laws through its proper representatives. The American Christian Church is that to which the thoughts, and prayers, and plannings of all American Christians ought to aspire.

BOSTON, MASS.

E. P. Gould.

"CENTRALIZATION IN CONGREGATIONALISM."

I Do not discuss this subject as a doctrinaire, nor shall I speak with an advocate's seeming bias, as if I had a pet theory, the adoption of which I deemed all-important. I am simply desirous of presenting for candid consideration the question of how to make our polity practically more effective.

We are living in the evangelistic epoch of the church's history, and it is of immense moment to Congregationalists, as well as to the world, to learn how we may become more aggressive, how develop greater propagative power. It is not to be presumed that we cannot make any changes for the better, or that our past experience has taught us nothing. More than this, we are now sharing the common work with other branches of the church, and each is challenged to do its best. The opportunities are boundless, and the emulation in good works is of a nature calculated to stimulate each household of faith to undertake the utmost for the sake of Christ and the world. Our growth as a denomination is not, on the whole, flattering, especially when it is remembered that we started with an uncommon prestige, had the lead in numbers, and now are surpassed by the Methodists, Baptists, Presbyterians, Roman Catholics, Campbellites, and Lutherans. Certainly there must have been circumstances which limited our growth, and, whether our errors or misfortunes occasioned this failure to hold our own or not, the thing we want to know is, how to amend our methods, and what to do, to bring our churches into greater organic unity, and to combine them for more effective field-work. I believe a great denomination like ours, with its splendid history, and its contagious, inspiring spirit, may be modified and improved in some of its working principles. In church polity, as in Christianity, a distinction between the essential and circumstantial is imperative; for that is practically the distinction between the spirit and the body; the building and the scaffolding; the warfare and the weapons; the end and the means. A church polity which in the past gave new enthusiasm to life, new wings

to faith, a new domain to liberty, must ever command our respect. But it would be a mistake to canonize forms of church life and government, which the expediency of special circumstances suggested and developed, as the only ones compatible with spiritual life and work. The past can never become the measure of the future, and while there are "things behind" worthy of historical remembrance, they are practically to be forgotten in the "reaching forth unto those things which are before." It may be taken for granted that the future will be with that church which has in it the greatest moral forces; and the greatest moral forces are those confessedly which most powerfully affect the conscience and the religious life of men. The true test of all theologies is, Do they provide fully for the spiritual necessities of men. There cannot, either, be any divorce between theology and practical religion. The former, whenever at variance with the deepest instincts and necessities of human nature, will ultimately fail. Truth alone is nutritive, error is the mother of death. No life can grow or continue save as it is fed by truth, and so there can be no religious life save as there is theological truth. But our inquiry to-day is rather as to applied Christianity, it relates to our methods of work, our principles of coöperation, and the question is, Should we encourage the tendency to centralization within our denomination? and if so, why? for the challenge that meets us is cui bono.

1. To start with, then, we name the need of a stronger government, which centralization would secure to us. We have been too largely in the past simply a collection of churches acting independently of each other. An esprit de corps has been impossible where this atomic sort of existence has prevailed. With common burdens, with imperative tasks, with the need of concerted and concentrated action, there is a call for a compacter organization and a closer denominational union. We suffer somewhat by comparison with sister denominations. They get the momentum which is supplied by simultaneous effort. Behind every movement of an evangelistic or charitable nature is the strength of the combined churches. Greater coherency gives greater force. We have been, seemingly, most afraid of all power of a centralized sort. Emphasizing the bond of union supplied in the fellowship of the churches, we have been reluctant to favor aught looking towards a quasi organic connection of the same. Strong churches may not feel the need of union with any others, but our weaker churches do. It is their independency and isolation, their lack of

connection with an organized body, charged with some sort of official interest in and responsibility for them, that makes them feeble and lonely. Then in the prosecution of evangelistic and missionary undertakings there is strength and unity of design according as the churches are consolidated and massed with their resources, spiritual and material. Our missionary societies have been too largely independent of the churches they are presumed to represent. We have been proud of what has always been an element of weakness, namely, that we were undenominational. We have been, therefore, always willing to build up other households of faith; creditable enough if it was not done, as it certainly has been, at the expense of the churches of our own name we were under every rightful obligation to help. There has been a sort of largess about us Congregationalists, because of which we have been givers to every appealing object or missionary society. Generous to a fault to applicants often having no claim upon us, we have in doing for others neglected our own vineyards. Now, as we find every other denomination doing whatever of the Master's work is possible along its own lines in its own way, is it not time that we operated yet more in the same fashion, seeking to combine the strength of all our churches, and to consolidate and focus all our own denominational strength. We cannot longer appear in the field, crowded with emulous combatants well organized, simply as a friendly knight, an ally any may secure, and ready to coöperate equally with any or all. We are not wanted in that guise, nor can we effect much if that be our rôle. What we do now and hereafter we must do as a distinct army corps, well officered and eager to vie with other corps in fighting under the great Captain of our common salvation.

