[#] I owe the illustration to Mr. A. L. Smith, of Balliol.Now so far we have been considering Society as consisting of relatively free persons (though the freedom exists in varying degrees, both as regards the external constraint and capacity for self-control), these persons having various claims which have to be regulated by the justice which the State upholds; in other words, in this stage, we are regarding justice in the way in which I suppose it is most usually regarded, namely, as rendering to a man what is due to him. That is the definition with which Plato inThe Republicstarts his enquiry, and he naturally found very soon that it would not work.[#] It will not work because the moral values of people are not determinable. You cannot, as a matter of fact, ever say what is the relative weight of the various claims that may be made on behalf of this or that man. Most particularly there is the perpetual conflict between the actual and the potential worth of any men.[#] He appropriately puts it in the mouth of Polemarchus, the well-brought up, but wholly inexperienced, young man.Suppose that we decide that we will give to all men in Society that which is their due. How are we going to determine what is due? Is it to be determined by their economic value, for example by the amount they are contributing to the economic or general welfare of Society? Well then, there are a large number of people at both ends of what we call the social scale who ought to receive nothing at all, because they are contributing nothing economically, or, indeed, in any other way, to the public welfare. And yet that is not their fault; they have been brought up, it may be in squalor, it may be in luxury, but in either case in circumstances which have made them almost incapable of anything like good citizenship. Are we to kill such persons, or leave them to starve, in the interest of the public welfare? All human instincts will protest that this is unjust, and that they can claim more than they can possibly be represented as contributing, simply because they have had, as we say, bad luck, and it is not their fault.[#][#] SeeAppendix III,On Justice and Education.Let us try what happens if after Plato's example we turn the matter upside down, and instead of saying that justice will be found when there is rendered to each man what is due to him, we say that justice is found when each man contributes what is due from him.Now logically, of course, these two are the same, because duties and rights are absolutely correlative. My rights constitute other people's duties towards me, and their rights constitute my duties towards them. The only difference is that it is far more easy in any given case to determine what is due from somebody—what can be claimed from him—than to determine what is due to him.In this imperfect stage of the world, where we are passing through the transition from something like barbarism to Christian civilisation, as we hope, it is possible that of two correlative processes, one will actually carry us further than the other even though it is logically inseparable from it. And in fact we find at once, that if we put it this way, and say that the principle of justice is not that each man should obtain what is due to him, but that each should contribute what is due from him, we are coming to the central principle of God's administration of His world, which is that we should render to every man not according to his desert, but according to his need. Indeed for practical purposes, if we are wishing to bring justice into our own dealings, and into the dealings of any public body with which we may have influence, this principle will carry us further than any other—"Render to every man according to his need."Let us suppose that we meet on one day with two beggars. One of them is a man who has borne a good character throughout his life, and has lost his work through no fault of his own; the works on which he was employed were closed, and he is now tramping in search of more work. All of us of course will say—"He deserves help and we will help him." Yes; and it is quite easy to help him. We have only to set him up again, and all will be well. It is not his own fault and we can rely upon him to make use of another opportunity. The other beggar is a man who has lost this place, as he has lost many before, through indulgence in some vice, such as drink. There are very many people who will say, "Well, it is his own fault, and now he must suffer for it." If God had taken that line with us, where would our redemption be?—"It is his own fault, now he must suffer for it." To say that is to repudiate the Gospel in its entirety. It is to call the Cross absurd and scandalous. "God commendeth His love toward us in that while we were yet sinners Christ died."No; the Christian will say, "This man needs help more than the other." It will not be the same kind of help. It is no use merely to give him money. That may merely help him to go wrong quicker than he would otherwise. He needs something that will cost us, probably, more than money; he needs our time—time to make friends; time to remove his suspicions; time to enter into real sympathy with him, and to detect what elements of strength there are in his character, that we may build them up again. But he needs help more than the other, and the Christian will be bound to give it, and he will say—"It was his own fault; he cannot help himself; it depends entirely on us; we will render to him according to his need."And all of this would lead to another formula for describing the justice which we shall desire to practise in the State, and in all our secular life of which the State is the highest organisation—The recognition of personality.I do not know at all what forms your labour unrest in takes in this continent, but I claim to have considerable opportunities of knowing what is the root of that unrest in England, at least among the better type of working people; for I am concerned with an organisation which is at work among working folk all over England, having an enormous membership, and which aims at claiming for them, and supplying them with, further facilities for education. Those with whom I thus come in contact are picked men, no doubt, because those who join an educational association are thereby marked off at once as intellectually at least more alert than those who do not join; but as I go about them, I find no room whatever for doubting that the root of the labour unrest in England is a sense that the whole organisation of our life constitutes a standing insult to the personality of the poor man. Why, for example, he feels, should it be possible for a well-to-do man to secure for himself, or for his wife, or for his child, the medical attendance that may be needed, while he in very many parts of our country depends upon institutions maintained by voluntary contributions? It is quite compatible with gratitude to those whose generosity maintains these institutions to feel that for such service he should not be dependent upon anybody's charity at all—whether the solution is to be that the State maintain such institutions or that every man who is doing his fair share of the country's work receive for himself the wage that will enable him to deal with such emergencies as they arise.Above all, men feel the denial of their personality in the organisation of industry itself. Men have fought and died for political liberty, which means the right to have a voice in making the laws by which you are to be governed. But the laws of the State do not for the most part invade a man's home, whereas the regulations of an industrial firm do. They determine when he shall get up in the morning and when he shall go to bed; they determine whether he shall have any leisure for the pursuit of any interest of his own. In the making of those regulations he has, as a rule, no voice whatever, and no opportunity of making his views understood except by threat, the threat of a strike. The men feel that they are what they are sometimes called, "hands" not persons. They are the tools of other men. You must apply all this to your own country, if and so far as it does apply. But one might easily imagine a village in Lancashire, or any other industrial district where all the inhabitants are dependent upon one industry; there are many such; and the control of that industry may be in the hands of a Board of Directors, settled perhaps in London; it may only meet a few times a year for the transaction of business, and otherwise not exist at all. They never see the people whose lives and destinies they thus control. The shareholders who want their dividends make no enquiries as a rule about the conditions in which the work is done. If that Board of Directors mismanages its business the village in Lancashire goes hungry. If that Board of Directors, when they have already got a full supply of work, takes on another large contract, that village in Lancashire works overtime; and the people have no say in the matter. Whatever else that is, it is not liberty, and in the judgment of the people themselves it is not justice. And indeed it is not either justice or liberty as we have learned in other spheres to understand those terms. The economic organisation of life comes far closer to the individual citizen than the political organisation, and the development of justice remains incomplete until it has secured liberty of an economic as well as a political kind.If it is true that the method of Christ is to appeal to the free personality of the man, so that he obeys out of love and devotion and not from fear of penalty nor hope of reward, other than the reward of realising the love of the Master, then surely it is in the true line of development towards the perfected Christian civilisation if we demand that these opportunities for the development of free personality shall be afforded. No doubt it must be done with wisdom. Rough and ready methods, however well-meant, might do far more harm than good, and leave us in a situation even worse than that which we know. But the Church has paid scarcely any attention to those things in England. It is very difficult to persuade Church-people that, because they are followers of Christ, and therefore might be assumed to recognise that they are "members one of another" with all these others, they are therefore bound (for example) in investing their money to find out the conditions under which their dividends are going to be earned. In almost every department of life we have left such things alone. Under the stress of war, we have suddenly become acutely conscious of the drink evil. It was there before; and we have been content that the great majority of our fellow citizens should have no opportunity for gratifying those instincts of social life and merriment, which are the birthright of all God's children, except in places where the influence of alcohol was supreme. We have been content with that. We have not thought it was our duty to find a means of supplying them with other places of recreation and amusement; we have saved our money. And then we have the impertinent audacity to claim our own redemption by the blood of Christ.One can go on with one evil after another in the same way. This is what makes the Church weak. It is no sort of use for us to say that Christ is the Redeemer of the world, and the Revealer of the way of life, if with regard to just those evils which