has been witnessed by this century. Modern science, with its endless applications in practical inventions, is the child of this period. To save our civilization from degeneration by worldliness, down through agnostic atheism, into dead materialism, Christianity must have advanced as rapidly. Has it? I answer, "Yes," and come, therefore, with joy to this semi-centennial cel

ebration.

Alone of all the nations, ours was born of the pure passion of civil and religious liberty. It is an exalting reminiscence that America has preserved this liberty through her first century. Our country's past has no parallel in the history of nations. Benton's prophecy is fulfilled. We reach the East by rail over the Rocky mountains. This is patriotism's inspiration for the future from the "days that are past." Indiana's story does not blot this fair picture. Fifty years ago the White river and the Ohio flowed through an almost unbroken wilderness. Less than one hundred years ago the first "Western pioneers" trailed, with their white covered wagons, into this region, where to-day there are millions of people. The first white settler came to this city in 1819. There were Indians here till 1824; and about fifty years ago William Jones helped to catch fawns where the Vandalia depot now stands. In 1845 there was a roost of wild turkeys in a sugar grove where St. Clair street crosses Meridian. The first railroad (to Madison) was not built till 1847; and the first train that left this city carried out of it Henry Ward Beecher, on his way to Brooklyn. It seems only yesterday. Fifty years ago this city was a mud village of 2,000 people; with the canal fraud, like a detached skeleton, lying upon it; and to-day it is the largest and the handsomest wholly inland city in the United States.

The great wheel of the world's life has rolled on with increasing velocity, and Christianity has advanced as never before since apostolic days. The fifty years last past have seen unparalleled results in mission fields. The sickles of the army of laborers gleam in the fast ripening field of the world's life. The spread of the English race has been matched by the spread of the English Church. Her Colonial Episcopate, the indication of her aggressive zeal, has increased tenfold, touching to-day with apostolic order and evangelic truth every corner of the globe. The Lambeth Conference, about to assemble, will voice the principles of catholic missionary work and religious reform, advancing with the rapidly moving line of modern progress throughout the English speaking world.

The Episcopate in America, true to the increased rate of advance in the nation, has multiplied twenty fold in the same period. The census of the United States reveals the immensely gratifying fact that the rate of the Church's progress has been greater than that of any other religious organization. The Church has grown in fifty years three times as fast as the nation. Christianity is not being left behind. In colonial days the Church could not grow. Without Bishops there could be no new ministers nor members. It

is a proof of the divinity of the Church that it lived. It was worse off than Moses left in the bushes of the Nile. There was no nursing mother to take it up. It was oppressed by the Egyptians. It was rated as the " patrician body," without sympathy for republican ideas. Washington was suspected because he was a Churchman. All Churchmen were supposed to be Tories, and at heart traitors to the Declaration of Independence. The clergy were called hirelings, and the people formalists, on account of the Prayer Book, and papists on account of the robes. The Bishops were considered lordly aristocrats, although their incomes would hardly keep them in respectable gaiters. The Church was looked upon as an English exotic that ought to die. The other Christian bodies were unhindered and fully organized from the start. They filled this middle west with their doctrines during the first tides of emigration. Fifty years ago, when the Church was first able to begin her missionary work here, public opinion, that Cæsar of American life, was unanimously opposed to the Episcopal Church. When these facts are considered the progress of the Church in this region during the past fifty years is simply a marvel. Nine Dioceses, with great institutions and endowments, have been developed out of Bishop Kemper's first field. In the Far West the Apostolic Church leads the van of the onward rolling tide of population.

