the Christians of the Eastern Church and of your own, which, abiding by the enact ments of the Apostles and the Holy Synods, neither admit of any absolute, arbitrary, and irresponsible monarchy in the flock of Christ, nor allow the faith to be defined after each man's fancy."

"Saluting both your most reverend Grace and all the right reverend Bishops of your Church with the brotherly salutation in Christ, we beseech God to grant unto you all length of days, health, and prosperity; and unto all the Christ-loving people of England and their rulers, the blessing of salvation."

Rev. E. FORBES, of Paris.

HAVING resided many years on the Continent of Europe, and specially in the city of Paris, from which I am now one of the many refugees, I feel no small interest in that part of the question which refers to Christian union with the Reformed Churches of the Continent. I believe that the basis of all real union is to be sought for rather in identity of doctrine than identity in Church Government and Church Ritual. Where there is a serious diversity of doctrine, whether in adding to, or taking from, the great truths of the gospel, there can be no unity.

This position appears to me clearly supported both by Scripture and the articles of our Church. I find St. Paul guarding the domain of doctrinal truth in words which in our day would be looked upon as most uncharitable,-viz., "Though we, or an angel from heaven, preach any other gospel to you, let him be accursed." I find the loving John saying, "Whosoever abideth not in the doctrine of Christ hath not God; and if there come any unto you and bring not this doctrine, receive him not into your house, neither bid him God speed." Still further, in the history of the seven Churches, their standing or falling did not depend on their form of Christian government-no fault was found with it -but all turned on whether they "held fast Christ's name and did not deny His faith." Wherever there was one Lord, one faith, one baptism," there they never exhorted to keep the unity of spirit in the bonds of peace; and in the large-hearted Peter, the terms of unity were thus defined,-" Grace be with all those who love our Lord Jesus Christ in sincerity and truth."

When we turn to the articles of our Prayer-Book, whilst I do see grave difficulties in the way of seeking for unity with any Church or Churches holding doctrines "repugnant to the word of God," which are stigmatized as "blasphemous fables and dangerous deceits"; before we seek for unity in this direction, either those errors must be aban. doned, or we must walk over the ashes of our Prayer-Book and our Bible.

I need not say these expressions do not apply to the Reformed Churches of the Continent. I do not find one word in the articles of our Prayer-Book to unchurch them. I find the definition of a Church to be "a congregation of faithful men, in which the pure word of God is preached and the Sacraments are duly administered." And still further, "Every National Church has authority to ordain, change, and abolish ceremonies or rites of a Church, ordained only by man's authority."

Tha! liberty our own Church claimed and exercised—that liberty she gave to them. And when we come to matters of far deeper importance, when we compare the confessions of faith in the Reformed Churches, such as the Scandinavian, the Augsburg, the Helvetic, the Bohemian, we shall find them in marvellous harmony with our own. Still furtherwhen we go back some 300 years, we shall find the greatest divines of our Church writing to such men as Bullinger, Peter Martyr, and Rodolph Gualter, not only in terms of

friendship, but in terms which showed they were agreed with them in all the saving vital doctrines of Christianity.

Coming further down the stream of time, I find Archbishop Grindal thus writing to them:-"We most fully agree with your Churches in your confessions of faith." I find Bishop Hall saying, "There is no difference in any essential matters between the Church of England and her sisters of the Reformation." I find Bishop Davenant going further -"We acknowledge them as brethren in Christ, and profess we have a brotherly and holy communion with them." The great and learned Archbishop Usher used these remarkable words,-" However I must think some of these Churches defective in discipline, yet, to testify my communion with them, I would receive the blessed sacrament at the hands of a Dutch minister in Holland, or a French minister at Charenton."

.

