LI E> i^ARY OF THE U N 1 VERS ITY or ILLl NOIS ^i^^: A^-'^ ^<-^ THE VOCATION AND DANGERS OF THE CHURCH THE VOCATION AND DANGERS OF THE CHURCH A Charge Delivered to the Clergy of the Biocese of IRocbeeter AT HIS PRIMARY VISITATION OCTOBER 24, 25, 26, 1899 BY EDWARD STUART TALBOT, D.D. ONE HUNDREDTH BISHOP ILontion MACMILLAN AND CO., Limited NEW YORK ; THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 1899 AXX rights reterved RicDARD Clav and Sons, Limited, LONDON AND BUNGAV. CONTENTS PART I rSTHODUCTION THE EETCRNS — GENERAL CHARACTER a. OBSERVANCE OF SPECIAL SEASONS ASCENSION DAY EMBER AND ROGATION DAYS DAILY SERVICES FAoe 1-3 3-6 6-9 6 7 9-11 ;3. THE GREAT SPIRITUAL NEED AND THE CHURCH'S FORCES 11-17 13 13 13 15 15 16 DEACONESSES ■ GREY LADIES LAY READERS, ETC CHURCH ARMY WILEERFORCE MISSIONERS 7. SUPPORT OF FOREIGN MISSIONS TEMPER OF THE CHURCH 17-21 GENERAL LOYALTY 17 PARTIES 17 AUTHORITY 19 THE ORDER OF HOLY COMMUNION 21-27 MANUALS 28 COMMUNION OF THE SICK 28 SPONSORS 29 EDUCATION 30-36 CHURCH SCHOOLS 30-32 BOARD SCHOOLS 32-36 s. Gabriel's college 34 INDEX CliERICAL INCOMES TITHE PEW RENTS PAGE 36-37 36 37 PART II. god's purpose in CHRIST THROUGH THE CHURCH 38-42 A. I. THE PURPOSE FULFILLED IN WORSHIP 43-50 II. THE PURPOSE FULFILLED IN CORPORATE LIFE 50-54 THIS FULFILMENT OBSCURED AND ENDANGERED: ECCLESIASTICISM ... 54-58 1. TRUE AND FALSE CHURCHMANSHIP 58-59 2. OVER-KNOWLEDGE OR DOGMATISM . ... 59-68 3. INSUFFICIENT REGARD OF THE LAITY 68-79 4. RELATIONS TO OTHER CHRISTIAN BODIES 79-82 B. THE CHURCH AND HUMAN LIFE — WHAT IS DONE 82-87 WHAT IS LEFT UNDONE 87-91 HINTS FOR PROGRESS 91-102 1. MORAL WITNESS ... 91 2. SYMPATHY, WITH PRACTICAL THOUGHTS AND ASPIRATIONS... 92-98 3. SUPREMACY OF CHRIST 98-102 Summary .. 102-108 Appendices .. 109-115 jftn^ UfUC Pray for the peace of Jerusalem : they shall prosper that love thee. Gracious Father, we humbly beseech Thee for Thy Holy Catholic Church. Fill it with all truth ; in all truth with all peace. Where it is corrupt, purge it ; where it is in error, direct it ; where it is superstitious, rectify it ; where anj^hing is amiss, reform it; where it is right, strengthen and confirm it ; where it is in want, furnish it ; where it is divided and rent asunder, make up the breaches of it ; Thou Holy One of Israel. Amen. Deliver Israel, God, out of all his troubles. PART I. Right Rev. Brother, Rev. Brethren, and Brethren of THE Laity, Four years ago from S. Luke's Day last past I was called to be the hundredth occupant of this most ancient See, and consecrated to be Chief Pastor of the so great people of this Diocese by the Holy Spirit, through the hands of my o"\^ti Father in God, Edward, Archbishop of Canterbury. I might have hoped to serve under him as Suffragan, and Chaplain of his Province, for years to come. It pleased God to rule otherwise : and a year had not passed before he was taken from our head by a death which, joined to such a life, shone with singular moral power and beauty. We sorrowed for a great loss : but often since then, in days of trouble which would have vexed his spirit, we have thought Anth gladness of his peace and rest. We see now, even better than then, how well he had done his work for his time : but I am not sure that we realise yet how much help to face her troubles the Church had quietly gathered during the Archiepiscopate of Arch- bishop Benson, from the impulse of his enthusiastic loyalty, and from the results of his courage and skill. Different men match different times, and for the rougher days which followed, we have counted it a great blessing to have at our head the unfaltering courage, strong decision, and simple justice of his successor, with influence heightened, and natural force not abated, by the long years of his record. It is only one of many like losses for which thinking Churchmen have to grieve to-day, that he should not be free to put the fire and force of his heart into the congenial tastes of rousing the Church to her duty of Evangelisation abroad, and of B 2 THE VOCATION AND DANGERS OF THE CHURCH conflict with the colossal evil of intemperance at home, and should have to give his time and strength, as he has done "odthout stint, to the meaner and more thankless work of composing controversy. But in the poorer, as in the nobler work, it is beyond price to have one to lead us whose constant aim is the unworldly service of the Master. Four years of Episcopate before a Primary Visitation are, I suppose, according to custom, one too many.^ But there may be compensation for this in some added opportunity of gaining know- ledge of this vast Diocese. I wish with all my heart that I had used it better. I am painfully sensible that there are some of you with whom I have even now hardly ever, if ever, come into contact, and more with whom I have never exchanged the words of brotherly intercourse, and, it may be, pastoral counsel, which give reality to the relations between Bishop and Clergy. But you, I know, by many a kind expression, make the excuses for this which, in part, deserve to be made : and I gratefully record my thankfulness for this among many other kindnesses of yours, which have warmed my heart and blessed my life in these four years, that you cast upon me no needless burden of correspondence and business. Do not carry this consideration too far ; and when in any matter of your parochial responsibility, or your personal life, you feel that you would desire help of your Bishop, do not scruple to ask it. Of your Bishop, or I should rather say, of your Bishops. " For I am mindful, and so are you, how it is that my load has been lightened : you are mindful, and so am I, with gratitude and affection, that half of what a Bishop's advice, sympathy, or experience can do for a Diocese, has been received by you in full measure and with unstinted trouble from the Bishop Suffragan. We do not remember this less gr^itefully because much of it has been done from a heart and home saddened by a great bereavement. But the Diocese, in fact, demands more than what the fullest energies of two Bishops can give. It is episcopally undermanned. We sometimes do too much, while the Diocese gets too little, partly because of what our hurried doings oblige us to neglect. It is this which has led to the project long considered not only ^ Canon LX. THE VOCATION AND DANGERS OF THE CHURCH 3 among ourselves but in Convocation ^ for the division of the Diocese. We have at last brought the matter out of a condition of confused debate into practical and generally (though not universally) accepted shape. I have spoken of this before, and need not dwell on it now. Personally, I feel that the need of a separation of Rochester and Chatham from the See of South London is the most pressing thing. The greatest difficulty is that the increasing coherence of the County of London and the disinclination on the side of the Diocese of Canterbury for any large territorial concession (or shall I say, resti- tution of what quite recently was ours ?) makes it difficult to equip Rochester with an adequate territory. She might at least, I think, take the Medway do"wn to the sea, including Queenboro' and Sheer- ness, and so include all the naval and riparian work. To this matter we shall, this autumn, put our hands. I have, during the recess, formed as strong a General Committee as I could command. I do not propose to occupy you Avith any general description of the Diocese, its needs and its equipment. Part or all of this was done by the first founder, as he deserves to be called, of the Diocese in its present shape. Bishop Thorold, with a brilliancy which Avill hardly be repeated, certainly not by me. Nor would I care to put myself into comparison with what I remember thinking when I read it, with little thought of what was coming to myself. Bishop Davidson's masterly review of Diocesan work and organisation. My attempt ■\\^11 be to offer you (1) some remarks, together with directions of counsel or authority, based upon the results of the Visitation; (2) some reflections upon the larger problems of the Church's life. Let me first tender to you my thanks for the material which you have placed before me in your replies. I can conscientiously say that I have reviewed the whole of your statistics, and read every word of your answers to my Supplementary Questions, making notes upon them which may, I hope, enable me to make subsequent use of your remarks or suggestions. I followed Bishop Davidson's precedent, and, as I hope, your ^ See the Report of a Committee of the Lovkv House of the Convocation of Canterbury, 1889, No. 237, in which this Diocese stands as the first case requiring division. B 2 4 THE VOCATION AND DANGERS OF THE CHURCH convenience, by making your annual Church Year Book Return serve as the main reply to Visitation enquiries. Let me say a word in passing as to the value of that Return. I am well aware that it costs you yearly considerable trouble, for I have myself, at Leeds, had it to make. But that trouble will, I am certain, be greatly lessened by the use of the Parochial Register, which is a counterpart in shape to the Return. The effect will be that if this is duly filled up when one Return is made, the next year's Return will stand to its predecessor only as a new edition. But whatever the trouble may be, I am sure it is well worth 'while, and I rejoice to see that the good sense and judgment of the Clergy has pronounced decisively in its favour, by an almost unanimous compliance with the request to fill it up, which could never have been enforced against a strong resistance. I know the difficulties that some feel about " numbering the people," and against "spiritual statistics." But I venture earnestly to say that these are objections not to the Return, but to a way of misusing it. In this Diocese certainly, numbering the people is likely to minister to something very unlike pride ; and such a Return is, at the very least, as much a confessional of our failures as a roll of our successes. I venture to think that in two ways, at least, it may be of real service to our Church life. It is good to be brought to book ; to have to take ourselves to task ; to see in black and white what we really are doing, and what it all comes to. It must be good also for individual Clergy to have to try their work by a paper which represents what is (with all allowance, no doubt, to be made for local circumstances of poverty, paucity of numbers, and the like) the standard of a vigorous, well-equipped, thoroughly worked parish. I should be ungrateful if I did not add a word of thanks to Canon Burnside, whose labour, much of it out of sight, has been enormous, and must have been often thankless. His skill, patience, and courtesy are largely responsible for the result. On his part, he has expressed to me appreciation of the degree of accuracy and completeness already attained, and of the yearly advance in these respects. I regret that I did not issue these Returns and my accompanying questions earlier in the year. This has caused some of you incon- THE VOCATION AND DANGERS OF THE CHURCH 5 venience, which you might have been spared, and for which I ask forgiveness, and in a certain number of cases it has led to hasty and imperfect replies. While I take my own share of blame, may I express a little regret that a few of the Clergy have treated the Return as a tiresome technicality, to be got over as quickly and laconically as possible ? They have not considered that, at least from the point of view of the Bishop, anxious to do his duty and to take interest in their work, it is an opportunity of some little im- portance. It may be well just to say this in view of a future Visitation, whether or not you and I are here to take part in it. I pass to the substance of the Returns. Their dry figures are eloquent of many meanings, and there is in them not a little pathos. They seem to me to speak most of labour, steady, unromantic, persevering labour, with little reward as the world counts it, either in money or fame, often with little tangible success as we ourselves count success. We of this Diocese may not be a brilliant Church, nor our work specially enterprising or inventive ; but I claim this for us, that we ' keep at ' it. We are, in truth, a working Church. But, brethren, even for this do not let us boast ourselves too much, living as we do in the midst of a people upon whom the strain of work, often underpaid and underfed work, is heavy, day and night. There are very few left of those records, once familiar, of two Services on Sunday, a monthly Communion, and the Church never open at any other time, unless for a wedding or funeral or on Christmas Day and Good Friday, National or Sunday Schools as the only form of organised work, and no giving except an occasional collection for the Wardens' expenses and the local poor. Such records will be, I hope, very shortly extinct. Even a poorly worked Church of to-day is usually a good deal above this level. But we can go much further and say that the average Church is a working Church, and that the records of a very large number suggest work which may easily, and does constantly, mean overwork for men, and women too, overmatched by the scale of their task. It goes with this that there is a quickened feeling for the Church's principles, and an increased perception of the value of her order. The Sacrament of the Lord's Table has been recovered from much of its neglect in former days ; it is normal now to make the 6 THE VOCATION AND DANGERS OF THE CHURCH celebration of it, according to the Church's practice from the first, an unvarying part of Lord's Day observance ; and very frequently (as is much best) this is done at one regular hour, whatever other op- portunities are added. The quiet steady habit of Communion v^^ith the Lord on His Day is perhaps the best and most representative part of such a standard of methodical religious life as we may prac- tically try to hold up to the well meaning and sincere among our young people. Lent is almost universally observed, if only in some very slight way in many cases, and in Church and School the seasons and chief festivals of the Church's year set their steadying and directing im- press on our teaching. That this may be formal is most true ; most true also that it would have more generally marked effects if we and those who work with us were ourselves more inwardly responsive to the contributions which the Church's days of fast, festival, and com- memoration make to our devout thought and self-discipline. But what is done is something, and in many individuals much. I have been glad to notice in this connection that the Churches in which the great Festival of our Lord's Ascension is not observed, or is left without a celebration of Holy Communion, are a very small minority.