I 
 
 PRINCETON. N. J. 
 
 Library of Dr. A. A. Hodge. Presented. 
 
 BX 5131.2 .T35x 
 
 Tait, Archibald Can5>bell, 
 
 1811-1882 . 
 The church of the future 
 
Digitized by the Internet Archive 
 in 2015 
 
 https://archive.org/details/churchoffutureOOtait_0 
 
/- 
 
THE CHURCH OF THE FUTURE: 
 a Bt'otcsan QTIjarae. 
 
 A.D. iSSo. 
 
THE 
 
 C 
 
 HURCH OF THE FUTURE 
 
 I. ITS CATHOLICITY 
 a. ITS CONFLICT WITH 
 THE ATHEIST 
 
 3. ITS CONFLICT WITH 
 
 THE DEIST 
 
 4. ITS CONFLICT WITH 
 
 THE RATIONALIST 
 
 5. ITS DOGMATIC TEACHING 
 
 6. PRACTICAL COUNSELS 
 FOR ITS WORK 
 
 7. ITS CATHEDRALS 
 
 8. APPENDICES 
 
 ARCHIBALD CAMPBELL 
 ^tct)bisJ)op of (ZTanuibuvs 
 
 NEW YORK 
 
 MACMILLAN AND CO., 
 1881. 
 
CONTENTS. 
 I. 
 
 Its Catholicity i 
 
 II. 
 
 Its Conflict with the Atheist 31 
 
 III. 
 
 Its Conflict with the Deist 57 
 
 IV. 
 
 Its Conflict with the Rationalist 87 
 
 V. 
 
 ITS UoGJiATic Teaching 114 
 
 VI. 
 
 Practical Counsels for its Work 139 
 
vi CONTENTS. 
 
 VII. 
 
 PAGE 
 
 Address to the Members of the Cathedral 
 
 Body 167 
 
 VIII. 
 
 Appendices 203 
 
THE 
 
 CHURCH OF THE FUTURE. 
 
 I. 
 
 ITS 'catholicity. 
 
 {^Delivered at Croydon, on August 31^/, to the 
 Rural Deajierics of Croydon, East Dartjord, and 
 West Dartford.) 
 
 My Reverend Brethren, and my 
 Brethren the Churchwardens, — I have 
 determined, under our peculiar circumstances, 
 not to follow the usual arrangement of those 
 episcopal charges which give special prominence 
 to matters immediately concerning the diocese 
 in which they are delivered. I have thought it 
 best for several reasons to ask the clergy to send 
 
 13 
 
THE CHURCH OF THE FUTURE. 
 
 [I. 
 
 in their returns to my visitation questions not 
 before, but during the actual visitation ; and I 
 propose, according to my practice since I be- 
 came Archbishop, to make the answers to these 
 questions a subject of future private correspon- 
 dence between myself and the clergy, rather 
 than to incorporate the results of them in my 
 charge. 
 
 The circumstances of this archicpiscopal 
 diocese are altogether peculiar, and are be- 
 coming every year more so. I do not know 
 how it will ever be possible hereafter for an 
 Archbishop of Canterbury to dispense with such 
 assistance as has now for many years been 
 kindly and efficiently given both to you and to 
 me by the Suffragan Bishop of Dover. Every 
 year Lambeth is becoming more and more a 
 centre to which the whole Anglican communion 
 directly looks ; and that communion seems to 
 me to be more and more every year becoming 
 itself a centre for all the Churches of Christen- 
 dom which protest against Roman usurpation. 
 The result is that the work of the Primacy, as 
 
I.] ITS CA THOLICITY. 3 
 
 distinguished from the work of the Diocesan 
 Bishop of Canterbury, is every year greatly in- 
 creasing. There are at least 162 bishops of the 
 English, or Anglican, communion with dioceses 
 scattered throughout the world, and, with all of 
 these, more or less, I find it necessary to be in 
 communication. You are aware that two years 
 ago one hundred of these fathers of the Church 
 gathered at Lambeth for a month's deliberation ; 
 and you will remember the expressions of filial 
 regard with which that great assembly of bishops 
 met to worship in our metropolitical cathedral 
 at Canterbury, and called to mind the associa- 
 tions which bound them to the birthplace of 
 what we commonly call Anglo-Saxon Chris- 
 tianity. I shall have to mention to you hereafter 
 some of the important results of that episcopal 
 gathering, felt both here at home and in the 
 remotest regions where our English tongue is 
 spoken. These, you will readily believe, are 
 not brought to accomplishment without much 
 labour. There is necessarily much communica- 
 tion between the Bishops of India and t'.ie 
 
4 THE CHURCH OF THE FUTURE. [i. 
 
 colonies and the chief guiding authorities of 
 our own Church at home. And our brethren 
 of the United States of America have, ever 
 since Archbishop Longley's wise resolve to in- 
 vite them to the first conference at Lambeth, so 
 far thrown in their lot with us that their work 
 and ours has become more directly intertwined 
 by distinct relations of friendship and co-opera- 
 tion. Moreover, the generation in which we 
 live has awakened to a more real understanding 
 than its predecessor of the force of the German 
 proverb — that " behind the hills (and we may 
 add beyond the seas) there are people," Chris- 
 tian people, with an old descent, quite uncon- 
 nected in their origin with either Rome or 
 Canterbury — with the same episcopal form of 
 government as ourselves, cherishing the old 
 liturgies, which are the basis of our Common 
 Prayer — Christians who have maintained their 
 faith through long centuries of oppression, whose 
 trials have been such as we Englishmen, thank 
 God, have never been exposed to, and who at 
 the jiresent day stretch out tlieir hands to 
 
ITS CATHOLICITY. 
 
 5 
 
 England with an earnestness of supplication 
 inspired by a confidence of help unknown in 
 former times. 
 
 Let mere worldly politicians dispute as to the 
 wisdom or unwisdom of England's undertaking 
 great responsibilities to help the distressed, and 
 extend the blessings of civilisation through the 
 suffering tribes in those dark regions in Asia, in 
 which practically there is no law and no justice, 
 no liberty, and no security of property, or even 
 life — we English Churchmen can have no 
 doubt of our duty as Christians to do all in our 
 power to remedy these detestable evils, when 
 they are brought distinctly to our notice. The 
 Churches of the East, one after another— Syrian, 
 Armenian, Chaldean, Nestorian — implore our 
 aid. The boon asked of us by some of these 
 communities, is that we give them help to ra'se 
 themselves by education, and secure for them 
 that respect from their persecutors which they 
 believe the very name of a connection with Eng- 
 land will insure. Blessed fruit of that great 
 position to which the kindness of our God has 
 
6 
 
 THE CHURCH OF THE FUTURE. 
 
 [I- 
 
 raised our nation, that even in these remote 
 regions the public opinion of Christian England 
 is not without its force ; and that people who 
 are known to have a clergyman of the English 
 Church among them feel nearly as secure as if 
 they were under the protection of some regular 
 emissary of the English State ! As a matter of 
 fact, scarcely a week passes without some touch- 
 ing appeal reaching Lambeth from these dis- 
 tressed Oriental Christians. No wide-spread 
 spiritual work, testifying to our Christian bro- 
 therhood, has yet been done among them but 
 by the missionaries of the American Indepen- 
 dents. All honour to these good men for the 
 efforts they have steadily pursued for so many 
 years, to the quiet efficacy of which testimony 
 is borne by the authorities of our Foreign Office. 
 Besides our intercourse with the comparatively 
 small Oriental Churches or sects of which we 
 have spoken, we have growing relations also 
 with the great divisions of the Greek Church in 
 Russia, in Turkey, and in Greece — with the par- 
 tially independent Bulgarian Greek Church, and 
 
ITS CATHOLICITY. 
 
 7 
 
 with the Coptic Church of Egypt and Abyssinia. 
 There is also that large body of native 
 Christians unconnected with Rome, on the 
 coast of Malabar, which has long claimed the 
 interest and the sympathy of our missionaries 
 in India. 
 
 But why do I recount the names of all these 
 Eastern Churches, some of which are compara- 
 tively little known ? Not only to let you under- 
 stand how the circle of our Church's influence is 
 widen inp", but also that I may press upon you 
 the duty of carefully considering their claims. 
 It is right, as I have often said before, that we 
 should have in every parish some organization 
 to promote our missionary work among the 
 heathen, and we call to mind with thankfulness 
 how our great Church societies have helped 
 forward the efforts which England is bound to 
 make to spread the Gospel in lands where 
 Christ is utterly unknown. England has its 
 commercial and colonizing relations with every 
 part of the globe, and Englishmen cannot escape 
 from the responsibility of sending the knowledge 
 
8 THE CHURCH OF THE FUTURE. [i. 
 
 of Christian truth to those who He in utter 
 darkness. Our great societies, as I have said, 
 such as the Society for the Propagation of the 
 Gospel and the Church Missionary Society, are 
 the true handmaids of our Church in this portion 
 of its work — and one or other, if not both, of 
 these societies, I consider that every earnest- 
 minded Churchman is bound directly to support 
 according to his means. But in our zeal for 
 the heathen we are not to overlook our fellow- 
 Christians. The Roman Catholic Church, in- 
 deed, separates itself from us by so sharp a 
 line of arrogant exclusiveness, built on a super- 
 structure of false doctrine, that our hopes of 
 influencing it must be very slight unless some 
 fundamental change be made in its whole 
 system. But these Oriental Christians show 
 a lively interest in our co-operation, and have 
 of late years expressed their desire to know 
 more of us, and to act with us in a fraternal 
 spirit. We shall do well then, to support the 
 efforts of which Lambeth is in a sort the 
 centre, for encouraging such attempts to foster 
 
I.] ITS CATHOLICITY. g 
 
 a truer brotherhood between ourselves and these 
 scattered Christian communities. 
 
 Not that we are to neglect our duties to 
 our Roman Cathohc brethren, or to those 
 who are labouring to free themselves from 
 the Roman yoke. Public attention has been 
 much directed of late years to the German 
 and Swiss movement of those who, having 
 joined the old Jansenist Community of Holland 
 in resisting the new Vatican decrees, claim 
 for themselves the name of Old Catholics ; 
 and the English Church looks with sympathy 
 and interest to the result of this movement 
 But not in Germany and Switzerland alone are 
 there symptoms of a revolt against undue 
 Papal pretensions. Many of you are aware 
 that our sister Church in the United States has 
 lately availed itself of the peculiar condition 
 of affairs in Mexico to foster there an inde- 
 pendent Spanish-speaking Church, which in 
 the towns at least of that country has made 
 rapid progress among those who before had 
 little choice left to them except between 
 
lO THE CHURCH OF THE FUTURE. [i. 
 
 infidelity and a very debased form of Romanism. 
 Tlie conference of bishops at Lambeth heard 
 the account of this movement, as well as of that 
 in the small Republic of Hayti, with deep in- 
 terest ; and, as representations had been made 
 from Spain that there were many earnest 
 Christians there, desiring to avail themselves of 
 the new-born religious liberty of their country, 
 the assembled bishops gave their sanction to 
 the extension of the Mexican movement from 
 America to the mother country from which 
 Mexico derived its Christianity. Bishop Riley, 
 of the Protestant Episcopal Church in Mexico, 
 a man who has the singular advantage, from his 
 birth and education, of being equally well versed 
 in the English and in the Spanish languages, has 
 just returned from his visit to the congregations 
 of protesting Christians in Spain and Portugal, 
 and reports that there is good hope of a real 
 and widely-spread work of reformation, under 
 Protestant episcopal auspices, in these countries. 
 In France, where Ultramontane Romanism holds 
 scarcely disputed sway as the national protest 
 
I.] ITS CA TIIOLICITY. I I 
 
 against infidelity, such efforts are naturally 
 small, and, as yet, feeble. But I cannot doubt 
 that we are right to give the sanction of our 
 help to individual priests who, amid a thousand 
 difficulties, are feeling their way to a purer form 
 of the old Galilean national Church. I do not 
 think that such efforts will in any way interfere 
 with the progress of French Protestantism, in 
 which England is so much interested, and with 
 which the Cathedral and Diocese of Canterbury 
 maintain a historical connection. These various 
 efforts after internal reform in the several 
 Churches greatly increase our responsibilities, 
 and I commend them to the careful attention 
 of all true-hearted English Churchmen. The 
 time has gone by when we could rest contented 
 in our insular position. 
 
 I have spoken hitherto of those who are 
 united with us in the episcopal form of govern- 
 ment. But I suppose we none of us forget 
 how much the Church of England owes in its 
 formularies to the Augsburg Confession, and how 
 little chance there would have been, humanly 
 
I 2 THE CHURCH OF THE FUTURE. [i. 
 
 speaking, of the Reformation spreading with 
 power if God had not raised up its champion 
 in Luther. Neither are we forgetful how, in the 
 persecution under Mary Tudor, our true-hearted 
 Reformers found a refuge .in Switzerland till 
 the tyranny was overpast, nor how there has 
 ever been, since those days, a bond of cordial 
 union, independent of outward forms, uniting 
 the wisest spirits of the Church of England with 
 the literary and theological labours of German, 
 French, and Swiss Protestants. We may speak 
 of an anticipated union with distant Oriental 
 Christians, but these men are our brethren 
 already, learning from our teaching as we learn 
 from theirs, united with us in the acceptance 
 of those great truths of the freedom of the 
 Gospel, which they and we, notwithstanding all 
 our differences, national and ecclesiastical, have 
 alike derived from dwelling on the writings and 
 imbibing the spirit of St. Paul. The Swedish 
 Lutheran Church, it is well known, claims to 
 live under the same outward government as our 
 own ; and the great Moravian body, spread 
 
1.] 
 
 ITS CATHOLICITY. 
 
 through Germany and known throughout the 
 world by its missionary efforts among the 
 heathen, makes a hkc claim. The boundaries 
 of separation, then, between us and Continental 
 Protestants who hold fast by the fundamentals 
 of the Gospel, fade to an indistinct line ; and 
 shall we not, from our necessary connection 
 with these, learn many lessons to guide us in 
 our dealings with our nonconforming brethren 
 at home and their representatives in the United 
 States of America ? In fact, it will be our 
 fault if the great Protestant communities 
 throughout the world, episcopal and non- 
 episcopal, which adhere to the apostolic faith, 
 do not feel that their cause is indissolubly 
 united with our own. 
 
 At home, important questions of policy may 
 keep us apart. Certainly it is our duty to 
 resist all efforts for subverting that national 
 constitution of our Church, which makes it 
 the authorised teacher of all our people, and 
 the mouthpiece through which our common 
 Christianity speaks in all our public acts as 
 
THE CHURCH OF THE FUTURE. 
 
 a State. Also, it is impossible to have a near 
 union of worship and teaching with those who 
 altogether repudiate our forms of prayer and 
 of Church government, and look upon many 
 of the statements made by our Church as 
 superstitious and ungodly. But not the less 
 is it our duty, where we can, to cultivate 
 friendly relations with them, an . draw them to 
 us, by the manifestation of a real Christian 
 spirit, while we look out for occasions on which 
 notwithstanding o«r differences, we may act 
 together for the spiritual good of the nations. 
 The Church of Christ throughout the world 
 would, it must be remembered, be deprived 
 of a vast proportion of its worshippers, if we 
 left out of sight our Christian brotherhood 
 with non-episcopal congregations at home, and 
 the overwhelming mass of such congregations 
 
 ' I have myself been for thirty years a member of the 
 British and Foreign Bible Society, which enables Church- 
 men and Dissenters so to co-operate in the great work 
 of circulating the word of God. The Society contains 
 among its vice-presidents the names of some forty 
 Bishops of the Church of England. 
 
ITS CATHOLICITY. 
 
 15 
 
 in the United States of America. Thus I 
 crust we Enghsh Churchmen are learning more 
 and more to reahse once again that great 
 idea which was so powerful of old to stir men's 
 hearts and make them help each other — that 
 there is a vast community cemented by 
 Christian faith and principle, which, amid all 
 national and other special differences, joins 
 together the whole body of those who worship 
 God in Christ. 
 
 I would here remark, in connection with 
 this subject, that what is commonly called 
 the Oxford revival of forty or fifty years ago 
 conferred many benefits on English society. 
 Not only do we owe to it a more reverent 
 appreciation of the value of the outward forms 
 of religion, but it greatly changed that large 
 section of the clergy who, ever since the days 
 of the Commonwealth, have inherited a horror 
 of Puritanism, and who, under recent teach- 
 ing, have risen from the careless indifference 
 which characterised their predecessors to a 
 rigid observance of the duties of their sacred 
 
THE CHURCH OF THE FUTURE. 
 
 [I. 
 
 calling. Still more, there can be no doubt that, 
 uniting good taste with genuine Christian 
 feeling, this revival laid hold of the imagina- 
 tion of many ardent and highly cultivated 
 young men who have since risen to important 
 public positions, and under its guidance have 
 exercised a lasting Christian influence on our 
 whole nation. Still I think this must be 
 granted on the other hand — that the teaching 
 thus introduced or resuscitated, notwithstanding 
 all its claims to Catholicity, was and is based 
 on a somewhat narrow system, and has con- 
 fined Churchmen's sympathies in the direction 
 in which before they were ready to expand. 
 My predecessors in the Episcopate had, I 
 think, less difficulty than we should experience 
 nowadays in welcoming the co-operation of 
 such men as was Robert Hall in the days 
 of our fathers, and wishing them God-speed 
 in their labours to resist prevailing infidelity. 
 Let me note here that the passing of the 
 Lord Chancellor's Burials Bill has been looked 
 forward to by some of us as likely, not only 
 
I.] ITS CA THOLICITY. \ 7 
 
 to put an end to a painful controversy, but 
 alsr^to have something of a healing effect in 
 reference to the general relations of Churchmen 
 and Nonconformists, as it certainly has been 
 the desire of those who have supported the 
 measure to make it contain concessions to the 
 claims of both sides in the controversy. How 
 far this charitable wish may be fulfilled is 
 of course uncertain ; but I am very confident 
 that the good feeling of the majority of our 
 clergy, when a certain amount of soreness, not 
 unnaturally engendered by the controversy, has 
 passed, will lead them fairly and generously 
 to endeavour to secure whatever good in this 
 respect the measure may be capable of pro- 
 ducing. The existence of dissent from the 
 National Church is a fact which we cannot 
 overlook. We deplore it, but we cannot act 
 as if there were no such thing in the land 
 as dissent on the part of good men ; and 
 I am sure that we all feel it our duty to 
 meet the inevitable state of circumstances 
 in which we find ourselves in a tolerant, 
 
 C 
 
1 8 THE CHURCH OF THE FUTURE. 
 
 Christian spirit. After all, it is something to 
 live in a country the whole inhabitants of 
 which, speaking roughly, acknowledge one 
 Lord and Saviour, and refer to one Bible 
 as the one accredited rule of their life and 
 citizenship. 
 
 I cannot help here remarking what an evi- 
 dence to a real and wide-spread Catholicity is 
 afforded by the hymns which we use in public 
 worship. The strains in which we Church of 
 England people sing God's praises are drawn 
 from the most diverse sources. We hear in 
 them the ever-living voices of early Chris- 
 tian fathers, of mediaeval saints, of Lutheran 
 reformers, of some modern Roman Catholics, 
 and of many English and American Noncon- 
 formists. These all unite with our own Church's 
 poets and divines of every school in raising our 
 thoughts in our holiest moments to the throne, 
 of God.^ An outward unity is indeed much to 
 be desired, but we must not sacrifice too much 
 to it, or neglect, because of our points of diffcr- 
 ' See Appendix A. 
 
ITS CATHOLICITY. 
 
 19 
 
 ence, whatever may unite us with all who hold 
 fast by the faith of the Apostolic and Nicene 
 Creeds. For myself, in the office which, in the 
 providence of God, I have held now for nearly 
 twelve years, I have certainly never experienced 
 any unwillingness, on the part of our country- 
 men without our pale, to pay to the Church 
 of England that deference which all Protestant 
 Christendom awards it, as the chief bulwark of 
 the reformed faith against the assaults, on one 
 side, of superstition, and, on the other, of an 
 aggressive infidelity. 
 
 From what I have said, you will, I think, 
 grant that I am justified in regarding it as my 
 duty, in a solemn address from this chair, to 
 speak of things which concern the whole Church 
 of Christ, and not to confine our view too much 
 to the separate interests of our own diocese, or 
 even to our own English branch of the Church 
 universal. But before I go into the questions 
 concerning the Church of Christ in general, to 
 which I hope to direct much of what I have 
 to address to you at the several stations of my 
 
 C 2 
 
20 
 
 THE CHURCH OF THE FUTURE. 
 
 [I. 
 
 progress through the diocese, it will naturally 
 be expected that I should say something as to 
 the present position of our own Church, in re- 
 ference to controversies which have of late much 
 agitated it, and have given occasion to our ad- 
 versaries to look upon us with scorn. I am 
 thankful to say that I believe the agitations of 
 the past years are subsiding, and that our 
 Church may now soon be allowed to brace 
 itself with undivided energy to the great conflict 
 of these latter days. Sad, indeed, if souls should 
 be perishing around us while we are engaged 
 in conflicts about mint, and anise, and cumin ! 
 The Mutines of Jerusalem fought with one 
 another within the walls, and the enemy stormed 
 their gates. "A house divided against itself 
 cannot stand." I trust we are coming to the 
 end of our late unhappy divisions within our 
 own Church. It is commonly said that the 
 Public Worship Regulation Act has altogether 
 failed of its purpose. I must be allowed, as 
 its chief promoter, to say that this is not so. 
 Those who make such a statement do not 
 
ITS CATHOLICITY. 
 
 21 
 
 rightly apprehend what its purpose was. Its 
 promoters never desired that it should produce a 
 crop of convictions and of punishments inflicted 
 upon wrong-headed, conscientious men. What 
 they desired was to put a stop to a state of 
 things — common and growing six years ago — 
 by which every raw theologian, visiting Belgium 
 or some other neighbouring Roman Catholic 
 country, came back laden with a crop of very 
 doubtful innovations, which he sought to intro- 
 duce into his own parish as an improvement 
 on the authorised mode of worship, to the great 
 annoyance and scandal of his sober-minded 
 parishioners. I think we may congratulate our- 
 selves that this state of things has come to an 
 end. The voice of the nation, tested in Parlia- 
 ment by the introduction of the measure I have 
 alluded to, has proved itself, in this repcct, to 
 be the voice of the Church as well as the voice 
 of the nation. We desired, by the provisions 
 of the measure, both as it was at first devised 
 by the bishops, and also as it was finally carried 
 in Parliament, to place in the hands of the 
 
22 THE CHURCH OF THE FUTURE. [i. 
 
 b shops the controlling power as to whether or 
 no a new practice might innocently be intro- 
 d iced consistently with the spirit and teaching 
 of the Church. Some had advocated that there 
 ought to be no changes under any circumstances 
 from the established usage of each parish ; but 
 this, we saw, would be fatal to the desirable 
 progress of improvement in many parishes, and 
 in others would secure an immunity for unau- 
 thorised and dangerous alterations in the form 
 of worship sanctioned by the Prayer-Book, if 
 they had already been introduced. It was 
 hoped, indeed, that a ready and inexpensive 
 method of applying the law of the Church 
 when necessary had been secured, and no doubt 
 this was done by the simplifying of process 
 and the limitation of the number of Courts 
 through which a trial can go, and by dis- 
 pensing with any necessity for the 'ntervention 
 of counsel or proctors in the conduct of a case. 
 Experience, however, has proved that no 
 precautions can prevent an undue expendi- 
 ture both of time and money, wlien excited 
 
I] ITS CATHOLICITY. 23 
 
 partisans are determined to call to their aid 
 the first lawyers of the day, and contest every 
 inch of ground. There have been very few 
 trials under the Public Worship Regulation 
 Act — about six in all, in six years ; but the 
 effect of these, even where unforeseen difficul- 
 ties have intervened, has been to make other- 
 wise thoughtless persons think twice before 
 they embroil themselves in all the difficulties 
 which the commencement of a suit would 
 necessarily throw in the way of their highest 
 spiritual usefulness in their parishes. The Act 
 was acceptable to the laity of the Church, 
 because it recognised distinctly their right to 
 be heard in matters concerning the common 
 worship of their parish churches ; and yet it 
 left with the bishops, as guardians of the rights 
 both of laity and clergy, the duty of controlling 
 and rejecting all vexatious and unnecessary 
 complaints. I would call attention to the 
 fact that the last decision on appeal, from a 
 case not commenced under the Public Worship 
 Regulation Act, has confirmed the b'shop in 
 
24 THE CHURCH OF THE FUTURE. [i. 
 
 the possession of a similar discretion in all 
 cases.' 
 
 With the bishops, then, according both to 
 the old and the new process for securing 
 uniformity of worship, it now rests to deter- 
 mine, in every case of complaint, what degree 
 of departure from the letter of the law of the 
 Church is not inconsistent with loyal adhesion 
 to the spirit of that law, and what innovations 
 go beyond the boundary. No clergyman can, 
 in such cases, be prosecuted, unless he has 
 deliberately resolved to repudiate the authority 
 of his bishop. The old theory of the Church 
 of England, as embodied in our rubrics, con- 
 templates the reference of all such cases to 
 the decision of the bishop ; and to the calm 
 decisions of the bishops exercising a discretion 
 secured to them by law, the overwhelming 
 majority of Churchmen are ready to submit. 
 It is to be noted that, as might be expected, 
 
 1 See the judginent of the House of Lords, in the 
 case of Julius v. The Bishop of Oxford and Another, 
 delivered March 23rd, 1880. 
 
1] 
 
 /rS CA THOLICITY. 
 
 25 
 
 the hundred bishops assembled at Lambeth 
 two years ago, representing a great variety 
 of opinions, and with various prepossessions, 
 agreed that such deference to the constituted 
 authority of each diocese was essential to an 
 Episcopal Church. Their resolution was to 
 the following effect : — " Considering unhappy 
 disputes on questions of ritual, whereby divers 
 congregations in the Church of England and 
 elsewhere have been seriously disquieted, your 
 committee (and the assembled bishops adopted 
 the decision) desire to affirm the principle that 
 no alteration from long-accustomed ritual 
 should be made contrary to the admonition 
 of the bishop of the diocese."^ And subse- 
 quently both Houses of the Convocation of 
 Canterbury, following previous resolutions from 
 both Canterbury 2 and York,^ adopted* a like 
 resolution. Wherever, then, the Church has 
 spoken, the solution of the difficulty has been 
 
 1 Sec the official " Letter " of the Lambeth Conference, 
 1878, p. 40. - Feb. 15th, 1867. 
 
 ^ March 20th, 1867. " July 4th, 1879. 
 
