The seventeenth Church Congress met at Croydon on Tues- day,
under the presidency of the Arohbishop of Canterbury. Canon Lightfoot, who had been chosen to preach before the Congress, appears to have dwelt with great eloquence on "the startling paradoxes" of sacred history, in which the
tcaost signal defeats of human hope (like the Babylonian captivity) have always been the forerunners of the greatest triumphs. He regarded the age in which the infallibility of the Pope had been claimed, the temporal power destroyed, in which science bad raised the greatest of all issues in the boldest form, and had thrown so new a light on the primeval history and origin of man, and in which ancient monuments and hieroglyphics had been ransacked to illustrate Biblical narratives, as unquestion- ably one likely to produce a great religious crisis,—perhaps a ceeming blow and a real stimulus to religious faith, —and he dwelt with much force on the spirit of courage, hope, and confidence in which the intellectual collisions of the day ehould be awaited and dealt with. The eloquent preacher, however, hardly meant, we suppose, to suggest that Church Congresses are to be numbered amongst those anomalous and paradoxical events, like the Babylonian captivity or the pro- clamation of Papal Infallibility, which may, by divine providence, he so overruled as to contribute to the triumph of divine pur- pose, in spite of a tendency apparently destructive of reasonable !human hope?
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