In our own day, a devout catholic like Fogazzaro has pictured for us the way in which a true prophet may arise within the bosom of the Church, only to meet with obstacles from the authorities, and finally with persecution ending almost in martyrdom. Yet that book, which, in spite of [p.53] Papal prohibition, has found such warm support and awakened such eager interest in Catholic Italy, bears witness to the profound longing (which many in England surely share) that there is within the orthodox Church for a deep spiritual ministry, which the recognised authorities have not always supplied, for a revelation of new truth to meet the needs of our day, for a fresh unfolding of the meaning of the gospel of Christ, which shall appeal once more with apostolic power to the hearts of men.
Two centuries ago the early Quakers felt that they had known such an experience and tried to hand it on to others. Need we wonder if it should appear that the Society of Friends to-day has inherited their traditions but not their spirit? For, indeed, the prophetic spirit can never be inherited, or passed on from man to man by any mechanical arrangement. It must come anew from generation to generation, often after the hardest travail of soul, through fresh strivings, as the result of other needs; but we can, at least, see that our ordering, whether of the Church's life or our own, is such as not to hinder its coming but to prepare us for it.
And not the least of such a heritage has been a form of worship and a view of life which may still give not only to a little community but to a wider world a school of the prophets.
When we see the weak side of quietism, and mistakes of an earlier day of mystics (as now we [p.54] are so apt to do), let us not forget that, amidst the quietist Quakerism of the eighteenth century, there grew up and flowered one of the most beautiful products not only of Quaker but of Christian training; to many of us to-day, John Woolman speaks as do few others with the power of a true prophet. Yet too often in the past the Society of Friends has been content with a succession of minor prophets, whose message was only to a little congregation. Without was a multitude who had no priests or shepherds, and nations needing a guide. To-day, if we cannot make teachers like Woolman, at least we can prepare the way for their coming.
Prophecy is born of prayer, supported by it, not the prayer of words, but that attitude of soul, of will, of which the most beautiful of our collects are the momentary reflections. In this spirit then, feeling our need and our fellows', let us long for more light to come into our lives. Let us remember that we have not just to sit down contentedly in the dark and wait for God's light.
If we try to listen to the voice of the prophet teachers of the past whose message still comes home to us, and to picture the thoughts of some disciple of theirs to-day, might we not frame them thus?
"If we cannot scatter the clouds, we can at least clean our windows and open our doors. Every faculty of our nature is God's gift and to be used in His service, and so we are not to think of prophecy [p.55] as coming with the atrophy of the intellect; with every power of our minds we are called to serve God and seek truth, which is His revelation. To pray, ' Thy will be done ' should be, as Fogazzaro has told us, no attitude of passive submission, but a call to our whole nature to strive to the utmost for the cause of God.
"Then we must remember that the more truly we are at one with Christ, the more we shall feel ourselves fundamentally united with all our fellows. We shall feel their wrongs and sins as ours, and their needs too, and as we come to feel this, we shall realise more and more that in every act and word and thought we are not our own.
"Every evil desire overcome is a victory for our brothers, and not merely for ourselves. Our lives are intertwined one with another, and constantly, unseen and unknown to ourselves and each other, we influence one another for evil or for good. The prophet is nothing else than a true priest, not to one or two, but to a multitude.
"We are all called to be priests, and, if God calls us to be prophets, in learning to be truly priests, we shall unconsciously be learning too in the prophets' school.
"The priest must have a two-fold vision, of the truth above him and of the brother beside him who has need of the truth. The more he can see of either, the more he can be brought into communication with his fellows, and with the truth, the more priestly will his service be. [p.56] "Let us be faithful in word and deed to the highest that we know, and higher things shall be revealed unto us. Let us be patient with the worst and those who naturally repel us. Far more repulsive has been the evil in our own thoughts in the eyes of the holy angels. Let us not be uplifted because others have been helped through us; Truth is not ours, but God's.
"Let us not be discouraged if our work seem fruitless; never despair of the truth. Have faith in the truth that has been revealed to you, for some day others too shall see it.
"Have faith in the Truth that is yet unknown; others perhaps have already caught some glimpse of it.
"Blessed is the man in whose heart there is built an altar with the inscription written: ' To the unknown Truth '; of such men are prophets made.
"Truth is beautiful in the mouth of a friend, but most divine when it is seen in the heart of an opponent. The devil had delight to seek for faults in Job; let us seek rather to see, with Christ, the good in the heart of the publican."
Those of us who are striving after this ideal should be the greatest of sacerdotalists; our faith and worship are built up upon belief in the essential priesthood of every human soul. Let us not forget then, that if all men have some vision of God, all may teach us something of Him. And since heavenly truth comes to no man naked, but clad in changing robes, let us strive in our [p.57] search for truth, alike in speaking and in listening, to remember that the garment of words changes and may mean one thing to us and another to our fellows. Let us get beneath words and forms to the life-giving spirit, and as we are to be the greatest sacerdotalists let us be the most thorough- going of ritualists too, to whom there are symbols and lessons of the Divine Life, not only in the beautiful liturgies of the altar, but in all the mysteries of nature and the sacraments with which life is full.
For surely there are not merely two or seven sacraments, but seventy times seven, for him whose heart seeks ever fellowship with his brothers and with the Father above him, who would be loved in them, and served by their service. The whole world is God's and full of His light; our lives are His and they are our fellows. And since in every heart of man is some well through which the God-given waters of life may flow, we may go forth in faith to our work; as we serve our neighbours and search for truth, in the spirit of followers of Christ Jesus, seeking that our own wells may be made wider and deeper, and that their springs may be shared more fully by others, God will make priests of all of us, and, if He will it, prophets too. [p.58]
"THE Finger of God," wrote once Sir Thomas Browne, "hath left an inscription upon all His works." We have little skill to read that wondrous message, but from the very dawn of humanity men have tried to trace the writing, have sought to spell out the words, and as they came to perceive something of those spiritual forces that are at work in the world, and to look beneath the surface of things to that which lies deeper, they too have endeavoured to embody in outward forms for themselves and for others the truths which they would apprehend.
The course of the ages changes the meaning of even the simplest words which we use, for words, like men, are mortal; and so it has come about that the thought which rises in our minds as we speak of a sacrament is not that which came to those who used the word long ago.
In the ancient days a sacrament was simply a holy thing, something consecrated and set apart; in very early times it was especially a sort of judicial pledge deposited by the parties in a law [p.59] suit; then it came to mean the solemn oath of a soldier, pledging his loyalty to his commander on entering upon his military service. It was used by early Christian Latin writers to render the thought of the Greek mystery,μυστήριον, a word which we have failed to translate into English, as so often we must fail in any translation from one tongue to another to render thought for thought.
We think nowadays of a mystery as being something hidden, but to the Greek it was rather a revelation; an unfolding through symbol of that which could not be wholly expressed in any words. The mystery remained a secret to him who was without, to the uninitiate; but the initiate understood its meaning.