26 THE CHURCH OF THE FUTURE. [i. 
 
 the same, and this solution has now received 
 the sanction both of the legislature and of the 
 highest judicial tribunal. We have then, a 
 doubly authoritative answer to the question — 
 How are the clergy at once to have pressed 
 upon them the duty of a loyal obedience to 
 the Acts of Uniformity and other laws regulat- 
 ing Church affairs, and at the same time to 
 be allowed such liberty in the letter of obedi- 
 ence as the peculiar circumstances of their 
 parishes seem to require ? The oft-quoted 
 words of the Preface to the Prayer-Book had 
 long ago laid down that "forasmuch as no- 
 thing can be so plainly set forth, but doubts 
 may arise in the use and practice of the same, 
 to appease all such diversity, if any arise, and 
 for the resolution of all doubts concerning the 
 manner how to understand, do, and execute the 
 things contained in this Book, the parties 
 that so doubt or diversely take anything shall 
 always resort to the bishop of the diocese, 
 who by his discretion shall take order for the 
 quieting and appeasing of the same ; so that 
 
I] 
 
 nS CATHOLICITY. 
 
 27 
 
 the same order be not contrary to anything 
 contained in this Book. And if the bishop 
 of the diocese be in doubt, then he may send 
 for the resolution thereof to the archbishop." 
 And, as we have seen, the spirit of this deter- 
 mination has now been formally embodied in 
 the resolutions of the hundred b'shops at 
 Lambeth, and of the two Houses of the Con- 
 vocation of Canterbury, as well as in the 
 decisions of the highest court of the realm. 
 The result thus arrived at has appeared to 
 Churchmen of various shades of opinion so 
 consonant with Church principles, that we have 
 before us the example of one of the most 
 devoted and widely respected leaders of that 
 section of the Church which has given its 
 special attention to the claims of what is 
 called " Catholic ritual," publicly acquiescing in 
 the decision of his bishop, though at the 
 sacrifice of retiring from a field of labour 
 \vh!ch was very dear to him. The clergy of 
 the English Church have ever, in times past, 
 been distinguished for their loyalty, their 
 
28 THE CHURCH OF THE FUTURE. [i. 
 
 devotion to the laws and constitution of the 
 well-ordered Church and realm to which they 
 are proud to belong, and their willingness 
 to sacrifice their individual tastes and opinions, 
 if need be, to the maintenance of good order 
 and good government. In this respect the 
 best sons of our Church in the present day arc 
 not below their fathers. Some may prolong 
 strife by raising objections to the authority of 
 the courts which have interpreted the laws of 
 the Church. But even these must soon retire 
 from their totally untenable position, when they 
 are forced to acknowledge that, whatever they 
 may think of the decisions of any court — 
 secular, ecclesiastical, or mixed — it is with 
 their bishops, to whom they have sworn ca- 
 nonical obedience, that they have to reckon 
 in their controversy ; and, moreover, that the 
 authority of the diocesan bishop in such cases, 
 has been afifirmcd by the assembly of a hundred 
 bi.shops at Lambeth and by the constitutional 
 .synod of the province. A few other unquiet spirits, 
 whose tendencies are all in another direction, 
 
ITS CATHOLICITY. 
 
 29 
 
 may still long for strife. There are fanatics who 
 desire to be imprisoned as martyrs, and foolish 
 opponents of those persons, who would seek 
 to gratify their thirst for an easy martyrdom. 
 But most wise men will prefer to trust to the 
 slow, it may be, but steady working out of the 
 Church's laws in its own way. There are 
 those, no doubt, who, feeling dissatisfied with 
 the moderation sure to characterise the de- 
 cisions of the bishops, and tired of waiting 
 till the law takes its course, may agitate for 
 some reversal of the existing law. But I think 
 I am not too sanguine in believing that the 
 overwhelming majority of Churchmen are tired 
 and ashamed of such disputes, and are thank- 
 ful they are dying out ; that our people desire 
 a well-ordered, hearty, and attractive ritual, 
 but are perfectly staunch in their dislike of 
 semi-Romish innovations, deeply attached 
 both to the forms and doctrines of the Church 
 to which they belong, and thankful that these 
 are being quietly, though it may be slowly, en- 
 forced. Happy indeed will it be for the bishops 
 
30 THE CHURCH OF THE FUTURE. [i. 
 
 of the present generation, if, in spite of the in- 
 numerable nrsrcpresentations to wliJch they 
 have been exposed, they shall be proved to 
 have been able, through the exercise of a 
 kindly moderating authority, to close those 
 disputes which at one time seemed likely to 
 rend our Church asunder, and if under their 
 guidance, Churchmen may now direct their 
 thoughts, undistracted, to the real work of 
 their Master, in edifying the souls of the 
 faithful, by dwelling on the central doctrines 
 of the Gospel, in converting sinners, and 
 m resisting the progress of viciousncss and 
 unbelieC 
 
II. 
 
 ITS CONFLICT WITH THE ATHEIST. 
 
 {^Delivered at Tunbridge, on September yd, to the 
 Rural Deaneries of North Mailing, South Mailing, 
 Tunbridge, and Shorekain.) 
 
 My Reverend Brethren and my 
 Brethren the Churchwardens, — In my 
 visitation address delivered last Tuesday at 
 Croydon, I endeavoured to set forth how the 
 Church of England of the present day must 
 be world-wide in its sympathies, and that 
 it has peculiar advantages, involving peculiar 
 responsibilities, in reference to the evils which 
 in this age afflict the Church of Christ in 
 all lands. The peculiar errors, both in doctrine 
 and in practice, with which the Church of 
 
32 THE CHURCH OF THE FUTURE. [ii. 
 
 Christ has to contend elsewhere, are, in their 
 degree powerfully at work amongst ourselves. 
 Therefore it cannot be right for an English 
 bishop, still less for one holding my position, 
 when addressing his diocese on so important 
 an occasion as a visitation, to confine his 
 vision to petty and passing disputes of a 
 narrow ecclesiasticism, or a narrow theology. 
 
 I think we are bound at the present moment 
 to look steadily at the Church's mission in its 
 full extensiveness. There can be no doubt 
 that the aspect of Christian society in the 
 present day is somewhat troubled ; that the 
 Church of Christ and the faith of Christ are 
 passing through a great trial in all regions of 
 the civilized world, and not least among our- 
 selves. There are dark clouds on the horizon 
 already breaking, which may speedily burst 
 into a violent storm. What would be said if, 
 through our weakness, we should give to those 
 who are banded together to resist or ignore 
 Christianity, the encouragement always secured 
 for an advancing foe, v/hen those who have 
 
II.] TTS CONFLICT WITH THE ATHEIST. 33 
 
 to repel the onset are blind to the greatness 
 of the real danger, and occupied with frivolous 
 disputes on minor matters among themselves. 
 Many questions, both important and unim- 
 portant, about which Christian men may 
 differ, can afford to wait for their settlement 
 till formidable dangers, threatening the whole 
 Church, are overpast. 
 
 I proceed, therefore, to consider some of the 
 phases of that conflict for which the Church 
 universal must brace itself in this nineteenth 
 century. Let us be thankful if we can feel 
 ourselves members of a compact, well- 
 ordered section of that Church, strengthened 
 by ennobling traditions of its past history, 
 holding fast by the teaching of the Apostles, 
 and ready to adapt itself, in its maintenance 
 of truth and holiness, to the ever-varying cir- 
 cumstances of the changing ages. Many 
 e.xpcct that, as the world grows old, and the 
 coming of the Lord draws near, there will be 
 some conflict betwixt truth and falsehood, 
 greater perhaps than has ever been known 
 
 D 
 
34 
 
 THE CHURCH OF THE FUTURE. 
 
 [11. 
 
 before. However this may be, it is certain 
 that each age of the Church must expect its 
 own great difficulties. History tells us how 
 error has assumed its own peculiar form ia 
 each century. I can have little doubt what is 
 for us the impending controversy. Superstition 
 may for a time raise its head, and does raise 
 it in a strange and unexpected fashion in some 
 of the countries of Europe, attracting numbers 
 as if it were the only antidote to infidelity, 
 instead of being, as I believe it is, the hand- 
 maid of the same evil influence. Men will 
 never be cured of believing too little by un- 
 scrupulous attempts to involve them in believ- 
 ing too much. Reason will never be effectually 
 restrained from wandering into the vague and 
 doubtful, by unauthorised claims to settle every 
 controversy by authority, and to forbid the 
 exercise of God's great gift of reason, as if to 
 think for ourselves, and . follow the dictates of 
 conscience, were a sin. It is well to note in 
 history how these two evils, superstition and 
 infidelity, act and react in strengthening each 
 
II.] ITS CONFLICT WITH THE ATHEIST. 35 
 
 Other. Still, I cannot doubt that the mor.t 
 formidable of the two for us at present is 
 infidelity. 
 
 It is natural, as life wanes, that we should 
 all look forward. What, then, will be the re- 
 ligion, or if religion, as some wildly suppose, 
 were to be driven from our land, what will be 
 the philosophy of those who stand in our place 
 when we are gone To judge by the loud and 
 unscrupulous talk of some, you might think 
 that we are fast being prepared for acquies- 
 cence in a materialistic atheism. I have no 
 fear that this scourge will desolate our land. 
 It is, indeed, a frightful thought that numbers 
 of our intelligent mechanics seem to be alien- 
 ated from all reh'gious ordinances, that there 
 are in some of our towns secularist halls well 
 filled, that there -is an active propagandism at 
 work for shaking belief in all creeds. Mar- 
 vellous that those who see vividly, in their own 
 painful experience, how unequally good things 
 are distributed in this life, and how much 
 there is always in it of poverty and misery, 
 
 D 2 
 
36 THE CHURCH OF THE FUTURE. [n 
 
 nothwithstanding all attempts to regenerate 
 society by specious schemes of socialistic re- 
 organisation, should be willing to confine their 
 hopes and aspirations to a life which is so 
 irresistibly hastening to its speedy conclusion, 
 and which leaves so little time for any one, 
 even the most favoured of human beings, to 
 enjoy that share of good things which this 
 world can secure for him. It is certain also 
 that, from above, in the regions of literature 
 and of art, efforts to degrade mankind, by 
 denying our high destination, and extinguish- 
 ing the br'ghtest of our hopes, have much 
 encouragement. 
 
 It is a peculiarity of our time that in every 
 household in England, which cultivates an ac- 
 quaintance with the literature of the day, we find 
 lying on our tables, for the use of our sons and 
 daughters, magazines, in the pages of which the 
 doctrines both of natural and revealed religion are 
 assailed. Such publications are placed within 
 our reach at every railway station. No doubt it is 
 urged in defence of these publications that they 
 
II.] ITS CONFLICT WITH THE ATHEIST. 37 
 
 are open to both sides — that if they convey the 
 poison they also convey the antidote, and that 
 good results from this system to the cause of 
 orthodoxy, because many persons who might 
 otherwise never read any literature which was 
 not of a sceptical character, will find within the 
 pages of such books sound treatises advocating 
 old truths, and will thus have good thoughts 
 forced on their attention. But, obviously, there 
 are two sides to this argument, and it may be 
 that the system of which we are speaking has a 
 tendency to lead the uninformed to regard all 
 questions as open, and truth as very doubtful. 
 It cannot, I think, but be allowed that this 
 peculiarity of our periodical literature is a 
 symptom of dangerous influences at work, even 
 if it does not foster them. 
 
 What shall we say, then, is the form which 
 this evil influence most commonly assumes ? 
 Is it simply sceptical, throwing doubt on all 
 things } Or does it, under a specious show 
 of having proved the doubtfulness of things 
 spiritual, proceed to dogmatise respecting 
 
38 THE CHURCH OF THE FUTURE. [n. 
 
 things material, as the sole, real, and valuable 
 inheritance of man ? 
 
 First, agnosticism. What is it ? Its name 
 announces that it knows nothing. Would that 
 its professions of ignorance were accompanied 
 by their logical result of a philosophical hu- 
 mility! An agnostic, I take it, is one who 
 says, "I know nothing of things spiritual and 
 metaphysical. You tell me that there is a 
 world beyond the grave, and that there is 
 something within me which is destined to live 
 in that world, when all the material objects, of 
 whose existence alone I can be certain, have 
 crumbled into dust ; you tell me old stories of 
 men believing that they had intercourse in time 
 past with a spiritual being, who dwells some- 
 where above the clouds. I know nothing which 
 is capable of corroborating such fancies. Why 
 am I not to regard them as the dreams of a 
 heated imagination .> I want something certain, 
 and I find this certainty only in the physical 
 phenomena around mc, and in the unchanging 
 laws of outward nature. It is just possible that 
 
II.] ITS CONFLICT WITH THE ATHEIST. 39 
 
 there may be some truth in your vague imagin- 
 ings, but I cannot ascertain it, and therefore, 
 for all practical purposes, I shall consider them 
 to be but vain. Life, with its enjoyments and 
 pursuits, as I see and feel them, is full of in- 
 terest ; but what I was before I came into this 
 world concerns me little, and as little am I con- 
 cerned respecting anything that can hereafter 
 befall the particles of which I am composed. 
 You say there is a Supreme Intelligence, ani- 
 mated by a Father's love, which regulates all 
 things. I see no proof of it. The laws of 
 nature roll on with iron uniformity. Whoever 
 tries to act against them is crushed by their 
 irresistible advance." I do not say that the 
 agnostic argues like some Epicureans — " Let 
 us eat and drink for to-morrow we die"- — but, 
 as I understand him, he .speaks thus—" Let 
 us confine our thoughts to what we are certain 
 of Let us conform ourselves to the irresistible 
 course of this all-pervading machinery, of which 
 we find ourselves a part. Let us make the 
 most of our present material existence. We 
 
40 THE CHURCH OF THE FUTURE. [ii. 
 
 can do no better ; and attempts to act as if 
 we knew more than we do will only make 
 things worse. Priests and so-called theo- 
 logical philosophers, all the world over, have 
 only been misleading us. They might, perhaps, 
 have their place in the world's childhood, when 
 men were incapable of a training in the rules 
 and operations of an exact and positive philo- 
 sophy ; but the world has come to its man- 
 hood now, or is fast approaching it. I know," 
 says this modern philosopher, "nothing but 
 what I can observe and classify, and I take 
 no interest in your theologies and vain 
 philosophies." 
 
 The better feelings of man contradict these 
 sophisms. An eminent Protestant pastor told 
 mc lately, in Paris, that, being called to conduct 
 funeral rites in most of the cemeteries of that 
 capital, he had made a point of inquiring of 
 the custodians of these grounds as to the rela- 
 tive number of religious and of civil, that is, 
 non-religious, funerals, and that he was assured 
 that the civil funerals reached a scarcely appre- 
 
II.] ITS CONFLICT WITH THE ATHEIST. 4 1 
 
 ciable per-centage.^ France has usually been 
 regarded as the stronghold of an atheistical 
 philosophy. Perhaps the claim to this pre- 
 eminence may be disputed now by some other 
 continental countries, but the fact of which I 
 was thus assured is worth dwelling on. It 
 seems to show one of two things, either that 
 theories of atheistic scepticism, though they may 
 satisfy some minds and make them altogether 
 indifferent in life, are rudely shaken when the 
 great and undeniable fact of death casts its 
 shadow over the human soul : that lingering 
 hopes and fears, against which the so-called 
 philosopher had striven, assert themselves irre- 
 sistibly in the presence of this great emergency ; 
 or this at least it proves, that in every family 
 those who are influenced by such hopes and 
 fears, though they may be but the frailer of 
 its members, assert their power in times of 
 mourning, strong in the promjatings of nature, 
 and determined not to be overborne by the 
 pratings of a cold-hearted would-be-philosophic 
 * See Appendix B. 
 
'42 THE CHURCH OF THE FUTURE. [11. 
 
 few. I think we may take some encourage- 
 ment from the report thus made, that this 
 atheistical scepticism is neither so widely spread 
 nor so powerful as some fear. 
 
 Secondly, if the world is not about to be- 
 come agnostic, certainly there is little fear of 
 its falling under the dominion of an atheism 
 which is dogmatic. Practical atheists we have 
 everywhere, if atheism be the virtual denial 
 of God in conduct though not in words. But 
 surely the boasted enlightenment of this cen- 
 tury will never tolerate the gross ignorance, 
 the arrogant self-conceit, which presumes to 
 dogmatise as to things confessedly beyond its 
 ken, and boldly asserts because it cannot see 
 God that therefore He is not. A coarse ma- 
 terialism which tells a man, because he is not 
 conscious in himself of any stirring of spiritual 
 life within him, that he may boldly deny the 
 existence of all spirit, and professes to know 
 that which its very theory proclaims to be 
 unknowable, will surely never make progress 
 amongst any but the most debased and 
 
II.] ITS CONFLICT WITH THE ATHEIST. 43 
 
 ignorant, in an age which prides itself on test- 
 ing everything by experiment, and on not 
 stirring one step beyond the calm convictions 
 which an inquiring reason sanctions. 
 
 But, if we do not fear either of these an- 
 tagonists, this is no reason why we should 
 not call to mind sound arguments, many of 
 them very old and very commonplace, but 
 not therefore the less forcible, whereby we 
 may withstand these baneful influences, and 
 thus hope to avert the ruin which they 
 may bring on the unwary. Say to the 
 objector — " You profess, as I understand you, 
 to believe nothing which is not capable of 
 being tested by the ordinary rules which 
 govern experiment in things material. How 
 then do you know that you yourself exist } 
 How do you know that the perceptions of 
 your senses are not mere delusions, and that 
 there is anything without you answering to 
 what your mind conceives 1 I ask you further, 
 Have you a mind ? and if you have not, what 
 is it that enables you to think and reason, 
 
44 THE CHURCH OF THE FUTURE. [ii. 
 
 and fear, and hope ? Are these conditions of 
 your being the mere results of yo\ir material 
 organism, like the headache which springs 
 from indigestion, or the high sp'rits engen- 
 dered by too much wine ? Are you some- 
 thing better than a vegetable highly cultivated, 
 or than your brothers of the lower animals ? 
 and if so, what is it that differentiates your 
 superiority ? Why do things without you 
 obey your will ? Have you a will ? and, if 
 so, what is it ? I think you must allow that 
 intellect is a thing almost divine, if there be 
 anything divine ; and I think also you must 
 allow that it is not a thing to be propagated 
 as we propagate well-made and high-bred 
 cattle. Whence came Alexander the Great ? 
 whence Charlemagne ? whence the First Napo- 
 leon ? Was it through mere accident or spon- 
 taneous generation that they sprung up to 
 alter by their genius and overwhelming will 
 the destinies of the world ? Whence came 
 Homer, Shakespeare, Bacon ? Whence came 
 all the great historians? Whence came Plato 
 
II.] ITS CONFLICT WITH THE ATHEIST. 45 
 
 and all the bright lights of divine philosophy, 
 of oratory, of poetry ? Their influence, after 
 all, you must allow to be quite as wide and 
 as enduring as any influences which are the 
 direct product of those positive material 
 sciences which you worship. Do you think 
 that all these great minds — for they are minds, 
 and their work was not the mere product of 
 a highly organized material frame — were the 
 outcome of some system of material gene- 
 ration, which your so-called science can sub- 
 ject to rule, and teach men how to produce 
 by growth as they grow vegetables ? Nay, 
 will you venture to deny that in the lives 
 and teaching of all the great men who have 
 swayed the world, including the leaders in 
 your own field of science, there has been 
 evidence of some divine intention calling them 
 into being, preserving them amid the accidents 
 and difficulties of life till they had accom- 
 plished the purposes for which that Divine 
 Intelligence had shaped them ? To sum up : 
 We challenge these rcasoners to look at facts. 
 
46 THE CHURCH OF THE FUTURE. [il. 
 
 which they pride themselves on taking for 
 their guide,— the fact that they live ; the fact 
 that they trust the perceptions of their senses ; 
 the facts of the world's history and of the way 
 in which mind, and not body, has dominated 
 it ; the fact that no knowledge of the wisest 
 among us can even approach to the solution 
 of this mystery of the power of mind ; and 
 we call on them, upon their own principles, 
 to abandon their materialistic theories, and 
 to worship an Intelligence, higher than their 
 own, which pervades all things and regulates 
 all things, and has stamped upon their very 
 nature the acceptance of certain principles 
 which they could not gain for themselves and 
 cannot test by experience. 
 
 Again, on the hard ground of strictest logi- 
 cal argumentation, we challenge these men 
 to give any intelligible account of how this 
 bright world and all that lives in it came into 
 existence without the action of a great first 
 cause, that is, God. Do you say it was evolved 
 in the lapse of countless ages t I ask you, as 
 
11.] ITS CONFLICT WITH THE ATHEIST. 47 
 
 you have been asked a hundred times before, 
 evolved from what, and how? If human life 
 be the refined product of a thousand evolu- 
 tions from the original protoplasm, how was 
 the protoplasm endowed with this power 
 of an almost endless fecundity? You gain 
 nothing by driving your hypothesis back 
 through the dark mists of an unknown an - 
 tiquity — at last you must come to something 
 which could not generate itself and endow 
 itself with marvellous powers. You may 
 mount your world upon an elephant, and your 
 elephant upon a tortoise, and invent as many 
 inferior animals as you please for the tortoise 
 to ride upon ; but at last you must come to 
 something wh'ch has in itself the power of 
 supporting itself, and that something must be 
 God. No one has ever yet been able to refute 
 the old argument necessitating a great First 
 Cause. And, if there hz such a Cause, it is the 
 Author of our being, and it must be by the 
 will of this Cause tliat through whatever length 
 of time, and amidst whatever changes, the 
 
48 THE CHURCH OF THE FUTURE. [n. 
 
 world and all that it inhabit and the whole 
 material universe have sprung into being. If 
 there be such a Cause is it possible to divest 
 yoiirself of the conviction that this First Cause 
 is something not akin to the mere material 
 frame, whose development has sprung from a 
 power imparted by this Cause ? You may ob- 
 ject to the phrase, as too figurative, that "God 
 breathed into man's nostrils the breath of life 
 and he became a living soul ; " but you cannot, 
 I think, on your own principles, escape from 
 the inference, logically deduced, that in some 
 one or other of its forms, however long ago, 
 this whole material system, in whatever primi- 
 tive and undeveloped form it then existed, was, 
 if we may not say breathed upon, at least in- 
 fluenced and directed and endowed with new 
 powers by an eternal and self-existing mind. 
 And if such a mind was in existence at the 
 first, do you suppose it died or fell asleep when 
 it had fashioned and wound up the material 
 machine ? A self-existing and eternal mind ; 
 how can it know death, or anything akin to 
 
n.] ITS CONFLICT WITH THE ATHEIST. 49 
 
 death ? The Lord from whom creation springs 
 at first must be its Lord ever. He may, 
 or may not, put forth His powers in the 
 direct regulation of its processes, but these 
 powers, almighty and omnipresent, if eternal, 
 must exist for ever ; and God, being the 
 Creator of the universe once, must, if there 
 is any meaning in the terms by which we 
 strive to express His existence, be ever Lord 
 of it. Moreover, if, in all sincerity, the man 
 of science, who is guided by real facts, 
 must allow that in man there is a mind as 
 well as a body, this mind, at however vast a 
 distance it may be placed from its original, 
 and however faint its resemblance, must have 
 something within it akin to that mind by which 
 it wa-s generated. It must be more like the 
 Eternal Mind than the body is, for it has 
 this in common with the Eternal Mind, that 
 it thinks and wills. May I not believe that you 
 will grant so much as this.' Will your experi- 
 mental philosophers refuse to take cognisance 
 of what the strictest observation shows to be 
 
 E 
 
50 THE CHURCH OF THE FUTURE. [ii. 
 
 the almost universal characteristics of the 
 human mind — its hopes, its fears, its bright 
 imaginings, its sense of right and wrong, feeble 
 at first, but proved by experience to be capable 
 of development, and therefore existing in its 
 rudimentary state even where inactive ? Man 
 has something within him which speaks of God, 
 of something above this fleeting world ; and 
 rules of right and wrong have their foundation 
 elsewhere than in man's opinion. Do not tell 
 me that in the savage these powers are scarcely 
 perceptible — no more perceptible is his power 
 of understanding the propositions of Euclid ; 
 yet he must have by nature some power of 
 understanding them, however latent and unde- 
 veloped. Had he not such a power within him, 
 not all your education could ever make him un- 
 derstand them. The savage has an intellect, even 
 when it is least instructed, and he has a con- 
 science, too, even when it knows least of God 
 and of right and wrong. Let the experimental 
 philosopher, then, look to the nature of man, 
 not the undeveloped nature of the child or the 
 
II.] ITS CONFLICT WITH THE ATHEIST. 51 
 
 savage, but that matured nature which Bishop 
 Butler considers the model of the real man, and 
 therefore the specimen of what he is in truth. 
 Let him observe the facts of human nature and 
 listen to its utterances, and he will find all things 
 proclaiming that there is some immutable eternal 
 distinction between right and wrong ; that there 
 is a God who is on the side of right, that man is 
 not a mere material body, but is animated by a 
 spirit within ; that this spirit has in it longings 
 and capacities which cannot be satisfied in the 
 brief space of seventy years — that he is made 
 for immortality, and is assured that he is im- 
 mortal. Are these very old arguments ? Well, 
 they are the answers to very old errors, and old 
 errors do not become new by being expressed 
 here and there in new language, and by the array 
 of any number of new facts, on the misinterpre- 
 tation of which they strive to ground their claims 
 to be believed as truths. I take it that the 
 old writers, heathen, Jewish, and Christian, have, 
 in truth, exhausted the arguments on this very 
 old subject, and that they are not wrong in 
 
52 THE CHURCH OF THE FUTURE. [n. 
 
 their conclusion that it is not the wise man 
 or the true philosopher and man of science, 
 but his reverse, who says in his heart "There 
 is no God." Great is truth, and will prevail. 
 
