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ASPECTS OF THE 
 CHURCH'S DUTY 
 
 A CHARGE 
 
 Delivered to the Clergy of the Diocese of Winchester 
 
 / 
 
 at his Primary l^isitation 
 September 2~]th and October \th^ 191 5 
 
 pDWARD STUART TALBOT, D.D., D.Litt (Cantab.) 
 
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ASPECTS OF THE CHURCH'S DUTY 
 
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ASPECTS OF THE 
 CHURCH'S DUTY 
 
 A CHARGE 
 
 Delivered to the Clergy of the Diocese of IVinchester 
 
 at his Primary Visitation 
 
 September i^th and October \th^ 191 5 
 
 BY 
 
 EDWARD STUART TALBOT, D.D., D.Litt. (Cantab.) 
 
 HONORARY fftuDENT OF CHRIST CHURCH 
 87TH BISHOP OF THE DIOCESE 
 
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 ST. MARTIN'S STREET, LONDON 
 
 1915 
 
1^3 
 
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THE WAR AND THE DUTY OF THE CHURCH 
 
 It is natural, and belongs to our duty, that at this time of 
 Visitation and review, we should look around and look within. 
 
 We have our duty, as part of the Church, to the world, the 
 empire, and the nation, and as a Diocese to the life of the 
 Church itself, and of that part of it to which we belong. 
 
 We have also our duty within our own pale, to be what God 
 would have us be, to minister as God would have us minister. 
 
 I propose to speak to-day about the first subject, and later 
 about the others. 
 
 The War has made, makes, and will make a huge demand, 
 moral, physical, and economical, on the powers of the nation. 
 
 This is plain to all; and, for most men, it means in some 
 sense an appeal to the nation's spiritual force. 
 
 But the Church exists to be a focus of that force : of which 
 it finds the central spring in Jesus Christ, Redeemer of that 
 World which is His own, and in the Spirit Who is His Gift to us 
 from the Father. 
 
 Has the Church, then, faced with this sudden demand, made 
 its contribution to the life of the nation, and how has it done so ? 
 
 (1) It had first, I think, to recognize and declare the full 
 solemnity of the crisis. I remember well how, having to preach 
 to the National gathering of the Order of Foresters at Bourne- 
 mouth on the terrible Sunday of suspense, August 2nd, 1914, 
 that duty seemed to possess itself of me. The old schoolings of 
 Scripture became alive with new meaning. Plainly, Scripture 
 was largely a literature of crisis preparing us for interruption and 
 
 ^ In delivery what follows was preceded by the contents of pp 49-51, infra. 
 
 B 2 
 
2 THE WAR AIJD THE DUTY OF THE CHURCH 
 
 challenge: and we remembered how ' crisis ' means judgement. 
 We saw how the crises of history were God's opportunities and 
 instruments. The words of the prophets, each in his time, 
 calling the people of God so to regard them, became suddenly real. 
 We saw, too, how the scholars by a curious coincidence had been 
 emphasizing to us in quite a new way the side of the Gospel 
 known as apocalyptic, which speaks more of catastrophe than of 
 evolution, and sounds the note of warning rather than that of 
 peace. The pictures of the inspired Apocalypse of S. John 
 glowed for us again. 
 
 (2) But we had, of course, to face the question whether the 
 war was necessary, and therefore right. We found that it was 
 right, and therefore necessary. We hesitated, many of us, while 
 there remained any doubt whether our action could hold off, 
 or would do anything to bring on, a colossal catastrophe in which 
 the powers of evil might rejoice as in their own successful work. 
 The question was decided for us upon a simple issue of national 
 honesty and honour towards a weak and defenceless people. The 
 decision was confirmed almost as soon as made by our discerning 
 that freedom and existence were in question, first for France 
 and then for ourselves : and that we were out to control by a 
 concerted effort of the nations a Power which was rapidly on its 
 way, by preparations of force and fraud, to the creation of a 
 domination such as would have threatened them all. 
 
 The nation plunged with something of the bhtheness of a 
 good conscience, and of conscious unanimity, into the greatest 
 adventure of its history. The Church (I use the word in this 
 place inclusively), sharply challenged to look at the matter upon 
 its own principles, found itself convinced that, anti-Christian 
 as war is, treachery and cowardly self-regard are more anti- 
 Christian, and threw the whole weight of its influence into 
 strengthening and consecrating the nation's decision. It dis- 
 cerned that unless war was always wTong there was no other 
 answer possible. Reflection endorsed the course instinctively 
 taken by the first breathless decision. Only a few honourable 
 protests from some (not all) of the Society of Friends and the 
 like broke the unanimity of the dehberate judgement of Christian 
 
THE WAR AND THE DUTY OF THE CHURCH 3 
 
 opinion that right was being done. Thinkers so independent 
 and intrepid as Canon Scott Holland ^ and Baron von Hiigel ^ 
 made us, by searching analysis, additionally sure of our position. 
 
 (3) So far, well. But, a little too content with its decision, 
 the nation was a little slow to see how much the decision involved, 
 and how much it left untouched. 
 
 Absorbed in the goodness of its cause, the country was slow 
 to face all that moral championship requires. A good cause 
 may fail for the fault or the feebleness of its defenders. Were 
 we prepared to own how much we were responsible, as part of 
 the European Commonwealth, for the odious and un-Christian 
 state of international relations which made the war possible 
 and inevitable ? What was our own record as a nation ? Was 
 our confidence then blended with a great humility and a great 
 penitence ? And looking forward, were we about to take up the 
 struggle with a profound sense (which faith, modesty, and 
 common sense would unite to create) that we could reckon for 
 success only upon that blessing of God which He gives to those 
 who put their whole trust in Him, but with fullest effort help 
 themselves ; upon a people, in other words, of strenuous and 
 self-denying endeavour and of prevailing prayer ? 
 
 There was and is here for the Church a great task. In the 
 simplest form we strove to discharge it. The pulpits called to 
 prayer. The noon-day bell, the special intercessions (Eucharistic 
 and other), the Days of special and solemn observance, the earnest 
 invitations by pastoral Letters witnessed to the effort. God 
 be thanked for all the volume of prayer which resulted. 
 But the response was admittedly inadequate : and the Church 
 had to face the double fact of weakness in its own grip of the 
 nation's conscience, and of slowness on the nation's part to handle 
 spiritual weapons. 
 
 I am appalled sometimes when I hear of ' Intercession 
 services dropped because no one would come,' ' no special 
 interest in prayer,' ' Sunday Services in which, except perhaps 
 
 ^ In his articles in the Commomvealth, republished under the title ' So as by Fire' 
 (Wells Gardner. Is.). 
 
 * Church Quarterly Review, January, 1915. 
 
4 THE WAR AND THE DUTY OF THE CHURCH 
 
 for a monotoned Collect, you would not have knoAvn that war 
 was going on at all.' The cases have mostly been from outside our 
 own Diocese. But I am far from boasting that they are without 
 parallel within it. ' Brethren, these tilings ought not so to be.' 
 But the call to prayer was not all or nearly all which the 
 crisis demanded ex parte Dei of the national spirit and conscience. 
 Beyond this, however, the responsibility of the Church merges, 
 more or less, in the general responsibility of the nation ; and a 
 Bishop must speak, in part at least, as another citizen might 
 speak. The behaviour of the nation seems to me (if I may speak 
 my mind) to have had two sides. First we shall all acknowledge, 
 bareheaded, the glory of the response made by overwhelming 
 numbers of its youth in simple, unhesitating, and characteristically 
 undemonstrative manner. They faced much, though they had to 
 face so much more than they knew : they bore hardness ; the hard- 
 ships of the early training time were not slight and were sometimes 
 squalid ; the winter trenches (fighting apart) were unspeakable. 
 Whatever the merits of the case about National, Service, we may 
 agree that this great output of sacrifice by men of whom each 
 was free was a thing to make the pulses of the present and the 
 future tingle with admiration and joy. The men from every 
 rank of society were setting everything on the venture ; the women 
 — wives, mothers, sisters, lovers — were speeding and sharing it, 
 and turning in multitudes to every form of service and helpful- 
 ness which they could discover or devise. We should be ashamed, 
 indeed, if as a Church we had not borne in all this the share which 
 (thank God) we can rightly claim. 
 
 To him that hath shall more be given ; and the witness from 
 the front assures us unmistakably and constantly how those who, 
 for the simple sake of patriotism and duty and under the stern 
 schooling of war, have opened their hearts to the more conscious 
 consecration to God of their sacrifice even unto death, and have in 
 life or death found their spiritual reward. 
 
 For all this response made by them on our behalf to the call 
 of the war, we thank God, and we thank them with a gratitude 
 which grows more intense as the cost and sorrow increase. 
 If there is, by God's mercy, to be hope for a better and nobler 
 
THE WAR AND THE DUTY OF THE CHURCH 5 
 
 England in the future, it is in the graves, named and nameless, 
 of Flanders and GaUipoli that that hope will have its strongest 
 roots. Nor should we fail to remember, along with all that 
 gallantry, and with all the tense strain of silent duty on the 
 bitter Northern seas, the less romantic but hardly less real 
 sacrifice of those who, in workshops and factories and mines 
 and on transports, have borne unnoticed and without complaint 
 a breaking strain of work for England's sake. 
 
 There is one part of the response. But another part may 
 satisfy us less. Looking back to the autumn of 1914, one cannot 
 be proud of our mood then. It was almost childishly confident 
 and easy. We were fed with talk about rapid and sure success 
 such as in 1870 we had despised in the French. We took a 
 ludicrously insufficient measure of the mighty strength and skill 
 of the great German war machine. The hairbreadth escapes 
 of the first retreat, and of the early attack on the Ypres front 
 won from us, no doubt, admiration for the bravery of our troops, 
 which deepened as behind the newspapers we got nearer the facts ; 
 but we did not nearly grasp the measure of their meaning. It 
 would be idle now to review the illusions on which we lived. 
 But it is not idle to point out that all this and more on the part 
 of our rulers and ourselves was part of that easy, amateui'ish 
 way of handhng great issues, which we see now more than we have 
 ever seen it, to be our inveterate and perilous characteristic. It 
 does not concern us here except for what there is in it of moral 
 fault. But it means these things which do concern us ; it means 
 a great national complacency, aUo^ving, and fed by, a great 
 inertness of thought. Our national qualities are, indeed, so 
 strong ; there is so much self-control, dignified reserve, personal 
 and official integrity, preference of deeds to words, warmth of 
 heart and, in our best people, natural sagacity, that self- 
 depreciation may seem impertinent and ungrateful. Yet the 
 more one mixes with different kinds of men, the more sure one 
 becomes that there is among us a great lack in all directions of 
 strenuous thoughtfulness leading to vigorous and considered 
 action. The watchword which at first was reaUy popular was 
 ' Business as usual,' and the quahty of firmness in it could not 
 
6 THE WAR AND THE DUTY OF THE CHURCH 
 
 make up for its miserably misleading inadequacy as the motto 
 of a unique emergency. Ask any skilled agriculturist how our 
 agriculture compares for enterprise and thoroughness with that 
 of other nations. In commerce we hear constantly how the 
 English trader goes on doggedly offering the same goods, while 
 his Continental rival dexterously invites the customers to express 
 their needs, which he then meets by appropriate supply. I 
 suspect the same thing is true about our slowness to apply in 
 manufacture the processes of chemistry. A homelier example is 
 the notorious extravagance and unskilfulness of English cookery. 
 Those who are at work for the care of child life will tell you the 
 same in regard to our care for pure food and pure milk. Perhaps 
 it is one tragedy of the war that thoroughness and method may 
 be discredited amongst us because of their German associations 
 and the hideous and murderous use to which they have been put. 
 But no hatred of the spirit which dominates German temper 
 and action to-day should blind us to the facts which should 
 abash us the more, the more we beHeve by comparison in 
 England. For we are up against a nation which has made its 
 organization of war a marvel of thoroughness, threatening us 
 to-day with the risk of dominating Europe and the world ; which 
 has gone far to meet the problems of its urban life by a careful 
 ordering of the growth of its cities ; which has led the way in 
 the remedy of great social wounds by the broad schemes of 
 insurance and pension ; which has utihzed for national advantage 
 every advance of scientific and technical knowledge ; which 
 has made shallow or careless work a by word in any walk of Ufe. 
 And now to-day is it only the great mihtary strength of 
 Germany which makes us afraid ? The real cause of fear is the 
 determination and skill of a nation which by a single concen- 
 trated and sustained effort of economy and sacrifice is husbanding 
 every ounce of its resources, doing without its luxuries, making itself 
 economically a self-supporting people, reducing steadily in its 
 own favour the enormous financial advantage which we held at 
 the start.^ 
 
 ^ Round Table,' p. 722. ' This War, in one of its aspects, is a spiritual 
 conflict between liberty and tj'rann}', between the principle of right and justice 
 
THE WAR AND THE DUTY OF THE CHURCH 7 
 
 We have on our side heroic fighting, skilful, tender, and abund- 
 ant nursing, and flowing springs of liberality : and these are 
 a benediction and consecration of our life. But of really intelli- 
 gent co-operation to keep down expenditure on imports, to put 
 ourselves upon war conditions, to develop the home-raised food 
 supply, to substitute a thrifty commissariat for reaUy appalling 
 waste, to deal firmly with the drink trouble where it hinders — 
 how little there has been of all this, and how Uttle our people 
 know and care what there is ! We are learning, but how slowly 
 we learn ! 
 
 I apologize for saying so much as this on these matters. But 
 I am appalled, I own, sometimes as I read and hear what our 
 strongest and soberest men say as to the way in which we are 
 letting the sands of opportunity run out. For myself and my 
 country I desire humihty but I dread humihation. 
 
 For us here all this has a double interest. It suggests how we 
 may best use any powers of influence and guidance that we 
 severally and corporately possess. To take a single point. It 
 would be an enormous gain if the combined influence of the clergy 
 might be used to impress the universal duty of those who gain 
 by the war in profits or wages or billeting rents or separation 
 allowances to invest at least the bulk of their gain in War Loan : 
 it is a duty to their own welfare in the ' lean years ' that will 
 follow and to the nation's cause. 
 
