In another place he writes: “Again, when I consider the power of the Word, how the most populous churcheswere constructed by the rudest and most ignoble disciples of Jesus, not in obscure and unknown places, but founded in the most conspicuous cities, in very imperial Rome itself, in Alexandria and Antioch, for all Egypt and Libya, for Europe, and for Asia,—again I am compelled to search out the reason of this, and to confess that they could not have succeeded in so audacious an attempt except by some divine and superhuman power, and the working together with them of Him who said ‘Make disciples all nations in My name.’”[61]
Between St. Clement of Rome and St. Ignatius of Antioch at the end of the first century, and Eusebius at the beginning of the fourth, stands at the end of the second century the witness of Tertullian. In setting forth the legal ground of prescription against the heretics of his day, he gives an account of the original propagation of the divine kingdom, which exactly tallies with all that precedes. “Christ Jesus our Lord ... had chosen twelve disciples to be attached to His side, whom He destined to be the teachers of the nations. Accordingly, after one of these had been struck off, He commanded the eleven others, on His departure to the Father, to go and teach all nations, who were to be baptized into the Father, and into the Son, and into the Holy Ghost. Immediately, therefore, the Apostles, whom this designation indicates as the Sent, having on the authority of a prophecy, which occurs in a psalm of David, chosen Matthias by lot as the twelfth into theplace of Judas, obtained the promised power of the Holy Ghost for the gift of miracles and of utterance. And after first bearing witness to the faith in Jesus Christ throughout Judea, and founding Churches, they next went forth into the world, and preached the same doctrine of the same faith to the nations. They then, in like manner, founded Churches in every city” (that is, an episcopal See in each city, without which, as St. Ignatius told us, there is no Church) “from which all the other Churches, one after another, derived the tradition of the faith and the seeds of doctrine, and are every day deriving them that they may become Churches. Indeed it is on this account only that they are able to deem themselves apostolic, as being the offspring of Apostolic Churches. Every sort of thing must necessarily revert to its original for its classification. Therefore the Churches, though they are so many and so great, comprise but the one Primitive Church founded by the Apostles, from which they all spring. In this way all are primitive and all are apostolic, while all together make up a unity; while they have peaceful communion, and title of brotherhood, and bond of hospitality, privileges which no other rule directs than the one tradition of the self-same mystery. From this, then, do we prescribe the rule that, since the Lord Jesus Christ sent the Apostles to preach, no other ought to be received as preachers than those whom Christ appointed; for ‘no man knoweth the Father save the Son, and he to whomsoever the Son will reveal Him.’ Nor does the Son seem to have revealed Him to anyother than the Apostles, whom He sent forth to preach that, of course, which He revealed to them. Now what this was which they preached—in other words, what it was which Christ revealed to them—can, as I must here likewise prescribe, properly be proved in no other way than by those very Churches which the Apostles founded in person, by declaring the gospel to them directly themselves, both by word of mouth, as the phrase is, and subsequently by their Epistles. If, then, these things are so, it is in the same decree manifest that all doctrine which agrees with the Apostolic Churches—those wombs and original sources of the faith—must be reckoned for truth, as undoubtedly containing that which the said Churches received from the Apostles, the Apostles from Christ, and Christ from God; whereas all doctrine must be prejudged as false which savours of contrariety to the truth of the Churches and Apostles of Christ and God.”[62]
But the whole work of St. Irenæus against heresies is based exactly upon the fact which we are here setting forth. His object was to show that the true faith was preserved intact in all the Churches of the world by means of the bishops appointed by the Apostles. Thus he commences his third book: “For the Lord of all gave to His Apostles the power of the gospel, through whom we have learnt the truth, that is, the doctrine of the Son of God; to whom the Lord said, ‘He who heareth you, heareth Me, and who despiseth you, despiseth Me,and Him who sent Me.’” ... “For after our Lord arose from the dead, and they had been clothed with the power of the Holy Spirit coming down upon them from on high, they were completely filled and had perfect knowledge: they went forth into the ends of the world, proclaiming the gospel of good things from God, and announcing peace from heaven to men, all of them and every one of them possessing equally the gospel of God.” ... “All, therefore, who wish to see the truth may behold in every Church the tradition of the Apostles, which was made known through the whole world; and we can number up those who were appointed by the Apostles bishops in the Churches, and their successors down to our own times, who have neither taught nor known any such delirious imagination as theirs.” He is speaking of the heresy of Valentinus. “For had the Apostles known recondite mysteries, which they were in the habit of teaching separately and secretly from the rest to the perfect, they would deliver such especially to those to whom they were intrusting the Churches themselves. For they desired those to be very perfect and blameless in all things whom they were leaving as their successors, handing over to them their own place of teaching. For if these acted faultlessly, the good would be great; whereas if they failed, the calamity would be complete.”
Irenæus sums up all this view in another place, where he says: “True knowledge is the doctrine of the Apostles, and the ancient compacted fabric of the Church through the whole world, and the character of the Bodyof Christ, according to the succession of bishops, to whom they delivered that Church which is everywhere.”[63]
In what has preceded we have traced carefully the transmission of spiritual authority, putting together the various intimations respecting it which are given in the four Gospels, the Acts, the Epistles of St. Paul, and the Apocalypse. From these intimations a most clear and unambiguous result has been deduced. Then proceeding to historical proofs, we find the third Pope from St. Peter, at the end of the first century, in an official document, summing up in words of great precision what had been the actual course of things in the two generations which lay between the Day of Pentecost and the time at which he was writing. If we compare the Gospels which record the institution of the power, and the history which records its actual beginning and exercise, as thus given by St. Clement, we find the most exact agreement. Another saint and martyr, contemporary with St. Clement, and holding by second succession from St. Peter what became the great patriarchal See of the East, affords the strongest corroboration to him in the doctrinal statements which are found interwoven in the letters addressed by him to various churches as he is carried a prisoner on his way to martyrdom. The first extant historian, writing in 324, on the eve of the assembling of the first General Council, testifies throughout the ten books of his work the universality of theepiscopal regimen, and intimates its organic structure by giving each link in the spiritual descent of the three great Sees of Peter and of the Church of Jerusalem. Intermediate between these three authorities, Irenæus, Bishop of Lyons, writing seventy years after St. Clement, and Tertullian, writing thirty years after Irenæus, give very graphic accounts of the Church in their day, which exactly accord both with the Pope and Martyr-bishop preceding and the historian following them. Instead of calling in other witnesses, let us attempt to give a general view of the Episcopate as it is found when emerging from the last great persecution, which terminated the first stadium of its course, and was followed by the peace of the Church, proclaimed by the Emperor Constantine 283 years after the Day of Pentecost. The whole of this period marks a time in which the growth of the Church and the form of her constitution were the result of a power proceeding solely from within, never favoured by the civil power, often actively persecuted, and daily in a thousand ways discouraged.
