The Bishop's New Spectacles

I

A MINISTER’S morning mail is like the membership of his Ladies’ Aid Society — at once his joy and his despair. Perhaps I am violating confidences, and in consequence may get myself into serious difficulties, by repeating what many clergymen have told me, that, although there are times when they do not see how they could get on without the dear ladies of the Aid Society, there are occasions quite as frequent when they do not see how in the world they can get on with them. It is sufficient to state the fact without going into a detailed record of experiences that have produced such mixed emotional reactions.

A minister’s mail furnishes similar reactions, especially if he ventures, in his sermons or public addresses, to deal with questions of current interest, or to state his convictions about problems of special moment. My own mail pouch is a fascinatingly interesting study whenever I have shown the hardihood to express views on certain controversial subjects which no one could gracefully avoid who is alive to the problems which agitate men’s minds — such problems as the solution of the liquor question, or the pernicious activity of paid uplifters, the manners and morals of this generation, marriage as a temporary or permanent institution, or a dozen other social questions which the conscientious minister knows involve definite moral principles on which, apart from their political and legislative application, he feels it his right and duty to speak.

When he does give voice to his convictions the mail bag bulges. Some of the letters are a delight. Indeed, most of them are pleasant reading, because the majority of those who write express appreciation of thoughts with which they are in hearty agreement. But there is always a generous sprinkling of epistolary disagreement, critical counsel, and violent protest. Numerous persons, with panaceas for all the ills with which society is afflicted, write lengthy letters proving that their own specific remedies furnish a sure cure for the evils we deplore. Every variety of enthusiast or crank reads into one’s statements approval of his own theories, much to the personal discomfort of the recipient of his adulation. Sometimes the writers express aggressive agreement with what the poor author was unaware that he had written. It hurts to be lauded as a protagonist of some special theory of which one has never till now heard. It hurts even more when one reads a note of severe rebuke for what he knows he did not say.

Every now and then some magazine article lets free a flood of letters from correspondents whose logical processes make one wonder how they came to subscribe to the dignified journals of public opinion to whose columns the modest contribution of the author was admitted. What a mixed variety of readers the magazines must have! How do they ever conceal from their advertisers the mental calibre of some of their constituency? Many of the letter writers are anonymous, sometimes, one feels sure, from modesty; more often because prejudice or misrepresentation prefers anonymity. But the poor author is deprived of the sweet joys of controversy. He has no opportunity to reply. He may not look forward with anticipation to a subsequent rebuttal, rejoinder and surrejoinder, et ad infinitum. He simply grins or groans.

In the pages of the Atlantic Monthly, a few months ago, I wrote of how ‘A Bishop Looks at the Church.’ The ensuing correspondence was voluminous. Much of it was a joy, though a few of the laity, most of them ladies of leisure, seemed to regard me as a sort of enfant terrible of the episcopate. Young people poured out their souls by post. Not all, to be sure, were thinking straight; one young man, for example, claimed to have lost his faith because he was convinced that a Y. M. C. A. secretary had stolen his pocketbook! But, for the most part, the writers showed constructive thought about the present status of institutional religion. Many of their criticisms met a responsive echo in my own heart, as when one Episcopalian youth declared that, so far as he could learn from the public prints, the general convention of his own church expected to spend three weeks in Washington during October with no more valid excuse for meeting than the acceptance of a missionary budget which its council knows, and we know, and the council knows that we know, will never be raised; the completion of the work of revision of a prayer book whose rubrics will be regarded by Catholic churchmen,Modernist churchmen, and Evangelicals as kindly suggestions of what it would be nice to do, in case you did not want to do something else; and the engaging in debate over such supposedly vital matters as the disposition of the Thirty-Nine Articles of Religion.