 But it also indirectly compels us to ask whether the spiritual 
 hfe of the comitry and of our own most characteristically English. 
 Church does not betray the same defects of inertia, want of insight, 
 foresight, and initiative ? ' The spirit of wisdom and under- 
 standing, of counsel ... of knowledge . . . and of godly fear ! ' 
 What a large part is this of the r sevenfold Gift of the Spirit. 
 Yet how Uttle a part, comparatively, these have in the minds- 
 of ordinarj^ Christians and of ourselves, the clergj'. Joha 
 
 as the foundation of intematioaal relations and the principle that might is right, 
 in whirh truth is on our side ; in another it is a contest between the idea that the 
 primary duty of the citizen is to give loyal and unselfish service to the community 
 of which he is a part and the idea that the primary right of the indivndual i& 
 freedom to ignore his duty to the community if he chooses, in lohich truth is with the 
 Germans.^ (The italics are mine. — E. W. ) 
 
8 THE WAR AND THE DUTY OF THE CHURCH 
 
 Ruskin spoke once in one of his paradoxes of its being every 
 one's duty to try to be beautiful ! It is a plainer duty to try 
 to be wise. No doubt the simple wisdom which is wise unto 
 salvation is the most precious and the most universal. But 
 it is not the whole. To discern the signs of the times, to 
 ' know the day of visitation,' is a wisdom which the Lord 
 expects of His people : and the Apostles enjoin and imply a 
 command of things present by the Spirit-led mind ; ' Ye have an 
 unction ; and ye know all things.' ' All things are yours.' Such 
 words we almost ignore and hardly understand. There is no dirge 
 more pathetic than the words, ' We see not our tokens : there 
 is not one prophet more : no, not one is there among us that 
 understandeth any more.' Only worse is the case of those who 
 ' building the sepulchres of the prophets ' that were in the past, 
 are unconscious of their own deafness in the present. God give 
 us eyes to see, and ears to hear. 
 
 Shall we take the instance of the iVIissionary opportunity and 
 duty of the Church of England ? There is not a little to be 
 thankful for here. We have learnt more, prayed more, improved 
 our strategy, developed our literature, made the Missionary 
 cause more a part of our Parochial life. Yet if we consider what 
 the situation has been: an Empire in peaceful touch with every 
 quarter of the world and containing within its own limits 
 several hundred million non-Christian subjects : a time when 
 doors opened and barriers fell as no one had known it happen or 
 even dreamt that it might be : accumulated wealth just limitless 
 for any enterprise if only faith and zeal were present — what in 
 presence of all this was the average attitude of Enghsh Church- 
 manship ? What was our own ? Shall we call it languid or 
 lukewarm ? or shall we be more really honest and searching if 
 we call it stupid — stupid for want of thought and imagination : 
 stupid by a dull conceit of ourselves, and a dull unreadiness 
 for the challenge of high possibihties and new opportunities ? 
 
 Nor let any one put this claim for wisdom and understanding 
 aside by a would-be humble contrast between it and our simple 
 duties of personal religion and pastoral care : nor treat it as 
 something rare or esoteric for the few academically trained or 
 
THE WAR AND THE DUTY OF THE CHURCH 9 
 
 philosophically minded. The wisdom which means insight into 
 a situation, and responsiveness to its calls or needs is found in 
 its degree in the child and the child-hke : it is assuredly present 
 in the intuitive perceptions and untaught speech of simple folk. 
 It always exists in a degree where there is a tender heart, a simple 
 faith, a quick sympathy with human experience, and a quiet 
 readiness for what God may show or do. Nor can we do without 
 it : it is needed to make our most ordinary work effectual. For 
 it is our task to be bridge-builders between the Truth of God 
 in the Gospel of Jesus Christ and the needs and the understanding 
 of those who are under our care or round about us in our land 
 and Church. What a wonderful difference (to take a favourable 
 instance) has been made in the effectiveness of teaching by a 
 little of the wisdom which is ready to study the ways of the child 
 mind in the different stages of its growth, and which is humble 
 enough to learn as well as teach, and to teach children in part 
 by what it learns from them. It was a quaint sajnng of dear 
 Bishop King that we ought to learn to play dominoes with our 
 people : meeting six with six or one with one according as they 
 had it in them to play. Commending ourselves to every man's 
 conscience (and how different except in the barest moral essentials 
 consciences are) is an Apostohc expression of this \visdom. 
 The Lord Himself took for His rule and ours that of bringing out 
 of the treasure things new and old : which in part at least must 
 mean the unchanging truth and its manifold adaptations. Can 
 any one look out on the world of to-day and doubt that such 
 spiritual wisdom to discern, and to interpret, and to commend 
 is quite a prime and urgent need of the Church ? We felt it 
 while all was as usual, and the storms seemed laid away : we 
 feel it afresh now that the tempest, or its outriders, are 
 upon us. 
 
 To plant the Cross of Jesus Christ, the Cross of grace and 
 sacrifice in the faith and heart of those who have shown such 
 noble willingness for the sacrifice of themselves, or borne so 
 gently and supported so quietly, the sacrifice of their beloved : to 
 help them to find their mute devotion brought there to its fulness 
 of utterance and meaning by their Lord, this is the wisdom and 
 
10 THE WAR AND THE DUTY OF THE CHURCH 
 
 counsel of our Chaplains at the front, and of the ' sons of con- 
 solation ' among our clergy at home. 
 
 Similarly our egregious failure as a Church to make the 
 Sacrament of the Lord's death, and of our Ufe and sacrifice united 
 with His, a natural and beloved part of the Ufe of soldiers, of 
 whom some seventy per cent, belong to our Church, surely indi- 
 cates that while we have exhorted and implored and doctrinaUy 
 expounded almost to weariness in our Sermons, we have failed 
 to make it known in terms of what the people do understand, 
 or to show it to them as the centre of their fellowship, the link 
 of their own daily duty with His great service even unto death, 
 the consecration of their own sorrows by union with His sorrow, 
 the offered centre in worship of a life offered in service. 
 
 The relations of the Church to our men : the possibihties of 
 a better and larger life for the rural country-side : the need of 
 essential Christian principle to make possible new and wholesome 
 relations between different classes in the same nation, and between 
 different nations in the world-wide human community — these 
 are all instances, differing but ahke, of the same duty binding 
 on us as men, as Christians, and as priests, in an ascending scale 
 of obhgation. We must not be content to repeat either sacred 
 doctrines, or social commonplaces : we must look out to learn : 
 we must buy up opportimities : we must be pessimists in facing 
 immeasurable dimensions of fault and failure in human hfe and 
 in the Church ; optimists in our behef of remedy by human 
 determination and God's redeeming power : we must remember 
 that the Church's life, following the Lord Who goes forth and 
 Who conquers, is a movement and militancy in which she is to 
 find the meaning and prove the power of the truth and grace 
 that are in her. Our blood should tingle with the sense that we 
 are spiritually ahve and at work. 
 
 Is this true, my brothers, is it right ? If so, then turn quickly 
 to the picture of the Church as she often is and appears in the 
 life of the parish, and diocese and nation, and join in owning a 
 contrast which might sicken us with despair if it did not rather 
 ring out the challenge of that divine Hope, which is for the 
 Christian at once privilege and duty. 
 
THE WAR AND THE DUTY OF THE CHURCH 11 
 
 The day of a rural routine which only the most faithfully 
 pastoral spirits could save from becoming listless and ineffective 
 is passing away. God grant us in the new times coming to be 
 ready to play our part in the common service and common 
 thinking which will fashion the new England under circumstances 
 of which God alone as yet can tell what they will be. 
 
 It should be an England, please God, which, still jealous of its 
 ancient freedom, will not believe that its problems can be solved 
 by leaving them alone and letting them drift : an England in which 
 the ideals and partial loyalties and necessities of different classes 
 will be harmonized by a new spirit of mutual fellowship, and by 
 the strong constraining hand of a real democracy, able to unite 
 and to govern itself. 
 
 It should be an England which wiU understand that from 
 nations as from men God expects the full use for good of the 
 talents of force or wealth or character which He gives, and not an 
 easy and confident possession of them ; which will win from its 
 own people a deserved loyalty ; and which in proportion to its 
 strength will face its active duty to the peace of the world, and the 
 freedom of the peoples. 
 
 Such an England will not come of itself : the years of strain 
 and penury which may follow the war may easily hold other and 
 more sinister possibihties. For us and for all Christian people 
 there is the double duty, of which the first part will greatly affect 
 the second, of meeting the mighty ordeal of to-day with what 
 our Lord has taught us of service, courage, and fellowship, 
 and of looking forward to the use in peace of the lessons which 
 He will have severely taught us by the disciphne of War. 
 
II 
 
 THE CHURCH'S CATHOLIC DUTY 
 
 If I am right in thinking that the War rebukes a thoughtless 
 carriage, and challenges us to ' consider,' this will plainly not 
 suspend thinking about the Hfe of the Church itself. It should, 
 indeed, allay controversy or soften its bitterness. History has 
 ever marked with the brand of decadence cities or churches found 
 wranghng when the enemy beat upon their gates. Men instinct- 
 ively speak lower when touched by any real solemnity, and this 
 is no time for noisy voices. But in some ways the War will even 
 quicken and deepen our thinking, in England's supreme hour of 
 crisis, about the status and character of England's Church. For 
 War tests like fire ; that which is precious comes forth as 
 gold, but the unreal, the flimsy, and the conventional are exposed. 
 Again, War has meant contact for Englishmen with other lands, 
 and their rehgious ways, suggesting comparisons and questions. 
 Alliance throws us into a new relation with the great Church of 
 the East, so often ignored by thinkers and controvei-sialists of 
 different sorts, and probably in some ways by us all ; it has 
 connected us with two countries whose rehgion, so far as they are 
 religious, is of the Roman kind, and we are come into an 
 antagonism, which is a great deal more than mihtary, with the 
 chief Protestant Power in Europe. We are under intense re- 
 pulsion from its spirit. We are led to a deep distrust of its 
 intellectual methods to a degree which may indeed lead to 
 unwholesome reaction. 
 
 How these different impulses will affect our Enghsh Church- 
 life the future alone can show ; but it is certain that influence 
 us they will in many ways. 
 
THE CHURCH'S CATHOLIC DUTY 13 
 
 Meanwhile that life had before the War come to a point where, 
 as so often before, the Church had to consider its ways and 
 to ask for what it stands. 
 
 ' I believe in the Holy Cathohc Church ' ; 'I beheve in 
 one CathoUc and Apostolic Church ' ; so, with the other churches 
 of ancient tradition, we constantly profess. 
 
 Here then is one natural focus for our thought. How and 
 by what right does the Church of England represent to the nation 
 (I postpone or omit wider questions about the Anghcan Com- 
 munion) the Catholic Church ? 
 
 Let me say at once that that word CathoUc means for me all 
 that is subhme, comprehensive, abiding, unshakable, and 
 deepest — not all that is quick and stimulating — in Christian 
 life to-day. It not only carries a grand universal meaning as 
 the epithet of ' the One Religion,' ^ but it implies the divine 
 character of that rehgion as of a thing God-given and not by 
 man devised or achieved, the religion of Him Whom the Father 
 sanctified and sent into the world, of Him in Whom all the 
 treasures, and all the fulness of the Godhead, are given to men. 
 
 Our mind rests for a moment upon the comely proportions 
 and stately dignitj'- of the Cathohc Rehgion, only to pass quickty 
 on and recognize the intense difficulties, and the immense draw- 
 backs, under which whatever anywhere claims or desires to be 
 Cathohc, must labour to-day. 
 
 (a) For first that of which the very essence and glory was its 
 uniqueness and its unity hves to-day the maimed hfe of division. 
 
 Yet it lives. If the crystal vase which holds precious hquor 
 be broken the hquor is lost. The vine which bears sweet 
 fruit can bear them no more if the branches of its hfe are torn 
 apart. But the Church of God, just because it is more and other 
 than any of the metaphors and symbohsms which describe it, is 
 impaired only and not paralyzed by its breaches. The hfe is 
 maimed but it lives. 
 
 The Cathohc hfe is a broken hfe. To me, to us all here, 
 this is a patent fact : patent by the evidence of historj^ patent 
 
 ^ The expressive title given to his Bampton Lectures bj' my beloved friend of a 
 life-time, John Wordsworth, Bishop of Salisbury. 
 
U THE CHURCH'S CATHOLIC DUTY 
 
 by all the warranty of spiritual fruit in the divided hves. One 
 Communion, mighty, -^ddespread, and imposing, appears to deny 
 the fact. It would have us beheve, at least in its strictest tones 
 of controversy, and alas ! in its practical deahngs, that true 
 Cathohcism has retreated within its owii broad yet narrow 
 pale ; and that outside hes, in an exclusion common to all, from 
 the Holy Orthodox Church of the Eastern Patriarchates to 
 the Society of Friends or the Plymouth Brethren, the rest 
 of what would pretentiously speak of itself as the Christian 
 world. 
 
 This is the claim which seems to us preposterous. But it 
 should be stated clearly, and faced plainly. And for this among 
 other reasons, that it involves a principle of distinction which has 
 been all powerful in controversial history, but which cannot, I 
 beheve, stand transfer from the artificial charts of controversy 
 to the realities which they profess to exhibit. We are asked, 
 I mean, to go back to the time when the East and West parted, 
 and say that the real description of the crisis is that one part 
 remained as before, unimpaired and whole, as the CathoUc Church 
 while the other part went oS into the undefined regions of schism. 
 We are asked to read the history of the Chm'ch of the fifteenth 
 and early sixteenth centmies, and to say that when the storm 
 arose and the flood came upon that Christian life so deeply 
 corrupted, so largely secularised, so foul with persecution and 
 cruelty, distorted and tainted by such overgrowths of belief and 
 practice, the real description of the result is that the side which 
 defended the existing system, and for loyalty's sake partly 
 condoned its mischiefs, remained as before unimpaired and whole 
 — ' the Catholic Church," while the part which was determined at 
 all costs to be rid of the evils and stumbling blocks went off, con- 
 demned and excluded, into the guilt of schism. 
 
 In that account I believe it to be impossible that history 
 and conscience should ever acquiesce. 
 
 Schism is a sin : it is more sinful and more poisonous than 
 we any of us reahze ; but to say that of that sin the East and 
 the Anghcan and the Reformed are guilty, and the Koman 
 Church with all its appalling and provocative fault, was guilt- 
 
THE CHURCH'S CATHOLIC DUTY 15 
 
 less, seems to me a morally impossible paradox.^ But the recogni- 
 tion of this will carry us a good way : and it clears the air. 
 
 It implies that the Catholicism which we seek cannot be dis- 
 tinguished wholly and merely by frontier : its precious things are 
 in part distributed. It implies that the visible Catholic Church 
 is a broken unity. 
 
 The question will be asked whether there is, then, no difference 
 as to Catholicity between the Churches of Eome, the East, and the 
 Anglican Communion on one side, and ether Churches^ or bodies 
 of Christians ? I think that the question really answers itself. 
 We claim what (with the possible exception of Conservative 
 Presbyterianism) they do not. But I think the simplest answer 
 is to say that we recognize — and that any full analysis of the 
 question of ' schism ' must recognize — the difference between 
 the Churches which have retained the essentials of Catholic 
 Order and those which have not. It is a distinction of vital 
 importance in theory and practice. But it does not seem to me 
 to be rightly expressed by saying that the three Communions 
 named are part of the Catholic Church and all the rest are not. 
 When I try to think of our Lord looking down upon His people, 
 I cannot think that such a distinction would answer to His 
 thought of our condition in all our woeful separations. 
 