St. Augustine, writing in the year 398, observes precisely of this time, that is, the year 314, that if the Donatists suspected the judgment of their African colleagues, there were thousands of bishops beyond the sea to whom they might have recourse.[64]In his owntime he counted 476 Catholic bishoprics in the African provinces. Throughout the Roman Empire it would seem that, before the peace of the Church, not only every considerable city, but even small towns, possessed their bishop. St. Hilary says: “Though there be only one Church in the world, yet every city has its own Church;” and St. Cyprian and St. Dionysius of Alexandria assert this of their own time.[65]
The conduct, then, of St. Peter, of St. Paul, and of all the Apostles in the propagation of the Church, was from the beginning one and uniform, and impressed itself on the succeeding generations.[66]They founded a Christian colony on the solid basis of a complete administration, and establishing their most fervent disciples as the chiefs of that hierarchic organisation, they left to them the charge of forming new centres of spiritual life in the cities dependent on those first chosen. Thus St. Peter chose first Antioch, Queen of the East, the head afterwards of fifteen ecclesiastical provinces; then Rome, the head of the whole Empire, of which Pope St. Innocent said, writing in the year 416 to the Bishop of Eugubium, that “it was an acknowledged fact that no one had established Churches” (by which he means a Bishop’s See) “in all Italy, the Gauls, the Spains, in Africa, in Sicily, and the intervening islands, except those whom the venerable Apostle Peter or his successors had appointed bishops.”[67]
Thirdly, he chose Alexandria, whose bishops became the head of the three provinces, Egypt, Libya, and Pentapolis. But no less St. Paul planted in Ephesus the Mother Church of the province of Asia (one-twentieth only of the great country called Asia Minor); in Thessalonica, the metropolis of Thrace; in Corinth, that of Achaia; he and Barnabas, in Salamis, that of Cyprus; while he set a disciple to appoint bishops over the whole island of Crete. These are specimens of the power which was thus established in every city over the whole world traversed by the Apostles and their descendants, a power fixed, not transitory; local, not roving. It was an occupation of each city by the spiritual authority exactly similar in divine things to the military colonies which Rome planted in its provinces for the propagation of its temporal sway. It was a corporate body with a most compact unity, at the head of which, informing and directing every act, stood the bishop, a name of power and jurisdiction. Of them St. Paul said, “Obey your prelates, and be subject to them.” From such words the power of government is a clear inference. If the faithful are obliged to obey the prelates of the Church, these must have authority to command. Thus St. Gregory of Nazianzum, addressing in the year 373 the governor of his province, used these words: “The law of Christ subjects you to my authority and to my tribunal. For we also have a government, nay, I will add a greater and more perfect government,unless spirit must yield to flesh, and heavenly things to earthly. I know that you will accept my freedom of speech, because you are a sheep of my flock, a sacred sheep of a sacred flock, nurtured by the Great Shepherd.”[68]Elsewhere he calls it “the government which is innocent of blood,” contrasting it with “the government of the sword and the lash.” The Greek Fathers universally, in explaining the dignity of the episcopate, use this word government.[69]
Of the way in which the world was thus evangelised we have an instance recorded by Photius, who says that Caius, a grave and learned priest of the Roman Church, was ordained by Pope Zephyrinus (who sat from 202 to 218), Bishop of the Nations, that is, without designation of any particular diocese, as if anointed and crowned for a kingdom, which by his valour and wisdom he was to obtain for himself. In this way the Roman Pontiffs consecrated a great number of bishops, whom they sent to bring the provinces under the yoke of the faith, as recorded above by St. Innocent.[70]But it is to be noted that those who were thus sent out during two centuries from the first age were not elected by the people of the several churches which they founded. They came to them by authority from without—the authority of the Apostles and the Apostolic See, mediately or immediately. In the cases just mentioned the mission was immediate: in other cases, where it was derived from some Patriarchal See or from a metropolis, it stilldescended from that original mission of the Apostles, and the distribution of authority made by Peter at their head.
For the whole of this mission there is one great type and source; our Lord at the head of His Apostles is the prelude to the bishop in the midst of his presbytery. He repeats Himself in every diocese, the first and everlasting Bishop, whose heirs spread throughout the world. All is from above.
But each bishop’s chair thus established is a centre of dogmatic truth and of moral force. The government extending thus over the whole Church is a mean between autonomy and centralisation. “The bishop is contained in the Church, and the Church in the bishop:” it is “a flock united to its pastor.” This is its local character: a most living authority, and a most careful representation of those governed. What it is in reference to the like authority planted elsewhere, we shall see presently.
The bishop, with his presbyterate and diaconate, fitted to him as the strings to a harp, in the words of St. Ignatius, this was the instrument by which our Lord chose to take hold of the world. “Many nations of barbarians,” St. Irenæus observes, “believing in Christ, follow the order of tradition without pen and paper, having salvation written in their hearts by the Spirit;”[71]but nowhere as to this point of episcopal regimen did this tradition vary. The Church having traversed the three centuries, assaulted from within by sects innumerable,and from without by a hostile Empire, emerges under this government alone. Nowhere was it without this settled order of the Episcopate. A presbyter not subject to a bishop, a single church or any number of churches not ruled by a bishop, these were unknown things. In the sects, indeed, there were all sorts of disorder and continued changes of government, just as there was incessant fluctuation of doctrine; the true and only Church showed itself precisely in this, that it preserved its doctrine and its government alike unchangeable.
