Now when Jesus was born in Bethlehem of Judea in the days of Herod the king, Behold,there came Magi from the East to Jerusalem, Saying, Where is he that is born king of the Jews?S. Matt. II, i.
Now when Jesus was born in Bethlehem of Judea in the days of Herod the king, Behold,there came Magi from the East to Jerusalem, Saying, Where is he that is born king of the Jews?S. Matt. II, i.
Hail to thee, Mary, the fair dove, which hath borne for us God the Word. We give thee salutation with the Angel Gabriel, saying, Hail, thou that art full of grace; the Lord is with thee.Hail to thee, O Virgin, the very and true Queen; hail, glory of our race. Thou hast borne for us Emmanuel.We pray thee, remember us, O thou our faithful advocate with our Lord Jesus Christ, that He may forgive us our sins.
COPTIC.
ut of the East, over the desert, we see coming to Bethlehem the train of the star-led Magi. The devout imagination of the Church, dwelling upon thesignificancerather than the bare historical statements of the Gospel, have seen them as the representatives of the whole Gentile world. We often think of the treatment of the sacred story by the teachers and preachers of the Church as embroidering the original narratives with legendary material. We can look at it in that way; and by so doing, I think, miss the meaning of the facts. What we call ecclesiastical legend will often turn out on examination to be but the unfolding of the meaning of an event in terms of the creative imagination. The object is to present vividly what the event actually means when the meaning is of such widely reaching significance as far to overpass the simple facts. It is thus, I take it, that we must understand the story of the Magi as it takes shape in pious story. That the Magi were kings, and that they were three in number, emphasises the felt importance of their coming to the cradle of our Lord. Actually, they were understood to represent the Gentile world offering its allegiance to our blessed Lord, and therefore they would naturally represent the three branches of the Gentile world as it was understood at the time. The importance of their mission was reflected in the presentation of them as kings--no less persons were required to fill the dignity of the part. There was, too, a whole mass of prophecy to be reckoned with and interpreted in its relation to the event, the most obvious of which was that of Isaiah: "And the Gentiles shall come to thy light, and kings to the brightness of thy rising."
The Church story is essentially true, is but a dramatic rendering of the Gospel story. We may however content ourselves with the more simple rendering. We can hardly think of the stable as the setting of the reception of the Eastern Sages. Just when they came we cannot tell; but we seem compelled to put the Epiphany where the Church puts it in her year, somewhere between the Nativity and the Presentation, and the scene of it will still be, the Gospel implies, Bethlehem. "Now when Jesus was born in Bethlehem of Judea in the days of Herod the king, Behold, there came Magi from the East to Jerusalem." And at the direction of Herod, and guided by the Star they came to Bethlehem and offered their gifts and their worship. "They saw the young child with Mary his mother, and fell down, and worshipped him: and when they had opened their treasures, they presented unto him gifts; gold, and frankincense, and myrrh."
We try to get before us what would have been the mind of S. Mary through all these happenings which attended the birth of her Child. What is written of her here is no doubt characteristic: "Mary kept all these and pondered them in her heart." Wonder at the ways of God had been hers for so many months now--wonder, with devout meditation upon their meaning. Where there is no resistance to God's will but only the desire to know it more fully there is always the gradual assimilation of the truth. S. Mary moves in a realm of mystery from the moment of the Annunciation to the very end of her life. It is so difficult to understand what is the meaning of God in this unspeakable gift of a Son conceived by the power of the Holy Spirit, and in the constant accompaniment of pain and disaster and disappointment which is the unfolding experience of her life in relation to Him. But we feel in her no speculation, no rebellion, no insistence on knowing more; but we feel that there must have been a growing appreciation of the work of God, unhesitating acceptance of His will. Just to keep things in one's heart is so often the best way of arriving at an understanding of them; is the best way, at least, of arriving at the conviction that what we in fact need to understand is not so much what God does as that it is God Who does it. Our true aim in life is to understand God, and through that understanding we shall sufficiently understand life. Failure in human life is commonly due to an attempt to understand life without any attempt to understand it in relation to God. It is like an attempt to understand a work of art without an attempt to understand the artist, to estimate in terms of mechanical effort, rather than in terms of mind. A work of art means what the artist means when he creates it: life means what God means in His creation and government of it, and it is hopeless to expect to understand it without reference to the mind of God.
