XIIJESUS CHRIST THE LURE OF THE AGESJesus Christ is the lure of the ages. He is the most interesting figure in history. History says little about Him, yet that little means much to us. It whets the appetite for more knowledge. The little is distinctly fascinating; what would be a full record of His sayings and doings, suppose such a narrative displayed in faded manuscript were unearthed from the musty archives of an old Eastern monastery and brought to daylight in the twentieth century? The fragmentary record that we hold is sufficiently vital to have kept His memory green for nearly two thousand years. What a glorious find a continuation of the wonderful story would be to those hungering for larger knowledge of their Lord's earthly life!Jesus Christ is the unplaced figure in history. He occupies no niche in the secular temple of Fame. No historian of the country in which He lived paged His name amongst the worthies of the age or gave it mention in a footnote of history. Outside the covers of the Sacred Book Jesus Christ is an unknown quantity. During His lifetime the insignificance of the movement He promoted in Galilee was unworthy of serious attention from the authorities. His disciples were men of obscure origin, a mere handful of ignorant peasants and fishermen, rated as misguided, harmless fanatics following a crazy leader to oblivion, the foreordained end of a madman's escapade. Others before Him had started forth on the splendid expedition to set the world in order and were interrupted in the performance of their formidable task. It was towering madness to suppose permanent results could follow a single-handed fight against the world; to think that He could disturb the well-founded authority of King Herod or challenge Cæsar seated in purple power on the seven hills of Rome: as likely He might uproot the seven hills themselves which cradle the imperial city on their nursing-lap. Yet to-day He ranks above all competing heroes and overlords earth and heaven in the compelling influence His solitary life imposes on the world's activities, and that influence is only just beginning to be felt by us; eventually it will succeed in refashioning the world after His own heart and conforming it to the likeness of His own image.Jesus Christ is the lonely figure in history. He launched His mission on the world without human patronage to give it a winning start. Illustrious men of the age did not do Him reverence, nor contribute their sympathy and support to stiffen His cause; they were frankly hostile to Him. He had no family influence to help Him in the great adventure; His ancestry was illustrious, but His relatives were poor and uninfluential folk; His father was a village tradesman. He was not a University man distinguished in letters to gain the ear of the cultured classes. He had no well-to-do friends to back Him either socially or financially. No man ever stood more remote from the world's conventional smile than He did. He was a rank outsider. He battled onward through resisting foes, upholding the shining truth as a sun-bright banner for brave men to rally round and fight for the kingdom of God and the empire of good souls on earth. He dwelt in spiritual isolation, for a mighty purpose cut Him off from the current influences of His time. The world's cold stare was the freezing recognition given Him, and it chilled the finer sensibilities of His loving nature.There was nothing professional about Jesus Christ. He was not a place-seeker. He held no office in Church or State. He was a plain citizen, plainly dressed. His manner was simple and natural and without side. His speech was of the people; He was one of the crowd. No glittering halo aureoled His brow, promoting Him beyond His brethren. As a prophet, appearances were dead against Him. Why should He rise above his class-level and teach His betters and superiors high morality and spiritual truth? He had no crumbs of learning Himself--how could He feed others out of an empty basket? He had never studied in the schools and won academic distinction! Surely He overstepped Himself. His neighbours resented His common everyday look, easy manner, and arrogant pretensions. These things did not mix well together. They denounced His new, strange teachings as dangerous to the community; He was an unchartered, restless demagogue, roaming the country, disturbing the public weal. They scoffed at this common villager and His idle dream of founding a kingdom of righteousness built on the dregs of humanity, and derisively asked "When shall this kingdom come?"Now, John the Baptist, hermit of the wilderness, was a prophet after their own heart. He played up to their ideal. He quickened their hot imagination. He was aglow with colour. He was a human tornado. His defiant attitude, eccentric apparel, and mystic fervour, were vividly picturesque; they caught the eye and compelled attention. He was an untamed child of the desert; he stood aloof from the common crowd. Even high-toned Pharisees were glamoured by his romantic pose. They listened raptly to his fiery message, and were fascinated by his insolent tongue and audacious words shot bolt-straight at them. His hearers staggered whilst he thundered burning condemnations on their smug sins and sordid lives; they writhed in agony as he lifted them from their feet and suspended them over the bottomless pit, choking in sulphurous fumes ascending from the fires of the damned below. Such ghastly presentment of the truth after the good old method of the prophets churned up the muddy depths of their polluted hearts. It converted the masses quickly, as a visitation of the plague could drop a panicky city to its knees, and when the excitement slowed down be as quickly forgotten as a nine-days' wonder out of fashion. The religious revival subsided like the froth blown off by the welcome wind of a new excitement. The emotions of a day spent down on the banks of the Jordan with John the Baptist, the idol of the people, were exhilarating, and something to be remembered for a lifetime by these hard-headed old Jews, and an interesting story to tell their children's children in years to come. The ministry of Jesus was not effervescent in character. He could have stormed men's imaginations with flaming pomp and splendour; He could have ridden a chariot of fire attended by thunder and lightning as running footmen to announce His presence, but men's hearts would have been unmelted by such fierce demonstrations of power. It might have awoke astonishment and intoxicated them into religious frenzy, but afterward it would have left behind a nasty chill on the heart.Jesus Christ had no official position in the Church as a teacher. He had no mandate from the powers that be to carry on. He did not present Himself as a high Church dignitary, high as an enthroned archbishop robed in scarlet and gold; nor was He comfortably placed as a canon in a snug cathedral stall; nor even a meek young curate casting longing eyes on Church preferment. The Church of the day would have none of Him. They flung Him from the synagogue. His ideas were unproven and unpalatable to His countrymen; He must build a new romantic world for Himself and His followers to live in outside the orthodox world of His day, if they wanted liberty to breathe, and so He began at the bottom of society and quietly built upwards. He was just a man walking amongst suffering humanity, and was one of the sufferers Himself. He came like dew descending on mown grass, noiseless, fragrant, healing; silently He ministered amongst the people, winning home to human hearts by sympathy and gentleness and love, and gradually the new kingdom of righteousness grew up in the midst of the weary old world. He gained dominion over men by their resistible beauty and power of Divine truth which He expounded, and made attractive by parable and picture and by His own blameless walk and conversation. His teachings were exemplified in His life, and His life shines in undimmed beauty the exemplification of His teaching. He became a living gospel to them which all men could read, and His Divine personality was a centre of healing power which cured men's infirmities of body and mind. He had no money to pay for services rendered to Him, and He gave no hopes of worldly honour or possessions to His followers. He was homeless and at the mercy of friends for the shelter of a roof and the hospitality of His daily meals. He had intense sympathy with men, but He was no deluded optimist. He placed measured value on every man's pledge of fidelity to His cause, for He knew what was in man; with clear insight He saw into their dishonesty, selfishness, misery, but He knew they never had had a chance to do better, and He meant to give them a good chance all round. He frankly told people their sins, yet with all His straight speaking He won men and women to Himself. His manner was gracious, and He was indulgent to the frailties of our human nature with a sympathy that pardons all. The deep longings of His heart were for their happiness and uplifting, and the difficulty He encountered in leading them to follow the things that made for their peace was heartbreaking to His sensitive nature.He had but few friends, and of the inner circle He gathered round Him all were not loyal; for He was betrayed into the hands of His enemies by one of the intimates of the band, and was forsaken by all in the hour of His supreme trial. He returned good for evil, blessing for cursing, and died in the act of praying for His enemies. No one could bring any serious accusation against Him, and he was declared innocent by the judge who condemned Him to death. Yet He was sacrificed as one whose life did not count; He was thrown as a sop to slake the blood-thirst of a howling Jewish mob. In the annals of the law-court His name is not mentioned, and there is no record of His trial and crucifixion to be found in history.Looked at from the standpoint of men of His time, His life was a failure, and the delectable vision of a kingdom of righteousness on earth, the coming of which He pictured in glowing, fluent colours, reads like a dainty fairy-tale spun for children's amusement. Yet He himself saw through the darkness into the white light of the future, and beheld the crowning success of His mission. He saw the coming triumph of the Conquering Cross, which should subdue all things unto itself, and in place of the finest legend ever planted on human credulity by an artist in words He saw outlined through the dissolving mists of time, solid and well founded, the City Beautiful, with its shining streets, its many mansions and translucent atmosphere, peopled with white-robed citizens redeemed and ever blest; and the verdict of to-day is that the ministry of Jesus Christ on earth was the turning point in the world's destiny. No other personality has exerted such profound influence on the lives of men as Jesus of Nazareth, the despised and rejected of His day.The ministry of Christ on earth lasted about three years in all. Until He was thirty years of age He was content to rest in deep obscurity. Nazareth, with its quiet remote valley, was world enough for Him to move in, and when His hour was come He found Himself. He opened His mouth and taught the people. He passed from village to village, a travelling storm-centre, exposing respectable old sins, ripping up time-honoured religious hypocrisies, vexing the Pharisees, and confounding the vain traditions of the elders. He laid down new laws of life and conduct for men's observance, and unfolded the love of God to man in its plenitude of tenderness and pity; even to waifs and strays and outcasts of city slums who had never received a kind, hopeful word from the lips of their own religious teachers. In fact, it was God breaking in upon history, opening a new permanent way into heaven for lost men to return home by, and to cull the wayside flowers of joy and happiness whilst homeward bound.Thus Jesus in three short years fearlessly and swiftly accomplished His world-wide mission, and died triumphantly in full achievement of His benign purpose.Not half the story of those few full, crowded hours of His glorious life has been collected and cast into history. It is a brief narrative of a brief career; so little of His life comes in view. Just a few detached incidents and a few disjointed conversations jotted down from the mellowed memory of three or four old men years after the events occurred furnish us an incomplete memoir of His earthly ministry--that is all we have. There was no adoring pen of a ready writer like Boswell to fix on the spot His sayings and doings. We possess only stray fragments of the life-story gathered up from memory and hearsay, and on these gathered fragments we found all our spiritual faith and base our eternal hope of blessedness. The structure seems to have been casually and hastily put together, but its design is the work of the Supreme Architect, and the house was well built and the foundation securely placed, for it has sheltered many millions of people through many generations of time. The roof is still rainproof, and the walls stand firm in their pillared strength.It is the living words of Christ that form the stronghold of the ages. His words are seed-thoughts dropped into the hearts of men which bring forth fruit manifold. Again they drop into other hearts, and springing up