denly, the net of some quiet country parish is filled with the influx of a great multitude; the village becomes a town, the town a city, almost in a day; and the net is strained to breaking. Or, again, some new or hitherto neglected field of labour is discovered; some class hitherto overlooked, some evil or sin or suffering that has been burrowing under the surface of society is suddenly laid bare; and the Church, by virtue of her claim to be national, is called on to deal with this and to deal with it at once; and this, too, is especially a trial which increases with success. All workers know how work brings and makes work, how each field of labour that we till brings us still to the verge of another and another; how still the sweep of our net widens and widens, and the weight it encloses tries more and more our strength, until we tremble lest it break. This, again, is a peril of our day; but a peril that is inevitable, and to be thankfully accepted as a token of success.

Such are some of the dangers arising from the very conditions of our work, perils of success rather than of failure. We are far, indeed, from saying that these are all our perils, even of this kind, or that there are not many of another kind. We are far from saying that we have not to grieve and repent for dangers caused by our own sins and our own neglects; far from saying that, as we gather here to ask for God's blessing on our Congress, our hearts should not be full of these; that as we draw nigh to His table, "the remembrance of them" should not be "grievous unto us and the burden intolerable." I would only remind you that if that prayer were to be fully answered; if from this gathering there were to come forth a Pentecost, yet that Pentecost would have its perils still; that we should still have cause to fear the breaking net, still need to beckon to each other for help. Yes! this next to our own individual repentance and awakened zeal; this is our great duty, our great safety against the perils of our day—it is to call the partners together. As the net breaks, and wherever it breaks, there should the fishermen gather together. The point of danger should be still the point of union. Wherever the Faith is threatened with heresy, or the Church with schism, for the machinery of the Church's work proves inadequate to some sudden strain, there should the partners assemble to lay upon the net a stronger and a closer grasp; to draw it, with their united strength, ever more strongly and steadily to shore.

We beckon, then, to our partners. But who are they? What allies shall the Church call to aid her in her task?

And, in the first place, there is one partner long associated with her in her task, that seems less and less disposed to hear her call. The State was once the active partner of the national Church in her great work. There was a time, when for a Christian nation, a national recognition of God was held to be a solemn duty, and to make national provision for the knowledge of His law, and the worship of His name its truest wisdom. This is so no longer. The axiom of all modern statesmanship, more and more plainly avowed, is this, that nations as nations, have nothing to do with God: that religion is the affair of the individual solely and exclusively, and one in which the State has, and ought to have, no concern whatever: that the Church-like any other voluntary association of individuals—is to be protected so long as it is peaceable, and sternly repressed whenever it grows in any way troublesome. But the idea that both Church and nation are each a divine institution -powers, each of them "ordained of God," having each their ground in real relations to God and to each other, having each their duties to each other, which they may not neglect without peril and without sin, this is scouted as the merest folly.

I am not asking now whether this view be true or false, whether the modern idea of a godless, creedless, prayerless State be the great truth or the great heresy of the age. I only say that its existence is a fact, and that under its influence the divorce of Church and State seems rapidly accomplishing itself all over Christendom. Men may differ, do differ as to whether this divorce between Church and State be desirable or no. All admit it to be probable. Statesmen are questioning whether the State, as they think it ought to be, can continue its union with the Church as it is. Churchmen are questioning how long the Church, as they think it ought to be, can continue its union with the State, as it is likely to be; how long the unbelieving husband may be sanctified by the believing wife, and at what point the infidelity or the cruelty of the husband may compel the wife, not indeed to seek, but with a saddened heart, to accept the putting away. To these and other questions men will give-are giving-very various answers. But all feel that while these are among the questions of our day, it is in vain for the Church to call for fresh

aid from the State.

On whom else shall she call? On those other partners, still

engaged in the same emprize, but whom the storms and tides of the past have drifted so far away that they are all but beyond the reach of her voice? Oh, if she could but recall these! If, without the loss of one vital truth possessed by each, if only with the lightening of each ship by the casting overboard of its evil freight of error or passion or prejudice, all these partner ships could come together once more! If, for one hour Christendom were one, what in that hour might it not achieve! Shall it ever, can it ever be, that the common peril of the breaking net, the danger of the total loss of faith from the earth, should thus unite those severed Churches and divergent sects? If this ever come, it will come, not by the adopting of each others errors, nor by the servile copying of each others defects; nor yet by agreeing to call diversity agreement and palpable schism unity. It will come by the faithful and searching reformation of each communion for itself and by itself; it will come by the turning, not of each to other, but of each and all to the common centre Christ.

