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I do not venture to suggest the rules of the fellowship which I foresee, but I cannot be mistaken as to its main characteristics. The fellowship must be natural. It must not depend for its formation or its permanence on any appeals to morbid or fantastic sentiment. It must accept the facts of life, as seen in the relations of the family, for the ground of its constitution. It must be an attempt not to realise counsels of perfection for a select few, but to give a healthy type of living for all.

The fellowship must be English. The nation is to the race what the family is to the nation. The nation represents on a sufficiently large scale the lessons which are conveyed by God through a common history, a common language, a common home. The nation is an element no less important in the life of the Church than in the life of humanity. And England, alone among the nations, has received the power which is essential for the task which we contemplate, the power of assimilating new ideas without breaking with the past.

The fellowship must be comprehensive. It must deal not with opinion, or feeling, or action only, but with the whole sum of life. It must proclaim that God is not to be found more easily in the wilderness and the solitary place' than in

the study, or in the market, or in the workshop, or by the fireside. It must banish the strange delusion by which we suppose that things temporal and spiritual can be separated in human action, or that we can render rightly to Cæsar that which is not in the very rendering rendered also to God.

The fellowship must be social. Every member of it must hold himself pledged to regard his endowments of character, of power, of place, of wealth, as a trust to be administered with resolute and conscious purpose for the good of men: pledged to spread and deepen the sense of one life, one interest, one hope, one end for all, in the household, in the factory, in the warehouse, in the council-room: pledged to strive as he has the opportunity to bring all things that are great, and pure and beautiful within the reach of every fellow-worker: pledged to labour so that to the full extent of his example and his influence toil may be universally honoured as service to the state, literature may be ennobled as the spring and not the substitute of thought, art (too often the minister of luxury) may be hallowed as the interpreter of the outward signs of God's working.

The fellowship must be open. The uniform of the soldier is at once a symbol and a safe

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guard. It reminds others of his obligations, and supports him in the endeavour to fulfil them. It makes some grave faults practically impossible. So too a measured and unostentatious simplicity, a simplicity in dress, in life, in establishment, widely adopted by choice and not of necessity, will be an impressive outward witness to the Christian ideal, and it will help towards the attainment of it.

The fellowship must be rational. It must welcome light from every quarter, as found by those who know that every luminous ray, reflected or refracted a hundred times, comes finally from one source. It must make it clear that Christians as Christians strive not for victory but for truth, that they, of all men, are least willing to satisfy the soul by mutilating its capacities, or deadening its sensibility.

The fellowship above all must be spiritual. It must rest avowedly on the belief that the voice of God is not silent among us, and the vision of God not withdrawn from His people. It must labour in the assurance that the difference of our age from the first age is not the difference of the dull, dim twilight from the noon, but that of common earth, flooded with sunshine, from the solitary mountain-top kindled to a lamp of dawn. It must find occasion for

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continual praise and thanksgiving in victories of faith, from that of the first martyr St Stephen to that of the last boy in U-Ganda who knew at least how to die for his Saviour. It must not weary of proclaiming that we-we poor, frail, erring creatures-live and move and have our Acts xvii. being in God, and that we are surrounded by sacraments of His Presence and of His grace. It must summon its followers not in the name of well-being and happiness but in the name of duty and love, made known to us in their scope and their efficacy by the Birth and the Passion of Christ. It must bring home to each noblest and each meanest that he—he in his great estate, he in his utter desolation-is a temple, a priest, a sacrifice to a living God.

Such a fellowship of 'brethren and sisters of the common hope' may seem to some to be visionary to others, I think, it will be only the expression of their own deep longings. It is at least, as far as I can judge, nothing more than the translation of our Creed into action according to the conditions of the time. The way to the new and fuller life must still be, as it always has been, through heaven.

And if it seem visionary, I can only say that I have suggested nothing which has not been realised on a large scale, under harder circum

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stances and with scantier knowledge than our own by Franciscans, by Moravians, by Quakers. Those Societies were not disciplined by that discernment of the laws of national and human growth which has been given to our later years. They were not supported by that catholic sympathy with every energy of man which has been quickened among us by a large interpretation of nature and history. We have learnt what they could not know. The counsel of God for humanity has been made clear to us not only in its general character, but also in the mode of its fulfilment. We can estimate fairly the resources of the race. No dark continents, no untried peoples, fill the dim background of our picture of the world with incalculable possibilities. The whole field lies before us. We look upon all the provinces of the kingdom of God. We can communicate to others the noblest which we have and save them from the long pains of our discipline. All things are ready.

All things are ready: and to you, my younger brethren, the charge is first offered of claiming the final victory for Christ. The issue will, I believe, if we may trust the cycles of the past, be decided in your generation. Look backward, then, for the inspiring encouragement of Christian experience. Look forward for the glorious as