Churchmanship

William T. Manning, Bishop of New York, powerful Conservative leader in the Episcopal Church, announced he would speak last Sunday morning in the Cathedral of St. John the Divine. Thousands came. As they sang Onward, Christian Soldiers, he ascended the pulpit. After the hymn the Bishop prayed for the dying statesman. After the prayer, he began to deliver in carefully enunciated syllables the sermon which, probably more than any other, will determine his place as a churchman.

Almost at once he caught the imaginations of his congregation. A desire close to the Bishop's heart is to raise the $15,000,000 needed to complete the Cathedral. "But," said he, "a thousand Cathedrals are of less importance than one foundation of the Christian faith. Better that the Cathedral should never be built than that a Bishop of this Church should fail to bear his witness for the full truth of Jesus Christ!"

Next, he invited his congregation's intellectual sympathy. He wished to state he was no medieval anti-evolutionist. Said he:

Few, if any, of us in this Church hold the position of those who are popularly described as Fundamentalists. We believe in the widest freedom of inquiry and of scholarly research. We welcome eagerly all the light that science and scholarship can give. We believe fully in applying modern knowledge to religion, but we insist that the power of God, and His revelation of Himself, shall not be limited by the measure of our human reason, or of our necessarily partial knowledge of the physical order.

Then he proceeded to state what was the gospel once and forever delivered by the saints. Said he:

Permitting all lawful liberty of interpretation and explanation in the case of every article, this Church calls upon all her clergy and people to believe the fact that Our Lord went into the place of departed spirits, the fact that He is now at the right hand of God, the fact that He will one day come again in judgment, and she certainly calls upon us to believe and expects us to believe and teach, the fact that He who, for our sakes, came down from Heaven, was born of the Virgin Mary, the fact of His bodily resurrection from the tomb, and the fact of His return to the place which He had, before the worlds were, at the right hand of the Father.

Finally, said the Bishop, he could not, and would not, countenance the teaching of any other doctrine by any minister.

He closed: "Other foundation can no man lay than that which is laid, which is Jesus Christ."

Liberals at once picked the weak spot in the Bishop's ecclesiastical utterance. "Permitting all lawful liberty of interpretation," said the Bishop. "But what is lawful liberty?" the Liberals asked. And were not answered.

Bishop Manning's sermon was neither a definition nor a defense of the faith; it was an appeal to the loyalty of the faithful; an honest stroke, well aimed, stoutly delivered; good churchmanship.