.198 RT. REV. BISHOP J. E. C. \VELLDON_, D.D., ON THE INFLUENCE 



people. There is strong reason, then, why the Mission should 

 be conducted in such a manner as will extend the range of that 

 sympathy. No doubt two different conceptions of a Church, 

 and of the function pertaining to a Church, in the twentieth 

 Christian century are possible. The Church may be a narrow 

 body of men and women holding the same ecclesiastical views 

 and practising the same religious observances, but scarcely at 

 all affecting the general course or tenour of the national life. 

 Such a Church is the Church of Eome in most so-called Roman 

 Catholic countries, except where the ignorance of the people, as 

 in Spain, stays, for the presentjthe danger of a widely spread 

 revolt against the authority of the Church. But in the public 

 national life of these countries the Church counts for little or 

 nothing. The Church goes one way, the State goes another ; 

 and except in the rare hours of deep popular emotion they 

 seldom meet, or they meet only as enemies. It has been the 

 good fortune of the Church of England that she has never lost 

 her touch with the national life. To-day, in spite of the 

 undeniable movement towards secularism in some depart- 

 ments of the national life, she is still the greatest moral and 

 spiritual power in the nation. One of the consequences, 

 whether it be good or bad, issuing from the sacerdotal or 

 ritualistic movement in the Church of England, has been a loss 

 of sympathy between the Church or the clergy and a consider- 

 able number of the laity. It has happened to me at different 

 times, to be associated in intimate relation with a body of 

 laymen who were working together for a high educational end. 

 They were men of strong religious principle, but they were 

 not theologians or ecclesiastical historians: questions of vesture 

 or posture, of ritual and ceremonial, left them, largely, if not 

 wholly, unaffected ; and in listening to the disputations of the 

 clergy, they seemed to feel as though they were Englishmen 

 living in a foreign country, where it was difficult, if not 

 impossible, to understand a word of the language spoken by the 

 natives. Such men were not then, and are not now, opposed to 

 the Church. They are regular worshippers ; they are often 

 regular communicants ; but they are bewildered at the matters 

 which interest, or appear to interest, the clergy, and from 

 public activity in the work of the Church they are more and 

 more disposed to hold aloof. If the chief, or one of the chief, 

 objects of the National Mission is, as has been suggested, to set 

 up the duty of attendance at Holy Communion as the central 

 obligation of every Sunday upon all Churchmen and Church- 

 women, there can be little doubt that the Church, after the 



