ARTICLE VII.—THE PROPER RELATIONS BETWEEN BENEVOLENT SOCIETIES AND THE CONGREGATIONAL CHURCHES.

IN discussing this subject, it is desirable to look at the foundation stones of the organizations for worship and for work with which Congregationalists are identified.

There is at the present time a special call for this examination and review. Recent events have given expression and emphasis to a demand for a closer relation between the churches and the American Board, and no one can deny the importance of enlisting the hearty sympathy of all Congregationalists in every endeavor to build up the Master's kingdom, and of conducting every missionary enterprise with wisdom, efficiency, and economy.

We meet at the outset a theory which confronted our fathers more than fifty years ago, viz: that by divine appointment the responsibility for all the work of evangelizing the world rests upon the organized church; and that this responsibility is not met by offerings, however generous and unremitting, of gifts and prayers and personal service, but calls for a share in the administration of affairs. This theory looks askance at independent voluntary associations. Its necessary corollary is that a church is untrue to its trust which permits this administration to be assumed by societies which it has not helped to create, and over whose affairs it has no control.

This is no new theory. As long ago as 1836 the Princeton Review, as the organ of one wing of the Presbyterian Church, said: "There are a multitude in this church who will not contribute to the American Board. You can neither persuade nor compel them to do it. The principle that the church ought to act in this behalf is written on their hearts, right or wrong."* A year earlier, the Pittsburgh Convention, representing fortyeight Presbyteries, resolved "that the operation of any mis. sionary society within the Presbyterian Church, and not

* A Plea for Voluntary Societies, page 118.

responsible to her judicatories, is an infringement of her rights and inconsistent with her peace and integrity." In its Memorial to the General Assembly this Convention complained that a voluntary society was "sweeping away from our own Board the funds, which, by the laws of all social order, ought to come into the treasury of the body to which its possessors belong," and begged that the Assembly would "solemnly enjoin all the churches to contribute to the funds of its own Board of Missions."*

These views, though strenuously opposed at the time by the new school party in the Presbyterian Church, were subsequently accepted by them, and naturally came again to the front when Dr. R. W. Patterson, of Chicago, in his sermon before the General Assembly in New York, in 1856, laid down the fundamental principle that "any denomination of Christians that ought to be perpetuated at all as such ought to have a definite work of evangelization to do in its distinctive capacity." "The church is the responsible body. . . Organizations external to the church and independent of her are entirely of modern origin. . . We have no right as a church to lay the responsibility . . on some society external to ourselves, and totally independent of all our decisions. . . It is our mission as a church to become a central and efficient agency."+

An overture presented to the Southern General Assembly in 1889, taking the ground that the church is "God's missionary society," and that other organizations are of "human origin," questions the propriety of relying on "voluntary associations as an agent for carrying on work in behalf of a specific object of the church's mission."+

The same theory underlies the missionary work of the Methodists and the Episcopalians. Not only the domestic and foreign missions of the Methodist Church, but the entire publication work of books, tracts, and even newspapers, is under the direction of the General Conference. The General Convention of the Protestant Episcopal Church is the Missionary Society of the Church.

* Plea, 58-60.

+ New Englander, 1860, page 983. Minutes, page 605, and The Missionary, Oct., 1889, page 371.

And yet even in Presbyterian church history this is a modern innovation; for in 1812, when delegates from Massachusetts to the General Assembly suggested to it the organization of a Presbyterian Board of Missions, similar to the American Board, that body responded that the engagements of the Assembly in respect to domestic missions were so numerous and extensive as to make it inconvenient at that time to take part in the business of foreign missions, and that the churches under its care ought to aid the American Board of Commissioners by contributions to their funds, and every other facility which they could offer to so commendable an undertaking. The result was that Commissioners were at once elected from the Presbyterian Church and a partnership was formed which continued for two generations.*

Moreover the existence of Church Boards does not do away with a felt necessity for other associations not under church control. The numerous Womans Boards are voluntary societies. So is the American Church Missionary Society, which, though recognized as an auxiliary of the Episcopal Board of Missions, has its own charter and separate administration. It has even been proposed to repeal the canon on which the latter Board is based, and to carry on the work of foreign missions through voluntary associations, because of divergent views within the Episcopal communion, a step avoided only by administering the Board of Missions with a proper recognition of all schools of thought, and in such a way that no cry of discrimination can be honestly raised.

