The Archbishop of Canterbury, of whose rather optimist in- augural
address we have said almost enough elsewhere, glided over the ground he had traced out for himself with a good deal of dexterity, aiming, it would seem, rather to keep the Congress in good-humour, and to prevent explosions such as Archdeacon Denison so gloomily, predicted the other day, than to put his tfinger on the real Church difficulties of the day. But he must almost, we think, have been aiming a sly hit at the Congress, when, having approved of these assemblies as indicative of real life in the Church, he added, "Archbishop Whately was wont to say that we might learn a parable from the steam-engine, in whose case the louder the noise, the less is the progress made by the machine. . . . . The voice of the Church may not he heard in the streets, and yet it may be doing its work peacefully and well." That would seem to be a sugges- tion rather subversive of Congresses than appreciative of them. The Archbishop also rather enigmatically warned the 'Congress against those undisciplined theological skirmishers, —he likened them to ecclesiastical Bashi-Bazouks or Cossacks— 'who hover on the skirts of the regular armies, but give little 'quarter, and make war seem still as barbarous as it was in savage times. Of whom was he thinking ? Archdeacon Denison, as we recalled just now, has shaken off the dust from his feet, and de- nounced Church Congresses (as well as potatoes) in the name of 'Catholicity, while a certain number of Evangelicals have done the came in the name of Protestantism ; but did his Grace mean to treat the potato-abjuring Archdeacon as an ecclesiastical Bashi- Bazouk,—or distributors of tracts on justification by faith as Cossacks who commit atrocities and give no quarter ?
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