through infirmity or expediency, pass by another brother or church, we will not retaliate by refusing our fellowship and aid in distress. Rather, their want of love shall stimulate us to show the fulness of love in fellowship and aid towards them. If there be a fault we will overlook it, that we may develop the love that shall remove all faults in due time. No other way is Christian.

But shall we not bear witness against all caste and color lines? Yes; but we need not write the protest in our fellowship, or over the doors of our schools and churches. Paul did not denounce Diana of the Ephesians, while destroying so largely the traffic in her shrines.2 His is the divine and better way. Instead of saying: "We will not grant you our assistance, if you refuse to unite with a conference or association because of color;" or, "We will not have any churches at all unless they are mixed churches," thus emphasizing the points of difference; the true Christian way is, to build on the points of agreement the widest fellowship that may be had, waiting for time and love to remove the barriers to complete fellowship. For by exacting too much at the start, you prevent all fellowship or paralyze your endeavor. It is the way of God to evolve from germs or principles more and more complex and beautiful systems, both in nature and in grace. We would force fellowship, if this be not a contradiction; God would develop fellowship from the growth of love in the regenerate heart. You cannot compel it before its time. If it be lacking, as it is in varying degrees in all Christians, the divine way is to strengthen the things that remain, to expel the evil by the growth of the new affection. Why should we depart from this method in dealing with infirmity or prejudice anywhere? Can we better it by insistence on what a very few have grace enough to endure? Not only reason but also experience teaches the contrary. But you cry: "Stand by principle, though the heavens fall." So say we. 1 Acts xix. 37. 2 Acts xix. 23-27.

But let us not put under the law of principle what God in the gift of his Holy Spirit puts under the law of expediency. All things that are lawful are not expedient. All are one in Christ; this is the principle. All may be one, and yet not worship or work in the same organizations; this is the expediency. Let our churches admit this fact and act upon it, and all will be well.

But our Southern churches do not refuse colored people membership therein, nor do the conferences deny admission. to colored churches. They deem such mixing in general inexpedient; that is all. And our Northern churches hold the same. There is no denial of Christian brotherhood in this. They, as we, hold all believers to be united in Christ as brethren, all churches to be free and equal; and yet the National Council in 1886, 1889, and 1892, recognized separations of our churches into two associations covering the same ground. It is to be hoped, therefore, that the two societies will turn their rule of retaliation into a rule of love, and co-operate heartily in occupying the fields opening before them. For the Georgia and Alabama plan, recognized in two National Councils, combining principle and expediency, has in it the Christian solution of the Southern Question.

ARTICLE II.

THE VALIDITY OF CONGREGATIONAL ORDI

NATION.

THE DUDLEIAN LECTURE, BY THE REV. WM. ELLIOT GRIFFIS, D. d., BOSTON, MASS., DELIVERED IN THE CHAPEL OF HARVARD UNIVERSITY, 1892.

THE grandfather of the founder of this lectureship was Thomas Dudley, one of the founders of Massachusetts. He was a Puritan who lived in the three homes of Englishspeaking Puritans, England, Holland, and America. He served as a soldier in that Dutch war for independence against Spain which was fought for the benefit of religious freedom everywhere. In his day the intercommunion of all the Reformed churches was the common fact and custom of Europe, not excepting the little island of Great Britain. Reformed and Lutheran ministers from the Continent, where Protestant, diocesan, or political episcopacy was unknown, were settled over English parish churches, or congregations of foreign refugees included in the English church settlement. English bishops presided over Presbyterian clergymen in Scotland, and sat, without claiming or receiving precedence, on equal terms with the Dutch and other pastors and profes sors of divinity, in the ecumenical council of the Reformed churches of Europe, at Dordrecht, in 1619. In that day there was no practical, no recognized distinction in nonRomish churches between episcopal and presbyterial ordination. Outside the Greek and Roman Catholic bodies, the mediæval notion of the so-called apostolical succession was little more than heard of beyond a British party. It was the boast also of the Church of England, that she was a true

Reformed church. Her ambition was to be equal in scriptural character to the Reformed churches of the Continent, whose scholars and scholarship, learning and writings, she so freely borrowed, that, in the Book of Common Prayer, probably two-thirds of what is not of Catholic origin, or from the Bible, is Lutheran or Calvinistic.

Towards the end of the one hundred years between the birth of Thomas Dudley and his grandson Paul, the situation changed. The sacerdotal tendencies, so persistently and successfully resisted everywhere else in Europe beyond the papal organization, prevailed in the one state church of England. Men holding a particular ecclesiastical theory, invented in times subsequent to the apostles, gained the seat of power, with the return of the Stuarts to the British throne. Henceforth, the sword, the prison, and the treasury supplied the basis for the dogma of the apostolical succession, which the Scriptures had failed to furnish. The close union of Anglican politics and religion had, as in so many instances since the time of Constantine, triumphed over the simple truth, and made a show of it openly. A dangerous innovation in Reformed doctrine was forcibly made orthodoxy and legal polity in the state church of England. It was decreed that only episcopal ordination was valid, that all dissenters and nonconformists should be ejected from the pulpits of the politico-ecclesiastical establishment, and that the doors. of the universities should be shut to them and their children. Probably two thousand churches, and as many ministers, were thus branded as nonconformist or dissenting, so that the higher learning had to be sought beyond seas.

While the embers of the controversy were still hot, and the scars of the conflict visible, Paul Dudley was born. He was in Harvard College in 1689, during the stirring events culminating in the fall of the Stuarts and the accession to the British throne of the Dutch Stadholder William III. Then it was hoped that the medieval notion of the sole

validity of episcopal ordination would, with other ideas inherited from a period subsequent to the apostles, be purged from the Anglican Church, which had called herself a true Reformed church. A commission of thirty was appointed for "the reconciling of differences." Among the concessions which Archbishop Tillotson was prepared to make, was the admission of those in presbyterial orders into the ministry of the Church of England by a conditional reordination. The English churchmen, however, distrusted the temper of the time, the commission failed to report, and the matter dropped.

In the same year that Paul Dudley was studying law at the temple in London, he saw the dominant sect of the country follow the errors of the Greek and Roman branches of the Holy Catholic Church. This error was, not in choosing episcopacy as a form of ecclesiastical polity, but in denying the validity of that general method of ordination practised in almost all the other Reformed churches in Christendom. Of the four lectureships established in Harvard University by him, one was for the exposure of errors in the Unreformed, or Roman, church, and another in defence of the truth against the particular error of the Church of England, made in reversing her own history. The words of the founder in stating our subject are sufficiently clear:

"The maintaining, explaining, and proving the validity of the ordination of ministers or pastors of the churches, and so their administration of the sacraments or ordinances of religion, as the same has been practised in New England, from the first beginning of it, and so continued at this day. Not that I would any ways invalidate Episcopal Ordination as it is commonly called and practised in the Church of England; but I do esteem the method of ordination as practised in Scotland, at Geneva, and among the dissenters in England, and in the churches in this country, to be very safe, scriptural, and valid; and that the great head of the church,