Page:Place & Influence of Church Congresses.djvu/11

 oratorical gifts cannot be overlooked; a fair balance of capacities on questions intended to be dealt with as two-sided is indispensable; and, finally, neither the clerical nor the lay element must, if possible, be overweighted.

I may have hitherto appeared to you to be summing up doubtfully as to Church Congresses; it is better, therefore, that I should, at the outset, explain that I hope to convince you that their place in the Church movement is legitimate and their influence healthful. But in order to do so fairly and fully, I have thought right to begin by showing you the difficulties, and it may be the deficiencies, under which they work, in order better to appreciate the good with which they may be credited. I have no intention of proposing any reform in their constitution or standing orders. I accept them as facts, and I assume that future Congresses will go on under virtually the same conditions. Their aim, as I must, at the risk of tautology, repeat, is influence, not power, and so restrictions which would be puerile or intolerable in bodies which had to reach decisive votes, and order the future actions of men, can merely be judged in the light of expediency or inexpediency when they are adopted by gatherings whose single, though important, object is mutual persuasion. Briefly, then, believing as I do, that the comitiary, as distinguished from a representative, constitution is essential to the vitality of Church Congresses, I further believe that restrictions in the nature of, and as stringent as, those which exist, are indispensable to guard the order, and in guarding the order to maintain the liberty, of rational debate.

I shall proceed to treat of the influence of these Congresses on the Church movement according to an ascending scale, handling first the material, then the moral, and lastly the religious aspect of the Congress, conscious as I am that these various aspects must and ought not to be too rigidly kept separate during the discussion. In what I have to say