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CHURCH QUARTERLY REVIEW.

'No. CLXXV. APRIL 1919.

ART. I.-THE TEACHING OFFICE OF THE CHURCH.

1. The Teaching Office of the Church. Being the Report of the Archbishops' First Committee of Inquiry. Published for the National Mission by the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge. (London. 1918.) 2. Les Conditions du Retour au Catholicisme. Enquête Philosophique et Religieuse. Par DR. MARCEL RIFAUX. (Paris Plon. 1907.)

'HE that goeth about to persuade a multitude that they are not as well governed as they ought to be shall never want attentive and favourable hearers.' Hooker's words, constantly verified from the beginning of human society, have been signally exemplified in the replies and reports of the Committees which have been at work as a sequel to the National Mission of Repentance and Hope. The particular complaints to which Hooker is referring were no ill wind to the Church, for they brought us the great constructive work of the Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity. And in spite of occasional exaggerated or unpractical aspirations, such as were pointed out by the Editor in the Church Quarterly Review for July 1918, it may be hoped that the Report on the Teaching Office of the Church, to say nothing of its sister Reports, may issue in solid constructive action fraught with the promise of good fruit. At any rate we hope that the Report now before

VOL. LXXXVIII.-NO. CLXXV.

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us, in spite of its close print, bad paper and somewhat unattractive appearance, may find hearers as attentive and favourable as its merits certainly deserve.

I

The Report starts from a general allegation of failure of the Church in respect of its teaching office. Here again we go back to the sixteenth century and with George Herbert we exclaim

'I am a scandal to the Church and not

The Church is so to me.'

The failure of the Church is too often talked of when it would be more in place for the talker soberly to face his own failure instead of saddling it upon the Church. The Church's so-called failures are the failures of individuals, especially individual officers of the Church. And we must all be ready to listen to home truths and bravely claim our share.

It is unnecessary to spend time in insisting on the gravity of the question. If the Church's teaching office is fruitfully discharged, whatever else be wrong, fundamentally all is well. If on the other hand it be neglected or inefficient, whatever else may be right, all is fundamentally wrong. It would be impossible to put this better than it is put by Estius, the great Douai commentator on St. Paul, whom the Bishop of Oxford, in his excellent paper (pages 67 and following) quotes on this point:

'It may be asked why, among the other things which the apostle requires from the bishop and deacons, he makes no mention of the administration of sacraments, of the altar, and of the sacrifice which the bishop should offer and at which the deacon should assist. . . . But there is a ready reply. The apostle gives no injunction on these subjects-first, because they are easier, and therefore of less importance, if the office of bishop and deacon be regarded as a whole. For it is not the case, as the mass of men think, that the episcopal or pastoral care consists chiefly in the conferring of Holy Orders at their proper seasons, the consecration of churches, the confirming of

the baptized, and the administration of the other sacraments at the right times and to the proper persons, and the offering of the sacrifice of the mass for the living and the dead; but the chief function of the bishop and of any shepherd of souls is the preaching of the Word of God.'

Are then the clergy of the Church of England in the sum total of their ministrations making their way, as preachers of the word of God, into the hearts and minds of the people of this country to whom their mission is directed? Such a question cannot be answered by a summary 'Yes' or 'No.' The present writer has every reason for believing and asserting that in numberless cases painstaking fidelity in the ministry of the Word is doing its work in the daily pastorate of souls and that, although in earthen vessels, the treasure is not only there but is multiplying five-fold and ten-fold and twenty-fold. Nothing is less fair than, on the ground of apparent signal failure in some cases, to depreciate by a sweeping generalization a whole mass of fruitful if inconspicuous labour. The priest who, with moderate intellectual equipment, none the less works on round the Christian Year, handling from the pulpit the whole cycle of Christian teaching, neglecting no main aspect of truth, and honestly dealing with every difficulty as best he can, may not greatly impress the chance visitor to his Church, but none the less has the ear of his people, and the best of them appreciate the work that he is doing for their souls.

At the same time the knowledge of very numerous such cases should not blind us to the many causes which exist for anxiety. Without ignoring the good in the present situation we must recognize that there is much to be desired in the spiritual power and intellectual ability of many of the clergy, and in the general influence of the Church in the social and practical life of the people. The failure which exists is not, as we shall see later on, peculiar to our country or to the Church of England. But it is for us to put our own house in order rather than to weed other people's gardens.

The Report deals very ably with the classes of failure and its several causes. Broadly there are two main heads,

intellectual and social. The clergy are alleged to be out of touch with modern knowledge and the intellectual problems of the day, while on the other hand the mass of the people look upon them as a class apart and upon their message as one for the well-to-do rather than for the industrial masses. Organized Christianity, so it is said, is more and more out of touch with organized labour, to say nothing of the lower stratum of labour at present imperfectly organized.

The causes of failure resolve themselves into lack of general and special intellectual training and consequent intellectual indolence and weakness in the clergy. Before touching on the remedies suggested we would wish to note what seems a serious gap in the Report, namely the question of vocations. It is unhappily the case that in the twenty years immediately before the outbreak of the war the number of candidates for Holy Orders shewed a marked decline, and not only so, the proportion of men of exceptional ability among the candidates for Holy Orders shewed a striking shrinkage, while again the proportion of University to the whole mass of candidates has undergone a striking diminution. While we recognize that the financial proposals of the Report to a slight extent promise, if carried out, to help more men through their theological studies, it must be said on the whole that improvement in the treatment of raw material (namely the candidates for Holy Orders) is of little avail if the raw material itself runs short. If on the other hand the supply of raw material improves, a marked and immediate improvement in its treatment becomes possible. What we need to work for, and above all to pray for, is a steady recovery both in the numbers of men seeking Ordination and in their educational and general quality. Given this, the suggestions in the Report, as they stand or with improvements, can be carried out not with ease, but with confidence in the result.

Once for all then we would insist upon this as the main contention of the present article. Some forty years ago the Abbé Bougaud, a well-known French ecclesiastic, was solemnly warning the Church of France against its 'grand peril,' namely the shrinkage of vocations. We understand