Eusebius observes how “the devices of opponents destroyed each other by their own violence. New heresies continually rose and fell, one giving way to the other, and corrupting themselves in a long series of the most diverse and strange conceptions. But the one Church, proceeding on the same lines, and in an even tenor, kept upon its path, ever increasing in brilliancy, and shedding forth upon every race of Greeks and barbarians the dignity, sincerity, and freedom, the tempered wisdom and purity, of the divine polity and philosophy;” where it is observable that by the words polity and philosophy he blends together the form of life and the truth of doctrine as coinherent with each other.[72]
Thus in less than three centuries the Episcopate was flung as a golden network over the greatest of the world-empires, and far beyond its borders. But let uswell understand what this means. It does not mean simply that there were bishops everywhere; that no church existed save under the rule of a bishop; that there were no presbyterian, still more, no independent churches. It is a much greater fact which we have to note; it is that there was “one Episcopate, of which a part was held by each without division of the whole;” “one Episcopate spread abroad in the concordant multitude of many bishops.”[73]The doctrine of St. Cyprian is thus set forth by De Marca: “As there is one body of the Church divided into many members through the whole world, so there is in it one only Episcopate, spread abroad in the harmony of many bishops. If these be considered as a body, they hold the entire Episcopate in common. But a certain portion of the flock has been assigned to each bishop to lead and direct it singly, but in consonance with the charity and communion due to the whole body. For if unity be relinquished, the bishop who departs from the body would dry up as a stream deflecting from its source, and wither as a branch cut off from the trunk and root. This distribution of portions, which have been committed to the various bishops, descended from the apostolic rule. For when the Apostles founded churches, though they conferred on the ordained bishop by the imposition of their hands all the power of order and jurisdiction, yet they assigned to him the place in which he should discharge his office. This has been marked with great clearness in the 20th chapter of the Acts,where we read that the Holy Spirit appointed bishops to govern the Church of God. But since the Church was to be ruled in unity, it was necessary that some mode of communion between the bishops should be established by the Apostles according to the example given by Christ in establishing the College of Apostles, which represented the whole body of the Church.”[74]And what this rule was De Marca proceeds to state in the words of St. Leo the Great, which, as written in the middle of the fifth century by the highest authority, will serve better to convey a lucid view of the one Episcopate than any more modern statement. In the year 446 St. Leo writes: “It is the connection of the whole body which makes one soundness and one beauty; and this connection, as it requires unanimity in the whole body, so especially demands concord among bishops. For though these have a common dignity, yet have they not a general jurisdiction; since even among the most blessed Apostles, as there was a likeness of honour, so was there a certain distinction of power; and the election of all being equal, pre-eminence over the rest was given to one. From which type the distinction also among bishops has arisen, and it was provided by a great disposition that all should not claim to themselves all things, but that in every province there should be one whose sentence should be considered the first among his brethren; and others again, seated in the greater cities, should undertake a larger care, through whom the direction of the universal Church should convergeto the one See of Peter, and nothing anywhere disagree from its head.”[75]
It is thus that the Church appeared when it came out of the fire of persecution and the perpetual conflict with heresies into peace and recognition by the Civil Power. It was not merely that by an innate force—which all the Fathers attribute to the gift of the Holy Spirit dwelling in it—a uniform episcopal government had been established wherever it extended, but that it was one Episcopate ruling one flock. Between a bishop viewed as the centre of unity in his own diocese, but unconnected with other bishops, and independent of them, and an Episcopate organically one, ruling one flock through the whole world, there is all the difference which exists between what is human, weak, and perishable and what is divine, strong, and enduring. In the former case the bishop’s throne would simply be a seat of rivalry, confusion, and error; in the latter, the union of the body is the test of health, and makes that divine beauty which our Lord in His prayer for His Church at the entrance of His Passion contemplated, which He likened even to the divine unity. This was the vision which lay before St. Cyprian’s eyes when he cried out, “The Spouse of Christ cannot be adulterated; she is incorrupt and chaste; she has one single home; she guards the sanctity of one marriage chamber with inviolable modesty. The Lord says, ‘I and the Father are one;’ and again, of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit it is written, ‘These three are one.’Can any one believe that the unity which springs from the divine strength, which is bound together by heavenly sacraments, can be broken in the Church and torn asunder by the collision of opposing wills.”[76]But St. Cyprian’s safeguard against this was the one Episcopate, which he views as centred in the See of Peter, its origin and matrix, and which, two hundred years after him, the great successor of St. Peter describes in act.
The Fathers regarded the establishment of bishops everywhere as a wonderful fulfilment of the Psalmist’s vision: “Instead of thy fathers, sons are born to thee: thou shalt make them princes over all the earth.”[77]And, in truth, the uniform planting in every city and town of a divine government such as we have described, the doing this, moreover, without favour or protection from the civil power, nay, in spite of its jealousy, resistance, and persecution, is a wonder of divine power. But this is only half what was done. This is not yet the One Episcopate, but there is to be added to it that “Sacrament of unity” whereby every one of these bishops belonged to an indivisible whole, and fed a portion of the one “flock of Christ.” Bishops, holding each in his own person the fulness of the priesthood, its generative and ruling power, whether the number of their people were small or great, whether their presbyters and deacons were many or few, in these respects equal to each other and complete in themselves, were in a furtherpoint of view members of one hierarchy, which could no more be multiplied than the Body of Christ or His Flock. The one Saviour could not have two bodies, nor the one Shepherd two flocks. Hence, what St. Leo calls “the provision of that great disposition that all should not claim to themselves all things, but that in every province there should be one whose sentence should be considered the first among his brethren;” in which words he marks the Metropolitan and his suffragans; “and others again seated in the greater cities should undertake a larger care”—as, for instance, the Bishop of Antioch, when he had fifteen Metropolitans subject to his chair—“through whom the direction of the Universal Church should converge to the one See of Peter, and nothing anywhere disagree from its head.” What terser and clearer statement of the actual government of the Church could be given now, though more than fourteen hundred years have passed since it was written?
This, then, is the full meaning of the One Episcopate; this is the marvel superadded to the sons of the Church who are made princes over all the earth, that they are not individual governors only of a local republic, but bound together by a manifold subordination, Bishop to Metropolitan, Metropolitan to Patriarch, Patriarch to Pope. There is the twofold beauty of unity and order; the first, “sweet and comely as Jerusalem;” the second, “terrible as an army set in array.”
And it may be said that if there be any one feeling which shows itself on all occasions in the writings of theFathers, any one conviction which sways all their arguments, it is the feeling that the flock of Christ is one and indivisible; that the Episcopate which rules it throughout the earth is one and indivisible also; and both because the Great Shepherd is one, and the Father who sent Him is one; as we have heard St. Cyprian in unsurpassable words declaring sixteen hundred years ago.
We see, then, the two forces of the Primacy and the Episcopate coexist at the end of this first great stadium of the Church’s course, as they coexisted on the Day of Pentecost. It is precisely when setting forth the testimony given to the one Christian faith against all heresy by the churches as established throughout the world, especially those which had Apostles for founders, that Irenæus, a hundred years after St. Peter’s death, dwelt upon this bond of the one Episcopate, “that necessity by which, on account of its superior principate, every Church, that is the faithful everywhere, were bound to agree with the Roman Church.”