Of special interest were several letters which presented a challenge in almost identical terms. One man wrote: ‘If the Church is as faulty and futile as your picture paints it, why do you remain in the ministry? And how can you continue to urge others to come in?’ And another: ‘You have expressed exactly what I feel about all of the churches when you declare that the real reason why some of us stay out of them is that we are bored beyond expression by t he type of people who are in them. I feel that you are “one of us”; so tell us, please, why you are in the ministry.’ Yet another: ‘What you say is true; only you have not said enough. Do you not see that what we really object to, in the churches, is not only that so few of the ministers are really “on the job,” or that so many of them have substituted sensationalism or political propaganda for religion, but that with every denomination both clergy and people are more concerned about their church than about Christianity, and, with your own denomination in particular, more interested in apologia of the Church’s position than in aggressive effort to win men’s souls? Those of us younger men who are in earnest about such a task may sometimes be unfair, we may be “half-baked,” but we have zeal and optimism; and these are exactly the qualities we do not find in church people or in their ministers. You evidently feel something of our difficulties. Tell us, then, why you entered the ministry, and why you stay.’ And, finally, the challenge was repeated in these words: ‘You have “looked at the Church,” Bishop, and you say that all is not well with it. Now get a new pair of spectacles, take another look, and tell us why you stilt believe in it.’

These letters were all anonymous. They could not, therefore, be answered, although some of them were written in such evident sincerity that they deserved courteous acknowledgment and perhaps some effort to reply, instruct, and edify. They made one long, indeed, for a personal interview. May I, then, put on my new spectacles, take another look, and answer the challenge?

II

In R. J. Campbell’s autobiography, A Spiritual Pilgrimage (the story of a life of patient and painstaking pursuit of truth, with courageous facing of the problems raised by modern Liberalism, and in its charm and the candor of its self-revelation equaled only by Cardinal Newman’s Apologia pro vita sua), there is an illuminating passage which makes clear the principal differences between the Irish Presbyterianism in which the author’s youth was spent and the atmosphere of English Nonconformity with which his later life was surrounded. With English Protestantism, the ‘Church’ had disappeared and the ‘Gospel’ had taken its place. Evangelization was the thing chiefly aimed at, and that of a particular and well-marked type. The very idea of the Church seemed almost superfluous. Any suggestion of the necessity of being grafted into a corporate life of fellowship was wholly absent. The gospel of salvation was purely individualistic; there was little thought of the Church as the Church, the home of the growing soul, the sphere of sacramental grace, the society which is Christ’s visible witness and representative on earth, in which He dwells and which His Spirit guides and inspires. The older Protestantism of Ireland, as of Scotland, still held to this corporate conception of Christianity — and held to it as firmly as does the Catholic, Roman or Anglican. ‘The minister was a man sealed to a vocation not of earth but of Heaven, chosen and anointed with a divine charism for the discharge of a sacred duty.’

We find the same line of cleavage in America to-day. Whether the Protestant congregation be one of the older type, with emphasis on evangelization, or a more cultured group concerned rather with intellectual problems of faith, religion is usually regarded as individualistic rather than corporate. The minister speaks of his own views and convictions. He may be a man of fine character whose preaching affords spiritual help and guidance, but what he says has no authority other than that of his own personal experience. His success or failure depends upon certain ‘accidents of the situation’ — whether he is the ‘right man in the right place,’ with a congregation wise enough and good enough to value him accordingly, whether he has a congregation less thoughtful than himself and never facing the questions of faith in which he is interested, or, on the other hand, a congregation more thoughtful than its pastor and seriously concerned over difficulties he does not even begin to think about.

The point is that the whole matter of religion and faith is a matter of personal experience, and the whole question of Christian allegiance and loyalty a matter of individual decision and choice. There is no conception of a corporate life as of primary consideration, nor of a corporate faith as the established result of an age-long experience. Of course, such a corporate conception of religion, with the Church idea dominant, does not minimize the necessity for individual discipleship and consecration. There must come, first, such a sense of the wonder of Christ’s life and of the beauty of His teaching as to call forth devoted, personal allegiance; but there must be the further conviction that Christ never meant His followers to be left loose and unattached — individual fellowship was to be kept strong and steady through corporate union.