press most heavily on men we have to say that for them He has unfortunately not supplied a remedy.No doubt if these evils are to be dealt with on a large scale, the work must be done by the State, for nothing else is adequate; and the Church here has two main tasks. It is no part of the Church's task to advocate general principles or particular maxims of economic science, though its members, in their capacity of citizenship ought to be active in these ways. The first task of the Church is to inspire the State, which after all very largely consists of the same persons as itself, with the desire to combat the evil; and the second is to counteract the one great difficulty which the State experiences. When the State takes up such work as this, there is one thing which we all fear: "Officialism." What is "Officialism"? Simply lack of love; nothing else in the world. It consists in treating people as "cases," according to rules and red tape, instead of treating them as individuals; and the Church which must inspire the State to want to deal with these things, must then supply the agents through whom it may deal with them effectively, inspiring them with the love of men which is the fruit and test of a true love of God.But beyond all this, the Church must be making demands far greater than it has ever made upon man's spiritual nature and spiritual capacity, and must then point to the organisation of our social life and say—"That organisation, because and in so far as it deprives men of the full growth of their spiritual nature, because and in so far as it prevents them from taking the share which belongs to God's children in His worship and the enjoyment of his gifts of nature and Grace, is proved to be of the devil."In our worship we find for the most part what we expect to find. There may be gifts offered us, gifts from God, that we never receive because we have not looked for them. It is in our intercourse with Christ that we shall find the means of solving the horror of our social problem, if we are expecting to find it; but we have not expected it. We have not really believed that He is the Redeemer of the World; we have not looked to Him for the redemption of Society. The State by itself, until the Church comes to its help, can do something indeed, but something which by itself is almost worthless.[#] It supplies the indispensable foundation without which a spiritual structure cannot be built up; but, if that building never comes, the foundation by itself is little more than useless. To those whom the social order favours it offers real liberty and life, but no inspiration; a perfect social order would offer liberty to all, but still no inspiration. The State alone can never be the house of many mansions wherein every soul is truly at home.[#] It is to be observed that the State is by its very nature largely limited to the regulation of those human relationships where men oppose each other with rival claims; as soon as men rise to the reciprocity of friendship the method of the State is inappropriate. People do not go to law to determine whether either loves the other adequately.LECTURE IVHOLINESS AND CATHOLICITY IN THE CHURCH"This is the law of the house: upon the top of the mountain the whole limit thereof round about shall be most holy. Behold, this is the law of the house."—Ezekiel xliii, 12."And I saw no temple therein: for the Lord God Almighty, and the Lamb, are the temple thereof."—Revelation xxi, 22.The Bible gives us two elaborately conceived pictures of the perfected life of man. The first is that which occupies the closing chapters of Ezekiel's prophecy; its leading feature is the immense separation which is insisted upon between the Temple and the secular City. The Hill of Zion has become a very high mountain; upon the top of it the Temple is set, and there is a wide space, at least two miles, between it and the City of Jerusalem, which has been moved away by that distance to the south.Indeed, if we take the description as intended to be complete, the City seems to exist chiefly to provide a congregation for the Temple's services, and the Prince only to offer representative worship on behalf of His people. All attention is concentrated upon the place of the worship of God, and the holiness which is to be characteristic of that place. By thus keeping the Temple holy, through separating it from the body of the City and its secular life, the Prophet attains no doubt the end he has in view, but he also, of necessity, though probably unintentionally, leaves the suggestion that the secular life itself cannot be wholly consecrated.In sharp contrast with this is St. John's picture in the Book of Revelation; here there is no specific place of worship at all, for the whole City is the Temple of God; more than that, the whole City is the very Holy of Holies, for it is described as being a perfect cube, and the Holy of Holies in Solomon's Temple was a perfect cube."And the city lieth four square, and the length thereof is as great as the breadth: and he measured the city with the reed, twelve thousand furlongs; the length and the breadth and the height thereof are equal. And he measured the wall thereof, and it was one hundred and forty and four cubits."[#][#] Rev. xxi, 16, 17.The City thus corresponds in symbolic form with the Holy of Holies. It is become the dwelling place of God. No special shrine is needed, no place to which men draw apart, because their whole life is an act of worship, and God dwells among them in their daily activities.There is one feature about this Heavenly City, which is obscured through the use of the old terms of measurement, for this cube is described as being 1,500mileshigh, 1,500milesbroad, and 1,500mileslong; but the wall which stands for defence against foes without and for the containment and order of the life within, and indeed represents in general the principle of organisation—the wall is only 216feethigh; so small a thing is order in comparison with the life which it safeguards.It is between those two poles, which are set for us as the extreme terms in a process, that the Church must live its life. There is truth in both of them.We were considering in the last lecture justice and liberty, which are the supreme achievements of the National State. Let us to-day consider the Holiness and Catholicity, which are the supreme treasures of the Church.Holiness must come first, Holiness which means absolute conformity to the will of God. Whatever obstacles there may be to overcome, whatever seductions to avoid, the Church is to remain absolutely devoted to the Divine Will. Only so can it be catholic or universal. It might for a moment achieve an all-embracing unity by giving up everything that is offensive to men, and gathering all within it under the glow of a comfortable sentiment; but then its life would be gone, and after a little while the men who had all become members of it would be just as though they had not. Only a Church which is perfectly loyal to the Will of God, can possibly be the home for all mankind.But Holiness has always had two meanings—an outward and an inward, a ceremonial and a moral. We shall agree, I suppose, in saying that the outward and ceremonial is in itself of no consequence, and exists only in order to preserve and make possible the inward and spiritual conformity to God's Will; but for that purpose, as all human experience has always shown, it is quite indispensable. We are made of bodies as well as souls, and if our whole being is to be permeated, there must be bodily expression of that which our souls enjoy or need. We must worship with our bodies as well as with our souls. So St. Paul, after all his emphasis upon the spirit as against dead works, begins his practical exhortation with the words, "I beseech you, therefore, brethren, by the mercies of God to present your bodies a living sacrifice."[#] The physical and bodily expression is always necessary, in this human life of ours, to the full efficacy and to the survival through the ages of the spiritual, though this no doubt is alone of ultimate consequence.[#] Rom. xii, 1.If the Church is to maintain its Holiness, it must of necessity be to some extent separated from the world; it cannot mix as a Church in all worldly activities. It cannot simply set itself out to permeate the general life of men, maintaining nothing that is separate and apart for itself. If it does that, it will simply be lost in the general life of the world.In the last resort our characters depend almost entirely upon the influences that play upon them in our environment; the one place where we have effective choice is in determining the influences to which we will submit ourselves. If there is no place in our society, or in the world, where men may count upon finding the power of God in purity, then men will inevitably fail to rise above that sort of character, which their worldly environment happens to be forming in them.The Church then, precisely in order to do this work in the world, must keep itself in some sense separate from the world; but the vast majority of its members are people in the daily life of the world, pursuing their avocations there; and it would plainly be wholly disastrous to require that all Christian people, in virtue of their Christianity, should withdraw themselves from the ordinary concerns of men.There is, therefore, no means by which this separateness of the Church can be achieved unless there are certain persons set apart to be representatives of the Church, and of the Church only; and who, because they are official representatives of the Church are thereby deprived of the right to take part in many worldly activities, though these in themselves are right enough.It is not because they are more truly members of the Church than others, nor because there is a different moral standard for clergy and laity, but because in the whole life of the Church there are certain functions which are incompatible with others, just as in the State a man cannot be at the same time an advocate and a judge, or commander-in-chief and ambassador.Thus, for example, as it seems to me, one who is called to be a priest of the Church, inevitably forfeits the right to take part in the hurly-burly of party politics; partly because, in a world which consists of many parties, he is responsible for bringing before men the claim of God to which all the parties ought to bow; partly also because a man's activities inevitably affect the quality of his own mind, and if we are to be as it were repositories of the Eternal truths, if we are to have ready for dispensation all the treasures which God commits to His Church, we need a type of mind which cannot, at least by most men, be maintained, if we are engaged in heated controversy and frequent debate.Another example may be found in the question whether a priest should serve as a combatant in his country's army. He is called to represent the Church; and the Church is essentially, not accidentally, international; it is not international merely as a scientific society may be, in that it is not concerned with political frontiers and men of all nations are welcome within it; but it is international in the sense that it exists to bind the nations of the earth in one. The officer of such a society may be as patriotic in his feeling as anyone else, but, just because he is an official, for him to take positive action on one side of the other weakens the Church's