^ In those few cases the Clergy would, I dare- say, plead that they could not get any one to join in the observ- ance. I should venture to reply that if so this is a mark of something lacking in the teaching — that a special effort, such as even a five a.m. celebration, which I have known both in town and country, might overcome the most stubborn external difficulties; that such special efforts, when a few can be led to make them, bring the reward which attends effort, teach more than many sermons, and mitigate the softness which, as colonial and missionary examples often remind us, is too characteristic of a long established Church life with an easy abundance of religious opportunities. On the merits of the matter there can plainly be no question that the Church, through her Prayer Book, with its Proper Preface for the Octave, Proper 1 I have noted seventeen eases. May I suggest the expediency in many places, both town and country, of attempting a very early Communion on that day, before the working hours of a day which the world does not keep ? The present scanty observance of it is rather a humbling proof how much secular recognition, or the opposite, governs our religious waj's. THE VOCATION AND DANGERS OF THE CHURCH 7 Psalms and name given to a Season, marks Ascension as one of her highest days. It is equally plain that its omission mutilates most seriously the anniversary exhibition of her historic Creed, and misses an opportunity of emphasising teaching about our Lord's present and abiding Lordship and Priesthood, which are specially needed to link His earthly work mth the dispensation of the Spirit, and to fill the Church's life not only with an inspiration from the past, but with the power of an endless life and a present Lord. May I ask that this omission be supplied, where it still exists ? I have asked you, in one of my questions, about the observance of Ember and Rogation Days. I hope that none of you have seen in the question the enquiry of an official, pressing with futile or meritorious pedantry, every detail of order. You are more likely to have thought that it was the question of a theorist, drawing pictures to which there is nothing corresponding in the life of to-day. I beg you to believe that this is not so. I think I may claim to be too sensitive to the life round me not to realise how remote and unmeaning names like these may sound in many a South London or country parish, when it is as much as you can do and more to get people to Church at all. But this does not alter my earnest ■wish to get you to observe these days more efficiently. It cannot be right that I should get as an answer to the question, " What means do you take to secure the observance of Ember and Rogation Days ? " the reply " None whatever." But is the answer, " Give notice of them, in Church," much more satisfactory ? The notice was surely never meant only for private guidance. What is not worth a place in the Church's united worship will hardly be respected by individuals. Nor is this unpractical. For there is a very real sense in which it is true that we may get more the more we ask. We often dilute till the colour and flavour are hardly perceptible. We are ^vrong in adjusting our system to the least attached Church- goer. A Church life is not one of the things which is, or should be, of the strength of its weakest link. There should, indeed, be sim- plicities of service and teaching which will prevent our turning away any one whom we might have won. But a life in which there is a certain substantiality and colour and variety is quite as likely to attract as one where these things are not. I think this could be 8 THE VOCATION AND DANGERS OF THE CHURCH shown from very various religious examples. Men and women who desire — and there are such in every parish — to serve the Lord are helped and not hindered by being shown that there is more to grow into in the Church's life than they saw at first. They can be led on in many a case to delight in its meanings. This is strictly relevant to the case in point. Special seasons of pleading with God in more intense, and, at the same time, in more particular and detailed earnestness for the things of our need : here is a thing to which the awakened religious instinct will respond. We invent them for our- selves; we have our Day of Intercession, or our Prayer Meeting. Why should they only be sought in these quite legitimate ways of our own, and not also found within the Church's order ? The result is that that order stands for what is formal, and anything warm or flexible must be sought outside it. It is not thus that we can create, by God's help, that worthy conception of the Church of which I hope to speak later on. Why should not our communicants be trained to see that the Church in God's name calls for and expects their service ? Only so shall we get more adequate working help, by a recognition of the law of Service as binding on all Christians. Only so can we get the Almsgiving which would bless and be blessed. Only so can we awaken and confirm faith in the power of corporate Prayer. A special service of humble and penitent prayer at the four Embertides, not only for the Bishops and those whom they ordain, but for the Church's needs and their remedies, for different branches of her work, for her greater unity, enlightenment, and charity, for pardon of her many sins, negligences, and ignorances, for blessing on the coming season of the year. This, surely, would not be difficult to arrange. It might be made a very concrete and real thing. It might be in part without form or book, guided by the clergyman. Why should not the weekly Prayer Meeting or Guild Meeting be sus- pended, and moved to the Wednesday or the Friday in Ember week, and then held in Church with a special character of this sort given to it ? Why should not the good habit become more general, which I find already fairly frequent, of holding a short special service of prayer on each of the three Rogation Days, one for Temporal Bless- ings, one for Foreign Missions, one for the Home Work of the Church — perhaps with a few spiritual words on Prayer to tune the ( THE VOCATION AXD DANGERS OF THE CHURCH » little group of prapng folk ? Ascension Day would not be worse observed if we had thus joined the great Intercessor ; and more things than you realise would be brought home to many hearts.^ Do not, I pray you, think this unimportant. Can we, as things are, say to ourselves at those times that a mighty and prevailing voice of prayer to which we can associate ourselves is going up to the Throne from the whole Church ? Can you reckon all the gain that it would be to us to be able to say it, and the quickening of the life that it would mean ? These are the measures of our own self-incurred loss. I cannot leave what I have said on this matter without asking you, and specially the younger Incumbents, to consider very de- liberately and prayerfully the bearing of what has just now been very imperfectly said on the much larger question of Daily Prayer in Church according to the directions of the Prayer Book. You will see at least that it is not as a formality that I should press it. Formality is rather the danger against which we who use it should continually watch. But why is prayer more formal on week-days than on Sunday, or prayer on each week-day more formal than on one, or prayer in public more formal than in the parlour or at the bedside ? I speak ^^ith entire respect of many who do not use it. I know that many of them are far better and more spiritual men than my- self; I know that they are men of earnest faith and greatly given to prayer. But yet I venture to say, as my responsibility obliges me, that I am sure that they are wTong. I believe that the conscience of the Church would be clearer and brighter from a general compliance with rules which I will reprint with this Charge.^ They are after all very clear and distinct and as plain as any directions in the Book ; they are reinforced by other features in it such as the Lectionary and the Psalter ; and they represent the very ancient practice and the very profound instinct of the Church, to give public and visibly united expression to her daily corporate supplication before the Throne. I believe that the Clergy would gain themselves by the daily re- minder of their Ordination vow to plead for their flocks, by familiarity ^ Appendix I., infra. - Appendix II., infra. 10 THE VOCATION AND DANGERS OF THE CHURCH with the whole Bible as it passes before them in steady course, by the gentle pressure of an ordered rule in a life which is too often one of just so much order, or disorder, as the individual gives it ; and even by the little yoke of self-denial which it entails. It saddens me often to send an earnest young^Deacon or Priest away from his Ordination to his solitary lodgings, and feel that in the devotional side of his daily life (except what he may gain — it is a large exception — from the example or occasional words of his Vicar) there will be no steady control or stimulus beyond what his own resolution and earnestness may supply. I think I have seen enough to warrant me in asking older men to see that they are not in this pulling back or even " offending " younger ones when they would wish to do the reverse. At least, I think I see a readiness in the young to respond to the Church's directions which goes much beyond any party limit. I believe, too, that the people would gain not only by the blessings granted to such prayer, and by the demand addressed, and the opportunity given, to the more devout among them, but by the quiet witness of faith and worship. These are not the days in which the worshipping side of life can afford to lack the help of organised form. I subjoin as evidence that I am not speaking unpractically the words of the most distinguished and not the least devoted of those younger College Missioners whom Cambridge has sent among us, himself returning now to Cambridge to feed and foster there, we trust, the response of new generations of Cambridge men to South London needs.^ ^ Rev. C. F. Andrews, Pembroke College Missioner, writes in his Thirteenth Anniial Report of the Mission, page 5 :— " The hour of our daily Evening Service ■was changed from 5"30 p.m. to 8 p.m. The change has proved most salutary. Since then we have never failed to have a good congregation each evening, the men ■especially being most faithful. Nothing could give more help to our worn and tired men and women at the end of a weary day than this closing act of worship and inter- cession. It performs an important missionary work also, as many who feel them- selves too shabby and disreputable to be seen in Church on Sunday come in one by one to worship in the week. The fixed hour is of great importance. Our people always know that the prayers are being oflFered for them morning by morning and evening by evening. Mothers have told me that even when it is impossible to leave their children and come, they have been comforted again and again when they hear the bell ring and know that they are remembered. I am now visiting daily a dying ■woman whose last words each time I see her, are "Please remember me in Church THE VOCATION AND DANGERS OF THE CHURCH 11 I give no direction, I do not even make any request, unless it be for careful consideration of what has been said, in a matter in which movement to be healthy must be of willing hearts. So only can we have not the thing only but the spirit of the thing, and without the spirit the thing will be of little value. But you know what I think, and wish and pray. To those who already do this I would earnestly say, beware of being mechanical, of ' getting the Office said,' of allowing it to be a substitute for the indispensables of Bible study and meditation and private prayer. Let your outward manner in saying it be the manner of those who pray indeed, and to whom familiarity with what they use brings only delicacy of touch, and power to draw out its beauty and wealth. Certainly the Churches of this Diocese should be foremost among those which "sigh and cry." Ours, if any, should be a pleading Church. For there is another side to our statistics. I do not wish to dwell upon it in detail. To do so might minister to our own depression ; and depression is a bad counsellor, a prophet who helps to fulfil his own prophecies. But it would be wrong to disguise the tremendous facts of alienation and practical secularism. Over large districts, and these not of the town alone, our communicants are only a small fraction or percentage of the population. They go as low in a case or two as one in a thousand. But in many more the fraction is piteously small. I do not think, nor do you, that this is a measure of the amount of religion, not only because of the work of other religious bodies, for this, like our own and more so, is often weakest where need is greatest ; but because there is an amount of elemental religion which gives no sign other than by its translation into the when the time for Service comes." Yesterday, in S. Thomas' Hospital, one of our Communicants said to me, ' As I lie here, I count the hours till Ser%nce time comes, and when Big Ben strikes a quarter-to-ten or a quarter-to-eight I think, ' now the bell's beginning,' and when the hour strikes I think, 'now they're all in Church and they'll be thinking of me and I'll be thinking of them.' Little by little there is growing up amongst us a definitely church-going people ; and this means order, reverence, obedience, quietness, besides other still deeper gifts which go to transform noisy, wild and intemperate lives. I have often thought that to go into the home of this or that one in our District who was before to be found every evening at the * ' public-house, and now is every night in Church instead, would give a vivid picture of what S. Paul meant by a ' new creature. ' 12 THE VOCATION AND DANGERS OF THE CHURCH mass of uncomplaining drudgery, and the patience and mutual kindness by which that drudgery is relieved. But what it does mean is, positively, an immense mass of unchecked animalism and heathenism, and, negatively, an immense loss of blessing from God upon human life, and of returns of love and service to Him. I do not forget — it is the greatest weight on one's heart — how much of this is the fault of the Church herself or of her ministers in the past and present, or how much of it seems to be the result, we are tempted to say the inevitable result, of the hideous grinding pressure of degrading and scandalous conditions of housing and life. I only put before you the fact as one which is to most of you well known. I draw but these two inferences as to the Church's method. The first is, that she must work hard and continually at her "remnant," at the little nucleus of convinced and living Christianity, and must get them increasingly to work and pray and strive with her for the rest : we must aim at hot centres of life. We must resist as our worst danger what is conveyed in the words which tell that where iniquity abounds love waxes cold.