We who believe in the Church continue to believe in it, with all its faults, because it seems to us in accordance with the mind of the Master. It is the forethought of Christ, not the afterthought of men. If the Church were nothing more than a convenience, — on the whole a satisfactory method of securing unity of Christian purpose, — then there would be no compelling motive for membership; we could not, for the life of us, get up much enthusiasm about it, or more than a very little interest in it. If its work seemed to us futile, we could shrug our shoulders and depart. Even the question of Christian unity would fail to capture the imagination — it would be a social, economic, or administrative problem, a matter of uniting conveniently useful societies into a common order. Who could get on fire with enthusiasm about any programme of ecclesiastical peace, save as an effort to heal the wounds of ‘Christ’s Body’?

At bottom, then, here is the real dividing line between Protestantism and Catholicism. Those of us who are sympathetic toward the Catholic conception of Christianity feel — whether rightly or wrongly — that the Church idea is an essential part of Christ’s teaching, and that in the New Testament nothing is found as entitled to call itself membership of Christ which is not also membership of the divine society which we call the Church.

The fact that Dr. Campbell found this Church ‘atmosphere’ in the earlier Protestantism of his youth shows that the conception is independent of Roman Catholic claims, and that the essential principles of faith and order may be held in union with an interpretation of life in terms of the individual conscience. In America, just now, so some of us believe, the real need is a return to this ideal, if Protestantism is not to end in what Mr. MacManus calls ‘the nadir of nothingness.’ Catholicism, as an ideal, is a system of worship, of sacramental grace, of order, doctrinal truth, and broad fellowship. It may degenerate, by an overinsistence upon authority, tradit ion, and apostolic order, into autocracy in ecclesiastical government and static intransigence of religious thought. Protestantism, as an ideal, stands for personal religion, individual acceptance of truth, rigid obedience to conscience, and consecrated service of Christ and of men. It may degenerate into unhealthy individualism, with self-determinism run mad, and private judgment multiplying sects; it may tend toward fatal indifference to authority and the lessons of experience; it may become overdesirous of basing morality upon law and backing it up by legal enforcement; it may be overfond of dictatorial methods of moral reform; it may appear narrow, aggressive, and disputatious. We need the ideals which lie at the root of both systems, but our first need in America at the present time is a reconsideration of the corporate nature of the Christian religion. However academic all this may sound to my youthful correspondents, it is worth while to get back to first principles in the discussion of our problem.

III

‘But,’ objected Alice, ‘“glory” doesn’t mean “a nice knock-down argument.”’ ‘When I use a word,’ Humpty Dumpty said in rather a scornful tone, ‘it means just what I choose it to mean, neither more nor less.’ Humpty Dumpty was a prophet born out of due time; his unconscious followers are many, and they play havoc with clear religious thinking. We are always using different terms for the same thing, or the same term for different things. Possibly the general attitude toward the Church would change if we could make less dim and obscure the thought of the One, Holy, Catholic Church. It is not just an abstraction, equivalent to ‘all the churches,’ or, with greater vagueness, to ‘all Christian people.’ Though we are members of particular churches, our membership is lifted into union in a society which is the ‘ Body of Christ.’ There is a Catholic, though not Roman, Church consciousness which makes this society more than an abstraction, like ‘mankind’ or ‘American’ and ‘European’; it is concrete and real.