 I do not fear, then, that either an atheistical 
 agnosticism, or still less a dogmatic atheism, is 
 the philosophy of the future, destined to establish 
 itself, as it wildly hopes, on the ruins of the Church 
 of Christ. The only fear I have is that be&are 
 such systt^ms are smitten by the sword of sound 
 argument, and ignominiously driven forth by the 
 revolt against them of all man's higher feelings, 
 they may do much harm to unstable souls. How 
 shall we prevent this 1 Sound arguments must 
 be at hand and easily found by those who have 
 the skill to use them. But there is always some 
 attraction in daring speculations which treat 
 contemptuously time-honoured convictions, and 
 try every art to invest themselves with an a'r 
 of ingenuity and novelty. The best safeguard 
 will be found in the development of the soul's 
 h-ghest and most God-like instincts ; and, thank 
 God, we Christians believe that in an attempt 
 
II.] ITS CONFLICT WITH THE ATHEIST. 53 
 
 to cherish and train these we have the aid of a 
 power which is Divine. This power will helj? 
 Christ's servants in their endeavour to fan tlie 
 Divine spark which is to be found in every 
 human soul, and to kindle from it a light which 
 will preserve the soul from walking in darkness 
 and guide it in the search after truth and 
 holiness. 
 
 My brethren of the clergy, you will be 
 watchful for your people in this matter, especi- 
 ally for the young of your flocks, for poison is 
 widely disseminated among them, and must be 
 met by an antidote. My brethren of the laity, 
 you will be on your guard also, both for your- 
 selves and for the younger and more easily 
 impressible members of your families. This 
 Church of ours in this age has great responsi- 
 bilities, and needs much wisdom and discretion, 
 in respect both of the intellectual speculation, 
 and the moral conduct of the coming age. Do 
 not suppose that in setting forth the trite argu- 
 ments, by which from old times a materialistic 
 atheism has been' discredited, I intend to 
 
54 THE CHURCH OF THE FUTURE. [ii, 
 
 suggest to you that you should have these 
 arguments ever on your hps ; stiU less would I 
 advise the clergy to introduce them into ordinary 
 sermons. Beware lest, in a mistaken zeal to 
 resist materialism, you give your opponents 
 occasion to scoff at your injudicious treatment 
 of subjects which are very intricate, and which 
 require much knowledge before we can handle 
 them in detail. If it be true that such per- 
 nicious error as we have been speaking of finds 
 its way into our homes, and reaches the rawest 
 and least well-informed of our people through 
 much of the current literature of the day, it is 
 well to proclaim that we are not ashamed to 
 rest our belief in God and a life spiritual 
 and immortal on the intellectual basis of the 
 old arguments by which great heroes of the 
 human race smote down similar sophistical 
 reasonings in the old times. But, practically, 
 little is gained for the good of souls in such 
 cases by argument, except that it is well to 
 have the feeling of security \\\v.c\\ the know- 
 ledge of such arguments in reserve confers. If 
 
II.] ITS COXFLICT WITH THE ATHEIST. 55 
 
 we would have those whom we can influence 
 free from this wasting taint, let us teach them 
 practically to live as in the presence of God, 
 to hold intercourse with Mim, and love the 
 thought of Him as an ever-present and affec- 
 tionate Father. Teach them practically to 
 listen to conscience as His voice, and to look 
 forward as solace, in the midst of life's cares 
 and sorrows, to the prospect of being admitted 
 at last into His immediate and felt presence. 
 The true cure for po'sonous error is to be 
 found, not in speculations, but in that practical 
 grasp of truth which unites the soul to God 
 and the spiritual world through the daily grow- 
 ing purification and elevation of the life and 
 character. All experience shows also that in 
 no way can this progressive purification and 
 elevation be so effectually secured as by setting 
 forth the adorablcness of the Everlasting Father 
 through His reflected image in the Incarnate 
 Son, and through all the wonderful channels 
 in which the human soul has its love for God 
 drawn forth by feeling how the Son of God 
 
56 THE CHURCH OF THE FUTURE. [il. 
 
 in His life and death, meets all its needs. 
 There is nothing illogical in introducing dis- 
 tinctly Christian arguments in refutation of 
 a system which appears so entirely incapable 
 of being influenced by a reverent . Christianity 
 tliat it rejects the basis of all natural religion. 
 Mark the way in which Christ manifested in 
 the Gospels does take possession of the heart, 
 and draw it so powerfully to the Everlasting 
 Father, that, before the brightness of the Sun 
 of Righteousness, the mists which rise from 
 a gross materialistic atheism break up and 
 are scattered like the clouds of night before 
 the dawn. 
 
III. 
 
 ITS CONFLICT WITH THE DEIST. 
 
 {Delivered at Dover, on September Tth, to the 
 Rural Deaneries of Dover, Elham, East Bridge, and 
 Sandwich.) 
 
 My Reverend Brethren, and my 
 Brethren the Churchwardens, — Those 
 of you who have read the addresses I 
 deh'vered at Croydon and at Tunbridge will 
 know that I propose to myself, during this 
 Visitation, to dwell more on matters which 
 concern the Church generally than on ques- 
 tions peculiar to ourselves. Since I met 
 the diocese at Tunbridge last Friday, however, 
 one matter of very great interest among our- 
 selves has been settled by the Legislature — I 
 
58 THE CHURCH OF THE FUTURE. [u 
 
 mean the Burials Bill— and I think it well to 
 prefix to this address a few words on that 
 subject. You all know the part I have for 
 several years taken in the controversy which 
 the Burials Bill has raised. I have been 
 anxious that its inevitable settlement should 
 be so arranged as to relieve the clergy, as 
 much as possible, from the hardship against 
 which four thousand of them protested in the 
 time of Archbishop Longley, arising from the 
 obligation, often felt to be intolerable, of bury- 
 ing without distinction' all persons not excluded 
 by the strict letter of the Rubrics, though they 
 might be known to have died in the actual 
 commission of scandalous offences. No doubt 
 the danger of a clergyman being exposed to 
 prosecution, on his refusal to use the whole 
 burial service in such cases, had been exagger- 
 ated ; but still some relief was wanted. We 
 have been fortunate in having this burial 
 question made the subject of legislation under 
 the auspices of a Lord Chancellor of whom no 
 one doubts that he has given the strongest 
 
111.] ITS CONFLICT WITH THE DEIST. 59 
 
 possible pledges of his devout attachment to 
 the Established Church. And both he, and 
 I am bound to add, from what I personally 
 know for certain, the majority of the Hou.^e of 
 Commons, have felt that it would be unfair to 
 concede a settlement of the grievance alleged 
 by Nonconformists, without a corresponding 
 concession, so far as the circumstances of the 
 case render it possible, to what was allowed to 
 be the reasonable grievance of the clergy. This, 
 then, has been one of my main endeavours in 
 this controversy — to preserve the substance, 
 even if we were unable to maintain the actual 
 words, of that arrangement by which the Con- 
 vocation of the Province of Canterbury pro- 
 posed to meet this grievance of the clergy. In 
 this we have been successful. Moreover, with 
 the concurrence of a large majority in the 
 House of Commons, we have maintained that 
 no services shall be introduced into our church- 
 yards which are not Christian. I cannot believe 
 that there are any among us who do not realize 
 the importance of this distinction. I cannot 
 
6o 
 
 CHURCH OF THE FUTURE. [iii. 
 
 think that there is any man, holding the faith 
 of the Church of England, who does not fee^ 
 that there is an infinite difference between those 
 who profess to believe in the Lord Jesus Christ' 
 and those who repudiate Him. I should be 
 astonished if there were any who really held 
 that, provided a man is a Nonconformist or a 
 Roman Catholic, he might, on account of his 
 separation from our own Church, almost as 
 well be an atheist or a Mohammedan. There- 
 fore I greatly prize the retention of the clause 
 which provides that all services in our church- 
 yards shall be Christian as well as orderly. I 
 am glad, also, that the rights of the clergy are 
 maintained in the general care and superintend- 
 ence of their churchyards. I am glad also that, 
 if they can state plain reasons for objecting, 
 they may refuse to allow funerals on Sunday, 
 and certain other holy days. Having once 
 made up my mind to concede the liberty of in- 
 terring Nonconformists, who desired to be buried 
 near the graves of their more orthodox fathers, 
 in places which I was glad to find that they 
 
Ill] ITS COXFLICT WITH THE DEIST. 6 1 
 
 professed to regard as sacred on account of 
 family or other tender associations, I could not 
 give a conscientious support to the introduction 
 of clauses into this Bill which would, in my 
 judgment, and that of the Government and the 
 majority of the Legislature, have been fatal to 
 its principle. And if in this particular I have 
 differed from several of my brethren on the 
 bench, and from a large body of the clergy, I 
 feel sure that none of you would have wished 
 me to act against my conscientious convictions. 
 It is a satisfaction to me to know that many of 
 the most respected of the clergy, in this diocese 
 and clsev/here, entirely agree with me in the 
 general course I have taken upon this whole 
 subject. On the other hand, I am aware that, 
 not unnaturally, the change which this Act will 
 introduce is very distasteful to many of you 
 I cannot but think that some of the clergy have 
 exaggerated to themselves the greatness of the 
 contemplated change, and I can understand 
 their dissatisfaction. But I can scarcely doubt 
 that, as a body, they will, on reflection, allow that 
 
62 
 
 THE CHURCH OF THE FUTURE. 
 
 [III. 
 
 a measure directly supported by at least one- 
 half of the episcopal bench as necessary and 
 right under the circumstances in which we find 
 ourselves, and acquiesced in, however unwill- 
 ingly, by the great majority of the bishops, as 
 inevitable, cannot be so unwise and bad as 
 some excited spirits have represented it. My 
 own hope is that it will serve to strengthen the 
 Church by removing a most painful cause of 
 controversy, uniting with us more closely in 
 death those whom unfortunate circumstances 
 have alienated in their lifetime from the benefi- 
 cent ministration of the Church of their fathers. 
 
 Let me, in leaving this subject, commend to 
 the careful attention of all who have been un- 
 duly excited by this controversy, the touching 
 words in which ,the Bishop of Lincoln closed 
 the debate in the House of Lords last Friday. 
 No one could be more conscientiously opposed 
 to this measure, from first to last, than that 
 man of deep learning and holy life. Let all, 
 therefore, who value his counsels ponder well 
 the weighty words which he addressed to 
 
in.] ITS CONFLICT WITH THE DEIST. 63 
 
 them on the practical duties which he before 
 them. I have thought his objections to this 
 measure exaggerated, but I do not fail to 
 acknowledge how formidable an obstacle in the 
 way of the settlement of this question has been 
 presented by his conscientious convictions, and 
 how important, therefore, it is that he has given 
 to those who may be expected to be influenced 
 by his decisions, advice so wise and truly Chris- 
 tian. I would only add to what he has said a 
 few words of advice to those for whose sake 
 chiefly this Bill has been passed into a law. I 
 am aware that violent agitators among them 
 are altogether dissatisfied with it, on account of 
 its Christian character, and the measure of con- 
 sideration which it has given to the rights and 
 feelings of the clergy. To these men it is 
 useless for me to appeal. I have never doubted 
 that they have further objects behind. Many 
 desire the utter subversion of our Established 
 Church, and are ready, for this object, to unite 
 with the foes of all religion. Such assaults, 
 I need not say, we are determined to with- 
 
64 THE CHURCH OF THE FUTURE. 
 
 [HI. 
 
 stand. But may I not siy to the great body 
 of religious Nonconformists in tliis country, that 
 we look confidently to them, to their good 
 principle, and good faith, and kindly Christian 
 feeling, to falsify the dismal vaticinations which 
 have been uttered in some quarters, and to 
 show that, over the grave at least, they desire 
 that the controversies which keep us asunder 
 should be hushed, and that nothing should be 
 heard in the ground in which we lay our dead, 
 in sure and certain hope of a resurrection, but 
 words of peaceful hope and comfort, which 
 will approve tliemselves to Him who is the 
 Resurrection and the Life ? 
 
 And now I leave questions respecting our 
 own Church's privileges, and the differences 
 of opinion among ourselves. Now, as at 
 Tunbridge last Friday, I desire to draw your 
 attention to some phases of that conflict which 
 has certainly begun, both in our own and other 
 lands, between the Church and Faith of Christ 
 on one side, and those who deny His power. 
 I proceed to ask, what will, in all human 
 
111.] ITS CONFLICT WITH THE DEIST. 65 
 
 probability, be in England the fate or condi- 
 tion of the Church and belief of the future ? 
 We are threatened by some, as I have already 
 said, with the overthrow of all Churches, and 
 the substitution for them of a philosophy. 
 The Church must always be greatly affected 
 by the prevailing philosophy, as both the 
 schools of the prophets and the schools of 
 the philosophers profess to have in the main 
 the same object — namely, to lead men to the 
 truth. I stated at Tunbridge my reasons for 
 believing that neither we nor our sons will 
 see the triumph of an atheistical philosophy ; 
 but are we so sure that we shall not be handed 
 over to a cold Deism .'' England had some 
 difficulty in making its escape from such a 
 system in the eighteenth century. Thanks 
 principally to Bishop Butler, and to the other 
 lights which reflected hie teaching, though in 
 varying forms ; thanks to Paley, to Douglas, 
 and to Watson, all four of them ministers of 
 our English Church, we escaped this evil. 
 Thanks also to Lardner, however doubtful 
 
 F 
 
66 THE CHURCH OF THE FUTURE. ill. 
 
 might be the form of dogmatic Christianity 
 to which he adhered, when Deism was smitten 
 by his great work, and thanks to the returning 
 good sense of the EngHsh nation, revolting, 
 towards the end of the century, from the im- 
 piety and wild schemes of the great French 
 Revolution, we were saved. Thanks, p^erhaps, 
 most of all, to that revival of deep religious 
 feeling which Wesley and Whitfield stirred in 
 our Church before they or their followers left 
 it, and to that school distinctly within our own 
 body with which to the end they maintained 
 friendly relations — Fletcher of Madeley and 
 Romaine, and the others who set before their ^ 
 fellow Churchmen the example of a deepened 
 spiritual life. Thanks, also, earlier, to such 
 men as Robert Nelson, who had, in the be- 
 ginning of the eighteenth century, received 
 and handed down from the seventeenth the 
 teaching of Bishop Andrewes. Thanks, also, 
 to other men little known, who, following the 
 same guidance, gave here and there through 
 the century the same teaching to their fellow 
 
III.] ITS CONFLICT WITH THE DEIST. 6/ 
 
 Churchmen. Who that understands the words 
 he uses can charge the theology of Bishop 
 Andrewes with being unspiritual 1 Thanks, I 
 say, then, to all these lights, some of them 
 shining brightly in conspicuous places, some 
 bearing their torch through the length and 
 breadth of the land, and some burning very 
 feebly, scarce observed in solitary places, — 
 thanks to the united efforts of them all, and 
 to God's overruling providence, the cold system 
 which seemed at one time likely to freeze all 
 vital warmth out of our nation's creed, was 
 thoroughly discredited by sound argument and 
 deep feeling, and our countrymen as a body 
 resolved, that, whatever their form of Chris- 
 tianity might be, they would not be satisfied 
 with becoming mere Deists. 
 
 And so it appears we are not to speak 
 of the revival of " Deism " now, for the 
 name has become discredited, and our new 
 philosophers are not " Deists " but " Theists.'> 
 What the distinction is I leave them to 
 explain. The old giant who frightened, not 
 
 F 2 
 
68 THE CHURCH OF THE FUTURE. [ill. 
 
 without cause, our fathers of the last century- 
 was certainly smitten by the Davids of that 
 time with their sling stones, and they were 
 able even to cut off his head as he lay 
 prostrate ; and now the successor of the old 
 evil comes out in a new guise and with a 
 new name. Yet I do not know that the 
 system is so new as it would represent itself. 
 Indeed, it is only an old foe revived. We 
 need no new arguments to meet old errors. 
 Till the old tried arguments are refuted, which 
 they never have been, they are enough, and 
 we are right to fall b.ick on them. It is 
 maintained indeed by the Theist that he must 
 not be confounded with the Deist of the last 
 century, for this reason, that he grounds his 
 system not on the mere conclusions of pure 
 intellect, but also on the suggest'ons of the 
 conscience and the heart, and he cont.-nds that 
 he is thus distinguished from most of the old 
 Deists by a far deeper religious sentiment. 
 Stdl, after full allowance has been made for 
 A\hat is thus urged, the fact remains that 
 
III.] ITS CONFLICT WITH THE DEIST. 69 
 
 modern Theism, like the old Deism, is a setting 
 up of what used to be called natural religion 
 in the place of revealed. It teaches that all 
 man wants of religious knowledge, all, indeed, 
 that is really true, may be known by the un- 
 aided human reason, taking that word in its 
 widest sense, and ought, through reason, to be 
 elicited, as their essence, from the forms in 
 which it has been presented, distorted, and 
 caricatured by the superstitions which have 
 sprung from man's imagination excited by his 
 fears. 
 
 Now, it is a long time since Lessing, in 
 Nathan dcr Weise, set forth the picture of 
 a father who had a valuable ring, of which 
 he wished the worthiest of his three sons to 
 be the inheritor ; but as th2 three sons could 
 not all have the precious ring, and he hesitated 
 himself to decide among them., he determined 
 to conceal which was the true or'ginal, and had 
 two counterfeits made, slightly different, it 
 might be, but still very like the true. These 
 three rings he bequeathed to his three sons, 
 
/O CHURCH OF THE FUTURE. m.] 
 
 the Jew, the Christian, and the Mohammedan, 
 and it was impossible for any of the three to 
 prove that his own was the genuine ring. We 
 may extend Less"ng's fable to suit modern 
 views. Perhaps our modern philosophers would 
 enlarge the family circle to whom these jewels 
 were bequeathed, by admitting into it the 
 Buddhist, and the Hindoo, and the red Indian 
 who speaks of a great Spirit and immortal 
 hunting grounds, and even the degraded savage 
 of Africa, or so-called aboriginal tribes of other 
 continent-;, who have little religion beyond 
 their terror for their Medicine-Man, and perhaps 
 some dim worsh'p of their ancestors, tempered 
 by a dread of evil spirits. Some of these 
 must, of course, be allowed to have as their 
 talisman very degraded copies indeed of the 
 original Divine jewel ; but our phiLsopher 
 requires each of them to bear his part in that 
 natural history of religions, which throws the 
 creed of all into the cauldron, and by the 
 alchemy of an enl'ghtcncd reason hopes to 
 bring out from their fus'on some likeness, 
 
in.] irS CONFLICT IV/TH THE DEIST. 71 
 
 more or less perfect, of that archetype which 
 they all resemble, though in very d fferent 
 degrees. 
 
 Now it must not be taken for granted with- 
 out proof that all the religions of the earth 
 have so much in common that they can 
 thus be classified together. For example, with 
 respect to Buddhism, about which we hear so 
 much nowadays, ought it not, in any sound 
 logical classification, to stand apart by itself.^ 
 Is it true that the highest aspiration to wh'ch 
 it would raise the soul, is that of annihilation, 
 or absorption into the animating principle of 
 the universe.' Is it true that there are grave 
 doubts whether it believes in any personal 
 God, and that it represents to its ordinary 
 followers as the legitimate object of worship, 
 not any God, but an almost infinite succession 
 of godlike men f The claim which it makes 
 to our attention is rather due to the supposed 
 purity of its precepts, than to its teachings 
 about the Divine Being. Judaism, Christianity, 
 and Mohammedanism have creeds which 
 
72 THE CHURCH OF THE FUTURE. [ui. 
 
 distinctly teach the existence of One Personal 
 God : they can well, therefore, be compared 
 together. Even the old . Greek and Roman 
 Paganism, with all its multiplicity of deities, 
 had some vague apprehension of the nature 
 of the one Supreme Being, the basis and 
 originator of all things. The far-off Oriental 
 religions require to be studied more accurately 
 than they seem yet to have been studied before 
 any philosophy can enucleate the teaching of 
 their complicated systems, respecting the belief 
 in the existence of one all-powerful God, and 
 a real life of the human soul after death. 
 
 But, after all, it is not our business to follow 
 the steps of our thcistical philosophers, through 
 the labyrinth by which they would prove that 
 the rudiments of the system they finally put 
 up for our worship are to be found from an 
 examination of all the religions of the earth. 
 It will be more to our purpose to look care- 
 fully to the result of their speculations, rather 
 than to the steps by which they have arrived 
 at it. It is our business to test how far it 
 
III.] ITS CONFLICT WITH 7 HE DEIST 73 
 
 meets man's wants, and will hold him up in the 
 day of trouble. A God who hides Himself 
 except so far as He may be known through 
 the efforts of the pure intellect, or in the voices 
 of the longing heart ; a life on earth in which He 
 scarcely can be held to interfere, as all things 
 move on irresistibly by the laws He has estab- 
 lished ; a life of the spirit hereafter, if there 
 be such life, not assured by any direct mani- 
 festations from above, but dimly conjectured 
 as a probable expectation — this, I think, is 
 the residuum supposed to represent the sacred 
 substance which all the confused earthly copies 
 have been caricaturing. The question is whether 
 this theism is likely to prevail as the philosophy 
 or religion of the coming age. In order to 
 answer this question it is necessary to consider 
 how far the system will stand the test of a 
 sound logic. Of course, we cannot here run 
 through the lengthened series of those evidences 
 by which revealed religion has been cohfirmcd, 
 in opposition to the Deism of the last ccntur\'. 
 Not a charge, but a library, would be required 
 
74 I^HE CHURCH OF THE FUTURE. [iii. 
 
 to develop these arguments. Let me very 
 briefly recapitulate a few which I think it will 
 be hard for our antagonist to dispose of 
 
 First, an a priori argument. If there is a 
 God, which the theist allows, is it not naturally 
 to be expected that He will make himself 
 felt If He be a God of love and of truth, can 
 we suppose that, being all-powerful, He will 
 allow His creatures to drift far away from truth 
 and holiness, and to establish among themselves 
 a state of internecine hatred and warfaie where 
 there m'ght be love and peace, and allow such 
 a state of things to spread over the whole 
 earth without putting forth one effort to make 
 Himself known ? The experience of the history 
 of religions shows that the unaided human 
 reason, and the best natural feelings of the 
 human soul, cannot of themselves master and 
 secure and uphold pure - conceptions of the 
 Godhead, and of man's relations to Him. Is 
 it, then, unreasonable to suppose that, in 
 order to prevent such ideas from perishing 
 from the whole earth, the all-powerful God 
 
III.] ITS COXFLICT WITH THE DEIST. 75 
 
 may naturally be expected from time to time 
 to manifest Himself in some unusual way, that 
 He may make Himself better felt and known, 
 at least to some portion of the human race, 
 which may ultimately be the means of spread- 
 ing truth and light to all ? Granted that there 
 is a God, a revelation, in some form, we 
 cannot say what, may be expected. 
 
 Secondly, how do you account for the un- 
 doubted fact that certain persons, whose his- 
 torical existence cannot with any show of 
 reason be denied, such as Moses or Isaiah 
 have believed that they had some instruction 
 direct from God, other than could be attaineJ 
 by the exercise of their natural faculties, and 
 that, in consequence, they have been able to 
 teach with a power unknown before, and that 
 their belief in this supernatural guidance has, 
 as a matter of fact, greatly influenced the whole 
 h'story of the civilization of the world .'' It 
 will not do to answer that Mohammed, and 
 perhaps the Buddhist sage, have claimed some 
 similar enlightenment. The question now 
 
76 THE CHURCH OF THE FUTURE. [iii. 
 
 under this particular head of our argument, 
 is not how many people have been thus en- 
 lightened from God. The claims of each 
 competitor will have to be tested by the 
 strict scrutiny of what they did and said, and 
 of the enduring and life-giving effects of their 
 teaching. All that is contended for here is 
 that, instead of the probability being against 
 God having spoken through a direct manifes- 
 tation of Himself to His creatures, the prob- 
 ability is on the other side. It may be 
 granted that this probability does not, by 
 itself, amount to a very strong argument, 
 but, at all events, it predisposes us to look 
 with care to the recorded manifestations of 
 the Deity, and cuts away the ground from 
 under those who would maintain that such 
 manifestations are altogether out of the 
 question. 
 
 Thirdl}', we arc landed in the d'stinct his- 
 torical evidence for the truth of Christianity. 
 That Jesus Christ lived, born in the reign of 
 Augustus Caesar, and put to death under 
 
HI.] ITS CONFLICT IVITH THE DEIST. 77 
 
 Tiberius, is as undoubted a fact of history as 
 that Cicero spoke in the Roman senate, or 
 that Augustus or Tiberius reigned. So also it is 
 an undoubted fact of h'terary history that with'n 
 some thirty years of Christ's death, certa'n let- 
 ters were written by one Paul, a Jew of Tarsus, 
 setting forth what, in consequence of Christ's 
 life and death. His followers believed respect- 
 ing Him, and His connexion with the Eternal 
 Father and with the spiritual destinies of the 
 human race, and respecting the precepts which 
 He had left for the regulation of His disciples 
 lives. I say nothing now of the detailed narra- 
 tives of the Evangelists. Can any one read 
 what wc know from the barest survey of the 
 origin of the Christian Church, and the history 
 of its first thirty years, culminating in St. Paul's 
 epistles, without allowing that Jesus Christ 
 claimed to be the Son of God, and in that 
 capacity claimed to make known His Father's 
 will as it had never been known before We 
 must drive our antagonists to the common vul- 
 gar dilemma, " Do you hold Him to have been 
 
78 THE CHURCH OF THE FUTURE. [iii. 
 
 impostor or wild enthusiast ?" Impostor is out 
 of the question ; for any one whose mind is 
 not darkened by invincible prejudice must allow 
 that we have stamped upon the history of His 
 times at least the traces and chief lineaments of 
 what He spake, and how He passed His life, 
 and I put it to any candid mind whether it is 
 possible that one who so spake, and so lived, 
 could be a mere impostor. And if you say, 
 " Not, of course, a vulgar impostor, but an 
 enthusiast, dreaming dreams about himself and 
 God, and not hesitating to force those dreams 
 upon mankind by any assistance of the common 
 arts for spreading opinion which were familiar 
 to his day," then let me ask you what you mean 
 by an enthusiast. Is it one who feels God 
 within him, as the derivation of the word im- 
 plies } The question is no longer whether Jesus 
 Christ believed Himself to have a mission from 
 the Father, but whether He was justified in this 
 belief. I cannot tell you how the Father speaks 
 to the human soul and consciousness, how He 
 makes His presence known, but certainly Christ 
 
III.] ITS CONFLICT WITH THE DEIST. 79 
 
 believed and taught that His union with the 
 Father, whatever it miglit be, did open to Him 
 ready access to the Eternal Throne. Dreams, 
 do you call them ? They are certainly mar- 
 vellous dreams, embodying themselves in mar- 
 vellous discourses, teaching a spiritual religion 
 scarcely guessed at except h.cre and there by 
 ancient sages when they thought themselves 
 wrapped in beatific vision. Can you prove that 
 this enthusiast, as you call Him, was wrong 
 when He felt and taught that God was in Him > 
 And if you cannot prove that He was wrong, 
 and you allow that God may not unnaturally be 
 expected so to manifest Himself, read, I beseech 
 you, carefully and reverently, as becomes the 
 subject, all that we can learn of what the Lord 
 thought, and said, and did. For the present 
 argument I do not care whether you take the 
 record of His work from the four acknowledged 
 Evangelists, or from some of those supposed 
 earlier fragments which an ingenious criticism 
 has delighted of late to set up as the rivals of 
 the Evangelists ; they all tell what is practically 
 
8o THE CHURCH OF THE FUTURE. [ill. 
 
 the same tale, and it is the tale which St. Paul 
 received and recorded. Do not tell me here of 
 differences which an exaggerated hypcrcriticism 
 has tried to set forth as existing between the 
 Christianity of St. Peter and St. Paul. The 
 main substance of the Lord's teaching, resting 
 on His Divine claim, is certainly common to 
 both apostles. Study, then, the record of this 
 teaching, and tell me whether man ever spake 
 like th's Man ; whether these calm reasonings 
 as to moral duty, and that deep spiritual in- 
 sight into the nature of the human soul and the 
 source from which it derives its life, which 
 breathe through the records, can be the product 
 of the dreams springing from a heated and dis- 
 ordered imagination. If they were dreams and 
 imaginations, God sent them ; and, proceeding 
 from Him, they are the expression of eternal 
 truths. How have .they spoken to thousands of 
 souls during the ages, and sustained them in 
 life's worst trials and in the hour of death ! If 
 they do not come from God, whence do they 
 come.' In truth, we know them to be His 
 
III.] ITS CONFLICT WITH THE DEIST. 8l 
 
 words as clearly as if we had heard them 
 spoken from the peak of Sinai. 
 