international position, and is, therefore, a more serious act than it is in the case of the layman. Here again there are not two standards, but there are diverse circumstances. If the Church called on all its members to refuse to serve, the result would be to interfere with the freedom of the State to act in its own sphere; if it allows everyone to serve, it is deprived of its Catholic witness just when that is most vitally needed. The only way of doing justice to the legitimate claims of both nationalism and Catholicity, is to differentiate between persons; and there is no practicable or even sensible way of doing this except to make the Church's officers responsible for the Catholic witness and its lay, or unofficial, members for the national.But does this not involve the danger of a priestly caste? Yes, no doubt it does; but there are two ways in which we may avoid falling into that danger. The first is perpetually to remember that men are called by God to the different kinds of work which He has for them to do; and we shall avoid unctuousness, which is no doubt what men most dread about a priestly caste, if we keep it perpetually in our mind that we are not personally holy because our calling is. We are entrusted with this great charge. We have to fulfil it. It is our work for Him. But there are those whom He calls to serve Him as politicians and as soldiers; if they do their work as in His sight, and to His glory, they are serving Him every bit as much as we are. All the work of all the kinds of men is needed in the world, and it is only if we suppose that we are made more holy because our calling is concerned with the specifically holy things that we shall fall before that danger.And the other safeguard, paradoxical as it may sound, is a very complete specialised training. One of the reasons, I am quite sure, why lay people often find us rather stilted and uncongenial is because we have not secured a sufficient grasp upon what is our own special subject to feel full liberty in conversation and to speak naturally. We are perpetually wondering at what point we shall be suddenly compromising that for which we are responsible. We tend to utter (and even to hold) merely conventional opinions and to express ourselves only in the stereotyped phrases, because we have not sufficient grasp of spiritual and moral truth to trust ourselves in forming individual opinions, or in finding our own language for expressing the opinions which we form. Precisely in the degree in which we know our own work and have full possession of what is entrusted to us, shall we obtain liberty and ease of manner, and be in general behaviour just like other people, which is what we ought most to desire.Still it is in the person of its priests that the Church must maintain that outward holiness, that separation from the world, which alone makes possible a concentration upon things divine; and without this concentration it can never become a catholic or universal body. "Universal," here does not, of course, mean all-inclusive. There are those who definitely and deliberately reject the claim of Christ, and those have never been submitted in any way to His influence. The unbaptized heathen are not members of the Catholic Church; and if they refuse the Gospel when it comes, they remain outside. Moreover, as we have seen, there is possible a vicious as well as a holy catholicity. There is nothing so seductive as the temptation to suppose that doctrine which evokes a response is on that account true, or particularly to be emphasised. Sometimes people dislike the truth. There are people who are alienated by it; and the attractiveness of our gospel to people, irrespective of their frame of mind, is no evidence of its divinity. There is a picture in the Old Testament where Moses the Prophet is apart upon the mountain top, communing with God, while at the foot of the mountain, Aaron, the official priest, is ministering to the people the kind of religion they like. He was encouraging them, as the Psalmist satirically says, to worship: "the similitude of the calf that eateth hay." There was nothing very dignified about it. But it was what the people liked; and the response to his ministrations was immediate and immense. Our task is to lay hold, so far as we may in our infinite feebleness, of the truth that was given to the world in Christ in all its sternness as well as its love—or rather in that sternness which is an essential part of its love; and this is what we must present to men.Again, it is not in proportion to their virtue in the ordinary moral sense that men are drawn to the Church; it is in proportion to their conscious need of God. It is perhaps worth while just now especially to emphasise the peril of a faithless virtue, and the depth of error involved in any attempt to take for the basis of a Church "the religion of all good men." What will happen to a man who sets his effort upon the building up of his whole character according to an ethical ideal? One of two things. Either he may in part succeed, perhaps as much as he himself desires to succeed, and then he may become self-satisfied and a Pharisee; or else he will find himself either failing altogether, or, having succeeded in part, incapable of carrying the success to its full completion, and not knowing where to find the power that will take him further; and so he ends in despair.No, the appeal of the Church, as universal, is simply that it has within it that which answers the real and deepest need of every human being. There everyone will find his home, when once he has found his need of God, if indeed the Church is holy.And this is also its distinction from the sects; for it endeavours to uphold the entire body of the truth, every particle of it that may be of service to anyone. I suppose there are very few of us to whom the whole of the Creed is a living reality. We may believe it all, but what we live by is usually a small part of it, and it is a different part with different persons. The essence of sectarianism, as I understand it, is the gathering together of those people who live by the same part of the Creed, in order that, like mingling with like, they may develop a great intensity and fervour of devotion. For a moment, indeed, they may be far more effective than the great body of the Church, and yet they cannot become universal. There is something lacking from what they uphold, which someone needs.[#] The aim of the Church is to be universal here also, and to uphold the entire body of the truth, presenting it in its entirety, even though the priest who is called upon to fulfil that office of presenting it to the people may himself be actually living by the slenderest portion of it. No doubt we shall present most forcibly that part of the whole truth which is most real to ourselves; and for that reason, if no other, we ought to try our utmost to gain a personal apprehension of the whole. But men's spiritual diseases are of many kinds, and all the healing truths must be offered by the Church in which all men are to find life.[#] This is a description of Sectarianism, not of any particular Denomination. We are all infected with the sectarian spirit. In many respects Rome is far more sectarian than the great Presbyterian bodies in Scotland. With all its faults I sincerely believe that the Anglican Communion is, in spirit, more of a Church and less of a sect than any other body. But then it contains several sects within itself, both "High," "Broad," and "Low."The truth which it thus presents, the Church believes to be the gift of God. This above all is the idea which it tries to safeguard by the outward signs of regular orders and sacraments.Our belief about the communion service is that there Christ comes to us just as once the eternal Word, which was present with all His creation, none the less came in full manifestation under the limitations of time and space at a particular moment and in a particular country. So in the communion the Divine presence which fills the whole world ("Heaven and earth are full of His glory," as we say in the service itself) is offered to us, and draws near to us; and that not because of any virtue in us; it was while we were yet sinners that Christ came and died; it is while we are yet sinners that Christ offers Himself to us; and it is as guarding against any conception that we can determine how He shall come, or when and where, and that we can, as it were, manufacture His presence in our own way, that the Church maintains with the utmost emphasis the order that is necessary for that service.It is to preserve the conception of spiritual life as a gift of God, and of the Church as the society which recognises and receives it as such a gift, in distinction from a mutual benefit society organised for the edification of its own members, that the Church insists upon the due order of its administration; and it is through concentration upon this idea of holiness, and all that it ought to mean in our personal lives, that we can make our greatest contribution towards bringing into existence again a real Catholic Church, a Church which shall genuinely include all the persons who believe in Christ in one order and fellowship. The first and indispensable condition of re-union is fuller dedication to the will of God in Christ. We shall be united to one another when we are all truly united to Him.But, if that work is to be accomplished, we shall also need wisdom, in order rightly to counteract the effects alike of folly and of sin in the past history of the Church; and here every man must be willing to make what suggestions he can, merely submitting them for acceptance or rejection by the whole body of the Church; because unless people are prepared to speak of the problem as they see it, leaving the final judgment to be formed by the body of which they are members, there is no hope of our making any progress at all.I will therefore, venture to suggest to you six principles, upon which, as my vision is at present, I think we might come near to agreement among ourselves; and if we should agree upon them, then we could offer these or whatever modifications of these the Church thinks fit, to those bodies which are at present in separation from us.I.—First, what do we mean by the Church? Ideally and in its eternal reality it is the Body and Bride of Christ, the instrument of His will and the object of His love, worthy as both. But in the process of time and upon the stage of this world, what are we going to mean by it, and who are we going to account its members? When people begin to think of this question, they always start with various enthusiastic schemes. The members of the Church are the people who have faith, or the people who are conscious of the need of pardon, and the like; but all of this breaks down because you can never tell who these people are. We must have some perfectly plain outward sign if the Church is to be an operative agency in this world; and you will find, I think, that there is none which you can reach except that it is the fellowship of the baptized. Baptism is the Lord's own appointed way by which men should be received in the fellowship of His disciples. We must take that as our basis.It is no business of ours to pronounce judgment upon the spiritual state of other persons. We shall thank God for every sign of the Christian virtues and graces shown in other persons who have not been brought to baptism; we may believe that they are members of the Church in heaven; but still, I would submit, we must say for all purposes of practical working, that the Church on earth is the fellowship of the baptized.II.