development of the Papal idea; here is to be seen, almost as in act, the becoming of the Pope full-blown and as known to us, the Pope called by the Holy Orthodox Eastern Church "the first Protestant," "the founder of German rationalism"; whose asserted supremacy is declared by that Church to be "the chief heresy of the latter days, which flourishes now as its predecessor, Arianism, flourished before it in the earlier ages, and which, like Arianism, shall in like manner be cast down and vanish away."

As the Bishop of Maryland remarks in his Lecture, the Roman controversy is inferior in dignity of subject to the great controversies of earlier centuries, which "were concerned, not with matters of order and ministerial authority, but with the far more awful questions of the very nature of God." Yet, as the Bishop further observes, those controversies are past, and their issues closed, while the Roman question remains

of instant, present importance, and, for us in America, of peculiar consequence. Want of intrinsic dignity in it is repaired by other considerations. The presence of the Roman mission in this country, its activity and aggressiveness, its ceaseless concern with our institutions and politics, always with precise aims and for definite ends of its own, are cause enough for examination and exposi tion of the unstable foundation upon which it rests

Against the unhistoric Episcopate in one infallible man we do not protest-for the word "protest" suggests, however faintly, a sense of helplessness, denoting the last refuge of overborne weakness, and implying actual though unwilling submission. It is not that we protest against the Roman claim; we do not allow it, we oppose it, deny it, reject it.

To this necessary work the Lectures here following will be found to lend most efficient aid. It is difficult to write of their excel

lence in measured phrase. Their learning and expressive point, their wide historic sweep and command of facts, their close logic and trenchant, destructive argument, will compel admiration. Not less admirable, to those who have ever attempted like tasks, will appear the success with which the Lecturers have overcome the almost intolerable difficulty of compressing historic periods and involved questions within manageable limits for a single discourse. It would be unbecoming here to attempt awarding proportionate praise to each; suffice it to say that the volume will be found to possess extraordinary value.

The series was most aptly planned as an articulate body and a consistent whole by advisers to whom the Church Club remains deeply indebted, and whose privacy it respects by restraining mention of their names in this place.

Happily, the Club is not in like manner

withheld from celebrating here the names of the Right Reverend and Reverend speakers who dignified its Course of 1894, and gratefully acknowledges its sense of profound obligation to the Bishops of Maryland and Vermont, to the Rev. Dr. Waterman, and to the Rev. Greenough White, the Rev. Robert Ritchie, and the Rev. Algernon Sidney Crapsey, for the kindness with which, in the midst of an absorbing vocation, they gave their unselfish labor in aid of the objects of the Church Club: "to promote the study of the history and the doctrines of the Church, and to stimulate the efforts of Churchmen for her welfare and for the maintenance of the faith."

New York, Advent, A.D. 1894.