The President of the Congregational Union for this year, the
Rev. Edward White, delivered his address on Wednesday, one of great power. It was chiefly on the relation of grace to law in the Christian revelation, and deprecated the idea that grace could be accounted for as part of the system of natural law, in the way in which Mr. Drummond, possessed, like the mind of the age, with scientific conceptions of law, had attempted to account for it. Mr. White maintained that the contrast between law and grace underlies the whole of Christ's ethical and religious teaching, and is traced in the strongest lines in the Sermon on the Mount. He regarded the State as the proper Divine institution for enforcing law and for making itself a terror to evil-doers, and the Church as the proper Divine institution for proclaiming to the world the promises of Divine grace ; and he maintained that neither could the Church inter- fere without evil in the functions of the State, nor could the State interfere without evil in the functions of the Church. Nevertheless, Mr. White, in a very eloquent passage, did the amplest justice to the claims of the Church of England,—• Established though it be,—on the affections and imaginations of Englishmen, and he paid a high tribute to that depth of
poetical feeling, in the English people which makes them so sensitive to attacks on- an institution closely intertwined with their history-and their- worship. It was an address in every way worthy of the great religious body of which Mr. White was the mouthpiece,
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