CONCLUSION 345 



intimately related to the agricultural industry. . . . This gives the 

 rural church a position of unequalled opportunity. The time has 

 arrived when the Church must take a larger leadership, both as an 

 institution and through its pastors, in the social reorganisation of 

 rural life." If that is so in a country which owns no Church estab- 

 lishment, much more ought it to be the case among ourselves, where 

 the Church has been designedly established and endowed, with funds 

 which come entirely, or almost entirely, from the land and its cul- 

 tivation, in order to serve as a pillar to healthy and satisfactory 

 country life, to which secular things as well as spiritual and moral 

 are necessary contributors. 



Towards the establishment of community life, the "powers that be," 

 that is, in this case, the squire and the parson, may indeed do a 

 great deal if they will only in this matter for a time, figuratively 

 speaking, " forget their own people and their father's house," that is, 

 sink their higher position for the nonce in bond fide human comrade- 

 ship. For community life is not consistent with the assertion of 

 rank. The Americans have no " squires," but their authorities 

 acting in the matter have readily accepted President Roosevelt's 

 view, and look in a great measure to " the Church " for furthering 

 the end proposed, upon the attainment of which hinge a great many 

 other developments. In American language the term " the Church ' : 

 designates what we should express by " the Church and all Denomi- 

 nations," of which latter, ridiculous as it seemed to the infidel 

 Voltaire, who contrasted our possession of " only one sauce " with 

 the presence among us of " a hundred denominations," the religious 

 life active among us has produced a not inconsiderable number, each 

 of them with its own influence upon its particular adherents, more 

 especially in the country — the population of which recks little of 

 dogmas and follows rather the apostle of " works " than the apostle 

 of " faith." And they must on no account be forgotten. For, 

 although in matters of doctrine we may, perhaps with reason, prefer 

 a discordia concors to a forced concordia, which under the circum- 

 stances is bound to be decidedly discors, in this matter of " works " 

 we should all be labourers in the same vineyard. The Church comes to 

 the uniting work handicapped in the first place with the reputation of 

 her officers being " the squire's men," and in the second with its not 

 over-enviable identification with " tithe," representing a burden, of 

 which Alcuin, the English adviser of Charlemagne, said thai '* our 

 people would never stand such an impost." Sydney Smith in his 

 humorous way puts the case so (that was at the time of the Irish 

 potato famine) : if the Pope himself were to come in person to claim 



