee out from thy 
 country and from thy kindred, and from thy father's 
 house unto a land that I will show thee of."* 
 
 And when Abraham heard that Voice and fol- 
 lowed it, then the Hebrew people began to be. 
 God spake and they were made ; He commanded 
 and they were created.f 
 
 And all through their history the Hebrew people 
 were accustomed to the Voice of God. He was 
 speaking to them every day. That Voice was the 
 guide of their lives in all things great and small ; 
 it told them how to feed their sheep and how to 
 teach their children ; it told them how to build 
 their temples and how to wash their kettles. 
 
 This Voice of God speaking to the soul of the 
 Hebrew is the source of all that we call Scripture. 
 
 * Genesis xii, i. t Psalms cxlviii, 5. 
 
A Voice in the Wilderness. jg 
 
 God spoke to His servants, the prophets, and the 
 prophets told what God had said to them in the 
 ears of all the people, and then some scribe wrote 
 at the mouth of the prophet all the words which 
 God had given him, and so those wonderful books 
 which \ve call Scripture came into existence/'' 
 
 The part which the Hebrews have played in the 
 religious history of mankind has been the cause of 
 great good and of some evil. 
 
 Because the Hebrew heard the Voice of God so 
 constantl}^ and so clearly, the impression has gone 
 abroad that God does not know any other language. 
 ]Men think he can only speak in the Hebrew tongue. 
 
 This belief found a fantastic expression in the 
 opinion of some scholars of the seventeenth cen- 
 tury, that Hebrew was the original language of 
 mankind. It was that which Adam heard, when 
 he heard the Voice of the Lord God " walking in 
 the garden in the cool of the day."'}" We know 
 now that this is a fond belief. We know that the 
 Hebrew is not an original language ; it is onl}^ a 
 minor stem on the great Semitic branch. 
 
 But this opinion shows how profoundl}^ the 
 Hebrew and early Christian writings have im- 
 pressed the mind. So full are they of the God- 
 hearing quality, that distinguishing mark of the 
 Hebrew people, that men say they are the ver}^ 
 Word of God, ascribe to them the infallibilit}^ of 
 God, and clothe their very signs and sentences 
 with unapproachable divinity. 
 
 * Jeremiah xlv, i. t Genesis iii, 8. 
 
/fo A Voice in the Wilderjiess. 
 
 Now no one can overestimate the influence of 
 tlie Holy Scriptures. They are woven witli the 
 very warp and woof of the life of civilized human- 
 ity. 
 
 They are the source of much that is best and 
 noblest in that life. They tell us of all the won- 
 derful works of God, of His wisdom, of His power, 
 of His love. 
 
 But if we separate the Scripture from the living 
 voice of God speaking in the living soul of man, 
 then we cut the Scriptures off from the true source 
 of their life. 
 
 If we are so lame in our reasoning as to say be- 
 cause God has spoken, therefore God cannot speak ; 
 if we think His voice is no longer a voice but only 
 a Written Word, then the Scriptures will be to us 
 nothing but Scriptures ; so many written books of 
 which we may and must at last judge the value. 
 
 Cutting them off from their vital connection with 
 the soul-life of man, we throw them into the arena 
 of discussion, the prey of the higher and the lower 
 criticism ; the powerful cause not of concord, but of 
 discord ; not of unity, but of dissension. 
 
 And this is just what Modern Protestant Chris- 
 tianity has done. It has founded its religion upon 
 a book and then upon the interpretation of a book, 
 so that sects have multiplied between the leaves of 
 the Bible as maggots multiply within the rind of 
 a cheese. 
 
 What then? Shall we cast the Bible away? 
 God forbid ; but we must use the Bible in living 
 
A Voice in the Wilderness. 41 
 
 union with the soul of man and with the life of 
 the Church. 
 
 We must remember that Bibles, wonderful as 
 they are, are still the work of men. IMen wrote 
 them out of the fullness of that revelation Avhich 
 God made to them of Himself in the secret places 
 of their hearts. 
 
 And what men have done men may do. If men 
 heard the Voice of God a thousand years ago we 
 must believe that men can hear that Voice to-day. 
 And we must see to it that men do hear it. Bach 
 man must hear that Voice for himself. Bach gen- 
 eration must hear. That Voice must speak to us 
 as it spoke to Abraham, to Isaac and to Jacob. We 
 must hear it as Saul of Tarsus heard it, if not in 
 the Hebrew tongue, yet in our dear Bnglish 
 tongue, which, next to the Hebrew, is most apt in 
 the utterance of religious thought and feeling. 
 And if we listen we will hear that Voice crying 
 unto us and saying, not perhaps " Saul, Saul, why 
 persecutest thou me ?" for alas, we have not zeal 
 enough for God to persecute anything or anybody 
 in His name ; but we will hear that more heart- 
 broken cry of " Saul, Saul, why neglectest thou 
 me?" 
 
 And the great of&ce of the Christian Church and 
 of the Christian ministry is to make the Voice of 
 God heard in the world. 
 
 That Church and that ministry is God's eternal 
 prophet to proclaim from age to age God's eternal 
 truth. That Church and that ministry was not 
 
4^ A Voice in tJic Wilderjiess. 
 
 set up in this world to be the reader of a book ; it 
 is here to be the preacher of a life. 
 
 The Christian Church, like the Hebrew nation, 
 owes its existence to the Voice of God. The great 
 flock of Jesus Christ came together at the call of 
 the Shepherd. 
 
 The very name of the Church speaks to us of 
 the nature of its origin. It is called by S. Paul 
 
 the eKKXrjaia rov 6eov. 
 
 This word eKK\r)a-La, means an assembly sum- 
 moned by the crier. It is from eKKaXeco, to call out. 
 And as the /crjpv^, or herald, went up and down the 
 streets of Athens calling the selected citizens into 
 the public assembly, so the icrjpv^^ or preacher, went 
 up and down the streets of this world calling the 
 elect souls into the assembly, or congregation, of 
 God. He called with the Voice of God, and the 
 people of God heard it. The}^ came at that call, a 
 motley crowd indeed of halt and lame and blind. 
 Slaves from the market, gladiators from the arena ; 
 rich men weary of their riches and poor men dying 
 in their poverty ; they came out of the barrenness 
 of Judaism and the wretchedness of heathenism ; 
 they came at the call of the apostles and prophets 
 of the Christian Church, as hungry doves come at 
 the call of the child that feeds them. 
 
 So came into existence that wonderful cKKXtja-ia, 
 rov Oeov, that assembly of living souls called out of 
 the world into the kingdom of God. 
 
 And the Church owes its continued existence to 
 the same cause that gave it being. It is the Voice 
 
A Voice i)i the Wilderness. 4.J 
 
 of God that gave it life ; it is the Voice of God that 
 gives it life. 
 
 If in any age or among any people that Voice is 
 no longer heard, then the life of the Chnrch pines 
 and dies away. 
 
 In the thirteenth century, the Christian religion 
 was ready to perish in Europe. An ambitious 
 hierarchy had lost all sense of the spirit world, in 
 its eagerness to grasp the power and wealth of this 
 world. It had drowned the Voice of God in the din 
 of arms. A brutal and a sensual priesthood per- 
 formed the rites of religion in a language which it 
 did not itself understand. A neglected people were 
 fast lapsing into a worse than heathen wretched- 
 ness. Then it was that God raised up one of the 
 sweetest of his prophets and the voice of St. Francis 
 of Assisi, which was the Voice of God, went out 
 like the voice of a flute calling men back to the 
 knowledge and the love of God. 
 
 This Voice of God can never be disguised and 
 never imitated. As soon as you hear a man speak 
 you can tell whether God is in him or not. There 
 was a quality in the voice of our Lord Jesus Christ 
 that astonished and charmed the multitude. " He 
 spake as one having power and not as the 
 scribes."* 
 
 If the Voice of God is in the heart, the mouth must 
 speak it. Balaam the son of Beor may try to hide 
 that Voice, so as to please Balak the son of Zippor, 
 but in spite of himself the words of God ring out 
 
 * S. Matthew vii, 29. 
 
/f-zf. A Voice ill the Wilder7iess. 
 
 to his own dismay, and to the dismay of the king 
 of Moab.* 
 
 And if a man has not that Voice he can never 
 assume it. Is it not a painful fact that you will 
 go into a Church of God, and you will hear a man 
 reading, as he supposes, the Word of God, or you 
 will hear him preaching, as he thinks, the Gospel 
 of God, and yet in his very tones and accents you 
 will hear the hollow ring of death ? He is that 
 saddest of all things in God's creation, a hypocrite, 
 a man who says with his lips what he does not 
 believe in his heart. 
 
 We can tell the Voice of God also because it is 
 a simple voice and always expresses itself in a 
 command. God's Voice is in the world to call 
 men to God. It commands men to leave sin and 
 death and hell, and come to holiness and life and 
 heaven. 
 
 It comes to Abram in Ur of the Chaldees, where 
 all is idolatry and forgetfulness of God, and bids 
 him get out of that country into a land which 
 God will show him : it comes to Peter and Andrew 
 on the shores of Gennesaret, and says to them, 
 " follow me and I will make you fishers of men." 
 
 And if that Voice ever comes to me on the banks 
 of the Genesee, or to you here by the waters of 
 New Haven, it will always come as the call to fol- 
 low Jesus, a call to some greater holiness, to some 
 higher duty. 
 
 But, Fathers in the Church and brothers in the 
 
 * Numbers xxii, ii. 
 
A Voice in the Wilderness. ^5 
 
 ministry, we must remember that the Voice of 
 God always says come, never go. It does not 
 point to others " the steep and thorny road to 
 heaven, while it the primrose path of dalliance 
 treads."* 
 
 Remember that we are to call men out of the 
 world into the Kingdom of God. But how can 
 we call them out of the world, when we ourselves 
 are still in it. If the world and its dignities is 
 still our world ; if we aspire to the episcopate 
 because of its social importance, because it makes 
 us equal to the men of rank and wealth ; if we 
 use our priesthood not for God's advantage but 
 our own ; if we are of all worldly men the most 
 worldly, how then shall we call men out of the 
 world ? 
 
 And yet this is our appointed task. We are 
 sent to call the people home, as " Mary called 
 the cattle home across the sands o' Dee."f And 
 though the tide of popular disfavor run high 
 against us, until our feet are washed by the " cruel 
 crawling foam," still we must stand and call the 
 people home across the sands o' Dee. 
 
 And, O my Fathers and my brothers, are we 
 doing this, are our voices going out, clear and 
 sharp and strong as the fife of the pied piper of 
 Hamelin, charming the people to follow us to the 
 mountain of God ? 
 
 Whoever speaks with the Voice of God will be 
 followed by the people of God. John Wesley 
 
 * Hamlet, Act ist, Scene III. f Chas. Kingsley's Poem. 
 
/J.6 A Voice in the Wilder7tess. 
 
 spoke with that Voice in the last century, and God 
 gave him the thousands of Wesleyanism and the 
 millions of Methodism. 
 
 It is the Voice of God speaking in the Church 
 that will give peace to the Church. If that Voice 
 cannot speak to us or if we cannot hear it, then 
 all the scriptures written since the world began 
 will not help us. The unbeliever, then, will have 
 us on the hip. He will say if God cannot speak, 
 God has not spoken. 
 
 There is nothing in this world more wonderful 
 than the origin and the history of a word. It 
 exists first in that region dim, mysterious, wonder- 
 ful where unconscious thought dwells alone ; then 
 it comes out into conscious thought and the mind 
 gives it form and order ; then the lips utter it and 
 it becomes a sound, it goes out and enters the ears 
 of the hearer ; he writes it down, and sound then 
 becomes transformed into sight. Ages afterward, 
 it may be, a man sees this written word ; he speaks 
 it with his lips : it becomes sound again ; it enters 
 into his mind through his ears ; it becomes thought, 
 it goes back into the dark chambers of uncon- 
 sciousness, and there by the magic of the soul's 
 power, it is transformed into life. And in this 
 wonderful process we have the conservation of 
 spiritual energy ; the secret of man's progress. 
 
 So God's written word upon the lips of the 
 preacher must become God's spoken word : it must 
 be not what God said to Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, 
 but what God says to you and me, and that spoken 
 
A Voice in the Wilderness. /f.y 
 
 word must pierce the heart of the hearer, and 
 from that heart it must come back, not as a word, 
 but as a life. 
 
 The unity of the Church will never come from 
 the reading of a book, it will come from the hear- 
 ing of a Voice. 
 
 When the Voice of Jesus sounds over land and 
 sea, and men hear that Voice and begin to follow 
 it, then they will be united as the sheep are united 
 who hear and follow the voice of the shepherd. 
 
 O, that it were in us to stop our din and our 
 discussion, to give up every man his psalm and 
 every man his doctrine, and lay our fingers on our 
 lips and listen, if perchance we may hear Jesus 
 " calling o'er the tumult," " Come and follow Me." 
 
CHAPTER III. 
 
 THE FAITHFUL IN CHRIvST JESUS. 
 
 When S. Paul writes his letter to tlie Churcli in 
 Epliesus, the most spiritual of all the churches, he 
 calls its members the faithful in Christ Jesus. 
 
 Tot9 TTtcTTOt? ev Irjcrov ^picrTOV. 
 
 And this word faithful was the dearest word to 
 the Christian heart during all the heroic ages of 
 the Church. It was to him what the word loyalist 
 was to the followers of the Stuart during all the 
 dark days of the rebellion ; what the word royalist 
 was to the noble of France during the horrors of 
 terror. 
 
 Faithful in Christ Jesus. These words ex- 
 pressed the supreme devotion of his life ; that for 
 which he lived, and that for which he was more 
 than ready to die. 
 
 If a stranger met a stranger on the highways of 
 Rome and saw that stranger make, as it were, 
 the sign of the cross, he hurried to him and whis- 
 pered in his ear "Art thou of the faithful," and if 
 he answered yea, then these two clasped hands, 
 and though they had never seen each other's face 
 before, were instantly brothers in a common faith. 
 
 The Christian man and woman of the early ages 
 lived by faith in the most real sense of those words. 
 The whole order of their life was based upon an im- 
 plicit belief in Christ Jesus. They believed that 
 He was the great power of God sent down from 
 heaven for their salvation. They believed that He 
 
A Voice in the Wilderness. /j.g 
 
 had lived for them and died for them, and that they 
 in turn ought to live for Him and die for Him. 
 
 They received every word of Christ Jesus as a 
 word from God and staked their whole existence 
 upon its truthfulness. Whatever Jesus told them 
 to do, that they tried, with all their might and 
 main, to do ; holding that whatever Jesus said was 
 right. 
 
 There is nothing in the history of the world to 
 be compared with the devotion of the early Chris- 
 tians to the Lord Jesus Christ. 
 
 The devotion of the forty-seven Ronins to their 
 lord, the devotion of a highland clan to its chief, 
 the devotion of the old guard to Napoleon, these 
 are all splendid examples of what love and loyalty 
 can do with the human heart and with human life. 
 
 But they are all weak and things of a day in 
 comparison with that age-long devotion, extending 
 over three hundred years, by which the Christain 
 Church testified her love and loyalty to her Lord 
 and Saviour Jesus Christ. 
 
 Kvery sacrifice that could be made was made to 
 gain the favor, and upbuild the cause of the Lord. 
 S. Paul set the keynote of the coming ages when 
 he cried " I count all things as dung that I may 
 gain Christ."* 
 
 The Christian Church planted itself upon its 
 simple faith in Christ Jesus, and standing there, 
 defied the whole force of the Roman empire and 
 of ancient civilization. 
 
 * Philippians iii, 8. 
 
50 A Voice in the Wilderness. 
 
 They did not take up arms against tlie State : 
 for Christ had said, " Whosoever taketh the sword 
 shall perish with the sword."* They did not resist 
 their enemies : for Christ had said " Resist not 
 evil." 
 
 But theirs was not a cowardly submission to 
 baseness and injustice, it was the bravest resistance 
 the world has ever seen. The early Christian 
 martyr stood calmly in his place ; refused obedi- 
 ence when his conscience told him he must not 
 obey, and for his refusal died. And his sufferings 
 and death made up what was " lacking in the 
 sufferings of Christ." 
 
 And all this was done so calmly and so sweetly, 
 for the most part, that the very persecutors were 
 won by the faith and devotion of the Christian. 
 When S. Polycarp was brought before the Gover- 
 nor and commanded to deny Christ, he answered, 
 " eighty and six years have I served him and he has 
 done me no harm. Why should I deny him to- 
 day, "f And he went out from the presence of the 
 Governor into the presence of death as calmly 
 as he would go to his morning meal. To die for 
 Jesus was to him and all like him a mere matter 
 of course. 
 
 Such was the faithfulness of heart and life 
 which gave to the Christian his name of the 
 faithful. 
 
 * Matthew xxvi, 52. 
 
 t Martyrdom of S. Polycarp. Apostolic Fathers. T. & T. Clark.- 
 Edinburgh, 1873. 
 
A Voice in the Wilderness. 51 
 
 And this faithfulness when fully roused is one 
 of the strongest passions of the human heart. 
 All great and heroic deeds and words spring from 
 it. To this emotion, Christ Jesus appealed when 
 He presented Himself as the supreme object of 
 human adoration. He stood and cried, " Come 
 unto me all ye that labor and are heavy laden and 
 I will give you rest.'"-' " God so loved the world 
 that He gave His only begotten Son, that whoso- 
 ever believeth in Him should not perish but have 
 everlasting life."f Believe and be saved was the 
 cry of the Gospel. 
 
 Jesus presented Himself, in His divine Per- 
 sonality, as the supreme object of human faith, 
 because faithfulness can reach its highest develop- 
 ment only when it is directed toward a person. 
 An abstract doctrine, an impersonal cause can 
 never fire the human heart to intense devotion. 
 
 A cause can never lay hold of the mass of the 
 people until it shows itself in some great life and 
 leadership. The cause of righteousness itself 
 made no headway until the King of righteousness 
 came to champion his own cause and to win men 
 to it by winning them to Himself 
 
 Faithfulness is the root of faith, and faith is 
 the source of creed. Faithfulness is the heart's 
 love and devotion. Faith is the expression of 
 faithfulness in life. Creed is the expression of 
 faith in words. 
 
 The Christian creed grew up naturally out of 
 
 * Matthew xi, 28. f John iii, 16. 
 
5-2 A Voice in the Wilderness. 
 
 the Christian faith. As Christian men and women 
 went up and down the world, they were whispering 
 in their souls of all that Jesus had done for them, 
 " Beginning from John Baptist until the day He 
 was taken up from them into heaven."* When 
 they met together they told each other of His 
 wonderful birth, His life, His passion. His death. 
 His resurrection. His ascension. They told each 
 other to wait and watch for His coming, as men 
 wait and watch for the morning. They cast this 
 belief of theirs, which was the very warp and woof 
 of their life, into songs, and they sang them when 
 they came together to worship. And they sang as 
 they went about their work at home. As it is 
 written, " And the ransomed of the Lord shall 
 return and come to Zion with songs and everlasting 
 joy upon their heads. "f So those ransomed of the 
 Lord returned to Zion with songs. These songs 
 were the great distinguishing mark of the Christian. 
 
