A GREAT CHURCH GATHERING.

Press, Volume LXIV, Issue 13101, 28 April 1908, Page 6

A GREAT CHURCH GATHERING.

Tho Pan-Anglican Congress, to which delegates from all parts of tho world are now streaming into London, will be one of the greatest religious gatherings of modern times. It will bring before the public, as nothing hitherto has done, the extent to which the Anglican communion has spread over the world. The Lambeth Conference is drawing to London bishop 3 from every corner of the Empire and from beyond it, and the great Congress will form a deeply interesting adjunct to tho Conference. The idea of holding the Congress sprang, it is said, from a sermon preached four years ago by Bishop Montgomery on the occasion of the anniversary of tho Society for tho Propagation of the Gospel. It was taken up by the United Board of Missions, the Archbishops of Canterbury and York gave it their hearty approval, and arrangements were at once boguh for holding a Congress on a scale never before imagined. There axe 250 Anglican dioceses, of which ninety-one belong to tho American Episcopal Church, and a largo proportion of them will be represented by their bishops. Each diocese outside tho British Isles may, in addition, send six delegates, and evidently in many cases the full number will be present. Tho Mother Church in the United Kingdom will be represented by spnie 5000 delegates. The subjects to be discussed by this enormous gathering at the meetings which will ta"ke place in the Albert Hall every morning, afternoon, and night, for a week, aro many and varied. The programme has been divided into sections—the Church and human society, with special reference to industrial problems and niarriasro questions; the Church and human thought; the Church's ministry; the Church's missions in non-Christian lands and in Christendom; the Anglican Communion. The Congress, as one writer remarks, will express, views on wages and monopolies, on commercial morality and Socialism; it will define the Christian philosophy which is (neither pantheistic nor agnostic; it will declare its attitndo towards science, and the higher criticism, the drama, and the Press. But it will do more than talk—it will do,much more than indulge in what has been termed an intellectual stock-taking. It will give, in all probability, the greatest stimulus to missionary, effort, that has

been experienced for generations, if not for centuries. Ono of the features of tho Congress is to be a great offering of men and money for missionary work at Home and abroad. It is asserted that no less than a million is expected to be subscribed for this purpose. There has already been somo speculation as to what will be done with this vast sum, most of which will bo handed over to a committee to use at their discretion, and it is thought that it will probably become the "fighting fund" for a great effort to Christianise China and Japan, a project fraught with tromendous possibilities for the whole world. Apart from this, liowover, the Congress will, from its very sizo, from the quickening impulso it must give to the Church's work, from the appeal which tho spectacle of its far-reach-ing influence must exorcise upon its adherents, bo one of the most notable events in the Church's history.