—That fellowship exists in fragments and sections. What is the peculiar mark of our fragment? This is authoritatively defined for us in the Lambeth Quadrilateral,[#] but our special character may be expressed briefly by saying that we are trustees for the Catholic order, who yet reject what seem to us the accretions which the Church of Rome upholds.[#] (a) The Holy Scriptures of the Old and New Testaments. as "containing all things necessary to Salvation," and as being the rule and ultimate standard of faith.(b) The Apostles' Creed, as the Baptismal Symbol; and the Nicene Creed, as the sufficient statement of the Christian faith.(c) The two Sacraments ordained by Christ Himself—Baptism and the Supper of the Lord—ministered with unfailing use of Christ's words of institution, and of the elements ordained by Him.(d) The Historic Episcopate, locally adapted in the methods of its administration to the varying needs of the nations and peoples called of God into the Unity of His Church.Now some such order as that which we maintain, is necessary, as it seems to me, to the fulfilment of the duty of charity. I hope I am not unfair to those who are separated from us, and are influenced by the ideals of Puritanism; but it has seemed to me that their discipline is not always charitable. Indeed, a Church must either excommunicate freely or else possess a recognised order if it is to avoid becoming indistinguishable from "the world" about it; if it is to be both holy and a friend of sinners it must have an order. The order which we maintain is simply that which has come down to us as the actual order of historic Christendom.III.—Thirdly, I would submit that the Body with its orders is a living whole, and that it is illegitimate to discuss such a question as the "validity" of Orders out of all relation to the historic life of the Church. The question of Orders must be considered in relation to the whole life of the Body of which they are an organic part.[#][#] SeeAppendix IV.On Orders and Catholicity.Thus, if we take the famous Quadrilateral as our starting point, a body which stands by the Canonical Scriptures, the Creeds and the two great Sacraments, though not upholding the episcopal succession, is closer to the ideal than one which is indifferent to any of these three as well as to the succession; it has maintained many of the (ex hypothesi) essential features of a true Church; it approximates to the complete requirement. Moreover, within the field of the problem of Orders, there are degrees of approximation; it is generally considered that an agreement between the Anglican and Presbyterian communions could be far more easily reached than between the Anglican and some other Protestant bodies. We must, therefore, avoid two kindred errors. One is to set up the abrupt dilemma—"Either a true Church or not," and the other is to regard the possession of "valid" Orders as being the one and only condition of the Catholicity of the body possessing them.The Church Visible cannot be identical with the Church Invisible; it is its sacrament. And the question resolves itself into one concerning the degree of adequacy with which it expresses,and thereby maintains through the ages, the fulness of the truth.Our actual divisions in the West date from the Reformation. No one disputes that the Church just before that time was corrupt to a horrible degree. It is possible to hold that the corruption could have been purged away without schism if the reformers had been wholly free from pride and impatience; I see no means of reaching a sound judgment on such a point; but at least it would seem that the guilt for the great division was as much in Catholics as in Protestants. In so far as there really was necessity of choosing between moral purity with schism on the one hand, and organic unity with sales of indulgences and the like on the other, there can be no doubt which the whole teaching of Christ required His followers to choose. "I will have mercy and not sacrifice"; "the Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath"; yet the Sabbath and the sacrifice were of Divine appointment.If then a fragment of the Church, confronted as it believes, with such a choice, breaks off and organises itself afresh, intending to maintain in purity all the Church's life and means of grace, I cannot assert that it is for all its generations deprived of Christ's sacramental presence. But assuredly the loss of the continuous order which so impressively symbolises the Divine origin of the Church and of its Sacraments tends to undermine the intention to preserve the whole truth and to obscure belief in it. For Orders, as we understand them, are the pledge of the unity of the Church across all space and through all time, so that the priest who celebrates, does so as the organ and instrument of the universal Church, and the congregation at every Eucharist is not the few persons gathered together in that building, but Angels and Archangels and all the company of Heaven, with whom we join in prayer and worship.IV.—Consonantly with this I would come to my fourth principle—that the whole question of Orders and Sacraments must be considered in reference to the Church's life through the ages, and not with direct reference to the gift received by any individual at any given service.How are we to secure (this is our problem) that from generation to generation men shall continue to feel that in the service of the Holy Communion Christ comes to them as by His own appointment, and they have only to be ready to meet with Him; and that in meeting with Him they are united with the whole Church in the Holy Communion, the Communion of Saints? I believe that the continued recitation of the Creeds in our own and other branches of the Church is the main safeguard, not only for ourselves but also for those who do not say the Creeds, against that combination of Pelagianism and Unitarianism to which men always tend to drift; similarly I can conceive that, just because we uphold the full conception of sacramental worship, others are enabled to receive sacramental grace at their communions. It may be so; I know not. Of course it cannot be received if it is not there; but even if it is there, its full benefit will not be enjoyed except by those who believe in its full power. Two men may stand opposite the same picture; both see the same lines and colours, the accidents; but it may be that only one sees the artistic reality or substance—the Beauty—while the other is blind to it. But the man who finds it does not put it there; the artist put it there; and if he had not done so no one could find it there; so too the reality of the Sacrament is the work of God. But our fruition of it depends on our faith, and even on the exact content of our faith. Now I do not for a moment believe that that faith in the full doctrine of sacramental grace can survive through the centuries, if it is once separated from the whole order which expresses it. Therefore, while I am not entitled to deny, as I am equally not concerned to assert, that the members of other denominations at their communion service receive the same gift that we do; still I say that as trustees for the Catholic order, and considering the matter in the light of the centuries, we have no right to sacrifice any of those means by which this full doctrine has been given to us, and by which perhaps it has been also preserved for them.V.—Fifthly, I would suggest that in any scheme for practical reunion no man must be required to repudiate his own spiritual ancestry.After all, if the Church is the fellowship of the baptized, then our brethren of the separation, as we sometimes call them, are members of the Church; but they are not members of our branch of the Church; and their faith is corporate and active in their membership of their own bodies; consequently we are bound to hold that they and their bodies are parts of the Catholic Church in this time of the division—the division which is due to sin.If it is true that it was largely, and perhaps mainly, the fault of the medieval Church that the split became a necessity; if it is true that it was partly, and perhaps mainly, the fault of the Church of England that the Wesleyan movement (for example) ever broke off, because we refused to make room for what was in its early stages most undoubtedly a movement of the Spirit of God in the world, then we have no right to condemn those who by reason of our sin, at least as much as their own, are outside our fellowship; and we must recognise that, just as in St. Paul's argument about the true Israel, blindness in part happened to Israel, and so God used the Gentiles to provoke them to jealousy—so blindness in part happened to Catholicism, and God is using the Protestant bodies to provoke us to jealousy.We must, I believe, maintain that our order is for us the only possible order for the reunited Church. But order is not everything. The wall of the Holy City is minute. When the time for reunion comes, we must insist upon our own part of the truth in such a way as to avoid all condemnation of other bodies for having been separated during this time—at least, all condemnation which we do not pronounce quite equally upon ourselves. What has happened in the divisions of the Church is a severance from one another of elements which are every one of them necessary to the healthy life of the Body. If one set of people could only get dry food and no drink, and another set could only get drink and no food, neither would be healthy. They would have to combine their stores before health was possible. Catholics have preserved perhaps a fuller sense of worship and of the gifts of God; Protestants have perhaps a truer zeal for righteousness and a more intimate access to God in prayer. Let us not judge the past; God will judge. But let us recognise our need of one another and accept from each other the positive truth and life which God has given to either.VI.—Meanwhile, in the time of the division, different bodies have developed different types of religious life. There is a wealth of spiritual activity in the world now such as it is difficult to imagine under a rigidly united Church; but we can easily preserve that if we are ready that there should be within the United Catholic Church different Orders—an Order of St. George Fox for example, testifying to the great ideal which Christ brought into the world, not as I think, and as I have already explained, the right ideal to be followed by all men in all sorts of circumstances, but undoubtedly the one method by which in the end the work of God can be finally accomplished, and for testimony to which I believe some men, and indeed the whole Society of Friends, are even now called by God. Also there may well be an Order of St. John Wesley, insisting more especially upon the need of individual conversion, which the Church, as a vast organisation concerned with world movements, is perpetually tempted to leave too much on one side. These Orders can quite well govern themselves to a very large extent, and order their worship in very many ways, just as is the case in the Orders familiar in the medieval Church, and in the Church of Rome at this time.
[#] I owe the illustration to Mr. A. L. Smith, of Balliol.