 (6) I leave for the moment questions thus suggested, 
 which are most pertinent to us all, in order to take up another 
 point. The word Catholic in its historical interpretation repre- 
 sents not merely universality but stability : it stands for truth 
 as well as unity. What is the standard of Catholic truth ? W^e 
 are thankfully able to recognize as such what the Apostles were 
 taught by the Spirit to teach, as their writings record ; what the 
 Church embodied in its Liturgies ; what the Christian com- 
 munity testified that it had received : what was by God's Blessing 
 
 ^ I do not impute this in the unqualified form in which I have stated it to 
 particular members or apologists of the Roman Church. I have only tried to lay 
 bare its essential nature. 
 
 * Members of the Representative Church Council will remember the telling refer- 
 ence made by Lord Halifax, when some scrupulous Churchmen stumbled at the wide 
 use of the word ' Churches, 'to the title of Mgr. Duchesne's recent j.book ' Les Eglises 
 Separ^es.' 
 
16 THE CHURCH'S CATHOLIC DUTY 
 
 laid up for us in the Apostles' and Nicene Creeds.^ We have the 
 convergent witness to this of East and West. 
 
 But does Catholicism mean no more than this ? 
 
 I am not going to touch here upon the great controversy 
 represented by the word Development, disputed as Dr. Mozley 
 showed 2 even between two schools of Roman authority. 
 
 But it is quite vital that we should recognize — and it is most 
 strangely and constantly overlooked, that truth, as it persists 
 and moves through time, is subject to influences of change. It 
 cannot really stand still : it gives out increasingh^jDf its sweetness 
 and meaning : it has opportunity to illustrate and influence new 
 circumstances and thoughts : and from these it receives new 
 illustration and expansion of its own contents. But it is also 
 liable to the influences which lower and distort and transform, 
 and cause changes of tone and emphasis that become changes 
 of substance. 
 
 I have often wished that a man of devout and candid mind 
 would give us in some simple form an analysis, with illustrations, 
 of the great permanent tendencies which work to deform and to 
 distort religious life ; a book in fact on the pathology of ReHgion.' 
 It would show us dangers such as those of stereotyping the 
 spiritual, of ever increasing emphasis on favourite sides or parts 
 of truth, of letting sometimes logic and sometimes emotion keep on 
 tacking to principles new corollaries or definitions or practices. It 
 would show us how truth is wounded in the house of its friends. 
 It would note some of these tendencies embodied by the Pharisees 
 in a system which Our Lord had to shatter in the interest of 
 divine truth, and of the human spirit. 
 
 There are plainly other deforming changes, downgrading or 
 critical. We have reason enough to remember these in the history 
 of the Church of England and in the tendencies of to-day. But 
 I speak now of those which specially beset what claims the name 
 of Catholic. And I do so because in so much that is said to-day 
 
 ^ See this well though untechnicallj' stated by Dr. Frere, ' English Church 
 Ways,' 1914, pp. 17-19. 
 
 •■' ' The Theory of Development,' by J. B. Mozley, D.D. 
 
 ' Something of the kind was given us in the book which Dr. Liddou translated 
 from the Italian of Rosmini, ' The Five Wounds of the Church.' 
 
THE CHURCH'S CATHOLIC DUTY 17 
 
 they seem not so much as remembered. Yet it is essential 
 to the health of English Catholicism that we should keep them 
 constantly in view. We must ask ourselves when we talk of 
 the Catholic system what we mean. The processes which have 
 brought the Roman system of doctrine and practice to what 
 it is to-day have been partly processes of growth and adaptation, 
 partly processes of degradation ; processes which have gone 
 through their later stages in a Church warped and maimed 
 by the loss both of the Eastern stability, and of the great tem- 
 peramental forces of the non-Latin races. This is the system 
 crowned by the doctrine of Infallibility, which is now imposed and 
 interpreted by an iron authority.^ Now, as we all laiow the 
 word ' Movement ' has for eighty years been prominently and 
 honourably associated among ourselves with what is Catholic. It 
 designated a great stirring of life (such as had characterised other 
 Movements) which moved onwards recovering half-forgotten 
 truths and carrying them into practical effect. Much was done, 
 and there is much still to do. Therefore it is natural for some to ask 
 ' When are we going to carry the Catholic movement to its full 
 development ? ' It is natural, but it is surely quite misleading. If 
 it meant that what the movement rightly recovered and taught 
 was to sink deeper and spread wider in the Church's life, that 
 would be (in my view at least) only good. But this is not what 
 the phrase suggests. It suggests movement more and more in 
 one direction. It disguises from us how easily in matters of truth 
 advance becomes exaggeration and in avoiding one error we 
 move towards its opposite. Suppose a Uke question asked of men 
 who were at work to right a heavily Ksted ship. Such a metaphor 
 may suggest the fallacy. There is no full Catholicism in this 
 sense but that which is the accumulated result of mediaeval and 
 modern accretion as Rome accepts it. We must upon this 
 shewing be ready for all the developments which are its 
 characteristically popular featm'es. We must include, for 
 example, as an able and devoted representative of this line 
 of teaching has lately said, in the whole system called Catholic 
 
 ^ The recent utterances of that authority about the treatment and interpretation 
 of Scripture give us warning what this means. 
 
 
 
18 THE CHURCH'S CATHOLIC DUTY 
 
 ' the reverence due to the pictures and shrines and relics of the 
 Saints.' ^ 
 
 There is nothing I think so certain as that the pursuit of 
 Catholicism so understood, can only end in the capitulation 
 to Roman claims of those who ah'eady with some consistency 
 treat the Church of England as a misleading name for two 
 errant Provinces of the ancient Patriarchate of the West, leaving 
 the great sister and daughter Churches of our Communion to 
 find what position they best may. Whatever other elements 
 the Church of England contains, must (upon this view) shift 
 for themselves. In the view of such Catholicism, the millions 
 of other Christians in our own land and beyond it, can be met by 
 us with nothing but a Rome-like attitude of unbending challenge. 
 It has no opportunities for the intercourse of respect and affection, 
 in which so much may be learned, and softened, and explained. 
 
 Now to this Catholicism there is, in the nature of the case, 
 nothing to oppose equally clear and equally peremptory. 
 
 For where a partial logic drives, and authority commands, 
 and some temperaments are fully indulged whUe others are 
 despised or ignored, the result must be definite enough. 
 
 But that there is another imderstanding of CathoHcism 
 with which the Chmxh of England, if she will take up the bm-den, 
 is entrusted, a truer and better way, more historical, more 
 humble, and more large hearted, — this I do maintain, as it has 
 been, I believe, maintained in successive generations of Enghsh 
 life, and not least in the generation that went before us. This 
 was the meaning of the appeal, which our fathers inherited and 
 have transmitted to us, to the Primitive Church, and to ' the 
 Catholic Fathers and ancient Bishops.' - They beheved that in 
 Creed, in Worship, in the reception of Scripture, and in Ministry, the 
 practice and teaching of those early days determined the essen- 
 
 ^ Even if we do not go further and adopt the suggestion made from an anonymous 
 but singularlj- aggressive source for a renewal of Indulgences with ' a small money 
 payment. ' 
 
 - See what Hardwick calls the famous Canon 'De Concionatoribus,"' passed by 
 the Convocation in 1571, so often quoted bj' the leaders of the Catholic Movement as 
 a characteristic expression of the appeal made by the best exponents of the Church 
 of England to primitive and Catholic authority. See, for example, Mr. Keble's 
 ' Tract on Catholic Subscription,' p. ].5. 
 
THE CHURCH'S CATHOLIC DUTY 19 
 
 tials of the Church's Catholic constitution and doctrine. There 
 followed the long stretch of centuries, in which so much was devel- 
 oped, added, altered and transformed, and with regard to this, 
 in default of a Universal Church and of an official authority, 
 the Catholic duty of the Church, and in their degree of individual 
 Churchmen, is to discriminate and to ' take the precious from the 
 vile,' from out of those long processes of progress and abuse, of de- 
 votion and travesty, which wrought themselves out in the Church's 
 life as the centuries passed. The nature of Scripture and its 
 inspiration, the condition of the Departed and our relation 
 to them, the implications and consequences of the Lord's Sac- 
 ramental gift to us of Himself, the honour rightly due to his 
 Blessed Mother and to the Saints, the treatment of those who 
 impaired or rejected the Divine Truths, these are all instances 
 in which the Church and the Christians who are responsible to 
 God and man for Catholic loyalty have to attempt the difficult 
 work of discrimination. It is difficult, indeed, but what makes 
 it difficult sustains the conviction of its necessity, the certainty, 
 I mean, that in the long historical process sound growths and 
 unsound, true developments and untrue, methods Christian 
 in spirit and methods (Uke the Inquisition) essentially unChristian, 
 were blended together. It should, moreover, be fruitful in charity. 
 For quite plainly in such discrimination there will be room 
 for great differences due to character, antecedents, and other 
 causes, and we learn the need of a large liberty and a large 
 tolerance. It must needs be that some of us will be more inclined 
 towards Roman elaboration of devotion, strength of discipline, 
 and even intensification of doctrine ; others more to the directness 
 and simplicity of spiritual demand which is so strong a feature 
 of the Catholicity of the New Testament ; others again more 
 to freedom of enquuy or to the Spirit-taught lessons of to-day. 
 Such differences imply, no doubt, a great demand upon mutual 
 patience and charity ; the life which includes them must be 
 liable to many strains of tension and alarm, and must present 
 many incongruities and points of advantage to the ultramontane 
 or the scoffer. 
 
 But there is a rich reward in the fruitfulness which comes 
 
 C 2 
 
20 THE CHURCH'S CATHOLIC DUTY 
 
 from mutual influence and mutual restraint, from men's learning 
 what others have to show and the times may have to teach ; 
 and in the Hberty which gives tendencies and temperaments 
 room to prove their strength, and learn their limitations. 
 
 It is the kind of liberty and of manifoldness in unity of which 
 the germ was there from the very first in different types of 
 Apostolic teaching : which developed later as different schools 
 of thought and teaching formed within the Church. But there 
 is a more imperious need for it in times when upon the Catholic 
 foundation men have built so differently. 
 
 I for one am not ashamed of this Anglo-Cathohcism, if that 
 be its name. I know that it often seems awkward and ungainly, 
 unaware of its own principles and unworthy of itself. I know that 
 in order to be of any value it must lay aside all arrogance, 
 and purge itself of all contempt on the right hand and the left. 
 But there is, I am persuaded, no nobler opportunity given to 
 any Church of serving the progress of the Redeemer's Kingdom, 
 of touching with sympathy and understanding the many sorts of 
 men who bear the name of Christ ' their Lord and ours ' ; 
 and of working with the Spirit of unity and life to bring the 
 Holy Catholic Apostolic Church out of its divided and sin-scarred 
 state towards a unity of life and love, of witness and faith. ^ 
 
 I am brought thus to a grave and difficult topic, the relation 
 of the Churches of the Anglican Communion to the other parts 
 of divided Christendom. 
 
 We are all thankfully aware and agreed that there has been 
 of late, right through the Christian world, a fresh impulse of 
 desire for Christian reunion, with a sense of the disloyalty to our 
 Lord of division among His disciples, and of the hindrance and 
 scandal which such division puts in the way of the Church's witness 
 at home and abroad. Such feehngs are not made to be stifled : 
 we cannot do otherwise than reverently regard them as prompt- 
 
 ^ I hold with Dr. Frere in his words spoken to Russian Churchmen ('English 
 Church Ways,' p. 8), that this ideal of ours has a great past tradition, and we 
 Anglicans believe that it has still a future before it, and especially a part to play in 
 the future reunion of Christendom for which we all pray. 
 
THE CHURCH'S CATHOLIC DUTY 21 
 
 ings of the Spirit. The prospects of reunion may seem to us 
 terribly remote. Even so it cannot be wrong meanwhile to do 
 what can be done to make the mutual disposition of the Christian 
 communities more Christian, more mutually respectful, under- 
 standing and kind. But this is to understate the matter. For the 
 relation between us is, thank God, not merely a relation of 
 disunion pure and simple; along with the disunion there are 
 on the right hand and the left of our Communion deep unities 
 too of faith, of service, and of feeling with other parts of the 
 broken and divided Church. But we have been accustomed to 
 behave as if the disunion were everything and the unities nothing. 
 We have indeed read each other's books and sung each other's 
 hymns, but we have hardly looked each other in the face, 
 prayed together, or taken counsel together. Experience has 
 convinced some of us (I think it really convinces most of those 
 who give it opportunity) that there is room for bettering here 
 with mutual benefit, and with this precious result that we show 
 to the world and the unbehever and the heathen that we are 
 something more than enemies and rivals, that in all our 
 separation we know ourselves as brethren. 
 
 But quite plainly there is, with all this, grave need for caution 
 lest we should give away what is not ours to give, and be untrue 
 to things with which we are in trust. 
 
 On one side, indeed, the stone wall of exclusion, and the 
 peremptory requirement of submission to the whole later growth 
 of doctrine, development, and disciphne which, whatever it is, is 
 not Cathohc since the East knows it not, and the Primitive Church 
 knew it not, saves us from any corporate danger of strajnng or 
 weakening. But it is a sad benefit. There is no feature in the 
 condition of the Christian Church, which ought to be in all its 
 parts soft and plastic in God's Hands for the work of His 
 reuniting grace, so discouraging as this hardness in one, and that 
 the largest, section of the whole. Brave efforts at concihation 
 made in our own time, as by Dr. Pusey in his ' Eirenicon ' and 
 by Lord Hahfax and his fellow experts, even at some risk to our 
 own unity and the consciences of many fellow Churchmen, were 
 designed to keep our own Church from a corresponding hardness 
 
22 THE CHURCH'S CATHOLIC DUTY 
 
 towards the great Church of the West. So long as they preserve 
 loyalty to our o\mi Mother Church and to such protests as truth 
 and liberty alike require, they deserve our thanks.^ They met 
 their inevitable fate, as things are. But even here the grace of 
 God, and the power of prayer, may move mountains, and the 
 future may show things hidden from ourselves.^ 
 
 But on the other side we have no such melancholy safeguard. 
 I pass by, though far from forgetting it, our relation to the 
 Holy Orthodox Church and other Churches of the East. Here, 
 great as the separation is, the case is characteristically different. 
 There is mutual respect, courteous reception, and opportunity 
 wilhngly given for mutual acquaintance and explanation.^ 
 
 But I refer now to the various Protestant communions of our 
 own and other lands. They are nearer to us locally and in 
 many relations of hfe : and accordingly if there is more prospect 
 there is more risk, and I should complain of no vigilance, even 
 if I thought it needlessly susceptible, which kept us mindful 
 and alert. The risk is greater for several particular reasons : 
 (1) English people are characteristically suspicious of principle, 
 and characteristically inchned to guide themselves by instinct 
 or circumstance. (2) In the presence of heathendom differences 
 take proportionately a smaller place. (3) As young Churches of 
 foreign blood grow up their rudimentary Christian hfe will be apt 
 
 ^ Nor were they new. I remember well a visit of Mr. Gladstone to Oxford more 
 than forty years ago in order to confer with Dr. Mozley about a possible republica- 
 tion of the literature of attempts at conciliation between Rome and the English and 
 Reformed Churches made in the centuries since the Reformation. Dr. Mozley spoke 
 of it as an important ' body of thought ' in Ecclesiastical history. It was soon after 
 Mr. Gladstone had written his strong controversial pamphlet on Vaticanism. 
 