We who believe in the Church, despite its present futility, feel that because it is the divine ideal it has recuperative power, now, as it has been shown to have such power in the past. If we criticize, it is with constructive purpose. We are so committed to the Christian programme, and so convinced that it can be realized only by corporate action and in a corporate life, that when we see the Church failing in its purpose it hurts, and we cannot but show our pain and shame. But we still cling to the Church idea, and we are convinced that only as Protestant America returns to that idea and ideal will there be renewal and regeneration of religious life. In America, the notion has become general that the churches are mere convenient agencies of Christian effort, to be accepted when desirable, changed at whim, or even deserted in disgust. They are ‘amorphous aggregations of individual souls,’ societies through which ‘a set of views may be promulgated, and a more or less incoherent and unstable set of views, at that.’ Against such a view of Christianity we protest with all our strength. We stay in the Church because we believe in its divine character, while recognizing its human faults. Our criticism, therefore, is something more than whining complaint or pessimistic despair. We point out weaknesses in the hope of arousing a ‘divine discontent’ which will lead to the restoration of the ideal in which we still have strong faith.

For certainly we are not surprised that the Church does fail. Of course it does, since it is human. We believe in democracy — government of the people, by the people, for the people — despite its blunders. The Church is of God, but it is also of men. It is a society of sinners, by sinners, for sinners — made up of weak men, carried on by them, designed for them. Even the apostles were a rather poor lot. Bruce Barton, in The Man Nobody Knows, said that no one had ever put a big matter into the hands of such poor trustees. Christ’s apostolic family was in all ways weak, though eventually, for most of its members, their commission raised them above themselves. Some failed, but the work was done by the brave and faithful. Protestantism, even at its best, thought of the Church as the Society of the Saints, whereas it is really the refuge of sinners, penitent but weak, learning but not yet made perfect, trying but often failing.

Christ expected weakness and failure. He likened the Kingdom to a net, full of fishes both good and bad. He compared it to a field, full of wheat and tares, which could not be separated until the time of harvest. There never has been a time, in the long history of the Church, when it did not need reformation and new inspiration. Its history is the story of a long struggle with a weak membership. But, somehow, it has served its purpose.

It will continue to serve its purpose, because it is the one society which enables men to know themselves ‘as part of a vital tradition covering a history longer than that lying between the horizon of their threescore years and ten.’ The Church is the only society, other than the family, with a great philosophy under it and a sublime ideal behind it. Its power lies not in its argument but in its aim; not in its advance — often slow, and sometimes so slow as to appear a retreat — but in its goal. On the whole, it knows whither it would be going. Dean Sperry says, ‘The only thing that will be the death of the churches is the death of all personal religion.’ He should have said more. ‘Churches’ may fail, if personal religion dies among their members. But ‘churches’ are little groups of a larger whole, and ‘the Church,’ in this larger sense, will not die. Like the giant, it ‘never feels perfectly well all over’; it is big, and there are distresses and disturbances somewhere all the time; but it is strong, and throws off diseases and cures injuries in its members.

Modern Protestant discipleship is hesitating and uncertain, impotent and unsaving, just because it lacks this larger vision of the Church Universal. It is to this larger vision that we remain loyal, despite the distressing inefficiency of the moment. The only hope of Protestant Church life lies in a return to the thought of the Church as a world-wide organism which represents Christ on earth and is ‘His Body,’ through which He does His work. Such a Church presents a great cause, challenging the labor and loyalty of men. It puts things in the right order. It summons men to worship, not in order to secure promises and favors, but in order to become

better and more active in service. It calls for an adventurous religion, not ‘the passivity, drowsy devotion, and blind obedience which people think is religion.’

IV

These considerations give us the real reason for Church loyalty. We can never, in days of doubt and distress, rekindle enthusiasm and affection for a Church that is little more than an Ecclesiastical Rotary Club. The truth is that American Protestantism has been reducing the Church to this level. I am not seeking admission to the ranks of those who week after week take their fling at the noon-day luncheon clubs. They have their place and value. But we may be good Americans of a reasonable — if not the full hundred — per cent w ithout becoming ‘joiners,’ or when we grow weary of combining oratory and eating we may resign without loss of self-respect. The average American, after a like fashion, believes that he may be a fairly good Christian while ignoring the Church, and, when bored by what he sees in the Church, feels that he may retire to the ‘private practice’ of religion.