Now so far we have been considering Society as consisting of relatively free persons (though the freedom exists in varying degrees, both as regards the external constraint and capacity for self-control), these persons having various claims which have to be regulated by the justice which the State upholds; in other words, in this stage, we are regarding justice in the way in which I suppose it is most usually regarded, namely, as rendering to a man what is due to him. That is the definition with which Plato inThe Republicstarts his enquiry, and he naturally found very soon that it would not work.[#] It will not work because the moral values of people are not determinable. You cannot, as a matter of fact, ever say what is the relative weight of the various claims that may be made on behalf of this or that man. Most particularly there is the perpetual conflict between the actual and the potential worth of any men.
[#] He appropriately puts it in the mouth of Polemarchus, the well-brought up, but wholly inexperienced, young man.
Suppose that we decide that we will give to all men in Society that which is their due. How are we going to determine what is due? Is it to be determined by their economic value, for example by the amount they are contributing to the economic or general welfare of Society? Well then, there are a large number of people at both ends of what we call the social scale who ought to receive nothing at all, because they are contributing nothing economically, or, indeed, in any other way, to the public welfare. And yet that is not their fault; they have been brought up, it may be in squalor, it may be in luxury, but in either case in circumstances which have made them almost incapable of anything like good citizenship. Are we to kill such persons, or leave them to starve, in the interest of the public welfare? All human instincts will protest that this is unjust, and that they can claim more than they can possibly be represented as contributing, simply because they have had, as we say, bad luck, and it is not their fault.[#]
[#] SeeAppendix III,On Justice and Education.
Let us try what happens if after Plato's example we turn the matter upside down, and instead of saying that justice will be found when there is rendered to each man what is due to him, we say that justice is found when each man contributes what is due from him.
Now logically, of course, these two are the same, because duties and rights are absolutely correlative. My rights constitute other people's duties towards me, and their rights constitute my duties towards them. The only difference is that it is far more easy in any given case to determine what is due from somebody—what can be claimed from him—than to determine what is due to him.
In this imperfect stage of the world, where we are passing through the transition from something like barbarism to Christian civilisation, as we hope, it is possible that of two correlative processes, one will actually carry us further than the other even though it is logically inseparable from it. And in fact we find at once, that if we put it this way, and say that the principle of justice is not that each man should obtain what is due to him, but that each should contribute what is due from him, we are coming to the central principle of God's administration of His world, which is that we should render to every man not according to his desert, but according to his need. Indeed for practical purposes, if we are wishing to bring justice into our own dealings, and into the dealings of any public body with which we may have influence, this principle will carry us further than any other—"Render to every man according to his need."
Let us suppose that we meet on one day with two beggars. One of them is a man who has borne a good character throughout his life, and has lost his work through no fault of his own; the works on which he was employed were closed, and he is now tramping in search of more work. All of us of course will say—"He deserves help and we will help him." Yes; and it is quite easy to help him. We have only to set him up again, and all will be well. It is not his own fault and we can rely upon him to make use of another opportunity. The other beggar is a man who has lost this place, as he has lost many before, through indulgence in some vice, such as drink. There are very many people who will say, "Well, it is his own fault, and now he must suffer for it." If God had taken that line with us, where would our redemption be?—"It is his own fault, now he must suffer for it." To say that is to repudiate the Gospel in its entirety. It is to call the Cross absurd and scandalous. "God commendeth His love toward us in that while we were yet sinners Christ died."
No; the Christian will say, "This man needs help more than the other." It will not be the same kind of help. It is no use merely to give him money. That may merely help him to go wrong quicker than he would otherwise. He needs something that will cost us, probably, more than money; he needs our time—time to make friends; time to remove his suspicions; time to enter into real sympathy with him, and to detect what elements of strength there are in his character, that we may build them up again. But he needs help more than the other, and the Christian will be bound to give it, and he will say—"It was his own fault; he cannot help himself; it depends entirely on us; we will render to him according to his need."
And all of this would lead to another formula for describing the justice which we shall desire to practise in the State, and in all our secular life of which the State is the highest organisation—The recognition of personality.
I do not know at all what forms your labour unrest in takes in this continent, but I claim to have considerable opportunities of knowing what is the root of that unrest in England, at least among the better type of working people; for I am concerned with an organisation which is at work among working folk all over England, having an enormous membership, and which aims at claiming for them, and supplying them with, further facilities for education. Those with whom I thus come in contact are picked men, no doubt, because those who join an educational association are thereby marked off at once as intellectually at least more alert than those who do not join; but as I go about them, I find no room whatever for doubting that the root of the labour unrest in England is a sense that the whole organisation of our life constitutes a standing insult to the personality of the poor man. Why, for example, he feels, should it be possible for a well-to-do man to secure for himself, or for his wife, or for his child, the medical attendance that may be needed, while he in very many parts of our country depends upon institutions maintained by voluntary contributions? It is quite compatible with gratitude to those whose generosity maintains these institutions to feel that for such service he should not be dependent upon anybody's charity at all—whether the solution is to be that the State maintain such institutions or that every man who is doing his fair share of the country's work receive for himself the wage that will enable him to deal with such emergencies as they arise.
Above all, men feel the denial of their personality in the organisation of industry itself. Men have fought and died for political liberty, which means the right to have a voice in making the laws by which you are to be governed. But the laws of the State do not for the most part invade a man's home, whereas the regulations of an industrial firm do. They determine when he shall get up in the morning and when he shall go to bed; they determine whether he shall have any leisure for the pursuit of any interest of his own. In the making of those regulations he has, as a rule, no voice whatever, and no opportunity of making his views understood except by threat, the threat of a strike. The men feel that they are what they are sometimes called, "hands" not persons. They are the tools of other men. You must apply all this to your own country, if and so far as it does apply. But one might easily imagine a village in Lancashire, or any other industrial district where all the inhabitants are dependent upon one industry; there are many such; and the control of that industry may be in the hands of a Board of Directors, settled perhaps in London; it may only meet a few times a year for the transaction of business, and otherwise not exist at all. They never see the people whose lives and destinies they thus control. The shareholders who want their dividends make no enquiries as a rule about the conditions in which the work is done. If that Board of Directors mismanages its business the village in Lancashire goes hungry. If that Board of Directors, when they have already got a full supply of work, takes on another large contract, that village in Lancashire works overtime; and the people have no say in the matter. Whatever else that is, it is not liberty, and in the judgment of the people themselves it is not justice. And indeed it is not either justice or liberty as we have learned in other spheres to understand those terms. The economic organisation of life comes far closer to the individual citizen than the political organisation, and the development of justice remains incomplete until it has secured liberty of an economic as well as a political kind.
If it is true that the method of Christ is to appeal to the free personality of the man, so that he obeys out of love and devotion and not from fear of penalty nor hope of reward, other than the reward of realising the love of the Master, then surely it is in the true line of development towards the perfected Christian civilisation if we demand that these opportunities for the development of free personality shall be afforded. No doubt it must be done with wisdom. Rough and ready methods, however well-meant, might do far more harm than good, and leave us in a situation even worse than that which we know. But the Church has paid scarcely any attention to those things in England. It is very difficult to persuade Church-people that, because they are followers of Christ, and therefore might be assumed to recognise that they are "members one of another" with all these others, they are therefore bound (for example) in investing their money to find out the conditions under which their dividends are going to be earned. In almost every department of life we have left such things alone. Under the stress of war, we have suddenly become acutely conscious of the drink evil. It was there before; and we have been content that the great majority of our fellow citizens should have no opportunity for gratifying those instincts of social life and merriment, which are the birthright of all God's children, except in places where the influence of alcohol was supreme. We have been content with that. We have not thought it was our duty to find a means of supplying them with other places of recreation and amusement; we have saved our money. And then we have the impertinent audacity to claim our own redemption by the blood of Christ.
One can go on with one evil after another in the same way. This is what makes the Church weak. It is no sort of use for us to say that Christ is the Redeemer of the world, and the Revealer of the way of life, if with regard to just those evils which press most heavily on men we have to say that for them He has unfortunately not supplied a remedy.
No doubt if these evils are to be dealt with on a large scale, the work must be done by the State, for nothing else is adequate; and the Church here has two main tasks. It is no part of the Church's task to advocate general principles or particular maxims of economic science, though its members, in their capacity of citizenship ought to be active in these ways. The first task of the Church is to inspire the State, which after all very largely consists of the same persons as itself, with the desire to combat the evil; and the second is to counteract the one great difficulty which the State experiences. When the State takes up such work as this, there is one thing which we all fear: "Officialism." What is "Officialism"? Simply lack of love; nothing else in the world. It consists in treating people as "cases," according to rules and red tape, instead of treating them as individuals; and the Church which must inspire the State to want to deal with these things, must then supply the agents through whom it may deal with them effectively, inspiring them with the love of men which is the fruit and test of a true love of God.