The two great Fathers, one the glory of the East, as the other of the West, Chrysostom and Augustine, born within a few years of each in the middle of the fourth century, and thus placed at a period sufficiently near, and yet not too near to contemplate the whole course of the Church during her conflict with the Roman Empire, both speak in numberless passages and in enthusiastic words of the wonder of the Catholic Church spread in all lands. The wonder was increased by the existence of heresies and schisms, which seemed by force of contrastthe better to delineate the form of the one Spouse of Christ. St. Epiphanius and St. Augustine himself had recorded a number of these when that notable sentence of the great Father, “The judgment of the whole world is a safe one,” which has passed into a proverb, was pronounced against the Donatists. What was the marvel which especially convinced their minds and touched their hearts? The Roman Empire, as they still saw it and lived in it, was, in fact, a vast confederation of many peoples, lands, and religions: the only unity which it possessed, amid endless varieties and contradictions, was that unity of civil government which Roman discipline, energy, and valour had so long maintained; which, the one of African the other of Hellenic race, equally felt and appreciated. This is the greatness especially of the imperial period. Now, springing up in the midst of this endless variety, this most profuse and party-coloured polytheism, this antagonism and rivalry of countless races, and no less in the light of a proud, refined, and most ancient, if also most corrupt, civilisation, they saw the establishment of one uniform government, bearing in its bosom one uniform religion, carried on through ten generations of men, and accomplished after manifold persecutions. They saw the religion and the government start together from the Person of one who claimed to be the Son of God, while He certainly died, as a malefactor would be condemned to die, upon the cross. They saw the religion and the government carried on in the second degree by twelve men, poor, illiterate, and powerless. And before their own timetheir fathers had told them how the chief of this mighty empire had bowed his head before the religion and the government springing from One who hung upon the cross, and in His name taught by the Fisherman and the Tentmaker. Was it not the One Episcopate with its one doctrine planted in all these lands, and imposing a uniform rule of life on men and women of every degree, attested by its hosts of martyrs, the purity of its virgins, the patience of its people, which seemed to them a miracle, the force of which they were never tired of proclaiming? That stately fabric in which doctrine and government permeate each other, “that unity coming from the strength of God, and seated in heavenly sacraments,” was it not this to which St. Augustine appealed in combating a heresy in the errors of which he had long been himself ensnared?—an appeal couched in words the force of which is vastly greater when they can be applied with equal truth in the nineteenth as in the fourth century. “I am held in the bosom of the Catholic Church by the agreement of peoples and nations; by the authority which took its rise in miracles, was nurtured in hope, reached its growth in charity, is confirmed by antiquity. I am held by the succession of bishops, down to the actual episcopate, from the very See of the Apostle Peter, to whom after His resurrection the Lord intrusted His sheep to be fed. Lastly, I am held by the very name of Catholic, which, not without reason, among so many heresies that Church alone has possessed; so that though all heretics would like to be called Catholics, yet if a stranger ask where the CatholicChurch is, no heretic would venture to show him his own church or house.”[78]
These words were written before the end of the fourth century, and exhibit the aspect in which the Church of Christ presented itself to St. Augustine. That which he has summed up in a few sentences was drawn out at somewhat, greater length by St. Chrysostom about ten years before, when the worn-out religion of paganism was falling to the ground, and the judgment of Theodosius in levelling heathen temples only expressed the victory of the Christian society. His words[79]portray so graphically the several features of that “divine and invincible power” to which he attributed the growth and expansion of the Church as he beheld it 350 years after the Day of Pentecost, that I will quote them here notwithstanding their length.[80]He begins with saying: “If a heathen says to me, How can I know that Christ is God? for this is the first thing to be established; the rest all follows from it; I will not make my proof from heaven, or such things. For if I say to him, He made the heaven, the earth, and the sea; he will not receive it. If I say, He raised the dead, He healed the blind, He cast out devils; that too he will not accept. If I say, He promised a kingdom and blessings unspeakable; if I talk to him of the resurrection, not only will he not receive it, he will laugh at it. How, then, can we approachhim, especially if he be an ordinary man? How but by those things which both of us admit without contradiction, of which there is no doubt. What, then, does he admit Christ to have done which he will not dispute? This, that He founded the race of Christians. He will not deny that Christ Himself established the Churches throughout the world.” Afterwards he thus comments on the marvellous fulfilment of our Lord’s prophecy on this subject: “Twelve disciples followed Him; of the Church no one had then conceived so much as the name, for the synagogue was still flourishing. When, then, almost the whole world was under the dominion of impiety, what was His prophecy? ‘Upon this Rock I will build My Church, and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it.’ Weigh as you please this word, and you will see the splendour of its truth. For the wonder is, not that He built it throughout all the world, but made it impregnable, and that though assaulted by such conflicts. For ‘the gates of hell shall not prevail against it’ are dangers which drag down to hell. Now, compare the distinctness of the prediction with the force of the result; behold words which have their evidence in facts, and an irresistible power producing its effects with ease. They are but few words: ‘I will build My Church.’ Do not run over them simply, but draw them out in your thoughts. Form a conception how vast a thing it is to fill the whole world with so many Churches in a short time; to change so many nations; to persuade multitudes; to break up hereditary customs; to extirpate rooted habits; toscatter like dust the tyranny of pleasure, the strength of vice; to sweep away like smokealtars of blood, and temples and idols and mysteries, and profane festivals, and the impure odours of victims, and everywhere to raiseunbloody altars[81]in the country of Romans, Persians, Scythians, Moors, and Indians, beyond the limits of our own world. For even the British Islands, lying in the ocean beyond our own sea, have felt the power of this word; for there too churches and altars have been erected. The word then uttered by Him has been planted in all men’s souls, is current in all their mouths. The world, which was overgrown with thorns, has been cleared of them, is become pure arable soil, has received into it the seeds of piety. It would be a proof of exceeding greatness, an evidence of divine power, if nobody offered resistance, in the midst of peace and in the absence of opponents, for so vast a portion of the earth to be changed in a mass from a long inveterate bad habit, and to assume another habit far more difficult. It was not merely custom which offered resistance, but pleasure which held possession, two tyrannous things. For men were persuaded to reject what they had inherited from a long succession of ancestors, from philosophers, and from orators; and not only so, but what was most difficult, to receive a new habit of life, in which the hardest point of all was, that it carried with it much endurance. For it led away from luxury tofasting, from the love of money to poverty, from impurity to temperance, from anger to meekness, from enviousness to kindliness, from the broad and wide way to the narrow and straight and rugged way; and this too the very men who had been nurtured in the former. For it did not take men of another world and another habit of life, but the very men who, through their utter corruption, were softer than mire in their old habit of life; on these it enjoined to tread the narrow and straight way, in all its roughness and sharpness, and they listened. How many? Not two, or ten, or twenty, or a hundred, but the vast majority of a world-wide population. And by whom did the persuasion come? By eleven men without literature, without station, ineloquent, ignoble, poor, who had no country, nor abundance of resources, nor bodily strength, nor distinguished reputation, nor renown of ancestors, nor strength of words, nor skill in rhetoric, nor eminence of knowledge; fishermen, tentmakers, foreigners. For they had not even the same language as those they persuaded, but that strange and outlandish Hebrew tongue. Through them He built this Church, which stretches from one end of the earth to the other.