I do not find any such individualistic system of faith and practice in the New Testament record of the beginnings of Christianity. Faith in Christ was always corporate. His followers were always brethren. They were exhorted not to ‘forsake the assembling of themselves together, as the manner of some is.’ They ‘continued stedfastly in the apostles’ fellowship,’ as well as in their teaching. They met daily, or at least weekly, for the ‘breaking of bread’ and the ‘prayers.’ For myself, I expect to continue in the same way though there are dullards galore in the congregation; and, even more, I shall continue though my pious soul be distressed by the hypocrisy, indifference, deadness, or self-complacency of those who make up the rest of the congregation. Perhaps, indeed, I may even be moved to ask whether my righteousness really exceeds the righteousness of the scribes and Pharisees by so large a measure as those in other ways likeminded with myself generally assume.

Indeed, even as a human institution, one cannot feel that the Church is a failure. After all, I seem to see an effect upon the general life of its members which, far as it falls short of what we desire, is greater than the results effected by any other human institution. We forget how great has been this general advance. It has affected our social life as well as our personal life, our national life, our spiritual life. Indeed, it even accounts for some of our present doubts and difficulties.

Why has the present generation become so critical of the type of Christians whom Bishop King used to call ‘mousy little men’? Why but because the Church has been presenting the human Christ, as never before, in all His winsomeness and attractiveness and in all the strength of His splendid manhood? Why have we become dissatisfied with the pettiness of much of our church work and the nasty little self-consciousness of some of our church workers? Why but because the Church has had teachers who have gradually developed another type of Christian — men with the natural virtues of ‘pleasant paganism,’ but also with the aroma and atmosphere of Christianity? Why do we find an increasing dislike of the present propagandist activities of Protestant America, save because of the fact that there have been some Christian prophets to show the attractive power of faith, until at last we are beginning to see its modest charm and are approaching the day when there will surely be wider appreciation of the kindly, courteous, tolerant, quiet, steady, and well-disposed religious folk who mind their own business and modestly and unobtrusively worship and serve God in their own way, without obnoxious insistence that everybody shall serve and worship God in exactly the same way; in particular, not showing themselves impertinently inquisitive as to the faults and failings of others and overzealous in bringing them to repentance and a better life?

Yes, there are improved standards of Christian life appearing just over the horizon, and the Church is responsible for the change, with the dawn of the new day. Religion to-day is more strong, more powerful, more sane, and not less devout, than the religion of our grandparents, because the Church has looked more closely into the life of the human Christ. The change of social attitude is due to the same influence. With all its faults, business is less brutally pagan than it was in other times. Industry has changed in a generation, and the change has not been due entirely to the growth of democracy or the power of labor organizations; it has been due to the preaching of ‘the social gospel’ by fearless churchmen. The change of mind as to corruption in politics is very marked, despite recent scandals. We are no longer ‘corrupt but contented.’ There is indifference, of course, because the country is prosperous, and prosperity causes ‘fatty degeneration of the moral nature’; but conditions are nothing compared with earlier days, and churchmen have not been without influence in pointing to the perils of an easy-going democracy. War has lost its romance. Why? Hundreds of pacifists who blame the Church for not stopping the World War forget that churchmen are responsible for clear thinking about the subject now, and that their moral influence, more than the hysteria of pacifist agitation, is responsible for the movement for peace.

One of the most frequent complaints against the Church refers to the unhappy divisions of Christendom; but to what do we owe the movement for unity but to the Church itself? Division came because the Church had become secularized and corrupted and had to be reformed. In the effort to establish truth, men became enamored of meticulous doctrinal expositions of the faith, and the process of fission went madly on. But it is the Church, not its critics, which is leading the return to unity and fellowship, and leading it with right motive, not as an economic consolidation, but as a unity of evangelical purpose, with true understanding of the mind of Christ. Nothing in our present age is so indicative of the recuperative power of the Church as the strength of this movement toward reunion.