In 1819 there were six Churchmen in St. Louis, the largest town then in the Mississippi valley, and they organized Christ Church there on the 1st of November-the first Episcopal church in all this vast region. One lady, from Illinois, alone received communion there at its first celebration. It was not until 1834 that the first confirmation took place. The next year, when Bishop Kemper was consecrated, he was elected rector of Christ Church, St. Louis. The Rev. Mr. Johnson, whom I remember as professor in the General Theological Seminary, came West with the Bishop, and visited Lawrenceburg, New Albany, Jeffersonville, Evansville and Terre Haute. Good old Dr. D. V. M. Johnson, of St. Mary's Church, Brooklyn, organized the parish I now have in Brooklyn, and built the first St. Luke's. Bishop Kemper secured promise from him, while he was in the seminary, to "go West." It was his cousin, Samuel, who did go with the Bishop, and D. V. M. Johnson followed the Bishop the next year, and reached Michigan City about 2 o'clock one morning, on his way to Lafayette. It was a weary journey, by stage and wagon, over slushy roads late in the fall. At 6 A. M. an old friend, David Moore, saw his name in the hotel register, waked him up and insisted he should stay over and preach. "They were hungry," he said; "they had not had Episcopal preaching for a year." He stayed and preached. The church was three dwelling houses combined, with the partitions taken out, and the "three decker" built in, and a little vestry room improvised in the corner. Before he could leave town on Monday they called him to be rector at $1,500 a year-an enormous salary for those days; but the town was settled by New York and Massachusetts people. Good Dr. Johnson might have stayed there

till now if he had not been attacked by the fever and bronchitis. When the bilious fever broke out there seventy new graves were filled before a drop of rain fell on the first that had been opened. It was a scourge.

In Indianapolis the Methodists held camp-meetings from 1821. The first Baptist church was organized within two years after Pogue settled here, and had possession of the first log school house. The next year the first Presbyterian church was born in the same cradle, and "Beecher's" church was organized in 1838. The "Christians" did not come till 1833. The Lutherans organized in 1837, and the Congregationalists in 1857. Christ Church was organized in 1837. The church in New Albany and in Madison had been organized two years before, in 1835; St. Paul's, Jeffersonville, and Trinity, Michigan City, in 1836. Lafayette organized just before Indianapolis, and Richmond and Evansville followed shortly afterward. In June, 1838, Bishop Kemper held a convocation in Evansville, and called a convention to meet in Madison the 24th of August, 1838. Nine parishes and nine clergymen reported, and six of the clergy came over the mud roads to the first convention-Rev. Messrs. Steele, Samuel Johnson, Fiske, Hoyt, Britton and Lamon. Bishop Kemper was unable to reach the convention owing to the state of the roads, and the Rev. Mr. Steele was chosen president, and Rev. Mr. Johnson Secretary. Ten laymen attended-seven from the parish in Madison, two from Richmond, and James Morrison from Indianapolis. The Diocese was then organized. But, remember, Indiana had been organized as a Territory nearly forty years, and as a State over twenty years. There were 600,000 people in the State, either utterly ignorant of the Church or filled with sectarian prejudices against her when the Diocese was organized. In those days that was a rare sermon that was not sectarian. Differences were magnified. The iron inflexibility of the old Puritans was the dominant characteristic of the religious bodies of that day. Is it any wonder that Bishop Kemper said to the next convention : "The world knows not, and scarcely can our friends at the East realize in imagination the peculiar and often sore trials to which my fellow-laborers are exposed during our efforts to establish the Church of the adorable Redeemer in all its apostolic purity in this interesting country." Is not the progress the Church has made in Indiana really marvelous? To-day there are 5,000 communicants, worshiping in noble church buildings, with Church schools and institutions, and a band of forty clergymen, led on by their dauntless Missionary Bishop, who knows no such word as "fail." Ten parishes only reported to the second convention, Christ Church, Indianapolis, leading the list. Fifty parishes and stations reported to this convention, with Christ Church still in the lead.

The two things which Bishop Kemper urged upon the Church as the best helps to its growth then, are the two things Bishop Knickerbacker is doing so much to set forward to-day: First, the establishment of Church schools; second, the endowment of the Diocese. The latter, Bishop Kemper urged

with special emphasis, and Bishop Knickerbacker, if he lives, is certain to accomplish it. The Churchmen of Indiana should hold up the Bishop's hands by sending their boys and their girls to the two schools now so well started and so ably taught, and by pushing forward the endowment rapidly to its full amount. The past warrants the investment.