 ' ' Paul and Silas in their prison 
 Sang of Christ the L,ord arisen." j 
 
 All the information that Pliny could give to 
 his master, the Kmperor Trajan, concerning the 
 Christian was, " that they met early in the morn- 
 ing to sing songs to one Christ as God, and bound 
 themselves by a solemn compact to do no evil."|| 
 
 So the Christian creed came into existence. A 
 song, a saying, a few pregnant sentences, passed 
 from lip to lip ; and grew at last into a settled form 
 
 * Acts i, 22. t Isaiah xxxv, lo. X Longfellow. 
 
 II Pliny's letters to Trajan. 
 
A Voice in the Wilderness. ^j 
 
 of sound words. There was no attempt at system- 
 atic arrangement, no effort at completeness, no 
 struggle to fathom the awful mystery of the life of 
 God in the flesh. It was all simple and natural 
 and childlike. 
 
 The Christian creed was not the result of an 
 effort of the human intelligence to know God ; it 
 was the outgrowth of the human heart in the great- 
 est effort that heart has ever made to love God. 
 
 The Christian creed has no existence apart from 
 the person of Jesus Christ. The creed apart from 
 devotion to the person of Jesus is a mere intellectual 
 puzzle ; good onlj^ to frighten the intelligence and 
 perplex the soul. 
 
 During the first age the Church was careless of 
 her creed. She had one faith to which she held 
 with all the tenacity of her life, but she had as 
 many creeds or forms of faith as she had children. 
 
 For three hundred years there was no creed 
 enforced under authority. 
 
 It was not until the great Arian discussion that 
 the Church in its corporate capacity became a 
 formulator of creeds. This action was forced upon 
 the Church by that most unhappy controversy that 
 wasted her life for two hundred years. 
 
 Men of subtle minds had arisen in her midst, who, 
 not content with the simplicity of the gospels, must 
 needs define more exactly the nature of the Lord's 
 person, and the inter-relations of the God-head. 
 
 These definitions frightened the Church. It 
 seemed to her that men were defining her Lord out 
 
5^ A Voice in the Wilderness. 
 
 of existence ; they were making of Jesus, that man 
 of sorrows, a mere phantasm ; they were making 
 of the Son of God, not a son but a creature. They 
 were dividing His divine personality ; they were 
 destroying His human nature. 
 
 The Lord Jesus Christ was betrayed into the 
 hand of Greek Dialetic ; He was worse than cruci- 
 fied ; the unsanctified human intelligence entered 
 into the Holy of Holies and stared with unhallowed 
 gaze upon the Divine mysteries, and like an unruly 
 child sought to take those mysteries apart, that it 
 might see how they were made up. 
 
 The Church in her fright met definition by 
 assertion. She brought in new words to set forth 
 old truths. She did her best in her hour of danger 
 to guard the faith once delivered to the Saints. 
 But her best was simply a choice of evils. Her 
 own definitions and assertions became stumbling 
 blocks in her way. 
 
 I wonder if we know when we sing the great 
 Nicene creed, what that creed cost the Church. We 
 set it to music and sing it lightly with our lips, all 
 unmindful of the fact that it cost the Church two 
 centuries of life and the fairest portion of the 
 earth. 
 
 The great Nicene Council opened that era in the 
 Church's history, which to my thinking is the 
 most futile and unhappy in all her life. 
 
 It was the era of discussion. The whole world 
 was taken with an itch for definition. Bishops 
 and laymen, emperors and slaves ; every man was 
 
A Voice in the Wilderness. 55 
 
 trying to explain God. One controversy followed 
 another in rapid succession : tlie Arian by the 
 Nestorian ; the Nestorian by the Eutychian ; the 
 Kutychian by the three chapters ; the three chap- 
 ters by the Monotholite, with a dozen smaller con- 
 troversies thrown in. The whole world went mad 
 in an effort to set down in words the exact truth 
 about things, which words at the best can never 
 adequately express, but only faintly shadow forth. 
 
 In this impious attempt to build this intellectual 
 tower of Babel, and to scale the heavens upon the 
 ladder of his reason, the Christian of the fourth 
 century sacrificed the life of primitive Christianity. 
 IvOve perished, righteousness was driven from the 
 earth, reverence was torn to tatters. Banishment 
 and death was inflicted by each party upon its 
 opponents ; every impurity and injustice was for- 
 given a man, if he would only cry ofioiovo-ia or 
 ofiovovaia in the right time and place ; the most 
 sacred mysteries of our holy religion were bandied 
 to and fro upon the profane lips of the factions in 
 the circus of Constantinople, and the different 
 schools of Christian doctrine were patronized b}^ 
 mimes and harlots.* 
 
 Now the result of all this was death. The life 
 was eaten out of the heart of Eastern Christianity. 
 In three centuries it fell an easy prey to Islam, and 
 the storm centers of the controversy, Antioch, 
 Alexandria and Constantinople are to this day in 
 the power of the infidel. 
 
 * See Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. 
 
5<5 A Voice in the Wilderness. 
 
 That is the awful price which the Church has 
 paid for definitions. 
 
 But a still greater price was demanded by the 
 terrific logic of life. In her great controversies 
 the Church lost the vital connection between Creed 
 and Faith. Her devotion was no longer to a 
 person, it was to a doctrine ; it was to a system. 
 Men were led to lay great stress upon words to 
 the forgetfulness of persons and things. 
 
 And to this day that vital connection between 
 Creed and Faith has never been restored. To 
 this day right thinking, so called, is set far 
 ahead of right living. The connection between 
 Faith and Creed is, of course, strong in a multi- 
 tude of human hearts, else Christianity had long 
 since perished out of the world. But the organ- 
 ized bodies of Christians still bow down to their 
 definitions as an African bushman bows down to 
 his fetich. 
 
 And men and women who love the Lord Jesus 
 Christ and who might live in holy concord, are 
 separated from each other by obsolete words and 
 worn-out phrases. 
 
 Therefore it is hopeless to expect to unify Chris- 
 tendom upon the basis of a creed. Christian men 
 have fought so long over their creeds that the very 
 word is a war cry. If we would restore the lost 
 unity of Christendom, we must go back to the 
 point where unity was lost. We must go from 
 Creed to Faith, and from Faith to faithfulness. 
 
 We must bear in mind constantly the fact that 
 
A Voice in the Wilderness. 57 
 
 Christianity is not a doctrine, it is a life ; it is not 
 a philosophy, it is a religion. And this religion 
 consists in personal devotion to Jesus Christ. 
 
 It is for the Christian ministry to show to the 
 Christian Church, and for the Christian Church 
 to show to the world that it really believes in Jesus 
 Christ. What it believes of Him may be left for 
 after-consideration. What then ? Shall we cast 
 away our creed ? God forbid. I that speak to you 
 am the very last that could give up the creed. I 
 love it with all the love that comes of custom and 
 of use. For twenty years I have said the creed 
 morning by morning, as at my altar I have sacri- 
 ficed the mysteries of the Precious Blood. 
 
 And it is this very thing that gives me pause 
 when I stop to think what great words I have said 
 about God^ what little tJinigs I have done for Him., 
 what adulation for Jesus has been on my lips, 
 what coldness for Him in my heart, then that 
 heart stands still with fear, and I am wondering 
 not what I am to think and say concerning the Lord 
 Jesus Christ, but what He is to think and say con- 
 cerning me. Dare I stand before the judgment 
 
 of conscience, and cry 670) enxi inaTO'i. ev Irjadu -y^plcnov. 
 
 Fathers in the Church, brothers in the ministry. 
 Churchmen and women of this generation, am I 
 alone in this fear ? Can this great Anglo-Ameri- 
 can communion, which has asserted its unfalter- 
 ing belief in the creed, say also that it has implicit 
 faith in Christ Jesus, undying faithfulness toward 
 Him ? Is this great communion day by day 
 
^8 A Voice in the Wilderness. 
 
 translating its Creed into FaitH, and Faitli into 
 faithfulness ? 
 
 If this wonderful process of transmutation is 
 not going on ; if the creed is held external to the 
 life ; if it is not in vital connection with the living 
 faith and loving faithfulness, then that creed is 
 vain. It is death and the cause of death. 
 
 There is no more deadly error than to think 
 that we can please God by word, while we displease 
 Him by thought and deed. It is vain that we cry 
 Lord, Lord, if we do not the things which He 
 says. 
 
 God does not love adulation. A man tried that 
 once ; he came running to Jesus and knelt down 
 and worshiped Him, saying, " Good Master, what 
 shall I do to inherit eternal life ?" Jesus looked at 
 him in pity and in scorn and answered, " why 
 callest thou me good ? Go sell all that thou hast 
 and give to the poor and come and follow me." 
 
 When I think of all the adulation that goes up 
 to Jesus Christ in creed and hymn ; how we call 
 Him God of God, Light of Light, Very God of Very 
 God, and then go on about our business and our 
 pleasure, with the same indifference toward Him 
 as if He were no more than the stump of Dagon 
 fallen on the threshold of the temple, I wonder 
 that He does not wither us with His scorn and vex 
 us with His sore displeasure. 
 
 And, when I look out on the world, I see that is 
 just what He has done. He has smitten us 
 with impotence. Our weakness, our foolish divi- 
 
A Voice in the Wilderness. 5p 
 
 sions, our worldliness, all show us that Jesus is not 
 pleased with us. 
 
 We must beware how we use our creed, lest we 
 make of it a charm or talisman ; lest we mumble it 
 as a witch mumbles her incantation, thinking that 
 in the mere words there is a virtue to save our 
 souls. 
 
 Outward words in themselves are nothing, they 
 are mere waves of the air ; they live, they die, they 
 change their meaning, they pass away. Words 
 heretical in the third century are war cries of 
 orthodoxy in the fourth. 
 
 It is the besetting sin of the ecclesiastic who is 
 largely a dealer in words, that he mistakes words 
 for things. I have heard men wisely argue, that 
 if such and such a definition were not accepted, 
 Jesus would cease to be ; His salvation fail from 
 the earth. 
 
 Now a true conception of Jesus and of His plan 
 of salvation is most necessary to man, but Jesus, 
 Himself, exists apart from all conception, a Fact 
 in the Universe. What we have to do at our peril 
 is to. see that our words correspond to the fact, and 
 our life to our words. 
 
 And the one fact concerning Jesus is that He is 
 here in this world as the guide of our life, the 
 object of our devotion. 
 
 If we love Him and follow Him, if we are faithful 
 to Him, that faithfulness will soon become faith, 
 that faith a creed or confession. 
 
 The creed or confession will not be and ought 
 
6o A Voice in the Wilderness. 
 
 not to be the same for every nian.* Maybe, our 
 creed will be the heart-broken creed of the Publi- 
 can, " God be merciful to me a sinner," or the 
 creed of the woman with the issue of blood, " if 
 I do but touch the hem of His garment I shall 
 be whole," or we may rise to the creed of S. Peter, 
 " Thou art the Christ, the son of the Living God," 
 or of S. Thomas, " My Lord and my God." But 
 whatever our creed, let it be the true expression of 
 our faith, as our faith is of our faithfulness. 
 
 And, O Fathers of the Christian Church, as 
 you stand in the streets, and cry unto men, I 
 beg and beseech of you by all that is wise and 
 true, do not cry unto men, believe in the Nicene or 
 any other creed, but cry, believe in the Lord Jesus 
 Christ. Do not rob the heart of man of a Person 
 and give him a definition. 
 
 The center of spiritual gravity is not in the 
 decree of any council however great ; the center of 
 spiritual gravity is in the heart of Jesus Christ. 
 
 *The Church's Creed is the expression of her corporate faith and 
 is the same for the whole Church. But the Church must live her 
 creed as well as say it. 
 
CHAPTER IV. 
 
 THE POWER OF HOLINESS. 
 
 To the Church in Pergamos the Spirit saith to 
 him that overcometh " will I give a white stone 
 and in the stone a new name written."* 
 
 This gift of the white stone and the new name 
 was not confined to the church in Pergamos : it 
 was a gift of God to the whole Church of Christ. 
 
 Among the four names given by S. Paul to the 
 Christians was one which may well be called a 
 new name. The sound of it, in the sense in which 
 he used it, had never before been heard on the 
 earth. 
 
 Men had known before what it was to be called 
 of God, not only men of the Hebrews, but men of 
 all the nations of the earth. 
 
 We make a great mistake if we suppose that the 
 great Pre-Christian religions of the Aryan nations, 
 the Indian, the Greek, the Scandinavian, the 
 religions which we now call mythologies, were the 
 work of devils, or the creation of diseased and 
 insane imaginations. These religions had in them 
 the voice of God. They were man's first efforts to 
 hear that voice and give it human articulation. 
 The Aryan nations heard the voices of their gods 
 at Delphic oracle and Dodona oak ; in Druid for- 
 ests and by Ganges waters ; and those voices had 
 called them to a higher and a better life, to love of 
 
 * Revelation ii, 17. 
 
62 A Voice in the Wilderness. 
 
 beauty and of order, to love of family and of state, 
 to sacrifice and to worship.* 
 
 So it was no new thing for men to know that 
 men might be called of God. 
 
 Nor was faithfulness a new virtue in the earth. 
 It was one of the great civic virtues of antiquity, 
 the one most highly rewarded, the one most 
 severely avenged. For its performance Rome 
 gave the consulship : for its violation the Tarpeian 
 Rock. Men had learned to be faithful long before 
 Paul preached Christ to the Gentiles. 
 
 But there was one name of S. Paul's which was 
 in reality a new name and signified a new quality 
 in humanity. 
 
 In writing to the Church in Philippi he writes 
 to all the Saints in Christ Jesus which are in 
 Philippi, and this is the new name given of God 
 
 to men, toi'^ d'yiol<i ev Irjaov '^ptaTOV. 
 
 And of all the qualities of the Christian charac- 
 ter this was that which he valued most. It was 
 that gift of God to him which won his lasting 
 gratitude and made him a devoted servant of God 
 and of Jesus Christ his Lord. 
 
 When a man became a follower of Jesus Christ 
 he became a holy man, a saint of God and this 
 was to him a treasure hid in a field, a pearl of 
 great price. 
 
 As some weary traveler who all day long has 
 made his way through some foul bog, where death 
 and decay were all around, where hissing serpent 
 
 * See Cox, Mythology of the Aryan Nations. 
 
A Voice in the Wilderness. 6j 
 
 and deadly cypress strewed his patli with poison, 
 where the dank and stagnant water was not fit to 
 drink, nor could he wash his hands and face in it, 
 where the air was heavy with the breath of death : 
 when this man at eventide drags his almost 
 exhausted body upon some upland and breathes 
 pure air again, and comes upon a spring of water 
 and washes his hands and his face ; then that man 
 is happier than he ever was before in all his life. 
 He has escaped from death ; he has seen the sky 
 again ; he has water to drink and he has washed 
 and is clean. 
 
 Now this was the feeling that was in the heart 
 of the Christian when he came out of the world 
 into the Christian Church. 
 
 That world from which he came out was an 
 unclean world, a world lying in wickedness, a 
 world of moral and spiritual death. 
 
 We cannot look back to the world as it was 
 when Paul was preaching Christ to the Gentiles, 
 without a feeling of pitiful horror for the men and 
 the women who lived at that time. 
 
 The world as it was then was a world in decay : 
 a world smitten with moral leprosy, and was 
 sloughing off into a shameful and dishonored 
 death. 
 
 Whatever there had been that was good and 
 noble in the Aryan religions of Greece and Rome 
 was gone ; only the base and degrading, the mean- 
 ingless ritual, the senseless doctrine, the unclean 
 ceremony was left to satisfy the heart of man. 
 5 
 
d/f. A Voice in the Wilderness. 
 
 The orgiastic religion of Semitic Asia had to a 
 great extent supplanted the more simple, natural 
 religion of Aryan Europe. The favorite divinities 
 were Dionysius, a god from the East, and Aphrodite 
 or Cythera, who was none other than Astarte, the 
 moon goddess, of evil fame. 
 
 The orgy was the ceremony that men and 
 women practiced as most pleasing to the gods. 
 
 To drink till a man was drunken ; to dance till 
 a woman was mad ; to gratify lust till lust became 
 a frenzy, was counted among the highest duties of 
 religion. 
 
 The ancient religions at their best, even the 
 Aryan religions, were lacking in two great essen- 
 tial qualities ; they were without mercy and with- 
 out purity. There were brave gods and beautiful 
 gods and wise gods, but save ouly Athene there 
 were no pure gods and no kind gods.* 
 
 From the death of Julius Caesar to the death of 
 Nero the dissolution of Roman society went on with 
 frightful rapidity. Rome, by her conquests, had 
 destroyed the smaller states, and in their destruc- 
 tion the one redeeming virtue of ancient civiliza- 
 tion perished. Patriotism was gone. The best 
 men in the cities of Greece and Asia, having 
 no openings at home, hastened in crowds to Rome, 
 seeking honor and preferment from the favor of 
 the emperor. Men who might have been states- 
 men in Athens, in Antioch, in Jerusalem, became 
 mere politicians in the Imperial City. 
 
 * See Cox, Aryan Mythology. Tylor's Primitive Culture. 
 
A Voice in the Wilderness. dj 
 
 Rome could excite the emotions of awe and ter- 
 ror, but never reverence and love. Rome was to 
 the Provincial as cold as death, as resistless as a 
 glacier, as cruel as the sea. She was as silent as 
 the stars and as impartial as the sands of the 
 desert. She covered the whole civilized world with 
 one even, arid, implacable tyranny. 
 
 She not only conquered the nations, she con- 
 quered their gods, she carried them about and 
 mixed them up in one corrupting mass of decay, 
 and no man knew his god from another.'^' 
 
 Now when human society goes to pieces it lets 
 loose the primitive passions of man, the passion 
 of lust and the passion of cruelty. And these 
 passions ran riot in those days and there was 
 nothing to hinder them. Lust took on the most 
 unnatural and revolting forms. Mere ordinary 
 sins and crimes no longer satisfied the jaded senses 
 and depraved imaginations of a worn-out race. 
 
 The simple prostitution of woman was sweet 
 and wholesome and almost a virtue in comparison 
 with darker deeds of uncleanness. 
 
 Men and women were in despair ; they did not 
 know what to do. The stoic fled for refuge into 
 his cold and hopeless austerity. The epicurean 
 sought to satisfy his conscience with a philoso- 
 phy that made sensual pleasure the supreme good. 
 But neither stoic nor epicurean found peace. Men 
 ran from themselves as from a horror and suicide 
 was the fashion of the day. 
 
 * See Gibbon's Decline and Fall. Satyres of Juvenal. 
 
66 A Voice in the Wilderness. 
 
 Now out of this world of sin a man came into 
 tlie Christian Church. No sooner had he crossed 
 the threshold of the holy place, than he found he 
 had passed from death unto life. 
 
 In the Christian community he found not only 
 purity, such purity as the Roman knew in the 
 days of Lucrece and Virginia, he found a higher 
 quality of soul, he saw for the first time what 
 men call holiness. It was a revelation to him. It 
 took possession of his soul as light takes posses- 
 sion of the eyes, and filled him with joy and glad- 
 ness. 
 
