Rev. E. E. Hale's Lecture.

Rev. E. E. Hale gave the first of his course of six lectures in the Divinity Chapel yesterday afternoon on the "Organization and Officers of the Early Christian Church."

Fifty years ago, he said, the object of every Christian church was to find out how the early church was managed and then to base on this its own organization. But now everything is changed. No church would want to change its forms of service and government and accommodate itself to the primitive methods of the early Christians which would very naturally be now utterly impracticable. That this is true was conclusively shown about twelve years ago when a manuscript was found showing how the church was managed in the first century. When the discovery was announced every sect, Baptist, Unitarian, Episcopalian, and all the others were sure that it was going to show that they were following in the steps of the fathers and that the others were all wrong. When the manuscript was translated and printed, no one had a word to say. As might have been expected, the arrangements would not now be practicable. So we now study church history as history and not as a model. What we do study as church history is only a record of the events of the church, but to make the study of any value we ought to study the development of principles.

Dr. Hale gave out copies of Dean Stanley's chapter on "The Ea;ly Clergy of the Christian Church" from his volume on "Christian Institutions," and referred to this for most of the information necessary for the rest of his lectures. The second lecture will be this afternoon at 3.30.