preme example of the loyalty which attaches the English-speaking race in its many and wide ramifications by ties of silent sympathy to the Church of England.

The Church has shared the fate of the English-speaking race in its worldwide diffusiveness. If there has been an expansion of England, so has there been an expansion of the Church of England as well. It may be true that that expansion "has been in most cases simply the following up of the unexampled expansion of commerce, dominion, intellectual and moral civilization which has been granted to England, and which has made the English-speaking people one of the great ruling factors in the present and future history of the world." But the expansion of England has necessarily imparted a new strength to the Church of England. It could not but happen that the .Church of the nation, whose Empire includes something like one-fourth part of the habitable world and of its population, should rise to a heightened sense of responsibility and opportunity. "In religion," to quote Lord Acton's words," "as in so many things the product of the centuries" since the Reformation "has favored the new elements, and the centre of gravity moving from the Mediterranean to the Oceanic, from the Latin to the Teuton, has also passed from the Catholic to the Protestant"; and the Church of England, like the nation itself, may be said, in Sir John Seeley's striking phrase, to have entered upon so great a possession, as it were, "in a fit of absence of mind.”

The Church, then, has been spiritually responsive to the political and industrial energy which has in the last three or four centuries created the British Empire. If it cannot be said of her in the fine figure which Edgar

4 Barry, "The Ecclesiastical Expansion of England," p. 8.

sLectures on Modern History," Inaugural Lecture on the Study of History, p. 9.

Quinet applies to the Church at large, that she has preceded the peoples like a pillar of fire in their migrations, at least she has followed her own people with an illuminating and sanctifying power to their new homes. She has become something more than the Church of England; something like the Church of the British Empire. Other Churches indeed-other denominations -have evinced an activity not less impressive than her own in evangelistic and missionary enterprise. But it is the historical relation of the Church of England to the English people which has given her her peculiar influence upon the English-speaking race. "The conception of an English patriarchate quasi alterius orbis papa," says Bishop Creighton, "was as old as Anselm and was almost realized by Wolsey." But it is only within the last fifty years that such a conception has promised to become a reality. For the daughter churches of the Church of England in all parts of the British Empire and beyond it, while asserting their prerogatives of independent organization and legislation, have tended more and more to look for sympathy and support to the Church and to the episcopate at home above all, to the Archbishop of Canterbury. Lambeth Palace, as a centre of world-wide spiritual influence, has become, or is becoming, a second Vatican. The Archbishop, whose home it is, holds in his hands the threads of spiritual activities reaching outwards to the limits of the known world. is in virtue of his ecumenical office, which is not the less real because as yet it is not formally realized, that he summons or invites the Bishops and other representatives of the Churches in communion with the Church of England, as if for a visit ad limina, to enter into counsel with him upon the duties, responsibilities and opportunities,

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"Historical Lectures and Addresses," P.

166.

the failures and successes, the possible developments and amplifications of the Church all the world over. This is the motive of the Lambeth Conference, which will meet for the fifth time, and of the Pan-Anglican Congress, which will meet for the first time, this year. It is true that the Church of England, after assuming an independent national status at the Reformation, was slow in rising to the conception of her imperial responsibility. Bishop Creighton indeed claims that

Elizabeth, in a time of great distress and difficulty, stood alone among her ministers and directed England's course, against their judgment of temporary expediency, steadily in this direction. For some time she alone understood the difference between an English Church and an Anglican Church. Owing to her resoluteness there was time for the lesson to be learnt, and Laud was the first who fully apprehended its full significance. To him the Church of England was not, as it had been to his predecessors, an arrangement for expressing the religious consciousness of the English people. It was a system instinct with life, full of mighty possibilities, with a worldwide mission peculiarly its own.

But so high a vision could scarcely dawn upon the mind of the Church of England as a whole in a single generation. There were two inevitable dangers to be overcome before the Church could assume a universal character. The Elizabethan and Caroline divines were mainly occupied in justifying the Anglican ecclesiastical position against the Church of Rome on the one side and against Continental Protestantism on the other. It was at their hands that the Church of England acquired and asserted her well-defined Catholic, reformed, central character. But no sooner had she vindicated her orthodoxy, her historical continuity, and her sacramental system, than there fell 7 Ibid. p. 178.

upon her the religious inertia which is for Churches as for individuals the almost certain penalty of breaking, in however righteous a cause, with ancient traditional modes of belief and worship. In the history of religious experience few confessions are more pathetically interesting than the language in which Luther, when once the first fresh reforming enthusiasm of his life had spent itself, lamented the difficulty of sustaining in altered circumstances the faith, the sanctity, and the spiritual devotion which had been so natural to him under the shadow of the Catholic Church. For the Church of England the eighteenth century, although it has been sometimes unjustly depreciated, was upon the whole an age of spiritual languor; it was not an age of missionary aggressiveness. At the beginning of the eighteenth century "there were not a score of clergymen of the English Church ministering outside the limits of this country, nor was Nonconformity more fully represented."