Our very ideas about God — for that matter, even our doubts about God and our difficulties of faith — are a sign of the advance of true Christian thinking. The world is more sensitive to the problem of evil than ever before. We see so much of the apparent heartlessness of the universe that faith which can survive the test of serious thought demands all a man’s honest effort; it must be what George Tyrrell called ‘faith in long trousers, not faith in knickerbockers.’ It is no longer easy to believe in a God of love, and we would best confess the difficulty, instead of avoiding it. Yet an Infinite and Eternal Power lacking the qualities of love and tenderness and pity would no longer be God for us. Why? Because slowly, through the centuries, the Church has taught of God as Jesus knew Him, until His thought of God has gradually moulded our ideas, just as His standards of life have slowly changed our moral conceptions. The very difficulties which oppress us have come to be felt as never before because Christianity, through the Church, has given us ideas of God which alone can satisfy. We must have a God who is like Jesus. No other God will content us, and if we cannot have such a God we will do without God rather than accept another. (Perhaps that supplies a hint as to the way in which to approach the question of Christ’s divinity.)

V

We hold fast to the Church, despite its faults and failings, because it is the one institution which definitely witnesses for Christ. Someone has suggested in a witty protest, with humor that stings while it smiles, that apparently the first qualification for the ministry nowadays is that one should have in him t he makings of an efficient administrator and financial manager. The writer deplores, as one of our contemporary tragedies, the fact that so many of our ablest young men become bond salesmen and stockbrokers, although these fields are already overcrowded and the men often meet with only moderate success, whereas if they had gone into the ministry they might soon attain fame and fortune as pastors of large city churches. Or some of them go into the law, and eventually into politics, whereas as emotional orators their great opportunity might have been found in American pulpits. Sometimes, yes. But the picture is a caricature, just as Elmer Gantry is so overdrawn in its ugliness, in depicting another type, that it defeats its own purpose. In fact, the quiet work of the true priest, preacher, and pastor goes on, and it is still holding up Christ, proclaiming faith in Him, and bearing witness to Him in service and teaching. No other society save the Church exists for keeping that faith alive. However inadequately the faith and teaching are presented, in a divided Christendom, nevertheless the fires are kept burning.

We do not believe that the witness will fail, and therefore we are sure Christ’s words will not pass away. Of late the world has been slowly coming to the conclusion that His way and teaching were right. The old plan of life has broken down, and men are looking wistfully to the Way of Life which Christ taught and to which the Church has always borne its broken witness. Some, it is true, feel that He was disillusionized at the end, and found that His plan of living would not work in a rough world like ours; that, while academically sound and idealistically beautiful, it was smashed to pieces by the hard facts of life, and cannot now be acted upon without exceptions and reservations. Yet the Church, in its weakest days, has always held up the standard, and at last we are coming to see that Christ was right in declaring that we must put ‘first things first.’ It is not a question of life smashing His teaching to pieces; the question is whether life itself will not be broken to bits if His teaching is wholly ignored. Personal problems are still settled by words He uttered centuries ago. There is scarcely a social movement which does not seek, in some degree, to utilize His principles. Economists and statesmen are beginning to talk in strange ways of taking His spirit into national and international relations. They have begun to dread the upheaval which is sure to issue out of complete disregard of Christ and Christian brotherhood. Men are saying now, in loud tones, what the Church has always said through the voices of its prophets, even when its speech has been feeblest: that apart from Christ there is no charity wide enough, and no faith deep enough, to bring the world lasting peace.

I do not think I am wrong in saying that the Church has always taught this, however feebly and falteringly, and that outside the Church it has rarely been taught with an approach to consistency. Nor do I believe I am in error in saying that, on the whole and in the large, the Church has based its teaching on faith in Christ, generally in Him as the unveiling of the heart of deity, always in Him as one in whose face men have seen the light of the knowledge of the glory of God.

