GUILD OF S. MATTHEW. A Society founded in 1S76 by a small number of Anglican clergy who were inspired by the teaching of Charles Kingsley (1819-1875). Their objects were three. 1. To get rid, by every pos sible means, of the existing prejudices, especially on the part of " secularists," against the Church, her sacra ments and doctrines; and to endeavour to " justify God to the people." 2. To promote the study of social and political questions in the light of the Incarnation. 3. To promote frequent and reverent worship in the Holy Communion, and a better observance of the teaching of the Church of England, as set forth in the Book of Common Prayer. The character of the work of the Guild is well explained in one of its Reports. " Be lieving, as we do, that the great fact of the Incarnation is the foundation of Christian teaching and practice, we cannot see how or why the Christian Church should not consider every question bearing upon the welfare, secular and spiritual of man. We feel the absolute need of preaching in season and out of season the Gospel of the Kingdom,' the fact that the Church is a real living society on this earth, working for the greatest good of the greatest number, and embodying in her sacraments and in her creeds the strongest assertions of true ' liberty, equality, and fraternity ' ever given to the world, doing this, too, on far higher grounds than can possibly be taken by any secular ' creed or society. Does the secularist talk of fraternity? We tell him there is no merely theoretical basis of true fraternity so grand or sure as the fact of the Fatherhood of God.
Of equality? Nowhere is it embodied so grandly as in Holy Baptism and in the Holy Communion; nowhere have its principles been carried out to their logical conclusions so thoroughly as in the Communistic Church of Jerusalem. Of liberty? The priests and bishops of the English Church have constantly led the people to victory over kings and pope alike. Of the rights of labour? Bible history, as apart from Bible biography, begins with a strike ' (Ex. v. 45), and some of the bitterest denunciations of the prophets both of the Old and of the New Testaments are launched against those who keep back by fraud the hire of the labourers who have reaped their fields.' Of patriotism? The English Church welded the incoherent Saxon kingdoms into one nation. The representative government of later times was modelled after the earlier councils of the Church. Of the wider bond of the brotherhood of nations? St. Paul preached it for the first time in Europe, in the teeth of the exclusive Greeks at Athens. The Hebrew prophets—nay, more, our Lord Himself--reiterated it in equally exclusive Judaea. The Catholic Church is the only true international." Cp. CHRISTIAN SOCIAL UNION, and SOCIALISM, CHRISTIAN. See C. W. Stubbs, Charles Kingsley and the Christian Social More meat, 1899.