Untitled - Electric Scotland

268 LIFE OF ARCHBISHOP TAIT [CH. XL
National Legislature, 1 and to the influence of London
upon the country
as a whole :
"To provide," he said, "for the spiritual wants of the metro
polis would be conferring a boon on the whole kingdom of
which this metropolis is the heart ; as, on the other hand, to
neglect the masses of the metropolis is to work ruin in the State.
. . . The Church as a spiritual institution, the Church of Christ,
can never perish ;
and this our own national development of the
Church of Christ with its own peculiar institutions, dear to true-
hearted Englishmen from the historical associations of the cen
turies of England s most real greatness ; which has been bound
up with so many crises of the nation s history in times past ;
which men love because it maintains the faith in which their
fathers lived and died, and in which they desire to rear their
children;
to which all the Protestant nations of the earth look
as the great bulwark of that at once reasonable and loving Chris
tianity which commends itself only the more to right-minded
men, the more they love freedom and the more they are educated
this, our great national development of the Church of Christ,
is in no danger if we, its ministers, are what we ought to be."
Upon these lines he proceeded to consider in copious
(his critics said over-copious) detail the training of
candidates for Holy Orders, the duties of a licensed curate
in his earlier ministry, and then of the parish clergy in
their maturer years, diverging to discuss the incidental
questions of Ritualism and the Confessional upon one
side, and of a sceptical *
intellectualism upon
the other.
The respective difficulties of town and country parishes,
the peculiar problem presented by the empty churches of
the rich city parishes from which the population had
moved away, and, above all, as has been already said, the
need of more vigorous and aggressive work for those
who had, for one reason or another, become alienated
from the Church s ministrations : such was the compre
hensive theme of this remarkable Charge. Some of the
1 Charge, p. 8.