XXIV.

THE MISSION OF THE CHURCH OF GOD.

(Preached at Convocation in Milwaukee, April 19, 1876.)

"Then contended I with the rulers, and said, Why is the House of God forsaken?"-NEHEMIAH xiii., 11.

To proclaim the gospel of Christ; to do His work upon earth; to be in His stead a messenger of love, mercy, and pardon to mankind; by the mighty power of the Holy Ghost; to make Christ present, though hidden from mortal gaze-this is the work of the Church of God.

A test of the Church's vigor in this respect is its power to propagate itself. If it lives it must grow; if it be Christ's Body it must be full of zeal for the souls for which He died. It must be true of her as it was of Him, that she has a work to do, and that she must be straitened until it is accomplished. She will not need to be preached to, and exhorted, and reasoned and pleaded with, any more than trees and plants and the mother earth, in the springtime, when the sun shines and the rain falls, have to be urged to put forth leaves and flowers. Her mission is to win souls, to convert, to baptize, to offer the mystical sacrifice, to absolve, to heal, to bind up the broken hearts, to bring

again the outcast, to advance with unbroken front, to speak with an unfaltering voice, and to make the wilderness and solitary place to be glad for her, and the desert to rejoice and blossom as the rose. If she has this power, she lives; if not, in the words of the text, the house of God is indeed forsaken.

The speaker of the words of the text was a layman, a reformer, a helper of the Church, a man whose life was given up to God, an inspired teacher, and one who was an example of what all these should be; and when he found the house of God forsaken, he said unto the rulers, "Why is it so ?"

I do not intend to prove this evening that the Church is not accomplishing its work, nor to bring statistics together to show that there is any decline in her influence. I do not know that it is so. I have no dismal forebodings to utter with regard to the future, for my heart is full of hope. The only point wherein the words of my text have any application is in the thought already indicated, that the house of God is forsaken if the Church does not do her missionary work with zeal, with earnestness, with a sort of generous prodigality, and with real success; and that if she does not do so it can not be her own fault, for she is the Bride of Christ, all glorious within, though the wrought gold of her clothing be dimmed and her raiment of needlework torn; but it is the fault of the rulers.

I have only one statistic to mention. The State of Wisconsin, comprising two Dioceses, consists of about fiftyfour thousand square miles, with a population in 1870 of over one million of people; and the Church in the year 1874 had fewer than five thousand communicants. I am well aware of all the reasons for the smallness of the num

ber of communicants, the great efforts of the various bodies of Christians who are earnestly laboring, the large foreign population, the many reasons which prevent conversions in great numbers. I am quite aware of the fact that we are better off than some other Western Dioceses. But with all these allowances the disproportion is a startling one, in view of the claims of the Church, and of the blessings which it is hers to proclaim.

If I go on to assert that the disproportion is the fault of the Church's rulers, I hope I shall not be misunderstood to mean this or that person or body of persons, parishes, Council, Standing Committee, priests, bishops. No one, I think, can watch the labor of most of our clergy and of the various committees appointed to work, without finding great toil, earnest zeal, and, I must say, results not in proportion to either.

If the fault be anywhere, it must lie, over and above whatever want of zeal there is in the most zealous of us, in our methods of work and in the organization that governs and controls us. The work we have to do; the burden that is laid upon each one of God's priests, ay, and on the lay members of the Church also; the awful answer we must one day give; the need, the crying need everywhere must be not my excuse, for none is needed-but the motive which makes it right to speak of what may be the difficulties we ought to remove.

The first point to which I desire to call your attention is that the distinctive doctrines of the Church are not as definitely and positively proclaimed as they ought to be. Between the Roman Church on the one hand, which declares herself to be the one Catholic Church of Christ, to the exclusion of all others, and the various orthodox and

unorthodox denominations which claim to preach Christ to the world, I do not know what reason our Church has to exist, except it be, on the one hand, that she is the American branch of the Catholic Church, and on the other that, because she is so, she can do what no other Christian body can accomplish. That she is a conservative, respectable, highly cultivated, refined body of people, that she has a Scriptural liturgy and even a sound body of doctrine, will hardly prove a sufficient reason for being merely another of the great number of denominations which do the work of Christ, or seek to do it, with all the weakness of disunion, divided counsels, and separate and opposing organizations.

The Church of which we are the priests and members puts forth definite claims to do, by an Apostolic Ministry, what God has bidden the Church to do. These are to administer the sacraments-sacraments which profess to be a reality: a Baptism which regenerates, a Holy Eucharist which gives the threefold blessing of the presence of Christ by means of the sacramental presence of His human nature, of the pleading of the one sacrifice once offered by virtue of that presence, and of union with Christ resulting therefrom to the penitent believer; to train up children with true Christian training; to preach the Gospel to sinners, and to have power to bind and to loose, in the name of God and by His commission, the sin-stricken soul; in an age of materialism to present the supernatural world, with all its hidden powers, to the acceptance of mankind; to preach chastity, honor, honesty, family life, and patriotic earnestness to the people; to visit the sick, to clothe the naked, to comfort prisoners, to soothe the dying, and to bear witness to the invisible bonds which bind the living and the dead in one Communion.

These are distinctive claims. If they are false, no priest should dare to present them. If they are true, the Church must dare to proclaim and to practice them. No questions of caution, or prudence, or the fear of offending, can possibly come in, in such questions as these. If it is the Church's mission to do all this, she needs to do it; and the more directly, plainly, without reserve, she does it, the more likely it is that she will accomplish her work.

But-and here is the point-all this needs to be done, not so much by individual effort and individual courage, though these are necessary, as by the organized system of the Church.

Let me suggest some points which do not seem to tend in this direction.

First: Every devout American Churchman believes in the due influence of the laity of the Church in her government, but they ought to be laymen. A layman, I suppose, is a baptized member of the Church who desires to any degree to exercise his privileges as such. I give the feeblest definition I can give, saying nothing about the reception of the Holy Communion and many other duties of Christians. By the laws which govern the Church in Wisconsin, and I believe generally in this country, any person, baptized or unbaptized, who has for six months attended its services, and statedly contributes to the support of an Episcopal Parish, can exercise the duties of a layman in that parish. He can vote for the vestry; he can have his share in electing the lay delegates to the Council; he can thus have a vote and voice, through his representative, in the election of a parish priest, in the general government of the parish, in the legislation of the Diocese, in the election of a Bishop, in the election of del