through the snow in long rubbers, the various folk departed to their often distant homes as the approach of the evening flushed the heavens with crimson glory. It turned out that it was a fifth Sunday in the month, and the routine had been broken; and a few days afterwards the bishop, meeting his excellency, congratulated himself laughingly on having found a new curate. Such scenes, not of course with the same setting, are being enacted week in and week out in every part of the Empire. Not only amid the snows of Canada, but in the depths of the Australian bush, in the homesteads of New Zealand, and the villages of the Cape, in many a corner of the West Indies and in scattered settlements wherever the Briton goes, the call of the old familiar psalms and prayers brings families together over many a long mile and carries their hearts back to the nursery of their race. This thought of service in its simplest form illustrates the mission of the Church of England, often attracting even those who do not belong to it, yet recognise with real emotion their obligation to the old tradition of the Mother Church. Indeed, the Church of England abroad is the Church of Empire. Would it not be lamentable that different views as to a mystery which is indeed unknowable should cause even a partial disruption of such a church? May we not without any suspicion of irreverence appeal to the clergy all over the world to recognise that the phrase for use is not," this is wrong!" but "this at any rate is the way in which it is given me to see the truth"? It is only a few months since the Dean of Durham made in the press an appeal on the above lines, so eloquently expressed that it should be given in his own words :— Yet the object which I have most at heart in writing to you is to plead that churchmen of all parties should refrain from taking up so irreconcilable an attitude as would, or might, threaten the world-wide influence of the church. For the Church of England, or the Anglican Communion, has come in the eyes of Christians, and even of many who are not Christians, in many parts of the world, to occupy a far more commanding position than as the Church of England alone. She represents, like the Church of Rome or the Holy Orthodox Church of the East, a particular conception or expression of Christianity, and that one which is singularly attractive to cultivated minds, as reconciling in a unique degree the past with the future, history with liberty, and faith with learning. It is scarcely an exaggeration to speak of the Church of England as being in a definite sense the hope of Christendom. Churchmen at home are too much occupied about sectional differences within the church. But people who live far away from England, whether within or without the Empire, do not appreciate, and, it may be, do not understand these differences; they are impressed by the unity and the dignity of the church as a whole, and they believe with an implicit faith in the value of her evangelistic mission to human souls all over the world. God forbid that the church should to-day receive from any of her children so cruel a blow as would imperil her life-giving energy. "Destroy it not, for a blessing is in it."* Equally arresting, though on a somewhat different plane, is the plea for a wider outlook in the church, on the ground that it forms a sort of bridge over which many shades of opinion may pass from one sphere of thought to another. The application of the metaphor is not quite clear; and the same broad lesson may be enforced in other ways, as in a claim voiced by Professor Relton, that in truth the Church of England is at once Catholic, Evangelical, Liberal and Anti-papal. We have assumed that the Church of England can only be what it now is if it remains the Established Church. It is quite possible that if disestablished it would, as a church, rise to new heights on the wings of a new freedom. But as a power for good throughout the English-speaking world, as a potent auxiliary to the commonwealth of British nations, it would be bereft of much of its usefulness. It is possible to disestablish the Church of Ireland; it is possible to disestablish the Church of Wales; and Scotland may have its own independent church: yet no instinctive protest will re-echo on the margin of the Empire. But touch the Church of England, and a national sentiment is outraged throughout the British world; a cherished tradition will have been endangered. If the Church of England will lose a little prestige, the State will lose immeasurably more. Throughout the Empire men are proud to feel that the church follows the flag, and that behind their painful efforts to support their own little parish or mission there stands the shadow of a great State which acknowledges its allegiance to the faith of their fathers. But it is unnecessary to raise the question of disestablishment: it is not implied in the action of the House of Commons, and it is hardly seemly that it should be brought up in a fit of temper by casual utterances on the platform or in the press. Though for the moment the House of Commons may seem to have thrown The Times, Feb. 6, 1928. 