2. Changed circumstances and new opportunities of service are stimulating this tendency to centralization. Evidently the ecclesiastical platforms and methods of our fathers were, as we now study them, excessively provincial. They were devised for a narrow home use; were adapted to a homogeneous population, covering but a limited area of country. Gradually, and with difficulty, have we outgrown our traditionary fear of any centralized authority. At first there was opposition to even ministerial district associations, and state associations were of a still later birth. Our great missionary societies, the American Board and the American Home Missionary Society, started as undenominational, and to-day have become, strictly speaking, Congregational organizations by the logic of events rather than by any

choice of our own. Now and then we hear a protest breathing the old-time and outgrown spirit, that neither agency is denominational, while practically the constituency of both has been for years, and is increasingly so with every passing twelvemonth, Congregational. Frankly we must acknowledge that the system we inherited was poorly equipped for anything beyond parish work amid the conditions which obtained in the New England of our forefathers. Now the whole outlook has altered. We find ourselves in the presence of rival church polities, having the confessed advantage of completer organization for aggressive movement under unity of management, and with a watchful vigilance which is quick to utilize every opening. Slowly we have been yielding to the pressure of circumstances, and have sought to modify and improve our own methods, and come into touch with the new conditions of service. We have discovered methods of religious coöperation and organized fellowship quite consonant with the genius of our Congregational polity. We are feeling this tendency of things in the direction of a compacter organization and greater unity of purpose in the formally suggested plan of consolidating our various missionary periodicals; in the voice of some of our Western churches, making its plea heard at the last National Council, to transfer ministerial standing to the district Conferences, and suggesting that the latter be the only constituent bodies of the State Conferences or Associations, and these, in turn, the constituencies of the Triennial Council. Also, we note another sign of the same trend of things in the call for the reorganization of the American Board; and in the effort of other national societies to come into closer formal relations with the churches; as well as in the very proper and timely proposal to observe Forefathers' Day, and use all its inspiring memories to awaken a new sense of responsibility, and kindle a new zeal for all kinds of evangelistic ventures in the home and foreign fields. And last, but greatest of all, this recent stream of tendency announces itself in the organization of the Triennial Council, now become a fixed fact of our polity, and a possible instrumentality of vast benefit to us as a denomination. Not at all because it has any authority beyond what is moral, but because it can formulate the consensus of opinion and belief in our churches; can discuss grave questions of denominational importance; can impress and shape the religious life of the country by its deliverances on matters of national moment in the domain of ethics and religion. It can greatly quicken the Christian activity and thought of our

adherents, as does the Episcopal Congress and the other great denominational bodies whose periodical assemblies attract so much attention. It is a tendency which thus far in this form has disappointed the fears of not a few alarmists, and has fulfilled the hopes of its most sanguine friends. We need not be afraid of this outcome of a closer, compacter denominational organization. It means augmented power for all kinds of practical work in all the fields into which we are challenged to enter. It brings the promise of a more helpful fellowship, with all its stimulating and supplementing ministries. It will in the long run rid us of the fear of being what we must become more and more, if we are to hold any influential place among the various Christian bodies of the landa denomination, with common traditions, substantial agreement in belief, and aspirations likely to quicken us for the broadest and bravest evangelistic undertakings. Already this tendency for union and coöperation on a yet larger scale expresses itself in the proposal for a Pan-Congregational Council or Conference, which our British brethren have recently made. The air is full of what I am describing, a tendency towards greater organic union, a concentration and coöperation which is prophetic of far larger influence and usefulness than we have ever yet had. Our place in America must become increasingly prominent and effective. Have we not, as a body, an honorable if not foremost place in the religious life and work of our beloved land; in its political and social problems; in the educational ventures which lend such lustre to our times?

Independency and fellowship, the two tap-roots of American Congregationalism, are blending in the centripetal influence all religious bodies are now feeling. The work to be done is so vast, and withal so urgent, that only a well-knitted clan of believers, loyal to their distinctive symbols, proud of their past achievements, yet saluting as their leader the one great Captain of the sacramental host of God's elect, can accomplish what seems possible and imperative. We cannot stand apart in these days when coöperation is the solution to so many of our gravest problems. We need not fear to follow our own national experience in seeking some closer tie than mere confederation of the loosest kind. We are more than a mere congeries of churches, and we ought not to be afraid of our destiny, nor hesitate to accept the mission that only churches organically united can accomplish. Our compact of union is found in the beliefs, the energies, the ideas and convictions, common to the churches of our order. Justice, trustee