But beyond all this, the Church must be making demands far greater than it has ever made upon man's spiritual nature and spiritual capacity, and must then point to the organisation of our social life and say—"That organisation, because and in so far as it deprives men of the full growth of their spiritual nature, because and in so far as it prevents them from taking the share which belongs to God's children in His worship and the enjoyment of his gifts of nature and Grace, is proved to be of the devil."
In our worship we find for the most part what we expect to find. There may be gifts offered us, gifts from God, that we never receive because we have not looked for them. It is in our intercourse with Christ that we shall find the means of solving the horror of our social problem, if we are expecting to find it; but we have not expected it. We have not really believed that He is the Redeemer of the World; we have not looked to Him for the redemption of Society. The State by itself, until the Church comes to its help, can do something indeed, but something which by itself is almost worthless.[#] It supplies the indispensable foundation without which a spiritual structure cannot be built up; but, if that building never comes, the foundation by itself is little more than useless. To those whom the social order favours it offers real liberty and life, but no inspiration; a perfect social order would offer liberty to all, but still no inspiration. The State alone can never be the house of many mansions wherein every soul is truly at home.
[#] It is to be observed that the State is by its very nature largely limited to the regulation of those human relationships where men oppose each other with rival claims; as soon as men rise to the reciprocity of friendship the method of the State is inappropriate. People do not go to law to determine whether either loves the other adequately.
LECTURE IV
HOLINESS AND CATHOLICITY IN THE CHURCH
"This is the law of the house: upon the top of the mountain the whole limit thereof round about shall be most holy. Behold, this is the law of the house."—Ezekiel xliii, 12.
"And I saw no temple therein: for the Lord God Almighty, and the Lamb, are the temple thereof."—Revelation xxi, 22.
The Bible gives us two elaborately conceived pictures of the perfected life of man. The first is that which occupies the closing chapters of Ezekiel's prophecy; its leading feature is the immense separation which is insisted upon between the Temple and the secular City. The Hill of Zion has become a very high mountain; upon the top of it the Temple is set, and there is a wide space, at least two miles, between it and the City of Jerusalem, which has been moved away by that distance to the south.
Indeed, if we take the description as intended to be complete, the City seems to exist chiefly to provide a congregation for the Temple's services, and the Prince only to offer representative worship on behalf of His people. All attention is concentrated upon the place of the worship of God, and the holiness which is to be characteristic of that place. By thus keeping the Temple holy, through separating it from the body of the City and its secular life, the Prophet attains no doubt the end he has in view, but he also, of necessity, though probably unintentionally, leaves the suggestion that the secular life itself cannot be wholly consecrated.
In sharp contrast with this is St. John's picture in the Book of Revelation; here there is no specific place of worship at all, for the whole City is the Temple of God; more than that, the whole City is the very Holy of Holies, for it is described as being a perfect cube, and the Holy of Holies in Solomon's Temple was a perfect cube.
"And the city lieth four square, and the length thereof is as great as the breadth: and he measured the city with the reed, twelve thousand furlongs; the length and the breadth and the height thereof are equal. And he measured the wall thereof, and it was one hundred and forty and four cubits."[#]
"And the city lieth four square, and the length thereof is as great as the breadth: and he measured the city with the reed, twelve thousand furlongs; the length and the breadth and the height thereof are equal. And he measured the wall thereof, and it was one hundred and forty and four cubits."[#]
[#] Rev. xxi, 16, 17.
The City thus corresponds in symbolic form with the Holy of Holies. It is become the dwelling place of God. No special shrine is needed, no place to which men draw apart, because their whole life is an act of worship, and God dwells among them in their daily activities.
There is one feature about this Heavenly City, which is obscured through the use of the old terms of measurement, for this cube is described as being 1,500mileshigh, 1,500milesbroad, and 1,500mileslong; but the wall which stands for defence against foes without and for the containment and order of the life within, and indeed represents in general the principle of organisation—the wall is only 216feethigh; so small a thing is order in comparison with the life which it safeguards.
It is between those two poles, which are set for us as the extreme terms in a process, that the Church must live its life. There is truth in both of them.
We were considering in the last lecture justice and liberty, which are the supreme achievements of the National State. Let us to-day consider the Holiness and Catholicity, which are the supreme treasures of the Church.
Holiness must come first, Holiness which means absolute conformity to the will of God. Whatever obstacles there may be to overcome, whatever seductions to avoid, the Church is to remain absolutely devoted to the Divine Will. Only so can it be catholic or universal. It might for a moment achieve an all-embracing unity by giving up everything that is offensive to men, and gathering all within it under the glow of a comfortable sentiment; but then its life would be gone, and after a little while the men who had all become members of it would be just as though they had not. Only a Church which is perfectly loyal to the Will of God, can possibly be the home for all mankind.
But Holiness has always had two meanings—an outward and an inward, a ceremonial and a moral. We shall agree, I suppose, in saying that the outward and ceremonial is in itself of no consequence, and exists only in order to preserve and make possible the inward and spiritual conformity to God's Will; but for that purpose, as all human experience has always shown, it is quite indispensable. We are made of bodies as well as souls, and if our whole being is to be permeated, there must be bodily expression of that which our souls enjoy or need. We must worship with our bodies as well as with our souls. So St. Paul, after all his emphasis upon the spirit as against dead works, begins his practical exhortation with the words, "I beseech you, therefore, brethren, by the mercies of God to present your bodies a living sacrifice."[#] The physical and bodily expression is always necessary, in this human life of ours, to the full efficacy and to the survival through the ages of the spiritual, though this no doubt is alone of ultimate consequence.
[#] Rom. xii, 1.
If the Church is to maintain its Holiness, it must of necessity be to some extent separated from the world; it cannot mix as a Church in all worldly activities. It cannot simply set itself out to permeate the general life of men, maintaining nothing that is separate and apart for itself. If it does that, it will simply be lost in the general life of the world.
In the last resort our characters depend almost entirely upon the influences that play upon them in our environment; the one place where we have effective choice is in determining the influences to which we will submit ourselves. If there is no place in our society, or in the world, where men may count upon finding the power of God in purity, then men will inevitably fail to rise above that sort of character, which their worldly environment happens to be forming in them.
The Church then, precisely in order to do this work in the world, must keep itself in some sense separate from the world; but the vast majority of its members are people in the daily life of the world, pursuing their avocations there; and it would plainly be wholly disastrous to require that all Christian people, in virtue of their Christianity, should withdraw themselves from the ordinary concerns of men.
There is, therefore, no means by which this separateness of the Church can be achieved unless there are certain persons set apart to be representatives of the Church, and of the Church only; and who, because they are official representatives of the Church are thereby deprived of the right to take part in many worldly activities, though these in themselves are right enough.
It is not because they are more truly members of the Church than others, nor because there is a different moral standard for clergy and laity, but because in the whole life of the Church there are certain functions which are incompatible with others, just as in the State a man cannot be at the same time an advocate and a judge, or commander-in-chief and ambassador.
Thus, for example, as it seems to me, one who is called to be a priest of the Church, inevitably forfeits the right to take part in the hurly-burly of party politics; partly because, in a world which consists of many parties, he is responsible for bringing before men the claim of God to which all the parties ought to bow; partly also because a man's activities inevitably affect the quality of his own mind, and if we are to be as it were repositories of the Eternal truths, if we are to have ready for dispensation all the treasures which God commits to His Church, we need a type of mind which cannot, at least by most men, be maintained, if we are engaged in heated controversy and frequent debate.
Another example may be found in the question whether a priest should serve as a combatant in his country's army. He is called to represent the Church; and the Church is essentially, not accidentally, international; it is not international merely as a scientific society may be, in that it is not concerned with political frontiers and men of all nations are welcome within it; but it is international in the sense that it exists to bind the nations of the earth in one. The officer of such a society may be as patriotic in his feeling as anyone else, but, just because he is an official, for him to take positive action on one side of the other weakens the Church's international position, and is, therefore, a more serious act than it is in the case of the layman. Here again there are not two standards, but there are diverse circumstances. If the Church called on all its members to refuse to serve, the result would be to interfere with the freedom of the State to act in its own sphere; if it allows everyone to serve, it is deprived of its Catholic witness just when that is most vitally needed. The only way of doing justice to the legitimate claims of both nationalism and Catholicity, is to differentiate between persons; and there is no practicable or even sensible way of doing this except to make the Church's officers responsible for the Catholic witness and its lay, or unofficial, members for the national.