yield fruit abundantly unto life everlasting; and so generation after generation men fall under His gracious spell, and turn to His words for guidance, for inspiration, for joy. You never reach the end of Christ's words. They are growing words. There is always something new springing out of them unexpectedly: new thoughts, new laws, new problems, new solutions, new enemies, new friends, new hopes, new consolations. The words of Christ are spending and being spent, but they are never exhausted. They pass into new meanings, into new currency, but they never pass away. They are the hope of all the ages.The early Christians lived in a state of spiritual elation; they daily, hourly, expected the Second Coming of Christ. It was the one article of their religious creed. The end of the world was to be the next important festival in the Church calendar, so they held in full near view their heavenly home, which was already feathered for their reception. At the sound of the Archangel's trumpet the heavens would open, the dead rise from their graves, and they would be caught up in the air to meet the Lord, and float off triumphantly into mansions of eternal rest furnished for their home coming. They saw it all vividly as a drama soon to be enacted, in which they each would play their ordered parts. The present was a dream-life to them, a mirage quickly to melt away. This hope of immortality was the first bright ray of light the gospel of Jesus Christ shed upon mankind. Having minds heavily charged with celestial visions, the common round of daily duties became unreal to them. They had a short creed and no theology. They sat on the brink of eternity, and the radiance streaming from its shining heights bedazzled their minds with bewildering raptures.After long and patient waiting the heavens did not open, no clarion voice trumpeted the dead from their graves or welcomed saints into paradise; the sordid, sin-stained earth remained their polluted dwelling-place. The illusion of the millennium faded away and disappointment frosted their early hopes, yet bravely they held on and died in the faith. The Saviour's promise did not fulfil on the comfortable lines they planned, but it would make good another way equally great. The Church learnt to take long views of the promises, and turned its thoughts to things terrestrial. The affairs of the present grew interesting to them; they commenced setting their earthly house in order, and when the Church settled down into the slow, steady stride characteristic of every long march it became clear that she was destined to rank amongst the permanent institutions of the world. She formed new rules of life for her children's guidance, and thus faith in Christ gradually lost the fragrant aroma of otherworldliness which first perfumed it, and in lapse of time the plan of salvation became more thought of than salvation itself. A vast ecclesiastical system was organized, having endless intricate ramifications, and God was appointed head of one department of it; and to-day heavy accretions of theology accumulate and fasten deadly tight on the old Church like barnacles crusting the bottom of a long floated ship, hindering its speed to port.Verily the time has now come that the good ship of the Church be careened, and the foul accretions of mediæval theology stripped off and the solid copper bottom of truth flash clean and bright in the sunlight, and the truth as it is in Jesus recover its splendour and power as in days of the early Church. His teachings shall yet win men to righteousness, and the fruits of His lips bring peace and joy to those who believe on His name.The words of Christ have a future before them in moulding the growing goodness of the world and in solving the hard problems of social reform which vex humanity. He is the wise Reconciliator who can adjust society and bring into harmony the classes of men now gnashing their teeth at one another on opposing fronts. Jesus Christ is the true Political Economist, but He taught far in advance of His times--truth always marches a bit ahead of us. At present in social science we are only just touching the hem of His garment, and healing virtue flows from it; presently we shall approach nearer to Him, and, feeling the full throb of His loving heart, we shall understand Him better, and His life-blood will pour into our veins and complete the healing of the nations.XIIITHE LURE OF THE LIVING WORDThe English State Church suffers from excess of theology and paucity of gospel. Our narrow Church creeds, in which the gospel of Jesus Christ is kept under cork by ecclesiastical cellar-men, must be broken that the good wine of the kingdom may flow freely. The gospel of Jesus Christ in the unwholesome captivity of rigid creeds is a feeble, mean, contemptible gospel, quite unable to save mankind, which business it undertook to achieve when coming into the world. If the teaching of Jesus Christ is no larger or kindlier than these old crumbling creeds show, it deserves to be scrapped, for there is no room in them for Christ to have fair play. Christianity is not a formula, it is a passion; it is not theology, it is truth. These dismal dogmas have not enough spiritual nourishment in them to keep men's souls alive; men starve on such unleavened food.What are these antiquated creeds of the Church which strangle religion? They are ancient dismantled strongholds where the fighting forefathers of the faith housed themselves tightly and fought their foes tenaciously. The modern fathers of the Church still inhabit these tottering towers of refuge, although their day of usefulness is spent. Loyal Churchmen still breathe lovingly the chilly, stifling atmosphere of these spiritual dungeons of traditional Christianity.We are living in a new age since August, 1914, and a new spirit possesses the people. With this terrific war raging new standards of values in religion, as in politics, have come into operation, shattering old ideals evermore. To encourage and strengthen them in this era of strain and conflict men need the larger, cleaner, diviner truth which fell from the lips of the living Christ. We want these truths to win through--the spoken words of Christ, with the free airs of heaven blowing across them, bringing healthiness of life, sanity of faith, and manifold charities, to all men who dwell on earth. The lure of the Living Word alone can hold men firm in this age of upheaval, when the old world has caved in and the plans of the new world are not yet manifest. There is finer, simpler, fuller spiritual teaching in the four gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, touching our present need than in all books of theology ever written and all Sunday sermons weekly preached. It is these half-forgotten things that matter on which new emphasis must be thrown.Theology is the great imposture planted on mankind as a substitute for the teachings of Jesus Christ. When one leaves the words of Christ and strays amongst the words of men, it is like a traveller switching off the main line whereon his destination lies and losing himself on a side-track. It is disaster to side-track on the journey of life. Keep to the words of Christ and you keep on the main line. The gospel as revealed in the teachings of Jesus is entirely free from the sacerdotal imperative which nowadays imposes priest and ritual in the path of spiritual worship and blocks the fair-way to God. Priests and rituals and creeds are non-essentials; they are only wrappings: they are not religion, nor the best part of it. We must distinguish between living, breathing Christianity and the man-made ecclesiastical garments which clothe it fashionably, because the difference between them is vital and far-reaching. True religion, however, is seldom found stripped of all temporary wrappings, but its spiritual vigour survives in spite of Church-made millinery which encumbers it and impedes its healthy growth. Strip the religion of Jesus Christ of its grave-clothes and put the pure gospel in her mouth, and never tidings could be told to weary, heavy-laden men to-day which would be hailed as half so welcome. The one thing needful to make this world an earthly paradise, delightful to dwell in, is for men to live face to face with God, without a screen of ritual or image or priestcraft obstructing the view of our Heavenly Father; it is the light of God's countenance that cheers the heart of man, and strengthens him to live a good life in all sincerity of purpose.Ecclesiastics have built up the Church into a colossal business trust which corners the Bread of Life and doles it to hungry mortals on terms of its own making. The Church is a wealthy corporation with immense property and privilege to safeguard and hold against all comers, and these temporal possessions engage its keenest thought and ceaseless activity. So it has important work to do other than saving the souls of men. To maintain its temporal authority in the world it has tampered with the teaching of Jesus Christ; by cunning craftiness of man the gospel has been twisted into theology, and the way of salvation shrouded behind a dense veil of ceremonial observances which the Church imposes on people and declares necessary to the saving of their souls. Much conflicting religious literature is issued annually by free-lances of the Press to explain the downright simplicity of the truth as it is in Jesus; and these conflicting opinions add other stumbling-blocks in the way, for they baffle the brains of the gentle reader, beating up a thick dust of doubt around him that his faith is smothered in a cloud of perplexity which darkens the daylight of truth.The words of Jesus, when read and pondered over, prove religion to be a very simple matter. Yet this simplicity is its standing peril. So little human wisdom is needed to understand the words of Christ that we are apt to fear they do not mean what they say in plainest language--the language runs too easy for the majesty and importance and solemnity of the theme. We think there is an occult mystery lurking behind the honest homely phrases. Language so often bewilders simple-minded people that we are hard of belief when told we can find the way to heaven ourselves without the aid of a bishop's pastoral staff to point it out. The difficulty is to convince the plain man that he understands the words of Jesus when he reads them, and that he feels his spirit touch the Spirit of the Saviour of his soul without a priest between to make the contact. The Church as a commercial organization would fall quickly into bankruptcy if the gospel in its naked plainness was believed in whole-heartedly.Very superior people tell us that the teachings of Jesus are only the beginning of God's revelation to man; they tell us that new revelations are constantly flowing in upon us through the sacred channel of the Church, and that the Church alone holds the key which deciphers these confidential messages despatched from mysterious sources for our edification. This is ecclesiastical bluff. The teachings of Jesus in the gospels suffice the spiritual needs of men through all time--time past, time present, and time to come. When God legislates once He legislates for aye, for truth is unchanging and cannot be improved on as the world grows older. No Divine after-thoughts will be added to the written word nor supplementary revelation supplied to guide men through the tangling maze of life. The Spirit of God is equal to all emergencies arising between now and the sundown of time. New-fallen light may illumine the written word in the forward quest of faith, for every age makes its own theology and coins new language to express old truths. The words of Christ are inexhaustible treasure locked in a deep mine, and in that mine lies many a lode of truth untapped by the diggers. The old gospel mine yields more and more treasure as the searchers strike deeper and deeper into its secret heart. The last nugget of truth has not yet been lifted from the treasure-house of God's Word.Back to the words of Christ: this is the one hope of a truly good life--national or individual. If we forsake Christ and turn to the teachings of the Church for our spiritual well-being, we suffer for our folly in so doing. The real meaning of anything is to be found at its beginning not in its latest developments. As religious systems develop and grow old they grow corrupt, and on the earthly journey pick up error with truth, and the two mixed together look equally sacrosanct to the uninitiated, simple soul, and even the very elect are ofttimes deceived. Water is purest at the spring-head; the farther it flows from the fountain, the more contaminated it becomes. Back to Jesus Christ and His teachings in the gospels. His words are the very life and light of men.Men often mistake the nature of religion through wrong teaching received in early years or no teaching received at all, thus giving the well-rooted weeds of error a long start to grow rampant in the human soil. Some people think religion is an isolated activity, like collecting old china, a hobby you can pursue, drop, and pick up again at leisure. Other people imagine it is the conventional badge of good society, giving tone to a life of fashionable respectability, like a carnation slipped into your buttonhole which adds a finishing touch to your evening dress. But they are not over careful, these