}^CNnip 8 H bis *??«? Q 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.) HONORARY STUDENT OF CHRIST CHURCH 87IH mSHOP nj- THR DIOCKSE MACMILLAN AND CO., LIMITED ST. MARTIN'S STREET, LONDON 1915 Price One Shilling net ASPECTS OF THE CHURCH'S DUTY ^^■ MACMILLAX AND CO.. Limited LONDON" . BOMBAY . CALCUTTA MELBOURNE THE xMACMILLAN COMPANY NEW YORK . BOSTON . CHICAGO DALLAS . SAN FRANCISCO THE MACMILLAN CO. OF CANADA, Ltd TORONTO 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 MACMILLAN AND CO., LIMITED ST. MARTIN'S STREET, LONDON 1915 1^3 COPYRIGHT 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. PRINTBD IN QBKAT BBITAIR BT RicHAKD Clat and Sons, Limitid, iSUMSWICE STREET, STAMfOBS STBK8T, 8.1 AND BUNOAY, SVrrOLK. Id C«ylord Bro», Makers Syracuse. N. Y. 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