^ The second, to which I shall return before I end, is that she must put her best thought and her best sympathy, without impatience and irritation, with much humility and self-questioning, into the work of disentangling, and if it may be, removing bit by bit the causes of this want of correspondence between man and God's Word to man as that word is spoken through her to the Londoner or dockyard man or country man of to-day — the want of bite of the tool upon the material for which we believe it was meant. We have got a broken contact to renew, and there is no harder work. Perhaps we should add to these two remarks the obvious third, that she is right in going on with her ministries of kindness, whether or no men hear the word which goes with the works, but never forgetting that in the end the word outweighs all the works, and lends them all their worth. It will, I think, be very plain that for all this work the unsup- ported solitary Clergyman is (as no one knows better than himself) an entirely inadequate instrument. He needs the support and co-operation of those who can touch men and women's lives from various sides, and come to them more on an equality, and without 1 S. Matt. xxiv. 12. THE VOCATION AND DANGERS OF THE CHURCH 13 the official character which must always attach to him. Thank God we have been gaining in these ways. It is constant and great joy to think of our two great Diocesan groups of trained ladies (which we owe, under God, respectively to Bishop Thorold and to the Bishoj) of Southwark), our 21 Deaconesses who have received by laying on of hands a commissioned Ministry for the work in which they have been trained in our beautiful Deaconesses' House under its first Head ; and our 28 Grey Ladies, giving themselves with less definite committal and less complete training, but at least for the time with not less devotion, to works of mercy. A little group of ladies from a centre at Blackheath, under Mr. Barnes Lawrence's guidance, and with support from the Church Pastoral Aid Society, attempts similar work. In about a dozen parishes, at least, to my know- ledge, we have help from Sisterhoods of women given to God for work among His Poor. At Tooting Mr. Baker main- tains, with a devotion and loyalty which I cannot characterise without seeming to flatter, the nucleus of a Brotherhood of men living in the world but devoting their leisure to charity. Would that it might increase ! If I do not dwell in detail upon the work of our Lay Readers, Scripture Readers, and Mission Women, it is only because time fails. It has been a pleasure to gather the Lay Readers together at Bishop's House, to give increas- ing care to the arrangements of their admission, and after full counsel with themselves, both on principles and details, to sanction and arrange for them a badge to be worn in Divine Service, a reminder to them of their responsibility and to the people of their Commission. I am glad to say that, by arrangement between the Bishop of Southwark and myself, I shall be able to secure a further degree of episcopal superintendence and detailed interest in this part of our work with little or no loss of my own personal contact. But besides these, I have in mind many forms of service by which individuals or groups, within the Diocese or beyond it, make the work of many of our parishes fuller and more really Christian. Among these, carrying, I cannot but hope, germs of great development in the future, is the increase amongst us of Settlements. To this, however, I refer elsewhere. I note in seven parishes the formation of small Chapters of the Brotherhood 14 THE VOCATION AND DANGERS OF THE CHURCH of S. Andrew, with others in preparation, a beginning I would fain hope of more active extension of the Church by the organization of individual lay effort, under whatever forms. To the Lay Workers' Association on which Bishop Thorold laid such stress, I cannot refer without some confusion of face, and can only plead that Ulysses' bow is not for every man's handling. It hurts me to the quick to feel that by not reviving it (the word is more appro- priate than maintaining) I may have pained some who had given to it labour and thought, or may have conveyed to any that I am indiffer- ent or disrespectful to lay work. If I know myself, that work has a very large place in my heart and respect. If even now I thought that I could really add to all the other claims upon me the very large amount of direct personal work which would, I think, be required to make the Association really effective, I would attempt its revival to-morrow. But in any case I hope that the want of this particular organization which had never (I gather) really reached high or general efficiency, will not prevent a real degree of contact between us Bishops and the laity, men and women, who form the militia of our army. May I say, in this connection, a word to the laymen ? They fall too much behind the women in the matter of service to their Church, I do not mean that their circumstances allow of their doing as much : but they need not do so much less. The special instance before my mind is that of Sunday Schools. How are our lads to grow up with a sense that religion is a robust and manly thing if they associate it with nothing but women's influence and women's teaching ? The fact that some women have gifts for work with boys and men which few if any men can rival, does not touch the point. I am speaking of general effect and not of particular cases. In one return I found a Sunday School with forty women teachers, and no men. The case is extreme, but-it is not uncommon for the men to be some three or four and the women some twenty or thirty. I am quite certain that there is a splendid sphere of service for a young man who will as a teacher get into touch with a circle of boys, and win them by personal influence and care which will soon extend beyond the bare limits of the Sunday School hour. The benefits mil return by God's blessing in mental, moral, and spiritual stimulus on the teacher. THE VOCATION AND DANGERS OF THE CHURCH 15 I asked you to tell me what you thought of the work of the Church Army. I shall hope to convey to its authorities some note of the results. But I may roughly summarise them as follows. They show amply enough to give welcome encouragement to the heads of the Army, to the excellent men whom it employs, and to those who are disposed to invite their help. But they certainly do not justify any relaxation of effort. In particular, there is pretty frequent indication that the work would be better if there had been fuller and deeper training. I expect that the authorities of the Army would fully realise this, and would allege no objection but the formidable one of expense. But no money is better spent than what is spent on preparation ; and I hope that the good work which is done may lead to larger and more liberal support, which will enable them to do more in this particular direction, deepening rather than extending their work. We owe a great debt to those who have bestowed upon the Diocese two Church Araiy Vans. Their charity has been well bestowed and well used, and if it is not invidious to select, I should like specially to record the many testimonies which I have received to the work of Captain Ager. I have lately had a fresh reason for speaking gratefully of the Church Army, since it has, quite spontaneously, been moved by South London needs to put at our disposal one of its ablest and most experienced Evangelists. This has been most generously done. Capt. Lamer is to reside in South London, at the sole cost of the Army ; he is to work under Diocesan direction, which I have arranged to exercise through our Senior Wilberforce Missioner, Rev. G. J. Bayley^ and he will conduct special evangelistic eflforts in parishes in the heart of the town for which the Vans are unsuitable. The mention of the Wilberforce Missioner gives me the oppor- tunity of expressing my satisfaction that by the kindness of the Trustees the troubled and broken history of that Memorial of the great Bishop has entered on what may, I hope, be a long chapter of steady and effective usefulness by its association with our Collegiate House at St. Saviour's. To form the chief resource of that House for its work of clerical reinforcement in places and times where this is required, and for special ministries of instruction or exhortation, seems to be the most practical and congenial application possible 16 THE VOCATION AND DANGERS OF THE CHURCH of the funds, and I am very glad to feel that the Mission which was in abeyance when I became Bishop, is thus again at work. " A living Church is a Missionary Church." It has been to me a matter of delightful surprise to find how much is done from this Diocese for the great and primary work of " preaching the Gospel in the regions beyond." ^ When I think of the poverty of so many of our parishes as I review them one by one, I do think that the sum of X22,000 for Foreign Missions returned to me is one for which we may well be thankful, with a thankfulness which prompts to increase Tooth of effort and hope. I cannot doubt that that offering stands for a real blessing to us, such as is promised to those that give. I have no doubt that for several reasons the true figure is somewhat more ; and besides there are the contributions which go direct from the givers to the central offices, or to the Mission Field. Nor is the sum only raised by a few wealthy parishes, but poor ones have in many cases given well out of their deep poverty. It is a matter in which we are happily at one, but it is rather fair than invidious to recognise the leading part taken by the supporters of the Church Missionary Society ; and I should like to name with special honour in this regard the parishes of Christ Church, Gipsy Hill ; Emmanuel, Streatham ; Holy Trinity, Richmond ; St. Michael's and St. John's, Blackheath. In a matter in which so much is done by the parishes of the Diocese, it is much to be desired that we should also act as a Diocese, and feel from so doing an invigoration of our collective life. I desire gratefully to acknowledge the willing, modest, and unselfish work of our Diocesan Board of Missions, which I have sought to assist by Pastoral Letters in its efforts to stimulate the observance of the Day of Intercession and Thanksgiving. No small part of our thanks to the Board should be given to its Vice-Chairman and Secretary, Mr. Bickersteth, whose work has the stamp of a dedication not less pure, because it carries with it the fragrance of filial and fraternal affection. Since your last Visitation the Board has given us its list of former workers in the Diocese who are now in the Mission Field. Will you allow me to make mention, with sorrow and happiness 1 2 Cor. X. 16. THE VOCATION AND DANGERS OF THE CHURCH 17 at once, that in two or three days from this time the name of a former Assistant Curate of Mr. Bickersteth, my own dear Chaplain, Thomas Edmund Teignmouth-Shore, will be added to this list as a member of the Oxford Mission to Calcutta ? Many, I hope and think, in the Diocese which he has served so well will give him a place in their prayers ? I have expressed before, and I repeat, the hope that our Diocesan Missionary Studentship Associations, of which Canon Jelf, Mr. Woodhouse and Mr. Shore have been secretaries, may be more widely recognised, and take gradually a much more important place among us than they now have. No one, I think, could read the Returns without being struck by the witness which they bear of loyalty to the Church of England, and contentment with her order of worship and instruction. This is unquestionably the most striking feature of the picture which they present. There are, of course, lines of party cleavage not difficult to trace, though I am glad to note a considerable number of Churches of different sorts whose conduct crosses these lines, and tends to take from them harsh distinctness.^ No doubt, too, there are many things of almost indefinable flavour in speech and deportment and ritual, and others of private use, which do not appear on the surface of statistical reports, and which collectively make differences more patent. But, allowing for this, we get the picture of a great Church permitting a large liberty to the differ- ent historical currents of feeling and opinion within her, and to reasonable developments of these under the powerful influences and solvents of modem life, and obtaining in return an overwhelming preponderance of substantial allegiance. There is an immense central mass of contented and unquestionable loyalty. As we advance towards the edges there is a tendency to accentuate the expression of particular interpretations of Church doctrine and order. To some extent these are to be welcomed. They show vitality, and they satisfy different temperaments of thought and feeling. Perhaps ^ To take a single instance I may mention the large range of use of such a book as the Manual for Holy Communion of that truly apostolic worker and Bishop of our own day, William Walsham How. C 18 THE VOCATION AND DANGERS OE THE CHURCH as one to whom moderation has always been both practically and speculatively congenial, I may say the more freely, that a Church which satisfied none but those of moderate temperament would be a narrow Church, and that moderation, like other forms of opinion, may easily have its ignoble as well as its noble side. In an imperfect world warm convictions and devoted attachments are often, and for many, practically inseparable from onesidedness of thought and expression. None the less the roads of onesidedness are travelled with ever increasing danger ; and it well beseems those to whom their Church allows liberty to be the more dutifully vigilant both of error and of offence to others. In towns the number of Churches allows more differentiation than in a country parish, where one Church must serve all. But this emphatically does not justify forgetfulness for the sake of the " congregation," of regard for what is best either for the parish, or for the whole Church and its rules and spirit. Finally, there is no doubt a fringe but a very small fringe of what distinctly approaches, or dabbles in, disloyalty. Such are those who act in this or that respect as though the English Church had not made protests which she did and does make, or broken off what she did break off, or wisely guarded against the recurrence of ex- perienced dangers ; or those in another direction to whom the dividing line between the Church and the Protestant denominations outside her is a vanishing line, and many features of her order rather accidents to be (at best) acquiesced in, or teachings to be diluted by explanation, than directions to be filially carried out ; or, once more, there are those (I have found this in two or three places, but only in these) for whom we cannot but feel deep sympathy, who, under pressure of what they deem reasons of criticism or other scientific evidence, begin to tamper, whether they know it or no, with those fundamental truths of faith which underlie the phases of its expression and interpretation. How the fringes of which I have spoken are to be dealt with, is, I think, to any candid and charitable man a very delicate and difficult question. I am quite sure that I do a reverent thing if I say that our Lord's teaching about the difficulty of plucking up tares has a most distinct bearing on this matter. The man who rushes in is, to say the least, not always wise. This must be THE VOCATION AND DANGERS OF THE CHURCH 19 frankly said, however unpalatable the saying of it may be to some. But assuredly it is not the whole of the matter. The Society has a right against the individual one or many. The enforcement of that right is primarily the work of Christian opinion, and the power of the collective mind and spirit of the whole body over individuals is the test of the healthiness of a Church. The more true unity there is the greater will that power be, and the more genuine in quality, because with more of love on both sides. Conversely the more division there is, the more that power is paralysed. A man does not Avdllingly defer to the opinion of another party. So it comes about that the action of opinion takes harsher and more coercive forms The power of force is brought in to do the work for which there is too little mutual love. We see the example of this in the various parties of the Reformation time, snatching in turn at the sword or the statute to compel others to their own way of thinking. The greatest danger, in my judgment, to the Church to-day, is the temper, wherever found, of those who practically prefer a party to the Church. As I think of men and movements I am disposed to say that there is hardly any better test of what is wholesome and trustworthy and what is not, than this, whether the main purpose and the bottom desire is to strengthen and serve the Church of England, or, upon the other hand, to push some particular party policy or organisation within her. This is open obviously to the genuine partisan's debating answer, that he hopes to strengthen the Church by making his views prevail within her. But I venture to leave what I have said. The test will often distinguish between two who are doing outwardly almost the same things.