 This, in short, set forth in a few lines, is 
 the conception we would force upon our 
 philosophers, of what is meant by revelation 
 — God unveiling Himself in a marvellous 
 way for the instruction and guidance of His 
 creature, man. A marvellous way — that is, a 
 way not to be accounted for by the com- 
 mon rules according to which ordinarily the 
 natural reason and the natural conscience work. 
 Natural religion, then, has revelation as its sup- 
 plement. The old Deism was an untenable 
 system, stopping short with natural religion, 
 and the so-called new Theism is no better, un- 
 less it makes some strange alliance, which seems 
 to be destructive of its very first principles, with 
 a system of rel'gion based on some distinct 
 revelation from God. I do not think it an 
 unimportant matter that a man should reject 
 atheism, and systems akin to atheism, in favour 
 of a distinct belief in God. It was a great 
 privilege which the old Jews enjoyed, even those 
 
82 THE CHURCH OF THE FUWRE. [m. 
 
 of them who were least able to appreciate the 
 spiritual promises of a coming Messiah, that 
 they believed in one Almighty God, whom they 
 recognised as their Heavenly Father, and to 
 Whom they were able to turn as their support 
 and guide in the emergencies of life. It would 
 be something to be a Mohammedan, with 
 his firm belief in Allah, were it not for the 
 debasing influence of those apparently insepar- 
 able surnoundings which prevent the mono- 
 theism of Islam from rising to spiritual percep- 
 tion of God, and any true spiritual training of 
 the human soul, and which seem to have an 
 inevitable tendency to destroy social life and 
 thwart the progress of any high civilization. It 
 is a privilege which the Parsee enjoys that 
 through the outward emblem of light, he reveres 
 the great First Cause, and in India, for ex- 
 ample, keeps himself free from the gross idola- 
 tries that surround him. But all these systems, 
 while they acknowledge one great God and 
 Universal Father, and while the gulf therefore, 
 which separates them from blank atheism is 
 
III.] ITS CONFLICT WITH THE DEIST. 83 
 
 deep and impassable, still, examined in their 
 entirety, must be pronounced to be very wanting 
 in the highest elements of a Theism which 
 brings the soul near to God, and represents God 
 as ever near to the soul. Judaism may do this 
 far more than the others in its degree ; but 
 surely impartial students of the Old and New 
 Testaments must allow nowadays that Judaism 
 points to something beyond itself, and that 
 something is the Gospel of Jesus Christ. Be- 
 sides, Judaism would not be what it is, soaring 
 above human systems, if it did not point 
 to the revelations it has received. 
 
 I argue, then, that a man who really believes 
 in God must go further than what was of old 
 called natural religion. A good Theist, if he is 
 true to his convictions, and does, in very truth, 
 realize them, will keep near to the God he ac- 
 knowledges by placing himself in the attitude of 
 prayer. He will read reverently, and ponder over 
 instructions which profess to come directly from 
 the Source of knowledge. lie will love the true, 
 the pure, and the holy, professing to look up to 
 
 G 2 
 
84 THE CHURCH OF THE FUTURE. [in. 
 
 One who is absolute truth, purity, and holiness. 
 If he does all this, he is not far from the king- 
 dom of God, and is surely bound by the rules of 
 sound logic, and in accordance with the dictates 
 of his highest reason, and the voices of h's best 
 nature, to go forward and become a Christ'an. 
 
 I think, my Christian friends, that you will 
 do well, in the conciliatory spirit of love, to set 
 some such considerations as these before any of 
 your brothers who maybe disposed to rest their 
 hopes for time and eternity on a Deism or 
 Theism which takes no account of revelation. 
 My distinct conviction is that such a system 
 cannot stand. It must not be supposed that I 
 am advising all who hear me to plunge into the 
 study of the evidence for a Divine revelation. 
 Such study cannot profitably be entered on 
 without careful preparation. But still, I do 
 wish to note that an acquaintance with the 
 nature of this evidence and .some of its principal 
 features is very necessary in these days, when 
 sophistical arguments, adverse to all revelation, 
 are perpetually forced on our attention. It is 
 
III.] ITS CONFLICT WITH THE DEIST. 85 
 
 well that from time to time, with a view to be 
 ready to defend ourselves and those whom we 
 can influence, as well as to give us confidence 
 against arrogant and unscrupulous attacks, we 
 should, as it were, take stock of the contents of 
 our well-stored armoury. And this also I would 
 have you note, that the reverent and wisely- 
 directed study of such evidence has an elevating 
 and purifying effect. It has two departments — 
 one philosophical, the other historical. I think 
 the man who approaches such subjects in a right 
 spirit will find that the philosophical part of the 
 evidence leads him to dwell with humility and 
 adoring awe on what he learns of God's nature 
 and of his own. And this reverent contempla- 
 tion of the nature of God and of man must 
 elevate and purify the mind ; while the second 
 part of the evidence — the strictly historical — 
 gives us more vivid conceptions of the reality 
 of the recorded facts by which revelation is 
 avouched, introduces us into greater familiarity 
 with the persons and characters whose teaching 
 we study, and, above all, enables us mcie 
 
86 THE CHURCH OF THE FUTURE. [ill. 
 
 thoroughly to appreciate that Divine historical 
 picture of God manifest in the flesh — Christ 
 living and dying for His people — around which 
 all sound evidence for revelation revolves. I 
 am not one of those vifho distrust the study of 
 the evidences for revelation as if they suggested 
 more doubts than they solve. Entered on with 
 suitable preparation, and reverently conducted, 
 such study tends, I doubt not, to raise the whole 
 character, by bringing the intelligence as well as 
 the devotional feelings, through the guidance of 
 the Holy Spirit, more directly into communica- 
 tion with the true God, manifested in Jesus 
 Christ. 
 
IV. 
 
 ITS CONFLICT WITH THE RATIONALIST. 
 
 {Delivered at Ashford, on September \oth, to the 
 Rural Deaneries of North and South Lympne' and 
 East and West Charing.) 
 
 My Reverend Brethren and my Breth- 
 ren THE Churchwardens, — The subject with 
 which I propose to deal in my visitation address 
 to-day differs from the principal subject in each 
 of my last two addresses in this respect — at Tun- 
 bridge and at Dover I spoke of the necessity of 
 our being prepared at this time to meet, by the 
 approved old arguments, what I believe to be 
 after all, notwithstanding their claims to novelty, 
 two very old forms of error lately revived among 
 us. The system of which I would chiefly speak 
 to-day has more appearance of being new. 
 
88 THE CHURCH OF THE FUTURE. [iv. 
 
 Many are greatly alarmed by the existence in 
 our Church of doctrines and errors more or less 
 approximating to what our fathers regarded as 
 the exploded superstitions of Rome ; and no 
 doubt there is an attractiveness to many minds 
 in mediaeval forms of doctrine and of worship. 
 It ought to be the part of those who guide the 
 thought of the Church in this age to teach men 
 how to prize and use aright the freedom vindi- 
 cated for them at the Reformation, and so to 
 imbue their minds with love of Apostolic Chris- 
 tianity, that they may easily cast off the in- 
 fection of that spurious and distempered system 
 which in dark times tainted and corrupted its 
 simplicity. As I have said before, I am in noway 
 insensible to dangers of this kind, and I trust 
 they will be met by sound Church of England 
 teaching, maintaining the doctrines of the pure 
 Gospel, as taught in primitive times. But, great 
 as this danger may be, it is not to blind us to 
 others of a totally different kind, to which I 
 wish principally to direct attention to-day. In- 
 deed, in my judgment almost the gravest danger 
 
IV.] CONFLICT WITH THE RATIONALIST. 89 
 
 from the strange revival, here and there, of 
 superstition in this nineteenth century arises 
 from the reaction which it is certain to pro- 
 duce. The current of popular opinion through- 
 out the world is all in the opposite direction from 
 superstition ; and I have great fear lest, in the 
 long run, the faith of our Church and country 
 may suffer far more by abstraction from than 
 by addition to its approved system of Christian 
 doctrine. It is curious to observe how, within 
 the last few years, there have been signs that 
 some of those who would reduce Christian 
 doctrine to very meagre limits, do not hesitate 
 to avail themselves of the popular taste for 
 outward ceremonial, and make in appearance 
 a strange alliance with the system to which 
 in truth they are most distinctly opposed. 
 
 There is, I hold, real ground to fear lest the 
 tendencies of this age result in the prevalence of 
 a lax view of Christian doctrine and teaching, in 
 many respects unlike anything with which our 
 country has in former times been familiar. 
 Presenting itself under the guise of an improved 
 
90 THE CHURCH OF THE FUTURE. [iv. 
 
 and more rational Christianity, speaking with the 
 greatest respect of the Lord Jesus Christ and His 
 Apostles ; professing to regard them as great 
 benefactors of the human race, and even admit- 
 ting that the historical Christ is in some sense 
 a wonderful manifestation of God brought near 
 to man, it virtually substitutes a new in the 
 place of the old genuine Gospel. The old 
 Unitarianism had something in it akin to this 
 system, and some modern Unitarians seem to 
 have adopted it. We do not deny that its pro- 
 moters have high aims, a zeal for the pure 
 morality of the Gospel, and many lofty aspi- 
 rations after holiness and intercourse with God. 
 But, convinced as I am that there is something 
 very hollow in it, I cannot look on without great 
 alarm, if it be true that attempts are made to 
 present our children and young people with this 
 substitute for the real Gospel. Should it pre- 
 vail, I fear we must bid farewell to a true con- 
 ception of human nature and the hatefulness of 
 sin, and lose the most powerful motives which 
 can guide human life, and be content to sink 
 
IV.] CONFLICT WITH THE RATIONALIST. 91 
 
 to views of Christian duty and tlie elevation of 
 the Christian character very different from those 
 which animated the Apostles. 
 
 1 have endeavoured to set forth, in my former 
 addresses, my grounds for the expectation that 
 our countrymen will not, in the coming age, give 
 themselves up either to an atheistical or to a 
 simply Deistical philosophy. Are we equally 
 secured against a meagre sublimated Christian'ty, 
 such as St. Paul certainly would not have recog- 
 nised as the Gospel which saved his soul, and 
 to which he devoted his life.' I say St. Paul, 
 because, I take it, our neo-Platonists, or by 
 whatever name they are to be designated, will 
 grant to us that St. Paul's Christianity and 
 theirs is very different. 1 do net suppose that 
 they are any better satisfied with that form of 
 the original Gospel which, as we have seen 
 before, certain ingenious critics, more or less 
 connected with their school, are fond of attri- 
 buting to St. Peter, whom they would represent 
 as the antagonist of St. Paul. I have alluded 
 before to some sure grounds for the conviction 
 
92 THE CHURCH OF THE FUTURE. [iv. 
 
 that there never was in existence any earHer 
 form of Christianity of a so-called more philo- 
 sophic cast, of which St. Paul's and St. Peter's 
 teaching was an exaggerated caricature. In 
 spite of all the cavilling of what calls itself the 
 advanced criticism, there remain sure historical 
 grounds for the assumption that there never was 
 any earlier form of Christianity than that to 
 which these Apostles devoted their lives. A 
 Christianity with the supernatural element elim.i- 
 nated from it would have appeared to them, as 
 it justly appears to us, to be no Christianity 
 at all. 
 
 Our great apologists of the last century 
 rightly and wisely turned to the Resurrection 
 of Christ, as the central point to which the 
 whole conflict with infidelity must be directed. 
 They agreed with St. Paul : " If Christ be not 
 risen, then is your faith vain ; ye are yet in 
 your sins." I remember being visited in my 
 rooms at Oxford, now some forty years ago, 
 by a young German, a disciple of this new 
 Christianity. I have seen the incident recorded 
 
IV.] CONFLICT WITH THE RATIONALIST. 93 
 
 in some periodical of late years ; but it was to 
 myself that it happened. Tlie young man 
 seemed to me in his rash statements to be 
 very ignorant of the Bible. I made him read 
 the isth Chapter of the ist Epistle to the 
 Corinthians, which appeared to be somewhat 
 new to him. He read it attentively, and, when 
 he had finished it, he said, " He was a good 
 man Pauhis, but he had h's fancies, and this 
 was one of them." This, in fact, is the key of 
 the position. Is St. Paul's account of the 
 Resurrection a mere fancy, or is it based on 
 a real historical fact ? That he himself held 
 it to be historical and real there can be no 
 doubt. The way in which he treats the subject 
 • — the whole narrative which he gives of the 
 Lord's appearance after His death — the 
 witnesses still living to whom he appeals — 
 leave no doubt of what he thought of the 
 Resurrection. And if he adds, " Last of all 
 He was seen of me also, as of one born out of 
 due time," do these words, describing his own 
 ecstatic vision, lessen the force of what he tells 
 
94 THE CHURCH OF THE FUTURE. [iv. 
 
 . us of the appearances vouchsafed to others, 
 whether they were or were not in many 
 respects dissimilar in kind from the vision 
 which he saw apparently not once only, but 
 many times throughout his life ? Would there 
 be anytliing unnatural in St. John, on the sea- 
 shore at Patmos, welcoming the wonderful 
 vision and the heavenly voice vouchsafed to 
 him in his ecstasy, as a fresh assurance to 
 his soul that the Friend, whom he had known 
 living upon earth, whom he had seen die, and 
 whom afterwards he had seen living, was 
 indeed alive for evermore ? So St. Paul, in 
 like manner, deploring that he had been so 
 long a stranger to the Gospel of Christ, and 
 had not been associated with the disciples 
 during those forty days when the risen Lord 
 mysteriously lingered near them on this earth 
 after His death and resurrection, naturally 
 breaks out—" Though I had not this privilege, 
 and was as one born out of due time, yet I 
 too in my degree — and according to the laws 
 which regulate the existence of the Eternal 
 
IV.] CONFLICT WITH THE RATIONALIST. 95 
 
 Son, now that He has gone back to the presence 
 of the Father — I, too, have seen my Lord, and 
 am strengthened by an assurance that He is 
 still living and is at hand to help me." What 
 was the e.xact nature of those manifestations 
 by which Christ, during the forty days, from 
 the first Easter to the first Ascension Day, 
 assured His disciples that death had no power 
 over His combined spiritual and fleshly nature, 
 it is impossible to say. We have in our hands 
 an account of the events which has every claim 
 to be deemed historical. We are not entitled 
 to make more of the recorded events, or less, 
 than the text warrants. On this, however, we 
 are justified in saying the Gospel of Christ is 
 built ; that He who lived and taught among 
 His disciples, having ended His earthly course 
 by death, proved incontestably to them after He 
 had died that death had no more dominion 
 over Him. His nature, like ours, consisted of 
 compound elements, which we designate as 
 soul and body : of these compacted there 
 was one Man, and in some mysterious and 
 
96 THE CHURCH OF THE FUTURE. [iv. 
 
 supernatural way, which approved itself to 
 their senses and their reason, He manifested to 
 His disciples that the whole man, Jesus Christ, 
 in His compound nature, was living after death. 
 Till He did so, they mournfully thought they 
 were disappointed by His death in their hopes 
 that it was He who should have restored and 
 built up the Israel of God. From the assur- 
 ances He gave them by His appearances they 
 gained a new strength. If Christ had died, 
 and there was an end of Him, His precepts 
 might indeed live as those of any other Rabbi 
 or of any one of the old Prophets, but the 
 hopes that were to sustain His Church in its 
 conflict with a persecuting world, even unto 
 death— where were they Buried in the grave 
 with Him. Where was the assurance of the 
 truth of all He had taught them—" I am 
 the Resurrection and the Life " " He that 
 believeth in Me, though he were dead, yet 
 shall he live, and whosoever hVcth and be- 
 I'evcth in Me shall never d'e".' Is it not the 
 echo of these words that we find per\'^ading 
 
IV.] CONFLICT WITH THE RATIONALIST. 97 
 
 the whole system of the Gospel as it went 
 forth in the first age to draw the world aft r 
 it ? What else sustained its despised followers 
 when persecution raged, first through Jewish 
 hatred, and afterwards through the arbitrary 
 decrees of Roman law, alarmed at the sight 
 of the deserted temples ? Jesus lives, and has 
 been proved to be alive. He is at the Father's 
 right hand making intercession for us, as 
 Stephen saw the Lord when in the hour of 
 supreme agony he commended to Him his 
 departing spirit. And the death of Christ, did 
 it not become itself a source of life to perishing 
 souls, through the assurance given by the 
 Resurrection that the life laid down for man 
 was surrendered voluntarily by One Who, in 
 His own nature, had power over death and 
 hell } And is it not a conviction of these 
 truths, all based on Christ's rising from the 
 dead, that through the ages has made the 
 Gospel of Christ what it is to us— the consoler 
 of the sorrowful, the healer of the conscience- 
 stricken, the antidote against the fear of death >. 
 
 H 
 
98 
 
 THE CHURCH OF THE FUTURE. 
 
 [iv. 
 
 The Gospel, therefore, with the supernatural 
 element eliminated, has ceased to be the 
 Gospel ; it may be a philosophy with more 
 or less of claim to a preference over other 
 human systems; but it is not that which the 
 Apostles received from the Lord and handed 
 down from Him to be the guide of all nations. 
 
 It will be understood that it is impossible 
 in this short compass to embody more than 
 a very slight sketch of the arguments which 
 I believe exclude the idea of a Christianity 
 without the Resurrection. The more you 
 examine the matter, the more, I believe, will 
 you be convinced that this great Christian 
 tiuth is the keystone on which the Gospel 
 rests ; and certainly if there be no Gospel 
 without the Resurrection, there is none with- 
 out the supernatural. The Resurrection once 
 granted, it becomes a question merely of 
 more or less, how far or with what qualifi- 
 cations every detail of each recorded influence 
 of the supernatural is to form an integral part 
 of the Christian Creed. With the general 
 
IV.] CONFLICT WITH THE RATIONALIST. 99 
 
 arguments establishing the inspiration of the 
 sacred records, we have at present nothing 
 logically to do. And certainly, apart from 
 such general arguments for inspiration, no 
 one who understands the subject will contend 
 that each separate miracle, taken by itself, 
 rests on the same historical evidence as the 
 one great central fact of the Resurrection. 
 After the questions connected with the in- 
 spiration of the sacred writers have been fully 
 discussed, the degree of certainty as to each 
 detail obtained from its incorporation in the 
 historical narrative may be rightly estimated ; 
 but at present, and, indeed, in all treatises 
 on evidences, properly so called, the books 
 containing the facts of sacred history must 
 be regarded in the first instance not as proved 
 to be inspired, but as ordinary historical docu- 
 ments. This they certainly are, independently 
 of the higher character which can afterwards 
 be vindicated for them. 
 
 Now let us stop to consider how the general 
 argument as to the Gospel miracles stands, 
 
 H 2 
 
lOO THE CHURCH OF THE FUTURE. 
 
 [IV. 
 
 when we view it apart from any theoiy of in- 
 spiration. The -detailed narratives of the Lord's 
 hfe contain the account of a great many mir- 
 acles. It is important to observe, as we have 
 done above, that the Epistles, as well as the 
 Gospels, make Christianity to rest on a super- 
 natural, otherwise called a miraculous, bas's. 
 There is, therefore, an a priori probab lity that 
 the life as well as the death of the Lord Jesus 
 was attended by supernatural manifestations. 
 Indeed, if He was what the Resurrection, with 
 its sequel, proves Him to have been, He could 
 not have come into this world and moved as 
 He did among men without an effort of super- 
 natural and miraculous power. The ordinary 
 course and laws of nature, as manifested in the 
 common history of man, were not capable of 
 producing such a one as Jesus of Nazareth was 
 proved by His Resurection to be. Therefore, 
 before the mysterious narrative of His Incarna- 
 tion we bow in awestruck silence. How could 
 the Son of God cd.tis into the world No 
 mere human experience can tell you. We know 
 
IV.] CONFLICT WITH THE RA TIONALIST. loi 
 
 what was believed by His disciples in the earli- 
 est age, when they had learnt to recognise how 
 superhuman was His nature. No other account 
 of the mystery has ever found credit in the 
 Church ; and if you believe in Christ's Resur- 
 rection, I see not how you can logically hesitate 
 at the mystery of His Incarnation. Also, being 
 such a One as His Resurrection proved Him, 
 He must surely, through all His early life, have 
 had around him a halo of the supernatural. 
 When, therefore, the narratives of the Evan- 
 gelists are placed in your hands as corroborat- 
 ing in detail the more general statements of 
 St. Paul, you have no cause to be surprised 
 when you find them such as they are, and you 
 read and ponder on their minutest details with 
 a reverence which you agree with the Church 
 Universal in believing to be their due. 
 
 The prejudice against miracles which is 
 characteristic of the present age is unreason- 
 able, and has been imported into the sort of 
 Christianity of which we have been speaking, 
 from Hume and from the Deists of the last 
 
102 THE CHURCH OF THE FUTURE. [iv. 
 
 century. We are not to surrender our reason in 
 judging the evidence for the miraculous ; but it 
 is equally unreasonable to pronounce, with not 
 a few sceptics of the present day, who have 
 recurred to the language of Hume, that all 
 miracles are in themselves impossible, or, at 
 least, incapable of proof To say this is to beg 
 the question. The very question before us is 
 whether some miracles have not been proved, 
 to the satisfaction of sound reason, by historical 
 evidence that cannot be confuted, and it will 
 never do to keep harping on the general pre- 
 mise that they are impossible, in answer to our 
 tangible and manifest good proofs that they 
 have happened. Moreover, I would have our 
 antagonists consider that their prejudice against 
 the introduction of the miraculous into the 
 scheme of the true religion is not only un- 
 reasonable, but shows a great ignorance of 
 human nature. Do some of them in their philo- 
 sophical exultation stumble at all narratives of 
 the miraculous and think that they could 
 believe a religion far better which had no 
 
iiv.] ONFLICT WITH THE RA TIONAIJST. 103 
 
 miracles ? I must remind them first of all th .t 
 there are grave doubts whether there can by 
 possibility be any such religion. All religion 
 allows that there is a God. If the existence 
 of God be granted — the existence, that is, of a 
 great first cause antecedent to the establishment 
 of the laws of ordinary nature — creation follows, 
 the greatest of all miracles. Again, all religion 
 has to do with an unseen God, and His unseen 
 but felt influence on the destinies of man. We 
 know nothing of Him, apart from a recognition 
 of something which is supernatural. And so 
 strongly has this true idea of what religion s 
 fixed itself on the human mind, that I am bold 
 to say that through the nineteen centuries since 
 Christ was born, and long before, this very 
 supernatural element, which is a stumblingblock 
 to many of our philosophers in these later days, 
 has been an attraction to thousands upon thou- 
 sands of simple souls for whom the Gospel has 
 been the Gospel of Life in so many countries 
 and in so many varying stages of civilisa- 
 tion. Is it inconceivable to these enlightened 
 
I04 THE CHURCH OF THE FUTURE. [iv. 
 
 philosophers that God Ahiiighty, who desired to 
 bring His supernatural truth home to the hearts 
 of these perishing thousands of the human race, 
 may have taken care from the very first, out of 
 His fatherly goodness, that this supernatural 
 religion which He desired to teach them 
 should be borne along in the true history of its 
 Founder with a flood of such supernatural inci- 
 dents as were likely to arrest the r attention, to 
 win their sympathy, and cling to their hearts? 
 The truly wise man will know what helps these 
 miracles have been to many thousands ; he will 
 not measure others by his own supercilious ob- 
 jections to them, and he will study the records 
 which contain them with a deep consciousness 
 that he is in the presence and is tracing the 
 ways of One Who is above ordinary nature. 
 
 I am aware that some of our antagonists try 
 to draw a line between the supernatural and the 
 miraculous, but the manifestation of the super- 
 natural is a miracle ; and what I have been 
 contending for is th's— that the whole of 
 Christianity is built upon a manifestion of the 
 
IV.] CONFLICT WITH THE RATIONALIST. 105 
 
 supernatural. We need not enter here on 
 Bishop Butler's suggestion that what we call 
 miracles may be not any stopping of the laws of 
 nature, but the manifestation of some higher 
 order of nature, which has its own higher laws, 
 capable of intervening at the times and under 
 the circumstances which God has fixed for their 
 appearance. I must refer the candid student to 
 Bishop Butler's treatment of this subject. 
 
 But then, after all, it is asserted that apolo- 
 gists are too apt to waste their time on the 
 question of whether miracles are possible or 
 not, instead of producing instances in which 
 they arc proved by conclusive evidence to have 
 taken place. I answer that if we are guilty of 
 this fault our antagonists have themselves to 
 thank for it, since, as I have said abjve, from 
 Hume downwards, it is certain that they rest 
 their arguments on an asserted or implied pre- 
 mise — that miracles are impossible, or, at least, 
 inadmissible. What we have said of the evi- 
 dences for the Resurrection of Christ ought to 
 save our present argument from this objection. 
 