 It was this power of holiness which was the 
 great staying power of the Primitive Christian 
 Church. 
 
 We wonder what brought men into the Christian 
 Church and what kept them there. The whole 
 world was against them, Christianity was not then 
 fashionable. To become a Christian meant to 
 become an outcast. The very name was an accu- 
 sation. If a man entered the Church he did it at 
 the hazard of his life ; he severed the noblest ties 
 of humanity, he became an object of hatred to his 
 father and mother, the wife of his bosom despised 
 and forsook him. At any instant he might hear 
 the cry of ad leones and find himself in the jaws of 
 the beast. 
 
 Yet for all this men and women crowded into 
 the Christian Church by the thousand, and there 
 they staid in spite of entreaty, of persecution and 
 of death. 
 
A Voice ijt the Wilderness. 6y 
 
 And if by any chance, by slip of sin or act of 
 cowardice, a man lost his place in the Church, then 
 he was heart-broken and stood for years in the 
 porch, and begged the faithful to pray for him that 
 he might be restored again to his place and once 
 more share in the prayers and rites of the Saints. 
 
 Now the power that brought him to Christ and 
 held him there was the power of holiness. 
 
 Man is so constituted that when he has once 
 seen the best, he never can be satisfied with less 
 than the best. 
 
 When Esther Lyon has known the love of the 
 strong, severe and truthful Felix Holt, she cannot 
 decline to the soft and sensual love of Harold 
 Transome.'^ 
 
 When a man has seen and known the holiness 
 of Christ and lost it, he is more wretched and 
 forlorn than a man who has had a crown and lost it. 
 
 The wisdom of God is seen in nothing so much 
 as this device of His to win and hold the soul of 
 man. He wins him and holds him by giving him 
 the best thing that He has. 
 
 Christian holiness is not simply chastity. 
 Chastity may be and often is a mere negative 
 virtue, simply the absence of passion. Holiness 
 is not the absence of passion, it is the presence of 
 passion. It is the purity not of the celibate but 
 of the lover. Holiness is the gift of God to those 
 who give themselves to God. It is the reciprocal 
 affection between the soul and its Maker. 
 
 * Felix Holt the Radical. Geo. Eliot. 
 
68 A Voice in the Wilderness. 
 
 Holiness is nothing else than a passion for God. 
 
 Now holiness was a mark of the Christian Church, 
 because the members of the Church were holy. 
 
 It never entered the mind of S. Paul that a man 
 could be a christian and not be a saint. If a man 
 did not love Christ, why then was he a christian ? 
 But to love Christ is sanctity. The primitive 
 christian man and church were pure because they 
 were passionate. It was the passionate love of 
 Jesus that burned in the soul and destroyed all 
 loves in conflict with it.'^ 
 
 Now holiness, which is love, is the source and 
 power of all sacraments. Sacraments are nothing 
 but the love tokens that pass between God and the 
 soul. 
 
 What is baptism but the water which Christ 
 gives us to wash our feet when we come in, sin- 
 stained, foot-sore and weary with the travail of life ! 
 
 What is the sacrament of the Precious Blood but 
 the bread and wine with which Christ refreshes us 
 after we come back from our work and our labor 
 in the evening ! 
 
 Holiness, then, is the very essence of the sacra- 
 ments. Without holiness the sacraments are but 
 cold and dead formalities, such as pass between 
 alienated souls. 
 
 For a sacrament to have its full force and power, 
 there must be holiness in the Church that admin- 
 isters the sacrament, as well as holiness in the soul 
 that receives the sacraments. 
 
 * See Ecce Homo. 
 
A Voice in the Wilderness, 6p 
 
 There must be holiness in the Church. The 
 great mass of men and women in the Church must 
 be, at least, potential saints. They must be men 
 and women who have tried at least to give their 
 hearts to God : men and women whose desire is 
 " to dwell in the house of the Lord all the days of 
 their life, to behold the fair beauty of the Lord, and 
 to visit his temple." 
 
 If there is no difference at all between the Church 
 and the world ; if the Church does not require for 
 membership any consecration to God ; if member- 
 ship in the Church is mere fashion, or convenience 
 or what not ; if the Church does not guard her 
 sacraments from pollution ; if she gives to any and 
 everybody without thought or care ; if a man may 
 go from his sin to his sacrament, easily, lightly, 
 without repentance, then the sacraments of that 
 Church are without force, as worthless as the drop 
 of water that is used, as insignificant as the wafer 
 and the wine. 
 
 I know that it is an approved doctrine of theology 
 that the wickedness of the minister does not invali- 
 date the sacraments. Nevertheless I should think 
 it unsafe long to receive the sacraments at the hands 
 of a priest of known wickedness. 
 
 But when a whole Church is unholy ; has no 
 passionate devotion to God ; has an indifferent 
 priesthood and a careless people, then the sacra- 
 ments of that Church may be valid, but I am sure 
 they are very unwholesome ; they are salt that has 
 lost its savor, good food tainted by bad air. 
 
JO A Voice in the Wilderness. 
 
 Does it ever occur to us to seriously inquire into 
 the condition of the modern Church. Its doors are 
 wide open, it is easy and popular to enter, there is 
 nothing to hinder, and yet for some reason the 
 people do not throng and press as they did in the 
 primitive days. 
 
 And surely it cannot be that there is no need for 
 the Church, that holiness is now the common 
 possession of all men. 
 
 The condition of the modern world is not much 
 better than was the condition of the ancient world. 
 The decay of faith which has been going on for 
 the last three hundred years, has left a vast body 
 of men and women without God in the world. 
 
 The forces of modern economic conditions, the 
 terrific pressure of competition, the vast aggrega- 
 tion of population in the cities, the presence in 
 every city of a mass of hopeless, irresponsible poor, 
 and a small company of equally hopeless and irre- 
 sponsible rich, have brought our modern cities into 
 almost as wretched a moral and spiritual decrepi- 
 tude as that which afflicted the cities of Asia in the 
 days of the decadence of Rome. 
 
 The necessities of the poor, together with their 
 lack of moral strength, make them the cheap and 
 easy instruments of the vices of the rich. 
 
 A gentleman in I^ondon said to me one day, as we 
 were watching the ceaseless flow of under-sized, un- 
 derfed men and women, go up the Grays Inn Road : 
 " Humanity is cheap in London. You can buy a 
 man or a woman for any purpose for ' tu-' pence." 
 
A Voice in the Wilderness. yi 
 
 Now, why is not the Church a city of refuge in 
 the midst of the cities of the world ? Is it not be- 
 cause the Church has lost the character of holiness ? 
 Is it not because the very men who are making the 
 world wicked ; the men who are grinding the faces 
 of the poor, the men who are defiling the women 
 and corrupting the children, are in the churches, 
 paying the expenses of the churches, hiring the 
 ministers, and entertaining the dignitaries ? I do 
 not say this is so ; I only ask with fear and 
 trembling, is it so? 
 
 If there is any approach to such a condition in 
 the Church, then the whole trouble of the Church 
 is accounted for. She sleeps the sleep of death 
 because she does not discern the Lord's body. 
 
 It is useless for a church in such a state to 
 administer the sacraments to those who are within, 
 or to offer them to those who are without. 
 
 Sacraments are a means of holiness to the holy, 
 just as bread is the means of life to the living. If 
 you give bread to a dead man will he take it ? If 
 you give it to a dying man will it not kill him ? 
 
 O my fathers in the Lord ; O my brothers and 
 my sisters, if you want to unify the Church, • 
 purify it. The wisdom that is from above is first 
 pure, then peaceable. Not till she is holy can she 
 or ought she to prevail in the world. 
 
 In these latter days we have tried every device 
 to win the people to the Church. We have had 
 fine music and eloquent preaching, and church 
 teas and church dances, and church theatres, and 
 
J2 A Voice in the Wilderness. 
 
 I know not what sclieme lias been left untried to 
 attract the people. 
 
 Some of us have thought that if we surrounded 
 the sacrament with beauty and dignit}'-, with 
 pomp and ceremony, we might in that way bring 
 back the people to the forsaken altars of God. 
 
 And some good has come of all this ; the revival 
 of ritual has been a help to devotion. But, alas ! 
 have we not found men and women ever ready to 
 substitute the holiness of beauty for the beauty of 
 holiness. 
 
 Now that we have tried everything else and found 
 it wanting, why not try again that which was so 
 successful in the days of our Lord, of the apostles, 
 confessors and martyrs. Let us try holiness. Let 
 us pray God to give us back again the white stone 
 and the new name. Let us think of ourselves 
 and of all Christian men and women as holy unto 
 the Lord. Let us dare to use again the name so 
 dear to Agnes, to Agatha, to Sixtus and to Lau- 
 rence, let every Christian man and woman humbly 
 bow his head and say, evw enii a'yioa ev rov xp('(^'Tov 
 Irjaov. I am a saint in Christ Jesus. 
 
 We must not think of the Saints as if, like the 
 Ichthosauri, they were an extinct race of men, with 
 shaven heads and pinched faces, with gown and 
 girdle and sandal shoon, men and women useful 
 for purposes of ornament, tQ be carved into statues 
 and painted on windows. 
 
 We must think of them as men and women 
 living to-day ; living as the saints of God always 
 
A Voice in the Wilderness. yj 
 
 have lived, little in the eyes of the world, much in 
 the eyes of God ; living some of them lives of hard- 
 ship at the wash-tub and the work-bench ; others 
 with their children and fathers bearing the heat 
 and burden of the day ; some of them with the vast 
 responsibilities of riches and making friends of the 
 mammon of unrighteousness ; some of them living 
 at home and some homeless tramps abroad ; some 
 of them in prison and some, alas, in brothels, for 
 the saints of God are sadly lost and bewildered at 
 times. 
 
 We must believe that this is not the devil's 
 world, but God's world, and God's people are in it. 
 And they will come home fast enough if we will 
 only keep house for Him and the doors wide open 
 for them. 
 
 We must not have anything in the Church to 
 frighten the saints of God. The Church is no 
 place for the display of wealth or pride or social 
 precedence. The people in the Church must as a 
 class be sweet and clean and merciful, not given 
 to much wine, no strikers, no brawlers. 
 
 Jesus our Lord will not be pleased with us if 
 we are at great pains to shepherd the goats and 
 leave the sheep all night on the wold. 
 
 And, O my fathers in the Lord, bishops and 
 priests, if you will do this one thing, if you will be 
 holy and try to make others holy ; if when you 
 go into the house of the Lord, the bells on your 
 garments are holiness to the Lord ; if you will 
 give your whole thought as to how you may best 
 
7^ A Voice in the Wilderness. 
 
 sanctify the Lord God in your hearts, I am prophet 
 enough to tell you, that without might, violence or 
 persuasion, you will unify the Church of God. 
 The people will flock to your churches as doves to 
 their windows. When once they know you can 
 heal their spiritual diseases, they will crowd your 
 doors as they crowded the doors of the house at 
 eventide when Christ was in Capernaum. 
 
 But, as you value your life in God, do not 
 offer them the barren sign of a holiness, when 
 what they want is holiness itself. 
 
 Love the Lord Jesus Christ and then you will 
 love the people and the people will love you. 
 
CHAPTER V. 
 
 THE STRENGTH OF BROTHERHOOD. 
 
 In his letter to tlie Colossians S. Paul addresses 
 them as the saints and faithful brethren which are 
 at Colosse ; thus joining together three of the 
 great names by which the Christians were known 
 to each other. And this last name, the Brethren, 
 01 ASeXcfyo I ev Tov Irjaov ^picTTov is the name which S. 
 Paul uses most constantly in all his epistles. He 
 uses it of himself. He loves to think of himself 
 as one of the brethren in Christ Jesus. He is an 
 apostle of the Lord ; he has great and wonderful 
 gifts ; he has rendered signal service to the Church, 
 but all this does not lift him out of the ranks. 
 He does not because he is a great man and a use- 
 ful man, demand for himself rights and privileges. 
 He is not above any man nor beneath any man. 
 He sits in unconscious dignity, and makes tents 
 beside Aquila and Priscilla, and talks with perfect 
 ease and freedom to Agrippa and Bernice. 
 
 S. Paul valued the principle of Brotherhood 
 because a greater than he had come among men 
 and had not been ashamed to call them brethren. 
 
 The Son of God, when he came into the world, 
 was careful to come not only as the Son of God, 
 but also as the Son of Man. And it was his man- 
 hood that was most in evidence during his earthly 
 life. His divinity was for the most part hidden, 
 His humanity was ever in sight. 
 
y6 A Voice in the Wilderness. 
 
 In all things He was anxious to share the com- 
 mon lot of man. He was born indeed of royal 
 blood, but that royal blood had flowed obscurely 
 and now ran in the veins of the carpenter of 
 Nazareth. 
 
 Jesus came out of the great middle class which 
 has always given to the world its greatest men. 
 He was at neither extreme of the social scale ; 
 neither a prince nor a beggar. He was a common 
 working man. 
 
 And when He became a teacher, He did not affect 
 the teacher's robes nor the teacher's titles. He 
 went out in all the simplicity of His early life and 
 was but a man teaching men. He was not by His 
 divine nature and wonderful spiritual genius lifted 
 out of the common lot. 
 
 He walked to and fro in the earth, He was tired, 
 He was hungry, He was sad, He was glad. He 
 suffered and He died just as every brother man of 
 His had walked and grown weary, been cold and 
 hungry, had smiled and wept, had suffered and 
 died since the world began. 
 
 Now it was not without purpose that God sent 
 His Son to dwell among us ; to pitch His tent as 
 one of the tents of Israel.* 
 
 This coming of Christ to be one of us was an 
 appeal to the social instinct of the human heart ; 
 which instinct more than any other has made man 
 what he is. 
 
 It is the instinct which has built up the family 
 
 * S. John i, 14. 
 
A Voice ill the Wilderness. 77 
 
 and the state, and whicli in tliese latter days God 
 has used to build up the Church. 
 
 Every student knows what a mighty part the 
 social instinct has played in the progress of man- 
 kind. His love of companionship and the com- 
 parative constancy of his affections is that which 
 has made for him the most beneficent of all his 
 institutions, the institution of the family. 
 
 From very early times man has sought the 
 woman not only for the gratification of his appetite 
 but also for the satisfaction of his affection. She 
 is not only his mate, she is his companion. 
 
 Marriage as a permanent relationship belongs 
 to man. 
 
 There is no marriage among the beasts. Divorce 
 is easy among the birds. 
 
 The children born to the man and his wife are 
 first their jo}^, and then their care, their sorrow, 
 and their solace. The long infancy and youth of 
 mankind welds the family. 
 
 Those who live for years together must learn to 
 know each other and to love each other. The dog 
 of three months old does not know his brother dog, 
 and fights him as a stranger in the streets. But a 
 man who has lived for years with a fellow man 
 born of the same seed, offspring of the same womb, 
 cannot soon forget that fellow man, and if he hates 
 and kills him, he hates and kills not a stranger, but 
 a brother, and it is his brother's blood that cries 
 from the ground. 
 
 During all those long ages before what we call 
 
7<? A Voice in the Wilderness. 
 
 civilization began to be, while men were wandering 
 in small companies about the earth, the family, was 
 the unit of social organization. Brothers lived 
 together under the rule of the father, not only for 
 a few years but all their lives ; children and grand- 
 children made up the common family. 
 
 And as different families came together in con- 
 flict, brother had to fight for brother in defence of 
 the common safety, so that when man came forth 
 from that first formative state he brought with him 
 the instinct of brotherhood as one of the strongest 
 instincts of his nature. 
 
 And as the family grew into the tribe and the 
 tribe into the nation, the idea of brotherhood was 
 made to cover those larger relationships. The 
 Greek was the brother to every other Greek, and 
 when our Lord would excuse Himself from going 
 to dine with Zaccheus, of whom the people mur- 
 mured and said " he was a man that was a sinner," 
 Jesus said " this day is salvation come to this house, 
 forasmuch as he also is child of Abraham ;" thus 
 appealing to the instinct of brotherhood. No one 
 could deny the right of a brother to help a 
 brother. 
 
 What the Christian ideal did was to make the 
 brotherly relation universal. It grasped the very 
 simple fact that the common nature of man proves 
 a common origin ; that all men can at last be 
 traced to a single stock, and so in a wide but true 
 sense all men must be brethren. 
 
 The Christian ideal carried the origin of man 
 
A Voice ill the Wilderness. yg 
 
 back to its ultimate source. It found the origin 
 not in man but in God. It was the common father- 
 hood of God which made the common brotherhood 
 of man. So when a man was in distress the 
 Christian would turn aside and help him, and in 
 excuse would say of him : "he also is a child of 
 God." 
 
 And it was time for this new conception of 
 brotherhood to enter the world. It was necessary 
 for the world to take some wider and more univer- 
 sal conception of the brotherhood of man, or 
 brotherhood itself would perish and the world 
 perish with it. 
 
 The brotherhood of the family had been lost in 
 that of the tribe, the brotherhood of the tribe had 
 been merged in that of the nation, and now 
 nationalism itself had been lost in the universalism 
 of the Roman Empire. 
 
 And the Roman Empire was only the cover for 
 the most intense and competitive individualism 
 that the world has ever seen. 
 
 During the last days of the Republic competi- 
 tion had done its perfect work. Individualism was 
 everywhere rampant. The family relation was 
 gone. The men of Rome mated like creatures of 
 the air and the field, a man would find his solace 
 with a concubine like a beast, and divorce his wife 
 with more than the facility of a bird. 
 
 He did not know his own children. They were 
 the offspring of obscure amours, often children of 
 slave girls whom their father sold in the market. 
 6 
 
8o A Voice in the Wilderness. 
 
 Unless one has studied the subject he can have 
 no conception of the utter dissolution of the family 
 that came to pass immediately after the great civil 
 wars of Marius and Sulla. 
 
 The tribal relation had long since passed away, 
 and by reason of the Roman conquest the nations 
 has ceased to exist. And now the Roman Repub- 
 lic was only a name. It was a mere cover for indi- 
 vidual enterprise, an instrument for the benefit of 
 individual greed. 
 
 There was no longer any res publica^ there was 
 only res privita. The Roman aristocracy fought 
 for pro-consulships in the senate, that a man might 
 go to Syria or to Egypt, where, in two years, he 
 would wring from a despairing people wealth 
 enough to come back to Rome and build marble 
 palaces by the thousand feet, and spend ten thou- 
 sand sesterce on a dinner. 
 
 This went on until Cains Julius Caesar carried 
 individualism to its logical issue and gathered the 
 whole accumulated power of the Roman world into 
 the hands of one man. 
 
 The work of Caesar was the inevitable result of 
 what had gone before. He had to fight with the 
 aristocracy for his share of the plunder. He was 
 stronger than they, beat them and took it all. 
 
 Caesarism was the ultimate triumph of individ- 
 ualism. Caesar calmly assumed the ownership of 
 the world as a personal possession. 
 
