develop such new work as it may deem necessary" between sessions of the General Convention. A second innovation tending towards centralization was the creation of eight "provinces", to which the dioceses are severally allocated. Each province, organized within its own synod, consisting of a House of Bishops and a House of Deputies (clerical and lay), is competent to deal with matters committed to it by General Convention or by the National Council, as well as with its own particular problems. In the case of both of these innovations there is a distinct advance in a "Federal" direction, away from the old "State" ideal of diocesan quasi-independence.

The Episcopal Church has continued to realize its place in the Anglican communion throughout the world, by the attendance of its bishops at the Lambeth Conference every ten years, as well as through innumerable committees, conferences, and the wide literature of Anglicanism. At home the Episcopal Church while not a member is co-operating on an ever wider scale with the Federal Council of Churches, and has taken a leading part in the World Conference on Faith and Order.

In its dealings with other bodies in Christendom the Episcopal Church has discovered that the schools of thought within its own body have always kept open avenues of contact, sympathy, and understanding to be closed only at the peril of its spiritual welfare. Except for the one instance of the "Reformed Episcopalians" there have been no schisms from the Anglican Church since the time of the Wesleys. But with the years the old lines of party delimitation have become susceptible of erasure and alteration. All three schools of thought have changed materially. The arousal of the sense of Christian responsibility to social ills is no longer, as it was in 1830, the peculiar privilege and outstanding characteristic of a "party" in the Church. In the same way, evangelical fervor, "personal religion", and piety have passed into the common possession. It was not surprising that the Catholic Movement should so often manifest evangelical fervor, nor that so frequently its representatives should find their work in the slums. The Broad Churchman of the seventies stood for principles now every

where admitted: for the obligation of an allegiance larger than that to any religious group, for a sensitiveness to intellectual and spiritual interests in the non-Anglican world, and to the duty of a relentless search for truth. Again, there was the gift of a part to the whole. The old-fashioned High Churchman, his static outlook, and his academic presuppositions, have passed, to give way to the "Catholic" churchman. The grandson of the Tractarian would have shocked his forbears by the "modernism" of his use of Scripture. The three schools of thought have largely interpenetrated, and the Church at large is the heir and beneficiary, the residuary legatee, gaining as a whole from the contributions of its parts.

From the baptism of Virginia Dare in 1585 to the General Convention of 1925 the Episcopal Church in America has attempted to carry out its task as a part of the Universal Church. It has made egregious blunders, usually repented of them, and frequently tried to atone for them; it has missed opportunities, and tried sometimes too late to recover them. It has always been aware of a duty undone, a work yet to be done, and an opportunity still to be created. As part of the Catholic Church, with a sense of a pre-Reformation as well as of a post-Reformation past, it cannot be content with insularity which spells provincialism, or a narrowness of outlook which constricts its vision. Tradition from the past must ever be freshly examined, and the old faith re-stated in order that its vitality may be preserved. Like the Maryland petitioners of 1700, this Church is "Protestant-Catholic", and, true to its own tradition, it would conserve both values and find for each of them adequate expression.

CHAPTER XXIII

THE EPISCOPAL CHURCH AND

INSTITUTIONAL LIFE

The Protestant Episcopal Church has shown how a communion can free itself from political and national connections, while still retaining all that makes up its essential character.

I

'N the United States, the Roman Catholic Church has ministered to the immigrants from Ireland, the Romance coun

tries, and Poland; the Russian Church to those from Slav countries; but the representative of Catholicity among persons of Anglo-Saxon descent has been the Protestant Episcopal Church.

The reason for this lies in the history of the country itself. During the Colonial period, the Church of England was the outstanding representative of the idea of traditional Catholic Christianity in the colonies. When these began an independent national life, the Anglican Church, reorganized like the colonies, maintained its ecclesiastical development. Of course, in the nature of the case it could no longer be a part of the State Church of England, but it was at one with that body of Christians by virtue of the fact that it claimed to represent nonRoman Catholic Christianity. Such claims were not made by the other Protestant groups in the United States, for they were less concerned with the continuity of ecclesiastical life than with the theological aspects of the contents of the Bible. Indeed Congregationalists, Methodists, Baptists, and Lutherans were so conscious of their break with the Church of the past that they gloried in it as a phase of their struggle with the Roman and various State churches.

The Protestant Episcopal Church in America a century ago

was probably more inclined to emphasize the word Protestant than at the present time. The development of its inner spirit has been increasingly in the direction of a new traditionally Catholic consciousness. It has justly regarded itself as standing for something which Non-conformist Christians minimize. Indeed, many of its members are more interested in the Roman Catholic and Greek churches than in Non-conformists. Its interest in the development of church unity has been great, but never to the point of abandoning its convictions as to orders, the sacraments, and the Nicene Creed.

This desire to protect the traditional Catholic conception of the Church has served to separate the Episcopal Church in America from other Christians. It does not usually admit the clergy of Protestant bodies to its pulpits. It has been reluctant to join the Federal Council of the Churches of America, although ready to co-operate with that body in such undertakings as do not compromise the conception of the word "church". It is, however, furthering the coming Conference on Faith and Order.

The significant contribution which the Protestant Episcopal Church is making to the religious life of the United States is that of an emphasis upon historical continuity and universality, upon the conception of the Church as the body of Christ, the channel of supernatural grace. Protestantism needs this sort of witness, or it might forget the great stream of faith and Christian experience which constitutes the Christian movement. Even more is it in danger of minimizing the Church as an institution for religious nurture and worship. Traditional Catholicism by its very spirit tends to counteract the tendency to transform Christianity into pure intellectualism. Its recognition of the divine and, if the word is properly understood, supernatural, elements in religion, serves to correct the drift of church life to non-religious and sterile culture. The influence of this new spirit in the religious life of the United States tallies well with the new conception of the social aspects of Christianity.

It is no accident that the Protestant Episcopal Church should have been among the leaders in all forms of institutional life.