^ But what is enfeebled is not lost. The power of the whole mind of the Holy Catholic Church, in spite of walls of separation, is still, as it would not be hard to prove, a real power,^ and much more is and ^ It may be of interest to note in this connection a trait of New Testament teach- ing which the Revised Version has restored to clearness. "Faction," which only occurred once as an erratic translation of epts (1 Cor. iii. 3), now stands in seven places as the distinctive equivalent of iptdeta (Rom. ii. 8 ; 2 Cor. xii. 20 ; Gal. v. 20 ; Phil. i. 17, ii. 3 ; James, iii. 14, 16), and ipiOda appears (Lightfoot on Gal. v. 20 ; Sanday and Headlam on Rom. ii. 8) to represent almost exactly party spirit within the Church. ^ Cp. "The authority of the Christian Church, the witness of Christendom, c 2 20 THE VOCATION AND DANGERS OF THE CHURCH ou^ht to be the living mind of the English Church, in which we have corporate unity, a power amongst us. The duty lies upon us all to respect and enhance that power. Remember that all of us con- tribute to make it, and all of us are in turn influenced and appealed to by it. We are bound then to the double duty of making it really Christian in its tone, temper, and spiritual quality, and of giving to it, so far as we conscientiously may, a real and ungrudged respect.^ If there are things to be controlled by the opinion which we help to form, we must do to them as we would be done by, trying to understand them and not merely reiterating party charges and mis- descriptions. We must, on the other hand, keep it quite steadily before us in all our ways, not needlessly to offend and wound the conscience and heart of the whole body, even though it include brethren whose fellowship with us is largely impaired by differences. Judge we ourselves, brethren, on all sides, and say whether this is the way in which collective Church opinion has been exercised, or been responded to, in the last half century. If we judge that it is not, do not let us throw charges of responsibility for this at one another but humbly and sorrowfully own that each has to bear an ample share. God grant that the very greatness of our difficulties and the sharpness of our sorrows in these days may be blessed by God to force the Church and all its members into learning — through pain — something of these truths, and may teach us the unhappiness of those among whom the great force of collective brotherly opinion is out of gear. however impaired by divisions and sins, is yet the master fact of our history and of our society, the master fact of all our lives." — R. W. Church, *' Pascal, &c.," p. 242. ^ Nor in a country like England, where the relation of the Church to the community has been what it has (I do not merely mean by Establishment, so-called), should I deny all right of moral influence to general public opinion. The Church of England is much more bound than Timothy was in a purely pagan world to have a good report of " them that are without" (1 Tim. iii. 7, cp. Col. iv. 5). But it must be borne in mind that this force of public opinion acts very unevenly. It is much more easy to enlist it against those who do too much, than against those who do too little. I remember reading that the populace of Milan in Hildebrand's time were on the side of austerity and against the marriage of the Clergy ; and in Alexandria in the fourth century the monks wielded the forces of the street. But this is, assuredly, not the normal state of things, nor that of our own time. The man of " low " or " liberal " Church views will always have the advantage as such with public opinion, except where they appear, as they did in the Evangelical movement, or in the life of Maurice, in the form of exacting and unworldly innovation in practice or opinion. THE VOCATION AND DANGERS OF THE CHURCH 21 But behind opinion, there is further the definite province of Authority and Law. There will always be the honestly mistaken, who cannot be persuaded, and there may always be the obstinately wilful, who will not. Yet here again you will agree with me that the workings of authority must still show the Christian mark. We shall not take political authority at its crudest, the authority of the police court and the policeman, as the pattern or standard of what even coercive authority in a Christian Society must be. Its patterns must be much rather those of the most equitable and constitutional kinds of authority and administration. It must be much more considerate and paternal ; it must show much more plainly, and at every stage, that in the spirit of Love it is, however sternly, doing Love's work. I do not feel disposed to enlarge now upon the questions which beset the exercise of authority, and the enforcement of the Church's Law in these days. But here again, please God, trouble may be an effective teacher, and we may learn to realise that the present difficulties in directing and enforcing are not due to mere wil- fulness and perversity in our fellows, whether stiff-necked rebellion in those below, or cynical and indolent apathy in those above. I have no obligation to hold a brief for the action of the Episcopate in days when I was not a Bishop, and for the almost complete ex- periment of toleration which it allowed. But my memory is perfectly distinct as to the general approval of this by opinion at large, and (as I tried once before to point out to you), it was a natural, and possibly, inevitable, result of a preceding period of ill-directed coercion. With regard to ourselves, I have already told you (at the Diocesan Conference) that I have exercised authority by direction in certain particulars, and have been for the most part well and dutifully met. Since then, I have thought it my duty to request that the liturgical use of incense should be discontinued in certain Churches. You will all join with me, I hope, in thanking our brethren, ten in number, who have complied with my request for this act of dutifulness. From some in particular, who had used incense for a long series of years, it required a very real sacrifice. I return now to the Visitation Enquiries. I asked you to return me your practice with regard to the Order of Administration of the 4 22 THE VOCATION AND DANGERS OF THE CHURCH Lord's Supper or Holy Communion. Controversy has, alas, especially centred round the Sacrament of Christian unity, and the people's minds are rightly specially sensitive about it. It is impossible, and indeed undesirable, to seek uniformity of use in all respects with regard to it. But what a Bishop can and ought to do is to require that the Service shall be fully used without alterations, additions, or omissions. As I have already replied to one of yourselves in a letter which, at his request, was made public, this seems to me to be one of the safeguards of our unity. There is, indeed, one omission which your replies show me to be almost universal — that of the longer Exhortation addressed to them that mind to come to the Holy Communion at the service at which it is read. I do not think, indeed, that this should be altogether omitted ; it seems well that it should be read from time to time like the other Exhortations of notice which precede it, so that the deep searching, and devout teachings which they contain may be familiar. A general rule may be of service to you here, and I would ask that it may be the use of this Diocese to read three times a year from altar or pulpit (1) one or other of the Exhortations to Communion, and also the (2) whole invitation to Communicants in both its parts. The first part might further be occasionally used with special convenience at a Communicants' Class or Union. But on ordinary occasions we may, I think, rightly follow a practically universal instinct which can be shown to be reasonable. Better education both of clergy and people and other means of instruction by books or classes, is much more available than in the 16th century, and this may therefore rightly be considered a change which in spirit is not so to be called. The Exhortations were inserted at a special time in view of its special conditions — and those conditions having altered they may drop out again with the qualification which I have named, and they will leave the completeness of the service untouched, I have further thought it right, as I mentioned at the Diocesan Conference, to allow on certain occasions the use of a special Collect (with the Collect of the Week) and a special Epistle and Gospel. This seemed (1) only to apply a little further the method of the Order of Holy Communion itself, in which those parts are variable according to seasons, &c. : (2) it followed many precedents such as THE VOCATION AND DANGERS OF THE CHURCH 23 that of the Order for the Communion of the Sick and the Ordinal in the Prayer-book, of the Services for Consecrating a Church, &c., which have been in traditional use ; and the forms of Harvest and Missionary Services sanctioned by Convocation. The Collect being either from the Prayer-book or specially sanctioned by myself, and the Epistle and Gospel being, of course. Scriptures, the limits of deviation are narrow and secure. The point is a doubtful one, but it seemed best to turn the balance on the side of elasticity. But beyond this I cannot go. I must ask that the whole Order be said when the Sacrament is celebrated and administered. I observe from your replies that this will affect practices of various kinds at a considerable number of churches. These practices, I am glad to say, are almost entirely without other significance than a desire for convenience or abbreviation. I had occasion previously to deal with the habit of omitting some parts of the Service, as the Creed and the Gloria in Excelsis, at certain celebrations to which it was desired to give a special colour. I directed that this should be given up. I held that Avhile the Church of England has nowhere forbidden individuals or congregations to make special remembrance of their dead in the pleadings of the Holy Eucharist, she has not sanctioned any specialization of the service to that purpose or intention alone, having indeed everywhere (except in the matter of Collect, Epistle, and Gospel and Proper Prefaces) preferred to keep one unvarying order round which the varying association of fast and festival, joy and sorrow, wedding or funeral, would cluster and play. I thank- fully record that my direction was complied with. There is, I hope, no need to reiterate the direction that nothing should be interpolated in the Prayer Book Service. This does not, of course, interfere with the reasonable and reverent use of brief private devotions by the Priest at certain points in the Service. Only these should be genuinely, what I have called them, private devotions, and should ^not in any way be so done as to suggest that they are inaudible insertions in the public Service ; and they should be brief. The Service should be said with clear and audible voice through- out. Nothing is more clearly the intention of the Prayer Book, and it is perfectly consistent with such natural modifications in tone and voice as instinct and reverence suggest in saying parts of the Service 24 THE VOCATION AND DANGERS OF THE CHURCH as different as, e.g., the Sanctus and the Prayer of Humble Access, or the Confession, and the Prayer of Consecration. I have ah-eady urged, and I must repeat, that I deem it imposs- ible to justify in loyalty to the Prayer Book any celebration of Holy Communion, which is not substantially a Communion with Communi- cants. Any one who uses the service otherwise must feel that he is going ' against the grain ' of it throughout. The rubric which refers to a minimum number in very small places implies with an implica- tion which is as direct as a statement that in larger places there should be more. To take compliance with it then, as a sufficient observance of the Prayer Book's directions is therefore the farthest stretch of general relaxation, to say the least, that can be justified or made. It is not enough to say that opportunity is given for Communicants, if, as a matter of fact, the opportunity is constantly unused. I recognise and claim a large measure of liberty for what is sometimes called non-communicating attendance. But I must pronounce the habitual use of public services without communicants to be dis- obedient to the Prayer Book and (in the strict sense) a ' scandal ' to the unity of the Church : and I ask any Clergy whom this may con- cern to give the matter their serious and practical attention. In all such matters I ask, and look, for the reasonable and genuine execution of Prayer Book principles and directions. The Commandments and the Collect for the Queen have been often omitted at early celebration in churches which have frequent cele- brations, and in a few at mid-day, and in many in the evening when the Holy Communion is preceded by another service. There are strong arguments of convenience for these abbreviations, arguments which are appreciated at even more