half-breeds are the extreme. They may have been wildly and enthusiastically interested and moved by the discourse, but they appeared as though deaf and dumb in the immobility of their stoicism. An entire audience of this character would be maddening, but fortunately there was a majority of other racial elements. At this centre the people have a Eucharist once or twice a month, in the morning of course, otherwise an afternoon service. Back again we drove to the vicarage in the late June afternoon with the sun in that northern summer still many hours high. Long before daylight had been dimmed the evening service in St. David's Church was over, the congregation being again largely men, including the two members of the Mounted Police, in their striking scarlet uniforms, young fellows of intelligence and manliness to whom one could not talk in anything but a plain, straight-from-the-shoulder way. By that time the visting parson had met many of the people and been welcomed with the genuine hospitality of such a community. Afterwards we sat down for the first time in that busy day to a meal in peace the late Sunday-night supper which is, in my experience, characteristically Canadian and socially most delightful and restful. On the next Sunday the order of services was varied. The town congregation got an early Mass and an evening service, while the congregation at the old Hudson Bay Post had a late Eucharist. In the afternoon we drove to another locality where are no parishioners at all, strictly speaking, and the service is in a schoolhouse. Here we were most informal. The vicar quite sensibly does not try to engineer people there through the intricacies of Evening Prayer, but gives them an informal service, extempore prayers, hearty hymns of the Moody and Sankey style, a passage of Scripture read and expounded, and a short, straight talk. The vicar does not wear a surplice but he does wear his cassock and he is evidently a priest and not a nonconformist minister. The people make no mistake. He is different. The Presbyterian minister from the neighborhood who had not provided any religious services for this locality, having found that the English Church clergyman had got together a congregation, the members of which were largely Presbyterian, suggested that he might arrange to come over on a Sunday. But he was met by the reply: "The Church of England clergyman has been coming to us for a whole winter without missing one of the appointed days and we are not willing to go back on him." How we did enjoy ourselves at that schoolhouse service, "putting up prayers, as the English phrase extempore devotions, walking up and down the platform, pounding the table, quite free from conventions. All the time the vicar is teaching the foundations of Church truth and when the preparation is finished the Church will come with our Lord's own service, the Sacrament of the Altar, and the people will have the root of the whole matter, whether they ever get Morning and Evening Prayer, or not. Between Sundays many things of interest happened. About a quarter of a mile from the vicarage two tents were pitched where an aged Indian couple lived, waiting for the end of life, one of them already bed-ridden. The vicar regularly reserved the Blessed Sacrament from the early Eucharist and carried It to the husband and wife, who arranged for the purpose a small table always scrupulously covered with a spotlessly clean cloth. Or he would go off for an all-day round of calls, returning late in the afternoon. Sometimes he arranges to go many miles to a distant part of the territory which is nominally under his supervision and takes two days for the visit. Not many miles away is a Government School for the education of Indian children, boys and girls, the Principal being a priest of our Communion. There we received a warm welcome and were shown the working of the school. The children are brought to Confession, Confirmation and Communion while in the school and are carefully instructed in the Faith. At any time a neighing priest might drop in for a visit and a meal for they are very companionable with one another, out there in the sparsely settled country. They have their Retreats and Quiet Days under greater difficulties than we encounter, hence with special blessings resulting. They do not wait to have some distinguished preacher or a member of a Religious Order come their way. One of their own number may be asked to conduct the devotional day. What has been set down here are the impressions gained from a single sojourn of a fortnight. But what a lesson. It was the Church at work. Not money nor great reputation nor a complex philanthropic machine, not Social Welfare detached from religion, but just the priest of the Church working in the Church's way, teaching the Church's truth, giving the supernatural strength through the appointed ordinances of Christ's religion,— all of them. Never shall we forget that visit to the wonderful Northwest. We felt very insignificant out there. Onwards the journey was continued, through diocese after diocese to the Canadian Rockies, greeted here and there by former students, offering the Holy Sacrifice in a magnificent summer-resort hotel amidst the grandest scenery, then turning eastward and without pause travelling thousand after thousand of miles over a territory of measureless possibilities, being held for Christ and His Church by hundreds of the loyal priests - back to the Atlantic seaboard and the country where the privileges of the Church are so many and treated so often with indifference. Verily here is an illustration of our Lord's words" The wedding-feast is ready but they which were bidden were not worthy. Go out into the highways and hedges and compel them to come in that my house may be full." Pamphylax. I F we be conscious in our hearts that great and unwonted mercies are being showered upon us by heaven, we ought with great concern to betake ourselves to more heart-searching selfexamination, and a deeper weighing of our thoughts and motives, lest we be heedlessly suffering ourselves to slip back into the part of traitor. Our times of extraordinary grace should ever be thought of as times of extraordinary soulperil.