ART. VIII. THE LAMBETH CONFERENCE.

THE remarkable Conference of the Episcopate of the Anglican Communion, which was brought to a close in the middle of Advent, deserves a far more particular notice than we are able to give it in the very few pages which are all that we have at our disposal on the present occasion, inasmuch as, taken as a whole, it is perhaps the most momentous event that has occurred since the Reformation, whether we regard its immediate or future results.

In one sense it may be said to present a marked and intentional contrast to the line of conduct which circumstances forced upon the Church of England at that epoch. Then she had to act apart and in isolation from other branches of the Christian family, though consistently maintaining that the isolation was none of her seeking, and on no account to be considered a repudiation of Catholic unity. Now the guiding spirit of her action has been unity; its operation, the combination and intercommunion of Church with Church; the precise contrary of the other.

And yet in another aspect the principles contended for are the same. Formerly it was the vindication, on the unchanging basis of Church authority, of the spiritual independence of autocephalous provincial or or national Churches, and the rejection of unprimitive claims at variance therewith. Now it has been the vindication of the same thing under another form, the freedom of such Churches to act together as undivided portions of one undivided whole.

Of both occasions we may say it was high time that the emperilled principle should be vindicated. The experience of to-day is proof enough of this. Follow the stream of the maintainers of the Papal Supremacy from the Reformation epoch downwards to our own time and see what they have come to. Look onwards, preserving in thought, so far as we can, the continuity of the development, and see what in a very few years they must come to. It was, indeed, time to make a stand. So much for one side. Now for the other. Starting from the same point, look down the stream of formal, and still more that of popular, Anglican theology, and see whither the mighty impulse of the former reaction was hurrying us. The merciful providence of God held back the Church whenever she spoke with authority, or, judging from the overwhelming preponderance of private opinions, she

would have made shipwreck of her spiritual claims altogether. Things had gone very hard with her when she produced a Burnet, who, after the loss of the non-jurors, was almost a representative man. Harder still when, her synods suppressed in the interest of a Hoadley, she sank down in silence and darkness to the level of the eighteenth century. Thank God her synods were silent then, when almost all true notion of the Church was gone, and she had become to all outward appearance a worm-eaten panel in the state coach, gorgeous with paint and varnish but rotten through and through. Hoadleys were common enough then, but against them did scarce even a dog move his tongue.

We of this generation, who with no little impatience fret against the evils we still see among us, can form no adequate idea of what our fathers saw in their youth. The English Church has been roused and drawn back from the edge of the precipice on which she was sleeping, and we, awake and wondering, look on at the downward rush of those who are not plunging into new and self-originated heresies, but are only holding on in the course which we were all taking a century

ago.

Shut up in our little island, we had come to glory in our isolation instead of mourning it; or rather we had lost nearly all idea that things either could be or ought to be other than they were. "Pride, fulness of bread and abundance of idleness" had done their work; the State was the idol of bishops, clergy, and people, and they worshipped it with all their power. Then came the gradual sapping of the foundations of political Christianity, and when the unbelief long latent in the Church was forced out by the growth of intellectual energy, the State at once and openly ranged itself on its side. The Gorhams, the Eliots, the Essayists and Reviewers, the Stanleys, the Colensos, all are now seen to be working together to one end, in the attempt to bind the Church to the wheels of the state car, that it may be crushed to pieces in its helpless decay.

They thought she was dead already, and when the voice was first heard, "Give place, she is not dead but sleepeth," they laughed it to scorn, knowing, as they imagined, that she was dead, that isolation and unspirituality had extinguished all corporate life. So far we had drifted; whither we might yet drift the readers of the frothy malignity of the Times and the heavy malignity of Dr. Colenso will be able to judge.

It was high time to make a stand. The reaction from

ecclesiastical despotism unchecked and fostered had brought us to the imminent hazard of losing all ecclesiastical authority; the vindication of lawful independence to the verge of deliberate and contemptuous isolation.

But out of the very urgency of the danger GOD brought deliverance. The peril, once realized, was by His mercy opposed, and in the right way in the main. Notwithstanding many mistakes in practice, the remedy was rightly, however imperfectly, apprehended in theory from the first. The false principle of isolation was to be counteracted by the true principle of combination and union. First, by individuals, through the informal but powerful agency of public meetings, Church unions, and the like; then by the Church herself through the formal and authoritative medium of synods. The great Bishop of Exeter led the way; the Province of Canterbury shortly afterwards followed; then, with slower and more reluctant steps, the Province of York. We can all remember with what unerring instinct of danger every fresh development of synodal action was maligned and ridiculed by the world. But the work went on and prospered, and though it moved but slowly it moved surely, and has scarcely ever, if ever, had occasion to write against its records, "To be undone hereafter." Many earnest and sagacious Churchmen may have thought that Convocation has left undone much that it ought to have done, but it has not done much that it ought to have left undone. Considering the circumstances under which it has been placed, we think few great public revivals have been kept more free from positively false steps.