“Nor was this the sole wonder, but there was a further one. These few, poor, private men, undistinguished, untaught, and unvalued, foreigners and despised, had the remodelling of the whole world placed in their hands, and were bidden to change it into a far more difficult condition of things. Yet this was not to be done in peace, but amid wars of all kind surroundingthem. War was in every nation and every city; nay, they felt its blast in every house. For this doctrine entering in, and severing often the child from the father, the daughter-in-law from the mother-in-law, brother from brother and servant from master, subject from ruler, husband from wife and wife from husband, and the parent from his offspring, since conversions did not take place in a mass, produced daily enmities, perpetual conflicts, a thousand deaths to its bearers, from whom men turned as common enemies. All persecuted them—emperors, rulers, private persons, freemen, slaves, cities and their peoples; nor them alone, but, hardest of all, their neophytes, while they were yet under instruction. War was waged equally upon the taught and the teachers, since the doctrine was opposed to imperial commands, to the common habit, to inherited manners. They were bidden to abstain from idols, to despise the altars of blood, which their fathers and all their ancestors had served, to quit impure beliefs, to ridicule festivals and reject initiations—things to them the most formidable and tremendous, and for which they would rather have given up their life than choose what the others said to them, to believe, that is, on the Son of Mary, on One who stood before the procurator’s tribunal, who was spit upon, who suffered unnumbered horrors, who endured an accursed death, who was buried, who rose again. But the strange thing of all was this: the sufferings were manifest to all, the scourging, the blows on the cheek, the spittings on the face, the strokes from the palms of the hand, the cross, the long mockery, thebeing put to scorn by all, the burial granted by favour. Not so the facts of His Resurrection; for when He rose again He appeared to them alone. And yet when they told these things they persuaded men, and so they built up the Church.
“But how did they do this? By the power of Him who commanded it. He Himself levelled the way for them; He made the difficulties easy. For had not a divine power given success here, there would not even have been a beginning, not even the first step. How otherwise was it? He who said, ‘Let there be a firmament,’ and produced it in fact; ‘Let the dry land appear,’ and it came; ‘Let the sun shine,’ and it shone; He who did all things with a word planted also these Churches, and the saying, ‘I will build my Church,’ produced all these effects. For such are the words of God, creative words, of creations wonderful and strange....
“Thus, then, they build the universal Church. Yet no workman who was driven about and hindered could with stone and mortar build a single wall; but these men erected so vast a number of churches through the inhabited world while they were being beaten and imprisoned, pursued and put to flight, banned and scourged, slaughtered, burned, and drowned, together with their disciples. They built not with stones, but souls, in the fulness of free choice. How can one compare a mason’s work with that of changing by persuasion a soul wherein demons had so long revelled, so that from a state of madness it should reach the height of a sound mind. Yet such was the strength of men whowent about all the world naked and discalced, and with a single coat; for they had fighting with them the irresistible power of Him who said, ‘Upon this rock I will build My Church, and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it.’ Count up the number of tyrants who were ranged in battle against it from that time, what persecutions they raised, in what position the faith stood all that first time when it was newly planted and men’s minds were tender. Heathens were the emperors Augustus, Tiberius, Caius, Nero, Vespasian, Titus, and all those who succeeded them down to the time of the blessed Constantine. All these fought against the Church, some with more, some with less violence; all of them, however, fought. If some of them seemed to be quiet, the very fact that those who reigned were conspicuous for impiety was a cause of warfare against the Church, because those around them flattered and served them therein. Yet all these snares and attacks were scattered like spiders’ webs, smoke, or dust. For the effect of their plotting was to produce a great host of martyrs, to unfold the immortal treasures of the Church, to disclose its pillars and towers. They, not only by their life but by their death, were the assurance of a great help to all who came after them.
“Here is the strength of the prediction: the gates of hell shall not prevail against it. From that which has been trust concerning that which is to be, and that no one shall overcome the martyrs.”
In reflecting on the history thus sketched out, the thought occurs how completely the ideal of Pope St.Clement, St. Ignatius, St. Irenæus, Tertullian, St. Cyprian, St. Chrysostom, St. Augustine, St. Epiphanius, and St. Leo, nay, not their ideal only, but that spiritual kingdom which they described as they saw before their eyes, would have been overthrown, if there were substituted for it a number of bishops scattered through the world in a variety of temporal kingdoms, some holding one part and some another part of an original revelation, with a multitude of discrepancies, and all deriving their authority to exercise their mandate from the several temporal powers to which they were civilly subject. The wonder which these Fathers one and all testify in gazing upon a divine Church would have passed into disgust and derision for an institution over which “the gates of hell” had prevailed by destroying its spiritual independence together with its doctrinal unity.
Let us proceed to examine how these two were both maintained, penetrating the divine work so far as to reach that intimate union which made one substance of outward regimen and inward belief by the force of an indissoluble life; for if the Episcopate had been a mere government, it would have had neither such unity nor such vitality, nor have been capable of supporting the Church’s fabric.
THE ACTUAL RELATION BETWEEN CHURCH AND STATE FROM THE DAY OF PENTECOST TO CONSTANTINE.
The One Episcopate Resting upon the One Sacrifice.
One of the points on which Pope St. Clement most strongly dwells is the care with which our Lord communicated to His Apostles definite and accurate instructions as to the kingdom which they were to set up. And from this care he draws the conclusion that, if infringement of the Mosaic law was punished by death, how much more guilty were they who showed insubordination to a precept of Christ in the institution of Christian rule? Thus St. Clement affirms that our Lord, far from leaving the government of His Church to be evolved out of local circumstances or individual temperaments or political affinities, determined it from the beginning. We shall now further show that He enshrined in it the very life of His people; and so that their worship, their government, their belief, and their practice were wrapped up together. Their government contained their doctrine, and set before their eyes in distinct vision Him in whom they trusted, Jesus Christ and Him crucified. It was not a human device but adivine ordinance, and the preaching of Christ through it was His action also. His words were deeds as much in the teaching of His Church as they were in the days of His flesh.
Our Lord created the priesthood of His Church on the eve of His Passion. It is the basis on which all spiritual power and all doctrinal truth rest in His kingdom; and He willed that the episcopate should be the instrument to communicate both power and truth to His people, and that the priesthood should be stored up in the person of each bishop. This plant of life, complete in itself, but only as a sucker of the One Vine,[82]the Apostles deposited in every city and town by the inspiration of the Holy Ghost; as St. Clement says, they passed on themselves and left it to grow by virtue of the same Spirit. The result was that when Constantine gave the acknowledgment of the Civil Power to the great Spiritual Kingdom, its Episcopate had far outgrown the limits of his empire.
In what does the High-priesthood of Christ consist? In two acts, which it is well carefully to distinguish.