Therefore Mary's way is the right way--the way of acceptance and meditation. So she sought to follow the mind of God. We are told little of her, but we are told quite enough to understand this. We know well her method, that she kept things in her heart. And we have one splendid example of the result of the method in the Magnificat. There the results of her communion with God break forth in that Canticle which ever since has been one of the priceless treasures of the Church. The Gospels never tell us very much; but if we will follow Mary's method they tell us enough to let us see the very hand of God in the working out of our salvation; they give us sample events from which we easily infer God's meaning otherwhere.
And we may be sure that the months that followed the Annunciation would have been months of ever-deepening spiritual communion, resulting in a rapidly advancing spiritual maturity. One necessary result would have been to prepare the blessed Mother to receive new manifestations of God's Providence, and to fit them into the whole body of her experience. She would not at any time be lost in helpless surprise before a new development of the purpose of God. Surprised as she must have been when the Eastern Sages came to kneel before the Child she carried at her breast, and hail Him as born King of the Jews, she would have set to work to fit this new experience into what her acquired knowledge of the divine meaning had become. And one can have no doubt that these visitors from afar would have told her enough of the grounds of their action to illumine for her the prophecies concerning her Son.
The special incidents that the Gospel select for record leave us always conscious that theyarea selection and therefore must have special significance. That we are told that the Magi offered certain gifts, rather than told the words of homage wherewith they presented them turns our attention to the nature of the gifts as presumably having a significance in themselves rather than because of any actual value. In the gifts of these Gentiles come from afar to kneel before Him Whom they recognise as King of the Jews, we are compelled to see a certain attitude of humanity toward Him Who is revealed to be not only the King of the Jews, but Lord of Heaven and earth; they give what humanity needs must always give--the gold of a perfect oblation, the incense of perpetual intercession, the myrrh of a humble self-abandonment.
These which are offered as the ideal tribute of humanity by the star-led Magi are found in their highest human perfection exemplified in the Mother of the Child to Whom the tribute is made. Perfect are they in our Lord; and she who is nearest Him in nature is nearest Him in the perfection of nature. We turn from God's ideal as set out in our blessed Lord to see it reflected as in a glass in the life of her whose perfection is the perfect rendering of His grace. Mary is so perfect because, by God's election, she is "full of grace."
We, alas! limp after the ideal at a long distance. One pictures the life of sanctity under the familiar symbol of the race course, where many start in the race, and many, one by one, fall out by the wayside. Those who go on the race's end, go on because of certain qualities of endurance that we discover in them. In those who run the spiritual race for the amaranthine crown these qualities of endurance are not natural, but supernatural: they come not of birth but of rebirth. They are qualities which we draw from God. "It is not of him that willeth, nor of him that runneth, but of God that showeth mercy." The hand that sets the race confers the gifts that enable one to win it. "So run that ye may obtain."
And perhaps the chiefest of all those gifts is that which makes us, the children of God, capable of the adoration of our Father. Worship is no other than the utter giving of ourselves, giving as Christ gave, "Who being originally in the form of God, thought it not a thing to be grasped at to be equal with God, but emptied Himself, and took upon Him the form of a servant, and was made in the likeness of men"; giving as the blessed Virgin gave when she gave, as she must have thought and have been willing to give, her whole reputation among men in response to the call of God; giving complete, in which there is no withholding. That is worship, sacrifice, the pure gold of self-oblation.
But it is possible to think of the power of worship from another point of view. God never takes but He gives. What He appears to take He gives back with His blessing, and we find the restored gift multiplied manifold. So in the very act of our worship God confers on us power.
