REUNION OF CHURCHES

Dominion, Volume 22, Issue 265, 5 August 1929, Page 14

REUNION OF CHURCHES

DR. TEMPLE ON THE POSITION. The Archbishop of York (Dr. Temple), writing in his “Diocesan Gazette” on reunion recently, remarked that there is considerable anxiety lest either too little or too much may be done at the Lambeth Conference next year. “In all schemes for reunion between reformed churches there has been agreement, so far as I know, that after the union all ordinations shall be episcopal,” he said. “These schemes, therefore, provide that, when the period of transition is ended, the Apostolic Succession will be secured in the united Church. So far as differences arise, they concern the interim period. ... It is merely misleading to isolate the proposals for transition, and to denounce them as surrendering a principle, if the effect of the scheme as a whole will be, after a short lapse of time, to establish that principle in a position of dominance over the whole field."

Dr. Temple added that missionary enterprise gives urgency to the problem of unity. “In India, for example, it is not the missionaries who are most clamorous, though they see the need; it is their converts. The Indian Christian will not consent to be indefinitely separated in worship from his fellow-Indian and fellow-Christian merely because they were brought to the one Christ through the agency of different European denominations. They must unite before long. Our task is to facilitate a union based on the Catholic principles which we hold in trust; we fail in our task if we either assist a union at the cost of those principles or so maintain those principles as to frustrate the union. And the latter will be as fatal as the former to those principles themselves. For the union will come later, if not sooner. If Catholic principles are found, as the result of our advocacy of them, incompatible with union, then the union will take place on another basis, and our achievement on behalf of Catholic principles will be a curtailment of their sphere of application.”