'Build thou the walls of Jerusalem.'—PSALM li. 18.

THIS contains within itself the principle of the nationality of Churches. In the Old Testament, I need not say that there is nothing else. The Jerusalem which the Psalmist wished to build up, the Jerusalem over which our Saviour on this day1 shed His passionate tears because it had not fulfilled its high purpose, was the Church of Israel. Its very name, Jerusalem, suggested its local, geographical, circumscribed origin. But as the New Testament advances and as Christian churches were formed it is still the same idea.

It is true that at that time the monotony and uniformity of the civilised world were such that nations, and therefore national churches, could not, properly speaking, exist. But cities and civic life existed, and it was in them that the first churches were formed. They were called not

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after the names of their founders, nor yet after any special doctrines which took root there, but after the city in which they had sprung up. They were the churches not of Paul, or of Apollos, or of Cephas, but the churches of Jerusalem, of Corinth, of Ephesus, of Rome, as the case might be. They each represented to a great degree the peculiar character of the city in which they were placed. Individual Christians became members of the church of any one of these places, not by proselytism from one to the other, but by the natural bonds of residence, of local association, of affection, of ancestry. And when in after times this idea of a municipal or civic church was superseded by the grander idea of a national church, it was an expansion of the same principle; it was the elevation of the Christian community to the higher level, to the larger fulness of life, which, through the Providence of God, was created in the formation of Christian nations. National churches therefore belong to the predestined advance, the perfect ideal, of the Redeemer's kingdom. To go back to small municipal churches, still more to go back to mere ecclesiastical churches, is to go back to the meagre elements of the old Roman Empire or of the old Jewish Synagogue before these new disciples had been

called into existence. To found churches on the mere likeness of opinion or custom is to found them on that false principle which St. Paul in the First Epistle to the Corinthians condemns as springing from or tending towards the carnal elements of faction or party spirit.

I propose to consider the chief peculiarities of the Church of England as a national church. Just as the peculiarity of the ancient Jewish Church was contained in the fact that it was the Church of Israel, or of the Church of Corinth that it was the Christian community of the people of Corinth, or of the Church of Philippi that it was the Church of the people of the Philippians, so the main peculiarity which distinguishes the National Church is that it is the Church of England. Whatever are the faults, the virtues, the opportunities of the English nation, these are to a great degree reflected in the English Church.

As the Apostle said to his converts 'Ye are our epistle,' so the clergy of the Church of England may in a large measure say to the English people, and the English people in like manner to us, 'Ye are our epistles.' Each is the expression of the mind of the other; each has its own characters written plain and broad; and those charac

ters, whether they be graces or blemishes, can be traced visibly on the face of each-known and read of all men.' Every Englishman has a right to the ministrations of the English Church; every inch of English soil is occupied by its parishes; every one of its pastors is the property as well as the guide of the English public. Other churches may have been founded for the maintenance of particular opinions or particular institutions. Other parts of the Christian community of this country have broken off for the sake of advancing particular truths, such as the maintenance of peace and plain speaking by the Society of Friends, or the maintenance of the Pope of Rome by the Roman Catholics, or the doctrine of separate congregations by the Independents, or the right of presbytery or predestination, by the Presbyterians, or the ancient practice of immersion by the Baptists, or the doctrine of assurance and the use of itinerant ministers by the Wesleyans, or the unity of God by the Unitarians. But the Church of England rests on no such special grounds. It was founded and it continues simply for the sake of doing good, after its measure, to the people of England. The Church of England is the inheritance of us all. However

much it may have failed to do this, still this is its object. Whatever estrangement may have grown up between it and the people, yet still there is a deep, an inextricable union.

Let me take three points in which this connection between the English Church and the English people is most visibly brought forward.

1. As the English State, so also the English Church is inseparably connected with the past. As there is a sense in which the State has preserved its continuity from the earliest times down to the present, through all the manifold changes which it has undergone, so also it is in the Church. The opinions, the usages, the forms of worship, both within the State and within the Church, have been altered over and over again; but the framework, the general framework, still remains the same. The episcopate, the parishes, the colleges, the cathedrals, the schools of the English Church, all are founded on what existed long before; and although the framework is nothing without the spirit, yet still the spirit receives a certain form and shape from the framework. It may be new wine that has been poured into old vessels, and oftentimes the old vessels have been strained to the uttermost to receive it;