These fathers of our Church found the elements of Christian union in those Reformed Churches rather than in those of the east or the west. I plead for the same brotherly Christian feeling,—that they be not put out in the cold shade of the uncovenanted mercies of God, but rather that the right hand of Christian fellowship be extended to them. I know that among several of the members of these Churches there is much error, and by none is it more seriously deplored than by the good men in those Churches. I know too there is much life. I know there are men whom I highly honour, such as Gaussen, D'Aubignè, Grandpierre, Monod, Brosier, Krummacher, and Valette. True, there are many things in these Churches differing from our own, (and I have never valued our own more highly than since I have been brought in contact with the Reformed Churches of the Continent)—there are many things in which, I say, we differ, and consider them defective, such as Church government, Church ritual, and Church robes; but when we come to great, vital, saving truths,—not how a man should be habited whilst officiating in the Church below, but how he should be clothed when standing before God in judgment,—whether clothed in his own righteousness or in the righteousness of our Lord Jesus Christ, which is unto and upon all them that believe,then there is perfect agreement. In the words of a living prelate of our Church, spoken to me many years ago, I fully concur-"I have known," said he, "good men in the church of Prussia, of France, Geneva, Scotland-the Church of England—and between them all, on vital truth, there is scarcely the shadow of a difference; and, my friends, in that day when the scaffolding of time and the scaffolding of Churches shall fall, and a building of God shall stand forth shining with the glories of eternity, when the wheat shall be gathered into God's garner, it shall not be asked what hedges divided it when it grew upon earth.

FRIDAY AFTERNOON, 14th OCTOBER.

The Right Rev. the President took the Chair at 2 o'clock.

CHRISTIAN UNITY. PART II.-WHAT PRACTICAL STEPS MAY BE TAKEN TOWARDS THE RE-UNION OF NONCONFORMISTS TO THE CHURCH.

The Rev. P. G. Medd, M.A., Fellow and Tutor of University College, Oxford, Rector of Barnes, read the following Paper :THE time being limited in which I have to deal with a great and complicated question, I must in advance ask hearers now and readers afterwards, to remember that fact, in view of inevitable shortcomings, both in matter and in style, and of some appearance, possibly, of dogmatismwhich I am very far from feeling arising from the enunciation of opinions and suggestions without the opportunity of stating the grounds on which they rest.

No practical steps of policy towards any great object can have any chance of success, however wisely planned, unless the minds of men in general, especially when large communities have to be dealt with, have been first prepared for action and movement by the diffusion and adoption of right ideas, by the general spread of a favourable and sus ceptible tone of feeling and sentiment beforehand.

How painfully, for instance, during recently past weeks, have we had to reconcile ourselves to the conviction that no intervention, however kindly meant, of neutrals, however deeply and feelingly interested, can have any effect towards reconciling mutually exasperated combatants until the sentiments of those combatants towards each other shall have undergone a favourable change, which shall dispose them to a calm and reasonable settlement.

So evident does it seem that ideas must always underlie policy,—that feeling must prepare the way for, and supply the motive to action,-that the general tone of men's minds must be favourable before we can proceed to what are commonly understood by practical steps, that I shall make no further apology for basing my own contribution to this great subject on this principle. Indeed, I take leave to consider that, in the matter before us, the most really practical of all steps, at least in the beginning, will be those which tend to rectify our fundamental conceptions as to the relations in which we and our Nonconformist brethren in Christ stand to each other, as things are now, and as to our consequent duties towards each other.

I say our Nonconformist "brethren in Christ," for I do not undertake to deal with the general question of the Church's duty towards all who are outside her external pale, but only towards those who are commonly understood by the designation "Orthodox Dissenters;" men who,

with whatever drawbacks, and amid whatever deplorable antagonism, still hold the essentials of saving Christian belief,—practically, I may say, the Baptists, the Independents, and the Wesleyans.

are Chris

1. The first necessary step, then, to the rectification of our fundamental conceptions is the frank and sincere recognition that these men are our Once get "brethren in Christ." Ce n'est que le premier pas qui coûte. this really and heartily avowed, and I believe we have taken a larger step towards that blessed consummation which, if we tians indeed, we and they alike must most earnestly desire, than any that will have to follow. It must-by God's help it shall be possible for brethren to live together in the same house. Does it not consist of Of whom does the Catholic Church consist? the whole body of those who, by whatsoever hands, have been baptized into the Threefold Name? Is not every person who has been validly, albeit irregularly, baptized, and has not afterwards denied the Faith, a member of the great Christian Society, a brother in Christ? Some seem to ignore or even to deny this, practically, if not in words; yet, on And it is a the strictest Ecclesiastical principles, it is exactly true. truth that seems to me to go a very long way indeed. Nay, it is on this very truth that the strength of the Church's position rests. Mother of all the baptized, and as such she claims the dutiful allegiance of them all. Her children they are; her palaces are their natural home by very birthright, though some, with whatever degree of excuse, or with whatever degree of fault of their own or of their predecessors, may have, for a while, forsaken her for homes of their own devising. Let her fulfil more and more a Mother's part, and then, in the exact proportion that she does so, her claim will be allowed.