 '■^ It is noteworthy that my friend Mr. Sil.as McBee of New York has, in his Con- 
 structive Qiuxrterly, succeeded by faith, prayer, and unremitting patience and tact in 
 bringing writers of every Christian kind, Roman, Greek, Anglican, along with other 
 Christian denominations, into common parley, without controversy, with an avowed 
 desire for unit}', and with much sanction and goodwill from the bodies which they 
 represent. The Review is published quarterly at the price of 3s. I hope he may 
 be increasingly supported. 
 
 ^ The little volumes of lectures given in Russia by Father Puller and Dr. Frere 
 are pleasant evidence of these relations. I am glad to take the opportunitj' of 
 thanking my friend Mr. W. J. Birkbeck for all that he has done so long and 
 gallantly, and with such wealth of exact knowledge, to promote understanding 
 between the two Churches. 
 
THE CHURCH'S CATHOLIC DUTY 23 
 
 to overlook the realities of important distinctions which have come 
 to them clothed in the uncomely and not very intelligible dress 
 of historical controversy. (4) There are matters of a practical 
 kind on which by general consent an agreed poMcy among different 
 missions is economically and morally almost essential, (5) In 
 some places a united or single National Church (though in these 
 discussions the Roman Missions, which in Uganda I beheve 
 number 100,000 disciples, are apt to be overlooked ! ), able to 
 focus its forces and defy its enemies, is a very alluring ideal : 
 the more alluring when, as it sometimes happens, we are told 
 that our adherence might secure its organization on Episcopal 
 lines. 
 
 All this it was, in itself widespread, which came to focus and 
 expression at Kikuyu. 
 
 My own anxiety to secure what we rightly could in mutual 
 approach made me the more anxious about what was there done 
 and proposed, and I think my own was the first voice to sound a 
 note of warning after the first jubilant announcement from an 
 irresponsible quarter that at Kikuyu all difficulties of reunion 
 had been overcome, and all divisions treated as insignificant. 
 I pointed out (in a letter to the Scotsman, afterwards reprinted in 
 our Diocesan Chronicle) how easily on the contrary such action 
 might really set back and not forward the cause which we all 
 desire to serve, and in the name of unity might become a cause 
 of disunion. The result has, I am afraid, somewhat justified 
 these fears. The occasion has been used at home to make demands 
 for a latitude in these matters which, if granted (as even those 
 who make them must know) would rend the Church of England 
 and rend it because, as many of us beheve, it would require sacri- 
 fices of Cathohc Order. Upon the other side, an honoured Bishop, 
 for whom local proximity gave a special sting to the danger, 
 made an attack with the dash and vehemence of a forlorn hope. 
 More respect on either side for the reserves of constitutional 
 strength and wisdom in our Church fife would have saved us much. 
 
 Having had, through my membership of the Consultative 
 Body of the Lambeth Conference, a part in shaping the advice 
 tendered upon the Archbishop's request to himself and in- 
 
24 THE CHURCH'S CATHOLIC DUTY 
 
 directly submitted to the Church at large, I must be reticent in 
 comment upon it, lest I should in any way gloss unfairly a docu- 
 ment of which every word was most carefully weighed, and which 
 was signed with an unanimity not less cordial because every one 
 of us felt that, if it was not drawn exactly as he would have drawn 
 it, he could sign it with complete loyalty to his own convictions, 
 and with the behef that it conveyed with more than individual 
 force and discretion what in his behef needed to be said. Behind 
 the signatories, themselves so diverse yet so united, there was a 
 great weight of conviction and experience in the Church. 
 
 But two or three things may be said without risk. 
 
 (1) First, I would emphasize its constitutional character. I do 
 not refer only to its reference throughout to principle and order : 
 ' Church order,' ' the principles accepted by the Church of 
 England,' ' the principles of the Church of England.' 
 
 To this it has indeed been objected that our standard is not 
 that of the Church of England but that of the Holy Catholic 
 Church. Ultimately no doubt ; and for us individuals too, where 
 there is some question of doubtful interpretation, or of trying to 
 make the Church of England in principle or conduct more ade- 
 quately loyal to historical or ideal Catholicity. But it is the 
 very essence of our position as Anglican Churchmen that we 
 have accepted the Church of England as for us representative of 
 the Church Cathohc. Practically therefore as the condition of 
 constitutional hfe it is to its principles and its order that we 
 must primarily refer in a disputed case. 
 
 But, beyond this, I would point to the requirement in the 
 Advice of constitutional sanction and constitutional action. The 
 Lambeth Conference of Bishops is indeed not strictly a consti- 
 tutional body ; it never claims and cannot enforce a direct 
 authorit3^ But those who look through forms to reahties, and 
 who recognize how much constitutions have come by crystaUiza- 
 tion of what had substance before it took shape, will feel that 
 reference to the Lambeth Conference means for us in a most 
 real and effective though provisional way reference to the 
 judgement of our Church and of its commissioned leaders. 
 
 It was accordingly in the judgement of the Consultative 
 
THE CHURCH'S CATHOLIC DUTY 25 
 
 Body a thing impossible that certain Dioceses of the Communion 
 should enter on their own account into a relation so plainly- 
 organic as ' federation ' with parts of other Christian denomi- 
 nations. Accordingly they took at its fullest value the reserva- 
 tion of Kikuyu itself as to the provisional character of what was 
 there done, and drove it home. 
 
 What the Lambeth Conference would be Hkely to allow or 
 disallow we must wait to see. But I feel it a duty to 
 say plainly that I cannot conceive how units of the Anglican 
 Communion can " federate " with other Christian Churches 
 without unfaithfulness to some of its principles, and the gravest 
 alteration of its position. ^ 
 
 (2) But there is another feature of the Consultative Body's 
 advice with which I would connect a very earnest appeal 
 to my fellow Churchmen, and particularly to those who 
 specially use the name of Catholic. There is a danger 
 besetting any enforcement of principle which, to give it a 
 name, I will call ' rigorism.' It is the essence of rigorism to 
 believe that a rule cannot be enforced if any exceptions to it 
 are allowed. The lawyer is plainly liable to rigorism ; but the 
 history of Equity testifies to the need even in his precise sphere; 
 for something of a less mechanical sort. For it is, indeed, in 
 the lower and more mechanical parts of life that rigorism is most 
 in place. The rule cannot be too rigorous which prescribes 
 the raising of the danger signal behind the passing train. But, 
 as we ascend, human life is less and less capable of mere rigorism. 
 The physician knows that well. For this reason the moraKst 
 requires his casuistry, in spite of its dangers. It cannot be 
 otherwise with the theologian or the administrator of the Church.^ 
 I know that it is urged that here there can be no flexibihty 
 because the principles with which we are in trust are, to the 
 best of our belief and knowledge, Divine. I believe the truth 
 
 ^ I ought, however, to say, in gratitude and fairness to the Bishop of Uganda, that 
 a conversation with him showed me that he had desired and steadily tried to keep 
 Church principles in view throughout. 
 
 The Roman sj'stem of dispensations, with all its practical sagacity, and all its 
 dangerous laxity, is on a large scale an admission of this. If Anglican laxity be too 
 frequent and characteristic, Anglican rigorism may easily be too stiff. 
 
26 THE CHURCH'S CATHOLIC DUTY 
 
 to be the other way. There must be an element of reverent 
 diffidence whenever we undertake to speak or act for God. It 
 must not interfere with our faithfulness to what we believe to 
 be the lines of His Will. But it must check us from enforcing 
 with inflexible logic what are very possibly like lines drawn across 
 the page by a ruler compared to nature's flowing work. For we 
 are dealing ^yith. the highest things, and they are the instruments 
 of Divine life and love. Nor can we forget that there are in- 
 dications in the Gospel itself which suggest that Our Lord would 
 warn us of rigorist perils. He was surrounded by rigorism 
 in the ways of the Pharisees and the teaching of the Scribes ; 
 and we observe that He broke through it, not merely by the 
 assertion of His own unique prerogative as the Son of Man, 
 but by reference to precedents of purely human experience, 
 to David and the priests. 
 
 On another side I should appeal to the analogies of adminis- 
 trative wisdom, in the ascending scale of the magistrate, the 
 school master, the statesman, the parent. One and all would 
 say, though in different degrees, that rigorism which allows no 
 exception would interfere with some of their best and most 
 delicate work. True that exceptions can be made and multiplied 
 till they make the law impotent and null. It was in this sense 
 that Bishop Creighton, with a little characteristic paradox, told us 
 that there was practically no marriage law in the pre-Reforma- 
 tion Church, by reason of the wholesale use of dispensations. 
 Exceptions must be made sparingly, they must be allowed in 
 order to meet some real specialty in the circumstances ; or to 
 the entry upon the field of some other valid principle. Above 
 aU they must be so made (and they can be so made) as in the 
 making to strengthen and enforce the rule by bringing it into 
 evidence, by making the principle of it apparent, and often by 
 winning through gentleness a recognition of it which resentment 
 would refuse. I trust with all my heart that the battle of 
 Catholicity in the Church of England will never be fought over 
 an issue of rigorism ; if it is, it will fail, and as I believe, 
 deservedly fail ; but with what results of loss and disaster, none 
 can foretell. 
 
THE CHURCH'S CATHOLIC DUTY 27 
 
 I have spoken of this and spoken strongly because I believe 
 not that it is the only danger of the Kikuyu matter nor, in 
 itself, the gravest, but because it is the danger which is most 
 likely to divide or baffle the great body of loyal Churchmen. 
 The Consultative Body, speaking with a great weight of varied 
 experience behind them, had no hesitation in refusing to treat 
 rigorism as a knife by which to cut knots that need untying. 
 
 I am perfectly aware, of course, how easy it is to make a 
 fighting reply to my appeal. ' There are principles which admit 
 of no exception. Is it rigorism to adhere to them unswervingly ? 
 And if not, how or by whom is the distinction to be drawn between 
 the principles about which we must be rigorous and those which 
 allow of exception ? ' 
 
 I reply at once that, as in so many cases, no hard dis- 
 tinction can be drawn. But where definition is impossible, 
 illustration may help. I cannot, without irreverence, re- 
 ceive the Sacrament from the hands of a Minister who is not 
 ordained according to what Catholic witness bids me believe 
 to be the due order and succession through men at each stage 
 appointed to ordain.^ I cannot dispense in any case with Holy 
 Matrimony as the one and only relation in the Church between 
 man and woman. These are instances of the first kind in which 
 principle must absolutely rule. They are obvious. Let me 
 give instances of the other and more difficult class. 
 
 Confirmation is required by the Church of England as the con- 
 dition to Holy Communion, and as part of the Church's order of 
 grace (a point emphasized by the Consultative Body). Therefore 
 to treat it (as used to be often done) as something which if omitted 
 at the normal age in childhood, may be reasonably neglected ; 
 or otherwise habitually to admit to Holy Communion unconfirmed 
 persons, was wrong ; and it should reassure the anxious to 
 observe the large numbers of adult persons whom we receive 
 
 ^ In a lecture delivered by the courtesy and request of the Principal (Ur. George 
 Adam Smith) before the University of Aberdeen, and afterwards published in the 
 Constriictivt Quarterly for March, 1915, I made some attempt to show the value 
 to us of a 'given' order or constitution, as symbol and part of the whole 'given' 
 Gospel and Grace of God in Jesus Christ. 
 
28 THE CHURCH'S CATHOLIC DUTY 
 
 as elements in many of oiir Confirmations, and occasionally 
 in a Confirmation for adults alone. The tendencj' is all that 
 way. So again any working of proposed Kikuyu rules which 
 would give any class of unconfirmed persons a right to com- 
 municate in our churches, or would in effect make congregations 
 in which the confirmed could only be one section in a piebald 
 whole, would be wholly inconsistent with our principle. The 
 principle is there, and it is clear. 
 
 But then there comes before us the case of the baptized and 
 earnest Christian brother (for such we agree that he is) not of 
 our Communion, who separated for a long time from the privileges 
 of his own people, begs the permission to join with us. I do not 
 say that all ministers of our Church are bound to comply with 
 this request. I think, indeed, that they ought not to do so 
 without reference to the Bishop. But of this I do feel sure that 
 none who after such reference does comply, and no Bishop who 
 sanctions such compliance ought to be condemned. In cases where 
 I have given such sanction, it has always been my practice to 
 secure that the reply given should be such as to make our own 
 principles more clear to the man. I wonder how many of our 
 adult candidates for Confirmation are due to their being met 
 in this way, and not by blank refusal. At any rate it must be 
 clearly understood that a demand for a rigorist decision is a 
 demand for something new, and contrary to the considered 
 wisdom of Bishops of the most varied kinds, and in most different 
 circumstances. 
 
 Or take a second case. It is perfectly true that the preacher 
 is a commissioned mouthpiece of the Church set to declare in 
 her name the things of faith and duty. It f oUows that preaching 
 as a fiuiction of the Ministry must be confined to those whose 
 commission the Church gives and recognizes, and even the lesser 
 forms of preaching given to laymen must be entrusted only to 
 those who are in full communion. Accordingly an exchange of 
 pulpits with other ministers would be to most of us intolerable : 
 and must in fact, if it were chronic, lead to afien teaching. At 
 home we must, I am persuaded, abstain from such exchange. 
 But if in the Mission field where different bodies of Christians are 
 
THE CHURCH'S CATHOLIC DUTY 29 
 
 contending with the same foes there should be occasion when one 
 visits another to ask the visitor to address one's people some 
 words of experience and encouragement — who need exclude this ? 
 Lord Hahfax raised the case of a missionary to whose station 
 David Livingstone might have come along, and asked whether 
 he would not have been rightly asked to speak to the people. 
 There are not many Livingstones, but a lesser than Livingstone 
 might well have credentials enough of Christian service to sug- 
 gest a hke request. 
 
 The Consultative Body made it clearly appear (1) that any such 
 action must be purely voluntary (and therefore could not be made 
 ' matter of right ' or general custom), (2) that it must have the 
 Bishop's sanction, (3) that it should be the reception of a ' visitor.' 
 And they added a note of demurrer to the sufficiency of Kikuyu 
 safeguards. 
 
 I can give no more examples. But it is in this spirit I am sure 
 that we should proceed. A clear intelhgent and loyal maintenance 
 of our own trust is a duty to that trust, to ourselves, to those 
 from whom we are separated, and to future possibihties of wider 
 union or closer relations with Cathohc Churches. It may be 
 combined with other actions towards separated Christians which 
 are cordial, intimate, and in the truest sense respectful. It will 
 not be misunderstood : it will be and is respected. It will be a more 
 effective witness than mere aloofness or mere condemnation. 
 It has in it the wisdom of those who remember that after a long 
 history of aberrations, confusions, and controversies, no Church 
 or individual is likely to be wholly right ; we may often be 
 right in making our own affirmations, while refusing to utter 
 what may seem the corresponding negatives about others. They 
 stand or fall to their ov^n Master. We must for example 
 require for ourselves what we know to make a vahd Sacrament, 
 without pronouncing upon the validity for others of what they do 
 in good faith and conscience before God. 
 
