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spent in designing what often has been no better than a caricature, and the best that has yet been done is as nothing compared to future possibilities. What these may be we are not concerned to know. Ours is the humble task of holding fast what truth we have, and never despairing of the ideal. We are Englishmen, and like it none the worse that it does not lend itself to rhetoric or to logical demonstration. We know by experience that a proof may be too conclusive to convince, just as a feeling may be too intense to be trustworthy. Our position towards Nonconformity is that which Dean Church has eloquently described in the last chapter of his History of the Oxford Movement, in regard to the great cognate controversy with Rome-a resolute and serious appeal to facts. We recognise the revealed ideal, and we see that for us and our nation it is embodied in the English Church. We must go on our way, setting forth the truth as we have received it, appropriating it to ourselves, and illustrating it in our corporate life. We recognise the Spirit of Christ conspicuously working in many members of many denominations, and working, because they have devoted themselves to Him, through the societies to which they belong. We will make no aggressive attempts to proselytise, and suggest no unwelcome schemes for organic union. But we are sure that, great as would be our gain from union with so much piety and wisdom, it would be far outweighed by the gain to those who should join our ranks-the gain of freedom and power that comes from the consciousness of working, not in self-chosen confines, but in the appointed field of all the redemptive activities of Christ.

T

X.

Education

BY H. A. DALTON, M.A.

I

I.

T is hardly possible to frame any intelligible conception of the Church of Christ in which a prominent place should not be given to the duty laid upon her, and the authority given to her, to educate her own members, and through them the world. Her divine Founder's commission to her imposes the nucleus of a creed as the condition of Baptism, and bids her teach the baptised to "observe all things whatsoever He commanded" His apostles. A creed and a discipline are alike essential properties of the Church.

The history of the divisions of the Church is the record of disputes as to the precise contents of the essential creed, the locating of the authority which is to determine them, the limit of their development; or again, as to the rigour and exactness of her discipline, the possible variations of its demand in different parts of the Church, the need and the divine sanction for a central authority on earth to rule the whole body. But all Christians who believe in a visible Church at all must agree that there are some fundamental truths, some necessary rules or methods of discipline essential to her existence, and that the Church, which is "the pillar and ground of the truth,"

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is authorised and is bound by some means or other to teach the former and to maintain the latter. It is certain, therefore, that the Church is an educating body, and that any part of the Church which left education out of its field of operation would be disobedient to the Founder of the Church, and would be risking in a very serious degree its claim to be a part of the Church at all.

1. The Church, then, is first a teaching body. She is responsible for "the faith which was once for all delivered unto the saints." She has a historic creed, which has come down to Christians of the present day with the sanction of ages, an authorised statement of definite facts, supernatural but historically attested, and of inferences from those facts as to the Being and the modes of operation of the Persons of the Blessed Trinity. This creed she is bound to teach to her own children. She cannot, without disloyalty to Christ, surrender this duty to any other organisation. She cannot be content with any compromise which should pledge her to withhold part of the essential truth. She is bound to insist on full liberty to teach the whole of the Christian creed, and, having that liberty, she is bound to make use of it. Whatever be the conditions under which, as things stand, the Anglican Church may best secure and use such liberty, she cannot lose sight of this foundation principle.

2. But, secondly, the Church must not only teach, she must also train her children. There is a discipline as well as a creed. The discipline will follow the lines of the creed. It will be the means by which the truths formulated in the creed will become the stimulus and the sanction of the moral life. Christian faith thus becomes a reality to Christians; it is thus seen that it "is not a formless impulse; it is self-surrender to a corporate life ruled on a definite model of religious and moral teaching."* * GORE, Romans, p. 234.

The "building up of the Body of Christ" is designed to further "the perfecting of the saints." If the creed registers the necessary truths, the discipline of the corporate life of the Church trains and develops the character of each of her baptised members. This function of the Church is, or should be, made effective in her missionary influence upon the whole world. It should operate during the whole life of each Christian. But not least has it to be displayed in the education of the young, and that in two ways, which may perhaps be distinguished as being respectively ethical and

devotional.

It is an idea too common in the popular mind that morals may be dissociated from theology, that it is possible to instil the principles of conduct without reference to theological truth. The Church cannot accept this; the Christian teacher knows that there cannot be a more fatal mistake. The great social duties of purity, truth, and honesty are indeed recognised in some degree as duties by the conscience of all men, with or without the sanction of revealed religion. But it is written in bold lines all across the history of mankind that the appeal to conscience depends for its practical force upon those sanctions, and upon aids which come from a higher source than human nature. "Video meliora proboque; deteriora sequor" is, broadly speaking, the universal witness of the human heart unassisted by grace; and the lesson of the decay of the ancient civilisations ought to be a sufficient warning against any attempt to divorce morality from religion. If such a divorce could be successfully attempted, for a time and among the nobler spirits the tradition of Christian morality would linger on, but were the restraints of religion completely swept away, no theories of selfinterest or self-respect or love of mankind apart from God could stem the force of human passion.

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"The paradise of materialism," it has been finely said, "will lie open before what we shall be told is emancipated humanity. The fiery sword of old terrors that, flaming and turning every way, deterred men from entering there, will have been snatched from the hands of superstition by science, and the multitude will rush in to eat, or strive to eat, and will make of that paradise what satiated lust, or unsatisfied desire, has made of other paradises from the first-a hell upon this earth.”*

The Christian educator knows that no morality will stand against the power of temptation which is not rooted in the holiness of God, and that no discipline can raise a man's character to its highest power which does not bring home to him the sense of sin through the sacrifice of the Cross, and the knowledge of a supernatural power in the continual presence of the Risen Christ through the operation of the Holy Ghost. The consciences of the young are sensitive, and their aspirations generous. The Church of Christ cannot offer to them a weaker sanction than the judgments of God, a lower ideal than the example of Christ, or a less effective aid to its realisation than the power of the Sacraments.

It follows from this that the discipline must also have its devotional side. The Church must be free to train her children in the habits of prayer, to keep alive the communion of the soul with God. She must teach them what it means to be regenerate in Holy Baptism; she must give them the indwelling presence of the Holy Spirit in Confirmation; she must lead them on to realise the power for holiness that is given by Holy Communion. To all this the Anglican Communion is deeply pledged. Her rules of discipline may be less rigid, less imperatively forced upon the conscience than those of that part of the Church with which the idea of discipline is more Sermon preached by Bishop Magee at St. Mary's, Oxford, October 30th,