But does this not involve the danger of a priestly caste? Yes, no doubt it does; but there are two ways in which we may avoid falling into that danger. The first is perpetually to remember that men are called by God to the different kinds of work which He has for them to do; and we shall avoid unctuousness, which is no doubt what men most dread about a priestly caste, if we keep it perpetually in our mind that we are not personally holy because our calling is. We are entrusted with this great charge. We have to fulfil it. It is our work for Him. But there are those whom He calls to serve Him as politicians and as soldiers; if they do their work as in His sight, and to His glory, they are serving Him every bit as much as we are. All the work of all the kinds of men is needed in the world, and it is only if we suppose that we are made more holy because our calling is concerned with the specifically holy things that we shall fall before that danger.
And the other safeguard, paradoxical as it may sound, is a very complete specialised training. One of the reasons, I am quite sure, why lay people often find us rather stilted and uncongenial is because we have not secured a sufficient grasp upon what is our own special subject to feel full liberty in conversation and to speak naturally. We are perpetually wondering at what point we shall be suddenly compromising that for which we are responsible. We tend to utter (and even to hold) merely conventional opinions and to express ourselves only in the stereotyped phrases, because we have not sufficient grasp of spiritual and moral truth to trust ourselves in forming individual opinions, or in finding our own language for expressing the opinions which we form. Precisely in the degree in which we know our own work and have full possession of what is entrusted to us, shall we obtain liberty and ease of manner, and be in general behaviour just like other people, which is what we ought most to desire.
Still it is in the person of its priests that the Church must maintain that outward holiness, that separation from the world, which alone makes possible a concentration upon things divine; and without this concentration it can never become a catholic or universal body. "Universal," here does not, of course, mean all-inclusive. There are those who definitely and deliberately reject the claim of Christ, and those have never been submitted in any way to His influence. The unbaptized heathen are not members of the Catholic Church; and if they refuse the Gospel when it comes, they remain outside. Moreover, as we have seen, there is possible a vicious as well as a holy catholicity. There is nothing so seductive as the temptation to suppose that doctrine which evokes a response is on that account true, or particularly to be emphasised. Sometimes people dislike the truth. There are people who are alienated by it; and the attractiveness of our gospel to people, irrespective of their frame of mind, is no evidence of its divinity. There is a picture in the Old Testament where Moses the Prophet is apart upon the mountain top, communing with God, while at the foot of the mountain, Aaron, the official priest, is ministering to the people the kind of religion they like. He was encouraging them, as the Psalmist satirically says, to worship: "the similitude of the calf that eateth hay." There was nothing very dignified about it. But it was what the people liked; and the response to his ministrations was immediate and immense. Our task is to lay hold, so far as we may in our infinite feebleness, of the truth that was given to the world in Christ in all its sternness as well as its love—or rather in that sternness which is an essential part of its love; and this is what we must present to men.
Again, it is not in proportion to their virtue in the ordinary moral sense that men are drawn to the Church; it is in proportion to their conscious need of God. It is perhaps worth while just now especially to emphasise the peril of a faithless virtue, and the depth of error involved in any attempt to take for the basis of a Church "the religion of all good men." What will happen to a man who sets his effort upon the building up of his whole character according to an ethical ideal? One of two things. Either he may in part succeed, perhaps as much as he himself desires to succeed, and then he may become self-satisfied and a Pharisee; or else he will find himself either failing altogether, or, having succeeded in part, incapable of carrying the success to its full completion, and not knowing where to find the power that will take him further; and so he ends in despair.
No, the appeal of the Church, as universal, is simply that it has within it that which answers the real and deepest need of every human being. There everyone will find his home, when once he has found his need of God, if indeed the Church is holy.
And this is also its distinction from the sects; for it endeavours to uphold the entire body of the truth, every particle of it that may be of service to anyone. I suppose there are very few of us to whom the whole of the Creed is a living reality. We may believe it all, but what we live by is usually a small part of it, and it is a different part with different persons. The essence of sectarianism, as I understand it, is the gathering together of those people who live by the same part of the Creed, in order that, like mingling with like, they may develop a great intensity and fervour of devotion. For a moment, indeed, they may be far more effective than the great body of the Church, and yet they cannot become universal. There is something lacking from what they uphold, which someone needs.[#] The aim of the Church is to be universal here also, and to uphold the entire body of the truth, presenting it in its entirety, even though the priest who is called upon to fulfil that office of presenting it to the people may himself be actually living by the slenderest portion of it. No doubt we shall present most forcibly that part of the whole truth which is most real to ourselves; and for that reason, if no other, we ought to try our utmost to gain a personal apprehension of the whole. But men's spiritual diseases are of many kinds, and all the healing truths must be offered by the Church in which all men are to find life.
[#] This is a description of Sectarianism, not of any particular Denomination. We are all infected with the sectarian spirit. In many respects Rome is far more sectarian than the great Presbyterian bodies in Scotland. With all its faults I sincerely believe that the Anglican Communion is, in spirit, more of a Church and less of a sect than any other body. But then it contains several sects within itself, both "High," "Broad," and "Low."
The truth which it thus presents, the Church believes to be the gift of God. This above all is the idea which it tries to safeguard by the outward signs of regular orders and sacraments.
Our belief about the communion service is that there Christ comes to us just as once the eternal Word, which was present with all His creation, none the less came in full manifestation under the limitations of time and space at a particular moment and in a particular country. So in the communion the Divine presence which fills the whole world ("Heaven and earth are full of His glory," as we say in the service itself) is offered to us, and draws near to us; and that not because of any virtue in us; it was while we were yet sinners that Christ came and died; it is while we are yet sinners that Christ offers Himself to us; and it is as guarding against any conception that we can determine how He shall come, or when and where, and that we can, as it were, manufacture His presence in our own way, that the Church maintains with the utmost emphasis the order that is necessary for that service.
It is to preserve the conception of spiritual life as a gift of God, and of the Church as the society which recognises and receives it as such a gift, in distinction from a mutual benefit society organised for the edification of its own members, that the Church insists upon the due order of its administration; and it is through concentration upon this idea of holiness, and all that it ought to mean in our personal lives, that we can make our greatest contribution towards bringing into existence again a real Catholic Church, a Church which shall genuinely include all the persons who believe in Christ in one order and fellowship. The first and indispensable condition of re-union is fuller dedication to the will of God in Christ. We shall be united to one another when we are all truly united to Him.
But, if that work is to be accomplished, we shall also need wisdom, in order rightly to counteract the effects alike of folly and of sin in the past history of the Church; and here every man must be willing to make what suggestions he can, merely submitting them for acceptance or rejection by the whole body of the Church; because unless people are prepared to speak of the problem as they see it, leaving the final judgment to be formed by the body of which they are members, there is no hope of our making any progress at all.
I will therefore, venture to suggest to you six principles, upon which, as my vision is at present, I think we might come near to agreement among ourselves; and if we should agree upon them, then we could offer these or whatever modifications of these the Church thinks fit, to those bodies which are at present in separation from us.
I.—First, what do we mean by the Church? Ideally and in its eternal reality it is the Body and Bride of Christ, the instrument of His will and the object of His love, worthy as both. But in the process of time and upon the stage of this world, what are we going to mean by it, and who are we going to account its members? When people begin to think of this question, they always start with various enthusiastic schemes. The members of the Church are the people who have faith, or the people who are conscious of the need of pardon, and the like; but all of this breaks down because you can never tell who these people are. We must have some perfectly plain outward sign if the Church is to be an operative agency in this world; and you will find, I think, that there is none which you can reach except that it is the fellowship of the baptized. Baptism is the Lord's own appointed way by which men should be received in the fellowship of His disciples. We must take that as our basis.
It is no business of ours to pronounce judgment upon the spiritual state of other persons. We shall thank God for every sign of the Christian virtues and graces shown in other persons who have not been brought to baptism; we may believe that they are members of the Church in heaven; but still, I would submit, we must say for all purposes of practical working, that the Church on earth is the fellowship of the baptized.