 This is the part of wisdom because it is the part of humihty, 
 reverence and charity. It can afford to challenge, it is bound to 
 challenge, the moral record of rigorism. 
 
 I am sorry to have occupied you so long with this matter. 
 
30 THE CHURCH'S CATHOLIC DUTY 
 
 But all have agreed in taking it as an important or even crucial 
 case. I had rather err by length than by carelessness. 
 
 For my conviction is that the main security for the faith 
 and consistency of the Church is in the judgement of the great 
 body of the loyal clergy and people. Their decisions must be 
 quietly and seriously matured, and I have too much faith in 
 the Church of England and in the good hand of our God upon. 
 her to fear that she will go gravely wrong. 
 
Ill 
 
 OUR DIOCESAN LIFE 
 
 A Visitation is historically a thing of interesting and ancient 
 tradition coming to us from times when the need of it was 
 greater in some ways than is now the case, and the method of 
 it was no doubt very different. 
 
 Beside the special enquiries for Avhich it is the occasion, and 
 the opportunity which it gives to the Bishop of conveying to 
 the clergy, and indirectly to the Church in the Diocese, some 
 thoughts which appear to him to be needed and timely, it is one 
 of the few occasions when we meet as a body, not as in the case 
 of a Diocesan Festival at each man's option, but officially and 
 by authoritative summons. 
 
 The Diocese: its Episcopal Administration 
 
 This alone would go far to justify its continuance. Yet even 
 here we see how imperfectly in a Diocese like this we are able to 
 express this union ; for the custom of meeting at several centres 
 where parts of the Bishop's Charge are given without special 
 relevance of the particular section to the particular group 
 geographically taken of the Clergy, I have always felt to be a 
 rather cumbrous and meaningless way of coping with the 
 problem which, in spite of modern facilities of communication, 
 the size of the Diocese creates. 
 
 When four years ago I became your Bishop, the question 
 whether the Diocese should continue as it was in size or should 
 be divided, seemed to me to meet us with demand for considera- 
 tion and solution. You know what happened. But it is perhaps 
 right that I should put upon record that, after a gathering at 
 
32 OUR DIOCESAN LIFE 
 
 Farnham of representative officers and various laymen of the 
 Diocese for preliminary consideration, I arranged that the matter 
 should come before the Diocesan Conference, and after a dis- 
 cussion which was very impressively and thoughtfully opened 
 by Lord Selborne and Lord Midleton, I was requested by the 
 Conference to appoint a Committee (which I tried to make as 
 fully representative as possible) to consider and report. I should 
 like to thank its Chairman, Lord Tennyson (who took the heaviest 
 part of the work) and the other members for the time and pains 
 which they gave. The result was an impartial and stimulating 
 but not very conclusive Report. Probably we all felt that it was 
 easier to see the difficulties than the solution. Since then the 
 report of the Bishop of Worcester's Committee on the creation 
 of new Dioceses in the Province justified our perplexity in so 
 far that it has marked Winchester as one of the Dioceses whose 
 case must be dealt with as part of larger rearrangements. 
 
 There for the time the matter stands. I have found no one 
 to suggest that dm'ing the War we can carry it further. 
 
 The experience of four years has convinced me rather sadly 
 how insuperable (unless for some quite masterly administrator at 
 the full height of all his powers, and probablj^ even for him) 
 is the problem of making the relations between the Bishop, 
 the clergy and the parishes what I should wish it to be, and what 
 ideally it ought to be. Xot seldom I feel poignantly, and it seems 
 to me that the Clergy and others must feel bitterly, how frail 
 and faint is my ovm. direct acquaintance with them and -wdth their 
 work. It is something that they know me to be accessible and can 
 from time to time bring me as they desire it their difficulties or 
 needs. It is more that I am able, by ways of which I try to make 
 the most, to contribute, through our Diocesan Chronicle ^ and 
 through Pastoral Letters, to them and to their people, something 
 of suggestion and guidance for thought and prayer. I have several 
 times been encouraged by words which shew that this is welcome. 
 
 ^ N.B. — This is further helped by improved liuks with the Parish Magazines 
 where Incumbents fall into the system of ' early matter ' which I have arranged 
 •with this view. Messrs. Warren, High Street, Winchester, will give information 
 about it. It is used by many. Will others enquire about it ? 
 
OUR DIOCESAN LIFE 33 
 
 But what really reconciles me for the present to our existing 
 system, as to a second best really good of its kind, is my 
 belief that the Diocese is looked after as a whole and in detail 
 with conscientious care and efficiency, and certainly with un- 
 ceasing exchange of knowledge and advice, by its Head 
 Quarters Staff. I so describe with deep respect, affection and 
 gratitude my brothers in the Episcopate and the Archdeacons 
 of Winchester and Surrey, including them with myself as, in 
 different degrees, partners in a common responsibility. 
 
 Visitation Enquiries 
 
 I have now to thank the clergy for what they have done for 
 me in reply to my Questions. I am glad that the plan now 
 usual of incorporating in the Returns to the Visitation the annual 
 statistical figures minimizes the trouble given by Visitation 
 enquiries. The other or special questions have been variously 
 treated. There are returns which might have been written in 
 five minutes and are mainly monosyllabic. One clergyman, 
 and he of Ruridecanal standing, reached the thirteenth question 
 before he found anything more than Yes and No to be required. 
 But this has not been the ordinary case. A great deal of useful 
 information has been given. I am able to form some general 
 impressions. I hope also, that in the coming time, please God, 
 individuals will pretty frequently receive indications that their 
 remarks, complaints, or suggestions have received consideration 
 and improved my knowledge of their needs. 
 
 I am able to say that I have myself read caref uUy every reply 
 to the last question in which I asked for anything which the 
 writer desired to put before me. 
 
 I have also given a good deal of other attention to the repHes 
 and, with help from my confidential staff at Farnbam, have 
 obtained some statistical results. 
 
 Perhaps I may be allowed to summarize quickly the chief 
 conclusions. 
 
 ' Immobility ' 
 
 One general characteristic comes out strongly. It is what 
 some one has rather contemptuously called the immobihty of 
 the English Church. This shows itself in different ways. There 
 
 D 
 
34 OUR DIOCESAN LIFE 
 
 is, it would seem, little experiment or tentdcive suggestion, or 
 new developments of method : this is more remarkable perhaps 
 in a Church of which people say with some truth that it is marked 
 by too much " go-as-you-please." It shows itself also in the 
 form of a good deal of resistance to change when it is proposed : 
 for it is evidently more characteristic (at least superficially) 
 of the laity than of the clergy. I suppose that in the course of 
 history a good many of the more eager or restive characters 
 among our people went off in movements of separation and 
 dissent : and that the quieter, more solid, and less critical 
 elements have accordingly prevailed in the heredity. 
 
 Now there are two or three things which I think deserve 
 consideration in regard to this. 
 
 a. One is that if what I have just said is at all true, or if for 
 whatever reason this conservatism of temperament is characteristic 
 of us, we ought to bring to bear upon it our self-knowledge and 
 self -discipline. We may err, likely enough, on the side of immo- 
 bility. J. S. Mill said somewhere, I think, that after being im- 
 pressed by the argument that such and such thing was un- 
 constitutional or un-English, he had come to feel that this was 
 probably a recommendation. For it very likely meant that 
 the change would give us more of something in which we were 
 deficient. It is worth while to bear this in mind in dealing 
 with our own special subjects. 
 
 yS. But of course in religious matters where instinct and habit 
 and temperament, though they count for much, are liable to 
 be specially modified by forces of authority or logic or imitation 
 or conscience, the general tendency to immobility may very 
 probably be compatible with a great deal of eager and restless 
 innovation by certain characters or kinds of people. And 
 then because the mass is immobile there comes the danger which 
 has sometimes been described as that of puUing the front of the 
 carriage off its body. 
 
 7. Leaving these exceptions, however, and returning to the 
 general view, we have I think to be careful that we do not mistake 
 the mind of our people by thinl^ing them sometimes more satis- 
 fied or immobile than they really are. If I am not mistaken 
 
OUR DIOCESAN LIFE 35 
 
 we shall learn this from the experience of our financial changes. 
 There was, and probably still is in some places, prejudice against 
 these as unnecessary and tiresome ; but I think it is being found 
 that there was in fact a good deal of latent discontent with our 
 unbusinesslike ways, and readiness to welcome something both 
 more orderly and better based on principle. It has been so too, 
 I think, in not a few places about Sunday School improvement, 
 one of the brightest bits of our recent record for initiative and 
 wise amendment. It comes out that it would have been a great 
 mistake to be arrested here by the very natural prejudice, at the 
 outset, of some of the workers. Or take the case of Parish 
 CouncOs. Here there is considerable variety of experience. But 
 the same men who would not stir to press for a Council nor 
 perhaps quite at first to welcome it, wiU have in them a good deal 
 of undergrumble about the Parson's sole power ; and if a Council is 
 well worked will soon grow a little proud of what they feel to be 
 something free and fair and constitutional.^ 
 
 S. For this reason, and for other and higher reasons, it will 
 be wrong if a parish priest is too easily deterred from something 
 which he feels to be in itself right and for the people important. 
 (Those limitations are as you will see significant. A thing may 
 be right in some of the minor senses of that word which yet is 
 not worth pressing upon reluctant people.) Neither the Church 
 nor any other cause would move if nothing were ever carried 
 which did not commend itself at first sight. The true order of 
 proceeding in most cases seems to me to be this. First let a man 
 set himself to win the trust and affection of his people, and above 
 all convince them that he cares for them. Then with the hold 
 so gained let him go on to explain to them what he desires to do : 
 let him explain it clearly and slowly, and so far as may be in terms 
 of their experience and intelligence. Let him seek their agreement 
 or at least their consent. It is, I think, surprising how much 
 has often been done in this kind of way. 
 
 ^ It is possible that this may be true in the case of Versions of Scripture read in 
 Church. It is to me personally a disappointment to find that only about 10 per 
 cent, use the Revised, and far more accurate, Version. No doubt this meets the 
 wishes of our more immobile people. But the prejudice would probably not be last- 
 ing, and there are other, and not less important, hearers whom we perhaps ignore. 
 
 D 2 
 
36 OUK DIOCESAN LIFE 
 
 Worship. 
 
 It is possibly in this connection that I may best refer to the 
 subject matter of the first questions on your paper ; about the 
 order of Sunday Services, the hours of celebrating the Holy Com- 
 munion, and its choral rendering. You will probably have 
 inferred from the position and form of the questions that the 
 matter was one which seemed to me to call for though^;. I do 
 think so. But you do not, I hope, attribute to me either a cut 
 and dry plan, or a desire to see all places follow the same method. 
 May I explain myself a little ? Nothing can be more important 
 to a Church than the character and treatment of its Lord's Day 
 worship. What will call out and meet with most simplicity and 
 force the spiritual capacities of God's people ? What will best 
 satisfy the devout, and be reasonably attractive to those who 
 need to be allured ? What will give them best opportunities to 
 pray, to praise, to hear, and to adore ? What will teach them best 
 the relation of the Work of Christ to their own needs ? Few 
 I think will now be found to answer these questions by referring 
 to the Order of Service universal when I was young, viz.. Morning 
 Prayer, Litany, and a section of the Liturgy or Order of Holy 
 Communion completed sometimes, and for a few of the congre- 
 gation, by the chief parts of the Eucharistic Service. 
 
 What were the strong points of this arrangement ? The 
 weak ones are plain, and felt by nearly all.i The strong points 
 were that it made the Psalter familiar to the people ; that it 
 accustomed them to hear selected passages of Scripture which at 
 least gave them an idea of its general course and drift, and made 
 them know its principal characters and events ; that in the 
 Epistles and Gospels, heard by all, they came to know the Gospel 
 History, and some of the most striking Apostolic utterances ; 
 and (I suppose) that the recital of the Ten Commandments 
 impressed (though in a form which called for a good deal of 
 explanation and supplement) the great heads of religious and 
 moral duty. 
 
 I hope that I have done justice to what for so long guided 
 the devotions of our forbears. But with all this it was, as we 
 
 ^ I remember the late Lord Ebury, an earnest Evangelical, writing to complain 
 of a fourfold repetition of the Lord's Prayer, and the bad effect on his boys ! 
 
OUR DIOCESAN LIFE 37 
 
 now see. almost a grotesque arrangement. It was very cumbrous 
 and long, it required a great deal of patient and intelligent 
 understanding, it lacked simplicity, it would hardly kindle, 
 though it supported, earnest devotion. The universal intro- 
 duction of hymns and the omission of the Litany have largely 
 modified it in many places. In many more Morning Prayer 
 has been taken alone.^ But in a large number of places the old 
 combination still holds, and in many others some modified version 
 of it is the standing form of Sunday worship, usually at eleven 
 o'clock. The combination with this of a previous and early 
 celebration of the Holy Communion has of course greatly altered 
 for minorities the balance of the arrangement, but the main parish 
 service remains what it was and where it was. 
 
 We have here a difficult situation. The replies testify to 
 a great weight of resistance to any change ; they naturally 
 do not reflect the amount of dislike and criticisms, and of failure 
 to stimulate and satisfy devotion which attend the present arrange- 
 ment, especially among the young. Its length, the defects of 
 its Lectionary, its want of simpKcity, and the repetition of the 
 same framework morning and evening cause some of the chief 
 criticisms which it receives. 
 
 Thought and observation have convinced me that the future 
 worship of the Church will be of two sorts ; it ^vill be mainly 
 Eucharistic, with supplements of the intercessory type, freely 
 combined with Scripture and hymns. In other words, the elements 
 will be (1) that in which the work and offering of Jesus Christ 
 will come nearest to His people, appealing to them, and, hke a 
 magnet,'- lifting them up with itself towards God, and (2) those 
 fcwms of prayer and praise which most resemble the unstudied 
 simple expression of the heart's needs, desires and love. 
 Worship should be sublime and it should be homely. 
 
 It needs very little observation and sympathy to become 
 aware how the Eucharist, when once understood, touches the 
 heartsprings as nothing else does, and this in people of the 
 most various temperaments and degrees of devotion. Used 
 
 ^ An important, if overlong, intercessory element has thus been lost and needs to 
 be in some way replaced. 
 
 * See ' Prayer,' by W. J. Carey, p. 47. 
 
