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faction incidental and self-justified opportunities of spiritual assembling, such as meetings in the nature of our Church Congresses so manifestly supply.
There is another aspect of usefulness in which I must present the Church Congress, so as to do full justice to the subject. I have spoken of the value of the debates in relation to the topics discussed. There is, however, an antecedent advantage in the debating itself, apart from the questions raised. Ever since our Church has awakened to new life, a strong and reasonable desire has grown up, both among laymen and clergy, for opportunities of regular conference, of which the placid Englishman of George III.'s days could not have realised the slightest idea. It was a healthy and strong impulse, and its repression would have produced inward inflammation: yet the means of gratifying it at that time were sufficiently difficult to discover. There were grave reasons, so long as the Church retains its constitutional position in the nation, from which we hope and believe it will not be so easily displaced, why the Convocatio Cleri should not risk its status by changing its identity. Diocesan conferences are of very recent introduction, and still but partially organised. In this emergency, the Church Congress — a purely voluntary association — combining, as I showed in my earliest sentences, a wide popular constitution with a very careful internal organisation, was preferred as an expedient, not pretending to be complete, but yet claiming to be real within its limits, to bring together the classes of Churchmen anxious for common deliberation.
The fact of such an institution, so voluntary and yet so regular in its self-responsibility, being so calmly conceived, and then launched with general acceptance into the orbit of an old ecclesiastical system, of which the members were already revolving in compliance with the law of their own attraction, proves, with a vividness of illustration, which it is impossible to embody in words, how young in physique,
