On Sunday last there was a special service in Westminster
Abbey for the members of the Lambeth Conference, who bad been received by the Archbishop of Canterbury at Canterbury the day before. A most earnest and impressive sermon was preached by the Dean. We cannot do better than quote from the admirable words in which he spoke of the possible union of the Christian denominations among our "own kith and kin "
" It is plain that we cannot abandon what we have hitherto declared to be the four essential characteristics of our own position,—the Holy Scriptures, the two great Creeds, the two great Sacraments, and the historic Episcopate. But we can and ought to recognise that where the first three are found, and where there is also an ordered ministry guarded by the solemn imposi- tion of hands, there our differences are not so much matters of faith as matters of discipline, and ought with humility and patience to be capable of adjustment,—a fuller recognition, on the one side, of a charismatic ministry which God has plainly owned and blessed; a fuller recognition, on the other side, of the permanent value of an Episcopate which has long since ceased to be a prelacy, a readiness on both sides to arrive at some temporary agreement which might ultimately issue in a common ministry regulated in the historic sense, though admitting the possibility of separate organisations and jurisdictions. Granted such recognitions and such readiness, what a prospect of reconciliation at a no distant future opens before us."
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