She is the

We shall never clear our ideas on this very fundamental point until we firmly grasp the all-important distinction between the separated bodies in their corporate aspect, and the individual Christians of whom they are composed. While we must, on all Scriptural and Catholic grounds, maintain that their societies, their corporate organizations, are merely human, and of human origin, as their names bear witness, and that, in so far as those organizations are separate from, and, within the same local limits, in opposition to, the one historic Church, which in its unbroken continuity of descent is and can be but one, they are contrary to the will and the law of Christ, and in principle wrong; we must yet, on the same grounds, admit that the individual units whereof those separate societies are composed are members and children of the one Church, "bone of our bone and flesh of our flesh," though by inherited position wherein they were born they are become "strangers unto their brethren, and aliens unto

their own Mother's children."

It is impossible to enter here into the question of what amount of justification or excuse there may have been, either for the first origination of these separate bodies, out of visible communion with the Catholic Church, or for their continued existence now under altered circumstan

ces.

We have to deal, not with the originators, but with the providential inheritors, of a separate position, whom we must regard much more gently and with even larger equitable allowance. To deny that God's blessing has rested and does rest on their honest endeavours to do good and to win souls to Christ, to deny that they have carried the Gospel to whole classes in this country, and still more in America, whom but for

them it might never have reached at all, to deny that God's Holy Spirit works among them in the fruitful conversion of souls from the power of Satan unto God, can only be done in sheer ignorance of facts or in sheer and audacious defiance of them.

I am not here to defend or apologise for the spirit that boasts itself of "The Dissidence of Dissent," which plumes itself on separation for separation's sake, and would seem to erect envying and strife into virtues, and call Schism itself a blessing a spirit from which modern English Nonconformity is, especially in its public manifestations, by no means free. We have not so learned Christ. We must abhor such a spirit, and grieve over it as the very worst product of religious division, a mere glorying in our shame. But have we no need, in our thoughts and speech about Dissent, and in our bearing towards Dissenters, to be on our guard against a sort of Ecclesiastical Chauvinisme, the very opposite of that Charity which "vaunteth not itself, and is not puffed up," a sort of implied underlying assumption that our own Church, in her system and practical working, in her Liturgy and Services and minis trations, is the very ideal of perfection, that every possible spiritual blessing is everywhere freely afforded through her agencies to all sorts and conditions of men, and that if any find her not exactly a careful nursing mother to them, the fault must be in themselves? Can any thoughtful or educated English Churchman, however devoted, however sensible of the blessings of which she is the channel to himself, lay for an instant that flattering unction to his soul? Must not any one who knows the past history and present condition, improved and improving though it be, of the Reformed Church of England, admit that the phenomena of English Dissent are not to be wholly ascribed to inevitable and inseparable difficulties, or a mere impracticable untowardness in the nature of things or of other people's tempers, but are largely due, or were in their origin, to blunders of policy, to errors of temper, and to neglect on the Church side, or to the unhappy mixture and entanglement, from the Civil Wars onwards, of politics with religion, and the miserable use, both before and after that period, of secular power-and this on both sides-to crush religious opponents? What was the religious condition of England, and of England's Church, here and in her great American Colonies, when God raised up in her one, who, in view of his work and its results, must be pronounced the greatest man she has yet seen-John Wesley? Why was that work allowed to become external to the Church to which he personally was unswervingly loyal? Might not that vast harvest have been secured to the Church, to the unspeakable advantage of all, had the line taken towards his movement been one of affectionate welcome and encouragement and fatherly direction? Might not the Church have been now in an impregnable position in the hearts and affections of the mass of the people of England, could she only have risen to the occasion, and have supplemented her existing system by that admirable organization which is now, I fear, rapidly hardening into a more marked separation and antagonism?

In view of these considerations, and of the lamentable fact that in our own day there have been those who, untaught by experience, would deal with a great religious movement with a like impolitic narrowness, surely we should not be high-minded but humbled. Does not every separated religious body around us exist in great measure through some