In the most famous mysteries of Greece, those which were celebrated at Eleusis, it would seem that along with the idea of revelation of truth went also the sense of upbuilding of the inward life, the purification of the soul and the assimilation of the Divine things imparted beneath the symbol. For revelation, the unveiling of truth, is no one-sided act; it involves response in the mind that receives; if the truth is apprehended, it must in part at least, be also assimilated. And so every mystery is something more than the unfolding of a hidden reality; it also implies the imparting of new life.[7][p.60 ]
In the earlier Christian literature sacraments still bear this wide meaning. Tertullian often uses the word thus. In one passage he speaks of a woman known to him who was accustomed to go into ecstasies during the weekly service of the Church; "she converses with angels, sometimes even with the Lord, and both sees and hears sacraments"[8]He speaks of "the sacrament of allegory,"[9]"sacraments of metaphors,"[10]in both cases alluding to Old Testament types, and again, he explains the wood by which Moses made the waters of Mara sweet (Exodus xv.), as a sacrament symbolizing the cross[11]
According to Prudentius, the early Christian poet, the Evangelist tells us that Christ gave these [p.61] commands to His disciples: "Seek not carefully for words when ye shall have to descant of my sacrament,"[12]"my Sacrament," being evidently here equivalent to "the Gospel."
But, as time passed by, the word sacrament became more and more used for certain mysteries of the Church alone, although far down into the middle ages even in this sense the word had a wider use than that of the seven sacraments of the Council of Trent.
Thus in 393 A.D. the synod of Hippo made a decree as to the use of the sacrament of salt at Easter by the catechumens, and in later times the ringing of bells and the use of the sign of the cross were regarded as sacraments. By the time of Augustine, however, the word sacrament was frequently used in its narrower signification, and already emphasis is laid on the saving power of the sacrament rather than on its significance as a revelation. Yet Augustine, though holding that the sacrament of baptism was necessary to salvation, once wrote thus: "For what else are each of the bodily sacraments, but, so to speak, certain visible words; most holy words it is true, but yet mutable and temporal ones?"[13]
It is this wider sense of the word which we must [p.62 ]be careful not to lose, the use in which a sacrament means the unfolding and imparting of the spiritual and eternal through that which we see and hear and feel.
Because in times past the Church has tended to narrow the use of the word, and, by confining the Divine operations to certain channels, to misread the great sacrament of life, so lessening the mystery of the world, there is all the more reason that we should not rest content with seeing how inadequate such views have proved. It is true that over the doctrine of sacraments men have fought and wrangled, forgetting the name by which they were called. But it is true, too, that to countless souls it has seemed that through the sacraments the Church has offered them help which has come as in no other way to their lives. And surely this has not been all delusion. The error of the sacramentalist in the past has often rather been that he has confined the Divine presence and the Divine working to certain fixed channels and unchanging visible signs. Those of us who hold that these good men have narrowed down the freedom of the inner life need to meet them not by denying the Divine presence where they see it, but by trying to see and to realize that presence ourselves more fully throughout all our lives. We are called to the worship and the knowledge of the transcendent and immanent God, who is here in the midst of our lives, in the midst of His world and His works, yet is far more than all these. [p.63] When the stern old Tertullian looked out upon the pagan world around him and noted in its religious rites strange mimicry and rivalry of the Christian mysteries, he could perceive no good in what he saw. In the worship of Mithras he found a baptism for the remission of sins, and a sign made on the forehead of the soldier in this pagan army of salvation; a crown purchased by the sword, and the ritual offering of bread. But all this, like the ancient Roman rites of Numa, or the mysteries of Eleusis and of Samothrace, seemed to him but the work of the Evil One. It was the devil's part, he wrote, to invert the truth and make of it his own counterparts, as he seemed to do in much of the ritual of the heathen temple.[14]
In like manner, in more modern times the early missionaries in the far east learned with amazement of the way in which, in the mountains of Thibet, the devil had made his imitation of the ceremonies and offices of the Catholic Church, and wondered as they heard of the Buddhist monasteries with their abbots and hierarchy of clergy, and the celebration there of mysterious offices strangely resembling their own mass, to the sound of bells and amid the smoke of incense.
In our own day an even wider area opens before [p.64 ]the historian's vision, and across five continents men trace, under various forms, rites whose origin seems the same. It is not now the devil who is credited with inspiring these myriad devices, but perhaps not a few of the students who return with Dr. Frazer from the survey of this vast field are inclined to feel that they have reduced all alike to one origin, in primitive savage superstition at work in the presence of life, birth and death. But if Tertullian and his school lack charity in their judgment on the sacraments of the heathen, there is surely danger too that our modern men of science may lead us to believe that in tracing a custom to its primitive origin they have found its cause or explained its nature. We can under- stand a thing best, not merely by knowing its beginning, but by also viewing it in its full development, judged not only by what it is at its lowest, or when it is most degraded, but at its highest and best.
The world-wide use points surely to a world-wide need, expressing itself in different ways, but in essentials the same. Unconsciously, indeed, in all our lives we make use of sacraments whenever we apprehend the invisible and the higher through the medium of the visible and lower. And, in our very thoughts, metaphors and symbols are nothing else than sacraments expressing truth in pictorial form. Even when men deliberately attempt to explain all life on a basis of atheistic materialism they still feel the need of what might [p.65] truly be called a kind of sacrament. It is very significant from this point of view to find that some French secularists have found it desirable to publish a ritual of civil ceremonies,[15]in which model liturgies are provided for a secular baptism, a secular confirmation service, as well as secular marriage and burial services. A conscious recognition of this same need led Auguste Comte and his Positivist followers to devise an elaborate ritual which might make their worship of Humanity more real.
The Society of Friends itself, which is popularly supposed to represent a protest against all forms of sacraments, can illustrate in its history the value of the true sacrament, and the danger there is of doing worship to the form of the sacrament, rather than to the life which makes it of worth.
No other Christian community has proved so strikingly the value in worship of the beautiful sacrament of silence, that universal liturgy in which all nations can unite; where ignorant and learned men come together on a like basis. Yet the very fact that in speaking of this we need to emphasize the worth of "Living silence," shows that too often, even here, men have but honoured a dead silence, making an idol of the sacrament which was only a means to an end, not an end in itself.
We may see even more clearly how easy it is for the form to become a bondage in the history of [p.66] another strange Quaker sacrament, that of the "Plain dress" of the middle nineteenth century. There is no need to tell how, in the case of this custom, the protest against changing fashions became itself the most tyrannous of fashions. What is especially interesting to us now, is to note that the dress which was an outward sign of inward grace became to be considered as, in a sense, holy itself. A young man or woman would wear the ordinary dress of the day, and suddenly some time of decision would come, a crisis in the inner life, and perfectly naturally the change would be marked by the adoption in the plain dress of the older generation. And it even became customary to associate the length of the hat brim with the holiness of the wearer's life; the truer to Quaker principles he was, the longer was the brim. It has been said that you may find in a journal written seventy years ago such an entry as this: "I think I can honestly, yet in all humility, say that in the past year there has been a growth in grace, and I have ventured to add a quarter of an inch to the brim of my hat." We smile; yet for some of us at least that ancient costume is so redolent of beautiful memories that we can scarce bear to laugh at its vagaries; we know too well the sacramental efficacy of the old Friend's bonnet, which forever recalls the goodness and love of the face beneath it.
