ART. VI. THE LATE GENERAL CONVENTION.

Journal of the General Convention of the Protestant Episcopal Church in the United States, 1856. Together with the Constitution and Canons.

UNUSUAL pains were taken by the Secular and Religious press to spread before the Church full and accurate reports of the proceedings and debates of the late General Convention. All who desired information in regard to what was said and done, enjoyed the amplest means for securing it. This fact renders unnecessary, at this time and in these pages, any formal recapitulation or elaborate resumé of the proceedings. In what we have to say, we shall go upon the presumption that our readers are duly informed as to the details. Our object, then, is not to narrate or to compile, but so to study the more important topics and forms of legislation, as to catch and put on record, for the inspection of after years, a just impression of the prevailing temper and dominant purpose of the Triennial General Convention of 1856. For history tells us that such bodies survive longer in their power for good or evil, through the tone and spirit of their conferences, discussions, and enactments, than through any special results which they may originate by the processes of formal legislation.

It will not, we think, be deemed an extravagant pretension, if we claim for a Quarterly some peculiar advantages in an attempt of this character. While conceding to our Weeklies all those qualities which make them effective and influential-such as enterprise, promptness, and a certain quick and nimble facility in dealing with affairs as they rise-qualities finding expression in paragraphs and leaders, written currente calamo, and embodying, sometimes, of necessity, judgments and criticisms essentially extemporaneous; yet we may claim for an organ like this, the very great advantage of securing for the subjects it treats a graver handling, more mature convictions,. and, on the whole, conclusions more truthful and impartial. This advantage may not always appear in these pages, but it enters largely into the public estimate of our resources and responsibilities.

The General Convention is composed of two Houses-the House of Bishops and the House of Clerical and Lay Deputies. The House of Bishops consists of all the Bishops, Diocesan and.

Missionary. Its sessions are strictly private, allowing the presence neither of reporters nor spectators. The House of Clerical and Lay Deputies consists of four clergymen and four laymen, chosen by each Diocese; numbering, all told, about two hundred and forty members. The sessions of this House, in token of its more popular character, are public. The course of legislation resembles that pursued in our Federal Congress. Both Houses must consent in order that any act may become a law; hence, each has an absolute veto upon the other. Whenever demanded by the deputies of any one Diocese, the vote on any question pending must be taken by orders; and to secure an effective majority, both orders must concur. The lay element, therefore, is practically just as potent as the clerical. Many analogies might be pointed out between this Body and the National Congress-so many, indeed, as to lead some to suppose that our spiritual fathers modeled, so far as practicable, the one after the other. It is well known that some of the guiding, controlling intellects in the formation of the one acted as advisers, at least, in the formation of the other. But to whatever extent, be it more or less, it was consciously attempted to conform the Supreme Legislative Body of this Communion to the Federal Legislature; there was one illustrious and memorable assembly which its framers had largely in their minds. We refer to the first Christian Council ever heldthe Council of Jerusalem, over which the Apostle James presided-whose members, as Scripture declares, consisted of Apostles, Elders, and Brethren. Our fathers accordingly established a Council composed of Bishops, Presbyters, and Laymen.

It has been sometimes objected to the Episcopal Church that its government and discipline are too centralizing in their tendencies, that Bishops wield too much power, that their sphere of influence is dangerously large, and therefore that the very genius of the Church estranges it from the popular voice. The Protestant Episcopal Church is representative-republican; but not democratic. It is so in the sense that our civil organization is. Politically we are a republic, not a democracy. There are two ends which all proper Church government must keep in view: viz, efficiency of collective action and protection of the individual-in other words-thorough organization and security of private liberty. Now the first can be had only by a certain amount of centralization; the second can be had only by a corresponding amount of diffused power. The Church has happily provided for the accomplishment of both these ends by centralizing in the prerogatives of Bishops, and by diffusing in the franchises of the laity. In doing so, she has had a wise

reference in all cases to the quality and degree of power so conferred. Without dwelling upon this point, we may safely assert that notwithstanding the authority vested in Bishops and Presbyters, no communion in the land has given the 'laity so much substantial and practical power as our own. For ample proof of the fact we need not go beyond the constitution of this the highest Council of the Church. The power thus granted to the laity is, in all its bearings, so influential as to demand the fullest guarantees that it will be safely exercised. The last and surest of these has, at length, been provided by an amendment to the Constitution enacted by the late General Convention, which requires every Lay delegate to the Convention to be a communicant, and not merely, as heretofore, a baptized member of the Church. This provision, so just in itself and so effectually protective of the Church against intrusions into her Councils of enemies under the guise of friends, will quiet the apprehensions of many of our brethren of the Mother Church, who have often expressed a well-founded surprise that we should grant to the Laity so much legislative power, without furnishing any adequate safeguards against its abuse by indifferentists and unbelievers.

