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(5) In some sense the Sacramental system produces results unobtainable otherwise. This is a delicate and holy subject. The witness of the past is overwhelming, but the appreciation of the issue is bound up with a score of related matters. What is Christian Character? A high achievement in the natural virtues, kindness, self-restraint, generosity, courage, prudence; or a development of the distinctively Christian virtues, Faith, Hope and Love, along with the interior virtues, humility, meekness, purity, self-sacrifice? Have these latter developed outside the Sacramental Grace which the Church dispenses? We must remember that the initial sacrament, Holy Baptism, may be administered validly although no further sacraments follow, and that the baptized receive real grace. Probably no one contention is likely to call forth such an outburst of indignant challenge as this, that the monopoly of the highest type of Christian sanctity belongs to the Christian body which posesses and dispenses all the treasures of sacramental grace which is the Divine Life. Yet the witness is written very clearly on the pages of eighteen centuries of the history of the sacramental Church.

(6) The phenomena of unrest and revolutionary movements when examined over a wide extent of time in the Church's life have an interpretation which does not lie on the surface. They indicate not that the Church is in the wrong or that she is lacking in the ability to supply what men need, but that the human element is at fault and paying the penalty of unadmitted and unrecognized limitations. Distortion of revealed truth, the loss of balance between related truths, the neglect of essentials are set side by side with efforts to restore, recover and readjust. There is a close analogy between the health of the spiritual body and of the physical body. Illness is not necessarily a sign that the body is diseased. It may be the beneficent sign that the limitations of the body have been ignored or the laws of health broken. The body that is vigorous and perfect throws. off illness or even disease, and recovers. The Body of Christ, the Church, has been continually experiencing the consequences of the neglect in some quarter or another of the laws of spirit

ual, corporate health. The testimony to the need and value of the repair of the Christian Body by the divine life within is the continual answer to the cavils of those who would discredit it and innovate or begin afresh. Very salutary is the study of heresy and schism.

There are other principles which are capable of being set forth as established and which are also to be included in the fundamental premises of constructive history. Each of those named and briefly commented upon here, along with others, will be found to afford the groundwork upon which the Church builds up spiritual lives. How different the study of the divine organism becomes when approached thus, as an edifice, a structure which does not collapse periodically like a house of cards! How different, on the other hand, from a series of houses built on quite different plans and models, the ideal of the aristocratic building like the millionaire's palace meant for the rich only, or the colonial type which is satisfactory only in certain surroundings, or the bungalow type, suitable for times of emptiness and vacation, or the portable house type which can be easily taken down and re-erected in another place, or a row of cells where each individual dwells by himself to be protected and housed, regardless of other individuals? The mighty cathedral seems to approach most nearly to a type of the Church as constructive history shows its rearing. But alas! even the cathedral is the work of man and man may lay it in ruins. The true figure of the Catholic Church is the "house not made with hands, eternal in the heavens." This is what the true use of Church History patiently worked out shows the Catholic Church to be. Arthur Whipple Jenks.

Far and wide, tho' all unknowing,
Plants for Thee each human breast;
Human tears for Thee are flowing;
Human hearts in Thee would rest.

The Church and the People

From the Guardian.

The following is the full text of the sermon preached by Canon A. C. Deane, Vicar of All Saints', Ennismore-gardens, in Westminster Abbey.

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Jesus then lifted up His eyes, and saw a great company." ST JOHN vi. 5.

T

HE words come from to-day's Gospel. You will remember their context. Our Lord stands in deep thought, with downcast eyes. Presently upon His meditation breaks a stir of feet, the murmur and movement of a crowd. "Jesus then lifted up His eyes, and saw a great company." At once the time for meditation is ended; this sight impels Him to act. The men and women before Him are hungry; it must be the task of Himself and His disciples to see that they are fed. Here is a simple picture of the situation confronting the Church to-day, and of the work which, because it exists to carry on Christ's mission, it is bound to undertake.