It is strange that in the ancient Church of Rome men should have come to think in much the same [p.67] way of the peculiar habits of the religious orders, regarding the monk's dress itself as something sacred, which an unworthy man dishonoured, and which actually helped its wearer to be holier in his life just as the old Quaker dress was felt by many to help them to be more consistent in all their ways with the ideal which they strove to realize. So strong was this feeling that men who were not members of an Order sometimes obtained as a privilege to wear for a time the cord, to die in the habit, or even to be buried in it, the dress itself being felt to be sacramental.
If these minor sacraments came to be so misunderstood, how natural it is that similar misunderstandings should arise as to sacraments in common use throughout the whole Church, and associated with the very deepest truths of the inner life. Yet if we go back to their origin we shall see that the two chief sacraments of the Church were most simple acts expressing in visible language the life of the spirit, acts perfectly natural and full of significance to those who first took part in them, but which in later days have too often lost their meaning because the mere form was held to have some magical efficacy in itself.
To understand these sacraments aright do we not need to enter into the spirit of the Teacher in whose name they are celebrated, and who is believed to have instituted them? As we read the evangelists' record of the life and words of Jesus, [p.68] we must surely feel that to him all life was a sacrament, a continual unfolding of the Divine through the visible world and through human life. In his eyes the sunshine falling alike upon good and evil men is a constant revelation of the Divine love, compassing just and unjust, overcoming evil with good. The beautiful flowers of the field, blooming for a moment and then destroyed, bring to him no thoughts of gloom, as they did to the Greek poet, but the certainty that the Power which gives such loveliness to the creatures of an hour will provide for His higher creation too. The sparrows chirruping under the eaves, humblest of birds, fill him with a sense of the Father's care for these, and much more for man. As Christ walks across the fields, he sees messages for men in all the life about him: the parable of the seed, summing up the whole mystery of our nature in its life and growth; the sower at his work, the fishermen at their task, all are parables for him. And so it is with the relationships of our human life, which Christ takes up in his teaching and makes sacramental. Because he is in unbroken communion with the Father unseen, he constantly brings all the little things of daily life into relationship with Him.
Christ found the religious folk of his day intent on fulfilling certain duties; eager to guard the letter of the scriptures, the sacredness of the sabbath, and to fulfil the various acts which the law prescribed. He did not destroy the sacredness of [p.69] the one day by his treatment of the sabbath, but he raised the other days to its level: he did not secularize life by his attitude to the law, but rather recognised all life as holy. Religion was no longer to be something confined to certain acts and to special offices and places, but rather the attitude of the soul toward God and one's fellows, a spirit pervading the whole life and not concerned merely with the externals of duty or with certain special seasons of prayer.
Was it not natural, and even necessary, that One who looked thus upon the world, seeing every- thing in relation to God as the Author and the end of life, should make of the commonest acts a means to the Source of all strength? The water of purification, without which men could not live a clean and healthy life, the daily bread without which they could not live at all, the wine which stood for the inspiring fellowship which makes life worth living, were symbols ready to hand and full of spiritual meaning.
We have a perfect instance, in the account given in the fourth Gospel of the washing of the disciples' feet, of the true nature of the sacrament, and we are able perhaps to see it more clearly because the actual form of this sacrament has never been in general use in the Church, and men have almost ceased to think of it as a sacrament at all. "Except I wash thee thou hast no part in me," the Master says to Peter; so necessary was the sacrament. Yet the mere form meant nothing, when the thought [p.70] and life beneath it was not entered into, for Judas too, submitted to the ordinance, and went out to betray his Lord. We are told how, when Christ had ended this visible parable, the disciples were bidden even so to wash each other's feet. Often possibly in after years one or another may have done a like act for his friend, and recalled the Master's words in doing it. But this sacrament never became fixed into a form, and so even now we can clearly see its meaning. Indeed, had it become a custom of the Church, Christians would have needed to have been very simple and humble if the ordinance were not to lose its significance. In the few instances where the rite of feet-washing is still observed, we see how far removed to-day the ceremony may be from the thought which once inspired it. The selected poor, who have first been carefully washed before the ceremony, are marshalled in stately order, attendant dignitaries are ready at hand with ewers of scented water and basins of precious metal; and so, yearly, do Pope and Emperor commemorate the scene in the upper chamber where in very different wise one whose kingdom was not of this world taught his followers the way they should serve him by serving one another.
The sacrament of baptism would seem to be one which comes naturally to the Eastern peoples: it has been in use for ages among the Hindus of India, and it was apparently in general vogue in Palestine in Christ's time. It would appear [p.71] to have been not so familiar to the Western world, for the evangelist Mark has to explain to his Gentile reader how it was the custom of the Pharisees to baptize pots and vessels, and even beds. Apparently, even in that day the symbol of purification had come to have a magical significance. The washing or purification as a symbol of initiation is common to many religions, and it was a natural pictorial language for the prophet John the Baptist to employ, to express the change of life that was to follow the repentance which he preached. Christ's disciples had, many of them, first been followers of John, and would readily continue to use this sign in their ministry. But though Baptism was to the early Church the natural expression of entrance into the new life of Christianity (as we see in the case of Philip and the Ethiopian eunuch), yet it is hard to imagine that if it were held to possess in itself the importance which in later time was attached to it, the Apostle Paul would actually rejoice in the fact that he had hardly baptized any converts at all himself.[16]Already, however, the ceremony had a meaning deeper than the simple act of purification severing the old life from the new, which was probably that of the first baptisms of the disciples during the lifetime of Christ. We gather from Paul's words that in baptism the believer made real to himself, and to those about him, his [p.72] going down with Christ into the waters of death and his rising again with him into a new life, by the power of the resurrection. Some inherent virtue was soon thought to attach to the outward act itself, or else one can scarcely explain the origin of that strange custom of baptism for the dead, alluded to in the same epistle.[17]
This thought of the inherent worth of baptism continued to grow until by the beginning of the fifth century it became generally held that without it salvation was impossible. The Christian con- science, however, discovered a way to remove what would have been the hardest application of such a belief by what was spoken of as the baptism of blood. If an unbaptized convert was martyred for the name of Christ (as often might happen), the martyr's death was held to be itself a baptism, and this idea was extended to what was called the baptism of desire, or the baptism of faith, whenever death occurred before it was possible for a convert to be baptized. The classical instance of this, discussed by St. Augustine and frequently cited by subsequent writers, is that of the penitent thief upon the cross,[18]And Tertullian, who called baptism the "seal of faith," goes so far as to say "we do not receive the washing of purification [p.73] in order to cease from sinning, since we had already been washed in our hearts."[19]The seal of baptism was in his view the legal and visible completion of the act, not the act itself. Still, he holds baptism to be the needful "vesture of faith," as he calls it in another passage, and accordingly discusses the difficulty raised by some heretics of his own time, that Paul being the only baptized apostle, the other apostles could none of them be saved; though he does not feel it needful to adopt the explanation of certain orthodox ritualists of his day, who held, he tells us, that the apostles were possibly baptized on the occasion when the waves beat in upon them in the little ship on the sea of Galilee.
