Page:Church Politics and Church Prospects.djvu/32

26 Church, as an institution, has grown up simultaneously with, though independently of, that theory of responsible government in colonies which successive colonial secretaries have worked up, it is well, for reasons of expediency, never to be too eager to bring the patents of colonial dioceses under the scrutiny of jealous tribunals; more we might say, but adhuc sub judice lis est, and we forbear.

Happily, no other colony has been disturbed by a doctrinal conflict. The Australian Church, as far as we can gather, seems holding its own, and a little more, without signal successes or signal reverses, founding here and there a new diocese, and completing works such as Sydney Cathedral. In New Zealand itself, missionary work, in face of the sad war now raging, must pretty well be at a standstill; not so, we trust, Bishop Patteson's labours in the dark islands. The Canadian Church is quietly consolidating itself under the metropolitical rule of the Bishop of Montreal. As far as we can gather, the Diocese of Huron is the only antipathetic element in the province. We conclude that the fusion of British America into a political federation will be sooner or later followed by the adhesion of the dioceses of Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, and Newfoundland, to Bishop Fulford's province. The Bishopric of British Columbia is, we trust, itself the germ of another province, and already the formation of a second Bishopric within its limits is under discussion. Of the Central African Mission, embalmed as it is in the memory of Mackenzie, we do not see our way to speak at length. There are a new Bishop and a new start, and this start has the advantage, which is as important in spiritual as in military strategies, of a base of operations. A confirmatory illustration of this truth has come to hand from another corner of the mission field. Every one knows that Great Britain holds in fee a small dependent island of Borneo, called Labuan, and that Great Britain has moreover great social, if not political, influence in the mainland of the island through the acquisition by Sir James Brooke of the vassal lordship of the district of Sarawak. Every one ought also to know that the Church of England has followed up this arrangement by the mission of a Bishop, who is on one side a diocesan of the Colonial Church as Bishop of Labuan, and on the other the head of an independent Church in communion with the English Church within the principality of Sarawak. The appointment of the Bishop of Sarawak under the seal of Rajah Brooke was as formal as that of the Bishop of Labuan by Queen Victoria.

Bishop Macdougall is too practical a man not to have realized the advantages and the peculiarities of his double position. Finding his mission ripe for decisive action, he held, on the last