We need such a faith. Life is a poor thing without it. How poor it is may be guessed from Robert Keable’s confessions published a few months after his death and showing how painfully he was trying to find his way back to light. How impotent and unsaving life is, apart from such faith, we see in the recent report on an inquiry into ‘The Sensible Man’s Religion.’ I have no doubt that the report is a true one, and that its conclusions fairly well summarize the beliefs of the average man outside the churches. But read the emasculated creed. It is a weak and nerveless thing. It makes no demands, offers no adventure, calls for no sacrifice, has no appeal, points no challenge. Doubtless there are also thousands within the churches whose faith is no larger. That is the reason we find the churches suffering from a terrible blight. Too many of their members have a religion which is hesitating and uncertain; it carries no atmosphere, has no courage or conviction. That is the reason for the sickness of the Body of Christ. ‘ At the centre His heart still beats strongly, pumping the life blood; but the valves are choked up, the blood cannot circulate freely, the members fail to work in harmony with each other, and many seem numb or dead.’

The remedy lies not in abandoning Christ’s ideal. It lies in seeking to embody the ideal. We shall not be alone when we set out upon our task. We shall find ourselves members of a goodly company; for the Church still has its saints and heroes. I call to remembrance men like Grenfell, Rowe, and Stuck; men like Mott and Speer; men like Graves and Teusler; women such as Miss Royden, Mrs. Simkovitch, or Miss Vida Scudder; soldiers such as Wood and Pershing; statesmen like Stanley Baldwin or Ramsay MacDonald; scientists like Pupin; men high in social life such as Lord Halifax or the Duke of Newcastle; we have had our Mahans in the navy; we have judges, college professors, business men, heads of great corporations, leaders of labor organizations, financiers, governors, and presidents. There lies before me a list of more than a hundred leading public men of America, and names of some fifty wonderful women, who would willingly make public declaration that all they are and all they have done they owe to the Church’s faith. Their names cannot be printed — indeed, the living who are named above will object to being numbered among the saints. If I were to print the complete list, there would be objection to the inclusion of some names; they all have their faults and defects. Imagine the excited discussion which would follow upon my naming Wilson or Roosevelt as Christian examples among the presidents! They had their faults. So had all the departed saints whose names are now in the sacred calendar. I have no doubt some of them were not any pleasanter companions than are you who would read the list, or those who compiled it, or I who withhold it.

That is not the point. The fact of importance is that every one of them has splendid virtues, and every one attributes all to Christ and the Church. There are good men and women, it is true, outside the Christian fellowship; but the names on my list are of men and women who show a peculiar quality of goodness which only the fellowship of believers creates. It is an indescribable something which makes us realize how impossible it is to separate the character we call Christian from the creed out of which the character is born and the Church in which it is nurtured.

I entered the ministry because I saw — far back in those days — what faith in Christ meant. I came to that faith, as did Romanes, after passing through doubts such as he had as he wrote: ‘When I think, as at times I must, of the appalling contrast between the hallowed glory of that creed which once was mine, and the lonely mystery of existence as now I find it — at such times I shall ever feel it impossible to avoid the sharpest pang of which my nature is susceptible.’ I came to faith through the shadow of a sorrow shared with the closest friend I then had, whose suffering I tried to lighten. I reached my faith through study of the person of Christ, finding that He exercised over me the same fascination the four Gospels show Him as exercising over those who felt that their eyes had gazed upon and their hands had handled the very Word of Life.

Then I looked at the Church, and I saw all its weaknesses. I watched its members and knew them for the poor things they were. I went into the ministry to make them more worthy of their calling. And ever since I have been trying to make myself more worthy of my own! I doubt if anyone would be won to the Church if he knew me as I know myself, and yet I think he might be won if he could guess what I should have been, and might still be, without the Church and its worship.