It was not to be wondered at that, with such a view of baptism current in the Church, the Catholic missionaries of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries should have laid stress rather on the numbers whom they could baptize than any other result. It is indeed at once pathetic and amusing to turn over the leaves of the letters from the missions which the good Jesuit fathers wrote two centuries and more ago, describing the progress of their work among the American Indians. You may read there the words of a missionary spending laborious days amid all manner of hardships, baptizing the sick and aged when very near to death and therefore removed from the danger of possible relapse into infidelity, and especially [p.74] rejoicing in the number of souls won by the baptism of dying infants, who could not possibly fall away from grace.
To such almost ludicrous notions do men come through materialising the pictorial language of the primitive sacrament, and imagining that its visible words have magical efficacy in themselves. Yet the thought of the scene in the upper room on the night of the last supper makes us feel how much that visible language might mean in its first simplicity.
As simple and as natural was that other sacrament, when Christ took the bread from the supper table, and the cup of fellowship, and gave them to those friends of his as his body and very life, which he was giving for them and for their fellows. What could be more fitting than that they should henceforth remember this farewell supper, this supreme gift of himself, when their master was taken from their sight, whenever they partook again of the Passover, nay, whenever they met together as disciples to share in a common meal in the name of him they loved? The more fully they lived in his spirit the more simply would each meal they took with one another be hallowed by the thought of his love and his presence.
Thus did the disciples in the early days take together the Eucharist meal from house to house in Jerusalem: and so, in the midst of the storm, Paul took it, before wondering fellow-passengers and crew, mingling the prayer of joyful thanks-[p.75]giving with the remembrance of the Lord for whose name he was suffering hardship.
Already in the time of Paul the communion service was beginning to lose its first simple spontaneity, as we may note in his directions to the Church at Corinth, but for long afterwards the Eucharist was in a much wider sense sacramental, than when its meaning was defined and imprisoned in the formulae of theologians. How full of beauty must the eucharist have been in those little churches of Asia Minor,[20]for which perhaps the Didache, "The Teaching of the Twelve Apostles," was written, towards the beginning of the second century. The eucharist prayer of the Didache is a true prayer of thanks: "We thank Thee, our Father, for the life and knowledge which Thou didst make known to us through Thy servant Jesus; Unto Thee the glory evermore !" "For as this broken piece of bread was scattered over the mountains and brought together and became one, so may Thy church be brought together from the ends of the earth into Thy Kingdom, for Thine is the glory and the power through Christ Jesus evermore."
Thus was the eucharist meal to early Christians a symbol of the unity of the Church, and a means of drawing them nearer in thought to each other. [p.76]
It is sad to think that what in those days was a bond of union should have become in later times a source of bitter contention and misunderstanding; may we not resolve that for our part, however we may differ from each other, or from the majority of Christians, in our views about this observance, we will not let this hinder us from realizing that others may be helped by means which do not aid us, and that it is infinitely better to draw near to God through outward forms than to be without them and not to draw near to Him: that what we need is to realize and to claim the liberty by which a hundred forms may become sacramental, and not to deny the reality of the life which may underlie the fixed forms which others use.
Luther once said that God might have made a sacrament of a bit of stick, had He chosen; Pusey repeated the saying to a friend with a shudder, telling him that it showed an irreverent mind.[21]Yet surely Luther's words convey the very key to our comprehending the truth of the Real Presence, which may be revealed without outward form, or under innumerable forms, just because God is so much nearer than we think, ever at work in His world, still disclosing Himself to those who seek with humble heart, even though they call Him not by His name. What we need above all is the spirit which will fill our lives with such sacraments, revelations of God to us and to our fellows. Sometimes we may be helped by an [p.77] ancient usage of the Church, at others by some new symbol: what matter the shape of the chalice if the wine be there?
John Henry Newman, in his early Protestant days, was wont to make use of the sign of the cross and to find it helpful. It is a sacrament which loses its meaning the moment one thinks of it as having any magical effect in itself, but if it be used to remind oneself of that which it stands for, as the symbol of the perfect deed of self-sacrifice, it may well help many learners in the school of Christ.
In like manner to-day, the wearing of a badge of membership in some society, or adult school (as twenty years ago a piece of blue ribbon), may doubtless prove an effectual sacrament to many men, aiding them to be faithful to a resolution made, as well as showing forth their belief to others. The sign is in itself useless, yet may mean much to the men who make it their symbol of comradeship.
The more worth living our lives prove, the fuller they will be of true sacraments, in little things and in great. The immense sacrament of nature is ever about us, and our human intercourse is made up, in all that makes it of worth, of count- less lesser sacraments. What meaning there may be in a simple handshake, and how much help and strength it may pass on to another! The mere physical act is as nothing in itself, yet it may avail to alter a whole life. Nevertheless, [p.78] we must see even here how easily mere custom may diminish or destroy the use of such a thing. In the studied greeting of formal civility the sacramental character disappears. Or worse still, that which was intended to be a medium of friendship becomes a means of undoing friendship's work. For so long as wrong exists in our lives we must beware of the sacraments of evil by which the ties which bind us to each other and to the world about us become the Devil's bonds instead of God's leading-strings.
The act, or the thing which forms the sacrament, may be in itself used either for good or ill. To one man even it may be good, while to another it may be a means of harm. The greater need, therefore, have we neither to judge our neighbour, nor ourselves to do lightly things which may be a means of good for him, but for us a sacrament of ill.
To take a single instance: Wandering in his father's library, a boy comes upon a book which he begins to read; and suddenly the conviction comes to him that he ought not to go on. The book is full of interest; perhaps in later years he may return to it and find its thoughts most helpful. And yet it may be that this book, which at a later time might prove a sacrament of good, may be for him now nothing but a sacrament of evil, since his mind is not ready to understand its teaching.
In the world without us there are some things so constantly associated with thoughts of goodness [p.79] and beauty that they seem almost naturally God's sacraments. Such are the flowers, which constantly call to our minds thoughts of joy and kindness; the sunlight, which cheers and invigorates; and drives away the disease that is the symbol of wrongdoing; the light, whose essence is so pure that it has become an image of the Divine nature. These are among nature's sacraments, and in the life of man we have, above all, the sacrament of the family, which at its best is an image of the love of the All-highest, and a foretaste of His Kingdom among men, of the city which is to be, in which all are members of one another, living to serve each other.
It may comfort us to think that the devil's sacraments are not so all-pervading; for night, which we think of as the cloak of evil, may itself be to the devout soul a symbol of the mysterious peace of God. One thinks of those wonderful lines of Vaughan:
Dear Night! the world's defeat;
The stop to busy fools; care's check and curb;
The day of spirits; my soul's calm retreat
Which none disturb!
Christ's progress, and His prayer-time;
The hours to which high Heaven doth climb.
God's silent, searching flight;
When my Lord's head is fill'd with dew, and all
His locks are wet with the clear drops of night;
His still, soft call;
His knocking time; the soul's dumb watch,
When spirits their fair kindred catch. [p.80]
Were all my loud, evil days
Calm and unhaunted, as is thy dark tent,
Whose peace but by some angel's wing or voice
Is seldom rent;
Then I in Heaven all the long year
Would keep, and never wander here.