The first is that divine act of the Blessed Trinity by which the Second Person, the Eternal Son of the Father, assumed a created nature into the unity of His Person, and that the nature of man. The act whereby He became man is the act constituting His Priesthood.[83]Before His Incarnation He was not a Priest; in the divinenature in which alone He is from eternity, He does not offer but receive sacrifice. St. Paul describes the act, and the instantaneous acceptance by the Divine Son, as man in His human nature, of the mission to be High Priest for the human race in these words: “When He cometh into the world He saith: Sacrifice and oblation Thou wouldest not: but a body Thou hast fitted to me: Holocausts for sin did not please Thee. Then said I, behold I come: in the head of the book it is written of Me, that I should do Thy will, O God.” The whole purpose of His Incarnation and the whole course of His future human life are here summed up, as accepted by Him in the first moment of His human existence, when He says: “A body Thou hast fitted to Me—behold I come—that I should do Thy will, O God.” The whole Christian faith rests upon this divine act. It is the simply inconceivable humiliation of the Divine Majesty, the simply unutterable effect of the Divine Love. The angels, who have had it before them from their creation in vision, and for more than eighteen hundred years in effect, have not yet mastered its depths; nor is the Mother of fair Love herself—the nearest to it—equal to the task either of expressing it or of comprehending it. How, then, was it to be impressed on the human race in a manner which should cause its full force to be received by those who learnt it for the first time; and when it had been thus learnt what further provision was to bring about that it should never be forgotten, nor pass into the crowd of things which have once been and then cease to be?
We have, first, in these words of St. Paul, the Divine Son accepting His mission as the first act of His human nature, and, further, expressing the nature of His mission—to do the will of His Father, that will being that He should take the body which His Father had prepared for Him. In that acceptance is comprised all the labours and sufferings of the thirty-three years foreseen from the beginning, willed by the Father, freely chosen by the Son in His manhood, as the first act of that manhood, which yet is prolonged through His whole life.
After this the Apostle goes on to exhibit the second act of His High-Priesthood, springing out of the first, and its consummation—the abrogation of the ancient sacrifices, although divinely instituted, and the substitution for them of that Body which God had fitted to Him. “In saying before, Sacrifices and oblations and holocausts for sin Thou wouldst not, neither are they pleasing to Thee, which are offered according to the law: then said I, Behold I come to do Thy will, O God: He taketh away the first, that He may establish that which followeth. In the which will we are sanctified by the oblation of the Body of Jesus Christ once.” As the first act, the Incarnation, runs on into the second, the Atonement, so the second depends on the first. Without the assumption by God the Son of a created nature, the nature of man, there would be no sacrifice for man and no reconciliation. The source of sanctification is the offering of the Body of the God-man, of no other body; and without the Godhead of Christ His religion would be the shadow of a dream.
How, again, was this second act of His High-Priesthood, the oblation of His Body on the cross once for all for the sins of the whole world, to be impressed upon the world?
Human acts pass away into the abyss of past time, and the ever-flowing tide of successive existence sweeps them into the background. The sufferings and teachings of our Lord Himself, even His death upon the cross, would in themselves as human acts be subject to this lot. How were they to be made ever-living and ever-present, rescued from oblivion, carried in the heart and professed by the lips of men in every succeeding generation until the day of doom?
Truly there was wisdom needed for this effect, and what did our Lord do?
He was at the very point of completing that will of God which He came to do, and for which a Body was fitted to Him. Having celebrated the Pasch of the Law, which had been instituted so many ages before, as the speaking type of what He was to accomplish, He with a word made His disciples priests to offer that Body which He then first gave to them, which on the morrow He was to offer on the cross, and in doing this utter the “Consummatum est.” The Priesthood, which was to carry in itself the whole power and virtue of His Church, He created before the sacrifice of the cross, but in immediate view of it, as the first act, as it were, of His Passion.
But the Priesthood which He created, and the offering in which it consisted, sprung from the union of thetwo acts which formed His own High-Priesthood, the assumption of the manhood for the purpose of redeeming man, and the execution of that purpose by His death on the cross. The Priesthood contained them both in itself, for the Body given was the Body broken on the cross, the Blood given was the Blood shed on the cross; and they were both the Body and Blood of a God-man. “Do this, He said, in commemoration of Me;” and as long as it was done daily, the double truth, the double benefit of God to man, the double marvel of redeeming love, offering itself and offering what is divine for the erring creature, could not fade from remembrance. It is as present now as it was at the hour of the crucifixion, and will be equally present to the end of the world.
But in order better to understand the force and meaning of our Lord’s action, it is necessary to consider the institution which, at the time of it, was in existence and full operation all over the world, the institution, that is, of bloody sacrifice.
From the beginning of history, and in all countries, the intercourse between God and man consisted in two things, prayer and sacrifice, and they were carried on together. For this much the Greek may fitly represent all Gentilism. Now Plato represents Euthyphron as saying to Socrates, “If any one knows how to say and to do things acceptable to the gods by praying and by sacrificing, that is piety, and such conduct preserves both private families and the commonwealth; and the contrary to these acceptable things is impiety, which overthrows and destroys everything.” To which Socratesreplies, “You call, then, piety a certain knowledge of sacrifice and prayer.” “I do.” “Then sacrifice is giving to the gods, and prayer asking of them.”[84]
A most careful student[85]of the Greek mind tells us: “As the need of the gods was felt by man in all the events of his life, in every work and every purpose, sacrificial worship, the burnt-offering, or the briefer libation-offering, ran through the whole of his being, and seemed to be prayer clothed in action.” And again, “We have shown that man conceived of the Godhead not only as by its immortality infinitely exalted above himself, but likewise as the Ruler and Administrator of the whole universe and the being of man; and moreover, that man, in spite of all doubt and error as to the nature of his gods, in spite of his allowing impersonal powers to be at their side who threaten their dignity, yet never detaches himself from them, because he always feels himself impelled to seek a living personal Godhead. To this he was riveted by the insoluble bonds of a spiritual and natural need; and the recognition of this dependence, the expression of human subjection, the tribute of homage which man offers in the certainty of needing its grace, that is piety, as it is shown in action and in word, that is to say, in sacrifice and in prayer.” And “the whole worship, that is, all sacrifices and divination, are made by Plato to be identical with the communion of gods and men with each other.”[86]
Another writer,[87]most learned in Greek and Roman antiquity, says: “These two constitute the oldest and most general form of honouring God. It might perhaps be said that the first word of the original man was a prayer, and the first act of the fallen man a sacrifice. Moses in Genesis, at any rate, carries the origin of sacrifice up to the first history of man, to Cain and Abel; the Greek legends, to Prometheus and the centaur Chiron, or to the eldest kings, Melisseus, Phoronæus, and Cecrops.
“In Gentilism as in Judaism, actual sacrifices of animals are everywhere the rule; beside them, in particular cases, offerings also of vegetable substances. Indeed, sacrifices were offered not merely for expiation, but wherever man had need of the gods, or reason to thank them, on all important moments of life, at the beginning and end of every weighty action, in order to maintain and make manifest the unbroken connection of man with God.
