from no one daring to adventure their stormy contingencies. After all, everything cannot be talked over in three days, and by a body which elects itself for five shillings a head, so that the harm of a rigidly exclusive list of subjects comes to be of a negative kind. There is one benefit arising from these Congresses which should not be overlooked, although it accrues rather to the bystanders than to the members themselves. The Congress is peripatetic, never meeting twice in the same place. It stands to reason that this sudden vision of the Church of England, in such large numbers and so great bustle, periodically flashing across the eyes of the population of a large town, must tend to exalt the idea of the Church in the place, as a large social and political power (if not also as something better), in a totally novel way. It comes to them neither in a dignified nor in a polemac guise, but large, loud it may be, brisk and popular. In coming years, when a good number of towns have been visited by this apparition, the Church will at least have been seen as it never was before. The comments of the Manchester and the Bristol penny papers on the throngs of unwonted visitors, during the Octobers of 1863 and 1864, already indicated a new sensation. It is noteworthy that the Roman Catholic Congress in Belgium did not on either occasion assemble beyond the walls of the sacerdotal city of S. Rumbold and the protection of the cardinal archbishop. Had it ventured to meet in Ghent and at Liege the parallel with England would have existed.
Upon the whole, the Congress at Manchester proved very successful. There were one or two personal contests during the earlier part of the proceedings, which adverse newspapers tried to make the most of, but in very fact they were but slight interruptions to the general gravity of the work. Free Trade Hall, time after time, was crowded. High Church and Low Church were each strongly represented; and both sides, thus for the first time brought together in large masses outside of the restraining influences of academic cloisters, made heroic efforts to behave well, and did behave as they should have done. The fact was evident to strangers, and has, we hope, not been forgotten since by the residents in the northern capital. It was clear that the Church of England, in its various phases, no doubt, but still as the Church of England, with its high side decidedly entering into the composition, so far from being unknown, or borne down by dissent or Romanism, or both, was a very strong and growing influence in Manchester, and was capable of great results there if it had confidence in itself to assert its strength. The vast rapt crowd crammed into every corner of the Cathedral, which with its double aisles and galleries, if not altogether a minster-
