before the first Council at Antioch, who went forth? Laymen, and these not Jews, nor even Syrians, but "men of Cyprus of Cyrene," who, "when they were come to Antioch, spake unto the Greeks," or, as Dr. Robinson has it, to those other than Jews-probably to those speaking the language of these laymissionaries themselves. The very namelessness of these obscure men has its lesson. They were not ordained ministers, nor is it within the scope of Revelation that they should be specifically commemorated. It may be that what we are to learn from this silence is the great truth, that the advance-post of Gospel preachers is to be of the community, to remain with the community, and to subside in the community-its outgoing and its incoming to be unmarked, and its work to consist, not in instruction in theology, not in Church discipline or government, not in pastoral charge, not in administering the ordinances, but in telling the glad tidings, in the close beating of heart to heart, and the near looking of eye to eye. So it was in the Reformation. The "Gospellers" who preached in the market-places, who sold Tyndale's Bible at the fairs, who, staff in hand, worked their way from hamlet to hamlet, who suffered at the stake, were laymen. "Piers Plowman," as he was sometimes called, in the gay court poetry of those days, had rarely a specific name that has come down to us, and was undoubtedly rude and illiterate; but he roused in the nation a deep and awful sense of the TRUTH which neither polished. orators nor skillful statesmen could suppress. The English Reformation came, not from Cranmer, nor from Henry VIII., nor even from Ridley, but from these unknown and uncommemorated men, who, of the people, acted with the people, and soon spoke for the people.

So it was with the preliminaries of the great awakening of the mother Church towards the end of the last century. Alas! that we should say it, but this work was carried on by men who, by their own showing, as well as by our own actions were to us as laymen. John Wesley, "that saint of God" -I quote by memory from a late noble speech of Bishop Wilberforce, of Oxford-"who went forth from us not voluntarily, but driven forth," took the attitude of a layman himself, and VOL. VI.-19

during his life prescribed that attitude to his followers. He administered no sacraments. For a long time he permitted no technical professional training to his preachers. Now I do not stop to speak of the independent denominational results of this movement. I have to speak, however, of its effect on the Anglican Church. Look at it! Before the Wesleyan movement, as we are told by a late pamphlet by Dr. Maberly, Head Master at Winchester, "the tone of the young men at the University was universally unreligious." In 1800 skepticism became rare, and earnest piety frequent. In 1750 scarcely a minister was to be found who preached the Articles in their integrity, or prayed the Liturgy in its fervor. In 1810 there was scarcely a point within an accessible distance from which could not be found a minister of the Church of England who lived and preached in fidelity to her standard. In 1790 all the funds contributed to Foreign Missions by the entire Church did not exceed £4000. In 1858 they reached £250,000. In 1750, as I will presently notice, the clergy, as a body, had sunk to a level below what was technically that of gentlemen. I apprehend that from 1800 onward they have become the most important social instrumentality in the realm.

It may be said that the poverty incident to a class of Scripture-readers and lay-teachers, will work against their usefulness, by cutting down their opportunities for study and social culture. That poverty, in the common sense of the term, is theirs, I will admit. Of lay preachers, there are none more likely to be efficient than the village-teacher or physician. The average income of such is very scanty-much less than that which would sustain an educated ministry whose members must move on terms of equality with the most refined of their parishioners. Even less than the income of the teacher or physician is that of the mechanic who may yet preach the Gospel acceptably to many to whom one less rude might not find admittance. For poverty, while it gives keenness to the ear of the hearer, gives tenderness and many sweet and touching cadences to the voice of him that speaks. No one sympathizes so pathetically with all the sorrows and wants of the poor as does the poor Christian himself; no one awakes so quick and

tender a response. The poor give far more than the rich; and what they give comes with love, and is received in love, for it is severed from all assumption of benignity on the one hand, and all sense of dependence on the other. It may be for this reason that the great Missionary Apostle, although jealously maintaining the right of the ministry to a free support, refused this support himself, and worked at his trade of tentmaking as day-laborer with Aquila and Priscilla. If this was in submission to that profound truth of our common nature, that labor speaks best to labor, poverty to poverty, it was not only wisdom, but prophecy. The great missionary work of the Church has always been done from the platform of poverty. Francis Xavier owned nothing but his staff and clothes. When John Wesley died, his estate consisted of but six silver spoons. Francis Asbury was the greatest pioneer missionary this country ever knew. For fifty-five years his itinerancy lasted. For thirty years he travelled annually from the Androscoggin to the Gulf of Mexico, from the Atlantic to the Mississippi. During this time he preached thirty thousand sermons. Yet his salary never exceeded sixty-four dollars, though he held the highest station in his communion. He never had a home. Yet out of this narrow support he found something to give to his poor preachers. His watch he once sold to aid them, and at another time his cloak. It may have been this that drew to him in such numbers young men, craving to preach the Gospel under his lead. Many whom splendid endowments, or wealthy parishes, could not have enticed, were impelled by the power of heroism upon heroism to follow this poor itinerant. Of such in the course of his Episcopate he ordained no less than three thousand. They were mostly chivalric and devoted men, whom a chivalric and devoted example, such as his, would be most likely to fire. Nor did the work stop here. He founded the Methodist Book-concern, the largest publishing-house in the world. He laid the basis and sketched the plan of those splendid endowments on which one hundred and thirteen American universities and collegiate institutions