* * * *
There is in God — some say —
A deep, but dazzling darkness; as men here
Say it is late and dusky, because they
See not all clear.
O for that Night ! Where I in Him
Might live invisible and dim!
or we may remember the "Hymns to Night" of Novalis, and that experience known to so many saints, which St. John of the Cross speaks of as "the obscure night of the soul," the darkness which we needs must traverse before we come to know the greater light beyond. The stern angel of pain seems to many a fiend; but some have found him to be a friend at the last, and certainly there is something in the heart of sorrow that no other experience brings to us, unless it be great joy, and as we feel it, we seem to understand that the spirit of joy and the spirit of sorrow are angels near akin.
In the world that man has made there is one thing above all others through which the influences of evil seem to work, the devil's sacrament of money. When one thinks of the hatreds and lusts springing to birth around it, and the curse it so often seems to bring alike to "him that gives and him that takes," when one sees wealth, [p.81] remorseless in its pride of power, worshipped and cringed to by its recipients and its courtiers, it is easy to understand how a simple Christlike man like St. Francis would have no dealings with money, and shunned to touch it as we might some plague-infected garment. And yet how often has this hateful thing been redeemed from its base use to be the minister of right. Even money is not hopelessly lost for good. The sacramental efficacy of the widow's mite has not ceased through all the centuries since she cast it, in her humility, into God's treasury. The sand hides the gold of Pharaoh, and the imperial treasures of Augustus are vanished and forgotten, but that poor woman's gift still goes on: she gave to God, to the best and highest that she knew, and in giving, little thought that through the word of the Master of Masters, her tiny coin could become for ever a sacrament to humanity.
So may a little thing and a base thing be made a symbol of good; most of all then should we find a channel of revelation in the highest thing we know; not only in the sacrament of nature, but in the sacrament of man.
Surely to us the most wonderful thing in life is personality, and it is human personality which may be the highest sacrament of good, or the most terrible sacrament of ill. Our deeds are often at their best poor clumsy acts that stray in the dark; our thoughts are all imperfect, and our words fail to express them fully. But in spite of all [p.82] this failure, soul acts upon soul, we know not how, and the influence of one life upon another goes out continually like the myriad rays of a lamp. Silently men are changed and transformed by this influence. And there is no man but is doing his part for good or ill in this transforming work, whatever he may be, wherever he may go. Is it not thus that God's self-revelation in Christ becomes real to the Christian? God speaks to us in Jesus through human personality. We draw near to him as a man, we see his life and listen to his words, and as we gaze and listen, we feel that God has taken hold of us.
We are very near now to the greatest of sacraments. Did not the apostle speak of the union of the Church with Christ as μέγα μυστήριου,magnum sacramentum? The follower must bear, in some measure, in his life, the likeness of his master; the nearer we draw to him, the more his presence will mould our lives with the impress of his character.
In the ideal marriage, even as we know it realised sometimes now, husband and wife live in such close communion, so share their thoughts, and feelings, so enter into each other's lives, that each character, reacting on the other, grows ever more like to it. May not this thought help us to understand something of what is meant by Christ's union with his Church? The Church is humanity in its ideal form, humanity as a whole striving after its true goal, and the human race comes to [p.83] understand and realize its aim by union with Christ, thus gradually growing to be more like him and to share his nature. The end and the means to it are no mere rapture of holy emotion, no selfish joy of idle contemplation. The relation- ship is much deeper; it must affect our whole character. It is not a rush of sentiment but a union of will.
After years of discipleship, and when he had gone through many things that he might draw nearer to the spirit of Christ, there came to St. Francis that wonderful crowning vision of the Saviour crucified, and amidst the joy of the vision there was pain. From that hour to the day of his death, the record tells us, did Francis bear in secret upon his body the marks of the passion. It does not matter how his frail frame came to respond to the thoughts that so dominated his mind: the important thing for us is not the accidental consequence to the body, but the attitude of mind and spirit, the union of will with a Christ suffering for humanity, bearing the sins of the world. He who has come to be made thus, in the humblest way, the comrade of Christ, must be the comrade too of all his fellow-men. Church and individual alike must show in character and life the meaning of this fellowship — fellowship in joy and in sorrow, too, willingness to learn, to give and to serve. Sharing the burdens of rich and poor, feeling the bonds that bind their lives, accepting ourselves responsibility and blame [p.84] for all ignorance and failure and wrongdoing, we may realize that the spirit of Christ is still at work in the world, that closer than our thoughts is the infinite love, and beneath our weakness the infinite strength of the Father's arms.
THE life of words is like in some ways to the life of men; the soul changes within them, though the form remains the same. Yet while language is still living it may regain something of its old power beneath the poet's healing fingers, and now and again a master of words will recall for us some dying form of speech. A writer of power is needed, surely to win us back the older and wiser use of the word sacrament as a spiritual symbol, the revelation of the unseen through the visible, the unfolding of the unknown through the known. "The image of the world," wrote Bacon,[22]"is a message of the Divine wisdom and power"; to many a mystic it has been more even than this, and nature has been full of sacraments bringing life from things not seen.
The story is told of the old Calabrian Abbot, Joachim da Fiore, that as he was saying vespers in some little church among the mountains, the glory of the setting sun caught his eye through the open [p.86 ] door of the nave. Suddenly realizing how much more beautiful was the great temple of the sunlit sky than the painted stone walls of his little building made with hands, he led his congregation out into the open air, and with nature's ritual around them they went on praying, gazing upon the picture of that evening landscape and the wonder of the sunset above. Though he was the adopted father of many admirable heretics, and for long a suspect himself, Blessed Joachim did not offend thus more than once, as far as we know, against the laws of ritual. But many another saint must have been tempted to do as he did. It is, indeed, easy for us to understand how in the old days every high place had its altar, and how again and again in later times solitude upon a mountain has seemed to give the most congenial atmosphere for prayer. Unconsciously, and quite apart from our beliefs, we instinctively turn in physical weariness, and often in other troubles, to the calm rest of nature. However much at times we may ponder her sterner side, and search in vain to explain to ourselves the mysteries of death and pain with which she confronts us constantly, it is not these things of which she speaks to man, when he goes to her sad and weary, like a tired child to his nurse. A feeling of quietness, beneath which lies strength, the dim apprehension of law, inexplicable indeed, but majestic and even beautiful, and above all that indefinable sense of peace which comes to us sometimes when we [p.87] are in the presence of that which is immeasurably greater than ourselves, all this may nature bring to us, when we go to her alone with our troubles. The old stoics must have sometimes felt this, though to the Roman mind at least wild nature did not usually possess the attractive power it has for us. One cannot but feel that when Marcus Aurelius cries to the Universe "that which is harmonious to thee, is to me too," he is conscious of something of this feeling in which our petty cares and troubles sink into nothingness amid the waters of the great ocean of universal life; though he arrived at the sense of this rather by inward meditation than by the contemplation of nature without him. And whatever the philosophers may have felt, one has no doubt of the poets. Propertius, alone in the Umbrian highlands by the sources of the Tiber, and Catullus, listening to the ripple of the waves of Garda, were able for a moment to rise above the pain and fire of passion into a calmer air; and yet the Roman poets have no such sense of the overwhelming majesty and order of nature as came to the Hebrew Psalmists.
