202 RT. REV. BISHOP J. E. C. WELLDON, D.D., ON THE INFLUENCE 



excluded from active and fruitful participation in the councils 

 of His Church. 



The Church is entering upon an age when experiments in 

 Divine worship will be not only valuable, but essential. The 

 freer the clergy are, under due episcopal control, to harmonize 

 their ministrations with the ever-varying needs of the people, the 

 more potent and the more beneficent will their influence 

 become. If the man in the street is the power that rules 

 to-day, then it is necessary to bring him out of the street into 

 the Church. So long as men and women are strangers to the 

 sanctuary of God, neither the most artistic beauty of ritual nor 

 the most inspiring eloquence of the pulpit can do them any 

 good. Somehow or other they must be brought under the 

 influence of the Church before they can be made good Church- 

 men and Churchwomen. 



The Church of England has become, in some sense, the 

 Church of the British Empire. She will not, indeed, attain 

 that lofty ideal until she has succeeded in associating with 

 herself all, or nearly all, the Eeformed Christian Churches 

 which live at her side. But the Imperial spirit will rule the 

 future of the Church. It is clear that the colonies and depen- 

 dencies of the Empire will play an ever-increasing part in 

 Imperial policy. Commerce, indeed — at least, within a certain 

 period after the war — will probably cease to be guided by 

 sentiment. Merchants will sell and buy goods where it is 

 profitable to sell and buy them, whether from the friends or 

 from the enemies of a hundred, or fifty, or twenty years before. 

 The permanent rivalry of two great mutual exclusive federa- 

 tions in the realm of international commerce would ill exemplify 

 the Christian spirit, which will, as all Christians must hope, 

 soon or late heal the festering wounds of the present war. 



But it may be hoped that the Church will play her part in 

 creating what may be called the United States of Europe — the 

 only organization which seems capable, even in the far distant 

 future, of putting an end to the continual prospect or menace 

 of international war. To unite the whole Empire in the closest 

 bonds of material and moral sympathy, and then to make that 

 Empire the protagonist in the great causes of truth, freedom, 

 progress and charity — that is the opportunity set before Great 

 Britain and her sons and daughters beyond the seas and all the 

 subjects and constituents of her power, and it is a mission which 

 will never be accomplished except under the influence of the 

 Cross of Jesus Christ. 



All good citizens in Great Britain, and not least of all 