Io6 THE CHURCH OF THE FUTURE. [iv. 
 
 Prejudiced persons may maintain that the evi- 
 dence as adduced by St. Paul and the Evange- 
 lists would not hold good in a court of justice 
 if it were brought forward in a trial on which 
 a man's life depended. I deny this. But let 
 me remind you, also, that what we are main- 
 taining is not what might or m'ght not be 
 thought sufficient evidence in a court of justice, 
 but what is sufficient evidence to establish the 
 truth of a fact in history. I will not allow 
 you to say an improbable fact, for on the hypo- 
 theses as to God and man's nature, which in 
 this branch of our discussion both we and our 
 antagonists acknowledge, the thing contended 
 for is proved not to be improbable. We are 
 bound to approach the examination of it in 
 the same impartial frame of mind in which we 
 should test any other alleged facts, and I am 
 confident that the historical verdict must be 
 on our side. 
 
 But here let us be done with the dry argu- 
 ments which, however they satis*)' the intellect 
 scarcely reach the heart. Does any earnest- 
 
IV.] CONFLICT WITH THE RATIONALIST. 1 07 
 
 minded searcher after truth declare that he 
 prefers to dwell rather on the moral than on 
 the strictly logical evidences for his faith ? 
 Let him receive every encouragement to do so. 
 Such moral evidences afford a more wholesome 
 food for the soul to feed on. Christ manifested 
 as the God-man, the perfection of humanity, 
 raising from the contempt to which ancient 
 systems had reduced them the lowly virtues 
 which we esteem as the highest Christian graces 
 — the contemplation .of this model must raise 
 the soul to those heights above human nature, 
 from which the God-man came, and to which 
 He has ascended. Or shall we contemplat; the 
 totally changed view of man s life and destiny 
 into which the advent of the Son of God has 
 introduced us } How different a thing is the 
 end of life now from what it was before Christ's 
 rising. How many thousand saints have felt 
 this difference as they approached to death and 
 passed through it. And life as well as death 
 — how has it been changed. What a dignity 
 has the human body and the human mind 
 
I08 THE CHURCH OF THE FUTURE. [i 
 
 attained from what the Gospel teaches us of its 
 union through Christ with the divine. And our 
 thoughts of God : how much nearer is the Al- 
 mighty Father brought to His creatures through 
 His manifestation in the Son. The Fatherhood 
 of God : how much better is it comprehended. 
 How is He shown to love every separate human 
 soul, and with what dignity are such souls in- 
 vested as loved by Him. God is no longer a 
 God at a distance, nor the God only of a pri- 
 vileged race. He has manifested Himself as 
 inviting the poorest slave under the most 
 oppressive thraldom, the outcast, barbarian, or 
 savage, to draw near to Him and to open the 
 heart in His presence. Does a man feel his 
 whole being elevated while he meditates on 
 ^such evidences as these, attesting the super- 
 natural and divine origin of Christianity.' 
 And while he dwells on what Christ was 
 during His earthy sojourn, does it please 
 him to uplift his soul to the Eternal Son 
 now living in the highest heaven, and 
 feeling and caring for the humblest of 
 
IV.] CONFLICT WITH THE RATIONALIST. 109 
 
 mankind ? And so employed, does the man de- 
 clare that he is better occupied than by poring 
 over dry argumentative proofs of the value 
 of the historical record setting forth the steps 
 by which the Divine Saviour mounted to His 
 Kingdom, and showed His people whence He 
 came and whither He was going? No sen- 
 sible person would desire to divert his friend's 
 mind from such elevating contemplations. It 
 is not with the positive, but the negative part 
 of the modern so-called philosophic theory of 
 Christianity that we find fault. We rejoice at 
 what the man believes of Christ and of His 
 power to heal the wounds of the human soul, 
 and of a life secured for the faithful with 
 Christ hereafter. We desire indeed to add a 
 fuller dogmatic teaching of all the Christian 
 verities, to what his system of philosophy has 
 already grasped, but, rejoicing in the thought of 
 that " whereunto he has already attained," our 
 chief effort will be to urge him to live according 
 to his faith, and we trust that such living will 
 enable him in time to agree more entirely 
 
I lO THE CHURCH OF THE FUTURE. 
 
 [IV. 
 
 with the teaching of the Church and of the 
 Bible. 
 
 There is a lesson impressed on us by his case, 
 and we shall do well to carry it into every 
 religious controversy which is forced upon us. 
 We differ seriously from our antagonists, but 
 the first thing to ascertain in the controversy 
 is, What are the points on which we agree 
 Most earnest-minded men are, in truth, very 
 much better than a cold logical statement of 
 their abstract beliefs would represent them. 
 Are they one with us on any points on which 
 they can make with us common cause Do 
 they agree with us, for example, on the immu- 
 table distinctions between right and wrong.' 
 Do they assent to the doctrine that we have 
 the means of knowing the one from the other, 
 and are bound to seek the good, though they 
 differ from us as to the source from which 
 conscience springs, and the test by which it 
 arrives at its decisions So far so good, and 
 we may hope on these foundations of a right 
 belief to lead even the Atheist onwards and 
 
IV.] CONFLICT WITH THE RATIONALIST. 1 1 1 
 
 upwards. But, further, do they agree with us 
 that there is a great God in Heaven, Who 
 must be able, if He wills, to read our inmost 
 thoughts } Let us urge on the Theist to 
 realise continually the full force of this doc- 
 trine which he recognises, its bearing on an 
 all-pervading Providence, its suggestion that 
 if God is, it may be possible for the soul to 
 hold communion with Him. And if we are 
 right, in the charity which hopeth all things, 
 to act on the principle thus laid down, in 
 dealing with these two sets of bold deniers of 
 the truth of Christianity, how much more must 
 it be our duty not harshly to repel any who 
 claim for themselves the Christian name, and 
 have a Christian faith, however defective 
 Nothing will be lost, but much gained, by 
 our assuming the attitude of a tolerant and 
 loving desire, while we gladly welcome the 
 truth which they have received, to lead them on 
 to further truth. Such an attitude is most like 
 that of our Heavenly Master, Who sought to 
 cherish the good in every man, and by cherish- 
 
1X2 THE CHURCH OF THE FUTURE., [iv. 
 
 ing it to foster it into a brighter and truer 
 light. Yet with all this toleration and kindly 
 consideration for the opinions of others, we 
 are not to forget the sound arguments, to 
 which, in this address, I have endeavoured to 
 point, whereby I believe it to be shown that 
 this so-called philosophical Christianity will be 
 found wanting when weighed in the balance, 
 and must, as sound reason and goodness pre- 
 vail, vanish away before the full and true 
 Gospel of Jesus Christ. 
 
 Brethren, excuse me if, in the conviction of 
 imminent dangers besetting the purity of our 
 faith, I have dwelt more than was, perhaps, 
 naturally to be expected in a diocesan charge, 
 on matters concerning, not ourselves only, but 
 the whole Church of Christ. We shall m.ake 
 very little progress in the distinctively Church 
 of England work of our separate parishes, if 
 there be any real danger lest the whole Church 
 and faith of Christ throughout the world be 
 unable to maintain itself in the conflict with 
 which these latter days have brought us face 
 
iv.l CONFLICT WITH THE RATIONALIST. 1 13 
 
 to face. I therefore commend to the thought- 
 ful consideration of all the nature of the 
 conflict in which the whole Church seems to 
 me to be involved, desiring that all of us, one 
 by one, may turn to the Source of Life ; that, 
 resting on the truth of the historical narratives 
 respecting Christ and His Apostles, we may 
 be strengthened in our several spheres to 
 advance better in our separate work for God, 
 
 I 
 
V. 
 
 ITS DOGMATIC TEACHING. 
 
 {Delivered at Canterbury, on. September 22nd, to 
 the Rural Deaneries of Canterbury, Ospringe, West- 
 bere, West Bridge, and Sitiingbourne.) 
 
 My Reverend Brethren, and my 
 Brethren the CHURCHWAROENs-In the 
 earlier addresses delivered at this visitation I 
 have spoken of modern speculations antagonistic 
 to the pure Gospel of Christ, which are, in many 
 cases, but the revival of old exploded errors. 
 Let me not be understood as in any way de- 
 precating a just freedom of thought, or the full 
 development of scientific research. No reason- 
 able Christian will fail to be grateful for the 
 
v.] ITS DOGMATIC TEACHING. 115 
 
 remarkable progress made of late years in accu- 
 rate observation of the phenomena of nature, and 
 the classification of the laws through which the 
 Creator works. We hail with real gratitude the 
 unfolding of the history of the changes through 
 which creation has passed, so far as its sequence 
 has been established by researches which rest 
 on a real scientific basis. We are grateful, 
 also, for the wonderful accessions made of 
 late years to our knowledge of the early his- 
 tory of the races of man, of the memorials 
 of their feeble efforts after civilization, of the 
 great progress they attained in the establish- 
 ment of ancient dynasties, under the shadow 
 of which arts flourished, and a powerful, though 
 it might be a barbaric, culture reigned. We are 
 thankful for all real additions to the sum of 
 human knowledge, though we object to the 
 attempt occasionally made in these restless days 
 to palm off upon us mere imaginative conjec- 
 tures as the conclusions of science. We are 
 glad that the affinities of the various languages, 
 and the relations of the several races of man, 
 
 1 2 
 
I 1 6 THE CHURCH OF THE FUTURE. [v. 
 
 are better understood than they were a hundred 
 years ago; and we give full weight to all that 
 has been established by such discoveries. Our 
 soundest divines, no doubt, fully admit that 
 many questions connected with the form in 
 which theology is taught may, in consequence 
 of what we now know as to language, ancient 
 monuments, and the earth's changes, require 
 reconsideration and readjustment, while we hold 
 fast the substance of our theological teaching. 
 I shall never forget how some fifty years ago I 
 casually entered the lecture-room in which Chal- 
 mers was addressing his students on difficulties 
 supposed to arise from the geological speculations 
 as to the days of creation, which had then just 
 begun to attract more than usual attention. 
 That great master, an ardent disciple of science, 
 as well as a divine, warned his hearers not to be 
 moved by any unworthy fears, as though science 
 and religion could be antagonistic the one to the 
 other. He pointed out how the geological specu- 
 lations to which he alluded raised a contest only 
 about outworks, while the central fortress 
 
v.] ITS DOGMATIC TEACHING. II7 
 
 remained impregnable within. And, I suppose, 
 there are few intelligent students of theology 
 nowadays, who see any inconsistency between 
 the teaching of approved geological sciences 
 and the great central truths respecting God and 
 man's nature, communicated to us in the Mosaic 
 records. No doubt a view of these records, some- 
 what different from that to which we were 
 accustomed in old days, is implied in this change 
 of thought ; but neither in respect of the early 
 books of Scripture, nor indeed of any portion of 
 what the Church has received and handed down 
 as the Word of God, is there any change in the 
 reverence attaching to that teaching by which 
 the Holy Spirit of God intended these books to 
 guide the soul. With science generally, and 
 with that scientific, philological, and historical 
 criticism, which, for the last hundred years, in 
 this country and in German}^, has been sifting 
 the sacred books with the minuteness of a 
 micro.scopical examination, we have no fault to 
 find, where the researches of students have been 
 conducted in the reverent and humble spirit of 
 
1 1 8 THE CHURCH OF THE FUTURE. 
 
 [V. 
 
 true philosophy. And we feel that our faith in 
 the great central Christian verities has come 
 forth unharmed from the scrutiny to which they 
 have been subjected. Nay, that they shine with 
 a brighter light, proved, after having been tried, 
 to be reflections from the very Source of light. 
 
 It is time now that I should proceed to lay 
 before you, somewhat in detail, what I trust will 
 stand in the coming age as it stands now, when 
 the philosophies, which somewhat ostentatiously 
 claim to supersede it, shall have been seen in 
 their true dimensions. Undoubtedly, then, the 
 guide of the coming age will be a Church — the 
 Church of Christ in our land — and not simply a 
 philosophy — a Church with a philosophy of its 
 own, a divine philosophy, the mistress and queen, 
 as it was of old held to be, of all the sciences, a 
 science which treats of God in His relations to 
 man, and of man in his relations to God and to his 
 fellow-men, which embraces the whole circle of 
 man's moral being in this life, and which avails 
 itself unreservedly of all the helps which God 
 has given it for raising human hopes and fears 
 
v.] ITS DOGMATIC TEACHING. iig 
 
 to the contemplation of a life beyond. But is 
 this Church of the future, of which we speak, 
 to be a new Church ? This cannot be, if, as we 
 believe, the Church is as old as the Gospel. Let 
 us see. This Church, as its name implies, must 
 be an organized body of believers in its truths, 
 worshipping one God through one Saviour in 
 one appointed way. It has its divinely-ordained 
 Sacraments for initiation into its membership, 
 and for the continuation and increase of the 
 spiritual blessings which it prizes and seeks to 
 disseminate. Such a body will always be more 
 or less obnoxious to all who think they can 
 safely control the world on other principles than 
 those which it upholds. Let us briefly sketch 
 some of the characteristics by which this Church 
 of the future will be distinguished. 
 
 First, it will hold fast the faith set forth in the 
 Bible, and will never be weary of turning to the 
 Bible as the basis on which its whole system 
 is built, and by which whatever it teaches must 
 be tested. It will not plunge into vain discus- 
 sions as to the precise mode and limits of the 
 
I 20 THE CHURCH OF THE FUTURE. 
 
 [V. 
 
 inspiration of the writers of the Sacred Books. 
 It will, I think, follow the wise caution of the 
 Thirty- Nine Articles. They give to the Bible 
 the name of "Holy Scripture" and "God's 
 Word written," and assert that " it containeth 
 all things necessary to salvation, so that what- 
 soever is not read therein nor may be proved 
 thereby is not to be required of any man that 
 it should be believed as an article of the faith, 
 or be thought requisite or necessary to salva- 
 tion." Moreover, they declare that "it is not 
 lawful for the Church to ordain anything that 
 is contrary to God's Word written, or besides the 
 same .... to enforce anything to be believed 
 for necessity of salvation." They declare that 
 the most authoritative general councils must 
 show their decrees as to what is necessary to 
 salvation to be taken out of Holy Scripture. 
 Yet these articles carefully abstain from any 
 minute distinctions as to what inspiration is — 
 how far it may be verbal or has only to do with 
 the general sense and fully-explained teaching 
 of the sacred writers. They throw no discourage- 
 
v.] ITS DOGMATIC TEACHING. 12 1 
 
 meat in the way of the most rigid criticism of the 
 Sacred Books ; they set forth, indeed, that 
 these Books must ever maintain their place as 
 tests of truth; but, as their meaning must be 
 arrived at by the reverent use of an enlightened 
 reason, they do not put up the Bible as the 
 antagonist, but as the guiding help of man's 
 reason. How far questions of physical science, 
 or other matters quite irrelevant to the prin- 
 ciples by which the human soul lives, have 
 any place in the revelation which the Bible 
 contains, the Articles do not consider. They 
 remind Christians that these sacred Books are 
 in their hands ; that the Church has guarded 
 them carefully as its most sacred deposit 
 through the centuries ; and that they have 
 not had their high place assigned to them 
 without a' very careful examination of their 
 claim to be retained ; while, on the other 
 hand, many apocryphal books have been ex- 
 cluded from the canon. With respect to the 
 Old Testament, they tell us to study it 
 as the faithful Jews of old studied it— not 
 
122 THE CHURCH OF THE FUTURE. [v. 
 
 looking in its pages for mere transitory 
 promises, but regarding it as the gradual 
 dawning of the light which was to burn with 
 its full brightness when Messiah came. This 
 sacred character of the Old Testament stands 
 out above all criticism of its details. We are 
 to read all the sacred records as intelligent 
 men, with a full right to judge of their 
 meaning by all helps which an enlightened 
 reason, and an enlarged observation and ex- 
 perience, and the judgment of the wise and 
 good of past and present times may place 
 within our reach. But over all these records 
 there rise the sacred lessons they contain, in- 
 telligible to the least-instructed human soul, 
 speaking of God's love and of His hatred of 
 sin, and of the promises which He keeps in 
 store for those who are faithful to Him. 
 
 Secondly, does this exaltation of Holy Scrip- 
 ture as the guide supersede all claims of au- 
 thority .> Certainly not. Authority is of two 
 kinds. Every Church must have absolute 
 authority to lay down its form of discipline. 
 
v.] ITS DOGMATIC TEACHING. 123 
 
 It will act wisely, and in accordance with the 
 precepts of its Master, if it directs its attention 
 as little as possible to the mere formal, as 
 opposed to the more spiritual, part of our 
 religion. But forms it must have for express- 
 ing its worship and its belief in the cardinal 
 points of the Christian faith. If these forms 
 were entirely given up there would be no out- 
 ward cohesion, and, upon the whole, experience 
 teaches that outward cohesion is very useful, 
 if not absolutely necessary, to keep men one 
 in action and in heart. But besides this abso- 
 lute authority, no Church, as no philosophy, 
 can dispense with that argument from authority 
 which, as I have hinted before, the decisions 
 of the wise and good have ever been held to 
 claim with right in the domain of moral and of 
 spiritual truth. The merest human philosophy, 
 of course, acknowledges such a claim of au- 
 thority even in that lower range of subjects 
 of which it treats ; still more the Divine philo- 
 sophy in its higher regions. The Church, then, 
 will never hesitate to give full weight to the 
 
124 CHURCH OF THE FUTURE. [v. 
 
 opinions of the wise and good, helped, as it 
 beh'eves them to be, in their conclusions by the 
 Spirit of God. It will not bow to them with 
 any servile or pretended acceptance of their 
 infallibility, but it will listen to them reverently 
 and give them their full weight. Seeking our- 
 selves to be guided in our study of Scripture 
 by the Good Spirit of God, we shall gladly 
 acknowledge the due authority of the opinions 
 of all who have been led by the same Spirit. 
 
 Thirdly, the Church, if true to its sacred 
 mission, will ever be on its guard against any 
 lowering of its standard as to what is sin. 
 Here, I fear, is a dangerous tendency of the 
 age we live in — to regard sin rather as a mis- 
 fortune or a mistake than a fault and cor- 
 ruption. No one can object to the generous 
 impulse which leads us to make due allowance 
 for those who grow up, through no fault of 
 their own, under unfavourable influences ; and 
 a merciful God, no doubt, considers and makes 
 due allowance for the inevitable disadvantages 
 under which so many human souls are reared. 
 
v.] ITS DOGMATIC TEACHING. 125 
 
 But still, sin is sin, and right is right, and the 
 true Church of God never falters in its con- 
 demnation of the one, and its upholding of the 
 other. It is its special business to form and 
 maintain an elevated public opinion, based on 
 the standard of the Word of God. And if the 
 Church must thus maintain the exceeding sin- 
 fulness of sin, it will never swerve from pointing 
 to the only true remedy. Captious discussions 
 may be raised as to the exact meaning and 
 logical definition of the Atonement, and the 
 Church in all ages has contained within its 
 bosom men who have not thought exactly alike 
 on this matter. But that the death of Christ 
 upon the cross brought God and man together, 
 that His blood washes away the stain of sin — 
 in what mysterious way we know not — that 
 the soul which feels itself by nature estranged 
 from God — and which in all pagan and mere 
 human systems is vainly striving to approach 
 Him, and is often found striving to approach 
 Him through some strange rites of immolation 
 — finds in the doctrine of this one great Sacrifice 
 
126 THE CHURCH OF THE FUTURE. [v. 
 
 a peace and a sense of nearness to the Ever- 
 lasting Father which it sought hopelessly else- 
 where — this doctrine the Church will never 
 part with while the world contains sinners who 
 have souls to be saved. 
 
 Fourthly, a true estimate of human nature 
 will ever point to some strange failure from a 
 high original, as set forth in the doctrine of 
 the Fall. No account of the degenerating 
 tendencies of bad example will be sufficient to 
 explain this. There is something radically 
 wrong, and that in a being who bears upon 
 him plain marks of having been destined to 
 achieve a high ideal. The doctrine of original 
 sin will approve itself to the most careful exami- 
 nation of human nature as it is. We shall 
 find it impossible to account otherwise for man's 
 tendency to a rapid degeneracy under unfavour- 
 able circumstances, and for the perhaps still 
 more alarming fact that, even under the most 
 favourable circumstances, evil desires and pro- 
 pensities are for ever cropping up in the mind 
 even of the most self restrained. And this 
 
v.] ITS DOGMATIC TEACHING. 127 
 
 doctrine of man's inherent weakness will ever 
 point to the necessity of a prevenient and sus- 
 taining grace which, through the Holy Spirit's 
 working, is mercifully sent to help and guide 
 those who would otherwise be wandering. 
 
 Fifthly. To the doctrines, then, of the 
 Fatherhood of God, and of the loving sym- 
 pathy of the Eternal Son, shown in His death 
 as a sacrifice, and in His intercession and 
 present aid as our Mediator, the Church 
 necessarily adds the doctrine of the aid of 
 the Holy Ghost. And when it reverently 
 sets side by side all that the Bible teaches 
 on these three great subjects, and weighs them 
 in its speculations on the nature of the Eternal, 
 it acquiesces in those expressions of the in- 
 effable mystery of the nature of the Godhead 
 which have come down to us in the old creeds, 
 asserting the Godhead, the personality, and 
 yet the mysterious union, of Father, Son, and 
 Holy Ghost. 
 
 Sixthly, as to the outward forms by which 
 this Church of Christ will maintain the 
 
128 THE CHURCH OF THE FUTURE. [v. 
 
 doctrines it upholds. Some of these forms are 
 Divine, and, therefore, necessarily of universal 
 obh'gation. Some have a lower origin and 
 stringency. " Go ye into all the world and 
 preach the Gospel to every creature. He that 
 bclicveth and is baptized shall be saved." 
 " Go ye and teach all nations, baptizing them 
 in the name of the Father, and of the Son, 
 and of the Holy Ghost, teaching them to 
 observe all things, whatsoever I have com- 
 manded you." If Christ spake these words, 
 baptism is a Divine appointment, and man 
 cannot dispen.se with it. So also is the Lord's 
 Supper. " Take, eat. This is My body which 
 is broken for you, this do in remembrance of 
 Me." " This cup is the New Testament in My 
 blood, this do ye as oft as ye drink it, in re- 
 membrance of Me." "As often as ye eat this 
 bread and drink this cup, ye do show the 
 Lord's death till He come." The Church of 
 Christ, then, without the Sacraments, would be 
 setting itself up against the Word of Christ. 
 But what a weariness to the devout soul are 
 
ITS DOGMATIC TEACHING. 
 
 129 
 
 the tomes which have been written on the nice 
 questions as to how through these sacraments 
 the Grace of God acts. O, friends, it is a simple 
 faith in Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, and a 
 simple joyful appreciation of the means ordained 
 in Holy Scripture, whereby the Almighty God- 
 head helps and elevates our souls, that is of 
 real value in the sight of Christ. And I do 
 hope some here present may live to see a time 
 when this simplicity may be more prized, and 
 the Church may be less vexed by anxious 
 and profitless questionings. The Church of 
 England is very simple, though not undog- 
 matic, in its statements on these matters. 
 Therefore, it is very wide in its comprehension 
 of various private views as to the doctrine of 
 the Sacraments, and in this peculiarity it keeps 
 near to Holy Scripture. 
 
 The clergy, indeed, are not entitled, in the'r 
 arrangements as to our common public worship, 
 to obtrude their private opinions respecting 
 such doctrines on the congregations whose 
 devotions they are appointed to lead. Every 
 
 K 
 
1 30 THE CHURCH OF THE FUTURE. 
 
 [V. 
 
 Church must prescribe a liturgy or order for 
 its administration of the Sacraments, and insist 
 that within certain limits a uniformity in this 
 liturgy be observed, so that it neither be added 
 to nor detracted from, and it is the duty of 
 the Bishops, as the executive of the Church, 
 to see that these limits be not transgressed to 
 the reasonable annoyance and scandal of any 
 of those who join with the clergy in public 
 worship. The rulers of the Church, then, are 
 bound to see that nothing is introduced into 
 its ritual which may reasonably be supposed 
 to proclaim disloyalty to the general principles 
 of its teaching. And if the clergy be allowed 
 more freely to assert their own private opinions 
 through their teaching in the pulpit, than 
 through the symbols of public worship, there 
 is no inconsistency here, provided care be taken 
 to prevent any man from contradicting any 
 statement of the formularies ; for it is of the 
 very es.sence of addresses from the pulpit that 
 they profess to be appeals to the reason and 
 the conscience, and that no hearer in an 
 
/TS DOGMATIC TEACHING. 
 
 intelligent age is bound to accept without 
 questioning the statements thus propounded ; 
 whereas in the common worship every man 
 must take a part, and it is unfair, beyond the 
 Church's warrant, to make him join in acts 
 which he believes his Church has not sanc- 
 tioned. 
 
 But no one will deny that besides the 
 Sacraments there must be other outward forms 
 which the Church of Christ must maintain. 
 " Go ye and preach the Gospel." Here is the 
 Divine warrant for the ordinance of preaching. 
 No Church neglects it without inflicting grievous 
 loss. A philosophy which never proclaimed 
 its doctrines would dwindle and decay. A 
 Church whose ministers are dumb dogs is unlike 
 the Church of the Apostles. The preaching 
 and the continual reverent reading of Holy 
 Scripture for edification has, ever since the 
 Reformation, been a marked characteristic of 
 the Church of England. And if, in past times, 
 we did not sufficiently avail ourselves of the 
 invitation to speak to one another and to God 
 
 K 2 
 
132 THE CHURCH OF THE FUTURE. [v. 
 
 in psalms and hymns and spiritual songs, this 
 want has been distinctly felt and recognized, 
 and great efforts have been already made and 
 are making to supply the need. The chief of 
 all Christian ordinances is prayer to the Father 
 through the Son, under the controlling in- 
 fluence of the Holy Spirit. Prayer, and praise, 
 and preaching, and the reading of Holy Scrip- 
 ture are ordinances directly prescribed by 
 God. Other ordinances are the Church's time- 
 honoured forms for common prayer, for edi- 
 fication, and for discipline or regimeut. The 
 Church will hold fast by these, both because 
 they are old— some of them Apostolic, — and 
 because they are good. Under this head will 
 fall its confirmations, its formal declarations 
 of God's readiness to absolve, its three-fold 
 scheme of government by bishops, priests, and 
 deacons. We shall not think lightly of what 
 connects us, in outward form, and in spiritual 
 influence, with the times when the Church 
 emerged fresh from the hands of the first 
 followers of the Lord Jesus. We shall, indeed, 
 
V. ] ITS DOGMA TIC TEA CHING. 1 3 3 
 
 be careful, as our article directs, to note that 
 these time-honoured forms, however instinct 
 with spiritual life, are not of the nature of the 
 Sacraments ; but we shall rejoice through them 
 as through the Sacraments, to connect our- 
 selves with the good and holy servants of Christ 
 who have maintained the light of His Gospel 
 even in the darkest ages. 
 