 What Caesar secured by force, Octavianus held 
 by craft, and secured the world as an inheritance 
 
A Voice in the Wilderness. 8i 
 
 in the Claudian-Julian families. From Augustus 
 the world passed by descent to Tiberius, and 
 from him went down the line to Cains, Claudius 
 and Nero, who used the world as a very little 
 thing to gorge their appetites and to glut their 
 cruelty. 
 
 The result of all this was to reduce the Roman 
 world to a state of miserable, degrading dependence. 
 Manhood was gone. It followed the state and the 
 tribe into the maw of competitive individualism. 
 
 At the bottom of social scale was the slave de- 
 pendent upon his master for life, compelled to sub- 
 mit to every caprice ; obliged to yield his body to 
 dishonor and outrage. Next after him came the 
 freedman, hardly better than the slave, the pimp 
 of his patron, doing the meanest actions for the 
 smallest reward. There was a crowd of debtors 
 living in daily dread of creditors, who might at 
 will send them to imprisonment and to slavery. 
 The cities were crowded with an idle rabble, which 
 the ruin of husbandry had driven from the coun- 
 try, parasites eating out the heart of the common- 
 wealth, crying for free bread and free shows. 
 
 At the top of the social world was the senator, 
 the knight and the publican spending his days in 
 fawning on the Caesar, his nights in a feverish 
 debauch ; fearing every hour that Caesar would 
 rob him of wealth and of life. 
 
 It was into such a world as this, that the Kingdom 
 of God came with its ideal of universal brotherhood, 
 and in the Christian Church of the second and 
 
82 A Voice in the Wi/derfiess. 
 
 third centuries the Roman world recovered its lost 
 manhood. 
 
 In the Christian community there was law, 
 order, self-respect. There was jiistice and piety 
 and wholesome love. 
 
 Some poor slave beaten by his master, would 
 escape in the night and go early in the morning to 
 a Christian assembly. There he would be greeted 
 by a clasp of the hand : he would hear from the 
 lips perhaps of some patrician the word brother ; 
 that word would send a thrill of joy to his heart. 
 He was no longer a slave of man, but a brother of 
 man. 
 
 Then the brethren would take him and wash his 
 wounds and tell him not to be ashamed, for the Son 
 of God had suffered like things. 
 
 Some poor slave girl would drag her outraged 
 body to the Christian Church and there hear how 
 Jesus had been put to open shame, and in the 
 Church find the purity of which she had been 
 robbed in the world. 
 
 Some matron fleeing from Caesar's lust, some 
 man of consular rank from his degrading friend- 
 ship, would find in the company of the Christian 
 Community the personal decency and dignity 
 which the heart craved as the necessity of life. 
 So the Brotherhood increased and multiplied until 
 it was the mightiest force in the Roman world. 
 
 This brotherhood, because it was a brotherhood, 
 was a society in which every man was the equal of 
 every man. 
 
A Voice in the Wilderness. 8j 
 
 And this brotherhood was and is the source from 
 which all episcopates derive their being and their 
 power in the Church. The brotherhood does not 
 exist for the episcopate, but the episcopate for the 
 brotherhood. 
 
 Christ our Lord gave the Christian brotherhood 
 existence. His divine Sonship- is that in which 
 all human sonship centers. He brought us home 
 to His Father and our Father, and on that fact 
 of Divine Fatherhood human brotherhood was 
 based. 
 
 The Church crystallized round about Jesus 
 Christ. He was the Shepherd of the sheep ; Apos- 
 tles were sent to seek the sheep and bring them to 
 the fold ; Bishops were appointed to watch the sheep 
 and keep them in the fold. The Bishops were, as 
 their name implies, watchmen, guardians, overseers. 
 
 Neither Jesus Christ, nor the Apostles, nor the 
 Bishops, are by of&ce, dignity or wealth or social 
 importance, separated from the brethren. They 
 are simply brothers doing certain duties. 
 
 Now in the course of time, notions of rank and 
 heirarchy have grown up in the Christian Church. 
 Men speak of authority, power and rule. 
 
 But all this is contrary to the first principles of 
 the Constitution of the Christian Church and is 
 destructive of the Brotherhood. 
 
 There is no opinion that has done so much harm 
 to the Church as the doctrine that bishops and 
 priests are appointed to rule in the Church as kings 
 and magistrates rule in the world. 
 
8/j. A Voice in the Wilderness. 
 
 This lias been and is tlie cause of discord, dis- 
 order and disunion. It has filled the heart of the 
 Bishop of Rome with the conceit that God has given 
 him authority in the world, to govern the world, to 
 rule the thoughts and lives of men. It has turned 
 the head of many a bishop and given him notions 
 of episcopal power which have made him a lord in 
 the earth ; it has given many a parish priest airs 
 of authority destructive of all personal influ- 
 ence. 
 
 If there is any one thing perfectly clear in our 
 Lord's teaching, it is that a bishop or successor of 
 the apostles is to have no authority or rule what- 
 ever. He is not appointed to rule, he is appointed 
 to serve. 
 
 This whole matter of dominion or authority was 
 decided by our Lord in the case of Zebedee's chil- 
 dren. When the ambitious mother of those young 
 men asked that one of them might sit on the right 
 hand and the other on the left of the Lord in His 
 Kingdom, and the ten were moved to indignation, 
 Jesus called them unto Him and said, " Ye know 
 that the princes of the Gentiles exercise dominion 
 over them and they that are great exercise authority 
 upon them. But it shall not be so among you, but 
 whosoever will be great among you let him be your 
 minister, and whosoever will be chief among you 
 let him be your servant."* 
 
 If words mean anything at all, our Lord expressly 
 withheld dominion and authority from the apostle- 
 
 * Servant and minister are the same. S. Math, xx, 25, 26. 
 
A Voice in the Wilderness. 85 
 
 sHp, and necessarily from the episcopate : He con- 
 ferred upon it tlie duty of oversight and service. 
 
 It was clearly our Lord's hope and purpose that 
 ambition for place, and pride of power should be 
 banished from His Church. How that hope has 
 been disappointed ; that purpose defeated ; history 
 too sadly tells. 
 
 Because of the usurpation by the Bishops in 
 times past of secular power and authority, because 
 they have been princes in the earth, there has 
 grown up round the Episcopal office a tradition of 
 dominion, power and authority that places the 
 Bishops in the highest seats of authority among 
 men. In many countries, the Bishop gives place 
 only to royalty itself, and even that he gives 
 grudgingly. For a long time the Bishops were 
 engaged in a life and death struggle with emperors, 
 kings and princes for the mastery of the temporal 
 world. They tried to exercise the miraculous 
 power of a Moses ; they wished to change their 
 pastoral staff into a scepter, their mitre into a 
 crown. 
 
 This struggle of the Christian priesthood for 
 temporal power is the tragedy of the Church. It 
 wasted her life, and lost her the spiritual leader- 
 ship of man. 
 
 The Bishops were beaten in their impious attempt 
 to grasp temporal power ; they were subordinated 
 by the kings, and then they became the allies and 
 the servants of their former enemies. 
 
 The kings made use of the bishops to buttress 
 
86 A Voice in the Wilderness. 
 
 their own absolute and irresponsible power. The 
 kings of tlie eartb gave to the Bishops of tbe 
 Churcli much earthly power and dignity, but only 
 on condition that they would hold it subject to the 
 royal prerogative. And in many countries the 
 bishops to-day are in this state of exalted subordi- 
 nation. They hold the position in the world which 
 is given them in the game of chess. On the chess 
 board the bishops stand next the king and queen, 
 having it as their special duty to guard those sacred 
 personages. So that in the eyes of men the of&ce 
 of a bishop has become a secular of&ce, of great 
 power and dignity and social importance, having 
 for its chief duty the guarding and conserving of 
 the secular power. 
 
 This conception of the of&ce is deep-rooted in the 
 mind of the English-speaking people. It is the 
 heritage of a thousand years of Episcopal life and 
 rule in the English Church. 
 
 We have just been reading of the enthronization 
 of an archbishop. He has entered upon the rights 
 and privileges of his see. He was seated upon 
 his throne with all the pomp and pageantry of a 
 royal coronation. 
 
 This man is by courtesy the first subject of the 
 British Empire ; he has the revenues of a prince ; 
 he has his palace in his diocese, and his palace in 
 London. Men bow down to him and give him 
 titles of honor. He takes precedence in all social 
 functions. He goes into dinner before dukes and 
 earls, next after the Prince of Wales. 
 
A Voice in the Wilderness. Sy 
 
 Now all this charms the popular imagination, 
 but it has nothing whatever to do with the Church 
 of God. 
 
 As a Bishop in the Church of God this man has 
 no right to dignity, honor, precedence or wealth. 
 These things do not belong rightfully to the King- 
 dom of God ; they have no place in it. A Bishop 
 in the Church of God has only one right and one 
 privilege. He has the right of service and the 
 privilege of sacrifice. 
 
 This is the only right and privilege which the 
 Lord Jesus Christ enjoyed, the only right and 
 privilege of S. Paul. To watch for the people and 
 to die for the people the only right and privilege 
 of the Bishop of the primitive Church. I do not 
 expect any words of mine to disturb the peace of 
 the English establishment, nor do I wish to disturb 
 that peace. '^ But if my words can reach the ears 
 of the American Bpiscopate, I want to say to them 
 in all humbleness and yet in all boldness, that 
 nothing like the English establishment can be set 
 up in this country; our Bishops must be bishops, 
 not princes or lords. 
 
 * The English Estabhshment is the creation of Divine Providence, 
 and has served a providential purpose. When that purpose is accom- 
 plished, the establishment as an institution will pass away. 
 
 The Bishops themselves are doing all they can to advance the cause 
 of disestablishment, to prepare for what must come, to get ready for 
 a Free Church in a Free State : the divisions of Dioceses, the crea- 
 tion of Episcopates with purely spiritual functions, are steps toward 
 the separation of Church and State. When there are a large number 
 of Bishops who are not and cannot be called to the house of Lords, the 
 establishment will pass away. The most spiritual of the Bishops will 
 be its enemies. 
 
88 A Voice in the Wilderness. 
 
 Even in the world princedom is doomed ; in 
 Western Europe it is only a survival ; in America 
 it has never had any existence. The great prin- 
 ciple of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ is now 
 the accepted principle of government in the most 
 enlightened nations of the earth. 
 
 The Chief Magistrate of the second greatest 
 nation in the world is simply a citizen holding a 
 public of&ce. He comes from the people, he 
 returns to the people, he is not their lord but their 
 servant. 
 
 This is not the age of princes but of peoples, and 
 it is not simply a passing age ; it is a clearly 
 defined period in human progress. The time has 
 come when the Church must rest her claim upon 
 somewhat besides Apostolic succession. Mere suc- 
 cession cannot save and never did save. Hilderick 
 was the successor of Hlodowig, and Karl the Gross 
 of Karl the Great, but succession did not save 
 Hilderick from the monastery, nor Karl the Gross 
 from the dismemberment of his empire. There is 
 no case on record where Apostolic succession saved 
 a wicked Church or a faithless Church from the 
 consequences of wickedness and faithlessness. 
 
 From this time forth stress must be laid not 
 upon the episcopate, but upon the brotherhood. 
 
 And surely the day has come for a new birth of 
 the idea of Christian brotherhood. It is this and 
 this only that can save the modern world as it 
 saved the ancient world. 
 
 Once more we see an intense competitive indi- 
 
A Voice in the Wilderness. 8g 
 
 vidualism breaking down tlie safeguards of human 
 life. Throughout western Christendom there is a 
 condition somewhat like that of Rome under the 
 empire. 
 
 The ties of the family are loosened, marriages 
 decrease, divorces increase, children scatter and 
 soon forget each other. Nationalism is fast losing 
 its hold as a rational and controlling principle. 
 Commerce and travel are making of the world one 
 great country. 
 
 Accumulated capital is in a measure playing the 
 part of the Roman army ; it is concentrating the 
 forces of the world in the hands of a few. 
 
 The division of labor and the introduction of 
 machinery has changed the condition of the work- 
 man from a state of comparative freedom to a state 
 of dependence. It has reduced his individual 
 efficiency just in proportion that it has increased 
 his corporate efficiency. He is a part, and a very 
 small part, of a machine. 
 
 The vast mass of the people do not share fairly 
 in the average prosperity of the community. We 
 have learned how to multiply. We do not know 
 how to divide. The earth is glutted with abund- 
 ance while multitudes are starving. 
 
 Now what we need is an episcopate that will see 
 this world as the primitive episcopate saw the 
 Roman world. 
 
 When some workman is sent from his place 
 without thought or feeling, warning, or help, sent 
 to what must soon be a dreary home with discon- 
 
go A Voice in the Wilderness. 
 
 solate wife and hungry children, the Church should 
 be there with the bishop at the door to receive and 
 comfort him. To find, if possible, the reason for 
 his dismissal and to rebuke, if need be, the cold- 
 hearted men who sent him away. 
 
 And when the men themselves, through ignor- 
 ance and wickedness, rise up against their masters 
 and destroy the industry by which they themselves 
 live, then they should hear the voice of their 
 bishop calling them back to reason. 
 
 There is nothing extravagant in the supposition 
 that there might be in every city a man of God 
 whose word would have power to stay the passions 
 and guide the lives of men. 
 
 The present writer will never forget a scene 
 which he witnessed not many years ago. He was 
 visiting a venerated and holy priest of the Church ; 
 this priest was old and feeble, simple and inoffen- 
 sive, and a public official came to see him, a strong 
 man in the prime of life and in the pride of high 
 station, and this man stood before the feeble priest, 
 striving to justify himself concerning a charge of 
 misconduct which this priest had brought against 
 him. 
 
 In this incident was revealed the moral and 
 spiritual power which always has been and always 
 will be the strength of the ministry of the Church. 
 
 And this is the power that we crave for the epis- 
 copate. But this power can be had only when the 
 episcopate identifies itself once more with the great 
 commonalty ; when it takes its place once more 
 
A Voice in the Wilderness. gi 
 
 in the midst of the people, thinking of them and 
 speaking for them. 
 
 In contrast with the incident mentioned above is 
 another which came under my observation at about 
 the same time. 
 
 I was visiting in one of our larger cities, and 
 at the invitation of the bishop and clergy, met 
 with them to discuss the matter of Christian 
 unity. For three days that city had been in the 
 hands of a mob. Mad, wild men were beating 
 against the circumstances of their life. While 
 this storm was raging in the streets, we, the 
 bishops and clergy, were calmly, in our little room, 
 discussing our powers and privileges as bishops and 
 priests of the Holy Catholic Church. We asserted, 
 I remember, our rights as the only true shepherds 
 of the people of God in this land. Meanwhile the 
 storm raged on in the streets as regardless of us 
 as if we had been the mummy of Ramases deep 
 hid in the heart of the Pyramids. 
 
 Never to my mind was there a more glaring and 
 pitiful a contrast between a claim and a reality 
 than when we that morning claimed to be the sole 
 shepherds of a people upon whose agony we looked 
 with calm indifference. When it was suggested 
 that if we had the power to guide the American 
 people, now was the time to use it ; it was at 
 once answered to that suggestion that the mob 
 outside were not subject to our guidance; they 
 were not Protestant Episcopalians. 
 
 Such a conception of the Shepherd's of&ce was 
 
g2 A Voice in the Wilderness. 
 
 not that whicti filled the heart of the Great Shep- 
 herd and Bishop of onr souls, when " He had com- 
 passion on the multitude because they were as sheep 
 scattered abroad, having no shepherd," and until we 
 have the mind of the Master we can never fill the 
 place of the Master. 
 
 When the overseers see where the people ought 
 to go, and guide them in the way, then we shall 
 have no need of an appeal to the past for our 
 authority. Men will hear that authority in our 
 voice, and see it in our lives. 
 
 Such an episcopate will rule simply because it 
 leads. 
 
 CONCLUSION. 
 
 We have now traversed the great subject pre- 
 sented for our consideration. We have endeavored 
 to trace back to their origin in the spiritual world 
 those outward and visible organs which the bishops 
 of the Anglo-American Communion consider the 
 instruments best adapted to bring peace once more 
 to the Church. 
 
 And in this we say the bishops have judged 
 wisely and well. But these organs to have any 
 life or force must be in vital union with the soul of 
 man. 
 
 The Holy Scriptures must find their inspiration 
 not in their own pages, nor in the decrees of any 
 council or sanhedrin, but their inspiration must be 
 in the heart of him who hears them. The cry 
 must be " He that hath ears to hear let him hear," 
 
A Voice m the Wilderness. gj 
 
 and if the bishops and the Church would have men 
 hear the voice of God, they must speak with the 
 voice of God. 
 
 The creeds must find their origin not in the 
 enactment of some body of men who met centuries 
 ago, to determine what men should forever after 
 believe ; these creeds must have their origin and 
 spring to-day in that principle of faithfulness, 
 loyalty and devotion to Jesus Christ which gave 
 them existence a thousand years ago. 
 
 The creed must be new born in the heart of every 
 believer. 
 
 The sacraments must not be looked upon as 
 charms which will of themselves work wonders, 
 but as the means of that union which is between 
 the soul and God, " a means of holiness to the 
 holy." 
 
 Nor is the episcopate to be considered as a sepa- 
 rate order of men who are appointed to rule in the 
 church. They are men chosen from the brethren 
 " to take heed unto themselves and to all the flock 
 over which the Holy Ghost hath made them over- 
 seers, to feed the Church of God which He hath 
 purchased with His own blood."* 
 
 Now if the great Anglican Communion simply 
 makes its own the rule that it offers to others ; if 
 it hears and obeys the voice of God ; if it is faithful 
 to Christ Jesus and holy unto the Lord ; if its 
 ministry is a ministry serving God and the people ; 
 daring to bear witness to God and his right- 
 
 * Acts XX, 28. 
 
g/j. A Voice in the Wilderness. 
 
 eousness " even before kings," then this Cliurcli 
 will not need to wait upon the motion of other 
 religious bodies ; it will but need to show itself to 
 the people and the people will follow it, and the 
 Church will be one again in that vital unity which 
 comes of a common thought and a common life. 
 
 But let us beware how we give the shell out of 
 which the meat is gone. 
 
 We must be careful not to confound the out- 
 ward and accidental with the inward and essential. 
 There are in the history of man's redemption only 
 two permanent factors. 
 
 Papacies, prelacies, patriarchates : these all 
 change and pass away. Church governments are 
 but for a season and a time. Books have their days 
 of power and their days of weakness : Rituals are 
 subject to use and disuse. Only two forces are per- 
 manent, working on from age to age to accomplish 
 the task of bringing in the kingdom of everlasting 
 righteousness ; these two forces ever working and 
 ever the same are God and the people of God. 
 
BOOK SECOND. 
 
 THE OFFICE AND WORK OF A BISHOP 
 IN THE CHURCH OF GOD 
 
 BEING AN ARGUMENT FOR THE DIVISION OF THE DIOCESE OF 
 WESTERN NEW YORK, ADDRESSED TO THE RIGHT REVEREND 
 WILWAM DAVID WAI,KER, D.D., I,I..D., D.CX., BISHOP OF SAID 
 DIOCESE, AND HERE PUBLISHED AND ADDRESSED TO THE 
 CHURCH THROUGHOUT THE WORI.D AS A PI^EA FOR THE 
 RESTORATION OF THE PRIMITIVE EPISCOPATE. 
 
