I APPEAL TO THE CHURCH OF THE ENGLISH. T HE Bishop

of Oxford's letter to the Archbishop protesting against the consecration of the Dean of Durham is a moment- ous incident. Its sequel may evolve a deeper faith or wreck an historic Church. The charge of heresy against Dean Henson, that he teaches a doctrine of the Incarnation divergent from his Church's, shall not be discussed here, but an antecedent matter. What is the Court which should try the charge? Few Churchmen ask themselves this. They take it for granted that the Archbishop and Bishops are the judges. They are the Court of First Instance, but not the Court of Final Appeal That Court is "the Church of the English." Fifteen centuries ago it would have been the Church Catholic in the sense of EcumenicaL It cannot be so now. But a branch of the Church, such as our own Communion, can be catholic, by the measures not of space but of spirit. To the catholic judgment of the English Church the cause must be brought : that is, our Churchmen acting as a whole, and acting under the Holy Spirit, must be the judges. The whole Church means.the Bishops, clergy, and laity. That which shall seem good to the Holy Ghost and to us of the whole Church will be the true judgment.

It will be said, and is generally assumed, that the Church has judged. In 1908 the Lambeth Conference placed on record "that the historical facts stated in the Creeds are an essential part of the Faith of the Church " ; more recently the Bishops of our Province •

"express their deliberate judgment that the denial of any of the historical facts stated in the Creeds" is illegitimate interpretation, and makes the profession of them by a minister insincere.

It must be replied, first, that a judgment by Bishops only and without the assensus populi is not enough, does not fulfil the standard

of catholic judgment. But also it has to be said, and said with

emphasis, that it is not enough that the Church once so judged, in 1908. She must judge now in 1918, ten years later, and what a ten years ! The Catholic Church of the English has not catholicity, in the sense of "wholeness," if she does not include those Who are her members at this date. The mind of this Catholic Church is the mind which has been formed in her by the Holy Spirit instructing the minds of all her people : the faith of our Church is the Life unto Christ in God which the Giver of Life has begotten and made grow in all her men and women, her Bishops and pastors, her prophets, saints, and scholars, from the beginning up to the living moment. This is the mind that must interpret the Creeds, and the Scriptures which those Creeds interpreted ; this mind must judge whether the doctrine taught by a minister of the Word is the doctrine she commissions him to teach. This faith is the essential faith by the standard of which should be measured the faith or unfaith of a minister of the Sacraments.

It will be asked how it is possible for a Church as a whole to form any such judgment. The answer is that the Church always has judged this way. It was not the Bishops at Nicaea who estab- lished that not Arius but Athanasius was the true teacher of the Incarnation. The Council of Bishops promulgated, the Populus assented. This Court of the Cletus and Populus together sat long deliberating, a stormy half-century, and only then at last secures judicavit orbis.

In an example more instructive for us because near to our time and circumstances, it was not the officers of our Church as such who decided that to deny the Verbal Inspiration of Scripture and

the Six Days' Creation was not heresy. It was the body of our Churchpeople, Cletus and Populus, the learned and the unlearned, together. Here too the Court sat long, though without the violences

of. the session between Nitaea and Constantinople, and the orbis ecciesiae Anglicanae gave the verdict that evolution could be held

by believers. And let it not be objected that these amended conceptions were not articles of the Creed. They were believed to be articles of Scripture, a greater than the Creed and the authority for the Creed.

But the procedure of the judgment in this Court, what was it?

"No Convocation, no Synod of Bishops promulgated by authority a revised article of belief and sent it to the Provinces for their assent. The pleading and counterpleading were heard in the open equal street of public discussion through the agencies of pulpit, press, and conference, of speech, lecture, magazine article, letters in journals, conversation in private circles, teachings of philosopher and of catechist. Here and there were cardinal moments when some pronouncement by a leading mind in book or sermon started a fresh crystallization of fluid opinion in the masses ; and always went forward the long, long, insensibly graded process of mental and moral growth, declaring itself in some last' unimaginable touch of time' at which the general mind of the Church awoke, without a start, to find faith unchanged but faith's word transmuted. What had happened ? In council of the whole body of the faithful we had reformulated the articles of our belief touching Holy Writ and the Origin of Man."

The inward fact of this process by which a Church revises her vision of things religious must be epitomized. A Church's faith is her life unto Divine Reality. Her beliefs are true when on experi-

ment of them she finds in her soul, in its reason and its faith, that she gains life unto that Reality. Such an experiment we made last century. We tested new conceptions of fact offered us by men of science against the living soul of the Church, and noted whether at the touch faith languished or rather quickened. We found that when "all creation widened on man's view" our soul widened

and deepened in response ; Nature was a vaster home for man, but man was now at home in it not less but more ; Inspiration of

prophets was a more universal fact, but to discover man's co- operance in it was to feel our prophetic soul more inwardly indwelt.

What has been will be. If our leaders, in high station or low, will make faith's venture of promulgating to the people the new thought, and the people make faith's experiment of testing that thought against their living soul, we shall know of the doctrine whether it is of God or no. Venture is asked of us, and venture asks courage. But God has not given His Church a spirit of fear.

Joint H. SHRINE.