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CHURCH AND STATE. THE" Christian Church now occupies the place I of the Ottoman Empire as the Sick Man of Europe." Every section has its reform move- ments, its Missions of Repentance," its Archbishop's Committees, it Comisiwn Ad-drefnu, its consulta- tions of specialists. But in spite of it all the patient steadily declines. The decline of the authority of the Pope during the war, and the ineffectualness of his appeals to the peoples and rulers to cease slaughtering one another, is no less marked than the failure of the Protestant hierarchies to prevent coercion and murder in Ireland, or to arrest the outbreaks of the Class War in South Wales or Anglesea. Nor can any drastic operation meet the case, such as the abolition of the Papacy-in which Protestants like Dr. Clifford see a sharp and simple cure. The extreme unction of a change of name from Calvinistic Methodist to Eglwys Henaduriaethol will not revive the dying. The un- speakable Turk was not notably improved by the removal of Abdul Hamid, and Presbyter is but Priest writ large." These considerations make one all the more grateful for such a frank and serious diagnosis as that of Prof. Miall Edwards. But even that does not seem to some of us to go deep enough. After five years' assent to those who sought to climb into the Kingdom of Heaven on earth by some other way; after five years' ac- quiescence in the negation of God implied by war, it is little wonder that the Fold of the Church appears as a ruin rather than a refuge to the bewildered sheep who were wont to seek security and shepherding within its walls. The very title of the "Christian Churches to represent Jesus Christ is now being questioned, if not denied. At the South Wales Association of the Calvinistic Methodist Body held in June, it was decided to circulate to the Churches a very grave diagnosis of the cause in Monmouthshire, made by an elderly and earnest minister. He stated frankly that young men from the Churches were flocking to the Socialist Party, who claimed to be out to translate the social gospel of Jesus into the realities of daily life, while the Churches contented themselves with crying, Lord, Lord," and ignoring His precepts. Further, the very conception of Churches as we behold them to-day, is being suspected in serious quarters as an aboriginal heresy, as the most besetting temptation of Christians to disunity and antagonism, and as the greatest hindrance to the gospel of the King- ship of God on earth. Protestants in the past have freely made such charges against the Church of Rome and the Church of England, without realising that the indictment might apply equally to the seven and seventy jarring sects of dissent. Even so moderate and so eminent a writer as Mr. T. R. Glover (author of The Jesus of History," and commended as a historian by the Archbishop of Canterbury) has ventured to write If the mind of Jesus has been at all rightly interpreted in this book, it seems to follow that he was not responsible either for the name or the idea of the Church. Nothing can By G. M. Ll. D. be more alien to the tone and spirit of his thinking than the ecclesiastical idea as represented by Syprian and Ignatius. Fine conceptions and high ideals clung about the idea of the Church in the best minds, but in practice it meant the transformation of the Gospel into a code, the repression of liberty of thought, and the final extinction of prophecy.- (Conflict of Religions in the Roman Empire.) Grave words--especially as applied to the supposed halcyon days of the early Church. How much more true of the Churches of our own time, when in Wales and in Ireland sectarian zeal was squared with un-Christian enmity, and where Protestant and Catholic, Anglican and Methodist, hated each other for the love of God." Results so awful, a spiritual blindness so appalling, and a complacency so damning-and these results repeated in age after age in the history of Christendom- must needs drive one back to enquire what subtle and inveterate temptation has haunted Christian disciples from the beginning, and even to consider an answer so startling as that of one careful and devoted student of Jesus, that the formation of Churches has all along been a tragic mistake. What then is the alternative? The Gospel of the Kingship of God. It is a matter of astonishment to some laymen to realise that in the Four Gospels the word translated l' Church [ecclesia, company, con- gregation] only appears twice. One of these refer- ences, enjoining the excommunication of the offender, is suspected of being an ecclesiastical interpolation. The other has been appropriated by the Church of Rome as the authority for limiting the true Church to the official or reputed successors of St. Peter. On the other hand, the. reference to the Kingdom (or Kingship) of God, appears repeatedly as the pre- eminent meaning of the Gospel. The Gospel of the Kingdom, the seeking first of the yingdom, the King- dom that is not as this world's kingdoms-cannot be denied to have a central and paramount place in the propaganda of Jesus. And if God is rightly revealed by Him as a spirit- the Spirit of Love, an accurate paraphrase of the at present meaningless phrase, the Kingdom of God would be the Government of the Spirit of Love," or more simply the Rule of Love." It is a matter of historical and even newspaper knowledge that Politics (national, ecclesiastical, social, domestic) is the field, above all others, in which human effort and sacrifice and passion and tragedy are most conspicuous. So deeply are passions aroused by it that the discussion of Politics are taboo at a formal dinner party. Now the very meaning of Politics is the science of government or the method of rule, and it is precisely on this subject of universal concern and of passionate interest and profound importance that the Churches are dumb or dark as though Christ had neither striven nor suffered to teach government by love on earth as it is in heaven. The tragedy of the Churches is that they have side- tracked divine services into consecrated buildings, Fugues in E, anthems and chorales, Westminster Con-