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The venerable Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts was founded in the year 1701. On the 16th of February 1738-9 Bishop Butler preached before the Society "at their anniversary meeting in the Parish Church of St. Mary-le-Bow" his wellknown sermon on "our factories abroad and in the colonies to which we are related by their being peopled from our own mother-country and subjects, indeed, very necessary ones, to the same Government with ourselves." A few years before his appeal had been anticipated by the self-sacrificing ministry of Bishop Berkeley in Rhode Island and of John and Charles Wesley in Georgia. But as yet it could touch the consciences only of individuals; it evoked no echo in the large heart of the Church.

8 Tucker, "The English Church in Other Lands," p. 19.

9 Bishop Berkeley left England in 1728, the Wesleys in 1735.

The Prayer Book in its structure and language is a witness, the more significant as being undesigned, to the early temper of Anglican Churchmanship. It is a composition of wonderful range and beauty, second only, as Charles Simeon said, to the Bible itself. It contains many prayers embodying the spiritual experiences of Christians in more than a thousand years. But in some respects its contents and its omissions are alike disappointing. It abounds in rather servile petitions for the Sovereign and the Royal Family. It breathes an atmosphere of alarm, as though not the Church only but individual Christians were living in constant peril. But in no single prayer does it express the sense of imperial responsibility. In none does it recognize the evangelization of the world as the supreme duty of the Christian Church.

The missionary spirit of the English Reformation may be said to date from the Methodist revival. When John Wesley said "the world is my parish," he asserted a principle wider perhaps than he himself knew it to be. His own life, with its record of more than 40,000 sermons, was mainly limited to the area of the British Isles; but the spirit of his teaching was such as transcended political and territorial limitations.

The Evangelical movement in the Church of England was the direct result of the Methodist movement which the Church had unwisely driven out of her pale. It exhibited the same worldwide spiritual ambition. The leading representatives of Evangelicism, the members of "the Clapham sect" which Sir James Stephen has so well described, if they were deeply concerned for the salvation of their own and their neighbors' souls, were not less keenly alive to the duty of bringing religion to bear as a saving force upon political and social questions, upon the elevation

of the national life in its various aspects and upon the reclamation and regeneration of mankind.

The societies formed as the results of the Evangelical movement about the beginning of the nineteenth century, such as the Church Missionary Society, the British and Foreign Bible Society, and the Religious Tract Society, reflected the sense of a duty in the Church of England to all nations within and beyond the British Empire." But the spirit underlying those societies went still further. Readers of the life of William Wilberforce know how eagerly he and his colleagues in the House of Commons seized upon the opportunity afforded by the renewal of the East India Company's Charter in 1813 to throw India open to the missionaries of the Cross. They succeeded so far as to incorporate in the grant of the new Charter resolutions affirming that "it is the duty of this country to promote the interest and happiness of the native inhabitants of the British Dominions in India, and that such measures ought to be adopted as may tend to the introduction among them of useful knowledge and of religious and moral improvement," and that "in the furtherance of the same objects sufficient facilities shall be afforded by law to persons desirous of going to and remaining in India for the purpose of accomplishing these benevolent designs."

The first Bishop of Calcutta-Bishop Middleton-was consecrated on the 8th of May, 1814, but privately in the Chapel of Lambeth Palace, and with such timidity that the sermon preached at his consecration by the Dean of Winchester-Dr. Rennell-was not allowed to be published. Yet the ceremony of that day, however carefully it might be veiled, was a sign which

10 The Church Missionary Society and the Religious Tract Society were both founded in 1799; the British and Foreign Bible Society in 1803.

could not be mistaken. It was a public reversal of the policy by which the officials of the East India Company had forbidden William Carey to land in Bengal except under the thin disguise of an indigo planter, and had afterwards driven him out of their territory to take refuge in the Danish settlement of Serampore. It was a confession of the practical no less than the spiritual failure waiting upon the sorry attempt of a Christian nation to disown or disguise its Christianity in the face of the heathen. Not all Anglo-Indian governors and administrators would adopt the emphatic testimony of Lord Lawrence, that the missionaries had done more good to India than all other Europeans; but there is probably not one of them who would hesitate to acknowledge the medical, intellectual, moral and spiritual benefits which have sprung from the work of European missionaries, both men and women, in India. To-day the Metropolitan Province of India and Ceylon includes as many as eleven bishoprics.