38 OUR DIOCESAN LIFE 
 
 in this way in the Roman and Eastern Churches as the chief 
 Service of Sundaj'- morning it has this power. Where its principal 
 parts are set to simple music as I have heard it in country places 
 abroad, it has evidently done for the people very much what we 
 desire, and part of what Our Lord, we may think, meant when He 
 made its celebration the common act of His disciples. It is indeed 
 in its main use far too exclusively priestly (for the priest alone) ; 
 it is separated from the people by its dead language ; it is over- 
 loaded with a great deal which is to them largely unintelligible 
 murmur and performance. But our own beautiful Order 
 (or perhaps better still, if we could agree to permit it, the Order 
 of the Scottish or American Books or of our 1st Reformed Prayer 
 Book), conducted with reverent audibility, and taken up by the 
 people at Creed, Sanctus, Gloria (and if it be thought well with 
 the insertion of the hymns Benedictus and Agnus Dei) to music 
 of a simple sort with which they become as familiar as with 
 the best known hymns, supplies a beautiful, simple, yet profound 
 expression of our corporate worship. 
 
 It will not be complete, it will not be eloquent of all the 
 meanings of the Sacrament, unless it be quite plainly a Com- 
 munion Service. But if it could be placed at an hour when 
 many of our working folk, tired after the week's labour and, in 
 towns at least, late Saturday hours, could make it the beginning 
 of their day, and with a reasonable Hberty allowed especially to 
 the older and more infirm members of our congregations, its 
 character as a Communion would be retained. Further, besides 
 the communicants of the horn-, a large number will be communi- 
 cating folk who have made their own Communion earlier, or will 
 do so on some near occasion, while they are free to assist in 
 supporting the beauty of the service as an act of praise, thanlcs- 
 giving, and intercession. If this is done, or rather where this is 
 done, and the service is kept free from over-elaborate ceremonial 
 which rightly annoys a reserved and rather undemonstrative 
 people like ours, and has unquestioned associations of abuse, I 
 beUeve in time it will assuredly win its way. I have come to 
 believe that we need not be too careful about the participation in 
 it of some who are non-communicants. It will be more likely 
 
OUR DIOCESAN LIFE 39 
 
 to draw them on to Communion, than they to spoil it by an 
 irreverent presence. 
 
 I am very far indeed from suggesting to you that, even if 
 you would, you should go back and upset our country parishes 
 by abruptly starting on such lines. I am well aware that some 
 of you will hardly be able to bear with patience my commendation 
 of what seems to them so plainly connected with mischiefs of 
 which perhaps I am as conscious as they. 
 
 But I do beheve that such a service is in the very truest sense 
 EvangeMcal, in that it links the worshippers, their prayers, their 
 praises, their offerings, their penitence, their work, their sufferings, 
 their sorrows, their resolutions to the loving mystery of the Lord's 
 self-oblation to the Father in His hfe-long sacrifice and in His 
 obedience unto that Death, which is the source of our forgiveness 
 and the means of our redemption and the pattern of our hves. 
 
 I believe that incidentally the clergy would find that this 
 helped them too in their preaching. The short sermon, as 
 one element among others with Scripture, Creed, and Worship 
 in the Eucharist, is easier to preach, more quietly instructive 
 and constructive, than when it stands more by itself. The order 
 would gradually instil a sense of the meanings and claims of 
 the Sacrament itself, more than the constant exhortations to 
 come thereto which, as I suspect, often irritate more than they 
 impress. It would be sacramental, in that best manner of which 
 we have too httle, as the Sacrament comes to be understood as 
 central to life, truth, experience and need.^ 
 
 The question about celebrations earlier than eight o'clock was 
 aimed at what has often seemed to me a want of consideration for 
 our poorer folk. The eight o'clock celebrations exactly suit many, 
 but chiefly persons of the more comfortable classes.^ The answers 
 have shown me that this has been widely recognized and met by 
 
 ^ The arrangement would incidentally go far to solve the difficulty of the 
 • Athanasian Creed ' by freeing the body of the people (for whom few can think 
 that it is really suited) from its use on great Festivals as it has indeed already so 
 freed many of the congregations who least need or desire the liberation. 
 
 2 I was impressed as Vicar by finding that servants in my household 
 spontaneously chose six o'clock from the different alternatives offered to them at 
 Easter. 
 
40 OUR DIOCESAN LIFE 
 
 the offer of earlier opportunities, especially on Great Festivals 
 or once a month. The total of such cases is 387. This charitable 
 flexibihty of order reaches, I observe, in the case of one in- 
 cumbent, and that a Rural Dean, to the use of a celebration at 
 5 a.m. on Ascension Day for labouring folk. 
 
 I must not dwell at length on the second or supplemental 
 kind of \\'orship of which I spoke. To a great extent it is in 
 practice effectively represented by Evensong. With improve- 
 ments in the Lectionary, and a more flexible use of the Psalter, 
 with more of its parts simply said in the plain voice by priests and 
 people, instead of the incessant and often mechanical monotone 
 broken by a drawled inflection of Versicles and Responses, it 
 may be made more natural, shorter, and more interesting than 
 it often is. The hymns diversify and adorn it. Here is the 
 occasion when the ' outsider ' most readily comes ; and this 
 is the time for whatever powers of appeal and exhortation to 
 him the individual clergyman may have. 
 
 I beheve that with some care in this direction it would be 
 possible with advantage to diminish the number of ' Men's 
 Services.' I think these are excellent from time to time, and 
 for special seasons or special subjects. But I am suspicious of 
 their value as a normal part of the Church order ; and as an 
 addition to the parson's Sunday work they are very onerous. 
 So far as I can judge they do not often bring men on to fuller 
 adherence and worship. This, however, is a matter on which 
 others have, from their greater experience, far more right to speak. 
 
 I should Hke to see some experiment made in the evening from 
 time to time — such as the substitution of a special service of the 
 ]\Iission t}^e on certain Sundays, or the substitution of intercessions 
 for the part of the Service after the third Collect, or a use of 
 special Psalms. Legally the largest of these changes may be 
 made by the expedient of announcing and saying Evening 
 Prayer at a somewhat earher hour. But I am sure that some of 
 the smaller ones may be attempted without that ; and though 
 I cannot legally sanction, I should be quite wifling to share the 
 burden of responsibihty with the parish priest. Always provided 
 that he not only considers, as he thinks, the people's interests, 
 but carries their sympathies with him. 
 
OUR DIOCESAN LIFE 41 
 
 The needs of the war time and of special congregations have 
 brought out the want of other forms of prayer of different kinds. 
 A conspicuous instance which impressed very many of us was 
 the Service of Intercession joined in by a vast congregation 
 from all parts of the diocese in the Cathedi-al on June 21st. On 
 that occasion the absence of music, except hymns, and the 
 use of the natural voice, were, 1 think, felt to be great gain. 
 Some use in such services of opportunities of Silence, lately 
 recommended to us so persuasively and from experience by our 
 Diocesan Missioner, Mr. Hepher,^ is a welcome addition to our 
 resources. 
 
 Such variety of devotional offerings outside the regular 
 Services, whether on Sunday or other days, must, I hope, 
 increasingly both quicken and satisfy our people's hearts. They 
 must be used with the sanction of the Bishop, must be in the 
 spirit of the Prayer Book, and not used covertly to introduce 
 innovations of doctrine or the like. It is right to say this, but, 
 within my own knowledge, I have found little or no reason to 
 say it. I may not know all. 
 
 While speaking on this subject, I cannot help putting in a quiet 
 word to suggest to the many clerg}^ whose Churches are closed, 
 or mainly closed, on weekdays, because, as is said with consider- 
 able truth, nobody would come, that they reconsider the matter. 
 
 An attempt to draw people to more prayer for our country 
 (and day by day the need for it seems to grow more urgent), 
 begun by an earnest address to the people in which the Parish 
 Priest would say that he meant to do his own special part by 
 ringing his bell and saying his Daily Office in Church, whether 
 people could come or not, but with the hope that especially 
 at Evensong some would begin to come, might, I thinlv, carry 
 more blessing andbe more persuasive than we can confidently expect . 
 
 Parish Councils 
 
 I spoke just now of the parson carrying his people's sympathies 
 with him. This leads me on to a different subject, that of Parish 
 Councils. 
 
 * The Fellowship of Silence, edited by the Rev. Cyril Hepher. Macmillan's (2nd 
 edition). 
 
42 OUR DIOCESAN LIFE 
 
 Upon this the evidence is very various, as is only natural, 
 parishes and men being so various. In about 136 cases there 
 is such a council, which works well. In a handful of cases it 
 exists but is not thought useful by the Incumbent. In one it 
 has been discontinued as useless. The co-operation of Wardens 
 and Sidesmen as a body evidently attain some of the purposes 
 of a council in many Parishes. This is evidently reckoned by 
 some a council and not by others, with some resulting indistinct- 
 ness in the statistics. The new jfinancial arrangements are as 
 we expected giving some impetus to the creation and working 
 of a council ; but in some cases the body convened is as yet 
 hardly more than a finance committee. I do not think that I 
 can usefully say more on this matter than that I am sure the 
 existence of a council presided over with firmness and good 
 temper by the Incumbent is to be desired in the great majority 
 of our Parishes, larger or smaller. With any growth in the 
 organic local vitaUty of the Church this would come about 
 and would be appreciated. It is the lack of such vitality which 
 makes the absence of such a means of cordial and articulate 
 co-operation between parson and people appear unnecessary or, 
 if tried, ineffective. Meetings, doubtless short and few in smaU 
 places, of men and women, to whom the choice of their neigh- 
 bours gave a little special sense of responsibility to hear and to 
 contribute opinion, and in proper cases to decide, upon matters 
 affecting the life of the Parish, would have a quickening effect. 
 Points connected with the common worship, its forms, hours, etc. 
 (the Parson's rights and responsibihties being duly reserved) the 
 Mission abroad which the Parish supports, communications from 
 Diocesan headquarters by Bishop's letter or otherwise, the finances 
 of the Parish as to local expenditure and central contribution, 
 the care of the children, the Church's due efforts against moral 
 evils, these are all instances which illustrate how with a little desire 
 to make work and arouse interest on the part of the Parson, the 
 sense of corporate life and the friendly intimacy between priest 
 and people may, I am persuaded, be developed. It should be 
 begun with some brief office of prayer in the hands of all : and 
 each member may with advantage have a prayer-card given to him. 
 
OUR DIOCESAN LIFE 43 
 
 The question as to the working of the arrangements which 
 lead up through the Ruridecanal and Diocesan Conferences to the 
 Representative Church Council of the Province and Church, 
 reveals, not to my surprise, so great and widespread failure in 
 the working, and I am afraid, such an absence of interest in the 
 matter that I think something more is requii'ed than words of 
 suggestion or criticism from myseK. It is famihar to you that the 
 basis of the whole is the register of people with the ' status of 
 communicants ' or speaking roughly, the baptized and con- 
 firmed people, who sign the declaration qualifying for member- 
 ship. This exists in some form in 142 Parishes. In that number 
 at least signatures have been taken, though they rarely come 
 to more than 50 all told, men and women. The Parish Register 
 is only kept in 42 cases. The Clergy do not in very many 
 cases show interest in or knowledge of the matter ; and they 
 constantly report the lack of interest on the part of the people. 
 I perfectly understand the difficulty : one has only to think of 
 many and many a parish that one knows, in order to reahze it. 
 But it all comes of the fact that our corporate Christian life in 
 the Church lacks consciousness and vigour and interest, and the 
 deeper things yet of which these come. 
 
 I hope to take counsel with those who can best judge whether 
 we should make, and if so how, some concerted effort to raise our 
 standard here. At present it must be frankly said that we are 
 failing almost entirely to make our contribution as a Diocese to the 
 building of a system by which the Ufe of the Church, estabUshed or 
 disestabhshed, may find corporate and representative expression. 
 
 Our Children 
 
 I may take a few matters more discursively. I asked you 
 about our childi'en. Much is being done for them in different 
 ways, and with much thought and care. It did indeed give me 
 a shock to read a very few replies in which an unvarying ' No ' 
 met every question about the alternative ways of teaching 
 chOdren. No Sunday School : no Day School teaching : no 
 Children's Service : no Catechizing. I would beg any in- 
 
44 OUR DIOCESAN LIFE 
 
 cumbent who has so repUed to consider again his solemn re- 
 sponsibility for the lambs of the flock. But 407 of our 
 Incumbents or some two-thirds of the whole report that they them- 
 selves give religious instruction either in Day or Sunday School. 
 I am very glad to know how many value the help given about 
 their Sunday Schools by our Diocesan Officers, Rev. Martin Ware, 
 and Deaconess Ethel. I hope that these precedents may en- 
 courage others to invite it. 
 
 I am glad to find that the plan of meeting the conscientious 
 con\4ctions and wishes of Nonconformists in places where the 
 only Day School is a School of the Church has been to some real 
 extent a working reality. The replies do not supply me with 
 exact statistics. But in quite a large number of cases offers 
 have been made of opportunity to ^vithdraw their own children, 
 or to give them teaching of their own. In the great majority 
 the Nonconformist parents are, to the best of the Parson's know- 
 ledge, quite satisfied without special arrangements. This is 
 reported in 200 cases. But in 21 Schools a Nonconformist 
 teacher has been put upon the Staff. 
 
 After care of the Confirmed 
 
 My questions about the care of those confirmed after Con- 
 firmation, and as to the percentage who remain communicants, 
 carry us on to the next stage in human life. I subjoin statistics 
 as to the percentages. The highest entries suggest, I think, 
 a rather rosy and not very accurate account. But allowing 
 for this the standard in such places must be high, and it is 
 something to know that in over 270 parishes 50 per cent, are 
 retained. The movements and exodus of the young, make 
 the value of the figures in many cases uncertain. 
 
 Much pains in many forms is spent upon trying to retain 
 and build up the young communicants. The methods are 
 very various and suggest that this is a region in which pastoral 
 work is at its best for activity and flexibihty. But it is only 
 honest to say that the figures leave room for a considerable number 
 
OUR DIOCESAN LIFE 46 
 
 of parishes where this form of shepherding is unattempted or 
 unsuccessful. There is no doubt that it wants no httle skill 
 and sympathy. It has to deal with the young in years, when 
 a spirit of independence is at its height, when experience and 
 responsibihty have not yet done their work in steadying and 
 sobering. Yet they are precious years, and years in which 
 for many of God's children the desire to serve Him and to do 
 right is very fresh and real. We need to run it into the moulds 
 which ^vill help to give it permanency, and to help the young 
 soul's growth in understanding and knowledge. For even 
 those who mean well often understand extraordinarily little. 
 We owe it to them to give them opportunities of learning how 
 interesting rehgion is, and how it really does touch their lives 
 and thoughts. Or putting it the other way, we do well to re- 
 member how for lack of knowledge, so much in our services and 
 sermons is meaningless, and therefore dull and unprofitable. 
 Think how much there is to tell, e.g. about the ways in which 
 the Old Testament can teach us, or how we can personally use 
 the Psalms and see something of Christianity in them ; or about 
 the Christian use of the Decalogue, or St. Paul's mind and 
 experience. We have ourselves some knowledge of the kind 
 with which we gloss what we read. I suspect we do not realize 
 how much, for those who have not the power to do this, is as 
 tedious as a foreign language which is not understood. This 
 is the kind of teaching which it is stimulating to give, and for 
 which the years after Sunday School afEord the opportunity. 
 I have described it very imperfectly, and perhaps have made 
 it sound too difficult or academical. Much of it may really be 
 quite simple in form, while on the other hand, in a time of diffused 
 education hke ours, some of it ought to be thoroughly done 
 from the best books by the clergy themselves, or by help where 
 this is possible of special proficients. I am very grateful to our 
 Higher Rehgious Education Society, and to Canon Vaughan 
 and others for their labours in this field. But in the develop- 
 ment of English thinking, which is so much to be desired, higher 
 religious education ought to have much more place. Our younger 
 Christian people ought to be more widely aware how much there 
 
46 OUR DIOCESAN LIFE 
 
 is to know and learn about religion, and how much bound they 
 are in godly dutifulness to learn it. May I remind you, if it is 
 not a platitude, that there is no more useful bit of equipment for 
 a clergyman than to know what books to lend or to point out ? 
 