conventional people, to apply its tenets in the privacy of their homes; religion is never enthroned as a domestic virtue. Lord Melbourne, the early Victorian Prime Minister, was one day coming from church in the country in a mighty fume. Finding a friend on the road, he unloaded: "It's too bad. I have always been a supporter of the Church, and I have always upheld the clergy. But it is really too bad to have to listen to a sermon like that we had this morning. Why, the preacher actually insisted upon applying religion to a man's private life!"Their interior life is neither better nor worse for hitching on religion as a supplementary virtue. Such good people would never miss an opportunity of attending a missionary meeting at Caxton Hall or neglect an early morning service at the parish church, but the maid-of-all-work in the kitchen is not benefited by the religious fervour which perfumes her ladyship with the odour of sanctity.Religion is a state of mind giving purpose and direction to the whole round of a man's activities. Religion is not like a red holly-berry in a tumbler of clear water, a hard, insoluble object, pretty enough seen through the crystal medium, but working no change in the water. Religion resembles a drop of cochineal falling into the water; it colours with rose hue the full contents of the tumbler; it tinges the whole character and conduct of a man; it permeates his thoughts and feelings and actions, changing the colour of his life for good and for ever. Religion works a change--a radical change--that is the point. It is not a question of drapery; it does not merely hang up a decoration here and there to improve appearances, leaving the secret chambers of the heart unclean. It makes a new man in Christ Jesus even out of the coarsest raw material to be found on the human market.The Church as established in our midst to-day cannot work a social regeneration in the land, for it gives forth so little of the teaching of Christ to the people. The gold of truth it circulates is mixed with the dross of error of its own minting. It may bear the image and superscription of Christ on it and pass the world's counter as genuine metal, but it is counterfeit coin of the kingdom. The Church does not grip the people. It is a fashionable institution of conventional high-grade orthodoxy, but it is a thing apart from the people. Its clergy socially are a multitude of pleasant, amiable, guileless folk spread over the tennis-lawns and garden-parties of England on a summer's afternoon, mingling good-humouredly with their neighbours, but ecclesiastically they belt themselves in a compact phalanx of self-centred, intolerant men with a purpose in life, or by preference they are self-constituted "priests." They hold the Church as a close borough, consume its revenues, swear by its creed, and maintain its privileges. They are strong partisans; the same interest guides them which governs the business man in upholding his trade interests--the sacred rights of property. To defend their inherited rights they will fight doggedly, and surrender only in the last trench.Outside the charmed enclosure of the Church the clergy esteem their Christian neighbours ecclesiastical inferiors, not to be consorted with on equal footing, and they leave the Almighty to take charge of outsiders here and hereafter. As a class long years of clerical assumption has sapped the humanness out of their nature, and only a priest is left in their skin.There are honourable exceptions to this general rule. Many individual clergymen are thoroughly alive with the spirit of Christ. They are men of broad sympathies and of intense devotion to their work, but it is surprising how tightly the Church as an institution grips those who minister at her altars; the Church is the idol of their hearts, the centre of their adoration. If the centre of their adoration could be transferred to Christ; if they could love Christ as devotedly as they love the Church of England, the result of their ministrations amongst the people would be gloriously successful; if instead of coddling the one respectable sheep that never strayed away they rounded up the ninety-and-nine lost ones and settled them in the home pastures the work would make their hearts ring with joy.I have heard sermons by clergymen in which the Church and the Prayer Book were exalted as the chief Divine oracles before which we all must bow in blind submission as though Christ and the Bible existed not in any corner of the preacher's mind; and the result of such degenerate doctrine is that preachers add good Churchmen to their flock, but not good Christians to the fold of Christ. A good Churchman thus becomes a superior being to a common Christian, as though it were more important to be a Churchman than a Christian. "Churchman" really is only the trade name for a man who believes in the State Church. To be a Churchman is good enough for some people.Compare the spirit of Jesus of Nazareth with the harsh, unsympathetic system represented by the Anglican creed which caricatures the Saviour in our midst. The cruel system which refuses to bury an unbaptized baby with its dead mother, or would refuse to allow a man or a woman to have a chance of happiness in marriage because, through no fault of their own, they have already suffered great unhappiness; that would refuse relatives permission to carve the word "Reverend" on the tombstone of a Wesleyan minister buried in a village churchyard because the dead man was not of the Church of England.The Kikuyu Conference is typical of our bishops' lack of Christ-like charity and shortage of that kindly touch of nature that makes the whole world kin. The question lying before the bishops in conference was "the promotion of a brotherly spirit and the adoption of practical steps toward unity" in the mission-field; or, should the Church of England retain its old crusted conventions as an exclusive institution and cold shoulder all outsiders. The bishops consulted in Lambeth Palace over this aggravating question, and finally decided that their first duty was to protect the Church of England in all its ancient sanctities, to retain the proud boundary-walls isolating those within in strict spiritual seclusion, and to warn trespassers off their private ecclesiastical preserves. Their duty to the State Church was clear-cut and formulated--viz., to maintain its high-cast principles and to avoid the contagion of the sects. None of the beautiful roses of charity growing in their garden-close must run over the wall for the wayfarer to pluck. Their fraternal duty to native Christians won to Christ by missionary zeal remains obscure. However, no loose form of brotherly love or Christian fellowship can be permitted in the mission-field or elsewhere. State Church principles must be upheld. As a sweetmeat and as a goody-goody sample of what Jesus Christ meant by brotherly love, an occasional hospitality to other Christian communities may be practised without prejudice to Church principles; you may come and partake of Holy Communion with us in our Church, but we cannot partake of Holy Communion with you in yours. For you to come to us is a privilege, for us to go to you would beinfra dig.On these liberal lines the bishops expound the teachings of Jesus Christ and uphold Church principles, and if Christ's principles clash with Church principles, so much the worse for the principles of Jesus Christ. The Church is the orthodox institution, and must hold itself inviolate even against the heterodoxy of Jesus Christ. The Kikuyu Conference and its deliberations may be summed up briefly as a study in Church principles and how to maintain them.Such harsh decisions bring contempt upon the Church, and widen the gulf which divides the rubric from the gospels and the clergyman from Christ. Jesus of Nazareth differs essentially from the Church on earth which to-day flies His banner and breaks His commandments. Christ declared for character and conduct as essentials in life; the Church favours creed and ceremony. Christ worked undogmatically, and the Church, overweighted with dogma, fails hopelessly in its Christly work.Observe the generous, liberal, broad-minded traits which even in the scanty records of the gospels mark Jesus Christ as the kindliest and most humane of men. Where there was a choice, He stood on the side of charity and common sense. He was no misanthrope; He was of social temperament. He knew well the joy of life, and He did not hesitate to participate in it. He drank wine Himself, and exerted miraculous power that others might drink it. In argument upon Sabbatarianism He took the more liberal view. He instantly and frankly forgave the woman taken in adultery. His heart went out in gentleness to children, to the poor, and to everybody who needed support and comfort. It is that golden thread of kindliness running like flashes of sunlight through His ministry which wins the love and adherence of disciples to His name.A few years ago an English ship foundered on the coast of Ushant. Many of the crew were drowned and the bodies washed ashore. The villagers of Ushant showed no little kindness to the shipwrecked strangers. The interment of the drowned sailors was a memorable scene. The deceased were all Protestants, the villagers were all Roman Catholics, yet the villagers performed the ceremony with all the ritual shown to those of their own faith. The curé officiating had qualms of conscience in admitting the bodies to the church and reading the Catholic service over them. An Englishman standing by remarked, "God has no creed." The curé waved his hand as if to dismiss the objections which perturbed his mind, and the service proceeded.This is a refreshing lesson in humanity furnished by the simple-minded, good-natured fishermen of Ushant. The spirit of Jesus breathes in it victoriously over the narrowness of creed and the hardness of heart which separate men in much party bitterness.XIVTHE LURE OF THE EUCHARISTA beautiful spectacular ceremonial the Church has wrapped around the Sacrament of the Lord's Supper, smothering it under the pomp of a religious service, which works upon the nerves like a subtle, mastering spell. The senses of the worshipper become drugged with incense, dazed by the glitter of broidered vestments, charmed with the strains of alluring music, spellbound with the deep droning voice intoning at the altar, and all the splendid equipments and sacred associations of the sanctuary, which tighten you up until a wrapt ecstasy of feeling intoxicates you in the midst of it all, and you are drenched in the luxury of strong, dreamy religious emotion.For nineteen centuries the spectacle has been growing in significance, and it is not finished growing yet. Every age adds a decorative touch to embellish its colossal splendours. Finality in ecclesiastical evolution lies a long way off in the distance. If one of the twelve disciples who supped with our Blessed Lord on that historic night could slip out of paradise and for a few minutes witness a modern high celebration of the Holy Eucharist, he would marvel much at the imposing function, and marvel more at men's credulity in mistaking an ecclesiastical pageant for a simple act of devout obedience to Jesus Christ. The plain and homely meal which our Lord instituted to be a remembrance of Himself and His death on the Cross has flowered into an ornate and flamboyant religious function striking wonderment and awe in the hearts of mankind by the glitter of its barbaric and imposing splendours. The Church has worked up the Lord's Supper into a supernatural mystic rite run on old pagan lines; in fact, it amalgamates Christianity with ancient magic, and so the spirit of Christ escapes from the service, and only His traditional dead body reposes on the altar like the cold ashes of an extinct fire.Recall the simple and unpretentious meal of which our Blessed Lord partook with His disciples on the eve of His betrayal and death. There in an upper room in the city of Jerusalem is the small assembly, consisting of the Master and His twelve disciples, and during the meal Jesus took a piece of bread, "and when He had given thanks, He brake it and said: 'Take, eat: this is My body, which is broken for you; this do in remembrance of Me.' After the same manner also He took the cup, when He had supped, saying: 'This cup is the New Testament in My blood; this do ye as often as ye drink in remembrance of Me; for as often as ye eat this bread and drink this cup, ye do show the Lord's death till He come.'"