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not be in the place of the pupil taking instruction from a layman, and that the horseplay at initiations placed a priest in an undignified position. When it became the fashion for the clergy to wear short coats, my first one provoked a very sharp remark from one of my most devoted parishioners, who thought it secular. A faithful lay friend told me that my influence would be much greater in the town where I was working if I resolutely kept out of the petty politics of the place. He instanced, as an example, the Methodist minister, who was working hard in that line, and said: "As a minister, he has killed himself here." The laity are willing to follow their parish priest as a spiritual leader, if he can convince them that he is a spiritual man, who desires not theirs, but them; but as an amatuer politician they are annoyed and often ashamed and alienated.

Well then, what kind of a priest does the layman like? To the priest who asks that question I would say: "He likes the kind you liked when you were a layman." A boy thinking about being a priest, if the rector were profane, indifferent, worldly or a mere agitator, or a man who apparently thought nothing of the priesthood, would not be likely to think seriously about it, unless he found another priest who set an ideal.

What the Church needs now more than the money for which such frantic appeals are being made and such complex organizations for all manner of work not necessarily religious at all, is men. Faithful priests and devoted laymen. Nothing is going to succeed until this need is met. When the priesthood rises up to its ideal as spiritual men, the laity will rise to the call to spiritual things. Until prayer, communion and confession are vital things to priests, they will not be vital to laymen, and they will think of their pastors as men making a vain profession for a piece of bread.

IN

The Church's Executive System

II. MENDING THE NET

REV. WILLIAM MILLER GAMBLE

N THAT first miraculous draught of fishes which preceded the call of SS. Peter and Andrew, the Evangelist tells us that the net broke under the weight of the catch, and that the boat began to sink. In the similar miracle recorded during the Great Forty Days, it is especially noted that in this instance the net did not break, and there was no danger to the boat. Mystical interpreters have found in this contrast a suggestion of the difference between the Church of the Old Dispensation, which broke down under the test of the Catholic inclusiveness of the Kingdom of Christ; and the Church of the New Dispensation, which was so constructed as to hold the faithful of all races and conditions.

In either case, we may surmise that nets, either under the old or the new dispensations, would from time to time need mending; also that the chief wear and tear upon a net, ordinarily, would not be due to extraordinary weight of the hauls made, out in the deep; but to being dragged over the sharp stones, and among the sea-growths, of the shallow near the shore. It is just possible that the breaking of the net and the sinking of the boat in the earlier miracle, were largely due to the fact that nets and boat were already the worse for wear from dragging on the bottoms of the shallows. It is certain that Judaism was unprepared for the Gospel of Christ to the Gentiles, just because it has been for a long time occupying itself in the shallows of religion. It had forgotten the breadth and depth of the promise made through Abraham to his seed, that the chosen race was to be a universal blessing. When the strain of visitation tested the Jewish Church it broke down from spiritual shallowness.

The Holy Catholic Church learned, though not always readily, to "launch out into the deep." When she failed to do so, and in so far as she failed to keep her Catholic mission before her-to all mankind and to human nature in all its aspects, her net was very likely to give way at critical times, to the loss of much of the catch.

And in any event, the Evangelist gives the New Dispensation no immunity from net-mending. When the meshes are torn, either by the catch or by the shallows, they must be mended.

The American Church is engaged just now in the necessary work of mending her net. In making that assertion I must ask to differ radically from Fr. Haydn, who in April told us that we are amusing ourselves with seeing mechanical wheels go round. I must confess that, in the executive system of the Church, I see no automatic machinery. Every part of it requires the touch of a human hand with a heart and mind behind it if it is to function. If the wheels go round, it is because, like those in Ezekiel's vision, the spirit of a living creature is in the wheel.

But for the present purpose, the figure of the Net of the Kingdom seems more to symbolize what the Nation-Wide Campaign and its results signify. The American Church, considered as a fisher of men has had some noble achievements, but it can hardly be said, in view of all its responsibilities, to have "launched out into the deep." She has been (or rather, we, her members as a whole, have been) contented with a very paltry part of the task of the Holy Church of Christ. And shallowness always results in weakness, in the fretting away of power. Confronted with a really heroic task, the cords will give way, the boards

warp.

Now the net of the Church is being mended, so that she can, without misgiving, launch out into the dark boding depths of twentieth century humanity, with all its pos

sibilities of anarchy and tyranny and hatred and destruction and-penitence and painful recovery, and the joy of being in the way of salvation.

The net of the American Church, as a net, has some absurd features. Its meshes are so wide that comparatively small fish are constantly escaping. The net has been cast at times in a lordly way, as though small fish are not particularly wanted. Many small fish still remain caught, although the wide meshes seem to tell them they will not be missed if they go. But many more escape -through the wide meshes of parochial isolation, which tends to make every parish a law to itself, builds it up upon the eccentricities of a small group, separates it from the corporate Church background. By growing up, by migration, by change of fortune, by lack of conviction in the midst of quite unconvincing spiritual atmospheres, the escapes are going on. And they are not all little fish that are escaping. Large minds and large hearts as well as big purses are escaping.

We have long known this, and have heard many things blamed for it, until we are weary. And all the hecklers and critics and scorners have systematically ignored one simple obvious fact-the net has needed mending. The meshes must be made close enough to hold fish. The working machinery of the Church must be put into working shape.

The Nation-Wide and the Council system is not sounding a Babylonian fanfare for us to fall down and worship a net or a drag. They are simply insisting that the Church has a net, and that it needs mending. It needs the meshes closed up and fortified, for deep-sea fishing.

The term "parochialism" has become a proverbial expression denoting the "small town" point of view; but perhaps we do not always recognize that parochialism in the American Church is more than an attitude, it is

almost an institution. The American Church has a double heritage of it, both from lack of Bishops, and from congregational influence. The diocesan system was introduced almost apologetically, and early bishops were often content to be parish rectors most of the time.

While it cannot be said that parochial isolation is the only or chief cause of spiritual weakness in the Church, certainly it has been in this country the gap in the Church's front which has permitted worldly interests to divide and control and enfeeble the life of the Church, and use it for selfish ends. What Erastian state control has accomplished in England to secularize the Church, that "parochialism" has managed to effect on the Church in this country: it has deadened and dulled the historic spiritual background by the prevailing social pressure of local standards; it has degraded the liturgy into something like the quaint old ceremonies of court rooms, and with something of the crackling dryness of their legalisms.

Communities tended to evolve a prevailingly Protestant religious cultural norm. The Episcopal Church influence often did little more than mildly moderate the extremes of Methodist and Puritan ideals, with the salt of humor and tolerance. There was indeed a stalwart stock of Church piety with roots far back, recorded in diaries in which the abstinence and strict fasts of the Church are never questioned as of obligation. Bishops Seabury and Hobart were aggressive in Church conviction. But the parish was so tied to the local atmosphere in most cases that the Church tradition was obscured, and standards of piety often came to be borrowed from alien sources. In the general view, the Church was regarded as a courtly variation of American Protestantism. Church faith, forms of prayer, and ethics were all on a defensive minimum basis, and the chief defense was the social leadership of its members, sometimes the evangelical piety of the rector.

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