 CONTENTS. 
 
 Page 
 Introduction, 97 
 
 Chapter I. 
 
 Argument from Expediency, ..... 99 
 
 Chapter II. 
 
 The Origin of the Episcopal Office, .... 107 
 
 Chapter III. 
 
 The History of the Episcopate, ill 
 
 Chapter IV. * 
 
 The Dut}^ of Oversight, 119 
 
 Chapter V. 
 
 The Power of Personal Influence, ..... 123 
 
 Chapter VI. 
 
 The Center of Unity, 126 
 
 Chapter VII. 
 
 The American Episcopate, 134 
 
 Chapter VIII. 
 
 Pastor Pastorum 142 
 
 Chapter IX. 
 
 Endowment, 145 
 
 Chapter X. 
 
 The Practical Plan, 151 
 
 Conclusion, 152 
 
 7 
 
NOTE TO THE OFFICE AND WORK OF A 
 BISHOP IN THE CHURCH OF GOD. 
 
 A reissue of this tract having been called for, I 
 publish it in this volume without material change. 
 Some have thought that it might be better to take 
 away its local color and make it a more abstract and 
 general argument. 
 
 But this I find myself unable to do. The argument 
 took force and form in my own mind from the local 
 circumstances which called it forth. It argues what 
 the lawyers would call a case. The principles illus- 
 trated and enforced in this particular case apply to all 
 like cases, and it seems to me are the stronger and 
 more telling because they are particular and not gen- 
 eral and abstract. 
 
 The argument has commended itself to some of the 
 best minds in the Church, and there is a feeling abroad 
 that it is in this direction of organization that the 
 Church must live and work for some time to come. 
 
THE OFFICE AND WORK OF A BISHOP 
 IN THE CHURCH OF GOD. 
 
 Being an Argument for the Division of the Diocese of Western New 
 
 York, Addressed to the Right Rev. William David Walker, 
 
 D.D., LL.D., D.C.L., Bishop of said Diocese. 
 
 Right Reverend and Dear Bishop : 
 
 At the special council of tlie Diocese of Western 
 New York, held, in the city of Buffalo on the 6th 
 of October last, at which council you were happily 
 elected to the Bishopric of the Diocese, I submit- 
 ted a series of resolutions calling for a division of 
 the Diocese in 1898, and providing for a postpone- 
 ment of the election of a Bishop until such division 
 was consummated. • 
 
 These resolutions the council did not deem it 
 wise to consider, the majority being of the opinion 
 that the interests of the church demanded the 
 immediate presence and oversight of a Bishop. 
 In that opinion of the council I cheerfully acqui- 
 esced, although I then thought, and still think, 
 that a full and free discussion of the conditions of 
 the Diocese might well have preceded an election 
 of its Bishop. 
 
 But we must and do believe that the action of 
 the council was overruled by the Spirit of God, 
 and that it is His will that you should come to us 
 as our spiritual head. 
 
g8 A Voice in the Wilderness. 
 
 Assuring you of my own entire loyalty and 
 devotion, and of my purpose in all things to sub- 
 mit to your authority, and of my intention to do 
 all I can to further the peace and prosperity of the 
 Church of God, I beg to lay before you, as before 
 a court of appeal, my reasons for believing a divis- 
 ion of the Diocese of Western New York necessary 
 to the well-being of the church in this part of the 
 world. 
 
CHAPTER I. 
 
 ARGUMENT FROM EXPEDIENCY. 
 
 I BASE my argument for this measure first upon 
 expediency and then upon principle, and I think 
 we shall find that the expediency arises out of the 
 nature of the principle. I deem it wise and expe- 
 dient that the Diocese should be divided, because it 
 contains two important and distinct centers of life. 
 At the western end of the diocese lies the city of 
 Buffalo, the third city in the State of New York, 
 and one of the larger cities of the country and of 
 the world. It lies at the foot of the great lakes, 
 and is the receiving port of the commerce that is 
 shipped over those vast inland waters. Its ship- 
 ping interest alone secures for it a permanent and 
 ever-increasing prosperity. But besides this it has 
 a vast system of railroads, carrying its people and 
 its goods to and from all parts of the world. It is 
 now, and is destined always to be, a city of facto- 
 ries and shops, as well as a city of stores, ware- 
 houses and elevators. It is already one of the 
 larger manufacturing centers of the country, and 
 the recent introduction of the almost unlimited 
 electrical power that is generated by the Niagara 
 river must give it an advantage that will attract to 
 it industries from every part of the globe. 
 
 It is safe to say that in twenty years there will 
 be living in and about the city of Buffalo, within a 
 radius of twenty-five miles of its city hall, a popu- 
 
100 A Voice in the Wilderness. 
 
 lation of not less than seven hundred thousand 
 souls. This population will come from every land 
 on the face of the earth, and will present problems 
 for solution to both church and state that will tax 
 the wisest statesmanship, and the most devoted 
 churchmanship. 
 
 The city of Buffalo is already a great center of 
 wealth, culture, learning and religion. Its public 
 and private buildings vie in dignity and beauty 
 with the public and private buildings of the world. 
 It has hundreds of churches and schools. Our 
 great civilization has done and is doing all that it 
 can to make this one of the most attractive places 
 to live in in this country. 
 
 Now every argument from expediency marks 
 out this city as a center of church life and work. 
 Here, if anywhere in the wide world, a Bishop 
 should have his seat, and exercise all the power 
 and influence of his sacred of&ce. And he will 
 find in this city alone work enough to fill all his 
 time and take all his strength, and problems suffi- 
 cient to occupy all his thoughts. He will not 
 need to pass beyond the bounds of the city of 
 Buffalo to find a place for the employment of every 
 power he possesses, and every hour he can give to 
 the administration of the affairs of the church. 
 
 So when we elected a Bishop at the recent coun- 
 cil, we really and necessarily elected a Bishop of 
 Buffalo. That city must of necessity be the resi- 
 dence of the Bishop, and must occupy the greater 
 portion of his time and thought. If he does a real 
 
A Voice in the Wildertiess. loi 
 
 and great work there, he will have but little of 
 himself to give to the country districts, and to the 
 outlying towns. It is for this reason that the 
 division of the Diocese is a matter of such immedi- 
 ate and paramount importance. 
 
 It was because I recognized the vast possibilities 
 of church work in the city of Buffalo, because I 
 recognized that that city demanded and ought to 
 have all that the wisest, holiest Bishop could give 
 it, that I went to the convention, carrying my reso- 
 lutions in my hand. 
 
 I went to plead for another city, a city in which 
 I have lived and worked for eighteen years ; a city 
 which I love as a man loves his own. I went to 
 the council in the great city of Buffalo prepared to 
 pray that it would consider not only its own inter- 
 est, but also the interests of the other important 
 city subject to its jurisdiction. 
 
 For the Diocese of Western New York has not 
 only the third, but also the fourth city of the State 
 of New York. 
 
 The city of Rochester, lying at the head of the 
 Genesee Valley, is the largest inland city in the 
 world. It is a city of nearly two hundred thousand 
 people, and it is increasing in population every day. 
 Being, as it is, the county seat of the second richest 
 county in the United States, — having as its tribu- 
 tary country the garden spot of the world, it is 
 now, and always will be, a most attractive place of 
 residence. It is known the world over for its fruits 
 and its flowers, and it has already a leading place 
 
102 A Voice in the Wilderness. 
 
 in some of the most important industrial pursuits. 
 It sends its shoes to London and Melbourne, and 
 its manufactured clothing to every state in the 
 Union. 
 
 This city of two hundred thousand people has 
 its university, its theological seminaries, Protestant 
 and Catholic, its schools, public and private, its 
 hospitals and homes, its hundred and more 
 churches of every denomination, and surpasses 
 any city of its size in the country, in the extent 
 and beneficence of its charitable work. 
 
 Now, on the face of it, it would seem the sheer- 
 est folly to treat this city, an independent center 
 of life, wealth, culture and religion, as if it were a 
 mere outlying town of the city of Buffalo. It 
 would seem to any reasonable person that the 
 church should be organized in this city to the 
 utmost limit of its power of organization. That 
 there should be here a resident Bishop, making 
 this city his home, and giving it the chief place in 
 his thought and his prayer. It seems to me and 
 to others to be the very spirit of unwisdom to ask 
 a man to rule the church, in its present formative 
 state, in both of these large cities. Neither of 
 them can receive from him that close attention 
 which its needs demand. 
 
 The Protestant Episcopal church is the only 
 ecclesiastical body that is not organized to the full 
 limit of its organizing power in Rochester. The 
 Roman church has its Bishop here, whose resi- 
 dence has made that church a power in this com- 
 
A Voice in the Wilderness. loj 
 
 munity. No man has ever accomplislied more in 
 any place than has Bishop McQuaid in the city of 
 Rochester, in the twenty-five years of his episco- 
 pate. 
 
 The Methodist Society makes this city the cen- 
 ter of one of its conferences. The Presbyterian 
 body makes it the home of a fully organized pres- 
 bytery. Only that church which calls itself the 
 American Church, the church that has in its keep- 
 ing the devotional and spiritual treasures of the 
 English-speaking peoples, neglects this important 
 and growing city ; gives it the church organization 
 not of a cit}^, but of a village, and condemns it to a 
 barren Congregationalism, which its priests have 
 vainly endeavored to mitigate by a ghastly attempt 
 at Presbyterianism. 
 
 I claim that the Episcopal church, in pursuing 
 this course of action, has violated the fundamental 
 principles of its own constitution, and is reaping 
 the consequences of that violation in disorganiza- 
 tion and disaster. 
 
 That the church in this city is disorganized, I 
 assert upon no less an authority than that of the 
 late Bishop of the Diocese. When he wrote to me 
 on my acceptance of the Rectorship of St. Andrew's 
 church, he said to me : " You will find the church 
 in that city sadly disorganized." The Bishop was 
 kind enough to add that he hoped my coming 
 might lead to a better state of affairs. 
 
 On coming to this city I found the Bishop's 
 words sadly true ; and he, alas, because of my sins 
 
10^ A Voice in the Wilderness. 
 
 and infirmities, found his hopes as sadly disap- 
 pointed. I have, indeed, by the grace of God, suc- 
 ceeded in organizing the life of the church to a cer- 
 tain degree in my own parish and around about 
 my own house, but I fear that in the church at 
 large in the city I have been only another element 
 of disorganization. 
 
 But in this I claim I am not wholly to blame. I, 
 a priest of the church, was never in the Divine 
 economy intended to be the center and source of 
 unity to the church. And any attempt on the 
 part of any priest to make himself the center of 
 unity, must result in abject failure. He is trying 
 to usurp a function that does not belong to him. 
 
 And this state of affairs has necessarily resulted 
 in disaster. Within the last five years, at least 
 twenty thousand dollars of church property has 
 been swept out of existence. One parish, the 
 foundations of which were laid wisely, by pious 
 and devoted men and women, has, by mismanage- 
 ment, become extinct, its propert}^ sold under the 
 hammer, and the memorials sacred to the dead, 
 and altar vessels consecrated to God, sacrificed to 
 pay the debts of the corporation. In another case 
 the black flag of revolt floated over a church build- 
 ing to the great grief and shame of every church- 
 man, and the work, which had existed for twenty- 
 five years, has been given up and the building- 
 sold, which building is now occupied by another 
 body of Christian workers not in communion with 
 the church. 
 
A Voice in the Wilderness. loj 
 
 I do not revive the memory of these sad disasters 
 to the church, which are matters of public history, 
 for any other purpose than to show that there is 
 some wrong in our system of church polity which 
 demands a remedy. I have given a great deal of 
 study and thought to this subject, lying as it does 
 very near my heart, and to my mind both the 
 wrong and the remedy are plain. The church in 
 this case has been violating a fundamental princi- 
 ple of her own constitution. This fundamental 
 principle of primitive and catholic law, is that the 
 church shall be organized up to the limit of its organ- 
 izing pozver in every considerable center of life. 
 
 The church in every city is, by the constitution 
 of the catholic church, an independent organic 
 body, having in itself all that is necessary to the 
 full life of the church. The church in every city 
 has a right to its Bishop, its college of Presbyters, 
 its staff of deacons, and its congregation of faithful 
 people. If the church is lacking in any of these 
 elements, it is lacking in some essential principle 
 of its life, and must suffer in consequence. 
 
 This perfect local organization and comparative 
 independence of the church in every city, is the 
 most important fact in the history of primitive 
 Christianity, and was one of the chief of the sec- 
 ondary reasons for the triumph of our holy reli- 
 gion.--== 
 
 And this primitive order is the one thing that 
 the Protestant Episcopal Church has in its keep- 
 
 * Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Chapter xv. 
 
io6 A Voice in the Wilderness. 
 
 ing to maintain and perpetuate. Tlie only reason 
 for our existence is that we maintain the primitive 
 polity of the church as it was before the great 
 Roman domination. 
 
 Now we cannot do violence to the constitution 
 of our own body without suffering. There is no 
 more reason why the church in Rochester should 
 be subject to the church in Buffalo, than there is 
 that the church in New York should be subject to 
 the church in Rome. 
 
 The evils that have afflicted us are the evils that 
 come from our neglect of the laws of our own life. 
 That law is a Bishop for every city, and a city for 
 every Bishop. In order to prove this, I shall have 
 to briefly traverse the origin, history and nature of 
 the Episcopal oihce, and show its relation to the 
 general life of the church. 
 
CHAPTER II. 
 
 THE ORIGIN OF THE) EPISCOPAL OFFICE. 
 
 The office of a Bishop in tlie church of God 
 derives its paramount importance from the fact 
 that it had its origin in no less an event than the 
 coming into this world of the Eternal Son of God. 
 The episcopal office had its beginning in the person 
 of Jesus Christ. He was the first "Shepherd and 
 Bishop of our souls.'"*' From him all other Bish- 
 ops succeed, and derive from Him all the powers 
 and privileges of their office. In the person and 
 life of Jesus Christ we have the norm of the Epis- 
 copal life in the church. The heart of the Great 
 God and Father of men was moved with compassion 
 because His people were scattered abroad as sheep 
 having no shepherd. The shepherds whom He 
 had appointed over the sheep were not true shep- 
 herds. The kings, the priests, the scribes, the 
 natural leaders and overseers of the people, fed 
 themselves : they did not feed the flock. God's 
 anger was upon His shepherds ; His pity was for 
 the flock. And He sent his own Son, born of 
 Mary, that He might shepherd His people Israel. 
 He sent Him to look after the sheep, saying: 
 " Behold I, even I, will both search My sheep and 
 seek them out. As a shepherd seeketh out his 
 flock in the day that he is among his sheep that 
 are scattered, so will I seek out My sheep, and will 
 
 * S. Peter i, ii, 25. 
 
io8 A Voice in the Wilderness. 
 
 deliver them out of all places where they have been 
 scattered in the cloudy and dark day.'"^ 
 
 Jesus came to see His people and give to each of 
 them according to his need. He came to see John 
 the son of Zebedee in his purity, and to give to 
 him the power of His inspiring love ; He came to 
 see the woman that was a sinner, and to give to 
 her the comfort of His cleansing word ; He came 
 to see blind Bartimeus by the wayside of Jericho, 
 and to give to him the glory of sight. Our Lord 
 went through the towns of Galilee, first to see, and 
 then to do. And at last He saw that what the 
 people needed most of all was that He should give 
 Himself. And He went down to Jerusalem and 
 offered Himself with prayers and groanings that 
 cannot be uttered ; when on the cross He had 
 called for the last time to His wandering people ; 
 when from the cross He had stretched out His 
 holy hands in blessing ; when He bowed His head 
 and gave up the ghost, then the Bpiscopal of&ce, a 
 new creation of God, was perfected, and entered 
 upon its long history of salvation and of blessing. 
 When the Lord God brought again from the dead 
 the Great Shepherd of the sheep, then that Shep- 
 herd gave to men whom He had chosen the Shep- 
 herd's staif, bidding them to feed His lambs and to 
 tend His sheep.f When our Lord breathed upon 
 his apostles and said unto them : " Receive ye the 
 Holy Ghost,"J He gave to them, in all the pleni- 
 
 * Ezekiel xxxiv, ii, 12. 
 
 t S. John xxi, 15, etc., Revised version. % S. John xx, 22. 
 
A Voice in the Wilderness. log 
 
 tude of its power and grace, tlie office whicli He by 
 His life and death had created. The apostles were 
 the immediate and direct successors of Jesus Christ. 
 
 The duty of their office was to go into all the 
 w^orld to seek out the people of God, to bring them 
 into the fold of His church, and to feed them with 
 the bread of life. 
 
 For a long time the apostles hesitated to go out 
 upon their great mission. They seemed to fear 
 that awful heathen world which they were sent to 
 convert. They kept close together, going no far- 
 ther from Jerusalem than Samaria and Antioch. 
 
 But this time of hesitation was not wasted time. 
 The church in Jerusalem was organized. James 
 the Just was made its chief pastor, and that church 
 became the pattern of all churches. And beside 
 this, a common Christian tradition became the pos- 
 session of all of the apostles, and that form of sound 
 words which has kept forever, " the truth as it is 
 in Jesus,"* was put into shape by their combined 
 \visdom and authority to be the eternal heritage of 
 the church. But the Lord Jesus, apparently im- 
 patient of delay, came down once more out of 
 heaven, and by violence seized upon Saul of 
 Tarsus, and made of the persecutor an apostle, 
 compelling him as a chosen vessel of His grace to 
 bear His name far hence to the Gentiles. 
 
 With the conversion of S. Paul a new era begins 
 for the Gospel of Jesus. The apostles leave Jeru- 
 salem and go each in his own way upon his own 
 
 * Ephesians, iv, 21. 
 
no A Voice in the Wilderness. 
 
 mission. And, as they feared, the heathen world 
 swallowed them up. They were lost in it. Of the 
 new apostle Paul we hear much for a little while, 
 but of the rest nothing. Faint rumors came to us 
 of their life and their death, but of their history and 
 of their fate we know nothing certain. Like some 
 rash Arctic explorer, they are lost forever to the 
 knowledge of mankind in the darkness and cold- 
 ness of an unblieving world. 
 
 And S. Paul also soon disappeared from history. 
 To my thinking there are no more dramatic words 
 in human writing than these : " And he abode two 
 whole years in his own hired house, and received 
 all that went in unto him, preaching the kingdom 
 of God, and teaching the things concerning the 
 Lord Jesus Christ with all boldness ; no man for- 
 bidding him."* 
 
 These few simple words close the apostles' his- 
 tory, and from henceforth these men go about their 
 work in all the silence and secrecy of nature, and 
 their lives " are hid with Christ in God."f 
 
 * Book of the Acts of the Apostles, xx\aii, 30, 31. 
 t^Colossians iii, 3. 
 
CHAPTER III. 
 
