with suitable tracery panels, mouldings, and workmanship to harmonize with the choir seats, and so complete the furniture of the chancel. It will be not only a new beauty, but of considerable service, for the woollen curtain-to a certain extentmuffled the tones of the organ, and interfered with the perfect hearing of the choir by the organist, as well as to the like extent reducing the sound of the organ to the choir and congregation.

In the Painting of Roof and Walls the sombre tone of the dark wood has been retained for the ground, and the principal feature in the design consists of broad vellum coloured chevrons, following the diagonal arrangement of the boards. Upon these broad bands are suggested, in varied low tones of colour, flowers and foliage in geometrical rather than natural forms. The spaces between are diapered with suitable designs. Rafters and beams are stop-chamfered and otherwise relieved with colour. The two principals which support the roof are treated very successfully with a floral ornament and foliage in lighter tones. upon the wood. In this part of the work the designer has aimed at perfect repose in colour combined with an agreeable variety of decorative forms.

The stonework of the six small windows in the south side of the chancel is delicately ornamented in colour. The two larger spaces between are filled each with a figure, that on the left being David with a harp, and on the right Miriam with the timbrel. The lower parts of the walls are treated in darker tints of green, red, and chocolate, and divided by columns into arcading with curtain work, the effect of which is exceedingly pleasing and beautiful.

But the chief interest of this part lies in the groups of figures which are placed on the north wall of the chancel. The subject is "Praise," and the occasion chosen for illustration is the dedication of Solomon's temple. Vocal and instrumental music as employed in Divine worship are here beautifully suggested. Design and execution are alike commendable. The sub-committee entrusted with the oversight of the work devoted much time and consideration to the question of materials and methods for this portion, so as to ensure its durability and to permit of easy cleaning when needful. The material is practically indestructible except by fire, and this church will be the first place in Birmingham where it is introduced. The tone of the paint

ing and treatment of the subjects are proper to mural decoration, which avoids details such as may be often introduced in moveable pictures.

GENERAL CONFERENCE OF THE NEW CHURCH IN AUSTRALIA. WE have been favoured with the following extract from a letter of Rev. J. J. Thornton to Rev. Dr. Bayley. The letter is written from Sydney, where the Conference was held, under date June 14th, 1883:

Marriage.

On August 1st, at the New Jerusalem Church, Peter Street, Manchester, by the Rev. Dr. Bayley, of London, and the Rev. David Davis, B. A., of Lancaster, uncle of the bridegroom, WILLIAM BARTON, eldest son of SAMUEL BARTON WORTHINGTON, of Manchester, to LILIAN BROADFIELD, eldest daughter of WILLIAM HUGHES, of Cheetwood, Manchester.

NEW CHURCH MAGAZINE.

ADDRESS FROM THE GENERAL CONFERENCE OF 1883 TO THE MEMBERS OF THE NEW CHURCH IN GREAT BRITAIN.

DEAR BRETHREN,-The religious use of recurring occasions, such as anniversary, jubilee, or centenary, circles for the most part round the notion of the substantial reality of Time as an actual external entity, and commonly seeks to point the moral of improvement which it thinks inherently attaches to the fact of reaching such a halting-place-as if the end of a year or of a hundred years were anything in itself, or more in value and spiritual consequence than any period of Time whatsoever. This common view can hardly be ours; and yet surely these Times and Seasons should convey their own reflections. I would invite you, therefore, in the name of the General Conference, to consider, as a fitting theme for the Centenary Year of the New Church organization, the true method of use of such occasions, and the consequent reflections thus forced upon us from our present circumstances.

The Time-principle must here give way to the State-principle. Of course it is certain that at every special point of mental history, general or individual, there is a fitting lesson which that time, and that time only, is capable of teaching, but then this is so whether there be a marked external occasion or not, or whether or not we are capable of divining the lesson; which is in reality only to say that the time is, under all circumstances, special or ordinary, the mere enswathment, and it may be, index of the mental State beneath; or, again, that the Time is nothing and the State is all. If, then, we should desire to "improve the occasion" (speaking in words familiar to us), it will not be done by drawing the lesson from the external fact VOL. II. NO. XXII.-OCTOBER 1883.

