uld understand those figures and parallels. And the Church must
awake to her opportunities, to her perception of the Cause....

What, then, was the function, the mission of the Church Universal? Once
she had laid claim to temporal power, believed herself to be the sole
agency of God on earth, had spoken ex cathedra on philosophy, history,
theology, and science, had undertaken to confer eternal bliss and to
damn forever. Her members, and even her priests, had gone from murder
to mass and from mass to murder, and she had engaged in cruel wars and
persecutions to curtail the liberties of mankind. Under that conception
religion was a form of insurance of the soul. Perhaps a common,
universal belief had been necessary in the dark ages before the
sublime idea of education for the masses had come; but the Church
herself--through ignorance--had opposed the growth of education, had set
her face sternly against the development of the individual, which Christ
had taught, the privilege of man to use the faculties of the intellect
which God had bestowed upon him. He himself, their rector, had
advocated a catholic acceptance, though much modified from the mediaeval
acceptance,--one that professed to go behind it to an earlier age. Yes,
he must admit with shame that he had been afraid to trust where God
trusted, had feared to confide the working out of the ultimate Truth of
the minds of the millions.

The Church had been monarchical in form, and some strove stubbornly
and blindly to keep her monarchical. Democracy in government was
outstripping her. Let them look around, to-day, and see what was
happening in the United States of America. A great movement was going
on to transfer actual participation in government from the few to the
many,--a movement towards true Democracy, and that was precisely what
was about to happen in the Church. Her condition at present was one of
uncertainty, transition--she feared to let go wholly of the old, she
feared to embark upon the new. Just as the conservatives and politicians
feared to give up the representative system, the convention, so was she
afraid to abandon the synod, the council, and trust to man.

The light was coming slowly, the change, the rebirth of the Church
by gradual evolution. By the grace of God those who had laid the
foundations of the Church in which he stood, of all Protestantism, had
built for the future. The racial instinct in them had asserted itself,
had warned them that to