 THE HISTORY OF THE EPISCOPATE. 
 
 For nearly a century nothing is heard of the 
 apostles. " We wot not what is become of them.'"^ 
 Secular history has never known of them, and 
 sacred history is silent concerning them, and as we 
 search for them in that age we cry. Where are the 
 Apostles ? 
 
 But in the course of time the darkness slowl}'- 
 lifts, and in the gray light of the new morning we 
 see a sight which leads us to exclaim, " Where are 
 not the apostles ? " for we see them everjr^vhere. 
 
 In every city and town of the Roman Empire is 
 a new, a strange and wonderful society, that owes 
 its existence to the presence and work of the Apos- 
 tles of the Lord Jesus Christ. 
 
 This society had in its keeping the secret of a 
 new life for man. Its members no longer consider 
 themselves as citizens of the kingdom of this 
 world ; they are citizens of the Kingdom of God. 
 When a member of this society was asked to give 
 an account of himself, he answered, " I am a Chris- 
 tian." " For this he confessed, instead of his 
 name, his city, his race, and instead of every- 
 thing, "f 
 
 There is not in the history of the world anj'^ 
 movement that can be compared with that move- 
 
 * Exodus xxxii, i. 
 
 t Eusebius. Bohn : Geo Bell & Sons, 1879. Page 160. 
 
112 A Voice in the Wilderness. 
 
 ment, whicli, originating in Upper Galilee in the 
 person of Jesus Christ, and by Him committed to 
 the hands of the twelve men whom He had chosen, 
 resulted in the creation of that new order of exist- 
 ence known as the Church. 
 
 Living, as we do, in the Church, familiar with 
 the thoughts and ways of the Church, we fail to 
 appreciate the wonder of its creation. It came 
 without observation. In the first century it had 
 no existence ; in the fourth century it ruled the 
 world. It was a great moral revolution that car- 
 ried humanity from one base of existence to an- 
 other. Before Christ, the human order rested 
 upon physical force ; after Christ, it has rested upon 
 moral force. Before Christ, it was strength of 
 arm ; after Christ, it is strength of heart. 
 
 This new life was in the keeping of this new 
 society. The Christian Church was and is organ- 
 ized moral and spiritual force. As we study the 
 inner life of these societies, they reveal to us their 
 wonderful and confessedly striking method of life.* 
 Found in every part of the Roman Empire, and 
 passing the imperial boundaries, into Persia on the 
 east, they have everywhere a common origin, a 
 common form of government, a common doctrine 
 and a common life. 
 
 f Presiding over each of these societies was an 
 officer called eTrtWoTro?, which word is defined by the 
 
 * Epistle to Diognetus, Apostolic Fathers. Edinburgh : T. & T, 
 Clark, 1873. Page 307. 
 
 t Justin Martyr. Edinburgh, 1873 : T. & T. Clark. Page 301. 
 Bishop called President of the Brethren. 
 
A Voice in the Wilderness. iij 
 
 Greek dictionary to mean an overseer, a watcher, a 
 guardian. This word has been corrupted in our 
 language into the shortened form of Bishop. 
 
 Now, the wonderful fact is that each of these 
 Bishops, wherever we find him, claimed to be a 
 successor of the Apostles of our Lord and Saviour 
 Jesus Christ. It was from them that he received 
 his authority to tend and feed the flock of Christ ; 
 he derived from them his doctrine and his mode of 
 life. He was himself an Apostle, though called 
 by another name. 
 
 In the Episcopate we have a marvelous example 
 of the conservation of spiritual energy. Christ 
 disappears in His own person, and reappears in 
 the person of the Apostles ; the Apostles disappear 
 in their own persons and reappear in the person 
 of the Bishop. The same force is in each of these, 
 simply changing its mode of operation. Christ 
 brings salvation, the Apostles publish it, the Bish- 
 ops keep it. 
 
 And this is what we mean by Apostolic succes- 
 sion. It is that Christ our Lord brought ; the 
 Apostles organized, and the Bishops perpetuate the 
 power of God for the salvation of man.* 
 
 The Bishops of the church became in a short 
 time a powerful and influential body of men. 
 They were soon recognized as the heads of the 
 moral and spiritual order in the ancient world. 
 
 * Man is saved by becoming and continuing a member of the moral 
 and spiritual order of being. The spiritual and moral order is the 
 Church of God. 
 
11^ A Voice in the Wilderness. 
 
 They attracted to themselves all who wished to 
 escape from the brutal, miserable life that men 
 were then living. The weary and the heavy laden 
 came to them for rest, the poor came to them for 
 bread, the oppressed for protection, the sinful for 
 pardon, the pure in heart for safety. Within three 
 centuries the Christian church had gathered to 
 itself the moral worth of the Roman Bmpire, and 
 its triumph was a foregone conclusion. 
 
 During the first and formative period of Chris- 
 tian history the Bishops rested in and made use of 
 moral and spiritual forces only, for the defence of 
 the church, and the maintenance and upbuilding 
 of Christian truth and life. As a class they were 
 men of the common people, without wealth or 
 social position or political influence. They did 
 their work without might, violence or persuasion. 
 The revolution which they inaugurated and carried 
 to a successful conclusion was stained by no blood 
 but their own. 
 
 They practiced that doctrine of passive resist- 
 ance which our Lord laid down as the comer-stone 
 of the new life of God. When Roman authority 
 commanded them to deny God and worship idols, 
 they neither submitted nor rebelled ; they simply 
 refused and died. They pitted moral force against 
 physical force, and in the nature of things moral 
 force was the stronger and prevailed. 
 
 When Christianity became the established relig- 
 ion of the empire, as it did in the fourth century, 
 the character of that religion suffered from the 
 
A Voice in the Wilderness. ii§ 
 
 change. It became worldly and popular. Its own 
 great distinctive doctrines were taught, but no 
 longer practiced, by the great mass of professing 
 Christians. 
 
 And this change was manifested in the life and 
 character of the Bishops. They became at once 
 men of great social and political importance ; they 
 acquired earthly dignity and earthly power and 
 wealth. They became the equals and companions 
 of emperors and kings, and the seat of the bishop 
 was placed beside the throne of the prince. 
 
 In the Bastem or Greek church this acquisition 
 of Avorldly power and greatness was followed very 
 quickly by an almost total loss of spiritual and 
 moral force. 
 
 That great order of men who in the second, 
 third and fourth centuries withstood the whole 
 power of the Roman empire, compelling that em- 
 pire at last to accept them as its spiritual pastors 
 and masters, at the end of the fifth century had 
 fallen so fast and so far as to become the syco- 
 phants of that pedant Justinian, and the playthings 
 of that harlot Theodora,'-' and that pusillanimity 
 has marked the life of the Eastern episcopate down 
 to the present day, when it finds itself the slave of 
 the Sultan and the Tzar. 
 
 In the Western or Latin church the history of 
 the Episcopal order was widely different from the 
 history of the same order in the Eastern church. 
 In the break up of the Roman empire, in the 
 
 * See Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. 
 
ii6 A Voice in the Wilderness. 
 
 absence of tlie Emperor, it found itself not in sub- 
 jection to, but in control of, tbe forcesW tbe pbysi- 
 cal and temporal world. And tbe temptation of 
 the Bpiscopal order in tbe west was to seize upon 
 these forces and use them for its own aggrandize- 
 ment. It saw the kingdoms of the w^orld and the 
 glory of them, and strove to make that kingdom 
 and glory its own. The great sin of the Western 
 Episcopate has been pride and arrogance. It has 
 striven for worldly power and wealth ; has built 
 for itself palaces and acquired large revenues.* 
 
 The Bishops aspired to be not only the equals 
 but the superiors of earthly kings and princes. 
 The claim of the Bishop of Rome to absolute tem- 
 poral and spiritual dominion, is the central and 
 controlling fact of Western church history, and to 
 that claim and its failure we owe the present feeble- 
 ness and confusion of Western Christendom. 
 
 But that fact, while central and controlling, is 
 not an isolated fact. The whole western Episco- 
 pate has shared in this sin of arrogance and ambi- 
 tion, and we associate that office in our minds with 
 titles of honor, with wealth, dignity and social 
 importance. 
 
 But it must be evident to every observant per- 
 son that we are entering upon a new era of devel- 
 opment in Christian history^ The permanent loss 
 of temporal power by the Bishop of Rome is only 
 one of the many signs of the times showing that 
 the days of the prince-bishop are numbered. We 
 
 * See Milman, Latin Christianity. 
 
A Voice in the Wilderness. iiy 
 
 may expect in the not distant future to see the 
 separation of Church and State brought to pass in 
 every Christian country, and the Church return to 
 its primitive condition as simply a moral and spir- 
 itual force in the community. 
 
 Such is the condition of the Church in this 
 country. Whatever social prestige may still cling 
 to it, the episcopate in this country has no political 
 influence or importance. For the first time since 
 Constantine, we have a Church and an Episcopate 
 entirely free from any control by or complication 
 with the State. The only power which the Bishop 
 has or can exercise is the power which belongs to 
 him as the successor of the Apostles and of our 
 Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ, a power spiritual 
 and moral, unaided by any forces other than those 
 which belong to the Kingdom of God. 
 
 It is well for us, if we can, to separate the epis- 
 copal office from any adventitious circumstances 
 which may have surrounded it, from the wealth, 
 the dignit}^, the social and political importance 
 which it has attained in the days of its earthly 
 greatness and earthly decadence, and see it, if we 
 can, in its first estate, when it exercised its great- 
 est influence and accomplished its most permanent 
 work. 
 
 When we see the Bishop as he was in the days 
 of his primitive simplicity, before he became a 
 prince and a prelate, we learn that he exercised the 
 duty of oversight ; exerted the power of personal 
 influence, and was the center of unit}^ to the Church. 
 
ii8 A Voice m the Wilderness. 
 
 These are tiie tliree great elements in the epis- 
 copal character as it was in the days of its purity, 
 and these three elements will always be the ele- 
 ments in which it will find its greatest strength. 
 
 And as it is this elementary character of the 
 episcopate that really lies at the basis of my argu- 
 ment for the division of the Diocese of Western 
 New York, I will beg your attention while we con- 
 sider each of these elements separately, and try to 
 show their bearing upon the question under con- 
 sideration. 
 
CHAPTER IV. 
 
 THE DUTY OF OVERSIGHT. 
 
 The episcopate, as its name implies, had for its 
 great duty the oversight of the Church. ETri^/coTro?, 
 Cardinal Pelliccia tells us, " was the name of that 
 commissioner among the Athenians who used to 
 travel every year through the subject cities of 
 Attica, that at his leisure he might hold a visita- 
 tion and administer justice in them. And this 
 was the official name, therefore, which the Church 
 transferred to those who in the republic of Chris- 
 tians have authority over others, and who are the 
 inspectors of their morals and of their manner of 
 life. This inspector was first in the ecclesiastical 
 hierarchy, and to him both deacons and laymen 
 and presbyters were subject, while he himself was 
 subject to Christ.'"-' 
 
 This duty of oversight was not an oversight of 
 institutions and general work, but an oversight of 
 souls. We are told in the Apostolic Constitutions, 
 which give us a view of the Church as it was in 
 
 * "The Polity of the Christian Church." Cardinal Pelliccia. Eng. 
 trans.: J. Masters & Co., London, 18S2. Page 74. 
 
 Note. — I beg to call the reader's attention to this Roman authority, 
 conceding, as it does, the independence of the Episcopate and its 
 direct subjection to Christ. But I beg to differ from the learned 
 Cardinal in his estimate of the episcopal office. His mind was colored 
 b}' the dignity, wealth and authority which accrued to the Episcopate 
 after the conversion of Constantine. But the primitive character of the 
 Episcopate was far more simple, having less authority and more direct 
 influence. 
 
120 A Voice in the Wilderness. 
 
 the third century, that the Bishop is to see to the 
 general temporal and spiritual welfare of the whole 
 body of the Church under his care. " Do you, 
 therefore, O bishops, be solicitous about their 
 maintenance, being in nothing wanting to them ; 
 exhibiting to orphans the care of parents ; to 
 widows the care of husbands ; to those of suitable 
 age, marriage ; to the artificer, work ; to the una- 
 ble, commiseration ; to the strangers, an house ; to 
 the hungry, food ; to the thirsty, drink ; to the 
 naked, clothing ; to the sick, visitation ; to the 
 prisoners, assistance. Besides these, have a greater 
 care of the orphan, that nothing may be wanting 
 to them ; and that as to the maiden, till she arrives 
 at the age of marriage, and ye give her in marriage 
 to a brother ; to the young man assistance, that he 
 may learn a trade," etc."^ 
 
 When one reads this account of the daily duty 
 of the Bishop, he does not wonder at the triumph 
 of the Church. Like the Lord, she made the 
 human heart the seat of her empire, and she won 
 that heart by hourly acts of mercy and kindness. 
 She won the gratitude, the love and the veneration 
 of those who in these days are called " the masses," 
 and who are so great a perplexity to this same 
 Church to-day. She won them by not looking 
 upon them as masses, but as individual men and 
 women, each having some special need, each know- 
 ing the bitterness of his and her own heart, to each 
 
 * Apostolic Constitutions, Book IV : T. & T. Clark, Edinburgh. 
 Paofe 1 08. 
 
A Voice in the Wilderness. 121 
 
 of these the Church came with its special ministra- 
 tion ; and the center of this system of ministration 
 was the Bishop. He was to see and know the 
 condition of every member of the flock of which 
 God had made him the overseer. 
 
 When one reads this account of an episcopal life 
 as it was in the days of its purity, with its vast 
 variety of action and its intense human interest, a 
 life which touched humanity at every point, one 
 does not wonder that the men who held and exer- 
 cised this of&ce were called angels.'" 
 
 And when one thinks of the modern Bishop, 
 condemned as he too often is to a barren ecclesi- 
 astical routine, to a wearisome round of social 
 functions, and to a vexatious of&cial administra- 
 tion, there rises in the heart a feeling of pity for 
 him. 
 
 A prelate of the church, holding high official 
 position, was sitting in the midst of the luxury 
 which his office forced upon him, and he turned 
 wearily and said to the present writer, " This is a 
 cold and melancholy grandeur." So cold and mel- 
 ancholy must be the grandeur of any Bishop, 
 wherever he may live, who b}'- the extent of his 
 jurisdiction, by the dignity of his office, the wealth 
 of his surroundings, is separated from the great 
 common life of men, who cannot see, feel, and in a 
 measure provide for those wants and wishes which 
 go to make up the sorrows and joys of human 
 existence. 
 
 * Revelations of S. John, Chapters ii-iii. 
 
122 A Voice in the Wilderness. 
 
 And on the other hand, when one thinks of the 
 modem mnltitude, scattered abroad as sheep hav- 
 ing no shepherd, hidden in by streets and lanes 
 and cross-country roads, blindly beating against 
 the hard fate that makes them poor and obscure, 
 and often wretched and miserable, seeking every- 
 where, except in the Christian church, for hope and 
 help, one is almost ready to envy for them the state 
 of the Roman slave and the Syrian peasant, for 
 these had the inspiring hope of Christian truth and 
 the careful oversight of a Christian Bishop. 
 
 If we are ever to win back the people again as a 
 whole to the worship and service of Christ, we must 
 go out and look for them, as Christ our Lord went 
 out, and his blessed apostles and his holy Bishops. 
 And in this work we look to our Bishops to take 
 the lead. 
 
 We should always remember that the jurisdiction 
 of a Bishop by divine appointment is not over ter- 
 ritory nor over institutions, nor over parishes, but 
 over souls. And hence, a Bishop's jurisdiction 
 should never be so great as to forbid his having 
 any but a most superficial and general knowledge 
 of his people. In a city like Rochester even, a 
 Bishop will have all he can do to see or know his 
 people. And without sight there can be no knowl- 
 edge, and without knowledge no wise or righteous 
 action. 
 
CHAPTER V. 
 
 THE POWER OF PERSONAI, INFLUENCE. 
 
 The only power which the primitive Bishop had 
 in the early church was the power of personal 
 influence. He ruled the church, not by reason of 
 what he had, or what he did, but by reason of what 
 he was. He came in contact with men one by one, 
 and so gained their hearts and guided their actions. 
 
 This power of personal influence is the strongest 
 power in the world. So strong is it that God based 
 His kingdom upon it. Our Lord spent the greater 
 part of His active ministerial life simply in gaining 
 an influence over the hearts and minds of His 
 apostles. He kept them with Him day and night, 
 talked with them, walked with them, eat with them, 
 and so made his way into their hearts that He 
 never came out again.* 
 
 The nature of the Bishop's authority was most 
 beautifully expressed by the name of his jurisdic- 
 tion. It is called in the Apostolic Constitutions 
 his na/3oiVta,f that is " round about his housed 
 His jurisdiction lay as far as his personal power 
 and influence could reach, and no farther. The 
 Bishop's house was the center from which radiated 
 the forces that ruled the church. 
 
 * See Pastor Pastorum, Henry Latham. Jas. Pott & Co., New York, 
 1891. 
 
 t From which our word Parish and the Parish priest has succeeded 
 to some of the most blessed powers of the ancient bishop. 
 
12/}. A Voice in the Wilderness. 
 
 Some plain dwelling, unmarked and unnoted, 
 was known by the faithful to be the abiding-place 
 of Christian truth and Christian charity, and the 
 threshold of that house was worn smooth by the 
 feet of those who came to give and to receive ; to 
 that house the wealthy Christian came to leave his 
 offering, and there the poor went to receive of the 
 treasures of the church. 
 
 It was an ancient maxim that the Bishop should 
 be given to hospitality. His house was every 
 man's. This conception of a Bishop, of the trans- 
 forming power of his personal influence, is set be- 
 fore us in that wonderful picture of a true Bishop 
 in the person of M. Myriel, with which Victor 
 Hugo opens his wonderful story " Les Miserables," 
 and especially in that scene where the convict, Jean 
 Val Jean, with his ticket-of-leave, driven from the 
 great inn down the street, and from the little 
 inn up the street, wandering cold and despair- 
 ing from the fields back into the dark, forbidding 
 town, meets a woman who, pointing to a low stone 
 house says, " knock there ;" he knocks, the door 
 opens, and he finds not only a welcome, but he 
 finds also his God and his own soul. 
 
 So in every city and town in the old Roman 
 empire there was a house at which distress could 
 knock and find a welcome. And the rich and the 
 poor came at last to bow down before this incarna- 
 tion of human pity and human purity. 
 
 But when the Bishops become princes, when they 
 began to rule over a wide extent of territory, they 
 
. A Voice in the Wilderness. 12^ 
 
 lost in a measure ttis power of personal influence. 
 Their authority became magisterial, their adminis- 
 tration bureaucratic. An hundred lesser officials, 
 as vicars and archdeacons, came between them and 
 their people, and the charm and the simplicity of 
 their rule was in a measure lost. 
 
