Page:Place & Influence of Church Congresses.djvu/16

 to men. One party, no doubt, concentrates its labour on developing the Church upon those specific lines, and while anxious, even to death, for the soul's internal concerns, treats those internal concerns as under the administration of the external Church; while the other party, in acting within that external Church, makes, so to speak, something of a separate interest of the internal condition and welfare of the soul. The High Churchman may be said to be differentially jealous lest the Apostolic depositum of the Faith should suffer by over-much anxiety as to personal religion; the Low Churchman lest the care to sustain a formal system should overlay the warmth of personal devotion. There is, of course, infinite individual interlacing between the two parties; and, now-a-days, a school has come into prominence about which I must be excused from speaking in this connection, which appears to seek not so much to fuse as to couple them. I can only, within my allotted limits, give the roughest sketch of distinctive differences. The influence of Church Congresses in bringing the parties face to face on the topic of personal religion will come under my second head of their moral influence. Under the present one comes their value in fostering, on both sides, a broader, deeper appreciation of the Church as a system and as a corporation than was possible in the days of the earlier isolation. The organisation and multiplication of dioceses; the strengthening and enlarging of cathedrals, both in their Chapters, and in the varied work given to those Chapters to do; the development of synodical action, including the due placing of the clerical and of the lay element; the relations of our Church to other communities at home and abroad; missions to the heathen, and enterprises having a missionary character among the dark corners at home; elementary and middle-class education; the higher training of the clergy; the Universities in relation to the Church; co-operative associations of men and of women for the