Manchester had pinned the congressionists to holding their third session in that city during the autumn of 1863.
The objection so frequently urged against Church Congresses that they settle nothing, we put aside as trivial; or, to speak more candidly, we accept it as their distinguishing merit. A Church Congress might not find its place under a condition of Catholic perfectibility. It is just because the work is incomplete, abrupt, illogical, and unsatisfactory, that such institutions, with their prudent abstinence from claiming perfection, come in so usefully. If the truth be admitted, that opinion must now be left to regulate many things which used to be regarded as within the province of authority, machinery which is successful in bringing together so many leading representatives of so many diverse schools in the Church, for free and friendly discussion, with the hope of agreement rather than of division, must be of proved utility.
Whatever else may be doubtful in the results of these 'parliaments,' to use the term in its etymological sense, it is certain that from no juggling, as some unscrupulous organs of Puritanism try to make out, but by the irresistible logic of facts, the party which holds its own the best, and gains the most upon the other side, is the High Church one. The lesson to him who will see is obvious. Common sense compels any knot of men, among whom clergy stand in a large proportion, who meet together to debate on the good estate of their own community, under the chairmanship of its magnates, to make the common law of, that community, and not their own crotchets, the rule of action. So many honest and zealous Low Churchmen, who had hitherto never been fairly brought face to face with the Church as a corporation, discovered, when volunteering to act in a combined Church gathering, that the unquestionable common law of that corporate Church contained useful elements of which they had hitherto been ignorant, or of whose importance they had hitherto made light. The other side had not this difficulty to overcome: the lesson they had to learn was one of personal forbearance and an elastic appreciation of antagonist positions, irrespective of their own intrinsic soundness.
A more solid objection, which was urged with considerable power in a paper read before the Bristol Church Union by Mr. Pocock, is the number not of open, but of closed questions, which in dread of a row must be entered on the 'Index Expurgatorius' of each successive Congress. We fairly say that the objection does not admit of an answer which would be logically satisfactory. Practically we believe that the half loaf of a Congress, held under the restrictions of this expurgation, is better than the no-bread of unchecked meetings, which would be impossible