 But, some one may say. This Church which 
 you are setting before us for the new age, 
 with its doctrines of the Blessed Trinity, of 
 the corruption of human nature, and the con- 
 sequent impossibility of man being justified, 
 except through the merits and death 
 of the Lord Jesus Christ, maintaining the 
 old Sacraments and the old ordinances and 
 forms, is nothing else than the old Church 
 of England. It makes, in these respects, 
 common cause with the old superstitious 
 Church of Rome and the old churches of 
 the East, and also with some, at least, of 
 the narrow systems whicli have shackled the 
 freedom of Christ's teaching, by the chains 
 
1 34 THE CHURCH OF THE FUTURE. [v. 
 
 of a too rigid logic welded remorselessly by 
 sectarian zeal. True, that this Church is, after 
 all, nothing more or less than the old Church 
 of England, freed from certain modern ac- 
 cretions on the one side and on the other, 
 which had grown round its authoritative creed 
 in times of deadness or unnatural activity. 
 Modern philosophers thought indeed that they 
 had made some rents in the received system. 
 These have been filled up and repaired. I 
 grant that this, which I have here presented, 
 I's the old Church of Parker and Hooker, per- 
 haps here and there having lost some few of 
 the peculiar, unimportant features which at- 
 tached to it from the character and peculiar 
 circumstances of the age in which these divines 
 lived, from the temporary controversies which 
 raged around them, or the temporary dis- 
 couragement or patronage which alarmed or 
 upheld them. I do not mean that these men 
 foresaw the difficulties which would be sug- 
 gested after their time by modern thought ; 
 but is it not remarkable that those who wrote 
 
ITS DOGMATIC TEACHING. 
 
 our formularies, being, after all, but human 
 compilers, were guided not to embody in them 
 statements which the advancement of know- 
 ledge would refute ? This arose, I think, from 
 their wisely determining, under God's good 
 guidance, and in imitation of the wisdom of 
 the early creeds, to confine themselves as much 
 as possible, in their expositions of the terms 
 of communion, to the great central, immutable. 
 Divinely communicated truths, passing in 
 silence, as much "as the exigencies of their 
 age allowed, through the dangerous field of 
 shifting human opinion. This, then, I maintain, 
 is the same reformed old Church of England 
 - — Catholic in its connection with antiquity and 
 with the Universal Church, Protestant in its 
 opposit'on to the peculiar encroachments of the 
 Roman See. We think none the worse of it 
 because it is the old English Church which has 
 been tried through severe struggles ; which for 
 three hundred years and more has been iden- 
 tified in its present form with the national life ; 
 which neither in our fathers' time nor in ours 
 
1 36 THE CHURCH OF THE FUTURE. 
 
 [V. 
 
 has been the antagonist, but always the ally 
 and patron of learning, of science, and of the 
 nation's growing intelligence. It may have 
 learned a fresher and fuller toleration than 
 was possible in the midst of its old struggles ; 
 but it is the same Church still, while God's 
 Providence has placed it in a peculiar posi- 
 tion for rallying round it both the lovers of 
 antiquity and those who are imbued with a 
 searching spirit of inquiry ; while the old 
 Churches of East and West cannot refuse it 
 some reverence, and the newer sects feel that 
 it is a bulwark against the return to exploded 
 superstitions ; it seems peculiarly pointed out 
 as a centre of union for the long-divided faith 
 of Christians. In it we hold that Christen- 
 dom has the surest bulwark, both of sound 
 faith and sound morals, against the encroach- 
 ments of a threatening infidelity. 
 
 Let me, in conclusion, recall what is told 
 us of a remarkable man, who went to his 
 rest in Christ some ten years ago, and whose 
 letters have lately been published; the friend 
 
77-^ DOGMATIC TEACHING. 1 37 
 
 and in some sort the guide of Frederick 
 Maurice. He had long been esteemed a 
 prophet among the disciples of an advanced 
 school of Christian thought. In the midst of 
 his speculations he had certainly lived a 
 saintly life. It is said that as death drew 
 near, in his old age, during the last few days, 
 all the abstruse questions which had troubled 
 him in life disappeared. He felt that it was 
 on the old familiar truths of his boyhood that 
 he had now a firm grasp. On these he dwelt 
 as life ebbed. It was leaning on these that 
 he entered into the presence of the Saviour 
 he had ever loved. A lesson here surely 
 both for individual Christians and for 
 Churches. It has been noted also that the 
 latter sermons preached by Dr. Arnold, be- 
 fore he was prematurely taken from the 
 Church on earth in his forty-seventh year, 
 to the sorrow of all good men, are marked 
 by an earnest clinging to the great .central 
 doctrines of Christianity, and a vivid inculca- 
 tion of them in their fulness on the souls 
 
138 THE CHURCH OF THE FUTURE. \\ 
 
 for whose spiritual good he yearned. He 
 was a man fearless in speculation, and had 
 known many harassing doubts ; but the 
 deepening experience of a devout life, and 
 his ripening conviction of the realities of 
 that eternal world which, though imperceptibly, 
 he was nearing, had on his noble spirit that 
 same effect which life's trials and the felt 
 nearness of God may be expected to produce 
 on all the most earnest truth-loving souls. 
 So it seems to me that the Church of Christ, 
 amid distracting speculations and the growth 
 around it of dangerous error, will learn to 
 cling only the more closely to the great central 
 truths of the Gospel of its salvation.' 
 
VI. 
 
 PRACTICAL COUNSELS FOR ITS WORK. 
 
 (^Delivered at Maidstone, on September 2W1, to the 
 Rural Deanery of Sutton.) 
 
 My Reverend Brethren, and my 
 Brethren the Churchwardens, — The 
 purport of this last address of my present 
 visitation is to set forth certain practical matters 
 in which I believe we, in our separate spheres^ 
 may best promote the usefulness of that great 
 and venerable institution of which we are 
 members. We have received the Church of 
 England from our fathers: we trust by God's 
 blessing to hand it down unimpaired to our 
 successors, and it is our hearts' desire to make 
 it in every way subserve the great purpose of 
 
I40 THE CHURCH OF THE FUTURE. 
 
 [VI. 
 
 advancing the cause of Christ. The Church 
 consists of its clergy and its laity, and on both, 
 in the sphere of usefulness proper to each, great 
 duties devolve. No layman, as no clergyman, 
 can, in any position of life in which he is placed, 
 divest himself of his relations to the Church 
 of Christ of which he is a member. As citizens 
 we must act in all things according to our 
 highest convictions ; so also as men of business, 
 and in the intercourse of society. The Gospel 
 has come into the world for the express purpose 
 of raising the standard of our thoughts and 
 actions, and each failure by which we sink 
 below the standard is a forgetfulness of our 
 allegiance to Christ. It is one of the chief 
 characteristics of the Church of England that 
 it insists primarily and chiefly on those great 
 doctrines which are common to the whole 
 Christian world. I am not, therefore, speaking 
 here of the distinctions which separate one 
 branch of Christ's universal Church from 
 another ; but I am protesting against a lax 
 view, not uncommon in the present day, which 
 
VI.] 
 
 PRACTICAL COUNSELS. 
 
 141 
 
 would tell men that, though they are Christians, 
 they may throw their Christianity aside when 
 they enter on their civil duties, and be content 
 in their relations to the State and in their 
 business transactions to be heathens, while on 
 _ Sundays and in the Church they make pro- 
 fession of Christianity. Such attempts remind 
 one of the old story of the Elector- Archbishop 
 on the Rhine who, when reproached with the 
 profancness of his language, said that he was 
 speaking only as a temporal prince, and that 
 he would speak very differently in his character 
 as Archbishop. The answer was, "When the 
 Elector goes to his place of punishment for his 
 profanity, how will the Archbishop separate 
 himself from his company?" A Christian 
 takes his Christianity with him, for better or 
 for worse, in all conditions of life. In every 
 relation in which he can possibly stand, it is 
 inseparable from him ; it is part of himself, if 
 he has in truth any real connexion with it. 
 Modern theories of the isolation of our Christi- 
 anity from the living, breathing, acting life 
 
142 THE CHURCH OF THE FUTURE. [vi. 
 
 which environs us every day in a Christian 
 State are a delusion. It is high time that 
 men should make up their minds whether or 
 not they are ready, not only to make their bow 
 to Christianity on certain stated occasions, but 
 to let it be avowedly the guide and motive 
 power of all their life. 
 
 And if this applies to all the laity, I am right, 
 I think, especially to urge it upon you who, 
 holding those lay offices which our own branch 
 of the Church maintains in every parish, have 
 a sort of mixed character in your near relations 
 to the clergy. If even the ordinary citizen in 
 such a nation as ours cannot separate his 
 secular from his distinctly religious duties, this 
 applies with increased force to all who hold 
 secular or semi-secular offices in the direct 
 service of the Church. It is very satisfactory, 
 then, to observe how the office of churchwarden 
 is each year more prized in its true character, 
 and that, too, at a time when its duties have 
 become much more difficult than they were, 
 and when the patronage and other influence 
 
VI.] PRACTICAL COUNSELS. 143 
 
 that formerly attached to it has, by legislative 
 enactment, been greatly diminished. I am 
 truly thank Tul to observe at each of my places 
 of visitation how many churchwardens come 
 forward to join their brethren of the clergy in 
 the Holy Communion. This is, I trust, a sign 
 of the growing appreciation of the true im- 
 portance and sacred character of their official 
 duties, and also, indirectly, of a growing appre- 
 ciation of that more widely-reaching truth of 
 which we have been speaking — that every 
 citizen in England has his religious as well 
 as his secular duties, and that the two are 
 indissolubly connected. 
 
 I will here mention, by the way, that a clergy- 
 man who is able to work harmoniously with 
 his churchwardens will certainly find his burdens 
 thereby greatly lightened, and if, here and there, 
 he feels that their views differ from his own, 
 and act as a check on what he desires to 
 introduce as a salutary improvement, it will 
 be well for him to remember that they have 
 better opportunities than himself of knowing 
 
144 THE CHURCH OF THE FUTURE. [vi. 
 
 the feelings of that section of the laity among 
 whom they move, and that, -even if at times they 
 are unduly obstructive, not much is to be done 
 by a rude over-riding of his peoples prejudices. 
 More will be gained by conciliatory attempts to 
 settle differences through kindly intercourse 
 than can possibly be lost by the interval of time 
 required for effecting such conciliation. I must, 
 indeed, as on former occasions, urge the laity 
 not to be unreasonable in such matters. It will 
 never do to stop all improvement in the outward 
 form of our public worship till such time as 
 there is a universal consent to its adoption, and 
 every captious objection has been silenced. 
 Those of us whose memories go back fifty years 
 must remember how dreary, and even slovenly, 
 were of old the arrangements in many of our 
 parish churches. We must grant that it has 
 been to the zeal of our clergy, stimulated by 
 the good taste of what was usually but a 
 minority of their parishioners, that changes, now 
 acknowledged by all to be improvements, were 
 introduced. The point I urge is not that all 
 
VI.] 
 
 PRACTICAL COUNSELS. 
 
 changes are to be stopped, but that they are 
 only to be introduced on mature consideration 
 when sincerely believed to be improvements 
 with every desire and effort to make them 
 acceptable to the people, and with dutiful 
 reference, when any dispute arises, to the con- 
 stituted authority as the rubric directs. But I 
 trust and believe that both clergy and laity are 
 now tired of foolish discussions on such subjects, 
 and that the minds of both are occupied by 
 weightier matters. 
 
 To return, may I not trust, in spite of some 
 signs to the contrary, that in the majority, both 
 of our clergy and our laity, there is a growing 
 desire to recognise religious obligations of a 
 simple Christian kind in all the duties which 
 devolve on them in the Church and in the 
 State ? Let us pass on now to another matter. 
 In such an age as this, it is above all things 
 necessary that the standard of clerical efficiency 
 shall be maintained. You are aware that over 
 our great Universities, in the course of the 
 reforms which have recently been introduced 
 
 L 
 
146 THE CHURCH OF THE FUTURE. [vi. 
 
 into them, a wave of free thought has rolled, ex- 
 alting the secular above the ecclesiastical. The 
 result of this is that, while in this Diocese at least 
 there is no lack of good and efficient candidates 
 from the Universities, the number of young 
 men of the highest University distinction at 
 Oxford, if not at Cambridge, who seek holy 
 orders, is, for the present at least, diminished. 
 I trust that this state of things will not last. 
 I believe it to have been greatly augmented 
 by the fact that of late years a narrow and 
 somewhat superstitious form of the Church's 
 teaching has been too often presented as part 
 of the necessary equipment of a clergyman. 
 And greatly have the truest friends of the 
 Church longed that in both our great seats of 
 learning the Church should always be pre- 
 sented to the rising clergy In its truest, widest, 
 and most intellectual aspect. We have no fear 
 that the purity of its doctrine will suffer from 
 the light of criticism and of history. May 
 God's blessing be with all who are striving, 
 under great difficulties, to train our rising youth 
 
VI.] 
 
 PRACTICAL COUNSELS. 
 
 in a theology worthy of our Church's mission, as 
 the great civilizing influence which is to leaven 
 the thought and direct the energies of the 
 coming age. 
 
 Moreover, in our Universities there has of 
 late been a great change in respect of places 
 of emolument — that is, scholarships and fellow- 
 ships now thrown open to competition ; and 
 certainly there never was a time when it could 
 more truly be said that a career is open to 
 talent. But these changes, beneficial as they 
 are, have certain drawbacks which we must 
 face. A young man has not much chance in 
 a competitive examination unless he has had a 
 careful training in his boyhood, and such care- 
 ful training is more easily procured by the 
 wealthy than by the poor. Again, there may 
 be many young men, both good and able, well 
 fitted from the devotion and the earnestness of 
 their character, and from other gifts, to become 
 valuable ministers of Christ's gospel, who have 
 no great aptitude for the particular studies as 
 the reward for which scholarships and fellow- 
 
 L 2 
 
148 THE CHURCH OF THE FUTURE. [vi. 
 
 ships are given. Two sets of persons, there- 
 fore, from whom we might expect an important 
 addition to the ranks of the rising clergy — 
 namely, clever young men who in their early 
 boyhood have no means, and young men who, 
 without being remarkably clever, have many 
 solid qualities of head and heart, are under 
 peculiar disadvantages, and require our aid. 
 A conviction of this suggested, at one of our 
 dioccsas conferences, the establishment of a 
 fund ta enable young men of promise, desirous 
 of entering the ministry of our Church, to be 
 educated at our Universities.^ It is one of the 
 advantages of recent changes that the cost of 
 such University education, for those who choose 
 to exercise a wise selt-denial, and to accommo- 
 date themselves to the somewhat straitened cir- 
 cumstances of their condition in life, is greatly 
 reduced. An annual gift of £']Q or £Zo to 
 any promising young man, whose parents can- 
 not afford the expense of his education, will 
 now make all the difference as to the 
 1 See Appendix C. 
 
VI.] 
 
 PRACTICAL COUNSELS. 
 
 149 
 
 possibility of his being trained for the ministry 
 at the Universities. I desire anxiously that this 
 effort on our part should be extended. The 
 poor diocese of Bangor, to its honour, has set 
 a good example here to all England, which I 
 trust we shall not be slow to follow. So im- 
 portant has this matter appeared that, while 
 the Cathedral Commission has been dealing 
 with the statutes of Canterbtiry Cathedral, it 
 has been suggested that one of the canons 
 should have this special work assigned to him 
 — to look out for such young men ; to raise and 
 administer the funds necessary for their educa- 
 tion ; and to superintend and guide them by 
 advice during their University career. 
 
 It is often urged as a disadvantage of our 
 Church system that young men are ordained 
 so soon after leaving the University, without 
 a peculiar training for the duties of the pas- 
 toral office. Efforts, as you are aware, are 
 made in diocesan theological colleges to 
 obviate this omission. I have always been 
 strongly of opinion that attendance at such 
 
X50 THE CHURCH OF THE FUTURE. [vi. 
 
 diocesan colleges ought not, as a rule, to be 
 accepted as a substitute for the three years 
 of University life. We do not wish our future 
 clergy to be of the lower Roman Catholic 
 priest or ordinary Methodist class-leader or 
 Scripture-reader type. We do not wish them 
 to receive all their education in some narrow 
 school where one theological teacher may force 
 all the instruction given into one groove. I 
 am free to acknowledge that a few theological 
 colleges here and there, ably officered and well 
 conducted, may be, and now are, a useful sup- 
 plement to the University course. There are 
 young men, well fitted for the ministry, who 
 are all the better for being removed, at the end 
 of their three years of University life, to some 
 new sphere in a quiet place, where they can 
 apply themselves to their studies, and make 
 preparation for their life's work, at a distance 
 from old associates. But, for the ordinary body 
 of our theological students, I cannot see why 
 the Universities themselves, with their great 
 endowments, spacious libraries, and learned 
 
VI] 
 
 PRACTICAL COUNSELS. 
 
 professors, with all the helps to devotion which 
 their chapel services ought to afford, may not, 
 in the midst of the stir of life which is their 
 characteristic, find some quiet spots where, 
 under due rule and guidance, the future clergy- 
 man may, better than elsewhere, mature both 
 the practical and the theoretical preparation 
 for his life's work. 
 
 But perhaps it more concerns us to turn our 
 thoughts to that work which the clergy must 
 continue to prosecute for themselves when they 
 have entered on their several spheres of pro- 
 fessional labour. If it be true of all men and 
 of all women who are to be well educated that 
 their most important education begins when 
 they have left school or college, this is espe- 
 cially true of the clergy. It is not among the 
 poor only that we may find examples of persons 
 well taught in youth whose progress stops with 
 their youth, and for whom, therefore, their 
 early training proves useless, even if it be not 
 forgotten. The bishops do not fail to urge 
 upon the candidates for deacons' orders that 
 
152 THE CHURCH OF THE FUTURE. [vi. 
 
 the year before they are ordained priests 
 must be used for study as well as practical 
 work. These deacons have reached that very 
 time of life at which the importance of the 
 books they read opens before them with fresh 
 attractions, as they learn more clearly to under- 
 stand by practical observation their bearing on. 
 man's highest interests. Disquisitions on what 
 before seemed abstract points of theology or 
 philosophy are warmed to life when we see 
 how such questions affect human souls. It is 
 for this reason that we rigidly uphold a high 
 standard in the examination of candidates for 
 priests' orders. I fear the elder clergy some- 
 times scarcely appreciate the importance of our 
 doing so. Excuses are made — " I hope you 
 will not be hard on my curate, for he has not 
 had a moment to read, he has been entirely 
 occupied with his parish work ; he has had to 
 preach three sermons a week." I answer, 
 " Alas ! for his parishioners.' How can an 
 ordinary inexperienced young man of three- 
 and-twenty evolve each week out of his own 
 
VI.] 
 
 PRACTICAL COUNSELS. 
 
 brain three regular addresses, which will really 
 reach the hearts and consciences, instruct the 
 intellects, and guide the lives of his people ? 
 Much reading will not make a man a good 
 preacher, still less will little reading ; but this 
 is certain, that without reading the man is sure 
 to be an indifferent, uninstructive, ineffective 
 preacher. I do not mean that he is necessarily 
 to read much, but he must read really and to 
 the purpose, for however short a time each day ; 
 note what he reads, and accustom himself to 
 carry on suggestive trains of thought. Granted 
 that the best preacher is the man who touches 
 the heart and thus influences the life ; granted 
 that many gifts of voice, manner, tenderness of 
 sympathetic feeling, and terseness of expression 
 are required, if the words of the wise preacher 
 are to be as goads that prick the conscience, as 
 nails driven home to the heart and fastening 
 themselves in the memory ; granted, above all, 
 that no man can preach effectively what he 
 does not himself feel ; granted that there are 
 many gifts besides fulness of knowledge which 
 
154 THE CHURCH OF THE FUTURE. [vi. 
 
 are required for good preaching; yet without 
 knowledge, in this age especially, the sermon 
 will often be a stumbling-block to some in- 
 telligent member of the congregation. It is 
 sometimes said to be a virtue carried to 
 a fault in the Church of England that all our 
 clergy are expected to be preachers— a fault 
 the very opposite of that into which the 
 Oriental Churches have fallen, where there 
 is very little preaching. But whether this 
 be a fault or not, it is indispensable to our 
 system— we must all preach. We cannot, 
 indeed, all be great preachers, but in the 
 highest sense we can all be good preachers, 
 if we give of our best with great care, and 
 try to overcome every obstacle which mars our 
 efficiency ; if we store our minds as well as we 
 can, and speak to our people with a hearty 
 love of souls. Surely, our theme— the life, 
 and death, and resurrection of Christ, and 
 His ever-living intercession, and the gift of 
 the Holy Spirit— must inspire us with earnest- 
 ness when we speak to our people even of 
 
VI.] 
 
 PRACTICAL COUNSELS. 
 
 the commonest duties of their every-day 
 life. 
 
 But besides the spiritual element in our 
 preaching, nothing will excuse us for not adding 
 to our stores all we can, whereby we may make 
 our instruction more attractive; and study 
 will be required that we may gain a deeper 
 and fuller understanding of Holy Scripture, 
 with a deeper insight into the way in which 
 its truths and precepts have moulded the lives 
 of God's people, under varying circumstances, 
 in all ages. A wider knowledge, also, of the 
 motives of action, and of the temptations and 
 trials which beset human life, will be gained 
 by him who carefully reads history and bio- 
 graphy, and observes beyond the limits of 
 his own personal experience. We must not 
 make mistakes as to the common truths of 
 physical science, if we would have influence 
 with the more intelligent even of the mechanics 
 who are brought under our care. We must 
 not be ignorant of the works of the great 
 masters in poetry and oratory, if we would 
 
156 THE CHURCH OF THE FUTURE. [vi. 
 
 know and reach the feeUngs of our people ; 
 and it would be preposterous that we should 
 seek to guide any but the most ignorant, 
 if we knew nothing of the currents of philo- 
 sophical thought which are bearing on many 
 of the most earnest of the young around us 
 to conclusions with which their fathers never 
 troubled themselves. All these things show 
 that the wise clergyman will strive, as far as 
 circumstances allow, to make himself, in Bacon's 
 phrase, a " full man." His early training for 
 his profession must aim at this. He must 
 aim at this afterwards in the higher education 
 he continues for himself throughout all his 
 days. No amount of personal goodness will 
 in these times compensate for the want of life 
 and energy, if he allows himself to settle down 
 into a mere vegetative state. If it be but a 
 few souls that are committed to him, and they, 
 for the most part, uninstructed people, it cer- 
 tainly will require much art and labour, added 
 to earnestness of purpose, to enable him by his 
 d'scourses to penetrate their somewhat dense 
 
VI.] 
 
 PRACTICAL COUNSELS. 
 
 understandings. And tremendous are the issues 
 for these souls, one by one, which, all experience 
 shows, must hang upon the question whether 
 our preaching is effective to reach them or falls 
 on dull ears. I advise every clergyman in a 
 remote country place to be very careful lest he 
 stagnate, either morally or intellectually. If 
 he stagnates, so will his people. I advise you 
 in such districts carefully to maintain and give 
 life to those meetings for mutual discussion and 
 for devotion which ought to be common in all 
 our rural deaneries. Think not lightly of the 
 task committed to the pastor in the very 
 smallest parish. It is a blessed work to which 
 he is called who is surrounded by a flock so 
 manageable that he can know every family, 
 and make himself the personal guide and 
 friend of each member of the family, from the 
 grandsire to the little children. And perhaps, 
 measured by the highest standard, the life of 
 such a pastor, who is earnest and real in his 
 work, is among the happiest which this world 
 can offer. 
 
158 THE CHURCH OF THE FUTURE. [vi. 
 
 Have I seemed to dwell too much on the 
 intellectual side of your responsibilities ? It 
 is difficult, in our profession as the Chris- 
 tian instructors of our countrymen, to define 
 sharply the limit which separates our intel- 
 lectual from our devotional sphere of work. 
 Let all who learn and all you who have to 
 teach be sanctified by prayer, by thoughts ot 
 your own weakness and of God's willingness 
 to give you strength, and of the eternal in- 
 terests with which you have to deal. It is 
 impossible here to go into all the practical 
 matters which a bishop visiting his clergy 
 might wish to bring before them. Your 
 direct private pastoral intercourse with the old 
 and young of each family under your care, 
 the great opportunities for making and 
 deepening good impressions as the periodical 
 confirmations come round, an opportunity 
 similar to that of which the priests of the 
 Church of Rome make so effective a use at 
 the time of the first Communion — these and 
 many like matters must now be passed over. 
 
VI.] 
 
 PRACTICAL COUNSELS. 
 
 Perhaps the defect will in part be supplied 
 by the suggestions of those visitation ques- 
 tions which I have issued. 
 
 Before I close I shall dwell only on two 
 other points. In these days, when so much 
 depends upon keeping alive the good social 
 relations which bind the rich and the poor, 
 when many attempts are, unfortunately, made 
 to set class against class, in antagonism to 
 the whole spirit of the Gospel, you will do 
 well to think nothing unimportant which will 
 bring you into friendly relations with your 
 people, and enable you to help the poor 
 among them to raise themselves in the social 
 scale. You will not forget that you have a 
 heavenly commission and a heavenly message 
 to deliver both to rich and poor, and this 
 thought will be with you while you join even 
 in their amusements. All the members of 
 your flock ought to be made to feel that you 
 take a real interest in their welfare. And as 
 to the poor, as I have said, their efforts to 
 better themselves, the best means of directing 
 
l6o THE CHURCH OF THE FUTURE. [vi. 
 
 their attention to habits of thrift and im- 
 proved industrj^ their plans for emigration, or 
 for obtaining better wages by extending at 
 home the field in which they seek for work, 
 —in all these things it is the part of a true 
 Christian pastor to aid all the less instructed 
 of his people. I think that he will be able 
 in many ways quietly to influence both rich 
 and poor to a better understanding of their 
 dependence one on the other, and of their 
 reciprocal duties in the body politic. I am 
 not urging the clergy to mix themselves 
 up unduly with their people's secular affairs, 
 but nothing is really secular which promotes 
 Christian good feeling between man and man, 
 and enables duties to be performed as in the 
 sight of God and Christ which might other- 
 wise have been neglected. 
 