It would be interesting, were there time, to trace the changes in religious spirit and tone, as well as in outward forms of the past fifty years. The period synchronizes very nearly with the Oxford movement-the revival of Church thought and life in England. The old sectarianism is dead or dying fast. Differences now are differences of Christian brothers, all baptized into the One Household of the Holy Catholic Church of God; and to be made, we daily pray, by the operation of the spirit of unity, to dwell together as brethren in the one household of the Apostolic Faith. The Bishops have opened the way for the answer to our prayers by their declaration of the only practical conditions of Christian unity. Fifty years ago men hunted more diligently than intelligently for Bible supports for their sectarianism, and the best sermon was that which hit the hardest blows, not for the world's betterment but for the preacher's side of a controversy. Now, thank the God of Peace! we hear the children of these old warriors speaking kindly of their opponents. The pulpit of to-day is no longer packed with the oldbattleaxes, but wreathed with olive branches and decked with the lily of the valley. When the voice from the pulpit speaks in the tone of Christ the whole of the gospel of Christ, the change will be complete.

So in outward things, the log school-house and the barn-like structures have given place to the stately and costly church of architectural beauty. Within, not only have rude benches and splint-bottomed chairs been replaced by carved and cushioned pews, but the music has changed utterly. The old discordant nasal twang and pitch pipe, followed by the croupy fiddles and piteous flutes, have vanished before the full-toned organ and large choirs in many of the denominational churches singing our beautiful Church music. Our liturgical service is even more and more taking the place of the “ long prayers." All these changes are helping towards Church unity, and, for ourselves, we can not be too thankful that no strangling legislation was passed in the early American conventions to hinder our own advance. Imagine the forms and customs of the Church in colonial days fixed upon us now! More and more during the past fifty years has the Church been shaking off the dust of deadness, awakening to her true life, and adorning herself to become by her beauty and her work for Christ the attractive center to the wandering children of God all around her. The Church has outgrown the carpenter's Gothic architecture without, and the old "three-decker" arrangement before the altar within, with great fat cushions, heavy with bullion and tassels. This was the arrangement in St. John's Church, Lafayette, which has disap

peared before the elegant new fittings and furnishings. All that seemed to say, a barn is good enough for God's house; the sermon is the main thing, and must be suggestive of sleep, yet duly ornamented and elegant. The service is in the second story of importance, but the people need not take any part; that had better be left to the clerk; and the sacraments are at the bottom in importance, if had at all. The sermon was all Dr. Pultord thought of when he insisted upon Dr. Johnson's getting out of a sick bed and holding services. He wanted preaching. We know with St. Paul that we have "an altar," and that God's thought of a Holy of Holies in His Church is ours to-day. There the elders bow before the symbol of the presence of Christ upon the throne of God; and with angels and archangels the white-robed choirs lead the worship of the Church on earth till it lifts up our hearts to heaven. As late as when Trinity Church, New York, was built, it was debated whether to put a cross on the spire, or an arrow, or a pineapple; and when my parish church in Maine was remodeled in 1863, a sailor was employed to put the cross on the steeple in the night. The carpenter said that if he attempted it in the daytime he would be mobbed as a papist.

Rev. Dr. Wainright was the first to depart from the custom of wearing gloves with the forefinger of the right hand glove slit, or cut off, so as to turn the leaves. Who would go back to the old times?

Who would restore the hired quartette to silence the praises of all the people?

Who would pile up a desk and pulpit to hide the blessed altar? Who would keep the penitents from communing with Jesus here every Sunday in the Holy Sacrament? Who would banish the flowers from the church? No one, of course. At the same time there is a danger of advanc ing too far. It becomes puerile weakness to imitate servilely the forms of a dead past. It is treason to the Church to bring back medieval uses in the name of catholic customs and truth. But, God is leading the Church forward to all her glory and beauty and power as in the days of old-the days of her unbroken, Apostolic unity, when the Empire of Rome bowed at her feet, and kings and princes served her for Jesus's sake. We rejoice because all these changes in the last fifty years are marks of the revival of spiritual life and energy. These things are but the outward index of inward life.

The Church has not only restored the beauty of holiness that men can see, but she has come to a fuller and deeper knowledge of herself in history and of her mission in the world. Standing on the mount, she has seen the mists lift, as the sun of Truth has risen over the horizon of the world's life; and the stream of her continuity since the first Pentecost, that men have said was only little scattered lakes, she has seen revealed as one unbroken river of Apostolic order, running from Christ, it source, to the ocean of His eternal dominion. Realizing what she is, the Church is growing stronger to meet her immeasured responsibility as the Anglo-Saxon Church to the Anglo-Saxon