 Missionary Work 
 
 I end with two matters of first class importance. Of these 
 two, one is our work in the diocese for the spread of the Gospel 
 in the world — our missionary work. I just touched on the subject 
 in my first address. I shall print a httle precis of your rephes 
 on the matter. They represent a great deal of work in the 
 parishes, and if it were a matter for personal thanks, I should 
 pay them heartily. But of course it is not. And shall I instead 
 invite you to be thoroughly discontented with the result ? 
 For we have in this matter a plain practicable ideal. Missionary 
 work should have a place in the alms and prayers of every single 
 parish, and after bare necessities, it should have the first place, 
 or something hke that. Plainly with us this is very far from 
 being the case. It is difficult to know without very elaborate 
 examination how much the different forms of work overlap. 
 But knowing our fondness for sermons, and that the missionary 
 sermon (a most necessary thing) represents the minimum or fine 
 of least resistance in the matter, the fact that only in a httle 
 more than half our parishes such sermons are preached is sig- 
 nificant, and a httle sinister. Moreover, this is very specially 
 a case for ' intensive culture,' and if we learn from one another, 
 the precis which I print will indicate quite a number of ways in 
 which the cause is served and which might be employed (or 
 some of them) much more widely. That only two should speak 
 of ' our own missionary,' and only seventeen of supporting 
 a child in a mission school is an illustration, I think, of my 
 meaning, though of course, many are doing the same indirectly 
 through the societies. 
 
 I would beg of you, in spite of the badness of the times, to 
 do all that you possibly can, to see that our forces at the Missionary 
 front are not weakened or deprived of munitions and reinforce- 
 ments, but rather that their hands should be strengthened as 
 
OUR DIOCESAN LIFE 47 
 
 a sign of thankfulness for all our ' good things ' of the past, 
 and of humble devotion to Him Whose hand is heavy upon us, 
 we cannot doubt, for our good. 
 
 Our Own Lives 
 
 Finally, brethren, ourselves. You have kindly and frankly 
 helped me by answering a question which I freely allowed you to 
 treat as intrusive, if you desired to do so. You have told me 
 what you do to get help for yourselves in the things of the spirit. 
 Is it, dear brothers, enough ? I know how very much tempera- 
 ments vary, and how this is a matter in which there should 
 be the largest liberty of individual method. No fear as to that ! 
 There is nothing but liberty ! Therefore, I will give, and in 
 speaking to my younger brethren, my sons by Ordination and 
 others, will give with some accent of authority, the advice that 
 far more of us should use the help of a Retreat than thirty-four, 
 with another seventy-five who go occasionally ! Your life, as I 
 remember with tender sympathy, is, spiritually, a very hard 
 life. It is so for many of you by the exacting strain and bustle 
 of town work ; but it is so also for many by the isolation and 
 slow routine of quiet places where it is so easy to slumber and 
 to forget or, for want of contact and stimulus, to let the standard 
 of effort sink. It is not good for man to be alone : yet there is 
 among the clergy, whether in town or country, not a little 
 spiritual loneliness. We are meant to be sustained and helped 
 on by the spiritual life of the whole body : and by the special 
 gifts of understanding and hohness which God gives to some of 
 our bretliren : yet many clergy seldom hear any voice but their 
 own : or have opportunities of listening, with time to ponder 
 them, to words of counsel or stimulus. 
 
 I know that some must be hindered in different ways, some 
 I fear by the necessary expense, and that some are afraid of 
 finding more than in taste or conscience they could fall in with. 
 This is, I think, largely a needless fear if a Retreat is wisely chosen. 
 But there must be very many more who are kept away for lack of 
 thought and method about it, or from a kind of inertness or 
 " accidie," and from a little fear of the bit of effort that it 
 would require, and even perhaps of what they would be brought 
 
48 OUR DIOCESAN LIFE 
 
 to face about themselves. The indication of these possibilities 
 may perhaps assist willing consciences in reconsidering the matter. 
 
 I am sure that the honoured brother, for such he is, who tells 
 me that a ' Retreat would incapacitate him for practical work ' 
 is saying what experience would not confirm ; and that the veteran 
 who reports that he needs no quietness since for half a century 
 all his days have been quiet (a variant of the reply made as the 
 story goes by the man who answered such an invitation by saying 
 that ' what they wanted in his part of the country was not a quiet 
 day but an earthquake ') forgets that quiet has various synonyms, 
 and that it was in the quiet wilderness that the prophet encountered 
 the earthquake and the fire, and, even more to the point, heard 
 the ' still small voice.' 
 
 Very many of you, I am glad to say, perhaps a third, attend 
 Quiet Days which the care of many of our Rural Deans provides. 
 But on these I may remark (1) that the experience of many of our 
 best men justifies me in saying that a Retreat is altogether and out 
 of proportion more helpful than a Quiet Day, and often makes a deep 
 and quiet impression where the latter creates a flurried sense of 
 failure to appropriate or (as one of you says) " gets on the nerves" ; 
 and (2) that our 'quiet days,' so called, are reallj^ often very unquiet 
 fragments of days, with perhaps the due beginning in a common 
 sacrament missing, and the last meditation cut off in order to 
 get home before dark, and a great deal of interpolated talk. I 
 cherish a little hope that the more full Devotional days which 
 you are keeping with me at this time ma}?^ set a standard of 
 rather a fuller and worthier use of this means of help. 
 
 We do want, brethren, in some form (I speak most truly for 
 myself) outside consciences to help our poor inside one. Think 
 what it is that would do this best for you — and take it. 
 
 And now with the earnest and affectionate prayer in my heart 
 that God would allow this Visitation of ours to be, in spite of all 
 its great and unhappy shortcomings on the part of him who leads 
 it, in some way a help at least to some of you, I commend you to 
 Him Whose ' day of visitation ' is at this time specially upon us 
 as members of a Church and nation, and before Whose judgment 
 we must all so soon appear. May His Mercy be upon us all ! 
 
The Charge was opened in the Cathedral as follows: — 
 
 Mr. Dean and Reverend Brethren, — 
 
 More than four years have passed since the day memorable 
 to me when, amidst the fresh beauty of the May blossom and 
 the spring, you joined to place me in the ancient seat of your 
 Bishops. It is no light honour to hold the place that Swithin 
 held, dignified by Wykeham, sanctified by Andrewes, and in 
 the later years filled by such workmen of God as have gone before 
 me in preceding Episcopates. 
 
 It is an honour, but as age makes thoughts more solemn and 
 more humble, it is a burden too, and almost an oppression if 
 a man has any true knowledge of himseK and of his abounding 
 fault and unworthiness. Yet while still He suffers us to work 
 here, let us lift up our hearts unto the Lord, and ask Him to use 
 and guide what He still entrusts and gives. 
 
 To the Diocese, to yourselves, I owe, and desire here 
 affectionately to pay, great thanks for welcome and confidence, 
 and for kindness of which the last few weeks have brought fresh 
 and deeper experience. 
 
 The four years have made curiously little difference in our 
 personnel. If I recall the passing from us of Canon Warburton, 
 friend and comrade of three Bishops, and Canon of this Cathedral ; 
 of Canon Skelton, of Woking, from his humble cure, but his 
 honoured position in the front rank of Diocesan service ; of 
 Dr. Hessey from Basing ; of my old college friend, John Jenkyns, 
 from his lovingly- tended Deanery of Bishop's Waltham ; and of 
 Mr. Boys from Fordingbridge ; and if I note respectfully and 
 gravely the resignation of charges which in man's sight have been 
 well and worthily borne, by Canon Toyne, of St. Michael's, 
 Bournemouth ; by Canon Blunt, of his almost patriarchal leader- 
 ship of the Deanery of Kingsclere ; by Canon Durst, after forty- 
 three years in the Diocese, of his Deanery and great Church in 
 Southampton ; by Mr. de Verd Leigh, of his twenty-years' task 
 at Aldershot ; by Mr. Chandler, Rural Dean of Stockbridge, of 
 nearly half a century's charge of his parish ; and by Mr. Mugliston, 
 
 £ 
 
50 
 
 always a quickener of our counsels, of Itchen Abbas and of the 
 Alresford Deanery — I have said, perhaps, as much by way of 
 personal reference as the opportunity permits. 
 
 But I should Uke respectfully to mention the ending of long 
 terms of service faithfully rendered by four officers of the Diocese. 
 
 Death closed, at an advanced age, that of Mr. Wooldridge at 
 our Registry (and his son's appointment to work which he had 
 already shared is a tribute to both generations), and that of 
 Mr. Harry Lee, faithful adviser and servant of so many Bishops, 
 just when he hoped to exchange work for repose here. Resignation, 
 very deliberately persisted in, removed our Chancellor, Dr. Gore 
 Browne, one of our links (another was broken last year 
 when Canon Barrington Browne passed away) with a Bishop 
 whose name is still honoured not only in this Diocese but in all 
 the Churches ; and now Mr. Barker, after twenty-six years of 
 strict and faithful care as Surveyor of the buildings of our parishes 
 — a duty which has always its thankless side — asks like release. 
 
 Of events, three claim thankful remembrance. When at your 
 head I assisted the Dean and Chapter to welcome under the 
 unclouded sky of that July day in 1912, their Majesties 
 King George the Fifth and Queen Mary to the re-opening 
 of this precious and magnificent shrine of God's worship and 
 of the Church's fellowship about His Feet, it was indeed 
 a case of one man labouring and another entering into his 
 labours. But the most strenuous labours were those of men 
 whom we are still able to greet with affection and respect to-day : 
 they have, I know, a full reward, not only in the glory of that 
 great day of achievement, but in the fact that the years which 
 have passed have not shown a hairbreadth of yielding in what, 
 under the guidance of Sir Thomas Jackson and Sir Francis Fox, 
 was well and firmly laid. 
 
 The second event was also one of building : not to conserve 
 the noble past, but to make effective and practical provision for 
 present and future ; not in the heart of this ancient city, but where 
 under the stress of modern conditions Portsmouth has poured 
 and pours out over the meadows of her island the thousands of 
 England's best stuff and mettle whom she has drawn in for 
 
61 
 
 carrying out her task of service to England's security. There, 
 by a happy coincidence, I hope to consecrate in this week of 
 visitation the fifth of Six Churches built, in whole or in large part, 
 by the Diocese. The memory of that £46,000 for new churches in 
 Portsmouth, given to its Bishop by a Diocese upon his simple 
 request in the second year of his Episcopate, must always remain in 
 his own mind as a source of grateful affection : but that is the least 
 part of its importance. It was a memorable example of how a 
 Diocese ought to act, is meant to act, and can act in the aid of 
 its weakness by its strength, and of its needs by its abundance ; 
 and how, by such action, a Diocese may increase in self-conscious- 
 ness as a responsible instrument in the service of God and in the 
 discharge of the whole duty of the Church. Such examples are 
 meant to be fruitful of further energies which may take quite 
 various forms and are, I am confident, most necessary both to meet 
 and stimulate the local work of our Parishes, and to support the 
 activities of the central and corporate efforts of the Church. It 
 is in this light that the initiation of our Diocesan Finance scheme, 
 with a great deal of willing service in the planning of it and 
 of cheerful co-operation in its execution, may perhaps in 
 retrospect be seen to have been the most important event of 
 aU in our four years. 
 
 The third event was the coming again to the Diocese of 
 the Church Congress, after twenty-six years' interval, at South- 
 ampton in September 1913. Alarming in prospect, it brought 
 when it came great happiness. Had we known what was to be 
 ' on the morrow,' the subject of ' The Kingdom of God in the 
 World of To-day ' would have had an almost unbearably solemn 
 significance. As it is, I think we may feel that by God's 
 blessing, it did as much as any subject could to prepare us for 
 the coming revelation in fire of God's royal will. 
 
 For all our events were dwarfed, and our peaceful-seeming 
 sky was darkened by the great storm which suddenly swept up, 
 and is upon us in all its gloom and thmider to-day. It must 
 claim the first place in our words and thoughts. 
 
 B 2 
 
The remainder of the Visitation took an altered shape in conse- 
 quence of the War. This was explained in the following letter to 
 the Clergy. 
 
 Farnham Castle, 
 Surrey, 
 
 August 21th, 1915. 
 
 VISITATION OF THE DIOCESE, 1915. 
 
 Rev. and Dear Brother, 
 
 You wiU probably have already observed in the Diocesan 
 Chronicle for July the dates and places of my Visitation. 
 
 I intended, when I published them, to follow usual pre- 
 cedents, and address a Charge, or section of a Charge, at each 
 centre to the Clergy assembled. 
 
 But circumstances have since then made me desire to alter 
 this procedure. 
 
 I should not like altogether to miss the opportunity of speaking 
 after the manner of a Charge. 
 
 But the desire is strong upon me to draw the Clergy closer 
 about me in united prayer and thought before God at this most 
 solemn time. 
 
 Amidst the ' earthquake and fire ' of this tremendous conflict 
 with all its searching demands, manifold sufferings, and incalculable 
 consequences, God is speaking to us, we may be sure, with the 
 ' still small voice,' which will be heard by open ears and ready 
 consciences. We all know how hard it is so to hear. We may 
 easily be strained, or careless, or absorbed. But we need, and 
 we wish, to be taught, and to learn. Moreover, we must earnestly 
 desire that our people should find and receive what God would 
 teach. Our Ministry to them at this time must have special 
 responsibilities and special opportunities for guidance as well as 
 for the tenderest sympathy and comfort. And we can only 
 help them if we are ourselves helped by God. 
 
 It is with these thoughts and desires in mind that I \vdsh to 
 invite all our Incumbents and Assistant Curates to join 
 
63 
 
 without exception, if they will, in spending together a full day of 
 prayer and thoughts upon what has been well spoken of as the 
 Call of the War to ourselves. 
 
 The Visitation will therefore be in two parts : — 
 
 I. — The Charge. 
 
 On Monday, September 27th, at the Cathedral ; and on 
 Monday, October 4th, at Holy Trinity Church, Guildford. The 
 hour in both cases will be 11.45 a.m. 
 
 I shall, if God will, dehver a Charge in two parts. All will 
 be welcome, if it accords with their convenience, at one or other 
 of these centres. 
 