For it is true, is it not, that in the very act of worship we experience, not exhaustion but exhilaration. In the very act of giving ourselves to God, God gives Himself to us, and in overflowing abundance. That is what we find to be true in our highest act of worship, the blessed Eucharist. Here God and man meet in a perfect communion. Here we offer ourselves in sacrifice--ourselves, our souls and bodies--in union with the sacrifice of our Lord; and here our Lord, Who is the sacrifice itself, not only offers Himself, but also He imparts Himself to those who are united with Him. And out of this sacrifice, thus issuing in an act of union, there flows the perpetual renewing of the vitality of the spiritual life. We are sustained from day to day by this sacrificial feeding; our strength which is continually being drawn upon by the demands of life, by the temptations we have to resist, by the exertion that is called for in all spiritual exercise, is renewed by our participation in the Body and Blood of our Lord. I am sure that all those who are accustomed to frequent communion feel the drain upon their strength when at any time they are deprived of their great privilege. I am also sure that many who feel that their spiritual life is but languid, or those other many who seem only dimly to feel that there are spiritual problems to be met, and spiritual strength needed for the meeting of them, would find themselves immensely helped, would find their minds illumined and their strength sustained in more frequent participation in the sacrificial worship and feasting of the Church. The attitude of vast numbers of those who are regarded as quite sincere Christians is wholly incomprehensible. The life of God is day by day poured out at the altars of the Church, and they go their way in seeming unconsciousness of its presence, of its appeal, of its virtue, or of their own sore need of it. The Magi come from a far distance on a hazardous journey into an unknown country that they may offer the gold of their adoration to an infant King; and the Christian feebly considers whether he is not too tired to get up of a morning and go a short distance to receive the Body and Blood of the Redeemer of his soul!
The Magi came also bringing the incense of their intercession. Their privilege was that they were admitted to the very Presence Chamber of the great King. That the Infant in Mary's arms did not show any sign of kingship, the humble room where they were received bore no resemblance to the presence chamber of such kings as they were accustomed to wait upon, was to them of no consequence. They were endowed with the gift of faith, and believed the supernatural guiding rather than the outward seeming. The faith that had followed the star from so great a distance was not likely to be quenched by the antithesis of what must have been their imagination of the reality, of all the pictures that had been filling their minds as they pushed on across the desert. It was no more incredible that the King Whom they were seeking should be found in humble guise in a peasant's cottage than that they should have been guided to Him by a heavenly star. The gift of God to them was that they should be permitted to enter the presence of the King.
This right of admission to the divine Presence is the precious gift of God to us. Since the heavens received the ascending Lord the Kingdom of heaven has been open to all believers. Prayer is a very simple and common thing in our experience; and yet when we try to think out its implications we are overwhelmed with the wonder of it. It implies a God Who waits upon our pleasure: it reveals to us a Father Who is ever ready to listen to the voice of His children. No broken hearted sinner, overwhelmed with the conviction of his vileness, cries out in the agony of his repentance but God is ready to hear. "He is more ready to hear than we to pray." No man pours out his thanksgivings for the abundant blessings he discovers in his life but the heart of God is glad in his gladness. No child kneels at night to repeat his simple prayer but God bends over him and blesses him. The wonder of it is summed up in our Lord's words: "The Father Himself loveth you," which are as an open door into the inner sanctuary, an invitation to enter to those who are hesitating on the threshold of the Holy of Holies.
And there is no danger of tiring God: we come ceaselessly, endlessly. The cries of earth go up to Him, pitiful, ignorant, foolish cries; but they find God ready to hear and answer, fortunately not according to our ignorance but according to His great mercy. We think of the clouds of prayer in all ages, from all nations, in all tongues, and the very vastness of them gives us an index of the divine love.
And it is not simply for ourselves that we pray, nor do we pray by ourselves; it is of God's love that in the work of prayer we are associated with one another. There is nothing further from the divine plan of life than our present individualism. Our temptation is to be egotistic and self-centred; to want to approach God alone with our private needs and wishes. We incline to travel the spiritual way by ourselves; we want no company; we want no one between our souls and God. But that precisely is not the divine method. We come to God through Christ; we come in association with the members of the Body. Our standing as Christians before Him is dependent upon our corporate relation to one another in His Son.
Important issues are involved. We attain through this associated life of the Christian the power of mutual intercession. We find that it is our privilege to share our prayers with others, and to be interested in one another's lives. We have common interests and we work them out in common. Therefore when we try to put before us an ideal picture of the power of prayer, it will not be the solitary individual offering his personal supplications to the Father, but it will be the community of the faithful assembled for the offering of the divine Sacrifice. It is the praying Body that best satisfies our ideal of prayer, where we are conscious of helping one another in the work of intercession. We remember, too, when we think of prayer as prayer of the Body of Christ, that it is not just the visible congregation that is participating in it, but that all the Body share in the intercessions, wherever they may individually be. Our thoughts go up from the little assembly in the humble church and lose themselves in the splendour of the heavenly intercession where we are associated with prophets and apostles and martyrs, and with Mary the Mother of God.