The Roman had still in dim recesses of his consciousness the feelings of an earlier age, for which every wild wood was peopled with mysterious powers; nature was full of unknown agencies whose workings man could but dimly perceive, and the ancient rites of his religion were the charms by which he held at bay the strange potencies of evil that surrounded him. The [p.88] Hebrew poet looked on nature even in her sterner aspects with the eyes of faith; hailstorm and thunder, and the very sea his people thought of with such dread, brought revelations to him of the Divine power controlling all; and because of this sense of unity, the mystery and wonder of the starry sky seemed to his inward ear vocal with harmonies. In some ways there has come to us in the last two centuries fuller knowledge of that reign of law which formed a part of the religious consciousness of the poets of ancient Israel. Science speaks to us of the insignificance of man beside the illimitable greatness of the universe of which he is ever striving to gain some knowledge, and trains us to revere the majesty of laws which he can only imperfectly apprehend. Yet it is well known how sadly one great leader of modern science regretted that in his old age he was no longer able to know the feeling of the beauty and majesty of the Alpine landscape which had so often helped him in the past, because, as it seemed to him, the habit of scientific analysis had taken from him that simpler sense of the earlier years, the direct consciousness of a beauty he could not explain. So true it is that the child's eyes and the childlike spirit only find the entrance into the Kingdom of Heaven, which is hid to the wise. One must not suppose, indeed, that the closing of this one door into the unseen means that others, too, are shut, or else the lot of the city-dweller would be even worse than it is. Dr. Johnson, kindliest and best [p.89] of townsmen, though he said that to see one green field was to see all green fields, was yet keenly sensitive to many of the lesser sacraments of man's social life; and those who read his prayers and meditations know that the invisible realities were to him no mere object of intellectual belief, but the atmosphere of his inmost thought. Yet it is a thing to be regretted that the habit of scientific research and the ordinary course of town life do too often so mould our faculties as to impede that vision which the contemplation of Nature still brings to the simple heart. The student's loss has its compensations, and may even involve in it an element of the noblest sacrifice; but this cannot be said of the man whose whole life is wrapped up in the making of money and in the pleasures and concerns of conventional urban society. Such men are robbing not only themselves and their families of the things which make life worth living, but a far wider circle; for they are helping to keep in being a civilization which deprives thousands of city children of ever knowing what the sacraments of nature mean. The majority of Londoners have never seen the sun rise, save over smoking chimneys; they have never been able to watch the full moon sailing across the clear blue of a cloudless night; never known a morning filled with the joyous exhilaration of sunlight only dimmed by the mist of the vanishing dew. Still less do such town-dwellers understand of the lonely silence of the night in the [p.90] open country, in which men may feel themselves back again amid the childhood of the race. True, the amber haze of day in London and the flicker of the gas lamps in the streets at night have a beauty of their own; but it is dearly bought if the price must be, at least for the greater part of our poorer men and women, and for almost all the children, so heavy a one as this. The civilization which shuts out from its gaze the vision of the stars may well grow blind to greater mysteries; if men will not listen to the music of the spheres, how should they hear the angel's song?
ONE of the strangest and sometimes perhaps one of the saddest things that the student of history comes to realize must surely be that law which seems to doom every great ideal and every great movement to give birth to organizations which, while created to promote it, end by destroying it or diverting it to different channels. The cynics laugh at the contrast between present-day Christianity, as manifested in the dignity of the great historic churches and the rude simplicity of the Galilean fishers; in a narrower field the most sympathetic of French historians has traced for us the tragic way in which the great spiritual forces that made the early Franciscan movement what it was, were trammelled, if not extinguished, by the growth of the very society which they had called into being.
The mystic laments the fall from the unrealized ideal; the statesman makes rejoinder that the change is a needful one, and a necessary means of progress. So across the centuries contend with one another the men of method and of discipline [p.92] and the men of vision. Iscariot still follows in the steps of Christ, bearing his money bags, planning his arrangements of finance, ignoring his ideal.
Most of us must sympathize with Iscariot; we have so often been in his place, sometimes in spite of ourselves, perhaps. Or if we cannot sympathize with him, at least we must with Brother Elias, that born master of organization, the practical man who saw the beauty of the character of St. Francis, recognised the power of his attractive nature, and wished to turn all to visible use, to build up around him a great society which should be a guide to kings and prelates, a divine strong- hold into which the beauty and the riches of the world should be brought. Elias doubtless felt that St. Francis was too good for this world; he himself dealt with men as men, understanding the worth of compromise, seeing the strength of institutions. The Elias whom most of us know well enough always tends to think of an ideal merely in its relation to institutions actual or possible, while the Francis, for whom we look too often in vain, thinks of the institution only as at best the imperfect embodiment of, or the means to, the ideal, and more often as the hindrance to be overcome on the way, "my brother the ass," who can only be guided with difficulty.
It is very easy for us to recognise in a far off time the failure of institutions to realize the ideal that inspired their origin, and we readily admit, in the abstract, the need for the ideal to dominate [p.93] the institution and the danger of the institution running away with the ideal. It is harder to see in our own lives how far we are allowing the machinery to take us from its object, how far that machinery is out of date or out of gear, since we are in the thick of it all, our ears dulled by the roar of the wheels. Assuming that we admit that Iscariot has his right and helpful place, how are we to find it and keep him there?
It may help us to understand the danger that follows upon organization, if we make even a partial survey of a group of existing institutions and try to trace the history of some one of them.
How great is the failure of our countless institutions intended to promote social welfare, we to some extent realize as we take up such a work as the "Annual Charities Register and Digest," of the Charity Organization Society, and turn over those 700 pages describing the various societies, with all their staffs and offices at work in the city which is still the London that we know. Life appears almost to become at times to some men one long committee, but, little, after all, seems done. And this failure may be seen, to some extent at least, even in recent movements which were originally a protest against the narrowness and superficiality of earlier methods of dealing with the problems of modern society. The first thought of the men who conceived the idea of the university settlement was surely not to found a new institution, so much as to bring life into touch [p.94] with life, to make centres in which knowledge and experience might be collected, and from which men and ideas might be put at the service of all who had most need of them. Yet, in spite of themselves, they have almost become institutions; indeed, some settlements have frankly made it their aim to be such, and as one reads reports from across the water of all that our American friends are doing, one must admit that they have been most successful in achieving their object. If the settlement movement (as it is called) had not begun as it did twenty odd years ago, perhaps these wonderful centres of activity would not have come into being, or would have been very different from what they are. Yet would the founders of the first settlement have recognised as their spiritual descendants these men, unselfish as they are, whose methods are so different? Did there ever come before their vision the picture of a great building raised by some millionaire, maintained by like gifts, manned by a staff of salaried workers, and providing at the expense of far-seeing or enlightened manufacturers, healthy amusement and duly certified religious teaching and secular instruction to the workmen of these subscribers, as well as dispensing, on behalf of Dives, basketfuls of crumbs, both of plain and fancy bread, to Lazarus and his fellows at the door?