That the Christianization of India should have been regarded as an undertaking scarcely less perilous than ridiculous is not perhaps altogether surprising. Henry Martyn himself admitted that the conversion of a Brahmin would seem to him as great a miracle as the raising of a dead body to life. But it may well be a subject of surprise, if not of astonishment, that the British Government should have designed in 1788 to establish the first colonial settlement in Australia without taking any thought for its spiritual welfare. It was not until 1829 that the Church of England assumed an organic relation to the Australian colonies. In that year all Australia was made an archdeaconry of the See of Calcutta. Bishop Wilson, writing in September, 1833, from Calcutta to the Archdeacon of New South Wales, who was 6000 miles away, used the following pa

thetic words: "Whoever else may hope to visit New South Wales from Calcutta, I at my age of fifty-six can never expect such a happiness.” Yet he sent the Archdeacon his episcopal directions upon Confirmation and upon the consecration of churches. Three years later, in 1836, Archdeacon Broughton was consecrated Bishop of Australia—a continent which now possesses. twenty bishoprics and three provinces.

But the spiritual duty which the Church was impotent to perform the leaders of Evangelicism attempted. It was through the influence of Wilberforce and his colleagues that Richard Johnson was permitted to accompany, as a voluntary chaplain, the first batch of exiles to Botany Bay. He could do but little, yet he did something, to keep the light of Christian faith and practice alive amidst "his people."

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To his colleague and successor Samuel Marsden belongs the glory of having preached the Gospel not only in Australia but in New Zealand. For after laboring among the convicts in New South Wales he became the apostle of the Maoris; and it is said that 30,000 Maori converts received Holy Baptism within sixteen years as the result of his ministry. There are now seven bishoprics in the province of New Zealand.

Other events there were, even earlier than these, which tended to the diffusion of Anglo-Saxon Christianity. It is probable that the persistent refusal of the British Government to allow the consecration of bishops for the American colonies was one, and not the least powerful, among the causes of alienation between the mother country and the greatest of her children. At last in 1784 Bishop Seabury was consecrated Bishop of Connecticut, but consecrated by Scotch and not by English bishops. The Protestant Episcopal

There is a graphic account of Johnson's difficulties in Rusden's "History of Australia," vol. i. pp. 190-192.

Church of the United States has become in a large degree the Church of cultivated Americans. It has founded eighty-two bishoprics at home and ten missionary bishoprics abroad; its congregations are estimated as numbering some five million souls.

But the earliest of colonial sees was Nova Scotia. Its first bishop-Bishop Inglis was the first Anglican colonial bishop. The Diocese of Nova Scotia, when he was consecrated in 1787, included all British North America. has developed into twenty-four bishoprics covering all Canada from the Atlantic to the Pacific Ocean.

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The development of the foreign and colonial episcopate in the nineteenth century, especially in the latter half of the century, is too long a tale to be told in this article. But a special interest attaches to the speech made on the 27th of April 1841 at "a meeting of the clergy and laity specially called by His Grace the Archbishop of Canterbury and held at Willis's Rooms for the purpose of raising a fund towards the endowment of additional colonial bishoprics"; for the speaker was Mr. Gladstone.

It is no easy matter (he said) to maintain in union the various parts of an empire so vast, and not so vast alone but of parts so heterogeneous, so singularly constituted and so widely separated as those of the Empire of Great Britain. I concur fully in the position that, while it may be in the course of nature and in the dispensations of Providence, that that Empire should hereafter divide itself without effort, without violence, without mischief by consent of all parties, in the maturity of events-while it may be that our Empire may be destined to such a division, yet if the connection is to be advantageous while it continues, if the connection is to be peaceful when it comes to its close, if the recollection that such а connection has once subsisted is to be a matter of satisfaction and thankfulness to those

future empires which may be generated from our own, it must be because, while it continued, its foundations were deeply laid in the recognition and maintenance of a common faith.

Such language seems now strangely out of date-it belongs to a time when the thought of a true imperialism had not dawned upon modern England. Fifty years later, at the jubilee of the Colonial Bishoprics Fund, Mr. Gladstone was able to dwell in appreciative terms upon the expansion of the episcopate; but he was careful to repudiate the idea of any necessary connection between the State at home and the episcopate abroad.

One plain fact sufficiently illustrates the progress of the Church of England. A hundred and twenty-one years ago there was not a single bishop of the Church or in communion with the Church outside the British Isles. The number of Anglican bishoprics is now 251, and of these 214 are situated outside England and Wales. As many as 244 bishops have already accepted the invitation to attend the Lambeth Conference this year.

The Lambeth Conference and the Pan-Anglican Congress are both expressions of the same Imperial conception of the Church of England; but they are different in character and object.

Forty-one years ago, at the suggestion of the Canadian Church, it occurred to Archbishop Longley that the rapid development of the Church of England in foreign parts seemed to demand some opportunity of mutual counsel and support among the episcopate. There would, he thought, be an advantage, both personal and ecclesiastical, arising from the assemblage of bishops all belonging to the same communion, yet exercising their apostolic ministry in widely sundered regions of the world. There would be a still greater advantage if the bishops of the same Church could arrive in certain essential mat