[*][*] 1 Cor. xi. 24-26.On this plain foundation the amazing and pernicious rite of Transubstantiation has been reared--a veritable temple of divination, and cloistered within its shadowed recesses the priest casts his spell, dispensing religious consolations to credulous and confiding mortals tangled in the coils of the seductive creed.Transubstantiation is a pagan heresy grafted on to Christian stock. In ancient times, when the pagan priest muttered an incantation over the idol of his god, the spirit of the god was supposed to enter the idol, and so when the Christian priest now utters a prayer over the bread and wine it is affirmed they become the real flesh and the real blood of Christ.A brief glance back on the early history of the Church shows us the door through which this sacerdotal error slipped into the sacramental service, and how the Church drifted from the words of Jesus Christ and sought other and strange gods for counsel. For three centuries after the Crucifixion the disciples held closely together in little groups or churches in the towns where they abode. Many of them dwelt in Rome, down in the dark subterranean city of the catacombs, with its maze of narrow lanes, blind alleys, and cryptic sanctuaries, hidden under the gay, cruel city of sunlit streets and open air. Here they lived, striving faithfully and patiently to attain pure, blameless, holy lives before God in a pagan world, whose sins they renounced and whose hatred they courted by thrusting the new and unwelcome society of Christ into their hostile midst. Christians were mistaken for criminals--but there, Christ was crucified as one. Through all persecutions they held fast to the teachings of Jesus of Nazareth. Nothing daunted them, nothing disheartened them. The words of Christ refreshed them in all the weariness of spirit. In teeth of deadly opposition they grew in number until a questionable honour was conferred upon the Church which changed its fortunes and marred its simplicity. The Roman Emperor Constantine became a convert to the new religion, and now and henceforth the religion of Jesus Christ is honourable in the sight of all men. It is the fashionable craze of Rome. The Emperor's Court followed the Emperor's example and joined up. The Roman world followed the royal lead and professed conversion. This is the flowering-time of Christianity. The Christian sect, yesterday the outcasts and scum of the earth, are now received into polite society, dine in the best houses, and are welcomed everywhere. The bishops of the Church are dug out of their deep burrows in the stuffy underground where they practised the simple life; they put off their poverty of pocket and meekness of spirit, and are robed in gorgeous raiment and rank amongst the rulers of the earth. They are transfigured men in mind and in manners. The Bishop of Rome leaps into fame, wins for himself a palace and a throne in the city of the Cæsars, and a court of red-robed cardinals surge round him with royal observances and diplomatic intrigue. Our bishops in England become princes of the Church, have princely palaces, and princely revenues to maintain the dignity of their princely estate. These gilded grandees of the Church are considered to be spiritually the lineal descendants of the Peasant of Galilee who at nightfall had not where to lay His head. Flattery worked the Church's undoing, for in the hour of her worldly triumph she gave away all that the early Christian martyrs had died to win.The mass of people who obsequiously played up to Constantine and joined the Church were not converted to the Christian faith; they did not believe in Christ with all their heart. To many of them Christ was only a new Deity added to the many gods they already worshipped. In heart they remained pagan, but behaved prudently and changed their coat at the Emperor's bidding. They did not forsake their old religion when they accepted the new creed; they amalgamated the two. They carried their pagan superstitions with them into the Christian Church, and, planted in new soil, there they took root and flourished vigorously in the garden of the Lord. The old gods became saints; the pagan shrines and images and festivals were whitewashed and christianized and given a place in the Church calendar; the magic by which their pagan priests trained the spirit of the gods to enter the idol at call, the same priestly magic transferred to the new religion brought the body of the Lord into the bread and the wine at the service of the Lord's Supper.Such galloping progress did the heresy make amongst the mixed multitudes who mingled their devotions with the elect in the Church that before long the bread and wine were given to the dead. The Sacrament, it is supposed, was placed on the breast of dead persons, as a charm against evil spirits. This superstitious custom was rooted deeply in the religion of the day, for the Church was compelled to legislate on the subject. The custom was forbidden in Africa by the Council of Hippo, A.D. 393; the Council of Carthage, A.D. 397; and in Gaul at the Council of Auxerre, A.D. 578; yet it lingered tenaciously in the hearts of the people as a sacred custom to be observed regardless of hostility to it in high places. Again at the Council in Trullo, A.D. 691, it was forbidden. An incident in the life of St. Benedict, who died about the year 540, discloses much to us. A boy who had been disobedient died suddenly, and his corpse could not rest, in the grave, so St. Benedict ordered the body of the Lord (the Sacrament) to be placed on the breast of the boy, and the corpse rested immediately, and remained quietly buried.The miraculous legend of the Lord's Supper obtains in the Church to-day with perfumed pomp and splendour of worship. The magic of the Real Presence bites deep into the core of the Church's creed. As the ages roll the legend develops new forms of expression. Its inferences are not always expressed, nor is its significance posted on the surface, but it is the deeply sunk tap-root of the green bay-tree of sacerdotalism which flourishes in the Church of Christ and binds the people round and round with disciplinary fetters of steel, captives to priestly power.The consecrated bread and wine still are worshipped as being the body of the Lord. When the priest consecrates the bread and wine on the altar for the Communion Service, sometimes a part of it is reverently kept back and is called the reserved sacrament; this reserved sacrament is conjured with. It is placed in a small box of ornate workmanship called a shrine or tabernacle, and is deposited on an altar in the church, which is called "God's resting-place," and is worshipped as the body of our Lord.In preference, a secluded and quiet place in the church is chosen for the altar of the reserved sacrament. "Admirable arrangements have been made in some English churches. In one church there is a side-chapel somewhat out of sight from the main entrance of the church. In another there is a crypt chapel.... In another there is a chapel reached by steps ascending from the church. By such arrangements, when the door of the chapel is kept unlocked and the fact of reservation is known, there is at once protection to the sacred presence of our Lord, and accessibility to those who will use it well." To these lonely side-altars in shadowy places of the sanctuary at any hour during the day stray worshippers come and kneel before the tabernacle and worship the body of Christ enclosed therein. "All that Christ can claim of human love and adoration is due to Him in His sacramental presence," says an Oxford advocate of the intruding heresy; "the worship which the Christian soul pays to Him when the sacrament is consecrated is paid also as it is reserved. It includes the utmost response of which the soul is capable."In past times plain-speaking people called these worshippers of the sacrament idolaters. That word may reveal the thoughts of many hearts to-day. Dr. Darwell Stone, in his book "The Reserved Sacrament," advocates an ample toleration widely extended in the Church of England on behalf of these idolaters. Facing the accusation of idolatry cast by his opponents, he throws out a challenge. Speaking of those who make the charge of idolatry, "from their own point of view," he states, "they are perfectly right. If the consecrated elements are only bread and wine after consecration as before, whatever gifts or virtues may be attached to the profitable reception of them, those who imagine that they are worshipping our Lord are wholly wrong in seeking the object of their adoration in His presence in the Sacrament. But if it be true that by consecration the bread and wine become His Body and Blood, if our Lord Himself, eternal God, very Man, glorified, spiritual, risen, ascended, is present in the Sacrament, then in the adoration there is no idolatry, but rather the worship which is the bounden duty of a Christian."Back to the New Testament, back to the words of Christ, and in reading them we find no evidence that Jesus at that farewell meal He partook with His disciples founded an elaborate and miraculous ordinance; we cannot read into the words of Christ any intention on His part to place in the hands of Churchmen a spiritual weapon to be used offensively and defensively in all their struggle and strategy for the Church's temporal aggrandizement, as it has been used to subdue and flatten down the people under their spiritual charge. The miracle of the Real Presence is of man's device. It is an offspring born of priestcraft and pride. Christ has no part or lot in it. The impression the gospels compel in us is that Christ was fighting the sacerdotal error in religion throughout His whole ministry, and for the Church to claim Him as its founder is the greatest irony of Christianity.But time works changes. As the story of the crucifixion of Christ receded with the lapse of lengthening years and became a distant tradition in Church history, the desire possessed men's minds for something tangible to nail their faith to; the desire was to bring Christ back again somehow into touch with living men and women. The blank of the long, silent ages grew intolerable. The chilling doubt of Thomas haunted men afresh; the longing to see and touch the wounded Christ gathered force. To gratify the religious devotion of the people, art did its best to portray in coloured pictures Jesus Christ the man who walked in Galilee and died in Jewry; and the Fathers of the Church responded promptly to the longing, and found to hand a ready-made mystery which answered the purpose and helped to stay the profound religious hunger of the day--a mystery which could be amplified to meet every expanding need of the people, and the people accepted with greedy faith the doctrine of the indwelling bodily presence of Jesus Christ in the bread and wine on the altar. These elements, they were assured, became changed into the real flesh and blood of Christ when consecrated by the priest, and the people acclaimed with reverent joy the wonderful transformation which brought Christ so near, and drew what religious consolation they could from the sacred illusion imposed upon them. The olden gods were returning in a new form.The people did not know and did not want to know the truth about their creed. They had neither the leisure nor the brains to think for themselves. The cake is baked; it is eaten with relish. Hungry men at table do not analyze their food; they eat it and are thankful. The people did not know, but the people had feeling. The Church stirred their feelings to the uttermost, played upon the heart-strings of joy and sorrow, hope and fear, faith and love, until their tumultuous emotions were aroused and they believed blindly according to priestly orders. We would make neither more nor less importance of the Lord's Supper, only just what Christ made of it to His disciples and to plain people through all time. Let us try and possess the ancient feeling that possessed the disciples when they sat at table with the Master, and, stripped of ecclesiastical emblazonment, we touch the Supper in its primitive simplicity as instituted in the upper room with the shadow of death shrouding the Founder of the Feast. He commanded His disciples after His death to meet together thus and to break bread in remembrance of Him.It is in memory of Christ, if the New Testament report of it is correct. Christ appointed the solemn rite to be an ever-living witness to His own love to man, and we in response make it our pledge of undying love and devotion to Him. It is the Sacrament of the ages. It never varies in purpose; it never stales by observance. The Lord's Table is the prepared place on earth where the Church Catholic should assemble to commemorate the great Sacrifice of Golgotha, and to commune with one another in spiritual fellowship and brotherly unity. It is a commemorative act, and as such, uncorrupted and undefiled by human inventions, it should have come down to us, but the Church has tampered with the holy thing. Christ did not intend us to idolize the bread and wine. It is the legend of the Brazen Serpent repeating itself in modern version. Human folly boasts of little originality. It borrows its sins from its ancestors and charges them up to the children's children. The Brazen Serpent that Moses lifted on a pole in the wilderness for the healing of the people was a symbol of God's saving mercy to the nation. Alas! the people turned the brass image into an idol and in course of time worshipped it, and so did evil in the sight of the Lord. Christ did not intend us to idolize the Sacrament; Christ commanded us to eat and drink the bread and wine, not to worship it. The Sacrament is in memory of Christ's sacrifice: it is not a repetition of it.To many Churchmen it is the simplicity of the service that savours of an offence. Human vanity dearly loves display, pomp, emotion, with which to salt its devotion to the Almighty and make it palatable to the Deity and to itself. Naaman the Syrian is not the only man who demands splendour of ceremony to colour a religious function in which he engages. His pampered soul feeds on fulsome flattery, and if he does not get it he is angry to the uttermost.
