ment of its vital power; and we shall be enabled to bear our own temptations and difficulties with more trustful submission.

Foreign missions help us to rise to a worthier apprehension of the truth which we hold, so simple that it comes home to the rudest savage, so vast that it requires the experience of every race to unfold its mysteries in the language of men.

We each have our own theory, our own ideal of action.

We dare not dissemble our convictions even when we submit to the practical necessity of co-operation.

Christianity alone is able to preserve and hallow and combine all that is noblest in the endowments of every nation, pervading with a new energy and consecrating to a new use the manifold gifts of that humanity which God has taken to Himself.

India was saved by the soldiers and statesmen who did not shrink from saying that the province which saved the Empire was "conspicuous for two things, the most successful government, and the most open acknowledgment of Christianity."

Successes leave us with the burden of responsibility. Each blessing comes as a promise, and is as it is used. It ceases to be real when it is made an occasion for rest.

The conquest of India for Christ is the conquest of Asia for Christ. And the conquest of Asia seems to offer the near vision of the consummation of the kingdom of God.

We must be a missionary people. So far we cannot change our destiny. We cannot abdicate our position or alter our heritage. The choice which we have is simply what shall be the message which we bear through the world.

IF

A School of Endian Students

F we are ourselves to draw from India fresh instruction in the mysteries of the divine counsels; if we are to contribute to the establishment of an organisation of the Faith which shall preserve and not destroy all that is precious in the past experience of the native peoples; if we are to proclaim in its fulness a Gospel which is universal and not western; we must keep ourselves and our modes of thought in the background. We must aim at 'something far greater than collecting scattered congregations round English clergy who may reflect to our eye faint and imperfect images of ourselves.

We must adopt every mode of influence which can be hallowed to the service of the Faith,—the asceticism, the endurance, the learning which are indigenous to the country.

We can in some degree, as the Spirit helps us, teach the teachers, but we cannot teach the people. The hope of a Christian India lies in the gathering together of men who shall be, to quote the words of a native journal, "as thoroughly Hindu as they are Christian, and more intensely national than those who are not Christian."

There is nothing that I should more earnestly desire for Cambridge than that some school of Indian students should be formed and sustained to witness to her devotion and to represent her spirit in the East.

We should gain by being brought into closer connection with men among whom the "struggling, hard-working,

hard-living scholar" is the noble ideal of the race: they would gain by feeling that they were called into actual fellowship with a centre of the religious thought of England.

To organise such a school appears to me to be the true University Mission. For it is, in some degree, to

offer to God the firstfruits of the best which He has given us. There is other work to be done abroad, but the Universities should aspire to that which is most difficult; to that which calls for their peculiar gifts; to that which may consecrate, so to speak, their proper work at home. And is it too much to hope that we may yet see on the Indus, or the Ganges, some new Alexandria?

IF

England and her Colonies

F we say that in the providence of God England has been appointed to be the mother of nations, it is with the feeling of overwhelming responsibility, and not of indolent pride.

We shrink from bringing our deepest personal conviction to bear upon questions of state till we unconsciously forget the divine element in the nation.

We fall under the temptation of seeking material solutions for spiritual problems; material remedies for spiritual maladies. The thought of spiritual poverty, of spiritual destitution, is crowded out. We treat the symptoms and neglect the disease itself.

The experience of Australia, as rich in resources as in enterprise, dissipates the illusion which animates such efforts. Vice and squalor find a place in Sydney no less than in London.

Boundless opportunities for industry and the independence of democratic equality have not brought universal competence or true freedom.

If the greatest present dangers of rich and poor are, as they surely are, moral in their origin, they must be removed by a moral cure.

For more than three centuries we have been led to develop individualism in religion, and to regard religion simply as a matter for the soul and God.

And now once again we are beginning to understand the language and the spirit of the Jewish prophets; to feel how the highest privilege of Israel was to be a Messianic people; to see that the message of the Incarnation is social no less than personal; to see that it reveals to us the destiny not of individuals only, but of humanity.

That which can regenerate a man, can regenerate a nation. This, nothing less than this, is the meaning and power of the announcement which still rings in our ears, The Word became flesh.

All around us we can discern the promise of creation, the unspoken expectation which changes the agonies of nature into the travail-pains of a more glorious birth (Rom. viii. 20 ff.) So the great announcement passes into life, and comes forth from life a living faith.

In our English Church seems to lie the best hope of the social Christianity of the future.

It must at least rest in a large measure with the English Church whether the civilisation of the Southern world shall be penetrated by Christianity as a social force.

To this end it must, we readily allow, vindicate to itself more fully than heretofore every force of truth and right and beauty—of spirit and soul and body-by which men are moved.

We grow so timorous about details, so anxious to meet every objection to the faith, that we are in danger of forgetting that we are commissioned to proclaim a message of glad tidings, to which the world and life and the soul of man bear spontaneously the witness of welcome of forgetting that our creed rests upon a fact by which man is bound so closely to man and earth to heaven that, while we hold it, love can never fail and hope can never be desolate. We grow content to interpret Christ's promise to His Church (Matt. xvi. 18) as if it assured to us survival and not victory. We accept the position of a beleaguered garrison, holding some last stronghold at desperate odds, when Christ would have us move forward in His name with a great tide of conquest, before which the last barriers of death and sin shall fall and set free their captives. We think of ourselves and not of God, of our feebleness and not of His might, of our temporal isolation and not of His eternal fellowship.

Yes, faithful is He that calleth. In that assurance we rejoice in our brother's work,1 for the sake of Australia and for the sake of England. He will take with him the wealth of the old life which he has made his own: he will give back to us the energy of the new life which he quickens and guides: he will help us to see the continuity of the old with the new by a vital progress. The prayers of this loved Abbey, closely connected from the first with our Colonial episcopate, will blend with the prayers and prophecies of the distant Cathedral: thoughts stirred here by memories of princes and statesmen with

1 The Consecration of Dr. Barry to the See of Sydney.