 It is the trend of modem church life to give the 
 Bishop his old place in the world, to take from him 
 his grandeur, and give to him his simplicity and his 
 personal power and influence. And surely this is 
 a change which all should welcome, and most of 
 all the Bishops themselves. It is better to be near 
 to the people, to feel them throng and press, if so 
 we can heal one woman of an issue of blood. It 
 was from the person of Christ that the influence of 
 healing went forth. And if we seek for a Bishop 
 for our city, it is because we need just that power 
 of personal influence to restore the health of the 
 church. We want to know our Bishop, and to 
 know him intimately, so that we can love him, and 
 because we love him follow him with a glad obe- 
 dience. 
 
CHAPTER VI. 
 
 THK CENTER OP UNITY. 
 
 It is a fact universally admitted tliat in the earl y 
 daj^s of our holy religion the Bishop was the source 
 and center of unity to the people of God. This 
 principle was laid down by ancient writers as 
 essential to the very being of the Church. S. 
 Ignatius, in his letters,* cries over and over again, 
 " Do nothing without the Bishop." The people 
 were to look to him in all matters that concerned 
 the welfare of the Kingdom of God. 
 
 He was to them in this regard instead of Christ. 
 As the Lord Jesus Christ was head over all to the 
 Church, as all things were built up in Him, as into 
 the head, so it was with each particular Bishop ; 
 he was the center toward which all church life con- 
 verged, and from which it radiated. 
 
 But this function of his did not give him abso- 
 lute and autocratic authority over the individual 
 members of the Church. Nor did it give him the 
 right to control, by the exercise of his own inde- 
 pendent and individual will, the action of the 
 Church as a body. His power to unify was the 
 simple outcome of his character as a man, and of 
 the place which he held in the economy of the 
 Church. He was the center of unity to the 
 Church, just as the sun is the center of unity to 
 the solar system. He attracted men to himself by 
 
 *S. Ignatius, Apostolic Fathers: T. & T. Clark, Edinburgh, 1873. 
 
A Voice in the Wilderness. 12^ 
 
 the power of love that was in him. In this way, 
 and in this way only, was our Lord the center of 
 union to His Apostles. They gathered round 
 Him because they found in Him a purity that won 
 their souls and a love that subdued their hearts. 
 Our Lord never exercised any external authority 
 over His followers. He left them free to go or 
 come as they chose. It was His to call and 
 theirs to follow. But when once they had come 
 under the spell of His power they could not free 
 themselves from it. Their own hearts kept them 
 faithful to their Lord. He was not some distant 
 king whose command they obeyed, because they 
 were subject to his law, but He was their dear Lord 
 and Master, around whom they gathered because 
 they loved Him and could not live without Him. 
 
 Now the Bishop had the same power as that 
 exercised by our blessed Lord and Saviour. He 
 was the representative on earth of that Man who 
 had drawn men to Him with the cords of love. 
 
 The nature of authority in the church is alto- 
 gether different from the nature of authority as it 
 is found in the world. Authority in the world is 
 outward and formal ; it rests upon force. A king 
 or governor commands the obedience of his subjects 
 under stress of law and fear of punishment. 
 
 But in the Church, authority is inward and real ; 
 it is authority over the wishes and impulses of the 
 heart. A Bishop could not command, he had to 
 win obedience ; and this was the secret of his mar- 
 velous power. The Bishops of the early Church 
 9 
 
128 A Voice in the Wilderness. 
 
 exercised a power greater tlian that of tlie prince 
 or magistrate. The property and tlie lives of tlie 
 people were at their service. The reason of this 
 was that the people loved the Bishop, and loved 
 the cause which he represented, and were glad to 
 make for it any sacrifice, even the sacrifice of prop- 
 erty and of life. 
 
 It is the forgetfulness of the nature of spiritual 
 authority which has been the fruitful cause of all 
 the disorders in the Church. When, in the course 
 of time. Bishops began to lord it over God's heri- 
 tage ; when they began to arrogate to themselves the 
 power of the prince and the magistrate, and to issue 
 their decrees and their commands, then the people 
 rebelled against them, and the Church fell into 
 confusion. 
 
 The Bishops, instead of being the principle of 
 union in the Church, became the cause of discord 
 and disunion. 
 
 It has been said that the great sin of the Church 
 has been that the Bishops have desired power 
 rather than light.''' 
 
 It is a comparatively easy thing to rule by 
 force ; it requires great patience to rule by love. 
 It follows that if a Bishop is to rule the Church 
 over which he is placed, his jurisdiction must not 
 be so large as to make his administration an out- 
 ward and formal one. He must be in intimate 
 association with all his people all the time. 
 
 In the ancient Church he was the president of 
 
 * Ruskin, Sesame and Lilies. 
 
A Voice in the Wilderness. i2g 
 
 the college of presbyters. He met with them 
 every week ; they worshipped together and worked 
 together, and this was the reason of his power over 
 them. It was the power of habit and association. 
 This continual association resulted in perfect union 
 of life and action, and in that union was the life 
 and strength of the Church. 
 
 And in the Karly Church, as in the Catholic 
 Church, always and everywhere, the jurisdiction of 
 the Bishop was the unit of organization. It was 
 his parish, his diocese, his church. In the diocese, 
 however large, there was really only one congre- 
 gation, one great body of people moving and 
 acting together. 
 
 It is the violation of this principle which is the 
 weakness of the Church in this country. With us, 
 it is not the jurisdiction of the Bishop, but the juris- 
 tion of the presbyter, which is the unit of organiza- 
 tion. In all the essentials of its life the parish is 
 now an independent body. Hxcept for the matter 
 of confirmation, there is no reason why a Bishop 
 should ever visit it or know anything about it. 
 
 But this unit of organization is too small to be 
 effective. It results in the establishment in every 
 city and large town of competing, and even rival, 
 organizations, that struggle for the building up of 
 the parish rather than the building up of the King- 
 dom of God. It is this fact of rivalry and compe- 
 tition which is the cause of the alienation of the 
 clergy and of that heart-break that comes of isola- 
 tion and misjudgment. This is the one evil 
 
ijo A Voice ill the Wilderness. 
 
 whicli, more than any other, hinders the work of 
 the Church to-day, and until some remedy is found 
 for it, the Church can never enter upon that life 
 and work which belongs to her as a church of the 
 living God. 
 
 And one remedy for this is the smaller diocese, 
 where the Bishop can bring his personal influence 
 to bear constantly upon all the clergy and all the 
 people ; where he can unify them in himself by 
 his constant care for them and oversight of them. 
 
 It will take a long time to bring about a change 
 so radical as that which is demanded by the change 
 from the parochial to the episcopal system, and it 
 can only come by having once more the parochial 
 episcopate, the Bishop whose jurisdiction shall be, 
 indeed, napoi/cm, round about his house. 
 
 But every step taken in that direction is a step 
 toward the unity of Christendom, for which we all 
 are praying. The Church will never unite in any 
 system of doctrine, nor in any outward form of 
 government ; it will unite in work and worship, 
 under the guidance of a person. 
 
 And that is one of the controlling facts in 
 the present problem. The Protestant Episcopal 
 Church has in its keeping two chief factors of 
 church unity ; it is the custodian of the primitive 
 Hpiscopate and of catholic worship. From all 
 sides the people are looking to that church with 
 hope and expectation. In the Prayer Book we 
 have the liturgical treasures of the English-speak- 
 ing race, and that book is becoming every day 
 
A Voice hi the Wilderness. 131 
 
 more and more the devotional handbook of the 
 English people ; they use it for marriages and for 
 burials ; in the gladdest and saddest hours of life 
 it speaks to them out of its precious pages. 
 
 The best minds in the various Christian bodies 
 are beginning to see that if the lost art of worship 
 is to be recovered, it can best and most easily be 
 done by the use of that form of public devotion 
 which has the authority of ages to recommend it. 
 
 A saintly Presbyterian pastor once said to the 
 present writer, " Sooner or later we must have a 
 liturgy, and when we come to it," taking a prayer 
 book out of his pocket, " here it is." 
 
 We must remember then that in organizing our 
 Church we are not legislating for the Protestant 
 Episcopal Church only, but for the whole of 
 reformed Christianity. We can, if we will, become 
 the center of unity for the now shattered and dis- 
 cordant members of the body of Christ. 
 
 And the restoration of the primitive episcopate 
 will be one of the most powerful means to accom- 
 plish this blessed result. 
 
 If in every considerable center of life we place a 
 man of godly character : such a man as we have 
 chosen as Bishop of Western New York : and if 
 that man gives his life to that city ; if he aims to 
 be simply and lovingly not Bishop of the Episco- 
 pal Church in Rochester or Buffalo, but the Bishop 
 of Rochester or Buffalo ; if he has a care for all its 
 moral and spiritual interests ; if he knows its poor 
 and its rich ; if he is able, in his own person, to 
 
IJ2 A Voice in the Wilderness. 
 
 bring these two classes together in loving service 
 for Christ ; if, because of his guidance and service, 
 his word is a word of power in that community, 
 then without argument, without observation, with- 
 out might, violence or persuasion, he will become 
 what he claims to be, the Bishop of that city, and 
 he will be the center of unity, because men will be 
 united in their love and reverence for him. 
 
 Nor is this altogether a dream of the fancy. 
 Already the Bishops of the Protestant Episcopal 
 Church are acquiring in the great centers of life 
 in this country an influence and a power far out of 
 proportion to the numbers, influence and power of 
 the particular communion over which they preside. 
 
 The Bishop of the Church in New York is the 
 Bishop of New York. His sacred of&ce, his devoted 
 life and commanding personality, all combine to 
 give him an influence such as no other man exerts 
 in that city. 
 
 And may we not look forward to the time when 
 the English and American Episcopate shall again 
 have oversight of the English and American peo- 
 ples, when they shall again be the recognized 
 heads and centers of the spiritual and moral forces 
 of Anglo-Saxon civilization ? No other Christian 
 body has anything like our equipment for this 
 work of guidance and unification. If we fail, it 
 will be because we cannot see the signs of the 
 times and do not know the day of our visitation. 
 
 And may we not look on further and see Eng- 
 lish Christianity, at peace with itself, strong in 
 the forces that it has gathered in the thousand 
 
A Voice in the Wi/derness. ijj 
 
 years of its life, facing that other great form of 
 organized Christianity, which is in communion 
 with the See of Rome, and facing it, not that it 
 may make war upon that venerable and ancient 
 body, which God forbid, no, not that it may make 
 war, but that it may make peace on equal terms. 
 
 I plead, then, for a Bishop in Rochester, because 
 I think a Bishop would be a center of unity here, 
 not only to the Protestant Episcopal church, which 
 sadly needs unification, but the center of unity also 
 to the whole people of God. It is to my thought 
 only a part of a great and general movement 
 toward the better organization of the moral and 
 spiritual life of man in this world, which can find 
 its perfection only in that church which was 
 founded upon the apostles and prophets, Jesus 
 Christ Himself being the chief corner-stone, and 
 which is guided by the Holy Ghost into all truth. 
 
 It may seem as if I were speaking foolishly in 
 thus connecting the thought of the better organiza- 
 tion of the church in Rochester with the better 
 organization of the church throughout the world ; 
 but it is the one and self-same tide that beats with 
 its mighty waves against the shore, and sends the 
 water running in every little inlet. A perfect 
 organization of the church in Rochester will lead 
 to a perfect organization everywhere. 
 
 We ask then for a Bishop in Rochester, because 
 we need his constant, careful oversight to guide 
 us, his loving, personal influence to comfort us, 
 and his presence in our midst to unite us in a 
 common life and work. 
 
CHAPTER VII. 
 
 THK AMERICAN EPISCOPATE. 
 
 In asking for a division of tlie Diocese of West- 
 ern New York, I am only asking that we shall 
 follow the lines of organic development which the 
 Church has pursued from the time of its organiza- 
 tion in this country down to the present day. 
 
 The history of the American Bpiscopate is, with 
 some variations, very like the history of the prim- 
 itive Bpiscopate. It begins in an apostolate, and 
 gradually changes into an episcopate. The early 
 Bishops of this country, Seabury, Hobart, Kemper 
 and Chase, were not so much Bishops as Apos- 
 tles. Their task was that of founding churches 
 rather than of supervising congregations. They 
 had assigned to them vast territories, the whole of 
 the State of New York, the whole of New Bngland, 
 the vast regions of the Northwest. 
 
 To read of the missionary journey of the saintly 
 Kemper is like reading over again the missionary 
 journeys of S. Paul ; the same hardships, the same 
 persecutions, the same undying faith, the same 
 burning zeal, the same unfaltering love. No one 
 reads the story of Kemper, of Clarkson, of Whipple 
 without feeling that he is in the presence of a new 
 race of apostles ; men sent of God to lay anew the 
 foundations of His Church. 
 
 But the consequence of this necessary chapter in 
 
A Voice in the Wilderness. IJ5 
 
 our early history was tliat men associated the juris- 
 diction of the Bishop with the idea of territory 
 rather than with the idea of souls. The first 
 thought was that the diocese of the Bishop must 
 be commensurate with the boundaries of the 
 State ; for each State a Bishop, and for each Bishop 
 a State. This would give him great importance 
 and dignity ; he would rival the Governor ; his 
 visit to any city or town would be a rare and 
 remarkable event ; villages could hardly expect 
 ever to see him. Such undoubtedly was the con- 
 ception of the Episcopal office that was in the 
 minds of many of the statesmen who were influen- 
 tial in organizing the Church in this land. 
 
 It was an erroneous conception, and had much 
 to do with hindering the growth of the Church. 
 As Bishop Littlejohn once said, " It was a funda- 
 mental error of the American Church, to consider 
 the jurisdiction of the Bishop as a jurisdiction over 
 territory and not over souls." * 
 
 It is curious to watch the gradual change of this 
 conception, until the notion of the Bishop, as the 
 Bishop in his see or seat, a Bishop living in one 
 place and influencing the Church from that place, 
 has almost displaced the idea of a Bishop over a 
 State, having no center of work and life, being a 
 visiting rather than a resident official. 
 
 The first step in this new direction was taken 
 when the State of New York was divided into the 
 two dioceses of New York and Western New York, 
 
 * Quoted from memory. Not the very words of the Bishop. 
 
i 
 
 ij6 A Voice in the Wilderness. 
 
 these territorial names showing that the territorial 
 idea still ruled the minds of churchmen. 
 
 The first canon for the division of a diocese, or 
 the formation of a new diocese, required " that no 
 such diocese shall be formed which shall contain 
 less than eight thousand square miles in one body, 
 and thirty presbyters who had been for one year 
 canonically resident within the bounds of such new 
 diocese."* 
 
 Compare this with the present law, which pro- 
 vides that no " new diocese shall be formed which 
 contains less than six parishes and six presbyters^'' 
 and which says nothing whatever about square 
 miles, providing only that no city shall form more 
 than one diocese,f and we see how far the Church 
 has traveled toward the notion of Episcopal juris- 
 diction, which was the notion which prevailed in 
 the primitive and catholic church. 
 
 This change of idea is seen in the new manner 
 of naming new dioceses. When the great State of 
 Illinois was subdivided into three dioceses we were 
 spared the distressing names. North Illinois, Mid- 
 dle Illinois, South Illinois. The see principle was 
 adopted, and we have Chicago, Springfield and 
 Quincy, with the suffragan Bishop of Cairo as the 
 ecclesiastical jurisdiction of that province in the 
 Church known as the Province of Illinois ; and 
 since then the general tendency has been to give 
 
 * Hoffman's Law of the Church : Stanford & Swords, New York, 
 1850. Page 160. 
 t Appendix, Journal of Gen. Con., 1890. Page 8. 
 
A Voice in the Wilderness. ijy 
 
 every diocese its see city, and to call it after tlie 
 name of that city. 
 
 And may we not liope in the near future to see 
 the great State of New York organize itself upon 
 primitive and catholic lines, and assume primitive 
 and catholic names? As it is now, one of our 
 Bishops has jurisdiction over a geographical region 
 (Western New York), and one over a mathematical 
 point (Central New York). May we not hope to 
 see this speedily changed ; to have a line of Bishops 
 reaching from the lake to the sea ; to have the 
 Church organized in every city on the Central rail- 
 road ; to have one Bishop at Buffalo, Rochester, 
 Syracuse, Utica, Albany, Poughkeepsie and New 
 York, with a Bishop for the southern tier in 
 Blmira, and a Bishop for the northern region in 
 Troy or Ogdensburg ? 
 
 And the first and greatest need is that we shall 
 have a Bishop in Rochester. 
 
 In all this I am simply indicating what are the 
 logical lines of church development. 
 
 It is evident to every one that the problem of 
 the Church in the present time is the problem of 
 organization. We no longer need to spend our 
 strength in the assertion of our fundamental prin- 
 ciples. The historic episcopate is conceded to us 
 by all fair-minded thinkers. Our liturgical wor- 
 ship has justified itself, and is gradually becoming 
 the worship of all English-speaking people. We 
 have asserted catholic truth, and have established 
 our right to catholic ritual. All these matters are 
 
Jj8 A Voice in the Wilder 7iess. 
 
 in a measure, at least, out of court. They are 
 settled. 
 
 The questions that now confront us are practical. 
 How shall we make the claim of our Church not 
 only a claim, but a fact ? How shall we become, 
 not only de jure but de fado^ the church of the 
 American people ? How shall we bring the people 
 into the Church ? How shall we carry the Church 
 to the people? How shall we give the Bishops 
 oversight of the people ? 
 
 These are some of the questions that demand 
 an answer, and in answering them we shall need 
 all our strength and all our wisdom. 
 
 That a great change has come over the mind of 
 the Church is clear to all. Little or no interest 
 can now be excited in any question of doctrine or 
 any point of ritual ; not because the Church has 
 become indifferent to these, but because she has 
 settled them. She has asserted her unfaltering 
 faith in the catholic creeds. She has made good 
 her claim to all that is essential to catholic worship. 
 
 These things are to her mind no longer matters 
 for discussion. The Church cannot be forever 
 talking about the same thing. She always has an 
 end of controversy. 
 
 Leaving, then, the principles of the doctrine of 
 Christ, she goes on to perfection.* Her work in 
 the next generation will not be the assertion of 
 principle, but the application of principle. 
 
 The new life of the Church is seen in the Parish 
 
 * Hebrews vi, i. 
 
A Voice in the Wilderness. ijg 
 
 House, wliicli is making tiie Cliurcli a center of 
 charitable activity in every place where there is a 
 priest and an altar. 
 
 And it is this new phase of the Church's exist- 
 ence which will bring new duties to the Bpiscopate 
 as well as to the priesthood. 
 
 A Bishop of a small diocese now has more to do, 
 more care and responsibility, than the Bishop of the 
 largest State had fifty years ago. 
 
 For this reason, also, I desire the division of 
 Western New York. It is in the line of progress 
 which Divine Providence has marked for this 
 Church from the beginning of its history, and 
 because the necessities of the age demand it. 
 
 You, Right Reverend Father, are changing your 
 jurisdiction from an Apostolate to an Bpiscopate. 
 Coming, as you do, from the wide spaces of North 
 Dakota to the few counties of Western New York, 
 you will, I am sure, think of your new jurisdiction 
 as a very little thing in comparison with the field 
 you have left. You will need no cathedral car in 
 it ; but I am sure you will find in a short time that 
 the crowded spaces of this little land will bring you 
 ten times the work of the empty spaces of that 
 greater land. Where you had one question to set- 
 tle there, you will have twenty here. Your cares 
 will be in inverse ratio to the extent of your terri- 
 torial jurisdiction. 
 