 I shall, I hope, have celebrated the Holy Communion in the 
 Cathedral and at Holy Trinity respectively at 8.30 a.m. 
 
 II. — The Devotional Days. 
 
 (1.) On Monday evening, September 27th, at Bournemouth. 
 (2.) Wednesday evening, September 29th, at Newport, 
 (3.) Thursday evening, September 30th, at Portsea, 
 (4.) Monday evening, October 4th, at Basingstoke. 
 
 I ask the invited Clergy of the respective districts, each and aU, 
 to join me at 7 p.m. for a Devotional Day, lasting till 5 o'clock 
 on the following day, and I desu'e respectfully to insist that 
 those who accept the invitation will be present for the whole 
 time. 
 
 I propose similar arrangements for the Clergy of the Winchester 
 and Guildford areas as follows : — 
 
 (5.) For the Winchester area, beginning at Winchester on 
 
 the evening of October 15th ; 
 (6.) And at Southampton on the evening of October 18th. 
 (7.) For the Guildford area, beginning at Guildford on the 
 evening of November 3rd. 
 The Gatherings 1 to 7 mil be intended primarily for the 
 Clergy as follows : — 
 
 (1.) Bournemouth, for the Rural Deaneries of Christchurch 
 and Lyndhurst. 
 
54 
 
 (2.) Newport, for the Rural Deaneries of East and West 
 
 Wight. 
 (3.) Portsea, for the Rural Deaneries of Portsmouth, Alver- 
 
 stoke, Havant, and Petersfield. 
 (4.) Basingstoke, for the Rural Deaneries of Basingstoke, 
 
 Andover, Stockbridge, and Silchester. 
 (5.) Winchester, for the Rural Deaneries of Winchester, 
 
 Alresford, Alton, and Kingsclere. 
 (6.) Southampton, for the Rural Deaneries of Southampton, 
 
 Romsey, and Bishop's Waltham. 
 (7.) Guildford, for the Rural Deaneries comprised in the 
 
 Archdeaconry of Surrey, with the Rural Deanery 
 
 of Aldershot. 
 
 But Clergy are at liberty to choose their own centre, if they 
 notify their intention to the Rural Dean at the centre chosen.^ 
 
 Clergy will have my authority for such suspension, with 
 due notice, of ordinary Church Services as may be necessary to 
 set them free for attendance. If such notice is' accompanied by 
 explanation, it will give an opportunity for creating an interest 
 among the people in what we do, and of inviting their prayers. 
 
 We shall join in common meals on the evening of arrival, and 
 at breakfast, luncheon, and tea on the following day. No charge 
 will be made for this. Clergy will have the opportunity to make 
 a contribution as they may desire. I shall make myself re- 
 sponsible (with help, if necessary) for any deficiency. I am most 
 anxious that the matter should not be a burthen to the Clergy 
 in this respect. 
 
 I have to ask everyone who receives this circular to send a 
 letter or postcard to the Rural Dean concerned explaining his 
 intention. 
 
 At each centre a small Hospitality Committee under the Rural 
 Dean will provide beds for those who are unable otherwise to be 
 present late and early. May I ask that these repUes should be 
 sent in a fortnight before the day chosen ? 
 
 This invitation is addressed to all Incumbents and Licensed 
 
 ' Or, in the case of the Isle of Wight, to the Vicar of Newport. 
 
55 
 
 Cui'ates. Chaplains of Workhouses (Diocesan Kalendar, p. 122) 
 and of Hospitals, etc. (p. 125) are included in the invitation to 
 the beneficed Clergy. 
 
 Clergy holding only the Bishop's Leave to Officiate are invited 
 to attend the delivery of the Charge on September 27th or October 
 4th ; but, for reasons of organisation and space, I do not feel 
 able to invite them to the Devotional Days. (For similar reasons 
 I do not at this Visitation give any invitation to Churchwardens. 
 They will, I hope, well understand that this is not from any 
 forgetfulness or want of appreciation of their services to the 
 Church.) As regards Naval and MiUtary Chaplains, I can only 
 say that if any desire to attend the Devotional Days, I should 
 be most willing to receive them. 
 
 There will not be at this Visitation the usual Roll-call. A 
 card is enclosed on which you are asked to write your name and 
 parish. This may be placed in the box provided on any of the 
 occasions (I. and II. above), and by so doing you will be deemed 
 to have made your official response to my Citation. 
 
 It is impossible on this occasion to include the Channel 
 Islands ; but any one of the Clergy of the Islands who was able 
 to be with us on any of the days named would be more than 
 welcome. 
 
 I hope that I have made this matter, which is I think a simple 
 one, sufficiently clear. 
 
 It remains only for me to ask that you will join in preparing 
 for this bit of united work by previous prayer for God's Blessing 
 upon it. It will be a great help and pleasure to me to feel that 
 we are thus coming into real and effective touch, however slightly 
 and briefly. 
 
 Nor can we doubt that so seeking in faith we shall in some 
 sort, according to God's goodness, find. 
 
 I desire to be. 
 Your faithful fellow Servant and Bishop, 
 
 EDW: WINTON: 
 
APPENDIX 
 
 The following statistical extracts from the Incumbents' 
 repUes to some of the Bishop's questions may not be altogether 
 complete. For example, it is almost certain that more than 
 two parishes support their " Own JNIissionary," j^et orAy two 
 mentioned the fact in answer to the question as to the means 
 taken to arouse and sustain interest in the work of the Church 
 in the Mission Field. Again, the rephes to the question about 
 the promotion of religious instruction among adults include 
 references to the existence of Guilds, Societies, etc., which probably 
 exist also in other parishes, although the Incumbent did not put 
 them down in this connection. 
 
 Probably there was similar incompleteness in other answers, 
 and so in the figures which follow. But the statistics, even so, 
 are of interest, and offer a more or less accurate account of 
 work in the Diocese. 
 
 2. Do you ever give your people opportunities of Holy Coni> 
 munion before 8 a.m. and at what hour or hours? 
 
 Number of parishes which offer opportunities of Holy 
 Communion before 8 a.m. frequently, i.e. once a 
 month, or oftener . . . . . . . . , , . . 218 
 
 [Of these three have begun the practice since the War began.] 
 The hours vary : 6, 6.30, 7, 7.30. 
 Number of parishes (other than those mentioned above) 
 which offer such opportunities only on great Festivals, 
 some only on Ascension Day, or Christmas Day, or 
 their Patronal Festival . . . . . . . . . . 169 
 
 Generally it is the town parishes which find the earUer hours 
 useful and appreciated. In scattered rural parishes there does 
 not seem to be the same wish for them. 
 
APPENDIX 57 
 
 4. Do you ever have this Service choral ? If so, how often ? 
 and at what hour? 
 
 Number of Clergy who report that they have Choral Com- 
 munion at or after the 11 o'clock Service . . . . 138 
 Number who have it at earlier hours, 8, or 9.30 . . . . 96 
 
 Some appear simply to mean that the Communion Service 
 up to the Prayer for the Church Militant is choral. 
 
 A good many have the Choral Service only on the Greater 
 Festivals ; others, again, have it once a month. 
 
 5. Do you (or your Assistant Clergy) give religious instruc- 
 tion personally in the [Day or] Sunday Schools ? 
 
 What are your arrangements for catechizing the children 
 in Church ? 
 
 What other services do you hold specially for children? 
 
 Have there been any improvements of method in your 
 Sunday Schools in the last few years ? 
 
 Number of Clergy who teach in both Schools, and claim 
 
 improvements in Sunday Schools . . , . . . 67 
 
 Other Clergy who teach in both, but do not claim improve- 
 ments . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 36 
 
 Clergy teaching in Day Schools only, and claiming im- 
 provements in Sunday Schools . . . . . . . . 57 
 
 Other Clergy teaching in Day Schools only, and not claiming 
 
 improvements . . . . . . . • . • • • 56 
 
 Clergy teaching in Sunday Schools only, and claiming im- 
 provements , . . . . . . . . . . . 88 
 
 Other Clergy teaching in Sunday Schools only, but not 
 
 claiming improvements . . . . . . . . . . 103 
 
 Clergy teaching in neither school, but claiming improve- 
 ments in Sunday School . . . . . . . . . . 61 
 
 The most frequent improvement is the establishment of 
 Kandergarten systems, also the grading of classes. Many refer 
 to the valuable help given by Mr. Ware and Deaconess Ethel 
 in the reorganisation of their work. 
 
58 
 
 APPENDIX 
 
 6. What methods do you use to help the confirmed to grow 
 up as regular communicants ? 
 What percentage of those confirmed in the parish in the last 
 four years, and still resident, remain communicants ? 
 
 The following methods are mentioned in the Returns : — 
 
 109 Guilds. 
 
 68 have Special Preparation Services before Great Festivals, 
 55 have monthly Preparation Services. 
 6 have weekly Preparation Services. 
 2 speak of Reunions for those recently confirmed. 
 14 send letters or cards of reminder at Christmas and 
 Easter. 
 
 1 sends monthly reminder to those confirmed during the 
 last two years. 
 
 1 sends monthly reminder to those confirmed at the last 
 Confirmation. 
 
 1 sends " regular letters to all." 
 
 1 " tries to attach two of the newly confirmed to a man 
 or woman who promises to be more or less a god-parent." 
 
 2 send letters to candidates on anniversary of their Con- 
 firmation. 
 
 Other plans include Special Sermons ; personal exhortation ; 
 impressing upon parents their responsibility ; servers ; Corporate 
 Communions for members of C.E.M.S. ; G.F.S., etc. 
 
 The following is an analysis of the percentage of Communicants 
 of those Confirmed in the last four years : — 
 
 26 
 
 say 
 
 100 per cent. 
 
 9 
 
 say 
 
 40 per cent 
 
 43 
 
 5 J 
 
 90 „ „ 
 
 7 
 
 ?> 
 
 30 „ „ 
 
 49 
 
 J) 
 
 80 „ „ 
 
 8 
 
 >5 
 
 25 ,, ,, 
 
 58 
 
 ?; 
 
 75 „ „ 
 
 3 
 
 >5 
 
 10 „ „ 
 
 55 
 
 )) 
 
 60 „ „ 
 
 1 
 
 says 
 
 '•■>■> 3> - 
 
 42 
 
 
 50 „ 
 
 ■\7 
 
 
 ■Fnr inat.QTiP 
 
 " Impossible to say : number of lapsed is large, especially 
 those confirmed under age of 16 or 17." 
 
APPENDIX 
 
 59 
 
 8. Is there any arrangement for the promotion among adults 
 of religious study or instruction ? 
 
 Parishes having Bible Class alone 
 Communicants' Guild alone 
 C.E.M.S. Reading Courses alone . . 
 Mothers' (or women's) meetings alone . . 
 
 G.F.S. alone 
 
 S.P.H.E.R.K. or other lectures alone . . 
 vStudy Circles (G.D.A. and other) alone . . 
 Lecture courses by the Incumbent (apart from Lent 
 and Advent courses) alone . . 
 Parishes combining two of the above 
 ,, ,, three .. ,, 
 
 four ,, ,, 
 
 70 
 9 
 21 
 14 
 1 
 33 
 10 
 
 3 
 45 
 
 7 
 •2 
 
 Total number of parishes making some provision 
 
 215 
 
 Bible Classes in 99 parishes. 
 
 Communicants' Guild in . . . . . . 20 ,, 
 
 C.E.M.S. classes in 39 
 
 Mothers' and women's classes in . . . . 37 ,, 
 
 G.F.S. classes in . . . . . . . . 25 ,, 
 
 S.P.H.E.R.K., &c., in 52 
 
 Study Circles in . . . . , . . . . . 12 ,, 
 
 Lecture courses by Incumbent in . . ... 7 ,, 
 
 There is frequent testimony to the difficulty of keeping 
 young people in their teens ; the practice of " walking out " 
 among the working classes begins so early. Several Bible 
 Classes have failed for this reason. 
 
 In a few cases mention is made of small lending libraries 
 at the service of parishioners. In one or two cases the Incumbent 
 tries to direct people's reading. 
 
 9. How many {a) men, (6) women have signed the declara- 
 tion required under the rules of the Representative 
 Church Council to qualify them for voting for Paro- 
 chial Representatives ? Do you keep a register in 
 which these signatures are taken ? 
 
 Number of parishes where signatures have been made . . 142 
 In only 11 cases was the total of men and women signing 
 over 50. 
 
60 APPENDIX 
 
 lo. Have you a Parochial Council? How is it formed? How 
 often and for what purposes does it meet ? Is your 
 experience of its working favourable ? 
 
 Number of parishes where a Parochial Council exists and 
 
 is satisfactory . . . . . . . . . . . . 136 
 
 Number of cases (additional to above) where it exists but 
 
 is not found beneficial by the Incumbent . . . . 8 
 
 In one case the Council was discontinued as being useless. 
 In many parishes a Finance Committee has just been formed 
 to manage the finances under the new W.D.F. assessment scheme ; 
 and many of the Clergy who lay claim to a Parochial Council 
 probably mean this. Other Clergy consult when necessary the 
 Wardens and Sidesmen, and have called that a Parish Council, 
 while others doing the same have not called it a Council. In 
 the 136 cases given above the method of election varies ; some 
 Councils being elected by people having the status of Communi- 
 cant, others by the congregation, others by appointment of a 
 member from each of several bodies of workers (C.E.M.S., 
 G.F.S., &c.). Some Councils have women members, others 
 exclude them. 
 
 II. Do you use in public service the Authorized Version of 
 King- James or the Revised Version ? 
 
 Clergy who always use the Revised Version . . . . . . 59 
 
 Others who use Revised Version occasionally . . . . 33 
 
 Others who use Revised Version on week-days .. .. 31 
 
 Some Clergy use the Authorized Version at the Parish Church, 
 and Revised Version at a second Church. 
 
 Five or six use the Revised Version on Christmas Day only. 
 
 One or two use the Revised Version for the Old Testament. 
 
 At one Church the Revised Version alone has been in use 
 for twenty years past. 
 
APPENDIX 61 
 
 12. What means do you take to arouse and sustain interest 
 in the work of the Church in the Mission Field ? 
 
 The following means are mentioned in the returns : — 
 
 87 Missionary Associations. 
 316 have Special Sermons. 
 
 (5 say they themselves preach Missionary Sermons 
 
 once a month.) 
 (1 says he himself preaches a Missionary Sermon 
 once a quarter.) 
 126 have Special Intercession Services, 
 54 ,, Sales of Work and Working Parties. 
 25 „ Study Circles. 
 
 71 ,, Branch of King's Messengers or Young People's 
 Union. 
 
 96 distribute Boxes. 
 17 support a child in a Mission School. 
 2 speak of " Our Own Missionary." 
 1 reports a Missionary Library. 
 96 circulate Missionary Literature : some binding it up 
 with the Parish Magazine. 
 
 19 speak of observing St. Andrew' s-tide. 
 
 [Many more no doubt do so. — E.W.] 
 1 holds a Monthly All-day Intercession. 
 
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