 There is still one other special domain from 
 which I trust our clergy will never find them- 
 selves excluded-the Christian instruction oi 
 our youth. I trust that our present direct 
 influence in our elementary schools may long 
 
PRACTICAL COUNSELS. 
 
 i6i 
 
 be continued to us ; that as a sacred duty you 
 may regard it as part of your daily task to 
 visit these schools, and see that religious in- 
 struction is properly conducted ; that you may 
 seek out your pupil-teachers and other advanced 
 scholars and draw them closely under your 
 personal influence and instruction. And even 
 if, unfortunately, here and there, the common 
 schools pass from under your direct control, I 
 trust that this will but make you redouble your 
 efforts to give life and reality to some well- 
 regulated system at fixed hours, when, by Sun- 
 day-schools or otherwise, you can gather the 
 young together for directly religious instruction. 
 It is a lamentable consideration that England 
 has hitherto been more backward than she 
 ought to have been in providing the blessings 
 of education for every class of her children. 
 All know and acknowledge how much the 
 clergy of the Church of England have of late 
 done in this great work ; but even now deplor- 
 able instances are to be found among us of 
 children growing to maturity in the grossest 
 
 M 
 
1 62 THE CHURCH OF THE FUTURE. [vr. 
 ignorance. My own experience as the head of 
 a large family of servants is, that well-grou-n 
 and tolerably intelhgent lads are to be found in 
 some country parishes, whose shght training at 
 scliool Iias never given them any real knmv- 
 ledge, and when examined at the age of eighteen 
 or nineteen they are found to know nothing. You 
 will not fail to satisfy yourselves that the least 
 advanced, as well as the cleverest of the children 
 in your schools, are really profiting by the in- 
 struction placed within their reach, and, more 
 especially with respect to religious instruction, 
 that what they are taught is not merely formally 
 accepted, but understood. For example, I 
 think you will act wisely if each of you, in your 
 schools, will satisfy yourselves by individual 
 questioning as to the prayers which the children 
 offer up morning and evening in their homes. 
 A child trained in habits of prayer may, by a 
 quiet example, become a missionary to a whole 
 family which would otherwise live without God. 
 
 Neither will you leave the young people of 
 your flock to wander unattended when they 
 
VI.] 
 
 PRACTICAL COUNSELS. 
 
 163 
 
 approach the dangerous threshold of mature 
 h'fe ; then, more than at any other time, they 
 require a helping hand. Where would any of 
 us clergy be, if, at that raw and inexperienced 
 age at which we left school, we had been 
 plunged, without restraint or guidance, into 
 the world's temptations } It was then that the 
 discipline and regulations of our colleges be- 
 came our safeguards, when, if left to ourselves, 
 we could not have used aright the liberty which 
 our age had brought us. And are we to believe 
 that the young plough-boy, artisan, or appren- 
 tice is more able to guide himself than the 
 young clergyman's or squire's son } For the 
 less refined, it must be remembered, unprin- 
 cipled men have provided in this age a 
 complete deluge of immoral and debasing 
 literature, which will sweep away all the pure 
 instruction they have received in childhood if 
 some friend be not at hand to direct them. I 
 am sure the clergy I address will not fail to give 
 this subject their most serious consideration. 
 And now I must close this visitation — that 
 RI 2 
 
164 THE CHURCH OF THE FUTURE. [vi. 
 
 part of it, at least, which is formally and 
 publicly conducted. As I have said before, 
 the greater part of the practical visitation of 
 the diocese is connected with the answers to 
 the printed questions placed in your hands 
 which you have now returned to me or my 
 officers. By these I expect to have a distinct 
 view of the position of each parish in the 
 diocese brought before me, and I shall not fail 
 to communicate with you individually, where 
 necessary, that we may mutually assist each 
 other in the accomplishrnent of the great work 
 committed to us. It must be quite uncertain 
 whether I shall have another opportunity of 
 thus meeting the whole diocese on visitation 
 — certainly we who have gathered together 
 this year can never, all of us, meet again. 
 Also since, if God spares my life, I shall soon 
 enter on my seventieth year, and I have now 
 almost completed the twenty-fourth year of 
 my episcopate, it can scarcely be expected 
 that even if life and health are spared to me 
 to enter on another visitation, I shall again be 
 
VI.] PRACTICAL COUASELS. 165 
 
 equal to the labour I have imposed on myself 
 of addressing the diocese in separate charges 
 at so many different stations. I have been 
 anxious, therefore, on this occasion to leave 
 on record my matured conviction of the nature 
 of certain pressing difficulties which in th s 
 age, in my judgment, greatly oppose the pro- 
 gress of the Church of Christ in this land and, 
 indeed, throughout the civilized world. I have 
 been anxious also to set before you somewhat 
 in detail what I conceive to be the special 
 mission of our own branch of Christ's Church. 
 May God enable all of us, clergy and laity, 
 rightly to measure our dangers and to do our 
 part manfully in resisting them. 
 
 I suppose when a bishop closes his charge 
 he always feels that there are many important 
 matters on which he v/ould wish to dwell, which 
 he has left untouched. It is so certainly to-day. 
 I will, however, only once again call upon you 
 all, clergy and laity alike, to lay seriously to 
 heart the great responsibility of our position 
 as ministers and office-bearers of the Church 
 
1 66 THE CHURCH OF THE FUTURE. 
 
 [vr. 
 
 of Christ established in this realm. In crowded 
 towns, amid the multiplicity of pressing cares, 
 which the aggregation of human beings brings 
 with it, in lonely rural districts where the very 
 absence of such peculiar difficulties brings its 
 own temptations and trials, you, clergy and 
 laity alike, have to uphold the Church of Christ 
 in that form in which we have received it from 
 our fathers, and in which we verily believe it 
 is well fitted to resist the opposition of im- 
 morality and infidelity and dull indifference. 
 We are all of us watchmen and stewards in 
 our several degrees, each with our separate 
 work ; God give us grace to do it. To the 
 clergy especially I would say in closing that 
 I well know, and I trust shall ever sympathise 
 with, the difficulties that beset them. As years 
 advance I trust we learn to know each other 
 better, and more fully to enter into each other's 
 feelings. You will not fail to pray for me, and 
 I certainly shall pray earnestly for the clergy 
 and laity of this diocese. 
 
VII. 
 
 ADDRESS TO THE MEMBERS OF THE 
 CATHEDRAL BODY. 
 
 {Delivered in Canterbury Cathedral, on 
 September 25//^.) 
 
 My Reverend Brethren and other 
 Members of the Cathedral Body— I 
 appear among you to-day as visitor under 
 somewhat peculiar circumstances. You are 
 aware that it has seemed good to Her Majesty 
 to issue a commission of inquiry into the condi- 
 tion of the various cathedral bodies, and espe- 
 cially to call the attention of the commissioners 
 to the propriety of drawing up new statutes in 
 lieu of any which may have become obsolete 
 or unfitted for the present times ; and you are 
 
1 68 THE CHURCH OF THE FUTURE. [vn. 
 probably aware that Her Majesty has thought 
 good to appoint me to the office of president^or 
 chairman of this Royal commission. Therefore, 
 as visitor here to-day, some may expect that I 
 sliould throw some Hght on the views which have 
 occurred to the commissioners in reference to 
 the duties which Her Majesty has devolved 
 upon them. You are aware, however, that the 
 range of subjects which is submitted to this 
 commission is very wide. It would be prema- 
 ture and improper for me to attempt to speak- 
 in the name of my brother commissioners on 
 an occasion of this kind. Of course, as we 
 have taken the metropolitical cathedral as the 
 first which we have investigated, it will not be 
 unnatural that I should give expression, in the 
 course of this charge, to opinions which have 
 been floating in the minds of the commissioners. 
 But these cannot as yet be supposed to have 
 any distinct consistency. 
 
 One point is obvious, that it is the duty of 
 the commissioners to recommend to Her Ma- 
 jesty a readjustmeut of the statutes of the 
 
vn.] ADDRESS. 1 69 
 
 various cathedrals, and I think I shall be be- 
 traying no confidence if I say that it is of the 
 very essence of this arrangement with reference 
 to the statutes, that some clause shall be intro- 
 duced into them which shall give power for 
 altering statutes from time to time, under the 
 sanction of some august authority, so as in after 
 times to adapt the arrangements of the various 
 catliedrals to changing circumstances in every 
 age. Great care, of course, is required in the 
 alteration of ancient statutes which have come 
 down to us with the authority of so long a 
 prescription ; and great care will be wanted in 
 constructing the particular statute which shall 
 give the power of alteration of statutes in after 
 times. As to two points, then, I think there is 
 no doubt : that we are likely to have new 
 statutes suggested, and that those new statutes 
 will contain a power of alteration. 
 
 And now let mc proceed more distinctly to 
 my duties in this visitition. A visitation, I 
 presume, is intended to call upon all of us to 
 consider how far wc are fulfilling the ideal or 
 
I 70 THE CHURCH OF THE FUTURE, [vii. 
 
 intention with which our great institution has 
 been founded. I say we, because such an investi- 
 gation, conducted with all the solemnity which 
 has attended our gathering at this time, puts cer- 
 tain searching questions to every one of us, from 
 the visitor, to whom great duties are confided, 
 down to the youngest King's scholar or chorister 
 connected with this great cathedral. We have 
 to ask ourselves how far, by God's help, we are 
 doing our several duties to the institution of 
 which we are all members. It may be that it is 
 but in some small matters, as they are reckoned 
 by the outside world, that we are failing, but every 
 failure, either in the old or the young among us, 
 ought to be noted at such a solemn time as 
 this, and noted with a view to improvement in 
 the future. We are gathered to-day in a very 
 venerable fabric, which speaks to us on every 
 side of the passing nature of those opportunities 
 which are given to us, as individuals, for the ful- 
 filment of the several duties committed to us by 
 God. We are here in the midst of the monu- 
 ments of very old time, amid memorials of the 
 
vn.] 
 
 ADDRESS. 
 
 history- of our country, over the graves of great 
 men who have done great works in former days. 
 It is something to feel ourselves, from the oldest 
 to the youngest, united in this great institution, 
 and, we hope, animated by the associations 
 which this building and its institutions call to 
 our minds. 
 
 Now, our cathedral, like every other cathe- 
 dral, has its own peculiar characteristics. It 
 would be a great mistake if those who desire to 
 make arrangements for the cathedrals in this 
 country were to treat them all exactly alike. 
 A list of them lies before me, in which some one 
 has marked those which belong to the old, and 
 those which belong to the new, foundation — a 
 very broad distinction indeed, the particulars of 
 which I need not enter into at present. But, 
 besides this great distinction running through 
 them all, who, for example, would for a mo- 
 ment consider that the great cathedral of 
 St. Paul's, in the centre of the centre of the 
 civilized world, was like the cathedral of St. 
 David's on the rocks of Wales, in a small village 
 
172 THE CHURCH OF THE FUTURE. [vii. 
 
 consisting of a few farmhouses ? Who would 
 suppose that Durham, with its magnificent 
 endowments and its great University under the 
 shadow of its walls, was exactly like, let us say, 
 Llandaff ? There must be the greatest distinction 
 between the different cathedrals ; and though it 
 is perfectly true that some similar principles will 
 be found to pervade them all, yet he would be 
 a most unwise reformer of our cathedral bodies 
 who would apply to them any stereotyped sys- 
 tem of improvement, which might be extremely 
 useful for one, but would altogether fail of any 
 usefulness for another. I trust that any such 
 vain attempt will be avoided, that every cathe- 
 dral will be dealt with according to its own 
 particular characteristics and the circumstances 
 that ; urround it. 
 
 When I say that a visitation calls upon us 
 to consider the ideal of our cathedral existence, 
 this may be understood in two senses. There 
 is the old ideal which existed in the mind of 
 the original founders, in an age extremely un- 
 like our present age, and in very different 
 
ADDRESS, 
 
 circumstances from those in which we find 
 ourselves. One of the difficulties which has 
 beset the cathedral bodies in late times has 
 been this, that they have not been able dis- 
 tinctly to realise — and it is impossible to realise 
 — the ideal which is contained in their ancient 
 statutes, because the whole state of society, 
 since these statutes were written, has entirely 
 changed, and things, which were admirably 
 suited for the days when cathedrals were 
 originally founded, have altogether ceased to 
 be capable of being applied to the exigencies 
 of the present times. And what has been 
 the result of this There may have been no 
 change of statutes outwardly ; but every man 
 of intelligence knows that the greatest of all 
 changes are those which take place while out- 
 wardly there appears to be no change. A 
 man lives, say, in the same house, surrounded 
 by many of the same outward conveniences, 
 and even by the same faces, from childhood 
 to old age, but the man is changing year by 
 year, and if he attempts in his old age, or 
 
I 74 THE CHURCH OF THE FUTURE. [vii. 
 
 in the vigour of Irs manhood, to accommo- 
 date himself to what was fit for his childhood, 
 he may fancy to himself that he is re- 
 maining unchanged; but an imperceptible 
 change has been going on, far greater 
 than any that could have come by a change 
 of outward arrangement. And so, I think, we 
 shall find, as of the Universities, so also of the 
 cathedrals, that the maintenance of old statutes 
 is very often synonymous with a departure from 
 their spirit. And hence there has grown up in 
 every old society such as this a number oi 
 traditionary explanations of statutes which have 
 really set them aside. Customs have come to 
 be as powerful as statutes— customs about which 
 no one exactly knows when they sprang into 
 existence, and therefore, from their venerable 
 antiquity, they have become as powerful as the 
 statutes which virtually they have set aside. 
 Now, it seems to me that it is wise carefully to 
 look through our old statutes and to reconsider 
 our old customs, not with the view of setting 
 aside anything in them which is excellent, nor, 
 
VII.] 
 
 ADDRESS. 
 
 ^75 
 
 I believ-e, with a view in any respect to violat'ng 
 their spirit, but of seeing that the letter and 
 the spirit more completely agree than they do 
 in the present state of things. We are to look 
 to the ideal of our cathedral. Are we to 
 suppose ourselves, then, in the days in which 
 this was an ancient monastery, going back to 
 Norman times, or even beyond Or are we 
 even to throw ourselves into the Reformation 
 age, when our monastery changed into a 
 cathedral entrusted to secular clergy; or are 
 we, as living men, with duties committed to 
 us b)' tiic Lord Whom we serve, to face manfully 
 the difficulties that are around us in the age 
 in which we live, and to endeavour to see that 
 these great institutions, which we have received 
 from unknown antiquity, shall be made as 
 much to serve our Lord and blaster in the 
 changing circumstances of the present day as 
 they did when they sprang from the hands of 
 their founders in the old times that are past.'' 
 Therefore we have, in looking to the ideal of 
 our cathedral, to look both back to what was 
 
176 THE CHURCH OF THE FUTURE. [vii. 
 
 originally intended, and to look around us now 
 to see bow far the original intentions arc cap- 
 able of being applied ucefuliy, as in God"s 
 sight, to the changing circumstances of the 
 present age. 
 
 Now, one thing is certain, that in the minds 
 of those who originally founded these institu- 
 tions, or reformed them at the time of the 
 Reformation, they were intended to be centres 
 of religious life. It .is a very serious question 
 for us to ask ourselves at this moment how 
 far this great institution of ours is, as I trust it 
 is, the centre of religious hfe and of religious light 
 to this diocese, and in its degree, to the whole 
 Church. This is a question -we have to pro- 
 pound to ourselves. Every one of us has a 
 part to bear in giving life to this ideal, from 
 the visitor, as I have said before, down to the 
 youngest student who is engaged in preparing 
 himself for life in the King's School. There 
 can be no harm in praising the exertions which 
 have been made in other cathedrals, though it 
 would be very undesirable that, gathered here 
 
VII.] 
 
 ADDRESS. 
 
 177 
 
 to-day, we should begin to praise ourselves. 
 Let us see, therefore, if we can find any other 
 cathedral which, under very difficult circum- 
 stances, is endeavouring to fulful tliis great duty 
 of being the centre of light and of worship 
 where God has placed it. It must be granted 
 that St. Paul's Cathedral has no easy task, in 
 the very centre of modern civilization, sur- 
 rounded by four millions of people, a vast 
 number of whom have no connexion with the 
 Church which St Paul's typifies. Yet I am 
 bound to say that, during late years, a great 
 work has been done in that cathedral. No one 
 can enter it on a weekday or on Sunday without 
 seeing that it has laid hold of the hearts of the 
 people of that great metropolis. No one can 
 doubt that there is life and energy within it, and 
 that it is becoming, as much as the altered cir- 
 cumstances of the times allow, very much the 
 centre of religious life in that evervvhelming 
 metropolis. Now, this is the sort of ideal which 
 ought to be present to the minds of all who 
 would improve any one of our cathedrals. It 
 
 N 
 
1 78 THE CHURCH OF THE FUTURE. [vii. 
 
 is, I trust, present to our minds, and that we do 
 endeavour, as far as adverse circumstances allow, 
 to fulfil it. We have to ask ourselves to-day 
 whether we can fulfil it better. The thing is not 
 impossible — that is plain. IMuch may be done. 
 Difficulties stand in our way, but those diffi- 
 culties will disappear if we brace ourselves to 
 our work with an earnest purpose to work as 
 in God's sight. 
 
 When we speak of the cathedral as the centre 
 of rclig'ous life, first we have its worship. And 
 we are met here together to ask ourselves 
 to-day whether, in all respects, our worship 
 is as perfect as it might be. I am sure there 
 is an earnest desire on the part of all of us 
 to make it as perfect as possible. Our mus'c 
 should be beautiful, elevating, edifying, above 
 all, devotional. A great deal of skill, a 
 great deal of time, a great deal of self- 
 discipline will be required if we are to 
 bring even this one part of our work to the 
 perfection which it is capable of attaining. 
 But in the worship of Protestant cathedrals, 
 
VII.] 
 
 ADDRESS. 
 
 179 
 
 musical services, and even devotional services, 
 always go hand-in-hand with instruction. The 
 manner of reading the Word of God may 
 seem a little matter, but it is very im.- 
 portant for us to consider with ourselves 
 whether the reading of the Word of God, 
 as an important point in all our church ser- 
 vices, is as perfect as it ought to be ; whether 
 those who casually enter our cathedral, coming 
 it may be by some excursion train, and remain- 
 ing for the service, hearing the Word of God 
 read, may fairly be expected to carry away with 
 them some striking sentence from Holy Writ 
 which may be of use to them in their after 
 lives. And if the reading of the Word of 
 God, so the preaching of the Word of God. 
 We have all of us, who are ordained ministers 
 of Christ, carefully to consider with ourselves 
 whether our preaching does answer the great 
 purpose for which the Lord sent us forth 
 to preach the Gospel to every creature. In 
 every cathedral with which I am acquainted 
 there are old arrangements about preaching 
 
 Ii.2 
 
I So THE CHURCH OF THE FUTURE. [vii. 
 
 which I am bound to say I think might be 
 improved. Why should people be tied down 
 to some routine, unless it is found that 
 that routine produces the very best possible 
 result ? Therefore, I should not be surprised 
 if the commissioners who are appointed to 
 consider the condition of our cathedral bodies 
 were to suggest that some alteration might pro- 
 fitably be made in this matter. Of course, with 
 the learned divines and aSle men that we have 
 here, we ought to be free from the imputations 
 which have been made as to other cathedrals 
 elsewhere ; but even we may not have attained 
 that absolute standard of such perfection as 
 is attainable. I have heard it said elsewhere, 
 of other cathedrals, that if you want to hear 
 dull sermons in a diocese, you had better go 
 to the centre of the diocese, and there you 
 are likely to hear them. I do not for a moment 
 say that that is the case here. But still it is 
 quite possible that even here some wiser ar- 
 rangement might be devised than that which has 
 stereotyped a system which makes the tenure 
 
VII.] 
 
 ADDRESS. 
 
 i8i 
 
 of a particular ofuce, rather than a fitness to 
 address the souls of the people who frequent 
 the cathedral, the qualification for addressing 
 them from the pulpit. I will not dwell further 
 upon this : but I think that it is a matter which 
 might well engage the attention of the cathedral 
 bodies, whether, somehow or other, more elasti- 
 city 'may not be given to the preaching rota, 
 whereby, without losing any of that great 
 authority which naturally belongs to the prin- 
 cipal preachers of our great cathedrals, we might 
 occasionally have more life. No doubt much 
 has been done in this respect in late years. To 
 refer again to St. Paul's, which has its disad- 
 vantages and difficulties, but also its advantages, 
 there is no doubt that since I first became 
 acquainted with the Diocese of London, 
 twenty-four years ago, the whole system has 
 been there entirely altered. The custom of 
 introducing extraneous preachers, at special 
 evening services on Sunday, began in the 
 metropolis at Westminster Abbey, under Dean 
 Trench, and Dean Milman speedily followed 
 
1 82 THE CHURCH OF THE FUTURE. [vii. 
 
 the example at St. Paul's. The best preachers 
 in England one after another are now to be 
 heard in these two cathedrals, whether they 
 belong to the cathedral body or whether they 
 do not. You will hear on Sunday evenings 
 the most eminent theologians and the best 
 preachers in the whole Church of England — 
 I might say, the best that are to be found any- 
 where. And though a cathedral in a country 
 town is very differently circumstanced in this 
 respect from a cathedral in the great central 
 metropolis, yet still you will be acting wisely, 
 I am sure, in this cathedral, in more completely 
 opening the pulpit, as you have partially opened 
 it of late years. By means even of what you 
 have already done the old stereotyped system 
 has somewhat given way to the introduction of 
 fresh life, and I trust that all have benefited 
 by it. 
 
 Again, if our cathedral is to be the centre 
 of religious life and of worship and of preach- 
 ing, we all are reminded, every time we enter 
 the precincts of this cathedral, that it is to be 
 
VII.] 
 
 ADDRESS. 
 
 183 
 
 the centre of religious life in the way J5f edu- 
 cation ; and here I am bound to say that I 
 think nothing has been wanting in the arrange- 
 ments of this cathedral body for making the 
 educational establishments connected with it 
 as efficient and useful as they possibly can be. 
 And I am sure that in those who teach, and in 
 those who preside over the regulation of our 
 educational establishments, there is an earnest 
 spirit and a determination to make our schools 
 efficient, as religious Church of England schools. 
 I hope the time may come when our choristers' 
 school may be improved. It makes a very 
 great difference as to the usefulness of our cathe- 
 dral services whether the boys who compose the 
 choir, and whose very occupation, while it is one 
 of privilege, is also one of considerable tempta- 
 tion, be thoroughly and devotionally trained. 
 I believe it is granted that if the means were 
 at hand much might be done to improve this 
 cathedral in this respect. To turn again to 
 the central cathedral of the metropolis. With 
 the abundant wealth which that body possesses, 
 
1 84 THE CHURCH OF THE FUTURE. 
 
 [VII 
 
 it has £stablished a great choristers' school which 
 is in many respects likely to be a model. It 
 may be very difficult, with our crippled re- 
 sources, to accomplish the same good work 
 which has been done there. But I am sure 
 that there is everj' desire on the part of those 
 who govern this cathedral to make the choristers' 
 school as efficient as is the great King's School 
 attached to our body. 
 
 We are honoured to-day by a very large 
 assemblage of those who, some twenty-five 
 years ago, would not have existed in this 
 cathedral institution — our honorary Canons. I 
 think that, even with the little that has as yet 
 been done to attach them distinctly to the 
 cathedral body, they have been of great use 
 in connecting the cathedral with the diocese. 
 The fact of a number of men who have worked 
 hard in their several parishes, bearing even an 
 honorary name which connects them with the 
 great central cathedral, has a good effect in 
 the whole diocese. Some people think the 
 honorary Canons ought to manage the cathe- 
 
VII.] ADDRESS. 185 
 
 dials. I do not think we are likely to have 
 a revolutionary change of that kind. But I 
 think that it is very desirable indeed that 
 in this respect the cathedrals of the new 
 foundation should be more assimilated to 
 the cathedrals of the old. You are aware, 
 probably, that some years ago Mr. Randolph, 
 a prebendary of St. Paul's, tested, in a court 
 of law, the rights of the old prebcndal chapter 
 of St. Paul's as compared with the rights of 
 the residentiary chapter. All that was esta- 
 blished was this (but it was an important point 
 as far as it went), that non-residentiary pre- 
 bendaries, answering very much to our hono- 
 rary canons, though, of course, of an older 
 foundation, are entitled, with the lesser chapter, 
 to vote for the election of proctors in Convoca- 
 tion. And, accordingly, the election of proctors 
 in Convocation is now an election conducted 
 in that cathedral by the whole body of non- 
 residentiary as well as residentiary canons. It 
 certainly has occurred to many persons that 
 it would be no inconvenience, but quite the 
 
1 86 THE CHURCH OF THE FUTURE. [vii. 
 
 reverse, to associate the honorary canons of 
 our cathedrals of the new foundation with the 
 residentiary canons in such duties as that which 
 has been claimed and vindicated for them in 
 the case to which I have alluded. And once 
 having established that these honorary canons 
 may be called together for the purpose of these 
 elections, it naturally suggests itself to us that 
 there may be other circumstances also under 
 which the bishop or the dean or the canons resi- 
 dentiary may desire to confer with them ; and 
 that, therefore, meetings of these honorary 
 canons in a greater chapter might by no means 
 be a disadvantage, but of great use to the 
 Church and to the diccese. 
 
 With regard to the governing body, it is 
 difficult, I think, to say exactly what was the 
 original ideal on which the residentiary canon's 
 office was established. But there is no diffi- 
 culty in my mind in saying what is the sort 
 of ideal which is suitable for this present age. 
 Our Universities, from a change of circum- 
 stances which we may greatly deplore, but 
 
VII.] 
 
 ADDRESS. 
 