XII
JESUS CHRIST THE LURE OF THE AGES
Jesus Christ is the lure of the ages. He is the most interesting figure in history. History says little about Him, yet that little means much to us. It whets the appetite for more knowledge. The little is distinctly fascinating; what would be a full record of His sayings and doings, suppose such a narrative displayed in faded manuscript were unearthed from the musty archives of an old Eastern monastery and brought to daylight in the twentieth century? The fragmentary record that we hold is sufficiently vital to have kept His memory green for nearly two thousand years. What a glorious find a continuation of the wonderful story would be to those hungering for larger knowledge of their Lord's earthly life!
Jesus Christ is the unplaced figure in history. He occupies no niche in the secular temple of Fame. No historian of the country in which He lived paged His name amongst the worthies of the age or gave it mention in a footnote of history. Outside the covers of the Sacred Book Jesus Christ is an unknown quantity. During His lifetime the insignificance of the movement He promoted in Galilee was unworthy of serious attention from the authorities. His disciples were men of obscure origin, a mere handful of ignorant peasants and fishermen, rated as misguided, harmless fanatics following a crazy leader to oblivion, the foreordained end of a madman's escapade. Others before Him had started forth on the splendid expedition to set the world in order and were interrupted in the performance of their formidable task. It was towering madness to suppose permanent results could follow a single-handed fight against the world; to think that He could disturb the well-founded authority of King Herod or challenge Cæsar seated in purple power on the seven hills of Rome: as likely He might uproot the seven hills themselves which cradle the imperial city on their nursing-lap. Yet to-day He ranks above all competing heroes and overlords earth and heaven in the compelling influence His solitary life imposes on the world's activities, and that influence is only just beginning to be felt by us; eventually it will succeed in refashioning the world after His own heart and conforming it to the likeness of His own image.
Jesus Christ is the lonely figure in history. He launched His mission on the world without human patronage to give it a winning start. Illustrious men of the age did not do Him reverence, nor contribute their sympathy and support to stiffen His cause; they were frankly hostile to Him. He had no family influence to help Him in the great adventure; His ancestry was illustrious, but His relatives were poor and uninfluential folk; His father was a village tradesman. He was not a University man distinguished in letters to gain the ear of the cultured classes. He had no well-to-do friends to back Him either socially or financially. No man ever stood more remote from the world's conventional smile than He did. He was a rank outsider. He battled onward through resisting foes, upholding the shining truth as a sun-bright banner for brave men to rally round and fight for the kingdom of God and the empire of good souls on earth. He dwelt in spiritual isolation, for a mighty purpose cut Him off from the current influences of His time. The world's cold stare was the freezing recognition given Him, and it chilled the finer sensibilities of His loving nature.
There was nothing professional about Jesus Christ. He was not a place-seeker. He held no office in Church or State. He was a plain citizen, plainly dressed. His manner was simple and natural and without side. His speech was of the people; He was one of the crowd. No glittering halo aureoled His brow, promoting Him beyond His brethren. As a prophet, appearances were dead against Him. Why should He rise above his class-level and teach His betters and superiors high morality and spiritual truth? He had no crumbs of learning Himself--how could He feed others out of an empty basket? He had never studied in the schools and won academic distinction! Surely He overstepped Himself. His neighbours resented His common everyday look, easy manner, and arrogant pretensions. These things did not mix well together. They denounced His new, strange teachings as dangerous to the community; He was an unchartered, restless demagogue, roaming the country, disturbing the public weal. They scoffed at this common villager and His idle dream of founding a kingdom of righteousness built on the dregs of humanity, and derisively asked "When shall this kingdom come?"
Now, John the Baptist, hermit of the wilderness, was a prophet after their own heart. He played up to their ideal. He quickened their hot imagination. He was aglow with colour. He was a human tornado. His defiant attitude, eccentric apparel, and mystic fervour, were vividly picturesque; they caught the eye and compelled attention. He was an untamed child of the desert; he stood aloof from the common crowd. Even high-toned Pharisees were glamoured by his romantic pose. They listened raptly to his fiery message, and were fascinated by his insolent tongue and audacious words shot bolt-straight at them. His hearers staggered whilst he thundered burning condemnations on their smug sins and sordid lives; they writhed in agony as he lifted them from their feet and suspended them over the bottomless pit, choking in sulphurous fumes ascending from the fires of the damned below. Such ghastly presentment of the truth after the good old method of the prophets churned up the muddy depths of their polluted hearts. It converted the masses quickly, as a visitation of the plague could drop a panicky city to its knees, and when the excitement slowed down be as quickly forgotten as a nine-days' wonder out of fashion. The religious revival subsided like the froth blown off by the welcome wind of a new excitement. The emotions of a day spent down on the banks of the Jordan with John the Baptist, the idol of the people, were exhilarating, and something to be remembered for a lifetime by these hard-headed old Jews, and an interesting story to tell their children's children in years to come. The ministry of Jesus was not effervescent in character. He could have stormed men's imaginations with flaming pomp and splendour; He could have ridden a chariot of fire attended by thunder and lightning as running footmen to announce His presence, but men's hearts would have been unmelted by such fierce demonstrations of power. It might have awoke astonishment and intoxicated them into religious frenzy, but afterward it would have left behind a nasty chill on the heart.
Jesus Christ had no official position in the Church as a teacher. He had no mandate from the powers that be to carry on. He did not present Himself as a high Church dignitary, high as an enthroned archbishop robed in scarlet and gold; nor was He comfortably placed as a canon in a snug cathedral stall; nor even a meek young curate casting longing eyes on Church preferment. The Church of the day would have none of Him. They flung Him from the synagogue. His ideas were unproven and unpalatable to His countrymen; He must build a new romantic world for Himself and His followers to live in outside the orthodox world of His day, if they wanted liberty to breathe, and so He began at the bottom of society and quietly built upwards. He was just a man walking amongst suffering humanity, and was one of the sufferers Himself. He came like dew descending on mown grass, noiseless, fragrant, healing; silently He ministered amongst the people, winning home to human hearts by sympathy and gentleness and love, and gradually the new kingdom of righteousness grew up in the midst of the weary old world. He gained dominion over men by their resistible beauty and power of Divine truth which He expounded, and made attractive by parable and picture and by His own blameless walk and conversation. His teachings were exemplified in His life, and His life shines in undimmed beauty the exemplification of His teaching. He became a living gospel to them which all men could read, and His Divine personality was a centre of healing power which cured men's infirmities of body and mind. He had no money to pay for services rendered to Him, and He gave no hopes of worldly honour or possessions to His followers. He was homeless and at the mercy of friends for the shelter of a roof and the hospitality of His daily meals. He had intense sympathy with men, but He was no deluded optimist. He placed measured value on every man's pledge of fidelity to His cause, for He knew what was in man; with clear insight He saw into their dishonesty, selfishness, misery, but He knew they never had had a chance to do better, and He meant to give them a good chance all round. He frankly told people their sins, yet with all His straight speaking He won men and women to Himself. His manner was gracious, and He was indulgent to the frailties of our human nature with a sympathy that pardons all. The deep longings of His heart were for their happiness and uplifting, and the difficulty He encountered in leading them to follow the things that made for their peace was heartbreaking to His sensitive nature.
He had but few friends, and of the inner circle He gathered round Him all were not loyal; for He was betrayed into the hands of His enemies by one of the intimates of the band, and was forsaken by all in the hour of His supreme trial. He returned good for evil, blessing for cursing, and died in the act of praying for His enemies. No one could bring any serious accusation against Him, and he was declared innocent by the judge who condemned Him to death. Yet He was sacrificed as one whose life did not count; He was thrown as a sop to slake the blood-thirst of a howling Jewish mob. In the annals of the law-court His name is not mentioned, and there is no record of His trial and crucifixion to be found in history.
Looked at from the standpoint of men of His time, His life was a failure, and the delectable vision of a kingdom of righteousness on earth, the coming of which He pictured in glowing, fluent colours, reads like a dainty fairy-tale spun for children's amusement. Yet He himself saw through the darkness into the white light of the future, and beheld the crowning success of His mission. He saw the coming triumph of the Conquering Cross, which should subdue all things unto itself, and in place of the finest legend ever planted on human credulity by an artist in words He saw outlined through the dissolving mists of time, solid and well founded, the City Beautiful, with its shining streets, its many mansions and translucent atmosphere, peopled with white-robed citizens redeemed and ever blest; and the verdict of to-day is that the ministry of Jesus Christ on earth was the turning point in the world's destiny. No other personality has exerted such profound influence on the lives of men as Jesus of Nazareth, the despised and rejected of His day.
The ministry of Christ on earth lasted about three years in all. Until He was thirty years of age He was content to rest in deep obscurity. Nazareth, with its quiet remote valley, was world enough for Him to move in, and when His hour was come He found Himself. He opened His mouth and taught the people. He passed from village to village, a travelling storm-centre, exposing respectable old sins, ripping up time-honoured religious hypocrisies, vexing the Pharisees, and confounding the vain traditions of the elders. He laid down new laws of life and conduct for men's observance, and unfolded the love of God to man in its plenitude of tenderness and pity; even to waifs and strays and outcasts of city slums who had never received a kind, hopeful word from the lips of their own religious teachers. In fact, it was God breaking in upon history, opening a new permanent way into heaven for lost men to return home by, and to cull the wayside flowers of joy and happiness whilst homeward bound.
Thus Jesus in three short years fearlessly and swiftly accomplished His world-wide mission, and died triumphantly in full achievement of His benign purpose.
Not half the story of those few full, crowded hours of His glorious life has been collected and cast into history. It is a brief narrative of a brief career; so little of His life comes in view. Just a few detached incidents and a few disjointed conversations jotted down from the mellowed memory of three or four old men years after the events occurred furnish us an incomplete memoir of His earthly ministry--that is all we have. There was no adoring pen of a ready writer like Boswell to fix on the spot His sayings and doings. We possess only stray fragments of the life-story gathered up from memory and hearsay, and on these gathered fragments we found all our spiritual faith and base our eternal hope of blessedness. The structure seems to have been casually and hastily put together, but its design is the work of the Supreme Architect, and the house was well built and the foundation securely placed, for it has sheltered many millions of people through many generations of time. The roof is still rainproof, and the walls stand firm in their pillared strength.It is the living words of Christ that form the stronghold of the ages. His words are seed-thoughts dropped into the hearts of men which bring forth fruit manifold. Again they drop into other hearts, and springing up yield fruit abundantly unto life everlasting; and so generation after generation men fall under His gracious spell, and turn to His words for guidance, for inspiration, for joy. You never reach the end of Christ's words. They are growing words. There is always something new springing out of them unexpectedly: new thoughts, new laws, new problems, new solutions, new enemies, new friends, new hopes, new consolations. The words of Christ are spending and being spent, but they are never exhausted. They pass into new meanings, into new currency, but they never pass away. They are the hope of all the ages.
