Page:Place & Influence of Church Congresses.djvu/8

 lamented W. J. Beamont, of Trinity College — the first Church Congress met in the Hall of King's College, Cambridge. It was but a scanty assemblage, and it boasted of no episcopal presidency, the chair being filled by the late Archdeacon France of Ely. The one which gathered during the subsequent summer at Oxford, in the Sheldonian Theatre, with Bishop Wilberforce as its President, was the earliest manifestation of the organisation in its normal completeness. The autumns of subsequent years have witnessed similar gatherings at Manchester, Bristol, Norwich, York, Wolverhampton, Dublin, Liverpool, Southampton, Nottingham, Leeds, and Bath, the diocesan having in each instance been in the chair, while it has been decided that another such Congress shall be held at Brighton before the present year closes.

The most salient characteristics of Church Congresses are the democratic simplicity of their organisation, and the autocratic limitation under which they are allowed to deliberate. Membership is voluntary for clergymen and laymen, under the single condition of communion with the Church of England. Women may attend the meetings, though happily there has never been a claim from any one to address the gathering. But the debates are conducted under the triple restriction of no voting or authoritative summing up, of a selected list of subjects published beforehand, and of the initiation of each topic (a process which not unfrequently takes up about two-thirds of the appointed sitting) being distributed among selected readers and speakers, at the choice of an organising Committee, by whom it is published in the programme — not to mention a wide license of selection which Chairmen claim, among the bewildering multiplicity of competitors for the modest allowance of ten minutes each, into which the remaining time is divided. We may put the nature of their constitution in another way: they are potential Comitia; the whole body of citizens form their members, if only those citizens can and are willing to attend. But