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ever, it is necessary to add that a very great part of the activity now existing is to be attributed to the action of Tait as Bishop of London. He began his work not only by building churches, which his predecessor had already done, but by labouring personally at the work of filling them, not only with the usual respectable congregations who go to church by nature, but with those of the highways and by-ways whom he “compelled to come in”—by all manner of additional services, open-air preaching, and other modes of stirring and attracting the attention of those classes which it is so difficult to reach. These were the expedients of Methodists and Dissenters in the days when Bishop Tait entered upon the work of his diocese. He made it apparent that every effort for the evangelisation of the masses was church work,—that missionary labour at home was quite as noble as missionary work abroad, as self-sacrificing, and even more necessary. He procured the opening of Westminster Abbey and St Paul’s for those afternoon services which have secured so large an attendance. He set the example of seeking out and making a personal appeal to the population of such great districts as Bethnal Green. Those proceedings stimulated every kind of effort, some of them perhaps more fantastic than useful, such as the services held in theatres, which was a temporary feature of the new influx of life; but they were also the beginning of the innumerable works now being carried out in every quarter of London, so that it may almost be said that no man, however wretched, is altogether out of the reach, save by his own obstinacy or by misadventure, of those saving agencies, public and private, which pervade every region of the greatest of cities. These efforts were not always to the Bishop’s mind. Exeter Hall and the theatres on one side, the ornate rites which attracted a gaping public on the other, were difficult agencies for a sober ecclesiastical ruler to deal with, and the Bishop’s first charge is in this way an excellent exponent of the principles by which so much of his afterwork was regulated.
“I wish to be very explicit as to the general principle I have followed in permitting or sanctioning these various efforts. When persons have come to me to propose any work of Christian usefulness in the diocese which has commended itself to the earnest approval of any considerable number of earnest and honest members of our Church—if it has seemed to me to aim, on the whole, at good ends, and to be undertaken zealously and in good faith, and to have some fair prospect of advancing Christ’s work, I have not hesitated to give my sanction to it, though its arrangements and mode of action might be very different from what I should myself have suggested. I have thought that it was the duty of my office to present no obstacle to the fair development of each man’s zeal, provided I believed him sincerely desirous of dedicating it to the service of the Church in which I am intrusted with authority; and if persons differing widely from myself, through respect for my office, have thus requested me to allow them to put themselves under my protection, and professed their willingness in turn to have their peculiarities restrained by my authority, I have not thought myself at liberty to decline. This metropolitan diocese is a world in itself, and its schemes of Christian usefulness must suit all tastes. Let all zealous efforts honestly undertaken with the view of advancing our Church’s means of reaching souls be fairly tried. Properly watched and guarded, they will soon show whether or not they are likely to advance God’s glory.”
Cautious and Scotch to the utmost degree, the scoffer may say