Year: 1874

vide observers, no doubt, are ready to say that
the wiser course would have been to suffer
fhe division to become absolute and permanent,
and that this or any body whose left hand is
perpetually fighting its right can have little
strength or leisure for other and higher work.
Upon this point we, of course, have no desire
to offer an opinion. With all other secular
spectators, however, we have been forced to
one or two conclusions by the course of
this Convention; the first of which is.
how few members of any party or
sect have sufficient hight of stature or clear
ness of vision to overlook the whole scope and
attitude of their sect or party; to see its bear
ing on the world and the empty niche in that
world which it ought to fill


In fact, devout and jealous men in every
party (not q few in this very Convention)
hardly seem to know there is any world
at oil outside of their own consecrated
palings. Many learned and eloquent divines
labored under the belief that the vital
question now put before the Episcopal
Church by God and the devil was the
election of DR.. Seymour, or the cutting short
the morning service by half an hour. Many
more, with a fastidious devotion to the
Church they hold so dear, have occu-
pied themselves in setting in order and
beautifying her minutest rubrics or customs,
and will go home well satisfied with the good
ends attained. But to us outside, who lack
their sincere affection for their ancient and
venerable Mother, it seems that they are
strangely blind with regard to that which
surrounds us in these outside precincts. Here
are the great majority of Christian people to
whom alb and chasuble are of no more value
than the dress goods in the shop windows,
who yet are honestly striving to serve God
and their brother, and who need from day to
day live, stirring words of truth to help
them so to strive; the greater majority outside
of these who do not give to the rites of
any church, God overhead or their needy
brother beside them, ten minutes sober thought
in the year, whose brains and whose zeal
powerful and ready bOth) are sworn in the
service of science or politics or money-mak-
ing; back of these again the criminal, ignO


rant masses to whom crime and Ignorance
came as inheritances, and farther and still
farther in the background illimitable multi
tudes who never heard of God or Christ;
swarming Chinese whose souls are strangled
by the needs of their hungry bodies. british
Africans, subtitle and learned heather. our own
>
some scheme more or less fantastic or sound by
which he hopes to make good his claim on the
unknown Father. With these unending null
titudes of humanity in view, God above us
and the darkness of evil close at hand on every
side, discussions on Ritualism, or even altera-
tions in the Prayer Book. hardly seem to us to
cover the whole subject. The arguments.
shrewd and able, the courteous skill in evading
dangerous topics, reminded us of the work of
the employees on train; this one heaps coal
under the engine, that tests the wheels, another
dusts and polishes the gliding and ornaments;
it needs the eye of a master, however. to see
where the train is going, to understand the
country through which it passes and to bring
it safely to the end of its journey.


The Church Congress held at the beginning
OF the Convention impressed the outside public
with a stronger sense Of the reality of EpiscO-
palianism as a mental and moral power, and
her ability to perform her work. Nothing
could have better illustrated the fact that
there is no touchstone of truth like common
sense than this Congress; for common sense
is, after all, the intelligence common to us all,
which fits every man to be jury, counsel and
Judge. Eminent theolOgiaDs came to the Con-
gress primed with treatises into which were
compressed years of experience and study, bit
they fell heavy and dead on the public ear.
But when Dr. Clarke, in a few short pungent
sentences, described the two classes of clergy


men in his church, the priest produced by one
kind of education and the man sent out among
men by the other; OF when Bishop Whipple, an
active worker among the savages on our border,
urged the vital question before the Church to
be not crucifixes or abs but our brother man,
the sharp. live truth of their little homlies
reused and moved every heart. If they had
served as hint to the Convention which
followed its dignifed and able work might
have been more effective on the world without.