than their full value in a restless and hurry- ing time. But there are hardly any cases in which I can admit their validity. These are not times in which we can omit any part of the preparation and hedging of the Sacrament. I was astonished the other day in turning the pages of a Guide for Communicants which was printed in the middle of last century, having run through many editions in the previous fifty years, to see how strenuous and exacting were the requirements as to preparation. May I be forgiven a homely suggestion, of which I have proved both ways the truth ? The time taken by the Commandments could in many cases easily be saved by THE VOCATION AND DANGERS OF THE CHURCH 25 a really punctual beginning, if the clergy enter the church one or two minutes before the service begins, and begin with the clock-strike. A much larger omission of the same kind is that of the whole first half of the Liturgy down to the Prayer for the Church Militant, or even to the Shorter Exhortation. This is of course a much more serious liberty to take \\'ith the service, and I am quite sure that I ought to request, as I now do, that it may cease. It deprives the service of some of its cardinal features, both fixed and variable, the only direct prayer for the Holy Spirit : the profession of faith, as part of the Sacrament : the special Scriptures of the day : the oblations and intercessions of the Offertory and Church Militant, Here, again, the argument of convenience or necessity will be assigned as the reason, and is the reason, for the practice ; and such arguments are always variously appraised. But I have no doubt that for you, as for me, that argument does not justify so serious a departure from the directions of the Prayer Book. It has been urged in several of your returns that the first part of the service •«ill be said later, or has been said earlier, in the day. But further reflection would, I am sure, show the in- sufficiency of the argument, for any but a bare legal or technical justification. The object is not that the Ser\i[ce should be somehow said during the day, but that the communicants on any occasion should have the Service provided for them. This would be true even if the same people had the whole Service in disconnected parts at dif- ferent hours ; even then the unsuitableness of having the latter half of the Liturgy first, and the former half which is so plainly preparatory, later, is very plain. But even this is not the case, as is shown by your own returns. These considerations are emphasised by what you your- selves tell me. A very frequent remark in the returns is that the con- gregations at different hours are practically distinct congregations : the early Communion and the later one, the morning congregation, and the evening congregation. There is then not the least security that the same people will be present to join in the separated portions. This applies to early Communions. They make the regular practice of many : and quite certainly these ought to have the whole service. It applies also to evening Communions, where it is plain that there is some difficulty of time in attaching the whole Order of Holy Communion to Evening Prayer. Upon this subject I speak ^s'ith 26 THE VOCATION AND DANGERS OF THE CHURCH a little embarrassment. You know that I regret and disapprove the practice in question as alien to the custom of the Church and a painful wound to its unity. I would prefer, therefore, not to regu- late it : and you will, I am sure, so far give me your generous trust as to acquit me entirely of any desire to hamper what I cannot hinder, and would hardly desire to hinder by mere force or constraint. N"ot with any such motive, but only for the reasons which I have given, I must ask those who so use the service to use it whole. I will give one further reason which I believe will commend itself to those who are affected by this request.^ You are moved to the evening admini- stration of the Sacrament, I know, chiefly by the stress on your charity and consideration of those who could not, you think, approach the Lord's Table, unless evening opportunities were given. I doubt whether ex- perience as a whole, or the comparative statistics of parishes which use and do not use the practice, support this conclusion. But experience on the surface may seem, at least, to do so. It follows upon your own showing that many of your evening communicants are never, or hardly ever, present at any other administration. Further yet, I observe that constantly in your Churches the evening Communion tends to become the one which is most largely attended. The fact is, to my mind, of unfavourable significance, but it goes to emphasise the same point, for it means that a large number of your communicants will come to the Sacrament only at that hour. Of these the immensely larger proportion will be working people, and people in whom we cannot presuppose very much teaching. How essential, then, it is that you should not deprive them of the schooling, so beautiful and so deeply instructive, which is given by the Order of Holy Communion as an organic whole : that you should not rob them of any essential features or parts of it ; least of all perhaps of that Decalogue, which, according to the practice once general, and still frequent, of posting them on the chancel walls, presents to them in the simplest and most authoritative form the great precepts, which the Catechism explains, of religious and moral duty. ^ Many (like myself) will find no slight evidence that I am right in making this request in the strong opinion of the present Bishop of Exeter as to the impor- tance of using the whole order of Holy Communion on such occasions. He expressed it in a passage to which he has kindly directed my attention in his Charge of 1895, p. 23. THE VOCATION AND DANGERS OF THE CHURCH 27 You know me well enough to know that interference of this kind in whatever direction is not to me palatable. May I try to assist you in compliance with it by one or two suggestions ? The service of Evening Prayer when you follow it by the Lord's Supper may easily be made considerably shorter than on other Sundays. Anthems and Services are now so frequent that the use of chants and a hymn instead would be a means of abbreviation in many cases. The Sermon of that evening might be limited to a quarter of an hour. If I cannot actually authorize, I certainly shall not challenge, the practice of pass- ing straight on such occasions from the Third Collect to the Prayer of St. Chrysostom and the Grace, or even direct to the Sermon. These abbreviations, fairly tried, will, I think you will find, minimise the inconvenience. I should not be surprised to find that in some cases they cancel it. You will, I trust, feel that I have striven to put this before you fairly and considerately. I now ask your compliance mth my request and direction. I am certain that in giving it, as I believe you will do, you will make a distinct contribution, at the cost of a slight sacrifice, first to the edification of your people and their training in our beloved Prayer Book, and secondly to the peace and harmony of the whole Church. I should esteem it a very true kindness, and it will greatly save my labour, if you will send me (and this applies to all to whom I have made these several requests) a line to tell me (if it be so), that you have been able to do what I ask. If there are cases in which there is real necessity for some exception, it should be submitted to me. But you will see that I must keep the standard of such necessity high, and I could not, without unfairness, admit it (so far as I can see) in any case, in regard to my last request. This provision for exception applies to the problem of the actual administration when numbers are very large, or time inadequate. In such a case pray consult me, as to how you may permissibly deviate, under stress of necessity, from the Prayer Book rule of separate delivery to each Communicant with the full words of Administration. These cases can be adjusted with absolute loyalty to the Prayer 28 THE VOCATION AND DANGERS OF THE CHURCH Book, even in the few cases where necessity involves some departure from its letter. What has to be said about Manuals for Confirmation and Holy Communion will be best said privately when it is needed. But you will be glad of the assurance that the number of cases is very small in which I have even to consider whether what is used goes beyond the large liberty of thought and expression which our Church allows, and which could not be touched without disastrous results. In some cases, I have been told, sometimes with emphasis, that no books are used, or given, except the Bible, or the Bible and the Prayer Book. This may be, in some cases, quite right : it is certainly quite legiti- mate. But further, the evils which are evidently dreaded are real. ' Little books,' as was pointed out by the large-hearted Roman Catholic writer,^ Rosmini, who saw the danger or evil as one of the wounds of his own communion, may well be a pregnant source of harm to the virility and wholesomeness of religion : and we shall do ill indeed if we let any think that books of devotion of whatever sort can com- pensate for the constant and persevering nourishment of the soul directly upon the Word of God in Scripture. These things, I think, we should generally agree to deprecate : it is not so certain that they do not happen oftener than we know among the imperfectly taught. There is a great love everywhere for short cuts and easy helps and work done to our hand which ought to be done by it ; and the devotional sphere is not exempt from the tendency. But yet books are among the tools of a time of general education. Our oral teaching often goes into people, I suspect, far less than we imagine; and with large numbers there is less opportunity for individual care. A wholesome and well -chosen form of devotion and simple teaching may prove most useful scaffolding, or may help apprenticeship in a difficult art, the art of Worship, public and private. The matter of communicating the sick is one on which it is plainly undesirable that I should say anything at the present time. It is not at all a simple matter, and we may all need to use a special 1 "The Five Wounds of the Church," edited by H. P. Liddon, D.D., p. 66. IRiringtona 1883). THE VOCATION AND DANGERS OP THE CHURCH 29 degree of self-restraint and mutual consideration in our thoughts and words about it. I have been glad to see how real a part it is of the ministerial work of the large majority of our parishes to carry to our sick this gift and privilege of grace. But how much larger the demand might be if the number of our Communicants were less painfully disproportionate to our population, and among these there was a more reverent and appreciative understanding of the Sacra- ment's place in Christian life, one hardly ventures to reflect. The question about sponsors has revealed how very general some breach of the Rubric is. I do not say this in complaint or with surprise. No one who has been a Parish Priest can be ignorant that its enforcement would bring down the baptisms in many places to a small fraction of their present number, for the only alternative — and it is one which none of us would contemplate for a moment — is a wholesale admission to sponsorship of unworthy or unqualified persons. I observe that there is a consent among you that the duty of bringing the child to Christ in baptism is the paramount consideration ; you are practically of one mind in holding that to let children go unbaptized for want of sponsors, in cases of real necessity, is to neglect the first duty. You are, I believe, right. Curiously enough, the rare instances which I have met of a different opinion have come from men of very decided, but contrasted, views, emphasising on one side the need of hedging the sacredness of the Gift in Baptism; on the other, the duty of protest against mechanical ideas of it. But their conclusion is not yours, nor mine, nor, I may add, that of the Episcopate. The instinct of the Church is clear upon the point. It does not therefore follow that the considerations which we overrule are unimportant, or that there is no room for care and exertion in the matter. Readers of the late Bishop Moberly's Bampton Lectures on the Administration of the Holy Spirit, will remember the stress which he lays upon the corporate duty of the Church to cherish the gift which she confers, to train the child whom she admits, to see that it is brought to recognise the pledges made in its name. It would seem to be a legitimate inference that the sponsors are in a manner special trustees of a general duty ; and if so, defect in sponsors is partly made up by all that is done corporately by schools, by Church workers, by children's services, to train the baptized. In some parishes it is 30 THE VOCATION AND DANGERS OF THE CHURCH possible to give special expression to this general responsibility by a Sponsors' Guild, or more simply, to get communicant workers and others to undertake some sponsorship as a charitable work.