thought (religious and philosophical) and Germany's international dealings will teach us the importance of seeking a sound philosophical basis for our corporate acts.

The changes in British administration and policy so closely coincident with the development of the Oxford Movement as to exclude all likelihood of accident find their place among the many things which teach us that without the Catholic religion there is no salvation.

Some Contributions of the Episcopal Church to Christian Unity

REV. JOHN HENRY HOPKINS, D.D.

I.

EYOND all question the greatest innovator of all history was our God and Saviour, Jesus Christ. He was the greatest reformer and the greatest personality who ever started a new era. At the threshold of that new era He said, "Think not that I am come to destroy the law or the prophets. I am not come to destroy but to fulfill." At the threshold of a new age we must look backward as well as forward, if we are going to be like Jesus. And if Jesus Christ's church is His body, the agency through which He works, and the agency through which we reach Him, that body too, the Church of Jesus Christ, must at a new era look backward as well as forward. That is the first great contribution to the United Church of the United States, which some day will be made by what is now called the Protestant Episcopal Church.

We trace our apostolic succession of bishops back to Pentecost. There is no titled property in existence whose title

deeds run back as far as that. The oldest title deed in the City of London is the deed to Fulham Palace where the Bishop of London resides. I was honored as a guest at that palace some years ago, and the Bishop then said that it was the oldest titled property in the City of London. His own title deeds to being a lineal successor of the apostles run much further back than that. That is not a mere technicality. It means that this Church was founded by Jesus Christ's apostles, through the Holy Ghost, on the day of Pentecost, and, therefore, that it has a history and a lineage and a status which contribute the best of the past to the needs of the everchanging present.

II.

There is a mistaken conception of evolution abroad today. You will find it in all kinds of literature, in all kinds of philosophy, in all kinds of sociology, in all kinds of art. It is superficial. It claims that because there is progress, nothing is fixed. This error springs from the radical and superficial evolutionists. To a certain extent it is true. Like most radicals, a superficial evolutionist is true in what he affirms and very wrong in what he denies. The chief contribution to religion made by this superficiality is often to the attractive misconception, originating, I believe with Guizot, that "Christianity came into the world as an idea to be developed." That is only half-true. In the first place, the term "Christianity" is not a Bible word. You cannot find it there. You cannot find it in the Prayer-Book, except in the preface. It is a misleading term. It seems to put the grace of the gospel of God our Saviour, on a par with Buddhism, Confucianism, Mohammedanism, Judaism and the like distortions. Therefore, there is a tendency amongst these superficial people to put Jesus Christ in Christianity

(to use their term) on the same plane as that occupied by Moses in Judaism, Mohammed in Mohammedanism, Confucius in Confucianism, and the like. If this is the case, we might as well go home and close our churches, and move to Berlin. Germany lies in fragments and there are gold stars on flags-because of this superficial tendency of today, to think that a new age must have everything new, a new Christ, a new kind of religion, a new kind of everything, and nothing that is old just because it is old.

Much American Christianity has been drifting whither it scarcely knows, because so many of its leaders have been obsessed by this superficiality, which says that "Christianity came into the world only as an idea to be developed." Therefore, of course, it must be something new in every new age, and the only thing it cannot be today is what it was in the beginning. To counteract that superficiality, to save a reforming age from catastrophe, to save American Christianity from being dissolved into mere transcience and guess-work, this Church stands to contribute the kind of reformation that Jesus Christ our God inaugurated. "Think not that I am come to destroy the law or the prophets." It was the threshold of the new era. "I come not to destroy but to fulfill." The Gospel facts are accordingly historic, and unchangeable. It is their adaptation which must change.

Therefore, we are like some advanced mathematicians. I suppose most of us, like myself, are using habitually about as much mathematics as we learned when we were ten years old. About all I use is addition, and occasionally subtraction, very unwillingly multiplication, and I rarely now attempt anything as difficult as division; but I remember in college studying Calculus. I remember that that somewhat advanced phase of mathematics consists of a wonder

ful combination of opposites. There is a "constant" that does not change; there is a "variable" that always changes, and, just there, the differential calculus is like Jesus Christ's Church, and, like the Gospel, it does not change and it does change. And, our apostolic succession is the constant element that we can contribute toward the flotsam and jetsam, the disorganization of drifting American Christianity. We are living in a new age physically, a new age in practically everything of a mundane nature, but I have not found any new wheel rounder than the old wheel, nor any new square squarer than the old, and you have not found any multiplication table more accurate than the original. It is the old, old, multiplication table, that does not change. It is constant and, therefore, only an adaption of it is needed. So Guizot was partly right and partly very wrong when he said "Christianity came into this world as an idea to be developed." That is only partly true, but if that is all, if Christ did not come into this world to be "the same, yesterday, today and forever," then Christianity must always be changing and because always changing, have no roots and no authority and no credentials. This, to repeat, is the first great element that this Church can contribute and longs to contribute towards the drifting, footloose, wandering Christianity of our friends. It is loyalty to the absolute, unchangeable Facts of the Godhead of Jesus Christ, the Incarnation, the Atonement, and all the other fundamentals of the Gospel.

III.

Again, if you and I were looking for the most wonderful age of Christianity, we know where we would go. "The noble army of martyrs, praise thee,"-so the Church has sung every day since the fourth century. We would go

back into those earliest days when every boy, girl, man and woman was liable to persecution and most cruel death, for being a Christian. We would go back to those days of the first, second and third centuries and the early part of the fourth century, when our forefathers were compiling the Canon of the New Testament, and when they very frequently paid for the privilege of being Christians by being burned alive, flung to the lions or crucified. That is where I would go to find the real thing, and I believe you would too. That age has stood the test.

You will remember that in the days of the French Revolution a young man came to Tallyrand, the apostate priest, and said to him that he had a new religion. Do you recall that old cynic's reply? "Well," he said, "go back and fast forty days and forty nights, be scourged and crucified and rise again on the third day, and when you're done, come back and tell me about your new religion." When you are talking about a new religion in a new era, this Church repeats the Nicene Creed, and I want to tell you that the Nicene Creed stands today on the same ground as the Canon of the New Testament, and the very same people who lived and knew the truth that was finally expressed in the Nicene Creed were the same people who stood those terrible martyrdoms, and decided what books should be in the New Testament. Now, when it comes to deciding what the New Testament means I feel a good deal safer, to say "Very well, just as long as Jesus Christ is the same yesterday, today and forever, and since the householder of the kingdom of God bringeth forth out of his treasure things new and old, we would rather take their opinion as to the fundamentals that describe Jesus Christ than the opinions of anyone else." That's the next great contribution of this Church to the age in which we live.