1 itself into opposition to the bishops, it is in fact almost unconsciously aiming at the very same result. Reflecting, as it may well do, more accurately than even the ecclesiastical authorities, the semi-conscious desire of the nation, it is more apprehensive than they are of anything which may be interpreted as an infraction of the basic doctrine and practice of the national church. Yet the House of Commons honestly desires an arrangement which will as far as possible and in as many directions as possible, sustain the broad principles of religious belief on which the doctrine of the Church of England is based. The majority of the bishops seem to realise that essential need; they seem to recognise that the Church of England must spread its wings to the utmost extent if it is to bring under them all those who claim its motherhood. Looking in one direction to the return of many who were separated in the past by points now recognised as immaterial, the bishops must at the opposite pole try to retain those who endeavour to read into the doctrine of the church a mystical idea foreign to the genius and sound practical sense of the English people. Recognising the insistence of " Modernism" they must regard also the reaction towards a kind of Orientalism; so the lion of Birmingham shall lie down with the lambs of other sees. Deploring the obstinacy which drove the followers of John Wesley outside the pale of the National Church, they should leave no stone unturned to keep within that pale another large body of "dissenters" whose view of the faith is urged with a rare earnestness and self-devotion. Doubtless the chief difficulty of the bishops is with the AngloCatholics, for these seem to have lost in great measure their sense of loyalty; their very enthusiasm and devotion are blind guides in a narrow and difficult path. Still it is surely not futile even with them to appeal to the broader and more universal aspects of the Master's teaching. If they find it hard to sacrifice some portion of the observances to which they have become attached, they may reflect that it is, in a high degree, repugnant to the evangelical section of the church to suppress their assertion of the Protestant principles which they hold as essential. To the League of Truth and Faith one may urge that they may surely rest content with having borne a good witness; and, recognising the renunciation required of many holy and spiritually-minded men, leave the rest in the hands of the bishops. VOL. 248. NO. 505. D For the bishops are satisfied that they can lay down a formula which will satisfy substantially the claims of the Anglo-Catholics without violating the doctrine of the Church of England. To the rest of us it seems wisdom to trust the bishops, who in so difficult an enterprise may rightly appeal to a prominent characteristic of the English people—a spirit of justice, fair-play and reasonable compromise. We are none of us entitled to claim infallibility for the view to which we incline: in the wider knowledge of the God who comprehends and apprehends all things, there may be tolerance for the view which to us seems intolerable. C. ALEXANDER HARRIS THE PAPAL MONARCHY The See of Peter. By JAMES T. SHOTWELL and LOUISE ROPES LOOMIS. "HE cleavages of opinion in the Church of England revealed by the controversy raging round the revision of the Prayer Book are of more than merely insular interest. It is not only that they affect the whole world-wide Anglican Communion : they are a symptom of a process more far-reaching still, namely, of the disintegration of traditional beliefs under the influence of modern scientific principles and methods. Especially has orthodox Protestantism suffered from this process; for the impregnable rock of Holy Scripture, as Mr. Gladstone called it, has been so undermined by the curious industry of the higher critics that to many troubled minds it no longer seems a secure foothold for the faith. Anglo-Catholicism is but one of the ways by which Christian people, consciously or unconsciously, have sought to evade the consequences of this destructive activity. The Tractarian movement was at the outset a conscious protest against it. But while the first Tractarians held rigidly to the belief in the infallibility of the Bible, they almost instinctively sought to buttress the faith by appealing to the concurrent authority of the apostolic traditions of the Church. As Tractarianism developed into Anglo-Catholicism, the latter tendency prevailed more and more; the main results of the higher criticism were accepted even by those accounted orthodox, and the ultimate test of the soundness of a doctrine or practice was not that it was based on "most certain warrant of Holy Scripture," but that it had been accepted by the Catholic Church." The obvious weakness of this position is that, in the absence of any generally recognised authority, individual bishops and parish priests have acquired the habit of themselves determining what is or is not " Catholic." Hence the chaos in the Church. " This confusion is for the time being most conspicuous in the English Church, but its main causes are operative everywhere in Christendom, though it takes different forms. In the Free Churches in England the tendency is for the old rigid orthodoxies |