^ There are difficulties about such arrangements, and in many places they would be impracticable, but when they fit in they may be useful, not least to the sponsors. Beyond this, my counsel on the matter would be largely summed up in the advice not to acquiesce in the matter going anyhow, because it will not go perfectly or even well; not to forget to keep the rule as a standard, however many and constant the exceptions. Begin here, as in other matters, from the top. Train your best and most attached people to fulfil the rule conscientiously and for example's sake. Explain frequently, where it is the least use to do so, that the exception is an exception, and unwillingly made. Press in particular for both parents' presence. One of you records that he never acquiesces in accepting the mother alone, without protest and a message to the father. Refuse entirely if a child brings the baby to baptize it. In my own parish at Leeds — I find the same in an instance or two in this Diocese — we gave a printed leaflet with a few simple words on sponsorship to each sponsor or parent. If you think that this would be futile in nine cases out of ten, or nineteen out of twenty, let this be no reason against doing it. If expense hinders, see whether one person will give the few shillings for that definite piece of work for the Lord and His little ones. If supply from a centre were a help or an economy, I would, if I knew that it would be welcome, arrange for this. Another important group of questions in your Returns related to Education. As to our own Schools, it has been cheering to me quite beyond my expectations to find how very small the percentage is of Schools in which the Clergy themselves do not take part in the religious teaching. Nor should I at all assume that in every one of the few cases where this is not done, the omission is due to neglect. There are very few general rules which have no exceptions. But I would throw an extremely heavy onus 2^'^^obandi on any clergyman's conscience before he decides that his case is one of the exceptions. It is not that I wish — God forbid ! — to take that teaching ^ Canon Allen Edwards tells me of one who so acts at need for him, in whose case ■" the office is a real one." THE VOCATION AND DANGERS OF THE CHURCH 31 out of the hands of the teachers, robbing them thereby of what is, I doubt not, a prized piece of their work, and a piece which leavens the whole, and depriving ourselves of the immense advantage of their trained skill in eliciting and conveying knowledge. But there should be room for the pastor too ; for his o^^^l prayerful work, in making truth live for his children, and in helping the influence of what they learn to pass over into temper, character and conduct. I am less certain, by a good deal, whether all is being done that should be done for our Pupil Teachers. There is no doubt improve- ment. The results are reported to me as " vastly better than they were five years ago." The establishment of our useful centres is no doubt largely responsible for this. But they do not always cover all the work ; and even where they do, their work will do incidental mischief if it wholly breaks the link of instruction between the Pupil Teachers and their OAvn clergyman — instruction of which the chiefest gain, when the opportunity is rightly used, may be to leave a per- manent impression of a tone and attitude of mind suitable to the handling of sacred things, such as may bear fruit for many years in the work of the rising generation of teachers. Before I leave the subject of our schools, I desire to express my profound satisfaction that we have held our ground. Not a single school has been surrendered. One (Burham) has been recovered. But this is not all. We have advanced. Nine new schools have been opened in the last four years, with accommodation for 2,855 children. Along with this, there has been a steady enlargement of old buildings, which yielded in 1898 alone an increase of 672 places. I offer my thanks to the Clergy especially, and also to many devoted helpers among the laity, for the toil and sacrifice by which the work of these schools is carried on. Particularly are our thanks due to those good and loyal servants of the Church, our Church School teachers, not only for their laborious daily service, but because many of them, for conscience and principle's sake, have forfeited a measure of pecuniary advantage rather than leave the Church side of the Educational system. An important event to be chronicled with satisfaction has been the inauguration, in useful and harmonious working, of our Diocesan Voluntary Schools Association under the Act of 1897. This is a further step in the direction of that unity 32 THE VOCATION AND DANGERS OF THE CHURCH which is strength. I should feel that we were stronger yet for the future if it were possible to amalgamate the Diocesan Board and this Association into one strong federal organisation for the defence and prosecution of our educational interests. I pass to the Schools which are not ours, the Board Schools. I asked you what your relations with them were, and what your esti- mate was of the value of their religious teaching ; and I awaited your replies with much interest, I now attempt to summarise their drift. I have indeed observed that this is a matter on which it is very difficult for a Bishop to speak without harm. If he speaks in criticism, the Church is charged with narrow-mindedness. If he speaks in praise, his words are taken up as those of an unwilling witness to the all-sufficiency of Board Schools. I shall try however to say what I have to say with as little regard as may be to these comments. Let me first record the tone of your own replies. They are with the rarest exceptions respectful, often very friendly, to the Board Schools. Nothing could be further from the truth than any idea of a general attitude of dislike and hostility to Board Schools on the part of the Clergy. I have reckoned nearly one hundred parishes in which the Clergyman of the Parish (or occasionally one of his assistants) is a Member of the School Board, or (in London) of the local Committee of Managers ; in twenty-four of these he occupies the chair. It is plain that the Clergy have generally thrown them- selves into the work of maki»g the Board Schools as good as possible. They have not held aloof any more than they have attacked. Secondly, these papers tell me of a splendid body of educational service, moral and religious, which is done by the teachers in the Board Schools. If it is any satisfaction to them that I should publicly say that they continually win the respect and gratitude of their clerical neighbours by their conscientious and earnest efforts to give teaching which will strengthen the foundations and influences of morality and religion in their children's hearts, let me have the pleasure, and it is a very cordial one, of making this record, and showing them this honour. In a large majority of cases this is the work of teachers who are themselves loyal Churchmen THE VOCATION AND DANGERS OF THE CHURCH 33 or Churchwomen. But this is not the whole of our debt. I have found many instances where the teachers of our Board Schools bring their trained powers over to the work of the Church ; they give alms of their leisure (I must fear sometimes at the expense of health and strength) by adding the work of the Sunday School to all the teaching of the week ; or they are in other ways valued helpers in the Parochial work. How much this must tell indirectly for good upon their own children in the Board Schools it is hardly necessary to point out. I have not once come across the case which, if report be true, is not uncommon abroad, where the staff of the School is an influence in the parish hostile to the forces of religion. There is a further reason why I have thus spoken of the teachers before speaking of the teaching. The reason is that its value depends so very much upon them, and varies accordingly. The teaching is, says one of you, " what the teacher makes it, nothing worth or most valuable." This would, of course, be true in a degree, and a large degree, in any system. But it is very specially true in the case of such a system as that of the London School Board. We have there, thank God, what may be called with true though limited meaning, a Christian system ; a system, that is, in which the re- ligious instruction is in the Christian Scriptures, and the hymns and prayers are Christian. It only needs that these Christian im- plements and forms should be used by teachers of Christian faith in order to make them give a religious 'education which, if it is not complete for us Churchmen, and though it lacks the clearness and distinctness of impression on a young mind which the simple outlines of Creed and Catechism can give, is yet a thing for which we cannot be too thankful. The sad thing is that there is no kind of security that the teachers should have this kind of congeniality with their subject : the encouraging thing is that in so very large a number of cases they have it. We think with anxiety of the future. Will the proportion always remain as it is now ? " The religious instruction of the pupil teachers is the present difficulty," says one of you, thoughtfully, " and the want of it the future danger, in Board Schools." The Training Colleges supply as many absolutely, but not relatively, as they did. In ■T 34 THE VOCATION AND DANGERS OF THE CHURCH them, perhaps, more than in anything else is the key of the position. I should say this, not only to Churchmen, but to all who value dis- tinctly Christian Education. Undenominationalism is not repro- ductive. Rate it at its very best as a working compromise, it will only work in a Christian sense in the hands of teachers of real Christian faith and conviction, and it may be fearlessly said that these will only be got from the denominations, and, as things are, in very great preponderance from the Church. It is, therefore, a rare degree of wisdom and courage combined which, in the enterprise of St. Gabriel's College at Camberwell, has given a defiance of faith and hope to the obstacles of financial difficulty, and actually begun to provide places for 80 more teachers, whom under our own auspices we may, by God's help, teach our faith so that they in turn shall be able and desire to teach it. It was no drawback to this but an added privilege that, to meet the wishes of the Department, and at the suggestion of our own Archbishop, the scheme includes a Non- Resident department for 80 more which is absolutely open to all. I earnestly crave for so generous and large-hearted a scheme the most liberal and ready support. It is at present in temporary premises but the permanent buildings, of which Lady Cranborne laid the first stone in July, are beginning to rise. But it cannot be fully equipped for much less than £50,000 : and this will give some idea of the magnitude of the enterprise, and the measure of need. From the teachers I turn to the teaching. The account of it might be largely inferred from what has been already said. It varies and it shows different sides. I attempted some classification of favourable and unfavourable estimates, and I noted 100 favourable and 37 unfavourable. But though the preponderance fairly repre- sents opinion among you, the classification is extremely rough. The qualification recurs quite constantly, " good as far it goes," and the favourable descriptions are often therefore intended as relatively favourable, relatively that is to the conditions of compromise and limitation under which the teaching is given. I should like to put to the front a remark by the vicar of a parish of pronounced dogmatic tone, who says that the teaching " is of great value, and helps Christian conviction in the mass of the people." If any one thinks that this is delusive, I would quote another highly competent clerical THE VOCATION AND DANGERS OF THE CHURCH 35 witness, whom I lately heard describe the gist of the Christian teach- ing given by the Board Schools in his parish in the words of the Church Catechism comment on the Articles of our Belief. It is not easy to estimate the gain which comes from the fact that to thousands of children the Bible is taught by teachers themselves Christian, as an inspired Book, and the Gospels as the record of the Son of God and ' Our Lord.' Other grades of good influence are perhaps represented by comments such as, " Lacks definiteness, but makes for godliness," or " Scripture histories with moral attached are kno-svTi wonderfully well." Reverence of tone is specially mentioned by some. Others, speaking relatively, find the teaching of the Board Schools and Church Schools in their instances on a par in value. Or once again, if any one asks whether the subjects are taught with care and efifectiveness in a workmanlike way — leaving questions as to the effects to come later — he may certainly receive a cordially affirmative answer as regards a large number, it may be the greater part, of the schools. Such ^vt)rk must be at least, in the words of one return, " good scaffold- ing," but, indeed, the figure says quite too little ; " excellent founda- tion," which occurs in another report, is much better. But it must not be denied that there is another side to the picture. Beside that same general qualification " good as far as it goes," which means a good deal, there are criticisms which strike beyond the limit thus implied. I am told for instance by several trusty witnesses, and it is certainly a widespread impression and observation, that it is constantly obvious in Sunday School or Confirmation Class which of the children have had Church School teaching and which only that of Board Schools ; in some cases because the latter lack knowledge of Scripture, in others because they know the facts, and possibly the ethical applications, but no more ; in another case it is said that they have not even been taught applications. " Lamentably ignorant " is the com- ment of one vicar whose own schools give some of the very best religious education in the Diocese. There are several comments to like effect. In precisely two cases these strong negative remarks are exchanged for a more positive charge of heterodox or partially negative teaching. A matter of grave anxiety in some places, which I feel sure the teachers share, is the lack of effect on the moral tone and bearing of the children outside. This is spoken of sometimes very strongly. D 2 36 THE VOCATION AND DANGERS OF THE CHURCH Anyone who has seen the admirable discipline of the children in school, must be surprised as well as greatly disappointed to find what their manners and ways often are outside. A thoughtful judge among yourselves treats this as part of the great modern mistake, or at least misfortune, of dealing with children in large masses. It means no doubt also what we have always known, that the school cannot replace the home ; and for many of these children home is not home in any sense, material or other. But it would certainly appear that the lack of a certain tone which a Church School gains from its allegiance to a definite faith and to a definite religious order and authority adds something to the difficulty of those who try to mould and refine character in children of the Board Schools. I shall not attempt to summarise this account, which I have tried in the main to keep close to the facts of the returns, but shall leave it to speak for itself I hope that it may bear upon its face the desire to be truthful and fair. There are more points than one in reference to the finance of the Church which give ground for great anxiety. The fall of Tithe to two-thirds of what its value was some years ago has meant a loss to the Church and to many of her ministers which has been little understood and still less repaired by the laity. This loss, together with the heavy burdens which lie on tithe from the legal accident of its being treated as land, produced a condition of things so hard as to be in places intolerable. The Tithe Rating Act of 1899 has ap- plied temporary relief. We were disposed to complain of the delay in dealing with the matter. But the difficulties of any remedy were so real that I rather take the fact of its passing when it did in the face of them as a sign how urgent the grievance was, and how sincerely the authors of the Bill desired to respond to the claims of need and of justice in. the matter. The matter still awaits a per- manent solution. But there is another cause of decreased or vanishing stipends, which has received much less notice, and in this Diocese, at least, has had widespread effects. I refer to Pew Rents. To support a Church hy Pew Rents means in many districts to follow the line of least resistance. It pleases a number of the people whose voices are most heard and heeded, it organises and consolidates support of the Church THE VOCATION AND DANGERS OF THE CHURCH 37 and attendance at some of its services, and it yields