This is, after all, an instance of a world-wide process. We are face to face once again with the fact that men are constantly attempting to do their [p.95] duty by deputy; to subscribe to what they see to be a good work rather than to set about to do it themselves, to give of their money rather than of their lives. It is the danger that has beset the church from almost the earliest days, that the men who should be inspiring and setting others to work have too often simply done their work for them, or tried to do it. Doubtless the old robber baron returning from some murderous fray felt his heart uplifted as, rounding a comer of the road on the way to his castle on the hill, he came in sight, in the valley below, of the monastery he had founded, and thought of the holy lives of the monks, and of their prayers put up daily for him, who had such need of them. Doubtless, too, the good monks' hearts warmed towards the old freebooter who yet had so much good in him as to be their founder and protector. But it was small consolation to the men he robbed and put to death to know that some part at least of their possessions would go to Holy Church and to make possible the cloistered self-denial of these men of God. The baron's keep has vanished, and the abbey is in ruins, but is there not evidence that the same process is going on to-day? It is not always pleasant to think of the ultimate source of some of the contributions which are to be found in the subscription lists of churches and charities. The man who realizes this may well hesitate to appeal to the wealthy for money to aid his plans, for he sees the effect of such methods in making [p.96] religious and social agencies distrusted by many among the very classes which they aim at helping. He will rather honour the spirit in which such a social worker as Jane Addams of Chicago refuses to receive gifts of "tainted gold," as she feels the conscience money of some unscrupulous men of business to be. Yet here again he may be in danger of deceiving himself. He needs, it is true, to beware of accepting, still more of asking for, gifts which would merely be given to promote the vanity or to further the selfish interests of the giver, but can a man so easily wash his hands of the stain of the mammon of unrighteousness? Does he not rather need to recognise that, indirectly at least, the fruits of injustice enter into all the money that comes to him, since selfishness plays the part it does in our social life, and since our lives are so bound up with each other that no man can set himself apart from his fellows? Only let him see that the gifts he asks for will quicken in the givers the sense of social responsibility and increase the desire to do and to give more themselves.
The payment of subscriptions, if this principle be disregarded, becomes a soul-destroying process, alike to him that gives and him that takes. The pious Henry III. turned once at bay, after listening to the pleading of Friar William of Abingdon, one of the most eloquent of the early Dominican preachers, and cried to him, "Brother William, there was a time when thou couldst speak of spiritual things; now all thou canst say is, [p.97] ' Give, give, give ! ' One may compare the disgust with which a modern public schoolboy often turns from the familiar appeal of the clergy- man who year by year comes to the school to preach on behalf of the school mission, and to carry back with him the usual collection, but nothing better. For the only thing worth giving or asking is life; and such a missioner too often fails to ask for it. Here surely we may find a hint of the explanation of all successful social work, which is the passing on of life from life, the result of the contact of personality with personality. In so far as organization promotes this and makes it possible does it stand justified, and only by this test.
One does not wish to undervalue the associations, the reflexes of life, which institutions so often pass on, or the wealth of a great past which they keep in store for us. But death is perhaps as needful and as inevitable for the body corporate as for the individual; for both it is often true that whom the gods love die young. It is surely better to spend and be spent in a short life rich in ideas, than to carry on a long existence by the aid of a comfortable endowment, which may prevent men from realizing how far out of touch they are with the actual needs of those about them. It is not known whether any council of bishops has decided if there be humour in Heaven, but one is inclined to think that the solemn way in which men shake their heads and lament the impending decease of an outworn institution must sometimes be greeted elsewhere by a peal of celestial laughter.
SOME day we may hope to see among our great national museums one made to illustrate the religions of the world, from the rudest rites of the savage to the highest developments of Buddhism, Mohammedanism, Judaism and Christianity. This museum of comparative religions does already exist to some extent in embryo in every great collection of antiquities, and the students of ethnology and folklore have been long at work in preparing materials for its catalogues. A partial glimpse of what it would contain is given in such a world-wide missionary exhibition as that organised in connection with the work of the London Missionary Society at the Agricultural Hall in the early summer of 1908.
The survey of such a great collection cannot but be stimulating to every thoughtful student. Some of its visitors may see in the hideous idols of the South Seas and in the pictures of the medicine man at work at his craft only a further incentive to aid the spreading of their own faith, which they feel more strongly than ever to be immeasurably [p.99] raised above the rites and thoughts of the savage. Others may look with sad eyes at the long series of pictures that is spread out before them, for they see everywhere only the same superstition, the primitive fears of unknown forces, developing with the growth of civilization into religions which expand with man's own needs and conceptions, intermingling with his hopes and aspirations and refined by his thought into the creeds and theologies of the higher faiths. Through all they trace the same instincts, and feel that the savage kneeling before a blood-smeared stone explains to them the Nicene Creed, that the hierarchy of the Church has its origin in the spirit-doctors and fetish-men of a simpler age.
Yet to some at least there may come far other thoughts than these, as they ponder over what they have seen. Everywhere they behold men stretching out their hands towards something above them, beyond them, struggling with fears, oppressed by dim consciousness of wrong, hoping for some way of peace. The priest himself is a witness to this innate need of the soul, since his very presence speaks of man's dependence on the higher than himself, while it also shows men's interdependence upon each other. For the priest's position is impossible, unless he is in some way regarded as a means of communication between man and God, and a centre of fellowship among men. With this thought in his heart a man may look back, not without hope, upon the melancholy pageant of [p.100] the centuries, and watch the strange part that the priest has ever played in it. The modern sceptic joining in the sad cry of the old Roman poet — "So many are the ills that superstition has had power to urge men to" — has had, after all, like the rest of us, but an imperfect vision of the confused drama of history. He sees priesthood as a selfish influence playing upon human ignorance and baseness; he does not perceive the wider priesthood at work of which this is only a perversion, nor realize that priesthood and prayer underlie all that is highest and best in human life. For priesthood is the highest expression of man's social nature, by which he enters into communion with his fellows and with God. It is only because we narrow the use of the name of priest that we do not honour it aright, for in its essence priesthood is not a profession, but a high duty to which all are called.
If we were to try to define this true priesthood, might we not say that a priest is one who, reaching out after the higher and better than himself, helps others onward too, bringing to them something to which they could not of themselves have attained, who shares his good with his fellows and takes upon himself their ill, making communion possible for them, because he has entered into communion with them himself. But it is not easy thus to summarise in a sentence a work which is in truth as wide as human life; wherever a man interprets [p.101] in the terms of his own day the unseen and enduring realities, and helps those about him to view things in their true relations, he is performing a priestly function; whenever he takes up their disadvantages as his own, in fellowship with suffering, and shares with others willingly the result of their own wrong-doing, then is he doing a part of the priest's divinest work.
