The Church Congress opened on Tuesday at Southampton Preaching at
St. Mary's Church, the Archbishop of Canterbury asked his hearers to consider what would be the thoughts of St. Paul if he could revisit the world and see what was happening this week at Southampton. In the Archbishop's opinion St. Paul would marvel most at the easy acquiescence of great multitudes of those who claimed the name of Christians in a totally inadequate and unworthy standard of discipleship, and at the waning of zeal and fire and enterprise. Statistics and the space accorded in the press made it clear that people at large had come to care about the Church's doings more keenly than of old, but other tests yielded less satisfactory results. Great gatherings inevitably ministered to self-satisfaction and perilous complacency rather than to self-revelation and a wholesome sense of their shortcomings. If a recurrent Church Congress was to do its work aright it ought to destroy, not at once but by degrees, the strange mis- understanding among Christian people as to what Church work ought to mean and include. To remedy the general and far-reaching dissatisfaction with themselves as a Christian body armed for service needed a re-setting of their whole conception of Christian service.
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