at first hand- some and easy returns. But when employed in suburbs which down-grade socially as the town presses outward, the system has meant a bequest of starvation benefices to the future. The people who can rent pews move away, and are not succeeded, and the stipend falls to little or nothing. The well-paid incumbent who had no poor is succeeded by the incumbent ^vith a pittance who has no rich. This is the experience of our past. Unhappily, we are preparing the same sorrows in fresh places for our successors. I do implore the clergy and laity of our suburban places where there is still some, if not great, wealth, to look this matter in the face : to make some provision against an inevitable future, albeit they and theirs will not see it, but only poorer and needier men. I would ask in some places for a small first charge on the Pew-rents for Endowment, in others for a special Endowment Fund to which Incumbent and people might subscribe : this is the fairer arrangement. Quite a small sum set aside annually at compound interest would make an invaluable nest-egg or nucleus : and if the Endowment Fund be kept before the people in the Parish accounts it would probably attract other gifts and legacies. Two agencies in the Diocese, the Diocesan Society and the Queen Victoria Sustentation Fund, are willing to make grants for this purpose to meet local con- tributions of a certain size : and the combined result will be again doubled by Queen Anne's Bounty or the Ecclesiastical Commission. I earnestly ask for the small measure of forethought, sacrifice, and method required for this disinterested, and therefore all the nobler, service. In connection with this urgent problem of our spiritual labourers' hire, I desire again very earnestly to press upon the Diocese general and earnest support of the Diocesan Branch of the Queen Victoria Sustentation Fund. The respectful privacy of its work prevents you from knowing, but I know, and the keen and zealous body of laymen who work with the Bishops and Archdeacons in the matter know, with what timely and welcome help the grants from its present small resources have eased galling pressures and breaking strains. The money is admirably spent, and I implore its increase. PART II. It cannot be wrong that, assembled in God's sight to consider our ways, the ways of our corporate and personal life, we should go back for a moment to the very beginning, and thence look forward to the end ; and, in the light of those ultimate things, realise the essential character of our Christian responsibility. We find ourselves in the midst of a great system of things of in- conceivable magnitude, intricacy, and wonder, which we call Creation. It is intensely mysterious to us as to its How, and Why, and Whence and Whither. We are baffled in every attempt to take it in. But, at any rate, we know it for a system, a fabric, not a mere heap or mass. That is a truth which has become immensely more familiar and luminous to us of these latter days by the scientific revelation of the order, consistency, and intelligibleness of nature, and in particular by the light which physics and spectrum analysis have thrown upon the kinship between the most different parts of nature. It is a system : but it is, further, a system in movement ; there is in it, or in the part of it with which we are most concerned, a progress. See what geology, and much more the sciences of life, have shown us here. But we may fairly say that they have only reaffirmed with new evidence, and over new areas, the working of a principle with which in its own way and by its own structure Scripture had made us familiar. What is this progress ? It may be only one chapter of it that we of this earth can read, but that chapter would seem to have a typical meaning. Upon material bases of extraordinary massiveness and extent, themselves progressively built up by secular processes of vast duration, there has been shaped, as it were, a platform for the exhibition and exercise of that which we call Life. Life may not be THE VOCATION AND DANGERS OF THE CHURCH 39 a product of matter, but its first beginnings are divided by an almost vanishing line from the more intricate inanimate processes. Anyhow, life gives to matter enormous new possibilities ; it carries matter up into new regions. I need not weary you by tracing life's course, long, intricate, and beautiful as it has been. For this is plain that, within our knowledge at least, life culminates in man. The in- animate and the animate world may alike recognise themselves in man. To say that he is the flower or spokesman or high priest of the life in them, is only to say, with more or less rhetoric, what is con- tained in the fact that the movement which has gone through them has issued in human life. All the best of them is carried out into it, but more is added. With a repetition of the same puzzle as before in the case of life and matter, we cannot tell whether consciousness is a pro- duct of life, and only know that, again, its first beginnings are separated by an almost vanishing line from the play of unconscious instincts. But consciousness takes rank of its own, and as it grows it alters everything. In the great regions which we know as intellectual, moral, and emotional, it develops things wholly new upon the earth's face : earthly and perishable, yet not of the earth ; dependent on the brain, yet quite plainly not of the brain ^; able to live a separate and almost spiritual existence, as, in their degree, do the winged words which descend from one generation to another, or the music which starts into life again off the dumb page and through fresh executants. While we wonder at these neAv things, and ask their meaning and destiny, there is discerned in them this characteristic quality, that they chafe against their limits : they are insatiable, and capable of far more than they are allowed to do : knowledge, con- science, love, are never satisfied, and defy the sufficiency of any finite satisfaction. It is at this point, when merely by the thrust of the movement which we have followed, we are driven out towards an Infinite, that we seem to catch a glimpse of what may be the meaning of the whole. May it not be, must it not be, the return of being to the Source from whence it came, not as the waters which flow from the rivers into ^ It is important to bear in mind that this distinction of mind and matter, and our superior certitude of the former, are now very generally admitted results of philosophy. — V., e. g., A. W. Ward, Gifford Lectures, ii., c. 18. 40 THE VOCATION AND DANGERS OF THE CHURCH the sea return in cloud to the hills, but as the highest known things return to their objects, knowledge to truth, admiration to beauty, love to love ? Love to love ! Does the secret lie there ? The word comes to us in seeming answer, "God is love." It is found to interpret the deepest and most universal experience of what is most real and of truest worth in man's own life. It explains, and is explained by, that experience. But, further, as we reflect what it is that love must desire, viz., its own return, we begin to see how all the interminable delays, and the prodigious waste and sacrifice, and the unimaginable labours of creation may be worth while, and have their meaning, if they issue in a true love from the creature to the Creator. "All Thy works praise Thee, O God." Without consciousness and ^vithout love the words are only meta- phorical. But they embody a truth which we too much neglect : a truth which lends spiritual character to nature, and throws upon man an almost unbearable splendour of responsibility, viz., that through him the whole creation speaks its praise, returns its love, to Him from Whom it came and Whose it is. There is a certain simplicity, as well as grandeur, in this view of the world, and of life as known to us. But we may know Who has made it simple. It rests on two principal foundations : first, the clear knowledge of God as living and true, prior to Creation, and its Lord, and still more of His innermost nature as Love ; and, secondly, the clear knowledge of man as God's child, made by God, dear to God, and welcome to Him. This double knowledge is due to Jesus Christ, and to that revealing of which He is centre and climax. It is, indeed, more than a gift of knowledge : it is a long step towards the accomplishment of what it shows to be man's task. To know our dignity and responsibility is to be lifted up towards its discharge. But, of course, this is only part of what we owe to our Lord. He is not only a Teacher, but a Life-giver. He accomplishes as well as explains. In following the course of creation upward to Man we had come to a barrier. Not that man himself has not been the subject of a long forward movement up from his primitive states to the advanced stage of his cultivation ; nor that there is any reason against looking for further progress. But it may be fairly said that THE VOCATION AND DANGERS OF THE CHURCH 4! there is not in all this progress any real sign of man's being able ' above himself to lift himself/ and to rid himself of those things of weakness and evil, which, twined in with his inmost life, fatally unfit him for any real discharge of his task, as bringer of Creation's true response to Creation's God.^ For this it would seem that created life must somehow be enabled to make a new start, though still upon its continuous journey. That new start is what our faith, following the faith of those whose eyes were opened when and after they companied with Him as He went in and out among them, recognises in the Lord Jesus. It is a new work, not upon Manhood, but in and through it. It is Sonship both revealed and perfected in human experience. It is a perfect Offering, because of which God can overlook, blot out, forgive, the whole stained and grievous record of man's fault and failure. It is a fulfil- ment, and a beginning. It is as it passes into us a new life, which requires and creates a recognition of the unfitness of the old for God's purpose ; a recognition so complete that it can be fitly de- scribed as a death to the old, to ourselves, that we may live unto Him. At last then Love Eternal has an answer of created love, God has a Son, and Creation a Priest unto God, and men in Him may rise to the discharge of their innate Sonship and Priesthood. Here then is that in the light of which all the meaning of our life and work is to be read. It is a redemption and recovery, regard- ing man upon the side of his fall and its consequences. It is a fulfilment and climax, if we regard the inherent and intended dignity and destiny of his nature. But it has this other characteristic, that it is distinctively God's own work. So it was recognised, so it was taught by Apostles, as such it had its power ; " God sending his own Son in the likeness of sinful flesh and for sin." This again, though it was new, was also a fulfilment of the past. It brought out into clearness what was all along discerned by the truest and most faithful men, that in God all human life, physical, moral and spiritual, lives and moves and has its ^ Man has an instinct of this high calling, but along with that instinct a sense that he has somehow lapsed or fallen from any possibility of its true discharge. His fall is as real to him as his rise, though he cannot give an equally historical account of it. 42 THE VOCATION AND DANGERS OF THE CHURCH Ijeing, as, indeed, in their degree have the whole animate and inanimate worlds. It brought this out, I say, into clearness, even while giving to it a wholly new meaning by the Personal presence of the Divine Son in human flesh. The Gift of the Holy Spirit, who had moved at first over the formless earth, who spake by the prophets, who was dimly discerned by Homer when he turned blind eyes to the goddess for inspiration of his Iliad, and had imparted to Bezaleel and every wise-hearted man their various powers, but who was now given as a new Gift in personal in- dwelling as " the Spirit •of Jesus," given to Himself without measure, and then promised, sent, and shared by Him like the precious ointment upon the head which went down to the skirts — this Gift is the uniting link between the personal Sonship of the Only Son, and the new created sonship of those who are sons in Him, as it is also the Link between the natural life of men before Christ, with its lower inspira- tions and graces, and the supernatural life (as we speak) to which they are called in Him. Thus in Him and from Him does the very life and power of God work to effectuate in men what was in Him as First-fruits, Captain, Source. I have ventured upon this summary in my own words of the work of » -• 'v-^n / s^'oC ^ ^i^w^ -^'"/Vpendix hi. (Page 75.) Parochial Church Councils. Resolutions agreed to by both Houses on July 5, 1898. 1. That this House desires earnestly to impress upon the parochial Clergj' the importance of securing the confidence and co-operation of lay Churchmen in the manner which, in each parish, maybe best adapted to its wants ; and that one mode by which this end might be accomplished would be the formation of Parochial Church Councils. 2. That the initiative in forming such Councils should rest in the Incumbent, subject to the approval of the Bishop of the diocese. 3. That such Councils should consist of the Incumbent or Curate-in-charge, who shall be the Chairman of the Council, the assistant Clergy licensed by the Bishop, the churchwardens and sidemen, duly appointed and admitted, together with elected councillors. 