The germ of such an ideal of priesthood may be seen in far-off days. The family priesthood of the Hebrew patriarchs, and of the early ages of Israel, contains, unconsciously at least, the promise of it, and in a wider form it formed the subject of the noblest prophetic appeal: Israel was called to be a nation of priests, revealing to other peoples the message of God.[23]It may be said, too, that the later history of the Jewish nation has shown in practice the value of the simple family priesthood of the parent, in keeping alive a faith which from the destruction of the temple down into the late Middle Ages was cherished and maintained entirely without the help of a professional ministry. Even when after the time of Maimonides, the rabbis began to be paid for the time which they took from other work to devote to the exposition of the Law for the benefit of others, there was still no arbitrary division between clergy and laity. The human centre of Jewish religious life is not the rabbinic ministry, but the lay priesthood of the family. [p.102]
It was natural that the ideal of a universal priesthood should find expression in the earliest literature of the Christian Church, reviving and enlarging beyond the boundaries of race the appeal of the earlier Hebrew prophets: twice in one writing of the Apostolic Age[24]are Christian folk spoken of as a holy priesthood or a royal priest- hood, while in the vision of the Apocalypse the same ideal is held up for the Church that now is and for the Church that is to be, in the millennial reign upon earth of the faithful disciples of Christ.[25]In the Pauline epistles the disciples are not actually called priests, but both the individual Christians and the Church as a whole are spoken of as Temples of the Holy Spirit, and appeal is made to the Romans "that ye present your bodies a living sacrifice unto God, which is your reasonable temple-service."[26]Moreover, the body in such a passage does not mean so much the flesh and blood, as the whole visible personality of a man; in like manner in that triumphant paean which seems to have been written by the apostle in the conscious- ness of the nearness of impending martyrdom, the thought in the words "I am already being poured out as a libation"[27]is that his whole personality is being poured out and offered up as [p.103] a final priestly act of cheerful giving: for the libation was the glad offering made not merely by an official clergy, but by the head of the household as its family priest, or by the individual as sharing in the universal priesthood of humanity.
Priesthood was regarded, it would seem, in the earliest days of the Church as a function to which all its members were called, but even in the apostolic age certain officials were appointed to fulfil particular duties in the Church on behalf of their fellow members. Yet several generations appear to have passed before priest and presbyter were regarded as fully equivalent terms.[28]As Church organization developed, the gifts of the Spirit were conceived less and less as widespread throughout all the parts of the body, and more and more as confined to certain classes, while in course of time these classes became more official and professional in character. Yet if we remember how repeatedly institutions tend to fetter and destroy the ideal that has created them, we shall find cause to wonder not in the growth of clericalism in the Christian Church, but rather in the fact that all down the ages of her continuous life men and women both within and without the ranks of her officials have realized, in part at least, the higher ideals of true priesthood. [p.104]
It is easy for us to see the harm done by the official spirit, and the hypocrisy which is so often its shadow; still we must not forget that noble army of men who have looked with far other eyes upon their office, feeling themselves the representatives for the sake of order of the Church as a whole, and realizing more or less consciously that their duty is not to be the delegates and deputies of the layman in discharging his priestly functions for him, but to be a means to help him to realize them more fully, aiding him to think more, to do more and to pray more for himself. Especially true is this of prayer, which the true priest must ever aid in others as well as in himself, whether the prayer find utterance in words, or remain unformed even into the mental words of thought. For is not prayer, in this widest sense, the life breath of the Church and of the individual alike? Prayer is indeed too often spoken of as though it implied words: whereas it may exist even without conscious thought, going on whenever the soul's hand stretches out after God, whenever man seeks after goodness, in every act of will by which he is brought into touch with that Spirit from whom all right thoughts, "all holy desires, all good counsels, and all just works do proceed."
The aim of conscious prayer, in its highest form, must be communion, and a communion of will which may continue when the conscious prayer itself ceases, underlying the work and thought of everyday life. To this communion the true priest [p.105] will ever direct his fellows, knowing that as he and they come to share in it more fully they will be the better able to help those about them towards their goal. He knows too, by experience, that there is a law of spiritual magnetism, by which just as in the physical world a weak magnet is strengthened by contact with a strong one, so in the spiritual world the will to do the good and to live aright may be strengthened by coming into the presence of a stronger will, and most of all by contact with the Divine will.
To the Christian, Christ expresses in human form what this will stands for, and so for daily life he is still felt to be the High Priest of man- kind, the touch of whose spirit polarises and renews our wills, as they come into contact with his life. The one early Christian writer who has developed for his readers the thought of Christ's priesthood, the author of the epistle to the Hebrews, sees in the earlier Jewish priesthood with which he was familiar only a somewhat imperfect type of his ideal: with thoughts turned upon the pontifical acts of Christ, which he realizes to be the keystone and crown of human history, he does not stay to consider how the priestly function may, in some measure, though imperfectly, be shared by the humblest disciple, too. Yet this thought of participation in the highest priestly work of the Master seems to have been present with the Apostle Paul when he spoke of "filling up that which is lacking of the sufferings of Christ," and the same ancient [p.106] Catholic view which sees in the good deeds of the saints the continuance of Christ's work, the endless treasure flowing out from his life, would lead us also to see in their sorrows and hardships, where these have been willingly borne for the sake of God and man, a continuance of the redemptive love of the Cross. The thought of the High Priesthood of Christ is not lowered by the fact that priesthood, even in its highest mediatorial side, is to some extent shared, however faultily, by every good human life, but it is rather made intelligible to us, because it ceases to be something wholly alien from us. The life of Christ is not utterly isolated from the rest of the human race, for it could not be this and remain human; it is rather the key for the Christian to all other goodness, explaining the meaning of sacrifice, and the possibility of sorrow and pain being made steps by which men may be raised upwards towards God. And just as the supreme sacrifice of Christ cannot rightly be separated from the rest of his ministry, but rather is understood as its consummation, concentrating upon Calvary the work which was the aim of all his life, so is his High Priesthood not something foreign and separate from the life of man, but the manifestation of a principle which is at work wherever good men live and die. Yet the more truly his followers have become priests themselves, the more have they realized how imperfect their priesthood is, how deep their need to find it constantly renewed by contact with the [p.107] unique and perfect high-priesthood which they find in Christ.
The close vital connection between the disciples' work and that of their Master is one of the thoughts most prominent in the last great discourse of Christ to his disciples as pictured in the Fourth Gospel, and it is emphasized in what commentators have called the great priestly prayer. The disciples' lives are to be in close union with their Master's as the vine branches with the parent stem, and beneath all their deeds must flow his living spirit. They must be in union with each other as he is one with the Divine Father, so making real to others the continuance of his life. Their whole lives are to be one great act of priesthood realizing itself through fellowship. For without fellowship priesthood cannot be, and Christianity could not exist. The Church is a society in which men are linked to each other and to God through Christ; there is no place in it for the selfishness of isolated individualism, or the centring of thought upon personal salvation alone. Its members belong to each other in belonging to their head. The metaphors used in the apostolic writings to describe the Church are all social; it is a body, a building, a city, a kingdom, in which every part is in relation to others, and only thus can join to make the whole. The more the children of the Church realize this, the more truly will they become a fellowship of friends, and show themselves such in daily life; theirs will be [p.108] no exclusive friendship, but one which overflows to all, in honest sincerity, because they cannot but work for all men's good.