The early Christians lived in a state of spiritual elation; they daily, hourly, expected the Second Coming of Christ. It was the one article of their religious creed. The end of the world was to be the next important festival in the Church calendar, so they held in full near view their heavenly home, which was already feathered for their reception. At the sound of the Archangel's trumpet the heavens would open, the dead rise from their graves, and they would be caught up in the air to meet the Lord, and float off triumphantly into mansions of eternal rest furnished for their home coming. They saw it all vividly as a drama soon to be enacted, in which they each would play their ordered parts. The present was a dream-life to them, a mirage quickly to melt away. This hope of immortality was the first bright ray of light the gospel of Jesus Christ shed upon mankind. Having minds heavily charged with celestial visions, the common round of daily duties became unreal to them. They had a short creed and no theology. They sat on the brink of eternity, and the radiance streaming from its shining heights bedazzled their minds with bewildering raptures.
After long and patient waiting the heavens did not open, no clarion voice trumpeted the dead from their graves or welcomed saints into paradise; the sordid, sin-stained earth remained their polluted dwelling-place. The illusion of the millennium faded away and disappointment frosted their early hopes, yet bravely they held on and died in the faith. The Saviour's promise did not fulfil on the comfortable lines they planned, but it would make good another way equally great. The Church learnt to take long views of the promises, and turned its thoughts to things terrestrial. The affairs of the present grew interesting to them; they commenced setting their earthly house in order, and when the Church settled down into the slow, steady stride characteristic of every long march it became clear that she was destined to rank amongst the permanent institutions of the world. She formed new rules of life for her children's guidance, and thus faith in Christ gradually lost the fragrant aroma of otherworldliness which first perfumed it, and in lapse of time the plan of salvation became more thought of than salvation itself. A vast ecclesiastical system was organized, having endless intricate ramifications, and God was appointed head of one department of it; and to-day heavy accretions of theology accumulate and fasten deadly tight on the old Church like barnacles crusting the bottom of a long floated ship, hindering its speed to port.
Verily the time has now come that the good ship of the Church be careened, and the foul accretions of mediæval theology stripped off and the solid copper bottom of truth flash clean and bright in the sunlight, and the truth as it is in Jesus recover its splendour and power as in days of the early Church. His teachings shall yet win men to righteousness, and the fruits of His lips bring peace and joy to those who believe on His name.
The words of Christ have a future before them in moulding the growing goodness of the world and in solving the hard problems of social reform which vex humanity. He is the wise Reconciliator who can adjust society and bring into harmony the classes of men now gnashing their teeth at one another on opposing fronts. Jesus Christ is the true Political Economist, but He taught far in advance of His times--truth always marches a bit ahead of us. At present in social science we are only just touching the hem of His garment, and healing virtue flows from it; presently we shall approach nearer to Him, and, feeling the full throb of His loving heart, we shall understand Him better, and His life-blood will pour into our veins and complete the healing of the nations.
XIII
THE LURE OF THE LIVING WORD
The English State Church suffers from excess of theology and paucity of gospel. Our narrow Church creeds, in which the gospel of Jesus Christ is kept under cork by ecclesiastical cellar-men, must be broken that the good wine of the kingdom may flow freely. The gospel of Jesus Christ in the unwholesome captivity of rigid creeds is a feeble, mean, contemptible gospel, quite unable to save mankind, which business it undertook to achieve when coming into the world. If the teaching of Jesus Christ is no larger or kindlier than these old crumbling creeds show, it deserves to be scrapped, for there is no room in them for Christ to have fair play. Christianity is not a formula, it is a passion; it is not theology, it is truth. These dismal dogmas have not enough spiritual nourishment in them to keep men's souls alive; men starve on such unleavened food.
What are these antiquated creeds of the Church which strangle religion? They are ancient dismantled strongholds where the fighting forefathers of the faith housed themselves tightly and fought their foes tenaciously. The modern fathers of the Church still inhabit these tottering towers of refuge, although their day of usefulness is spent. Loyal Churchmen still breathe lovingly the chilly, stifling atmosphere of these spiritual dungeons of traditional Christianity.
We are living in a new age since August, 1914, and a new spirit possesses the people. With this terrific war raging new standards of values in religion, as in politics, have come into operation, shattering old ideals evermore. To encourage and strengthen them in this era of strain and conflict men need the larger, cleaner, diviner truth which fell from the lips of the living Christ. We want these truths to win through--the spoken words of Christ, with the free airs of heaven blowing across them, bringing healthiness of life, sanity of faith, and manifold charities, to all men who dwell on earth. The lure of the Living Word alone can hold men firm in this age of upheaval, when the old world has caved in and the plans of the new world are not yet manifest. There is finer, simpler, fuller spiritual teaching in the four gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, touching our present need than in all books of theology ever written and all Sunday sermons weekly preached. It is these half-forgotten things that matter on which new emphasis must be thrown.
Theology is the great imposture planted on mankind as a substitute for the teachings of Jesus Christ. When one leaves the words of Christ and strays amongst the words of men, it is like a traveller switching off the main line whereon his destination lies and losing himself on a side-track. It is disaster to side-track on the journey of life. Keep to the words of Christ and you keep on the main line. The gospel as revealed in the teachings of Jesus is entirely free from the sacerdotal imperative which nowadays imposes priest and ritual in the path of spiritual worship and blocks the fair-way to God. Priests and rituals and creeds are non-essentials; they are only wrappings: they are not religion, nor the best part of it. We must distinguish between living, breathing Christianity and the man-made ecclesiastical garments which clothe it fashionably, because the difference between them is vital and far-reaching. True religion, however, is seldom found stripped of all temporary wrappings, but its spiritual vigour survives in spite of Church-made millinery which encumbers it and impedes its healthy growth. Strip the religion of Jesus Christ of its grave-clothes and put the pure gospel in her mouth, and never tidings could be told to weary, heavy-laden men to-day which would be hailed as half so welcome. The one thing needful to make this world an earthly paradise, delightful to dwell in, is for men to live face to face with God, without a screen of ritual or image or priestcraft obstructing the view of our Heavenly Father; it is the light of God's countenance that cheers the heart of man, and strengthens him to live a good life in all sincerity of purpose.
Ecclesiastics have built up the Church into a colossal business trust which corners the Bread of Life and doles it to hungry mortals on terms of its own making. The Church is a wealthy corporation with immense property and privilege to safeguard and hold against all comers, and these temporal possessions engage its keenest thought and ceaseless activity. So it has important work to do other than saving the souls of men. To maintain its temporal authority in the world it has tampered with the teaching of Jesus Christ; by cunning craftiness of man the gospel has been twisted into theology, and the way of salvation shrouded behind a dense veil of ceremonial observances which the Church imposes on people and declares necessary to the saving of their souls. Much conflicting religious literature is issued annually by free-lances of the Press to explain the downright simplicity of the truth as it is in Jesus; and these conflicting opinions add other stumbling-blocks in the way, for they baffle the brains of the gentle reader, beating up a thick dust of doubt around him that his faith is smothered in a cloud of perplexity which darkens the daylight of truth.
The words of Jesus, when read and pondered over, prove religion to be a very simple matter. Yet this simplicity is its standing peril. So little human wisdom is needed to understand the words of Christ that we are apt to fear they do not mean what they say in plainest language--the language runs too easy for the majesty and importance and solemnity of the theme. We think there is an occult mystery lurking behind the honest homely phrases. Language so often bewilders simple-minded people that we are hard of belief when told we can find the way to heaven ourselves without the aid of a bishop's pastoral staff to point it out. The difficulty is to convince the plain man that he understands the words of Jesus when he reads them, and that he feels his spirit touch the Spirit of the Saviour of his soul without a priest between to make the contact. The Church as a commercial organization would fall quickly into bankruptcy if the gospel in its naked plainness was believed in whole-heartedly.
Very superior people tell us that the teachings of Jesus are only the beginning of God's revelation to man; they tell us that new revelations are constantly flowing in upon us through the sacred channel of the Church, and that the Church alone holds the key which deciphers these confidential messages despatched from mysterious sources for our edification. This is ecclesiastical bluff. The teachings of Jesus in the gospels suffice the spiritual needs of men through all time--time past, time present, and time to come. When God legislates once He legislates for aye, for truth is unchanging and cannot be improved on as the world grows older. No Divine after-thoughts will be added to the written word nor supplementary revelation supplied to guide men through the tangling maze of life. The Spirit of God is equal to all emergencies arising between now and the sundown of time. New-fallen light may illumine the written word in the forward quest of faith, for every age makes its own theology and coins new language to express old truths. The words of Christ are inexhaustible treasure locked in a deep mine, and in that mine lies many a lode of truth untapped by the diggers. The old gospel mine yields more and more treasure as the searchers strike deeper and deeper into its secret heart. The last nugget of truth has not yet been lifted from the treasure-house of God's Word.
Back to the words of Christ: this is the one hope of a truly good life--national or individual. If we forsake Christ and turn to the teachings of the Church for our spiritual well-being, we suffer for our folly in so doing. The real meaning of anything is to be found at its beginning not in its latest developments. As religious systems develop and grow old they grow corrupt, and on the earthly journey pick up error with truth, and the two mixed together look equally sacrosanct to the uninitiated, simple soul, and even the very elect are ofttimes deceived. Water is purest at the spring-head; the farther it flows from the fountain, the more contaminated it becomes. Back to Jesus Christ and His teachings in the gospels. His words are the very life and light of men.
Men often mistake the nature of religion through wrong teaching received in early years or no teaching received at all, thus giving the well-rooted weeds of error a long start to grow rampant in the human soil. Some people think religion is an isolated activity, like collecting old china, a hobby you can pursue, drop, and pick up again at leisure. Other people imagine it is the conventional badge of good society, giving tone to a life of fashionable respectability, like a carnation slipped into your buttonhole which adds a finishing touch to your evening dress. But they are not over careful, these conventional people, to apply its tenets in the privacy of their homes; religion is never enthroned as a domestic virtue. Lord Melbourne, the early Victorian Prime Minister, was one day coming from church in the country in a mighty fume. Finding a friend on the road, he unloaded: "It's too bad. I have always been a supporter of the Church, and I have always upheld the clergy. But it is really too bad to have to listen to a sermon like that we had this morning. Why, the preacher actually insisted upon applying religion to a man's private life!"