-Arthur Ritchie. PUBLISHED MONTHLY BY TEMPLE PUBLISHING CORPORATION 93 NASSAU STREET, NEW YORK, N. Y. President: GEORGE A. ARMOUR, Princeton, N. J. Vice President: GUY VAN AMRINGE, 31 Nassau Street, New York Business Manager: The Rev. WILLIAM H. A. HALL, 93 Nassau Street, New York EDITORIAL COUNCIL: Charles S. Baldwin, Ph.D., Professor of Rhetoric, Columbia University; the Rev. J. G. H. Barry, D.D., Rector of the Church of St. Mary the Virgin, New York; the Rev. Charles C. Edmunds, D.D., Professor of New Testament Literature, General Theological Seminary; the Rev. Hughell E. W. Fosbroke. D.D., Dean of the General Theological Seminary; the Rev. Francis J. Hall, D.D., Professor of Dogmatic Theology, General Theological Seminary; the Rev. Arthur W. Jenks, D.D., Professor of Ecclesiastical History, General Theological Seminary; the Rev. William T. Manning, D.D., Rector of Trinity Church, New York; the Rev. John Mockridge, D.D., Rector of St. James Church, Philadelphia; the Rev. Ralph B. Pomeroy, B. D., Rector of Trinity Church, Princeton, N. J.; Chandler R. Post, Ph.D., Assistant Professor of Greek and of Fine Arts, Harvard University; Robert K. Root, Ph.D., Professor of English, Princeton University; the Rev. Hamilton Schuyler, Rector Trinity Church, Trenton, N. J.; Chauncey B. Tinker, Ph.D., Professor of English Literature, Yale University; the Rev. Lucius Waterman, D.D., Rector of St. Thomas Church, Hanover, N. H. year BEGINNING with the March number and the second of the AMERICAN CHURCH MONTHLY, the duties of the literary editorship will pass into the charge of Reverend Selden P. Delany, D. D., of the clerical staff of the parish of St. Mary the Virgin, New York city. Dr. Delany is well known in Church circles, having for several years before coming to New York occupied the position of Dean of All Saints Cathedral Milwaukee. His considerable and wide parochial experience, his prominence in many activities of the Church, and his literary ability already known from published writings and his contributions to the MONTHLY and other periodicals attest his possession of the qualifications necessary for post of editor. The Editorial Council confidently entrusts to him the carrying out of the ideals and purpose of the magazine. NE hears from time to time the query whether there is likely to be a split of our American Church into two or more distinct sections, on account of partisanship developing to such a degree that life and action together become impracticable. We do not expect this to happen. The phenomenon is common enough in the case of the Christian bodies that have severed their organic connection with the historic Church. That schism begets schism is abundantly illustrated from history. But the first separation must be a real cutting off from the source of life and vitality. A process of disintegration then sets in which is not so much a disease for which there is no remedy as a disease which has already passed beyond the stage where a remedy can be applied. The Church itself possesses the power of staying the progress of disease, "the miracle of repair." So long as there is the common life flowing through its members, even if sluggishly in some, and mingled with foreign elements in others, in certain cases thin and weak, yet the members still are "knit together in one communion and fellowship in the mystical Body of Christ " and the bond holds unless some act of violence cuts asunder the ties. If it appears that some such disaster impends at any time, the safeguards and counteracting forces also come to the front to check the movement before a fatal step has been taken. With the consequences of separation and schism before us for our warning in the sad cases of larger and smaller bodies for the past three centuries in English Christianity our own communion is not likely to pass deliberately by suicidal acts into such a state of fatal disintegration. NEV EVERTHELESS, it is increasingly evident that two sets or groups of our own people are standing apart with sharp definition and demoralizing results at the present day. We do not allude to "parties" having the familiar slogans and shibboleths. The grouping we have in mind is not into "Broad," " High," or "Low," nor reactionary and conservative, nor even catholic and protestant. A similar grouping to that which we have in our mind at this moment would be found operative in any section of Christendom, and always and everywhere with deplorable effects so far as the real aims of religion are concerned. We mean the distinction between intelligence and ignorance in relation to Christianity, its history, sacred |