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and its particular circumstances, nor by the vague imagination that we ought somehow to be specially good because these circumstances have come, but by exploring the State itself, underneath the circumstances, to which, whether as individuals or as a community, we may have at any time arrived.

The application of this commonplace is not far to seek. The mere external history of the Church, as consisting of so many Societies or more or fewer numbers, though relatively something, is yet absolutely nothing to the purpose; that it should have reached its hundredth year is of no more consequence than if it had but reached its 90th or its 110th; that time is measured by centuries is an accidental relation unknown and impotent as a factor in the development of the Church's mind; that we should be specially good because we happen to have reached the end of the first of such stages in our progress, is a fruitless sentimentality without lever power enough so much as to make the stone of error even to quiver in its place, much less to move it, and which will never touch a single passion of the mind; but the general States of the Church's community as indicating the actual spiritual progress attained, the knowledge of these States, and the detection of their evils, by the Church herself, and her anxious reflection and action thereupon-these are, as the years roll by, the true moments of value and interest, the genuine centuries of the age of her life.

And yet here again we must distinguish. Can man himself tell the interior spiritual times and seasons of the community any more than of the individual? The answer is certain: by these interior States his knowledge and analysis are alike defied, and nothing beyond the general fact has been made known. "It is not for you to know the times or the seasons, which the Father hath put in His own power." What then? The exact point to which the Lord has brought us in organic spiritual fact and degree does not concern us to know. The States of feeling and thought which characterize us, especially in contrast with those which might or should be ours, and the duty of the day thence arising for God's community-it is upon these that our eyes may most profitably be bent.

The New Heaven and Church is a magnificent fact. Those who enter it are in a city whose Builder and Maker is God. But how shall gold and glass and precious stones and trees and

streams utter the transcendent reality? And so the souls who get behind this correspondential splendour are filled with wonder and admiration; and also, like poor humanity, take to themselves something of the admiration and the glory. Are not we in the New Jerusalem? Is it not ours-our Church? Do others know what we know? And thus the very spiritual resplendence of the Revelation becomes a glow-worn cloak of self-complacent content, and not seldom the chief light it emits is a call to admiration of its own magnificence. If God be Wonderful, surely wonderful also is the littleness of man! I make bold to say that this self-admiring content in the great possession as personal to us, this self-appropriation of the glory of the New Jerusalem, and the hardness of character and intellectual assurance implied in it, are some of the features of our State in this hundredth year of growth, which we should do well to understand, and if possible to remedy.

Such a State cannot be ours and not dominate us: it is fundamental, integral, permeating. It holds our tone within its strings and winding brass, and when they are struck or blown it is It that speaks as us. In the light of it we read our own natures, obscuring our motives thereby, misinterpreting our feelings, casuistically defending our thoughts, and justifying our actions. But worse perhaps than all this (though it might appear that nothing could well be worse), because embracing the whole community of the Church, is our tendency to investigate and interpret by the lurid light of this form of the selfhood the Writings of the Church themselves; at least, it must be said, for it is simply true, that if such a state be ours of the present century, it is impossible we should do other than make it not only the judge and divider among the riches of the Church, but by its blinding persuasive power upon us we should quietly, dogmatically, arbitrarily, but all unconsciously, raise a standard of appeal as to ultimate verities within the domain of our own prepossessions, and decide "by the Word of" the proprium the eternal, What is Truth? And why is this worse than the personal, self-complacent obscurations of character? Because we are here, in the wide field of Church life, not merely obscuring the mental states themselves from which character is formed, but delaying the advance, perhaps even ensuring the destruction, of their good by corrupting the source of their life. The force