II.—That fellowship exists in fragments and sections. What is the peculiar mark of our fragment? This is authoritatively defined for us in the Lambeth Quadrilateral,[#] but our special character may be expressed briefly by saying that we are trustees for the Catholic order, who yet reject what seem to us the accretions which the Church of Rome upholds.
[#] (a) The Holy Scriptures of the Old and New Testaments. as "containing all things necessary to Salvation," and as being the rule and ultimate standard of faith.
(b) The Apostles' Creed, as the Baptismal Symbol; and the Nicene Creed, as the sufficient statement of the Christian faith.
(c) The two Sacraments ordained by Christ Himself—Baptism and the Supper of the Lord—ministered with unfailing use of Christ's words of institution, and of the elements ordained by Him.
(d) The Historic Episcopate, locally adapted in the methods of its administration to the varying needs of the nations and peoples called of God into the Unity of His Church.
Now some such order as that which we maintain, is necessary, as it seems to me, to the fulfilment of the duty of charity. I hope I am not unfair to those who are separated from us, and are influenced by the ideals of Puritanism; but it has seemed to me that their discipline is not always charitable. Indeed, a Church must either excommunicate freely or else possess a recognised order if it is to avoid becoming indistinguishable from "the world" about it; if it is to be both holy and a friend of sinners it must have an order. The order which we maintain is simply that which has come down to us as the actual order of historic Christendom.
III.—Thirdly, I would submit that the Body with its orders is a living whole, and that it is illegitimate to discuss such a question as the "validity" of Orders out of all relation to the historic life of the Church. The question of Orders must be considered in relation to the whole life of the Body of which they are an organic part.[#]
[#] SeeAppendix IV.On Orders and Catholicity.
Thus, if we take the famous Quadrilateral as our starting point, a body which stands by the Canonical Scriptures, the Creeds and the two great Sacraments, though not upholding the episcopal succession, is closer to the ideal than one which is indifferent to any of these three as well as to the succession; it has maintained many of the (ex hypothesi) essential features of a true Church; it approximates to the complete requirement. Moreover, within the field of the problem of Orders, there are degrees of approximation; it is generally considered that an agreement between the Anglican and Presbyterian communions could be far more easily reached than between the Anglican and some other Protestant bodies. We must, therefore, avoid two kindred errors. One is to set up the abrupt dilemma—"Either a true Church or not," and the other is to regard the possession of "valid" Orders as being the one and only condition of the Catholicity of the body possessing them.
The Church Visible cannot be identical with the Church Invisible; it is its sacrament. And the question resolves itself into one concerning the degree of adequacy with which it expresses,and thereby maintains through the ages, the fulness of the truth.
Our actual divisions in the West date from the Reformation. No one disputes that the Church just before that time was corrupt to a horrible degree. It is possible to hold that the corruption could have been purged away without schism if the reformers had been wholly free from pride and impatience; I see no means of reaching a sound judgment on such a point; but at least it would seem that the guilt for the great division was as much in Catholics as in Protestants. In so far as there really was necessity of choosing between moral purity with schism on the one hand, and organic unity with sales of indulgences and the like on the other, there can be no doubt which the whole teaching of Christ required His followers to choose. "I will have mercy and not sacrifice"; "the Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath"; yet the Sabbath and the sacrifice were of Divine appointment.
If then a fragment of the Church, confronted as it believes, with such a choice, breaks off and organises itself afresh, intending to maintain in purity all the Church's life and means of grace, I cannot assert that it is for all its generations deprived of Christ's sacramental presence. But assuredly the loss of the continuous order which so impressively symbolises the Divine origin of the Church and of its Sacraments tends to undermine the intention to preserve the whole truth and to obscure belief in it. For Orders, as we understand them, are the pledge of the unity of the Church across all space and through all time, so that the priest who celebrates, does so as the organ and instrument of the universal Church, and the congregation at every Eucharist is not the few persons gathered together in that building, but Angels and Archangels and all the company of Heaven, with whom we join in prayer and worship.
IV.—Consonantly with this I would come to my fourth principle—that the whole question of Orders and Sacraments must be considered in reference to the Church's life through the ages, and not with direct reference to the gift received by any individual at any given service.
How are we to secure (this is our problem) that from generation to generation men shall continue to feel that in the service of the Holy Communion Christ comes to them as by His own appointment, and they have only to be ready to meet with Him; and that in meeting with Him they are united with the whole Church in the Holy Communion, the Communion of Saints? I believe that the continued recitation of the Creeds in our own and other branches of the Church is the main safeguard, not only for ourselves but also for those who do not say the Creeds, against that combination of Pelagianism and Unitarianism to which men always tend to drift; similarly I can conceive that, just because we uphold the full conception of sacramental worship, others are enabled to receive sacramental grace at their communions. It may be so; I know not. Of course it cannot be received if it is not there; but even if it is there, its full benefit will not be enjoyed except by those who believe in its full power. Two men may stand opposite the same picture; both see the same lines and colours, the accidents; but it may be that only one sees the artistic reality or substance—the Beauty—while the other is blind to it. But the man who finds it does not put it there; the artist put it there; and if he had not done so no one could find it there; so too the reality of the Sacrament is the work of God. But our fruition of it depends on our faith, and even on the exact content of our faith. Now I do not for a moment believe that that faith in the full doctrine of sacramental grace can survive through the centuries, if it is once separated from the whole order which expresses it. Therefore, while I am not entitled to deny, as I am equally not concerned to assert, that the members of other denominations at their communion service receive the same gift that we do; still I say that as trustees for the Catholic order, and considering the matter in the light of the centuries, we have no right to sacrifice any of those means by which this full doctrine has been given to us, and by which perhaps it has been also preserved for them.
V.—Fifthly, I would suggest that in any scheme for practical reunion no man must be required to repudiate his own spiritual ancestry.
After all, if the Church is the fellowship of the baptized, then our brethren of the separation, as we sometimes call them, are members of the Church; but they are not members of our branch of the Church; and their faith is corporate and active in their membership of their own bodies; consequently we are bound to hold that they and their bodies are parts of the Catholic Church in this time of the division—the division which is due to sin.
If it is true that it was largely, and perhaps mainly, the fault of the medieval Church that the split became a necessity; if it is true that it was partly, and perhaps mainly, the fault of the Church of England that the Wesleyan movement (for example) ever broke off, because we refused to make room for what was in its early stages most undoubtedly a movement of the Spirit of God in the world, then we have no right to condemn those who by reason of our sin, at least as much as their own, are outside our fellowship; and we must recognise that, just as in St. Paul's argument about the true Israel, blindness in part happened to Israel, and so God used the Gentiles to provoke them to jealousy—so blindness in part happened to Catholicism, and God is using the Protestant bodies to provoke us to jealousy.
We must, I believe, maintain that our order is for us the only possible order for the reunited Church. But order is not everything. The wall of the Holy City is minute. When the time for reunion comes, we must insist upon our own part of the truth in such a way as to avoid all condemnation of other bodies for having been separated during this time—at least, all condemnation which we do not pronounce quite equally upon ourselves. What has happened in the divisions of the Church is a severance from one another of elements which are every one of them necessary to the healthy life of the Body. If one set of people could only get dry food and no drink, and another set could only get drink and no food, neither would be healthy. They would have to combine their stores before health was possible. Catholics have preserved perhaps a fuller sense of worship and of the gifts of God; Protestants have perhaps a truer zeal for righteousness and a more intimate access to God in prayer. Let us not judge the past; God will judge. But let us recognise our need of one another and accept from each other the positive truth and life which God has given to either.
VI.—Meanwhile, in the time of the division, different bodies have developed different types of religious life. There is a wealth of spiritual activity in the world now such as it is difficult to imagine under a rigidly united Church; but we can easily preserve that if we are ready that there should be within the United Catholic Church different Orders—an Order of St. George Fox for example, testifying to the great ideal which Christ brought into the world, not as I think, and as I have already explained, the right ideal to be followed by all men in all sorts of circumstances, but undoubtedly the one method by which in the end the work of God can be finally accomplished, and for testimony to which I believe some men, and indeed the whole Society of Friends, are even now called by God. Also there may well be an Order of St. John Wesley, insisting more especially upon the need of individual conversion, which the Church, as a vast organisation concerned with world movements, is perpetually tempted to leave too much on one side. These Orders can quite well govern themselves to a very large extent, and order their worship in very many ways, just as is the case in the Orders familiar in the medieval Church, and in the Church of Rome at this time.