Their interior life is neither better nor worse for hitching on religion as a supplementary virtue. Such good people would never miss an opportunity of attending a missionary meeting at Caxton Hall or neglect an early morning service at the parish church, but the maid-of-all-work in the kitchen is not benefited by the religious fervour which perfumes her ladyship with the odour of sanctity.
Religion is a state of mind giving purpose and direction to the whole round of a man's activities. Religion is not like a red holly-berry in a tumbler of clear water, a hard, insoluble object, pretty enough seen through the crystal medium, but working no change in the water. Religion resembles a drop of cochineal falling into the water; it colours with rose hue the full contents of the tumbler; it tinges the whole character and conduct of a man; it permeates his thoughts and feelings and actions, changing the colour of his life for good and for ever. Religion works a change--a radical change--that is the point. It is not a question of drapery; it does not merely hang up a decoration here and there to improve appearances, leaving the secret chambers of the heart unclean. It makes a new man in Christ Jesus even out of the coarsest raw material to be found on the human market.
The Church as established in our midst to-day cannot work a social regeneration in the land, for it gives forth so little of the teaching of Christ to the people. The gold of truth it circulates is mixed with the dross of error of its own minting. It may bear the image and superscription of Christ on it and pass the world's counter as genuine metal, but it is counterfeit coin of the kingdom. The Church does not grip the people. It is a fashionable institution of conventional high-grade orthodoxy, but it is a thing apart from the people. Its clergy socially are a multitude of pleasant, amiable, guileless folk spread over the tennis-lawns and garden-parties of England on a summer's afternoon, mingling good-humouredly with their neighbours, but ecclesiastically they belt themselves in a compact phalanx of self-centred, intolerant men with a purpose in life, or by preference they are self-constituted "priests." They hold the Church as a close borough, consume its revenues, swear by its creed, and maintain its privileges. They are strong partisans; the same interest guides them which governs the business man in upholding his trade interests--the sacred rights of property. To defend their inherited rights they will fight doggedly, and surrender only in the last trench.
Outside the charmed enclosure of the Church the clergy esteem their Christian neighbours ecclesiastical inferiors, not to be consorted with on equal footing, and they leave the Almighty to take charge of outsiders here and hereafter. As a class long years of clerical assumption has sapped the humanness out of their nature, and only a priest is left in their skin.
There are honourable exceptions to this general rule. Many individual clergymen are thoroughly alive with the spirit of Christ. They are men of broad sympathies and of intense devotion to their work, but it is surprising how tightly the Church as an institution grips those who minister at her altars; the Church is the idol of their hearts, the centre of their adoration. If the centre of their adoration could be transferred to Christ; if they could love Christ as devotedly as they love the Church of England, the result of their ministrations amongst the people would be gloriously successful; if instead of coddling the one respectable sheep that never strayed away they rounded up the ninety-and-nine lost ones and settled them in the home pastures the work would make their hearts ring with joy.
I have heard sermons by clergymen in which the Church and the Prayer Book were exalted as the chief Divine oracles before which we all must bow in blind submission as though Christ and the Bible existed not in any corner of the preacher's mind; and the result of such degenerate doctrine is that preachers add good Churchmen to their flock, but not good Christians to the fold of Christ. A good Churchman thus becomes a superior being to a common Christian, as though it were more important to be a Churchman than a Christian. "Churchman" really is only the trade name for a man who believes in the State Church. To be a Churchman is good enough for some people.
Compare the spirit of Jesus of Nazareth with the harsh, unsympathetic system represented by the Anglican creed which caricatures the Saviour in our midst. The cruel system which refuses to bury an unbaptized baby with its dead mother, or would refuse to allow a man or a woman to have a chance of happiness in marriage because, through no fault of their own, they have already suffered great unhappiness; that would refuse relatives permission to carve the word "Reverend" on the tombstone of a Wesleyan minister buried in a village churchyard because the dead man was not of the Church of England.
The Kikuyu Conference is typical of our bishops' lack of Christ-like charity and shortage of that kindly touch of nature that makes the whole world kin. The question lying before the bishops in conference was "the promotion of a brotherly spirit and the adoption of practical steps toward unity" in the mission-field; or, should the Church of England retain its old crusted conventions as an exclusive institution and cold shoulder all outsiders. The bishops consulted in Lambeth Palace over this aggravating question, and finally decided that their first duty was to protect the Church of England in all its ancient sanctities, to retain the proud boundary-walls isolating those within in strict spiritual seclusion, and to warn trespassers off their private ecclesiastical preserves. Their duty to the State Church was clear-cut and formulated--viz., to maintain its high-cast principles and to avoid the contagion of the sects. None of the beautiful roses of charity growing in their garden-close must run over the wall for the wayfarer to pluck. Their fraternal duty to native Christians won to Christ by missionary zeal remains obscure. However, no loose form of brotherly love or Christian fellowship can be permitted in the mission-field or elsewhere. State Church principles must be upheld. As a sweetmeat and as a goody-goody sample of what Jesus Christ meant by brotherly love, an occasional hospitality to other Christian communities may be practised without prejudice to Church principles; you may come and partake of Holy Communion with us in our Church, but we cannot partake of Holy Communion with you in yours. For you to come to us is a privilege, for us to go to you would beinfra dig.
On these liberal lines the bishops expound the teachings of Jesus Christ and uphold Church principles, and if Christ's principles clash with Church principles, so much the worse for the principles of Jesus Christ. The Church is the orthodox institution, and must hold itself inviolate even against the heterodoxy of Jesus Christ. The Kikuyu Conference and its deliberations may be summed up briefly as a study in Church principles and how to maintain them.
Such harsh decisions bring contempt upon the Church, and widen the gulf which divides the rubric from the gospels and the clergyman from Christ. Jesus of Nazareth differs essentially from the Church on earth which to-day flies His banner and breaks His commandments. Christ declared for character and conduct as essentials in life; the Church favours creed and ceremony. Christ worked undogmatically, and the Church, overweighted with dogma, fails hopelessly in its Christly work.
Observe the generous, liberal, broad-minded traits which even in the scanty records of the gospels mark Jesus Christ as the kindliest and most humane of men. Where there was a choice, He stood on the side of charity and common sense. He was no misanthrope; He was of social temperament. He knew well the joy of life, and He did not hesitate to participate in it. He drank wine Himself, and exerted miraculous power that others might drink it. In argument upon Sabbatarianism He took the more liberal view. He instantly and frankly forgave the woman taken in adultery. His heart went out in gentleness to children, to the poor, and to everybody who needed support and comfort. It is that golden thread of kindliness running like flashes of sunlight through His ministry which wins the love and adherence of disciples to His name.
A few years ago an English ship foundered on the coast of Ushant. Many of the crew were drowned and the bodies washed ashore. The villagers of Ushant showed no little kindness to the shipwrecked strangers. The interment of the drowned sailors was a memorable scene. The deceased were all Protestants, the villagers were all Roman Catholics, yet the villagers performed the ceremony with all the ritual shown to those of their own faith. The curé officiating had qualms of conscience in admitting the bodies to the church and reading the Catholic service over them. An Englishman standing by remarked, "God has no creed." The curé waved his hand as if to dismiss the objections which perturbed his mind, and the service proceeded.
This is a refreshing lesson in humanity furnished by the simple-minded, good-natured fishermen of Ushant. The spirit of Jesus breathes in it victoriously over the narrowness of creed and the hardness of heart which separate men in much party bitterness.
XIV
THE LURE OF THE EUCHARIST
A beautiful spectacular ceremonial the Church has wrapped around the Sacrament of the Lord's Supper, smothering it under the pomp of a religious service, which works upon the nerves like a subtle, mastering spell. The senses of the worshipper become drugged with incense, dazed by the glitter of broidered vestments, charmed with the strains of alluring music, spellbound with the deep droning voice intoning at the altar, and all the splendid equipments and sacred associations of the sanctuary, which tighten you up until a wrapt ecstasy of feeling intoxicates you in the midst of it all, and you are drenched in the luxury of strong, dreamy religious emotion.
For nineteen centuries the spectacle has been growing in significance, and it is not finished growing yet. Every age adds a decorative touch to embellish its colossal splendours. Finality in ecclesiastical evolution lies a long way off in the distance. If one of the twelve disciples who supped with our Blessed Lord on that historic night could slip out of paradise and for a few minutes witness a modern high celebration of the Holy Eucharist, he would marvel much at the imposing function, and marvel more at men's credulity in mistaking an ecclesiastical pageant for a simple act of devout obedience to Jesus Christ. The plain and homely meal which our Lord instituted to be a remembrance of Himself and His death on the Cross has flowered into an ornate and flamboyant religious function striking wonderment and awe in the hearts of mankind by the glitter of its barbaric and imposing splendours. The Church has worked up the Lord's Supper into a supernatural mystic rite run on old pagan lines; in fact, it amalgamates Christianity with ancient magic, and so the spirit of Christ escapes from the service, and only His traditional dead body reposes on the altar like the cold ashes of an extinct fire.
Recall the simple and unpretentious meal of which our Blessed Lord partook with His disciples on the eve of His betrayal and death. There in an upper room in the city of Jerusalem is the small assembly, consisting of the Master and His twelve disciples, and during the meal Jesus took a piece of bread, "and when He had given thanks, He brake it and said: 'Take, eat: this is My body, which is broken for you; this do in remembrance of Me.' After the same manner also He took the cup, when He had supped, saying: 'This cup is the New Testament in My blood; this do ye as often as ye drink in remembrance of Me; for as often as ye eat this bread and drink this cup, ye do show the Lord's death till He come.'"[*]
[*] 1 Cor. xi. 24-26.
On this plain foundation the amazing and pernicious rite of Transubstantiation has been reared--a veritable temple of divination, and cloistered within its shadowed recesses the priest casts his spell, dispensing religious consolations to credulous and confiding mortals tangled in the coils of the seductive creed.
Transubstantiation is a pagan heresy grafted on to Christian stock. In ancient times, when the pagan priest muttered an incantation over the idol of his god, the spirit of the god was supposed to enter the idol, and so when the Christian priest now utters a prayer over the bread and wine it is affirmed they become the real flesh and the real blood of Christ.