 187 
 
 which we cannot alter, are severing, more and 
 more, their formal connection with the Church. 
 If the Church is to maintain, in an age like 
 this, the high position which it has ever main- 
 tained on account of learning, we must have 
 positions for learned men. I may speak in the 
 presence of the residentiaries of this cathedral 
 with perfect freeness on this subject, for I 
 believe it will be difficult to produce any ca- 
 thedral in the kingdom, the names of the 
 members of which are better known as learned 
 men than are the residentiaries of the cathedral 
 in which we are now assembled. I trust that 
 this characteristic of our cathedral body will 
 ever be maintained. Study, however, is not 
 inconsistent with some outward activity. We, 
 in our cathedral body, have two officers whose 
 business it is to co-operate with the Bishop in 
 the management of this important diocese. 
 I believe I may fairly say, that if it were not 
 for the assistance which I personally receive 
 from the two archdeacons, it would be im- 
 possible with any satisfaction to carry on the 
 
1 88 THE CHURCH OF THE FUTURE. [vii. 
 
 work of the Diocesan Episcopate as connected 
 with the duties of the Archbishop of Canter- 
 bury. And yet I do not think that even the 
 onerous .duties wliich devolve upon the arch- 
 deacons interfere with their being learned 
 men. Certain changes as regards the Canons 
 Residentiary have, I am free to confess, 
 been proposed. Whether they will be carried 
 into effect or not is quite another matter. 
 But it may be well that we here should 
 know what sort of clianges have been 
 proposed, and consider for ourselves how far 
 they are good. One is that a point in the 
 ancient statutes which seems in many cathe- 
 drals, if not in this, to have been somewhat 
 overlooked, should be reasserted— namely, the 
 controlling authority of the dean, assisted by 
 the precentor, in the whole management and 
 the arrangement of the cathedral services. I 
 do not know that this is not the case here 
 already, but it is not the case in all cathedrals— 
 that I can testify. It is true that in the multi- 
 tude of counsellors there is wisdom, but if you 
 
VII.] 
 
 ADDRESS. 
 
 wish to manage your parishes well, do you 
 think it would be a good plan for the manage- 
 ment of them that you should always call a 
 meeting of the whole rural deanery when you 
 wish to make the slightest change or im- 
 provement in the arrangement of your parish 
 church ? And that you should be bound 
 hand and foot not to make any change till you 
 had persuaded the whole body of the rural 
 deanery to agree to what you think best for 
 your parish church ? I believe that this sort of 
 divided responsibility is the most admirable of 
 all machinery for preventing improvements. If 
 we wish to improve we must throw upon the 
 members individually the responsibilities which 
 we call upon them to fulfil. And I believe that 
 this was the ideal of the original statutes — that 
 certain officers, as the executive, had great 
 duties committed to them which it was left to 
 their individual responsibility, acting to the. best 
 of their judgment, adequately to fulfil. The 
 central body met to lay down great principles 
 from time to time, but it considered that, having 
 
I90 THE CHURCH OF THE FUTURE. [vii. 
 
 elected certain officers, or having received cer- 
 tain officers elected by others, those officers had 
 their distinct duties to perform. Usually, the 
 dean of the cathedral had a very distinct office 
 to perform as regulator of the whole, and, with 
 the assistance of the precentor acting under 
 him, was to be considered as responsible for the 
 services of the Church. 
 
 What, then, is the duty of the canons.? 
 There, are various offices which the old statutes 
 prescribed as falling to the canons. These 
 offices ought to be made, as much as possible, 
 realities, and in some cathedrals the Chan- 
 cellor of the old foundation carries on the 
 work of instruction. You all know what 
 has been going on in this matter at Lincoln. 
 You know how similar views have been im- 
 ported into the now scarcely formed cathedral 
 at Truro. This, at all events, is certain, that 
 some duties connected with instruction— and in- 
 struction which shall extend beyond the limits 
 of the actual cathedral body— may most legiti- 
 mately and properly be committed to certain of 
 
VII.] 
 
 ADDRESS. 
 
 191 
 
 the members of the residentiary chapter. It 
 has been found in some places that lectures 
 delivered in great centres of the diocese by 
 members of the chapter have been of use. How 
 far any system of this kind can be incorporated 
 into our existing cathedral system here in 
 Canterbury I am not prepared at the present 
 moment to say ; but I do not despair that 
 something of the kind may take effect. We 
 have lately been making considerable exertions 
 to secure some means of sending deserving can- 
 didates for holy orders to the Universities.^ 
 Several young men are at this moment main- 
 tained at the Universities by a diocesan fund. 
 It seems at once to open up a sphere of useful- 
 ness for some one of our residentiary body that 
 he should take the management of these young 
 men more distinctly under his control, cor- 
 respond with them, direct them in their work, 
 and generally look after their progress, and see 
 that they are making good use of the assistance 
 which the diocese affords to them. In some 
 ' Vide Appendix C. 
 
192 THE CHURCH OF THE FUTURE. 
 
 [V.I. 
 
 places a theological college has been established 
 in connexion with cathedrals. You are aware 
 that we discussed this subject at some length at 
 one of our diocesan conferences, and it was 
 decided that, upon the whole, it was not desi- 
 rable for the present, at least, to establish such 
 a diocesan theological college. But something 
 of the kind in the way of assisting these young 
 students who are sent from our diocese to pre- 
 pare for the ministry may certainly be incor- 
 porated with advantage in our cathedral sj-stem 
 Again, this town of Canterbury contains, if I 
 am right, eighteen churches. It ought to be a 
 model town with so many clergymen to look 
 after comparatively few people, and I hope and 
 trust it is. But this suggests whether, somehow 
 or other, members of the cathedral body might 
 not take more under their cai'e than they have 
 done, according to the traditions of past times, the 
 different parishes clustered round the cathedral. 
 Some .scheme of this kind I certainly hope will 
 be ventilated and reduced to some useful form. 
 Now many people are anxious that our canons 
 
VII.J 
 
 ADDRESS. 
 
 should do nothing whatever but be canons. I 
 do not know that this is a very good thing. 
 If you find a distinct work for a man it is 
 very desirable that he should be present 
 in the sphere in which his work lies. And 
 no doubt the diocese has a prior claim to 
 other places on the cathedral as its centre. 
 But our cathedrals do not wholly belong to a 
 particular diocese, they belong to the Church. 
 We cannot forget that here it is not, as in 
 some cathedrals, the diocesan who has to fill 
 up every office in the residentiary body. On 
 the contrary, most of those who come to us 
 are eminent men selected by Her Majesty's 
 advisers or by Her Majesty herself and sent 
 down, thereby proclaiming our connexion 
 not merely with the diocese of Canterbury, 
 but with the whole Church. I believe, for 
 example, that the University is the better for 
 its connexion with the Church through the 
 canon-professor, and that the cathedral, as 
 well as the diocese, is also the better for its 
 connexion with the University through the 
 
 O 
 
194 THE CHURCH OF THE FUTURE. 
 
 [VII. 
 
 professor-canon. But these, of course, are merely 
 hints which are thrown out for consideration. 
 When the statutes are ready to be laid before 
 Her Majesty, and before they have been finally 
 approved, they will be submitted to the resi- 
 dentiary body, that they may give what advice 
 seems to them desirable on the subject. 
 
 There are two points I have omitted. The 
 duty of the minor canons and the duty of 
 the Six-preachers. Efforts will certainly be 
 made to render the relations of both these 
 offices to the chapter more satisfactory. Modi- 
 fications will, no doubt, be suggested in the 
 tenure of the offices, and improvement sought 
 in other respects. VVe must all feel how greatly 
 the efficiency of the daily services depends 
 upon the careful and loving discharge of their 
 duties by the minor canons. 
 
 We have heard a good deal in the Diocese of 
 late about the office of Six-preacher. I cannot 
 say I think this office answers at the present 
 moment either to the ideal which was in the 
 mind of the person who founded it, or to that 
 
VII.] 
 
 ADDRESS. 
 
 second ideal of usefulness in supplying the wants 
 of the present day. I suppose the congrega- 
 tions which they address are not very numerous 
 and that from no fault of their own, because, 
 as I understand, they generally preach on days 
 when there are not likely to be very large 
 congregations. I am aware that if their con- 
 gregations are not large, neither are their sti- 
 pends ; and it is hardly to be expected that 
 a man can devote his energies to a work of 
 this kind, when he has other pressing duties else- 
 where, and when the arrangements made for the 
 office are of the insufficient kind which they are 
 at present. Therefore it has been suggested 
 that it would be a very good thing to diminish 
 the number of the Six-preachers, and to in- 
 crease their pay, assigning to them at the 
 same time more distinct duties, such as were 
 contemplated in the original foundation of their 
 office, duties which I think no one can doubt 
 are very much required now, as they were when 
 the office was originally established. Preachers 
 who shall circulate through the diocese, selected 
 
 O 2 
 
196 THE CHURCH OF THE FUTURE. [vii.' 
 
 for their fitness to discharge the office, and so 
 remunerated that it will be possible for them 
 to give their time and attention to it, may be 
 a most useful adjunct to every cathedral in the 
 country ; and other catiicdrals which have not 
 the advantage of this arrangement in their 
 statutes may benefit by following the sugges- 
 tions made by our statues. 
 
 But there is a very common-place difficulty 
 which remains at the end of all our arrange- 
 ments, and it is this; that the work is infinite, 
 and the material for the performance of it, or 
 the adequate discharge of it, is very limited in- 
 deed. We spoke of what has been done by St. 
 Paul's ; we may speak of what has been done by 
 Durham ; but, though it is a sad thing to 
 confess, yet I am afraid we must allow that the 
 wealth of those two great bodies has been a most 
 important factor in their being able so well to 
 discharge the duties that have been committed 
 to them. Besides the salaries appropriated by 
 Act of Parliament to the members of chapter 
 in such Cathedrals, there are, at St. Paul's and 
 
VII.] 
 
 ADDRESS. 
 
 197 
 
 at Durham, large public funds available to in- 
 crease the usefulness of the general cathedral 
 staff. Unfortunately this is not so here, and 
 unless some means can be devised for increas- 
 ing the funds at the disposal of this cathedral 
 body, I am afraid' we may talk of reforms to 
 the end of our lives, and we shall find very 
 great difficulty in accomplishing them. Now, 
 it so happens there is a clause in an Act of 
 Parliament passed not many years ago^ which 
 may help us in this matter. It was a clause 
 introduced by the Archbishop of York, author- 
 izing the Ecclesiastical Commissioners to apply 
 to certain offices in the cathedrals, which were 
 supposed to be underpaid, sufficient funds out 
 of any estates formerly belonging to the 
 cathedrals which are now in the hands of the 
 Commissioners. The Ecclesiastical Commis- 
 sioners are not commanded to perform this 
 duty ; they are only commanded to consider 
 it. I am sorry that their consideration hitherto 
 has not led to any satisfactory result. But I 
 ' Vide Appendix D. 
 
1 98 THE CHURCH OF THE FUTURE. [vir. 
 
 think it is right that we should call attention 
 from this cathedral to the existence of this 
 decision of the Imperial Parliamcnt-that we 
 should state our case clearly and distinctly, and 
 show what are our wants and what is the com- 
 paratively moderate sum which we should be 
 satisfied with. Parliament has given similar 
 instructions to the Commissioners with regard 
 to local claims in parishes, which claims have 
 been attended to ; but we think it wrong that 
 Parliament should have called attention in the 
 same way to local claims in our cathedrals, and 
 that those claims should hitherto have been 
 entirely ignored. I hope, therefore, that our 
 projects of improvement of our cathedral body 
 are not altogether visionary, and that they may 
 be arranged in course of time, and that those 
 various improvements may be brought to ac- 
 complishment by such assistance from the 
 Commissioners as is indispensable for the 
 discharge of our duties. 
 
 I have detained you much too long, but the 
 subject is one which very much interests me in 
 
vii.l ADDRESS. 199 
 
 connexion with this visitation and in connexion 
 with my duties elsewhere ; it is one which I 
 persuade myself greatly interests the public ; 
 and it is one which cannot fail to be interesting 
 to you. Before we part let us once more 
 seriously call to mind the responsibilities which 
 rest upon us as members of this time-honoured 
 institution. Turn where we will, within these 
 walls associations of the past call upon us during 
 our brief span to fulfil the duties which God 
 requires of us. Go into the Deanery, and you 
 will see there pictures of great men who, in 
 connexion with this cathedral, began or ended 
 great careers of usefulness for the Church in 
 which they were ornaments. Look around these 
 walls and trace the monuments which you are 
 passing, and from all of them voices will be 
 heard calling each of us while our life lasts to 
 exert ourselves for our Lord and Master. 
 
APPENDICES. 
 
VIII. 
 
 APPENDICES. 
 
 APPENDIX A.— See p. i8. 
 
 I have bee.i furnished with the following note by the Rev. 
 R. T. Davidson, my chaplain. 
 
 A. C. C. 
 
 " The number of hymns in ordinary congregational use in 
 our churches is very large, and probably the majority of those 
 which have attained a wide popularity, whether among 
 Churchmen or Nonconformists, have been written by mem- 
 bers of the Church of England. The hymns of such Church- 
 men as Bishop Ken, Bishop Heber, John Keble, Isaac 
 Williams, Dean Milman, Henry Francis Lyte, and many 
 others, are known and loved among all Protestant denomina- 
 tions wherever the English tongue is spoken. In the 
 * Scottish Hymnal,' for example, authorised by the General 
 Assembly for use in the Established Church of Scotland, we 
 find hymns written by each of the above-named authors and 
 by many other English Churv-hmen. 
 
204 
 
 APPENDICES. 
 
 [viii. 
 
 " On the other hand, the subjoined table, specifying the 
 authorship, or reputed authorship, of about one hundred of 
 our own best-known hymns, may serve to show how various 
 are the sources from which many of those in general use 
 among us have been collected. In cases where the hymn was 
 originally written in another language, the name of the ori- 
 ginal author, and not of the translator, has been given. 
 Some of the authors named in the last division of the list 
 never separated themselves from the Church of England ; 
 but the school to which their sympathies belonged has 
 been subsequently identified, however erroneously, with the 
 l\Iethodist movement of the last century. 
 
 "It will be obvious that the table I have drawn up makes 
 no pretension to completeness. For some of the information 
 't contains I am indebted to a paper read by the present 
 Lord Chancellor at the York Church Congress in 1866. 
 
 " R. T. D." 
 
 (i). HYMNS OF THE EARLY CHURCH. 
 
 5 
 
 Ascribed lo — 
 S. Ambrose 
 
 . Now the dnyllght fills the sky . 
 . O Jesn Lord .>f he.ivenly grace . 
 
 . liet re the ending ot trie day . . 
 . Almighty Ciod, '1 hy throne above 
 
 Ilef re the ending of the day . 
 
 . u tj jii oi tnitn, I) Lora 01 mignt 
 . C meH. lyC.hoit.who.everone 
 
 O G >A of truth, () Lord of might 
 
 Karth has many a noMe city . . 
 
VITI.] 
 
 APPENDICES. 
 
 205 
 
 (2). MEDIEVAL HYMNS, ETC. 
 
 Ascribed to — 
 S. John of Damascus 
 Stephen the Sabaite 
 Joseph r.f the Studiunr 
 
 S. Bonavenliir.-i . 
 S. Bernard of Clugny 
 S. Bernard of Clairvau 
 
 S. Thomas Aquinas 
 S. Thomas of Celano 
 
 Collection" . 
 S. Francis Xavier 
 
 The day of resurrection . • . 
 
 Art thou weary? 
 
 O happy band of pilsrrims . . 
 'J he strain upraise of jny praise 
 At the cross her statiuu keeping. 
 Jn the Lord's atoning grief . . 
 Jerusalem the golden . . . , 
 ( ) sacred head surrounded . . . 
 Jesu, thou juy of loving hearts . 
 Jesu the very thuught of Thee . 
 Thee we adore, O hidden Saviour 
 Ihee 
 
 Day of wrath, O day of mourning 
 That day of wrath that dreadful 
 
 Come Holy Ghost our souls inspirt 
 Now God be with us for the night 
 
 is closing 
 
 Christ the Lord Is risen again ! , 
 My God I love Thee, not because 
 
 (3). HYMNS WRITTEN BY INDEPENDENTS. 
 
 Isaac Watts .... Come let usjoin our cheerful songs 
 Jesus shallretgn where'er the sun 
 Lord of the W(Tlds above . . . 
 O God our help in ages past . . 
 There is a land of pure delight . 
 How bright those glorious spirits 
 
 Philip Doddridge 
 Simon Browne . 
 
 of the Lord . . . 
 Come gracious Spirit, heavenly 
 dove 
 
 (4). HYMNS WRITTEN BY PRESBVTERIANS. 
 
 Richard Baxter 
 
 Joseph Grigg . 
 'J homas Gibbons 
 Anna L. Barbauld 
 
 Horatius Eonar 
 
 Lord it belongs not to our care , 
 Ye holy angels bright .... 
 Jesus, and shall it ever be. . . 
 Angels roll the rock away . . 
 
 ■ to God, 
 
 1 the Lnrd of lighl 
 
 id 1 
 shall roll 
 
206 
 
 APPENDICES. 
 
 [VIII. 
 
 (5). HYMNS WRITTEN BY BAPTISTS. 
 
 ele .... I Father of mercies in Thv word . 
 
 . . . . Father, whate'er of ear h.y bliss 
 I Beddome . . 1 Witness ye men and angels now 
 
 (6) HYMNS WRITTEN BY ROMAN CATHOLICS. 
 
 F. W. Faber 
 
 Sweet Saviour bless lis ere we gc 
 O come and mourn with m( 
 
 a while 
 
 Hark. hark, my soul . . . 
 Lead, kindly light, amid ih' en 
 
 Praise to the HoLest ia the height 
 
 (7). HYMNS WRITTEN BY MORAVIANS. 
 
 John Cennick (in part) . 
 
 Nicolaus Zinzendorf 
 
 Lo He comes 
 
 Children of the Heavenly King 
 Awake and s^ng the song . . 
 Angels from the realms of glory 
 Go to dark Gethsemane . . 
 For ever with the Lord . . . 
 Hail to the Lord's anointed . 
 Songs of praise the angels sang 
 Lord, pour Thy Spirit from on high 
 O 1 hou, to whose all-se 
 
 Jesiis.Thy blood and right 
 
VIII.] 
 
 APPENDICES. 
 
 207 
 
 HYMNS GENERALLY IDENTIFIED WITH 
 
 THK MKTHODIST M IVKMENT OF THE 
 EIGHTEENTH CENTURY. 
 
 Robert Se.igrave . . . 
 Angii'itu'i Kl. 'I'oplady . 
 Charles Wesley . . . 
 „ „ (in part) 
 
 John Ne 
 
 T.'kaweis . . ! 
 Rowland Hill .. . 
 Thos.Kelly(i9lh century) 
 
 Rise my soul and stretch thy wing 
 Ri)clc of ages cleft for me . . 
 Hark, the herald angels sing . . 
 Lo He comes, with clouds de^ 
 
 scending . . . ^ 
 
 Christ the Lord is risen to-day 
 Sf>ldiers of Christ arise . . . 
 Forth in Thy name. O Lord, I gc 
 Christ, whose glory fills the skie; 
 
 I forf 
 
 Lord i 
 
 Guide me, ( ) Thou great Redeemer 
 I he God of Abraham praise . . 
 H.iil thou once despised Jesus . 
 Hark, my soul, it is the Lord 
 O for a closer walk with God . 
 God of our l.fe, to Thee we call . 
 God moves in a mysterious way . 
 Gl prions things of Thee are spoken 
 Ho*- sweet the name of J 
 soindi 
 
 hom all goodnes: 
 
 Lo. n und the thr. 
 
 Through the day Thy love hath 
 
 Co'me, see the place where Je 
 lay 
 
 crowned 
 
 glo 
 
 : head that ( 
 
208 APPENDICES. [viii 
 
 APPENDIX B— See p. 41. 
 
 The French Pastor, to whose statement I have referrd, is 
 M. Eugene Bersier. I have since been in correspondence 
 with M. Bersier upon the subject, and the following is an 
 extract from one of his letters 
 
 .... "Appeld kcdlebrer continuellement des enterrements 
 dans nos cimetieres de Paris, je me suis fait un devoir de 
 recueiller aussi exactement que possible auprcs des Ordonna- 
 teurs des Pompes funubres des renseignements precis sur le 
 nombre des enterrements purement civils. Je suis heureux 
 de declarer, d'apres leur t^moignage, que ce nombre est 
 comparativement tr^s restreint. 
 
 " Dans rOuest de Paris, il monte k deux ou trois par cent., et 
 dans les quartiers tout-k-fait populaires, on estime qu'il ne 
 ddpasse pas cinq par cent. J'ajoute que mon impression 
 sur ce point est partag^ par mes coUtfgues dans le ministere. 
 
 " Au reste, il peut ctre interessant de citer, sur ce point, le 
 journal La R^publique Franqaise, oigane d'un parti tres 
 nettement positiviste et anti-religieux. II disait le 20 
 Septembre dernier : — 
 
 " ' Ddcreter maintenant, sans aucune provocation du clerg^ 
 paroissial, la suppression du budget des cultes, ce serait 
 heurter de front 1' opinion publique. lis sont tres rares, en 
 effct, mane parmi les libres-peiisenis, les honimes qui 
 entcndent se passer enticrcinent du clerge, ne fut-ce que pour 
 la premiere communion de lettrs enfants.' 
 
 "EuG. Bersier." 
 
VIII.] 
 
 APPENDICES. 
 
 209 
 
 APPENDIX C— See pp. 148-191. 
 CANTERBURY CLERICAL EDUCATION FUND. 
 €ommitlr£. 
 
 THE EARL SONDES 
 
 R T. HON A. J. 15. BERESFORD 
 
 HOPE. M.P. 
 J. G. l ALBOT. ESQ., M.P. 
 H. A. BRASSEY. ESQ., M.P. 
 R. NOR ION. ESQ. 
 E. H. SCOTT, ESQ. 
 
 THE BISHOP OF DOVER. 
 THE DEAN OF CAMKkBURY. 
 THE ARCHDEACON OF WAID- 
 
 S'lONE. 
 REV. CANON KOHl'.R I SON. 
 REV. CANON IFFFKFVS. 
 REV, CANON JENKINS. 
 REV. C.\NON SCOTT ROBERT. 
 
 SON. 
 
 REV. CANON ELWYN. 
 RiiV. J. S. HOARE. 
 
 Tre.\<;iibeu. 
 
 REV. CANON ERSKINE KNOLLVS, Wrotbii;u R-r-tory, Sevenoaks. 
 
 Hon. Secrstarv. 
 REV. C.^NON MOORE, The Precincts, Canterbury. 
 
 IB.inlurs. 
 
 Messrs. Hammo.nd & Cn. Can'erbury. 
 Mesiri. WlGA.N & Co., Maidstone. 
 
 The object of the Fund — founded by the Diocesan Con- 
 ference of 1877, under the sanction of the Archbishop of 
 Canterbury — is to contribute towards the education of can- 
 didates for Holy Orders, resident in, or connected with the 
 Dio"ese of Canterbury, whose private means are insufficient 
 for the purpose, but w!io may be recommended as thoroughly 
 deserving of assistance. 
 
 P 
 
2IO 
 
 APPENDICES. 
 
 [viii. 
 
 Grants, not exceeding £Zo annually for three years in any 
 one case, are paid subject to Terminal certificates of good 
 conduct and diligence. 
 
 The Committee earnestly appeal for increased support, 
 v;ithout which they will be compelled to reject the applica- 
 tions of some very promising candidates for University 
 education, with a view to seeking Holy Orders. 
 
 The Fund, if duly supported, will have the two-fold good 
 effect of raising the position of deserving men, and of adding 
 to the supply of candidates for Ordination, still very far short 
 of the demand. 
 
 The Committee will be influenced by no party views in 
 administering the Funds committed to their charge ; and 
 sincerely hope that, by additional Offertories, donations, and 
 annual subscriptions, their hands may be strengthened for 
 the fulfilment of a work so beneficial to individuals, and so 
 important to the Church in general. 
 
 Grants have already been made in five cases, the payment 
 of which began at Easter, 1879, and will close at Midsummer, 
 1884. As regards one-half of the gross amount however the 
 Committee have been obliged to trust that the necessary 
 Funds, not yet provided, may be supplied in time by the 
 liberality of members of the Church. Meanwhile they feel 
 themselves precluded from incurring any further responsi- 
 bilities until t beir funds have been materially increased. 
 
 A Clergyman offers ^100, to meet nine other similar con- 
 tributions, as the foundation of an invested fund, or small 
 endowment, the interest only of which shall be available for 
 expenditure. 
 
VIII.] 
 
 APPENDICES. 
 
 21 I 
 
 APPENDIX D.— See p. 197. 
 
 The iSih section of the' Act 29 & 30 Vict., cap. in., is as 
 follows : — 
 
 '• When the Ecclesiastical Commissioners are or may be in 
 receipt of any income arising fro.n estates that belong or 
 have belonged to any dean or chapter, or any major or minor 
 corporation of any cathedral or collegiate church, the said 
 Commissioners shall be at liberty (whether an Order of Her 
 Majesty in Council has or has not been passed in relation to 
 such income, arvd notwithstanding any limitation contained 
 in any Act of Parliament as to the stipends and allowances 
 of any of the persons herein-after mentioned) out of such 
 income to make such provision as to them may seem need- 
 ful for securing adequate stipends and allowances to the 
 minor canons, schoolmasters, organists, vicars choral, lay 
 clerks, officers, choristers, bedesmen, servants, and other 
 members of the cathedral or collegiate church, and for secur- 
 ing adequate sums of money for the maintenance of any 
 existing college or school in connexion with the cathedral or 
 collegiate church." 
 
APPENDICES. 
 
 [VIIL 
 
 APPENDIX E. 
 
 CONFIRMATIONS DURING THE LAST ELEVEN 
 YEARS. 
 
 Held principally by the Bishop'of Dover as Siiffraoan. 
 
 
 Candidates. 
 
 
 Number of 
 
 Year. 
 
 
 
 Total. 
 
 Male. 
 
 Female. 
 
 lions. 
 
 1869 
 
 
 
 7.48. 
 
 
 
 1.825 
 
 2-493 
 
 4318 
 
 34 
 
 
 2 35! 
 2 5(8 
 
 3.680 
 
 6033 
 
 73 
 
 
 3.075 
 
 56 3 
 
 78 
 
 
 1,980 
 
 3 256 
 
 5.236 
 
 85 
 
 
 1.886 
 2.428 
 2,063 
 
 3-807 
 3..65 
 
 4,844 
 
 6,235 
 5.223 
 
 70 
 107 
 
 85 
 
 
 2-198 
 
 3-599 
 
 5.797 
 
 93 
 
 
 2.432 
 
 3 785 
 
 
 
 
 3,462 
 
 
 ?9 
 33 
 
Date Due