The powers of the General Convention may be briefly defined. They are simply those which, by common consent, it is supposed can be more advantageously exercised by such a central body than by the several Dioceses. It has hitherto been. the rule to interfere as little as possible with matters that could be better cared for by the several Diocesan Conventions; and to look to the General Convention only for such legislation as the whole Church alone was competent to enact and enforce. Thus each Diocese has its own local missions, its own provisions for Christian education, its own mode of regulating the affairs of Parishes, its own Annual Conventions; while to the General Triennial Council belongs the care of Foreign and Domestic Missions, of the Prayer-Book, as containing the Church's devotional system; and, briefly, of all the essentials and most of the accidents of doctrine, discipline, and worship.

Up to a certain point there is considerable similarity between General and Diocesan rights, powers, and functions in the Church, and Federal and State-rights and powers in our political system. But, after all, it is only a partial likenessone which, when introduced as an argument for or against proposed changes in our Constitution, is productive of serious fallacies. For, in the formation of our Ecclesiastical system and of the Constitution which defines its powers, there was no such process as that witnessed in the formation of our national union. There was no covenanted cession of rights, no formal transfer

of power, no surrender of local sovereignty and independence by one party to the other. The Protestant Episcopal Church, therefore, is to be regarded not as made up of confederated Dioceses, each in itself originally separate and independent, but as a branch of the Church Catholic, having its existence in the body of its members and performing its functions of legislation and government cotemporaneously through Councils, Diocesan and General.

As to the dignity, importance, and influence of the General Convention, it is hardly proper to pass them without a word. We are in no fear that they will be overestimated. Our fear is the other way. This Body appears too much like a creature of yesterday; its modes of procedure are too familiar; it deals with too many living and immediate issues, and is too much identified with the errors and infirmities necessarily incident to the conduct of its varied business, as well as to the zealous conflict of antagonistic plans and opinions, to be at all likely to become the object of undue reverence or extravagant admiration. We are apt to forget, while thinking of these vulgarizing associations, the mighty interests it handles and the solemn trusts it guards. We are prone to overlook its representative significance in the present, and its moulding power over the future. Occupied in criticising this or that measure to which its sanction has been given, pleased or displeased with this or that result of its deliberations, we fail to see how it periodically gathers in and reproduces in debate, or condenses into law, the diffused and slowly ripening sentiments of the Church; and thus, by its sessions, marks the steps backwards or forwards of our collective religious life.

In estimating the importance and dignity of this supreme Council, there may be some diversity of opinion as to the comparative rank of the sources whence they proceed. Some may dwell chiefly on its latent as well as manifested capacities for good, and some on its office as the gradual elaborator of a system of law and policy destined to spread over this continent. Some, again, may be attracted by the diversified talent, the grave and cultivated intelligence, the calm, conservative temper, and the ripe Christian experience which usually characterize its members; while others may be more profoundly impressed, by the educated and influential constituencies it represents, constituencies illustrious in every department of thought and activity, and wielding, to-day, in Society and the State, in Religion and Letters, a power out of all proportion to their numbers. As for ourselves, we are disposed to rest its claims upon the serious attention of the time, chiefly on the fact that it

is not only performing the responsible functions conferred by the Church in her best periods upon her national and provincial Councils; not only doing the work done by the synods of Rome, Carthage, and Antioch in the third century, or by those of Arles, Saragossa, and Milan in the fourth, or by those of Orleans and Toledo in the fifth; but doing the same work, discharging substantially the same duties, ministering to the same glorious ends, for a people and in a land and age like ours; all whose characteristics, whether of the brain, the heart, or the arm, are projected on a scale of grandeur unknown to any other period of the world's story. The work, in itself, is one of awful magnitude; but it fairly oppresses the judgment and the conscience when we reflect that it must be done among and for such huge masses of accountable life as are now leaving the old centers of civilization and seeking new homes and 'building new empires between these two oceans. Races, not individuals, are in motion; states, not villages and cities, are struggling to the birth. The most solemn and precious of the traditions of Christian humanity, are in the midst of an exodus from worn-out populations and decaying social fabrics into a land broad enough for the play of the world's forces, and a nation whose heart is young, whose sinews are fresh, and whose plans and hopes are even more magnificent than its capabilities of achievement are powerful and diversified.

But if this aspect of the case reveals broad views of the dignity and importance of our General Convention, there is still another fraught with a revelation yet more impressive and momentous. All these races that meet and commingle here— each bringing with it some homebred weakness or corruption, each defective in the training that qualifies for the safe exercise of political rights, each craving more or less exemption from salutary restraints; and each moreover grasping with covetous hand that lowest good of thinking natures-wealth which soonest breeds excess and pride; all these must be so fused into one as to draw their moral being from the same general sources, and to submit their wills to the same social bonds. Now it is well known that the religious element is at once the deepest and most energetic element in national life. It has more to do than any other with the formation of national character. Beyond any other it enfolds the germ of a nation's future. In the work just spoken of it must act a more prominent part than it has ever done before. But this religious element is a variable force; the quality and direction of its influence depending greatly upon the form it assumes, the channels through which it operates, and the historical associations with