A brief glance back on the early history of the Church shows us the door through which this sacerdotal error slipped into the sacramental service, and how the Church drifted from the words of Jesus Christ and sought other and strange gods for counsel. For three centuries after the Crucifixion the disciples held closely together in little groups or churches in the towns where they abode. Many of them dwelt in Rome, down in the dark subterranean city of the catacombs, with its maze of narrow lanes, blind alleys, and cryptic sanctuaries, hidden under the gay, cruel city of sunlit streets and open air. Here they lived, striving faithfully and patiently to attain pure, blameless, holy lives before God in a pagan world, whose sins they renounced and whose hatred they courted by thrusting the new and unwelcome society of Christ into their hostile midst. Christians were mistaken for criminals--but there, Christ was crucified as one. Through all persecutions they held fast to the teachings of Jesus of Nazareth. Nothing daunted them, nothing disheartened them. The words of Christ refreshed them in all the weariness of spirit. In teeth of deadly opposition they grew in number until a questionable honour was conferred upon the Church which changed its fortunes and marred its simplicity. The Roman Emperor Constantine became a convert to the new religion, and now and henceforth the religion of Jesus Christ is honourable in the sight of all men. It is the fashionable craze of Rome. The Emperor's Court followed the Emperor's example and joined up. The Roman world followed the royal lead and professed conversion. This is the flowering-time of Christianity. The Christian sect, yesterday the outcasts and scum of the earth, are now received into polite society, dine in the best houses, and are welcomed everywhere. The bishops of the Church are dug out of their deep burrows in the stuffy underground where they practised the simple life; they put off their poverty of pocket and meekness of spirit, and are robed in gorgeous raiment and rank amongst the rulers of the earth. They are transfigured men in mind and in manners. The Bishop of Rome leaps into fame, wins for himself a palace and a throne in the city of the Cæsars, and a court of red-robed cardinals surge round him with royal observances and diplomatic intrigue. Our bishops in England become princes of the Church, have princely palaces, and princely revenues to maintain the dignity of their princely estate. These gilded grandees of the Church are considered to be spiritually the lineal descendants of the Peasant of Galilee who at nightfall had not where to lay His head. Flattery worked the Church's undoing, for in the hour of her worldly triumph she gave away all that the early Christian martyrs had died to win.
The mass of people who obsequiously played up to Constantine and joined the Church were not converted to the Christian faith; they did not believe in Christ with all their heart. To many of them Christ was only a new Deity added to the many gods they already worshipped. In heart they remained pagan, but behaved prudently and changed their coat at the Emperor's bidding. They did not forsake their old religion when they accepted the new creed; they amalgamated the two. They carried their pagan superstitions with them into the Christian Church, and, planted in new soil, there they took root and flourished vigorously in the garden of the Lord. The old gods became saints; the pagan shrines and images and festivals were whitewashed and christianized and given a place in the Church calendar; the magic by which their pagan priests trained the spirit of the gods to enter the idol at call, the same priestly magic transferred to the new religion brought the body of the Lord into the bread and the wine at the service of the Lord's Supper.
Such galloping progress did the heresy make amongst the mixed multitudes who mingled their devotions with the elect in the Church that before long the bread and wine were given to the dead. The Sacrament, it is supposed, was placed on the breast of dead persons, as a charm against evil spirits. This superstitious custom was rooted deeply in the religion of the day, for the Church was compelled to legislate on the subject. The custom was forbidden in Africa by the Council of Hippo, A.D. 393; the Council of Carthage, A.D. 397; and in Gaul at the Council of Auxerre, A.D. 578; yet it lingered tenaciously in the hearts of the people as a sacred custom to be observed regardless of hostility to it in high places. Again at the Council in Trullo, A.D. 691, it was forbidden. An incident in the life of St. Benedict, who died about the year 540, discloses much to us. A boy who had been disobedient died suddenly, and his corpse could not rest, in the grave, so St. Benedict ordered the body of the Lord (the Sacrament) to be placed on the breast of the boy, and the corpse rested immediately, and remained quietly buried.
The miraculous legend of the Lord's Supper obtains in the Church to-day with perfumed pomp and splendour of worship. The magic of the Real Presence bites deep into the core of the Church's creed. As the ages roll the legend develops new forms of expression. Its inferences are not always expressed, nor is its significance posted on the surface, but it is the deeply sunk tap-root of the green bay-tree of sacerdotalism which flourishes in the Church of Christ and binds the people round and round with disciplinary fetters of steel, captives to priestly power.
The consecrated bread and wine still are worshipped as being the body of the Lord. When the priest consecrates the bread and wine on the altar for the Communion Service, sometimes a part of it is reverently kept back and is called the reserved sacrament; this reserved sacrament is conjured with. It is placed in a small box of ornate workmanship called a shrine or tabernacle, and is deposited on an altar in the church, which is called "God's resting-place," and is worshipped as the body of our Lord.
In preference, a secluded and quiet place in the church is chosen for the altar of the reserved sacrament. "Admirable arrangements have been made in some English churches. In one church there is a side-chapel somewhat out of sight from the main entrance of the church. In another there is a crypt chapel.... In another there is a chapel reached by steps ascending from the church. By such arrangements, when the door of the chapel is kept unlocked and the fact of reservation is known, there is at once protection to the sacred presence of our Lord, and accessibility to those who will use it well." To these lonely side-altars in shadowy places of the sanctuary at any hour during the day stray worshippers come and kneel before the tabernacle and worship the body of Christ enclosed therein. "All that Christ can claim of human love and adoration is due to Him in His sacramental presence," says an Oxford advocate of the intruding heresy; "the worship which the Christian soul pays to Him when the sacrament is consecrated is paid also as it is reserved. It includes the utmost response of which the soul is capable."
In past times plain-speaking people called these worshippers of the sacrament idolaters. That word may reveal the thoughts of many hearts to-day. Dr. Darwell Stone, in his book "The Reserved Sacrament," advocates an ample toleration widely extended in the Church of England on behalf of these idolaters. Facing the accusation of idolatry cast by his opponents, he throws out a challenge. Speaking of those who make the charge of idolatry, "from their own point of view," he states, "they are perfectly right. If the consecrated elements are only bread and wine after consecration as before, whatever gifts or virtues may be attached to the profitable reception of them, those who imagine that they are worshipping our Lord are wholly wrong in seeking the object of their adoration in His presence in the Sacrament. But if it be true that by consecration the bread and wine become His Body and Blood, if our Lord Himself, eternal God, very Man, glorified, spiritual, risen, ascended, is present in the Sacrament, then in the adoration there is no idolatry, but rather the worship which is the bounden duty of a Christian."
Back to the New Testament, back to the words of Christ, and in reading them we find no evidence that Jesus at that farewell meal He partook with His disciples founded an elaborate and miraculous ordinance; we cannot read into the words of Christ any intention on His part to place in the hands of Churchmen a spiritual weapon to be used offensively and defensively in all their struggle and strategy for the Church's temporal aggrandizement, as it has been used to subdue and flatten down the people under their spiritual charge. The miracle of the Real Presence is of man's device. It is an offspring born of priestcraft and pride. Christ has no part or lot in it. The impression the gospels compel in us is that Christ was fighting the sacerdotal error in religion throughout His whole ministry, and for the Church to claim Him as its founder is the greatest irony of Christianity.
But time works changes. As the story of the crucifixion of Christ receded with the lapse of lengthening years and became a distant tradition in Church history, the desire possessed men's minds for something tangible to nail their faith to; the desire was to bring Christ back again somehow into touch with living men and women. The blank of the long, silent ages grew intolerable. The chilling doubt of Thomas haunted men afresh; the longing to see and touch the wounded Christ gathered force. To gratify the religious devotion of the people, art did its best to portray in coloured pictures Jesus Christ the man who walked in Galilee and died in Jewry; and the Fathers of the Church responded promptly to the longing, and found to hand a ready-made mystery which answered the purpose and helped to stay the profound religious hunger of the day--a mystery which could be amplified to meet every expanding need of the people, and the people accepted with greedy faith the doctrine of the indwelling bodily presence of Jesus Christ in the bread and wine on the altar. These elements, they were assured, became changed into the real flesh and blood of Christ when consecrated by the priest, and the people acclaimed with reverent joy the wonderful transformation which brought Christ so near, and drew what religious consolation they could from the sacred illusion imposed upon them. The olden gods were returning in a new form.
The people did not know and did not want to know the truth about their creed. They had neither the leisure nor the brains to think for themselves. The cake is baked; it is eaten with relish. Hungry men at table do not analyze their food; they eat it and are thankful. The people did not know, but the people had feeling. The Church stirred their feelings to the uttermost, played upon the heart-strings of joy and sorrow, hope and fear, faith and love, until their tumultuous emotions were aroused and they believed blindly according to priestly orders. We would make neither more nor less importance of the Lord's Supper, only just what Christ made of it to His disciples and to plain people through all time. Let us try and possess the ancient feeling that possessed the disciples when they sat at table with the Master, and, stripped of ecclesiastical emblazonment, we touch the Supper in its primitive simplicity as instituted in the upper room with the shadow of death shrouding the Founder of the Feast. He commanded His disciples after His death to meet together thus and to break bread in remembrance of Him.
It is in memory of Christ, if the New Testament report of it is correct. Christ appointed the solemn rite to be an ever-living witness to His own love to man, and we in response make it our pledge of undying love and devotion to Him. It is the Sacrament of the ages. It never varies in purpose; it never stales by observance. The Lord's Table is the prepared place on earth where the Church Catholic should assemble to commemorate the great Sacrifice of Golgotha, and to commune with one another in spiritual fellowship and brotherly unity. It is a commemorative act, and as such, uncorrupted and undefiled by human inventions, it should have come down to us, but the Church has tampered with the holy thing. Christ did not intend us to idolize the bread and wine. It is the legend of the Brazen Serpent repeating itself in modern version. Human folly boasts of little originality. It borrows its sins from its ancestors and charges them up to the children's children. The Brazen Serpent that Moses lifted on a pole in the wilderness for the healing of the people was a symbol of God's saving mercy to the nation. Alas! the people turned the brass image into an idol and in course of time worshipped it, and so did evil in the sight of the Lord. Christ did not intend us to idolize the Sacrament; Christ commanded us to eat and drink the bread and wine, not to worship it. The Sacrament is in memory of Christ's sacrifice: it is not a repetition of it.
To many Churchmen it is the simplicity of the service that savours of an offence. Human vanity dearly loves display, pomp, emotion, with which to salt its devotion to the Almighty and make it palatable to the Deity and to itself. Naaman the Syrian is not the only man who demands splendour of ceremony to colour a religious function in which he engages. His pampered soul feeds on fulsome flattery, and if he does not get it he is angry to the uttermost.