4. That the elected councillors be male communicants of the Church of England of full age. 5. That the electors be baptized and confirmed members of the Church of England, resident in the parish, and of full age. 6. That the duties of the Council should be to take the principal share in the raising of funds and administration of finance, to assist the Incumbent in the initia- tion and development in the parish of all departments of parochial Church work, and to advise him on matters on which he thinks it expedient to consult them. 7. That if it should be considered by the Incumbent to be desirable that the Council should be dissolved, then, with the written consent of the Bishop of the Diocese, the Incumbent may dissolve it. APPENDIX IV. (Page 94.) Report of the Committee appointed to consider and report upon the Office OF the Church with respect to Industrial Problems — (a) the Unem- ployed ; {h) Industrial Co-operation. I. The Committee desire to begin their Report with words of thankful recognition that throughout the Church of Christ, and not least in the Churches of our own APPENDICES 111 Communion, there has been a marked increase of solicitude about the problems of industrial and social life, and of sympathy with the struggles, sufferings, responsi- bilities, and anxieties, which those problems involve. The}- hope that they rightly discern in this some increasing reflection in modern shape of the likeness of the Lord, in whose Blessed Life zeal for the souls and sympathy for the bodilj' needs of men were undivided fruits of a single Love. The Committee, before proceeding to touch upon two specific parts of the subject, desire to record briefly what they deem to be certain principles of Christian duty in such matters. The primar}- duty of the Church, as such, and, within her, of the Clerg}-, is that of ministry to men in the things of character, conscience, and faith. In doing this, she also does her greatest social duty. Character in the citizen is the first social need ; character, with its securities in a candid, enlightened, and vigorous con- science, and a strong faith in goodness and in God. The Church owes this duty to all classes alike. Nothing must be allowed to distract her from it, or needlessly to impede or prejudice her in its discharge, and this requires of the Clergj', as spiritual officers, ' he exercise of great discretion in any attempt to bring within their sphere work of a more distinctively^ social kind. But while this cannot be too strongly said, it is not the whole truth. Character is influenced at every point by social conditions, and active conscience, in an industrial society, will look for moral guidance on industrial matters. Economic science does not claim to give this, its task being to inform but not to determine the conscience and judgment. But we believe that Christ our Master does give such guidance by His example and teachings, and by the present workings of His Spirit ; and therefore iinder Him Christian authoritj- must in a measure do the same, the authoritj', that is, of the whole Christian body, and of an enlightened Christian opinion. Tliis is part of the duty of the Christian Society, as witnessing for Christ and representing Him in this present world, occupied with His work of setting up the Kingdom of God, under and amidst the natural conditions of human life. In this work the clerg}% whose special dutj- it is to ponder the bearings of Christian principles, have their part ; but the Christian laity, who deal directlj- with the social and economic facts, can do even more. The Committee believe that it would be wlioUy wrong for Christian authority to attempt to interfere with the legitimate evolution of economic and social thought and life bj- taking a side corporatel}' in the debates between rival social theories or systems. It will not (for example), at the present day, attempt to identify Christian duty •with the acceptance of systems based respectively on collective or indi%-idual ownership of the means of production. But they submit that Christian social duty will operate in two directions : — 1. The recognition, inculcation, and application of certain Christian principles. They offer the following as examples : — (a). The principle of Brotherhood. This principle of Brotherhood, or Fellow- ship in Christ, proclaiming, as it does, that men are members one of another, should act in all the relations of life as a constant coimterpoise to the instinct of competition. {h). The principle of Labour. That every man is bound to service — the serWce of God and man. Labour and service are to be here understood in their widest and most inclusive sense ; but in some sense they are obligatory on all. The wilfully idle man, and the man who lives only for himself, are out of 112 APPENDICES place in a Christian community. Work, accordingly, is not to be looked upon as an irksome necessity for some, but as the honourable task and privilege of all. ('".) The principle of Justice. God is no respecter of persons. Inequalities, indeed, of every kind, are inwoven with the whole providential order of human life, and are recognised emphaticallj' in our Lord's words. But the social order cannot ignore the interests of any of its parts, and must, more- over, be tested by the degi'ee iu which it secures for each freedom for happy, useful, and untrammelled life, and distributes, as widely and equitably as may be, social advantages and opportunities. (d.) The principle of Public Responsibility. A Christian community, as a whole, is morally responsible for the character of its own economic and social order, and for deciding to what extent matters affecting that order ai-e to be left to individual initiative, and to the unregulated plaj' of economic forces. Factory and sanitary legislation, the institution of Government labour departments and the influence of Government, or of public opinion and the press, or of eminent citizens, in helping to avoid or reconcile industrial conflicts, are instances in point. 2. Christian opinion should be awake to repudiate and condemn either open breaches of social justice and duty, or maxims and principles of an un-Christian character. It ought to condemn the belief that economic conditions are to be left to the action of material causes and mechanical laws, uncontrolled by any moral responsibility. It can pronounce certain conditions of labour to be intolerable. It can insist that the employers personal responsibility^ as such, is not lost by his membership in a commercial or industrial Company. It can press upon retail purchasers the obligation to consider not only the cheapness of the goods supplied to them, but also the probable conditions of their production. It can speak plainly of evils which attach to the economic system under which we live, such as certain forms of luxurious extravagance, the widespread pursuit of money by financial gambling, the dishonesties of trade into which men are driven by feverish competi- tion, and the violences and reprisals of industrial warfare. It is plain that in these matters disapproval must take every different shade, from plain condemnation of undoubted wrong to tentative opinions about better and worse. Accordingly any organic action of the Church, or any action of the Church's officers, as such, should be verj'^ carefully restricted to cases where the rule of right is practically clear, and much the larger part of the matter should be left to the free and flexible agency of the awakened Christian conscience of the community at large, and of its individual members. If the Christian conscience be thus awakened and active, it will secure the best administration of particular systems, while they exist, and the modification or change of them, when this is required by the progress of knowledge, thought, and life. It appears to follow from what precedes that the great need of the Church, in this connection, is the growth and extension of a serious, intelligent, and sympathetic opinion on these subjects, to which numberless Christians have as yet never thought of applying Christian principles. There has been of late no little improvement in this respect, but much remains to be done, and with this view the Committee desire to make the following definite recommendation. They suggest that, wherever possible, there should be formed, as a part of local APPENDICES 113 Church organisation, Committees consisting chiefly of laymen, whose work should be to study social and industrial problems from the Christian point of view, and to ckssist in creating and strengthening an enlightened public opinion in regard to such problems, and promoting a more active spirit of social service, as a part of Christian duty. Such Committees, or bodies of Church workers in the way of social service, while representing no one class of society, and abstaining from taking sides in any disputes between classes, should fearlessly draw attention to the various causes in our economic, industrial, and social system, which call for remedial measures on Christian principles. Abundant illustration of the kind of matters with which such Committees might deal will be found in the following sections of the Report : — II. The problem of the Unemployed brings us face to face with the two questions : — (I.) How best to help those who are unemploj-ed, and in need, at any particular moment. (II. ) How to counteract the causes in the society of our time which tend to drive people into this necessitous class, and make it so numerous. (I. ) The unemployed are of different types and require different modes of treat- ment. (a. ) The unwilling, such as the lazy, and the vagrant. These especially need authoritative discipline and corrective management. The existence of such an idle and necessitous class being a danger to society, the State should undertake the duty of dealing with them, both by means of dis- ciplinary authority, and by an enlightened administration of Poor Laws, making labour a condition of relief, and using all possible means, by training and otherwise, to turn them into good citizens. (6.) The unfit, viz. : (1) The aged poor, for whom Christian society is bound to provide by pension or otherwise some form of decent support ; (2) the sick, who must be nursed and tended while ill, and should be assisted in making a fresh start when they recover ; (3) destitute children, who should be main- tained and educated, so that they may have a chance of growing up to be honest and useful members of society. (c.) The unfortuivate, the wreckage of our industrial and social system. Many of these are wrecked, not by any fault of their own, but through dislocations of trade, changes of fashion, mechanical inventions, the lack of technical training, and other causes, and they have a strong claim on Christian society to assist them by some form of organisation ready for the purpose. (d.) The morally weak, who are wi-ecked through lack of character, being rendered useless by drunkenness and other forms of vice ; and they offer a large field for the healing and reforming influences of Christian charity, such as homes and reformatories. II. The causes which tend to swell the number of the unemploj-ed and suffering poor present even greater difficulties. The Church will best contribute to their solution by patient consideration of such matters as the following : — (1) Forms of trade or industry, or any usages, which lead to the "sweating" and degradation of the labouring class, and possible methods of reform. I 114 APPENDICES (2) Methods of moralising industrial and commercial relationships. (3) Stronger control by public opinion and authority over the housing of the poor, both in town and country, and methods by which the existing laws may be more effectually carried out so as to secure the conditions necessary for a decent moral life. (4) The encouragement of all sound organisations which have for their object the advancement of thrift and temperance, and the assistance of the working man in making provision for sickness and old age. (5) Possibilities of minimising fluctuations and dislocations of employment, with the sufferings consequent upon them, by means of such agencies as Labour Bureaux, Boards of Conciliation and Arbitration, and some judicious use of public works in times of stress. (6) Methods of making country life and occupations more attractive and re- munerative, so as to lessen the drift of population into great towns. (7) The success or failure of the many agencies and schemes, both public and private, which are already in operation for the healing or prevention of these social ills. III. In dealing with the subject of Industrial Co-operation, the Committee desire to record their appreciation of the benefits which its originators and supporters have conferred upon the community. It has helped to spread and strengthen the feeling of mutual membership or brotherhood, and to conciliate the interests of the capitalist, the workman and the purchaser. It has been equally beneficial in contributing largely to the growth of thrift, independence, a sense of the dignity of labour, and happy family life and contentment, among that portion of the working classes who have taken a share in it. The Committee hope to see it as successfully established on the side of productive industry, as it is in the field of commercial distribution. At the same time there would seem to be the need of a note of warning. The very success of the movement is bringing with it an element of danger. It will be equivalent to the comparative failure of this great movement if it should degenerate into a vast system of joint-stock shopkeeping or industry, conducted on selfish principles, with no dominant moral purpose pervading it, no longer earnestly striving for the amelioration of social and industrial conditions, but aiming chiefly at large dividends. Such a system is only selfish competition decked out in new garments, and bearing a new name. The sympathy of the Church with the co-operative movement must depend on the faithful adhesion of those who direct it to its true moral and spiritual purpose. Such Committees of Social Service as have been recommended above should draw attention to subjects like the following : — 1. The dangers that threaten the co-operative movement through its becoming infected by the spirit of selfish competition, as illustrated by its tendency to give up the principle of profit-sharing on the part of the workers. 2. The elevating influence which the feeling of associated ownership exercises on the character of workmen. 3. The great importance of education. APPENDICES 115 4. The necessity of confidence in approved leaders, and readiness to entrust responsible authority to capable individuals, and to remunerate them liberally. 5. The vast opportunities for social amelioration which the co-operative system has before it. The Committee hope that they have shown conclusively how varied and urgent are the questions which demand Christian thought and attention ; and that they have sufficiently indicated some of the ways in which it is possible to permeate commercial and industrial life with the regulative and inspiring force of applied Christianity. They record their conviction that conspicuous, sustained, and widespread effort in this direction, more particularly on the part of Christian laymen, is required at the present time, as one special sign and form of the witness of the Church to the all sufficiency of her Divine and Incarnate Lord, and to the transforming, enlighten- ing, and quickening power of His Spirit upon human character and life. Resolution formally adopted by the Lambeth Conference in 1897 : — ' ' That this Conference receives the Report of the Committee on the duty of the Church in regard to Industrial Problems, and commends the suggestions embodied in it to the earnest and sympathetic consideration of all Christian people." APPENDIX V. Ordinations for the Three Years 1896, 1897, 1898. Number of men ordained Deacons 1896 — 1898. Ordinations at Trinity 37 ,, in September 30 ,, in Advent 37 Total 104 In 1896 29 In 1897 ; 44 In 1898 31 Total 104 Of these 25 were graduates of Oxford. 45 ,, ,, ,, Cambridge. 14 ,, ,, ,, other Universities. 7 ,, Associates of King's College, London. 7 came from non-graduate Theological Colleges. 6 were Literates. Of the Oxford and Cambridge candidates 23 had graduated with honours, 6 in the 1st Class (one a double first), 6 in the 2nd Class, 10 in the 3rd Class, and 1 in the 4th Class. RICHARD CLAY AND SONS, LIMITED, LONDON AND BUNOAY.