 When I think of the life of the simplest parish 
 priest, how full it is of care, of difficulty, of tempta- 
 tion, of labor ; how he must rise early in the mom- 
 
14.0 A Voice m the Wilderness. 
 
 ing, while it is yet dark, and say Hastily his morn- 
 ing prayer and celebrate quickly tke Blessed Sac- 
 rament of tke Precious Blood ; kow ke gives a little 
 time to kis family cares ; kow ke visits kis sckools 
 for a moment, gives a kasty glance at kis parisk 
 works, reads and writes a letter or two of business 
 or of friendskip, goes out and makes a call kere 
 and tkere upon tke sick and tke well ; , struggles in 
 tke midst of all tkis kurry for tke spirit of recollec- 
 tion ; kow ke falls into and must recover kimself 
 over and over again from tke sins of slotk ; kow ke 
 kas kardly time to glance into a book, ancient or 
 modem ; kow ke must prepare kimself almost witk- 
 out breatk for preacking and instruction. Wken I 
 tkink of my own life, I pity my own soul. It kas 
 so little care. Tke day is not sufficient for its 
 needs. 
 
 Muck more must we pity tke soul of tke Biskop 
 of tke great diocese ; kaving tke care of all tke 
 ckurckes ; kurried from place to place ; kaving no 
 altar of kis own wkere ke can stand still and pray ; 
 receiving in every kour letters tkat demand imme- 
 diate answer ; called upon to take part in a multi- 
 tude of ecclesiastical, educational and social func- 
 tions ; confirming and preacking tkree times a day ; 
 making addresses kere, tkere, and ever3rwkere. 
 Wkerever ke goes it is an occasion ; excitement 
 tke law of kis life. Wken we tkink of tkis we 
 skould tkink of it witk tke greatest tenderness and 
 consideration for tke Biskop ; all karsk judgments 
 skould die away in tke tkougkt tkat tke Biskop 
 
A Voice ill the Wilderness. i/}.i 
 
 cannot do the things that he would ; he has no 
 time. 
 
 But it should lead us to provide, as far as we 
 can, for the Bishop's leisure ; to give him space for 
 prayer, for study, and for thought. 
 
 We need the suiall diocese in oj^der that we may 
 have the great Bishop. It was Augustine, of the 
 little city of Hippo, that laid the spell of his theo- 
 logical genius upon the Western Church, and Wil- 
 son of the little diocese of Sodor and Man who 
 gathered and bequeathed to us his treasures of de- 
 votion. 
 
 It is not the great diocese that gives dignit}^ to 
 the Bishop, it is the great Bishop that gives dignity 
 to the diocese. 
 
 One of the objections to the division of the dio- 
 cese of Western New York is that lessening the 
 territory will detract from the dignity of the Bpis- 
 copate. I answer to this that the proposed diocese 
 of Rochester is a little larger than the regions of 
 Upper and Lower Galilee, which formed the Epis- 
 copal jurisdiction of the Lord Jesus during all the 
 years of his ministry ; and surely what is good 
 enough for the Master is good enough for any ser- 
 vant of the Master. 
 
 The work of the Church just now needs deepen- 
 ing rather than extending; and in this work of 
 deepening, the Episcopate and the priesthood will 
 have to spend time and strength for years to come. 
 
CHAPTER VIII. 
 
 PASTOR PASTORUM. 
 
 Another reason that demands a Bishop for such 
 a city as Rochester is the pressing need of the 
 clergy and their family for pastoral care and over- 
 sight. As things are now, the clergyman is the 
 only member of the church without a pastor. He 
 and his family can never look for a friendly, infor- 
 mal, pastoral call, such as he is daily making to 
 his people. There is no minister of God who takes 
 interest in him and his children. 
 
 He cannot for evident reasons be his own pastor, 
 nor is it well for him to be the only pastor for his 
 wife and children. They need other influence than 
 his, other care and thought than his, to make the 
 church real to them. 
 
 They need the loving care of the Bishop. If he 
 comes in, not only on confirmation day, when all is 
 hurry and confusion, but on some other day, when 
 he has no other purpose than to cheer and to com- 
 fort the heart of the wife of the minister and to 
 bless his children, he would help greatly to form 
 their spiritual life. 
 
 And the priest himself, above all men, needs this 
 care and interest ; all the time he is giving and 
 never receiving. " Virtue goes out of him,"* and 
 he has no time to go " apart into a desert place and 
 rest awhile, "f The loving care of our blessed 
 
 * Mark v, 30. f Mark vi, 31. 
 
A Voice in the Wilderfiess. i^j 
 
 Lord and Saviour for the twelve is one of the most 
 beautiful things in all His beautiful life. He 
 taught them the duties of the pastoral office by- 
 being to them the most perfect of pastors. 
 
 If we could read their hearts — yes, if they could 
 read their own hearts — we should find that this 
 loving pastoral care is the one thing the ministers 
 of the church are craving, and for lack of which 
 their souls are growing dry and hard. 
 
 And the Bishops should meet the clergy in con- 
 ference and retreat and preach to them as they 
 preach to their people. 
 
 But to do this work requires time, and time is 
 the one thing a Bishop never has. 
 
 If a Bishop had but fifty clergy to look after, 
 he would find his hands and his heart full of care, 
 anxiety and work. If he gave each of them three 
 days in a year (and surel}^ if confidence is to grow 
 between clergy and Bishop they each need that 
 much of his time), then half his year can be spent 
 in the simple pastoral care of the pastors. 
 
 And that is what the Church in this diocese had 
 in mind when it elected its Bishop. We chose the 
 man we did choose because we thought he would 
 be kind, thoughtful and tender of his clergy. He 
 had been in our families and we had learned to love 
 him, because we saw in him a heart to love us. 
 
 And if, when he comes into this large diocese, 
 with its burden of care, with its multitude of duties, 
 he has no time for this intimate care for his clergy, 
 
 lO 
 
14-4- ^ Voice in the Wilderness. 
 
 both he and we will suffer the pain and loss of dis- 
 appointment. 
 
 So I beg of him and of the people to consent to 
 that division of jurisdiction which shall enable him 
 to do this necessary and blessed work. 
 
CHAPTER IX. 
 
 ENDOWMENT. 
 
 The one reason why the resolntions for the 
 division of the diocese were not considered was the 
 financial reason. One layman said to me : " This 
 is a mere business matter. If you can show me 
 where the money is to come from I am with you in 
 this movement." 
 
 And from the first agitation of this question 
 down to the present this has been the one lion in 
 the way. There is not a man, cleric or lay, with 
 whom I have conferred who has not conceded the 
 wisdom of an immediate division of the diocese of 
 Western New York. 
 
 Bvery sensible business man outside the church 
 expected us to take such action at the last council. 
 The late Bishop of the diocese, in an address which 
 he made at a meeting of the Archdeaconry of 
 Rochester, spoke of this division as a thing which 
 must come to pass. 
 
 The one reason why we halt and hesitate is 
 because we say, " We cannot afford it." We find 
 it hard work to support one Bishop ; how can we 
 take care of two ? 
 
 Now, let us look at this matter from the plain, 
 practical business side first. 
 
 The cost of Episcopal administration need not 
 be more than eight thousand five hundred dollars 
 per year. This will pay the salary of the Bishop, 
 
1^6 A Voice in the Wilderness. 
 
 give him his house to live in, and provide for the 
 expenses of the diocesan council. 
 
 Now it does seem to the onlooker as though the 
 church in the cities of Buffalo and Rochester, with 
 the outlying towns and county, could provide such 
 a sum as this for Episcopal oversight. 
 
 There are at least fifty thousand adults in the 
 diocese of Western New York who are either mem- 
 bers of or are interested in the welfare of the 
 diocese. These, if they could be reached and inter- 
 ested, would provide for the maintenance of the 
 Episcopate without the least trouble or self-sacri- 
 fice.-"^ 
 
 I may be asked, then, why it is so difficult to raise 
 the means necessary to support the Episcopate as 
 it is? 
 
 One reason why it is difficult to secure the means 
 of support for the Episcopate is because the Epis- 
 copate does not come near enough to the people to 
 touch their hearts and gain their affections. The 
 Bishop comes to the parish as a visitor ; he per- 
 forms one function ; he is not otherwise felt by the 
 people in the life and work of the church. 
 
 When he does come, he comes not as a man, but 
 as an official, a dignitary ; and while the people 
 come to see him and to hear him, they do not see 
 
 * The total of contribiitions for the Diocese of Western New York 
 in the past year were I301, 165.43. Five per cent, of this would amply 
 provide for the Episcopate in Buffalo and Rochester. Would it not 
 be well for the Church to give herself proper Episcopal oversight and 
 economize somewhere else? Let us spend 1 16, 000 for an Episcopate 
 and 1285,165.43 for other purposes. 
 
A Voice in the Wilderness. i^y 
 
 him often enough to love him and to feel him a 
 necessity in their lives, and hence their coldness in 
 giving to him. 
 
 And this brings us to the last and chief reason 
 of our failure to properl}^ provide for our episco- 
 pate and for our failure to divide our diocese, when 
 its life requires division. And this 7'eason is that., 
 in putting the money question in the foreground., in 
 saying that we cannot divide the diocese until wc 
 have at least one hundred thousa7id dollars., WB 
 ARE GUILTY OF THE GREAT APOSTACY, 
 We are departing from the fundamental principles 
 of the kingdom of God. We are looking upon 
 that kingdom as if it were simply a business of 
 this world. 
 
 If I had stood up in the late Diocesan Council 
 and said : " Gentlemen, I hold in my hand one 
 hundred thousand dollars for the endowment of 
 the diocese of Rochester, every man would have 
 pricked up his ears and the division would have 
 been an accomplished fact. But, if I had said that 
 the diocese of Rochester had now, and always has 
 had, the only endowment which God has ever 
 appointed for the support of his Bishops — which 
 
 ENDOWMENT IS THE LOVE OF GOD WORKING IN 
 
 THE HEARTS OF THE PEOPLE — then I would have 
 been laughed to scorn. 
 
 Yet this is verily the case. This is the only 
 endowment which God gave His own Son when 
 He sent Him to be the Shepherd of the sheep. 
 When He came into the world, there was no talk 
 
i^S A Voice in the Wilderness. 
 
 of an hundred thousand dollars endowment for 
 Him. He might have been born an heir, to all 
 the wealth of this world. He was born an heir 
 only to its poverty. He went forth on His mis- 
 sion with a single staff in His hand, with only one 
 coat and one pair of shoes. He was compelled to 
 look to His Father daily for His daily bread. 
 God's love worked on the hearts of some poor 
 women of Galilee and they ministered to Him of 
 their substance. Now, what was good enough for 
 Jesus Christ, is good enough for any successor of 
 Jesus Christ. And, I think, we will all agree in 
 this : That the nearer a Bishop can come to living 
 the life of Jesus Christ on earth, the greater will 
 be the Bishop. 
 
 There is nothing said in the Books of the Acts 
 of the Apostles about endowments. The Apostles, 
 on the Day of Pentecost, did not say : " Assure us 
 of our support, and we will preach you the Gospel 
 of our Lord." They preached the Gospel, and 
 their support was assured. Endowment came to 
 them with the outpouring of the Holy Ghost, 
 when the love of God burning, like a fire, in the 
 hearts of the converted peoples, caused them that 
 had lands or possessions to sell them and lay the 
 price at the Apostles' feet.* 
 
 I do not say that endowments are in themselves 
 evil ; they may be the source of great and lasting 
 blessing. It is a beautiful thing for a man to give 
 of his goods in perpetuity to God and the poor 5 
 
 * Book of the Acts of the Apostles, Chapters ii-iii. 
 
A Voice ill the Wilderness. i^g 
 
 who, when he goes out of the world, departs with 
 a God-like beneficence and leaves an eternal bless- 
 ing behind him. 
 
 Such endowments of churches, schools and char- 
 ities are a part of that treasury of the Saints which 
 we enjoy to-day, and which makes our lives easier. 
 
 But like all the blessings of God, endowment is 
 the source of great peril to the Church ; the great- 
 est peril indeed that has beset her in her history. 
 The Church has never suffered from her poverty. 
 She has suffered grievously from her riches. 
 
 Whenever an endowment is considered as a 
 good of and by itself ; apart from the love of God ; 
 when men rest in it, and do not use it to do new 
 work for God, then it becomes the greatest curse 
 that can afflict the life of the Church. 
 
 Never, in the history of Christendom, was there 
 a Church more richly endowed with worldly wealth 
 than was the French Church at the close of the 
 last century. The ecclesiastical bodies owned 
 nearly one-third of the landed property of the 
 country. 
 
 Bishops were endowed with the revenues of 
 princes ; they had their episcopal palaces in their 
 dioceses and their episcopal hotels in Paris. The 
 purple monsigneur vied with the plum-colored 
 courtier in the extravagant luxury of his living. 
 
 But when they lost the love of God working on 
 the hearts of the people, all their endowments could 
 not save them. They were hunted out of their 
 palaces like rats, out of their holes. And the 
 
J^o A Voice in the Wilderness. 
 
 churcli organization over which they presided was 
 swept out of existence, never to be restored/^ 
 
 So it was with the Church of God, and so it 
 always will be when she trusts in wealth rather 
 than in love. 
 
 So, although I have said that fifteen thousand 
 dollars will pay the diocesan expenses of the two 
 dioceses of Buffalo and Rochester, yet that is not 
 necessary. Nothing is necessary but a self-devoted 
 Bishop. He who can trust in God, and God alone, 
 will be for us the greatest of all Bishops. Let him 
 go forth with his staff only into the streets and 
 lanes of the city, into the highways and byways 
 of the country. Let him seek the people and com- 
 pel them to come into the kingdom of God, and 
 then he need not fear for his own support ; the 
 people will support him. 
 
 We hear a great deal about a support commensu- 
 rate with the dignity of the episcopal of&ce. The 
 episcopal of&ce reached the perfection of its dignity 
 when it was naked on the cross. 
 
 It is not necessary that a Bishop should live 
 like a gentleman, much less like a prince ; it is 
 only necessary that he should live like a saint. 
 
 * The old Gallican Church was one of the first institutions to perish 
 in the revolution. The National Assembly confiscated the Church 
 lands, rearranged the Bishoprics, and made the Church a department 
 of the State. The Legislative Assembly abolished Christianity as a 
 religion altogether. The Catholic religion was restored by Napoleon, 
 but it was not the old Church with its rights ; it was the new Church 
 of the revolution. See Thiers' French Revolution. 
 
CHAPTER X. 
 
 THE PRACTICAL PLAN. 
 
 If my view had or could prevail, I would propose 
 to the Church this practical plan of operation : I 
 would organize a campaign of education. I would 
 preach in every city, town and hamlet of Western 
 New York the doctrine of the episcopate as it is 
 laid down in this argument. I would, if possible, 
 rouse an enthusiasm for the Church as a divine 
 institution, divinely organized. I would show the 
 people the place of the bishop in that divine 
 economy. I would secure from the people a gift 
 for the episcopate, such as each man was able to 
 give. 
 
 And having secured suf&cient to protect the 
 episcopate from absolute poverty, would give him 
 his staff and send him forth to his work and to his 
 labor until the evening, feeling perfectly sure that 
 if he labored he would have his reward. 
 
 I would have this work begin now so that the 
 division could be made at the General Convention 
 of the Church, which meets in Washington in 
 1898. Then the Church in the State of New York 
 completes a rhythmical period. The first division 
 of the State of New York was made in 1838, the 
 second division in 1868 : may we not look for the 
 third in 1898 ? 
 
 The first division gave to the episcopate the 
 saintly Delyancey ; the second gave to it the 
 
IS2 A Voice in the Wilderness. 
 
 theological learning of Littlejohn, the wide, far- 
 reaching statesmanship of Doane, the sanctity and 
 scholarship of Huntington. Bvery division has 
 brought increased life to the Church, increased 
 power to the episcopate. No call has ever been 
 made on the love and devotion of the Church and 
 the Church has not responded. 
 
 CONCI.USION. 
 
 I do not lay this argument before the Bishop of 
 the diocese to complicate in any way the beginning 
 of a new administration of ecclesiastical affairs. 
 But I do lay it before him with the firm conviction 
 that it should receive his careful consideration, and 
 that the reorganization of the Church should have 
 his early attention. 
 
 I believe that the principles of this argument 
 apply not only to this diocese, but to the Church 
 throughout the country. 
 
 The great work of the Church in the next period 
 of her existence must be the work of organization. 
 Not the assertion of principles, but the application 
 of principles. She must endeavor to be in reality 
 what she claims to be in theory. 
 
 The Episcopal Church in this country makes an 
 awful claim. She claims to be the only true 
 Church of God in this land. This claim separates 
 us from the communion of the ancient Church of 
 Rome on the right hand and from the modern com- 
 munions of Protestantism on the left. 
 
A Voice in the Wilderness. ijj 
 
 A Church making such a claim must justify its 
 claim before God and before man. It must be what 
 it says it is. If we are what we say we are, then 
 the reconstruction and readjustment of Christianity 
 must be largely our work. 
 
 We have a divinely ordered ministry, a divinely 
 settled creed, a divinely constructed worship. Our 
 ministry is from Christ, our creed from the Holy 
 Ghost, our worship from the Church. Our Church 
 is not man's church, be he pope or doctor ; not 
 Wesley's nor Calvin's, nor Leo's. It is the Church 
 of God. So we say and so we believe. 
 
 But what an awful claim this is, and what awful 
 responsibilities it lays upon us. If we do nothing 
 to sustain it, it is and will be the most hideous of 
 unrealities : an unreality that will be crushed in 
 the crash of realities that are rushing together in 
 the modern world. Therefore it is that I pray 
 God that we may make good our title, that we may 
 in deed, as well as in word, be the Church of the 
 Living God. 
 
NOTE. 
 
 The writer would not have it inferred from anything that 
 he has said in this book, that he faults the personal life or 
 character of any member of the Anglo-American Episco- 
 pate. Such a faulting would, on his part, be an act of 
 insolence, the like of which he trusts he could never be 
 guilty. He sees in the Anglo-American Episcopate many 
 of the noblest men whom God has ever raised up for the 
 edification of His Church ; he sees in that Episcopate one 
 of the great hopes of Christendom. 
 
 What the writer does fault is that conception of the 
 Episcopal OflEice which looks upon it as an office of earthly 
 dignity and importance. And what the writer does believe 
 with all his heart and what it is the main purpose of this 
 book to maintain, is that the struggle of the Bishops of the 
 Western world for political and social leadership has lost 
 to them the spiritual leadership of mankind. 
 
 That for which the writer prays is that the Bishops may 
 be once more what their name implies, overseers ; having 
 oversight of the English people. 
 
DATE DUE 
 
 
 
 
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 1 
 
 GAYLORD 
 
 
 
 PRINTED IN U S. A.