Synodal action, however, is nothing but the spiritual activity of a combined Episcopate, and it is easy to see that the principle once established, on however small a scale, as the remedy called for by the necessities of the time, could not be confined within the narrow limits of individual provinces. The streams were running from the mountains and

they must needs converge. Communications took place between the English provincial synods; kindly greetings were exchanged between mother and daughter Churches, and between the daughter Churches among themselves. Then, in the far-off South, in one of the smallest of Ecclesiastical Provinces, broke out deadly heresy, and forthwith not that province only but the whole Anglican Communion was astir. The pulse of a common life and a common love vibrated throughout the entire body. The legal position of the Church in the colonies had already been shown to be involved in doubt and confusion, and when the spiritual action of the

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Emming paralel with the shore-famed events there had been for years a patty breasing desire for the renewal of fraternal relatives 26 thy with a parts of our own immediate Commmin but with the whole Cable body. How it first arose pode et say; it was the work of the Spirit according to His Own W. As the other instance so here, the movement began with biviiaks; in private prayers, in private action': then in combined setion, the formation of societies, the A.P.U.C., and the Eastern Church Association. Soon it began to assume its rightful place in Synodal Assemblies; in the American Church first, immediately afterwards in cur own. Stan ing committees were appointed, mutual co-operation sought and obtained. The fruits were soon apparent. The heart of the East began to open to us in a wonderful manner, in multiplied acts of friendliness, in isolated instances of actual Communion, in formal though non-official conferences. Even the Western Church was not wholly unmoved. Hundreds of Roman Catholics joined the A.P.U.C.. a marked reaction began to take place in some quarters against the preposterous claims of the Ultramontanes, and it began to seem not impossible to grave and sober theologians among ourselves that terms of agreement might eventually be framed on which the English Church might unite with the moderate Roman party. The way was not seen to anything more than this: to all human understanding it is easier for a camel to go through the needle's eye than for the genuine Catholic and the Ultramontane elements to combine. They do not really com bine even in the Roman Communion itself, and it is altogether impossible that even an apparent combination should extend beyond it.

Still, even the West was not wholly barren ground; the wellworn dictum of De Maistre was not forgotten; and the result of the whole movement found expression in various ways, among which we may mention the establishment of this REVIEW, the Sermons and Essays on Re-union, and the famous Eirenicon with its consequences. Naturally, however, it was in the direction of the East, as we have said, where there are fewer substantial and traditional obstacles to be surmounted, that the hopes of Re-union were least clouded; and it was in

that direction, therefore, that the most favourable opportunities might be expected to arise.

In both our internal and external relations, then, everything seemed ripe for some unusual action. Until that period in our domestic Ecclesiastical history to which we brought down our summary the two streams had flowed on apart, with the exception of the cautious and tentative measures adopted by the American synods and our own. There had been no corporate effort made to bind the Mother Church of England more closely to her many daughters, and at the same time and by the same agency to stretch out hands of love and affection to the Churches of the two great sister Communions. But the time was now come, and the way was wonderful. Isolation and its resultant Erastianism had in their blind rashness overreached themselves; the barriers which seemed to shut in the Churches of the British Empire suddenly crumbled away, and the spiritual bodies, with their spiritual life renewed, immediately coalesced in a great act of corporate unity, at the very moment when the needs of their own communion demanded a re-assertion of the one unchanging faith, and when that re-assertion would fall with the best effect on the prepared minds of the other great branches of the Church. What had Mr. Long, what had the Privy Council, what had Dr. Colenso, to do with the Re-union of Christendom? Precisely what they had to do in preparing the way for the Lambeth Council. The two great questions of the spiritual and legal independence of Churches and the essential unity of all branches of the Catholic family are in their reality one. never thought of these things a while ago; we saw them only apart when we began to see them at all; now we are learning to see them in union as a stereoscopic whole. And what a vision it is a vision of beauty, yet not visionary.

We

When we realize this, it will no longer seem at all wonderful (as it might do otherwise) that the Re-union element should have obtained such a striking prominence in the proceedings of the Lambeth Conference. There was scarcely an alternative. The only principles on which the Bishops could effect their immediate object were the essential and immutable principles of the unity of the Universal Church. Look, for instance, at Resolutions VIII. and IV. of the September Session, which enunciate the bases of Anglican intercommunion. Mutatis mutandis, they are equally applicable as an Eirenicon for all Christendom. Or look at the still more remarkable "Introduction" to the Resolutions. The Resolutions refer to the wants of one branch; the Introduction, to