And the very first need is that it should lift up its eyes, that it should look beyond its own immediate affairs, beyond the little band of disciples gathered round it, in order to become conscious of the hungering multitudes. That Church can have no growth and no future which contentedly limits its ministration to those who are already its faithful adherents. It must follow its Master's example, it must life up its eyes, and see a great company of men and women who as yet are strangers to it, but have souls which hunger for the Bread of Life. For what-let us try to face the question quite honestly - what to-day, at this supreme crisis in our history, at the moment when the things of the soul have a deeper significance than ever before, what are the actual relations between organized Christianity, as represented by the Church, and the great mass of the English people? By "the mass " I do not mean the less privileged classes alone. We are compelled to answer, I think, that among people educated and uneducated, among rich and poor, among the fashionable world and among

artisans, among men and women of mature age and, even more markedly, among the young, the conviction grows that the Church, with the Christianity it represents, is not a necessary, or even for ordinary folk a desirable, factor in life. Those holding such a view are not necessarily hostile to the Church. No, they are quite content that it should minister to the minority - people of a special temperament, they think - who seem to derive help from its services. They even recognize the value of the pulpit when it can do something "really useful," such as gaining recruits for munition works or subscriptions for a War Loan. Yet they feel and they are pleased to find the Church itself apparently countenancing the view that services and Eucharists and common prayer and intercession are peace-time luxuries, the abrogation of which under present conditions cannot injure our national life.

Meanwhile how are we as a Church, as individual Churchmen and as members of Christ's Society, attempting to grasp the situation and to amend it? To ignore it entirely is so easy particularly easy, perhaps, for us clergy! Take the instance of any Incumbent here in London. He contrives, we will suppose, to fill his own church. He gathers together an eclectic congregation drawn from many parts of the Metropolis, and amounting to a few hundreds in all. It is a real temptation to him not to look beyond them, not to lift up his eyes, not to think of the great company, even among his own parishioners, who view him, his church, and the whole system of devotional observances they stand for, with good-humoured indifference. He will even imagine at times that if only every parish church would adopt the particular ritual and modes of worship employed in his own our difficulties would be at an end. Yet the plain truth which we clergy though not we alone are bound to recognize is simply that we have reached a crisis. Either our Church must lift up its eyes and see the great company it has failed as yet to feed, either it must recognize its responsibilities towards them, and, relegating to their right place all lesser preoccupations, must set itself wholeheartedly to the task of becoming the Church of England in fact as well as in name

or else it will continue to minister only to a dwindling band of devotees, it must become at last a mere esoteric cult, an impotent pietistic anachronism.

But here I may anticipate two criticisms. "You are labouring the obvious," it may be said. "The Church does clearly realize the gulf existing between itself and masses of our people, and is seeking means to bridge it. Think of the National Mission, undertaken for this very purpose. Or look at the Church newspapers, examine the reports of Diocesan Conferences. You will find in them full consideration of this subject; you will see how many expedients are being put forward with a view to making the English Church a more effective agency in our national life." The answer can be brief. We are encouraged to hope that the National Mission has accomplished as yet no more than its preliminary stage, and at any stage it would be wrong, obviously, to judge a movement of this nature solely by its visible results. That already the Mission has done good in individual parishes we may thankfully believe. But will any competent observer claim that, as yet, it has even begun to influence the religious life of our nation as a whole? Such a sequel, we pray, may come. Only its coming depends, under God, upon the very point we have been considering, upon the willingness of the Church really to think out big questions, to see things in their right proportion, to aim at something more than the edification of the faithful, to consult more than a narrow circle of clergy, to imagine less that lay opinion is adequately represented by a group of ecclesiastically-minded laymen. So far, it must be said frankly, the very character of the solutions propounded in Church newspapers and Conferences only proves how signally we have failed to grasp the nature of the real problem to be solved. No one who had gone beneath the surface of things, no one who had really thought out what the alienation of the people from the Church implies, or pondered the deep causes which have led to it, could dream of remedying it by such expedients as are warmly championed to-day. They range, you will find, from the adoption of a "full Catholic ceremonial "— a phrase meaning as a rule precisely those aids to devotion which happen

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