“Those most ancient domestic precepts recorded by Hesiod enjoin on every one, at declining and at dawning day, to conciliate the gods, with pure and chaste heart, by holy sprinklings and fragrant perfume, that their heart may incline to us with good-will and peace, and as often as thou returnest from a journey, offer fair sacrifices to the immortal gods. In family life sacrifices were made specially at birth, marriage, and death. The Cretans, who considered human marriage as a transcript of the heavenly marriage between Zeus and Hera, made offerings on occasion of it specially to these gods. If aman wished to marry at Athens, he first made his prayers and sacrifices to the so-called Tritapatores, the first father’s of life, for the happy generation of children, since no birth takes place without God. At the marriage itself, again, there were sacrifices, when the gall of the victim was thrown behind the altar to signify that no bitterness should infect their union. Moreover, the bride at Athens was introduced by a sacrifice into her husband’s race; and again, a victim was offered upon the inscription of children on the tribe list. At Sparta mothers were wont, on the espousal of their daughters, to make offerings to Aphrodité Hera, the goddess of married love; the Bœotians and Locrians to Artemis Euklea; the maidens of Haliartus made a preparatory gift to the fountain Kissoessa, according to ancestral custom. If the marriage was blest by a child, a sacrifice was offered for this on the seventh or tenth day after the birth, and thereupon the child was named. At death, again, sacrifices were offered for the peace of departed souls, as well by individuals as by the commonwealth. According to Plato, it was an orphic doctrine that there were certain deliverances and purifications which availed also for the dead. The gravestones were anointed and crowned with flowers, pyres were erected, and victims slaughtered on them, or cakes were thrown into the fire, holes made in the earth, and libations of wine, milk, and honey poured into them. Only no sacrifices were offered for children, because, as they had departed unstained by intercourse with earthly things, they needed no further reconcilement. Plutarch describesthe great public sacrifice for the dead which the Platæans, in late times, continued to offer yearly for those who had fallen in battle against the Persians.
“In agricultural life, also, which is the beginning and foundation of all religious habit, every important moment was sanctified by sacrifice. The Athenians, at the beginning of tillage, before they turned up the land, offered the preparatory sacrifice to Demeter[88]for the prosperity of the future fruits, and are said on one occasion, in the fifth Olympiad, at a time of general dearth, to have made such an offering for all Hellas at the command of the Delphic god. So at the end of the winter, when the fruits of the field began to grow, all the magistrates, from eldest time, offered the previous thanksgiving[89]to Athené, the protectress of the city. So they offered at Rome, at the time of the pear-tree blossom, before ploughing, vows and grain cakes, for the health of the labouring oxen; then before harvest offerings to Ceres of bread and wine, and so again when a wood was cleared, at the digging and blessing of the fields. So both peoples were wont in general to give the first-fruits of everything which the favour of the gods gave to them; fruits of the field as of the herd, of the vintage, and of the trees; the former liquid, and the latter solid. These first-fruits represented the whole mass, for all the productions of nature belong to the Giver thereof. Aristotle holds the offering of such first-fruits of the field to be the oldest kind of offerings in general, and a Roman writer finely says, since theancients lived in the belief that all nourishment, the fatherland, nay, life itself, is a gift of the gods, they were wont to offer something to these of everything, more to show their gratitude than because they believed that the gods needed it. Hence, before they ate anything of the new fruits, they consecrated a portion to the gods; and since they possessed both fields and cities in fee from the gods, they dedicated to them a portion for temples and chapels, and some were wont to offer to them the hair, as the topmost portion of the body, for the sound state of the rest. Thus the Bhagavadgita[90]says: ‘Sacrifice to the gods; they will give you the wished-for food. He who eats what they have given without first offering therefrom is a thief; they who ate what remained of the sacrifice are free from all sins.’ The fathers of families made an offering every month to Hecaté for reparation of sins committed in the house. Certain dishes were prepared and carried through the whole house, while the curse which rested on evil deeds committed was put therein, and then they were placed at midnight upon a cross-road. Whoever ate of this, it was believed he took the curse into him with the food. Only curs and currish men did it.
“Sacrifices were connected not less with all important acts of political life. ‘Those before us,’ says Philo, ‘began every good action with perfect victims, deeming this the best means to bring about a good end to them,’ In the consciousness that all were stained with sin, but that sinful men could discover no good counsel, swinewere sacrificed before every assembly of the people at Athens, and their blood sprinkled as a purification over the seats of the meeting. A priest then carried certain parts of the victim round the assembly, and cast their sins into these parts. When this was done, incense was offered, and the same priest went with a vessel of holy water round, blessing the assembled people therewith for the matter which it was to undertake. Then the herald recited the customary prayers, and the consultation at last began. The sacrifices by which the council, the generals, the Prytanes, and all public magistrates entered on office were similar. In like manner sacrifices preceded the sittings of justice and the taking of oaths. In war no important step was taken before the sacrifices were prosperous and announced a good result. Sacrifice was offered at the first start, at the passage of boundaries and rivers, at making an advance, at taking ship, at landing, before assault of besieged cities, before battle, and after victory. The Athenian generals were wont specially to sacrifice to Hermes, the leader. All truces, peace-makings, leagues, and treaties were accompanied with sacrifice. A direction was attached to all sacrifices ordered by law or oracular decrees, that they should be according to the hereditary three customs, that is, take place on months, days, and years,i.e., solar years, lunar months, and days of the month. Plato enjoins, as in Athens was really the fact, that on every day of the year the magistrate should offer sacrifice to a god or genius for the city and its inhabitants, their goods and chattels. Of Julian, the last emperor attached to theHellenic worship, it is expressly said that he, not only on new moons, but every day, welcomed the rising sun-god with a bloody victim, and accompanied his setting with another, and served the gods not by other hands, but himself took part in the sacrifice, ran about the altar, took up the mallet and held the knife, and that, in order the better to discharge these duties, he had built a temple to the sun-god in the midst of his palace. The shedding of blood was everywhere the bond of union between man and man, and between man and God; to the commonwealth the guarantee of its security, the firmest pillar of its government.”
If we extend this description of the prevalence of sacrifices among the Greeks and Romans to all the nations of antiquity, we shall be able to form a conception which, after all, will be very feeble when compared with the reality, of the degree in which the whole religious life between man and God, the national life in the various nations, the social life in each nation, the domestic life in each family, was alike dominated by the idea and practice of bloody sacrifice.