Whatever arguments may be adduced in support of the church theory, it would not be wise for one to assert that enthusiasm for missions is largely due to ecclesiastical control. A single illustration is in point. The Spirit of Missions for April, 1889, bears the following testimony:

"While all baptized members of the Church are declared to be members of the Domestic and Foreign Missionary Society and bound to support its work, yet probably 200,000 church children do not know of that fact, for there are more than 2,000 parishes which never send a contribution to the missionary treasury. While the children's Lenten Offering for Missions

has been enjoined upon all Sunday-schools by the Board of Missions for several years, yet a great many children know nothing about it, for fully 2,500 Sunday-schools never engage

in it."

One need not go far to trace the beginnings of almost all works of benevolence to voluntary associations rather than church boards. Not to speak of our older and well established societies, all of them due to the voluntary principle, or of Young Men's Christian Associations, Societies of Christian Endeavor, and the International Missionary Alliance, we have the most recent illustration in the new Arabian Mission. A few young men, believing themselves to be divinely called to engage in pioneer mission work among Moslems and slaves in Arabia and the adjacent coasts of Africa, after a vain appeal to church boards to organize such a mission, form an association with an advisory committee, and go to work, asking all interested in the project to contribute to its maintenance. The enterprise is begun! How long would it have been delayed, if it had first to gain the approval of a national church?

And this is the Congregational way. Said Dr. Justin Edwards, a few months before his decease:

"I could never have done what I did in the incipient movements of the American Tract Society, nor in the formation of the American Temperance Society, nor in the establishment of the American Sabbath Union, unless I had enjoyed the aid of a popular and unfettered church government, allowing me to combine the agencies of enterprising individuals whenever and wherever I could find them, men accustomed to act for themselves, minute men, ready for every good work, without waiting for the jarring and warring of church courts."*

Whatever the practical working of an ecclesiastical establishment for missionary and educational work, the underlying theory is in conflict with the fundamental ideas of Congregationalism, which do not regard the churches as organized for the administration and control of far-reaching charities.

If we refer to the definitions which have come down to us from the early days of New England, and which have been repeated and emphasized in cases innumerable during the last forty years, we find a church to consist of a company of * Prof. Park's Address before the Am. Cong. Union, 1854.

believers "united into one body by a holy covenant for the public worship of God, and the mutual edification of one another in the fellowship of the Lord Jesus." So said the Cambridge Platform in 1648; so said the platform presented at Boston in 1865, and the most recent Manual falls in with the view that the Christians of any place "combining themselves in an organic body for the purpose of Christian worship constitute a church."* According to this view, the church is not national or provincial; it does not exist to execute all righteousness or all benevolence, or to propagate and defend the faith; but for local and spiritual ends; for public worship and the observance of Christian ordinances, and for mutual helpfulness and edification.

It is a late and not an accepted enlargement of this definition which lays upon the local church responsibility for the evangelization of the world, and gives it a work to do in propagating the gospel in all lands. Congregationalists have always emphasized independence and fellowship as the two cardinal principles of the order, and so jealously have they maintained their independence that only within a very recent period have they accepted any other organization than the local church. Ecclesiastical councils are occasional bodies, convened to advise on some matter of common concernment, and having nothing to do but give advice, and then adjourn. Connecticut had indeed at one time its standing councils, known as consociations, but they were not missionary or administrative bodies. Many churches even stood aloof from them from the first; others, one by one withdrew; finally the whole system of judicial control became distasteful, and 'now only four organizations in the State retain even the traditional name. Probably the First Church of Christ in New Haven never had any organic relation to any other before the year 1866. Nor did the Broadway Tabernacle Church in New York or any of the group of churches which grew up around it.

Of late years the Conference system has come in, not to do missionary work at all, and with careful restrictions as to any outside undertaking. Latest of these is the Manhattan Conference, which aims to promote mutual acquaintance, sym* Boardman, Congregationalism, page 12.