Page:Place & Influence of Church Congresses.djvu/13

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of the executive or a successor of the Apostles; the division of the land into parishes with their parsons, belongs to the common-law of common-sense; liturgical worship and pre-adjusted forms can claim the sanction of educated experience. An Establishment may be destitute of these features, and then the onus probandi will be upon its authorities to show if it can do as well or better without them. A Church claiming to be Apostolic may also, from some external cause, have been organised without their full manifestation having been secured. But while in this latter case the organisation is plainly defective, so in the former one the presence of such features is no à priori proof that the Establishment is more than an Establishment. The broad fact which is certain is, that an Establishment can assimilate the external organisation of an Apostolic Church, and that an Apostolic Church can accept the benefits of an Establishment without creating any liability why it should be called on to abandon or to modify its distinctive features. The Church of England, as it is, is a living example of this compatibility; for it can claim the allegiance and support, without arrière-pensée, alike of those who regard it as a powerful and popular engine for those high moral objects, which can only be compassed by a national Establishment, and of those who reverence it as the Civitas Dei within its territorial borders. It is the 'truce of God' between the parties. The Establishment section might desire to make it more popular, and the Apostolic section might long to make it more hieratic, but each side, if wise, feels that the attempt, if pushed too far, would sever the alliance, and bring down the Church of England as it is with a heavy swoop. In the meantime, while patient, like all institutions, of cautious and conservative reform, it remains so long as it is not tampered with, neither too popular to be a Church, nor too hieratic to be an Establishment. Of this 'truce of God,' an active and vigorous, not to say young and bustling embodiment is the Church Congress. The professing