Such was the deliberate verdict of the bishops and the leading clergy of the Protestant Episcopal Church, concerning her efficiency, during and prior to the year 1856. Such was the intensity of the conviction which forced itself upon the minds of committees and conventions, and swept from one end of her communion to the other, that, without great changes in her mode of dealing with the masses of our people, no considerable influence over them could ever be obtained. It is no wonder that Bishop Upfold should have written, concerning these admissions, that
"Her worst enemies could not have said a worse thing of the church; and, _if it be true, involves a cogent argument for at once abandoning a church so radically and essentially defective in its organization and working agencies_." [Footnote 45]
[Footnote 45: _Memorial Papers_, p. 189.]
Surely if evidence of any kind could satisfy us that, at any time at least, the Episcopal Church was not adapted, by internal structure and external operations, to control and harmonize American society, the evidence which the _Memorial_ movement thus elicited, has done it. If it ever has been, or can ever be, made manifest that any given church is not the "Church of the People," it was then demonstrated that the Protestant Episcopal Church is not so.
Since that golden epoch twelve years have passed away. That the people of America have materially changed, either in intelligence or religious feeling; that their necessities are lessened or more easily supplied, no one will venture to assert. All the world knows that the spiritual destitution of the nation has increased, and that the same means which failed to relieve it then meet with like failure now. All the world knows that the Protestant Episcopal Church is the same dignified and stolid organization, moving on in the same beaten track, its ponderous and cumbersome machinery revolving heavily round the same well-worn axis, and limited on every side by clamps and bands, which tremulous conservatism dare not offer to unloose.
The records to which we have heretofore referred show also that, in both of these particulars, all the world is right. Not one of the measures advocated by the _Memorialists_ has ever been adopted. No law has ever passed, requiring that her clergy preach instead of read. No general attempt has yet been made to organize the lay element, either male or female, into a body of efficient laborers. No change has taken place in the canon which requires that upon every occasion of public worship the Prayer-book, and it only, should be used. And, worse than this, no disposition to so modify existing modes of labor as to secure their wider range or surer efficacy has ever since been manifested. Even when, at the convention of 1865, a memorial was presented, signed by nearly fifty leading clergymen, repeating the statements of the _Memorial_ of 1853, and praying for the institution of an association of "_Evangelists,_" in the hope that "these statements may be so regarded as to secure to the church the important instrumentalities." ... "which were never more urgently demanded than at the present time," the house of bishops coolly resolved that "_it was not expedient to entertain the subject_" and the other house tacitly concurred in the decision. [Footnote 46]