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It does not fall to me to narrate the steps that led to the final establishment of the episcopacy upon a sure foundation, nor yet to trace the process through which the Church's legislative system came gradually to its completion. In order, however, fully to appreciate the situation we must go back a little. White of Pennsylvania, Dr. William Smith of Maryland, and Dr. Wharton of Delaware.
He did not deny any church or any churchman the right to take a full part in political discussion. But he did deny any religious teachers the right to brandish for a political purpose the weapons of their spiritual armoury; and he urged the inexpediency, in the Church's own interest, of endeavouring to build up a clerical party.
We hear a great deal about the authority of the Church in these days, as a determiner of truth and as a prescriber of Christian action. It means generally official authority, the power of guidance and definition of the Church's action, etc., which some people think is lodged in the hands of preachers, pastors, priests, either individually or collectively. There is nothing of that sort meant here.
Nothing is said about the crime of bringing an unwanted child into the world, where often it cannot be adequately cared for and is, therefore, condemned to a life of misery. The church's one point of insistence is upon the right of itself to legalize marriage and to compel the woman to submit to whatever such marriage may bring.
The three offices of Christ, they are his priestly, his prophetical, and his kingly offices. These are those in which God's glory and the church's salvation are most immediately concerned, and they that have been most opposed by the devil and his angels.
At the which bold words some few men shouted in acclaim, but for the most part the citizens were mumchance, their hearts cold within them, while all eyes stared fearfully upon the Prior, who, lifting white hand again, rose up from cushioned chair and spake him loud and clear: "Then, upon this rebellious city and all that therein is, on babe, on child, on youth, on maid, on man, on wife, on the hale, the sick, the stricken in years, on beast, on bird, and on all that hath life and being I do pronounce the church's dread curse and awful ban: ex "
Let the world know that the Church's mission on earth is not to accumulate wealth, or to gain political power or knowledge, or to cling to this institution or to that, but to cleanse mankind from its unclean, evil spirits, and to fill it with the spirit of saintliness. Let the Church first change her spirit and then urge the whole of mankind to change theirs.
She looked up into my face the other night after my call for volunteers for the new mission we are beginning in the slums of the East Side, and asked me if the girls were not going to be given the chance to do something worth while in this church's work. "I couldn't honestly answer her off-hand and in my groping I forgot the child and her question.
Since the mission of the church was to be world-wide and perpetual, it is fitting that the church should be described prophetically in order that we might have definite information concerning the operations of the divine hand in working out the great problem of the church's destiny after the close of the sacred canon.
We think of the Church's often absurdly needless divisions, the backwardness of its thought, the coldness of its devotion, the inefficiency of many of its methods, the want of consecration in a host of its members, the imperfections and limitations of the best and most earnest of them; and we do not really expect any marked advance; we hardly anticipate that the Church will hold its own.
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