Meanwhile it is our first duty to call upon our own partnersupon the members of our own Anglican Communion-to call them, not to union, we are still one, but to cooperation; to cooperation in counsel, in organization, in effort; to such cooperation, to such united and organized effort as alone can cope with the perils of our day. It is here especially that our Church life needs strengthening and is largely capable of it. The religious revival of this century has filled the Church with individual life. It has even revived and largely strengthened the first unit of ecclesiastical organization—parochial life. But though this is far from complete, we have hardly made a step beyond it. The higher, the larger form of organization, the life of the Diocese, of the Province, the life of the whole Church, this is but faintly beginning to stir. We are a collection of regiments, but the banding of regiments into divisions, of divisions into one great army, the power of concentrating the whole weight of the Church as one man, and throwing it collectively upon the point of need, how far have we attained to this? How far, again, have we utilised all the wealth of materials that the Church possesses in her laity? How far have we organized, and brought to bear systematically upon the vice and the sin and the sorrow of our day, the vigorous business-like aptitude of our practical laymen, or the tender might of Christian woman's love? How far have we aimed at catching and gathering into the one great central reservoir of the Church

the half wasted springs of individual benevolence, and pouring them all in well directed channels to every spot that needs them? All this we have scarce begun to do. It is the work, it is the need of our day. It is the felt need that utters itself in all such gatherings for conference and counsel as these. Synods, Convocations, Congresses, all express the deep yearnings of all earnest churchmen for the completion and the manifestation of the organic life of the Church, as distinguished from the separate life of its individual members. These gatherings are the acknowledgment of that truth, forgotten by those who sneer at all such meetings, as assemblies for talk. They who so speak forget that even if the talk did not result, as it has resulted, in valuable action, even if conference did not bring, as it has brought, more than one practical result, the gathering is in itself a good thing, may be a very blessed thing in that Church to which He has said, "Where two or three are gathered together in my name there am I in the midst of them."

And if the meeting of a Church Congress any where would be a token of this desire of unity, especially so is our meeting here, and now. The fact that the Church Congress, no longer content with giving as it has given from the first a welcome place to Irish Churchmen in its assemblies, has resolved that this year the place of its assembling shall be Ireland; the fact that this proposal came, not from Ireland but from England, that our English brethren anticipated the invitation we were hastening to offer, and the welcome we were eager to assure them of-this is a significant fact. It is a sign of that ever-growing spirit of brotherhood which every meeting of brethren generates. It is more. It is the declaration, on the part of our English brethren, of their deep and deepening conviction that we are members of a united church; united, not merely nor mainly by the outward bond of a common establishment, but by the inner and organic unity of a common life; joined together in a union which the State never made, and which the State can never therefore take

away.

now.

This were a significant fact at any time; it is tenfold more so Now, when our gathering occurs in so grave a crisis in the history of the united Church-the united Church we say advisedly, for the perils of the crisis are not for us alone. It is indeed a grave and an anxious moment for our common country

and our common Church, that in which we are assembled. Think what men may of the causes or the merits of the struggle through which we are passing, all must feel that its issues for good or evil must be deep and wide and lasting; that they involve the assertion of more than one great principle which, by the ruthless, resistless logic of events must work itself out to great and yet unforeseen results. Such moments of great organic change are fraught with peril both to the State and to the Church. We say to the Church as distinguished from the Establishment; for we know full well, what we are so often accused of forgetting, that neither the Establishment nor the Endowment is the Church; that her "life consisteth not in the abundance of the things that she possesseth." This is as true for the Church as it is for the individual. But it is, nevertheless, equally true for the individual as for the Church that the loss of all or most of his possessions, the sudden and violent change in all his outward circumstances and relations, must seriously try and endanger even his spiritual life. We know that at such a moment his friends will anxiously watch how he bears himself, how the life that is in him may sustain him under the shock of such a trial.

It is at such a moment-when we are threatened with such a trial—a trial which involves much more than that of loss of money only-a moment when the anxiety of suspense is even harder to bear than the trial itself may prove, should it come upon us—at such a moment, in the providence of God, you, our English brethren, have come amongst us. You have come, we love to know, to help us with your sympathy, your counsel, your prayers; come with the not unnatural desire to see and judge us for yourselves; come to watch how we bear ourselves in the presence of a danger that may one day be yours.

We bid you one and all a hearty and a loving welcome-all the more hearty and the more loving because we believe that you represent the feelings towards us of the large majority of our English brethren. We believe, we know, that it is not in their hearts, any more than it is in yours, to watch in coward and selfish security, from your harbour of present safety the perils and the efforts of your brethren caught in the storm and struggling with the waves; to note with sneering critiscism how, as they toil against the storm, their movements have not all the exact order, nor their voices quite the measured calm their critics can boast of; to scoff at their sea craft; to exult over their breaking net. You

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