The ceremonial of sacrifice was as follows: “The sacrificial usages themselves were very solemn. Everything expressed that the sacrifice was made freely and joyously. Those who offered to the heavenly gods wore white robes, and crowns on the head and in the hands. Those who offered to the gods beneath the earth were robed in black. The victim was also crowned and adorned with ribbons, and on solemn occasions its horns were gilt. It was led by a loose cord, to indicate thatit followed willingly and of its own accord. If the animal took to flight, that was a bad prognostic. It had to be put to death, but might not be led up again to the altar. Before touching the sacrificial utensils, the hands were washed in order to approach the holy with purity. As with us, a boy poured water over the hands of the sacrificant. Then the sacrificial cake or sacred salt-meal and the knife of sacrifice were brought in a basket and carried round the altar. A branch of laurel or olive, symbol of purification and peace, was dipped in the water-stoup and the bystanders sprinkled therewith. The holy water itself was consecrated with prayers and the dipping into it of a firebrand from the altar. Silence was then enjoined, and when the profane had been dismissed with such words as ‘Depart, depart, whoever is a sinner,’ the herald cried with a loud voice, ‘Who is here?’ those present answered, ‘Many, and they pious.’ Then the proper prayer of sacrifice began for the gracious acceptance of what was offered; and after the victim had been proved sound and faultless, a line was drawn to mark its willingness with the back of the sacrificial knife from the forehead to the tail, and grain was poured over its neck until by nodding it seemed to give its consent to be sacrificed. Then there were fresh prayers; the priest took a cup of red wine, tasted the blood of the vine, allowed also those present to drink of it, and poured the remainder between the animal’s horns. Then the hair of its forehead was cut off and cast into the fire as a firstling; incense was kindled, and the remaining grain finally poured uponthe altar with music of pipe and flute, that no ill-omened word might be heard during the sacred action. In specially solemn sacrifices there were also choral hymns and dances. The animal was struck with the axe and its throat cut; when the sacrifice was to the gods above, with hands raised towards heaven; when to the gods below, with head bowed to the earth. The blood was then received in a vessel and partly poured out upon the altar, partly sprinkled on those around, that they might be delivered from sin. Especially all who wished to have a portion in the sacrifice had to touch the victim and the sacrificial ashes. According to the oldest usage the whole victim was burnt; later only certain portions—the head and feet (the extremities for the whole), the entrails, especially the heart as the seat of life, the shanks as the place of strength, and the fat as the best portion. Then red wine, unmixed, was poured upon the flames. The sacrificers consumed the rest, as in the Hebrew thank-offerings and among the Egyptians and Indians, in a sacred festive meal; among the Arcadians, masters and slaves altogether. Such meals were usual from the most ancient time after the completion of the sacrifice, and in them originally the gods were considered to sit as guests with men. All sang thereby, as law and custom determined, sacred hymns, that during the meal moral comeliness and respect might not be transgressed, and the harmony of song might consecrate the words and the conduct of the speakers. By this common partaking of the pure sacrificial flesh, the communion of the offered meats, asubstantially new life was to be implanted in the partakers; for all who eat of one sacrifice are one body.
“Hence the first Christians obstinately refused to eat of the flesh of heathen victims. ‘I had rather die than feed on your sacrifices.’ ‘If any one eat of that flesh he cannot be a Christian.’[91]At the end of the feast, as it seems, the herald dismissed the people with the words λαοῖς ἄφεσις—Ite, missa est.”
Thus we find that sacrifice existed from the beginning of history in all nations, and was associated with prayer; the two together made up worship, and the spiritual acts of the mind, expressed in prayer, were not considered complete without sacrifice, a corporeal act as it were, so that the homage of soul and body together constituted the complete act of fealty on the part of man to his Maker. But we find also more than this. The spiritual acts which are contained in prayer, as the expression of an innocent creature to his Creator, are three: adoration, which recognises the supreme majesty of God; thanksgiving, which specially dwells on the benefits received from Him; and petition, which speaks the perpetual need of Him felt by the creature. And with these in a state of innocence prayer would stop. But if the harmony between the Creator and the creature has been broken, if sin has been committed, and a sense of guilt arising from that sin exists, then prayer expresses a fourth need of the creature, which does not exist in the state of innocence—the need of expiation. Now offerings of the natural fruits of the earth, of whateverkind, correspond, it is plain, to the three former parts of prayer—to adoration, thanksgiving, and petition for support; but the bloody sacrifice of living creatures, in which occurs the pouring out of their blood in a solemn rite, the presentation of it to God, and the sprinkling of the people with it, can only be accounted for by a consciousness in man of guilt before God. The existence of a rite so peculiar in so many nations, and its association everywhere with the most solemn act of prayer, is not accounted for even by such a consciousness alone; for what power had the shedding of an animal’s blood to remove the sense of guilt in man or to propitiate God? There was no doubt the consciousness of guilt on man’s part, but what should ever lead him, of himself, to conceive such a mode of expiating his guilt, such a mode of propitiating God? It was much more natural for him to conceive that the act of pouring out the blood of a creature, in which was its life, the most precious gift of the Creator, would be an offence to that Creator, the Lord of life, its Giver and Maintainer. Thus the act of bloody sacrifice can only be accounted for as in its origin a directly divine institution, a positive law of God. As such it is plainly recognised by Moses when he introduces it in the history of Cain and Abel, where, in the first man’s children, it appears as already existing. God alone, the absolute Lord of life, could attach together prayer and bloody sacrifice, and enact that the worship which He would receive from His creature, the worship which not only adored Him as Creator, thanked Him as Benefactor,asked His help as Preserver, but likewise acknowledged guilt before Him for sin committed, should be made up of a compound act, that of solemn prayer, and that of shedding and offering blood, and partaking of a victim so offered. The rite of bloody sacrifice is, therefore, the record of the Fall stamped by the hand of God on the forehead of the human race at its first starting in the state of guilt. The death of a vicarious victim was the embodiment of the doctrine that man had forfeited his life by disobedience to God his Creator, and that he should be restored by the effusion of the blood of an innocent victim. The fact of the concentration of these four acts of prayer about the rite of bloody sacrifice, through all Gentilism, as well as in Judaism, has no end of significance.
This conclusion was drawn by St. Augustine,[92]who says: “Were I to speak at length of the true sacrifice, I should prove that it was due to no one but the one true God; and this the one true Priest, the Mediator of God and men, offered to Him. It was requisite that the figures promissive of this sacrifice should be celebrated in animal victims, as a commendation of that flesh and blood which were to be, through which single victim might take place the remission of sins contracted of flesh and blood, which shall not possess the kingdom of God, because that self-same substance of the body shall be changed into a heavenly quality. This was signified by the fire in the sacrifice, which seemed to absorb death into victory. Now such sacrifices wereduly celebrated in that people whose kingdom and whose priesthood were both a prophecy of the King and Priest who was to come, that He might rule, and that He might consecrate the faithful in all nations, and introduce them to the kingdom of heaven, the sanctuary of the angels, and eternal life. Now this being the true sacrifice, as the Hebrews celebrated religious predictions of it, so the Pagans celebrated sacrilegious imitations; for in the Apostle’s words, what the Gentiles sacrifice they sacrifice to devils and not to God. For an ancient thing is that immolation of blood, carrying an announcement of the future, testifying from the beginning of the human race the Passion of the Mediator that was to be, for Abel is the first in sacred writ recorded to have offered this.”