now rest.

Now, I am far from saying that ordained clergymen of the

Episcopal Church should not be generously supported, or should be expected in any sense to sustain themselves by secular labor. On the contrary, I think that their income should enable them to receive and retain a culture sufficient to qualify them to TEACH the TEACHERS; to mix freely among the most refined. But still more impressive is the call on us not to reject the agency which can bring into the missionary work that training of poverty, and that element of sympathy in labor, which St. Paul thought it not unworthy of himself to use at Corinth, and which have been found so efficient in the subsequent progress of the Church.

But it may be urged, the scheme is unpracticable. Are you sure? I admit that in a sordid age we will not be likely to find men capable of the work, who will give themselves up to preaching without support, and this in exclusively subordinate and obscure situations, entirely out of the range of ecclesiastical preferment. But such ages have been. It was so at the time of the first missionary extension of Christianity. It was so at the Reformation. It was so at the time of the Methodist revival of 1766. I believe that, to some extent, it is so now. The question is, whether our own communion is to throw herself in the way, and say that she will not accept such labor. My belief is, that, so far from so doing, she should put herself at the head of the movement. There are, I have no doubt, earnest-minded men impelled to undertake this work. They are willing to go forth as teachers to the most distant West. What I ask is, that our Bishops, in discharge of their general supervisory duties, should accept such aid, and use it as a preliminary in the work of Gospel Mission. As to schism, there is much less danger of it in promoting than in repressing this element. The Methodists and Puritans went off, not because they were encouraged, but because they were discouraged. Protection and countenance retained in Rome the Jesuits. It is for us to learn that the best way to produce integrity of essence is to permit variety in mechanism.

But it is further argued that the recognition of lay-preachers will lower the ordained ministry. Let me pause a moment to examine this position. Observe, in the first place, the remarka

ble fact that it is in those communions-for example, the Romish and the Methodist-in which lay-preaching is most common, that ministerial prerogative is the highest. Turn, next, to our own Church, and see how it is that the ministerial office rises or falls as the spiritual functions of the laity are recognized or ignored. Let us take, for instance, the time of Queen Anne and of the first two Georges, when the squire of the parish would cut off the ears of the tinker whom he found exhorting in a barn, and when the frigid establishmentarianism, if not the ecclesiastical rigor of the great body of the clergy, forbid the exercise of any lay religious gifts. How they, the clergy, had a monopoly of the work of spiritual instruction, how it helped them, Lord Macaulay has very vividly told us. But I pass this authority to take up one whose ecclesiastical sympathies, as well as whose personal opportunities, give him peculiar claim to be heard as to a question of fact such as this. Dean Swift (once-and how strange is the question of results, had the appointment been perfected-Bishop-elect of Virginia) writes, in 1719, to a young clergyman lately entered into Holy Orders, "that the clergy were never so scurvily treated" as then. In a contemporaneous essay, on "The Fates of Clergymen," he proceeds to set forth this position in detail. He tells of a clergyman who, through the intrigues of his sis ter, "the waiting-woman to a lady," "was admitted to read prayers in the family twice a day, at ten shillings a month. He had now acquired a low, obsequious, awkward bow, and a talent of gross flattery, both in and out of season; he would shake the butler by the hand; he taught the page his catechism; and was sometimes admitted to dine at the steward's table." By what means this worthy was promoted to a comfortable living, it is not necessary to stop to notice. It is enough to say that the portrait is avowedly one of a class, not of an individual. Of the clergy, at that period, one large fraction was occupied in chaplaincies in private families, where the minister was only a head-servant, and was considered fortunate if permitted to marry the lady's maid. Another fraction was held in thraldom by the squires, who, abundantly High Church and High Tory, found nothing either in their religious or their politi