There was a third gift that the Magi brought to Him Whom they hailed King, a gift that is more perplexing as a gift to royalty than the other two. That gold and incense should be offered a King is clearly His royal right; but what has he to do with the bitterness of myrrh? But to this King myrrh is a peculiarly appropriate gift, for it is the symbol of complete self-abandonment. He who came to do not His own will but the will of Him that sent Him; Who laid aside the robes of His glory, issuing from the uncreated light that He might clothe Himself with the humility of the flesh, is properly honoured with the gift of myrrh.
And as it was the symbol of His humility, so is it the symbol of our humanity in relation to Him. It suggests to us that uttermost of Christian virtues, the virtue of entire abandonment to the will of God. This is a most difficult virtue to acquire. We cling to self. We are devoted to our own wills. We rely on our own judgment and wisdom. We are impatient of all that gets in the way of our self-determination. We have in these last days made a veritable religion out of devotion to self, a cult of the ego.
But he who will enter into the sanctuary of the divine life, he who will seek union with God, he who will be one with the Father in the Son, must abandon self. He must lose his life in order to save it. He must let go the world to cling to the Lord of life. This will of the man which is so insistent, so persistent, so assertive, so tenacious, must be laid aside and the Will of Another adopted in its place. Often this is bitter. Very true of us it is that when we were young we girded ourselves and walked whither we would; but it must be in the end, if we make life a spiritual success, that when we are old another shall gird us and carry us whither we would not.
The secret of life is found when the bitterness of myrrh is turned to sweetness in the discovery that the outcome of the sacrificial life is not that it be narrowed but enlarged; and that for the life which we have entrusted to Him God will do more than we ask or think. When our will becomes one with the will of God we are surprised to find that we have ceased to think of what we once called our sacrifices, because life in Christ reveals itself to us as of infinite joy and richness, so that we forget the things that are behind and gladly press on.
Queen of heaven, blessed may thou beFor Godes Son born He was of thee,For to make us free.Gloria Tibi, Domine.Jesu, Godes Son, born He wasIn a crib with hay and grass,And died for us upon the cross.Gloria Tibi, Dominie.To our Lady make we our moan,That she may pray to her dear Son,That we may to His bliss come.Gloria Tibi, Dominie.Sixteenth Century.
And when the days of her purification according to the law of Moses were accomplished, theybrought him to Jerusalem, to present him to the Lord.S. Luke II. 22.
And when the days of her purification according to the law of Moses were accomplished, theybrought him to Jerusalem, to present him to the Lord.S. Luke II. 22.
O come let us worship the Holy Trinity, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost,--we the Christian nations, for He is our true God.And we hope in Holy Mary, that God will have mercy upon us through her prayers.Hail to thee, Mary, the fair dove, who hath borne for us God the Word.
COPTIC
he reading of a story in the Gospels is often like looking through a window down some long arcade; there is in the foreground the group of actors in whom we are presently interested, and beyond them is the whole background of contemporary life to which they belong, of which they are a part. If we have time to think out the meaning of this surrounding life we gain added insight into the meaning of our principal characters. It is so now as we watch this group of humble peasant folk coming up to the temple to fulfil the demands of the law of Moses. In the precincts of the temple they are merged in a larger group whose interests are clearly identical with their own, and whom we easily see to be the local representatives of a party--the name, no doubt, suggests an organisation which they had not--scattered throughout Judea. Their interest was the redemption of Israel. They were the true heirs of the prophets, and among them the prophecies which concerned the Lord's Christ were the subject of constant study and meditation. Amid the movements and intrigues of political and religious parties, they abode quietly in the temple, as Simeon and Anna, or in their homes, as Zacharias and Elizabeth,waiting. Their power was the silent power of sanctity, the power that flows from lives steeped in meditation and prayer. They constitute that remnant which is the depository of the hopes of Israel and the saving salt which prevents the utter putrefaction of the body of the nation.
We cannot for a moment doubt that Mary and Joseph were of this remnant, and that they were in complete sympathy with those whom they found here in the temple when the Child Jesus was brought in "to do for him after the custom of the law." The actual ceremony of the purification was soon over, the demands of the law satisfied. Neither Jesus nor Mary had any inner need of these observances; their value in their case was that by submission to them they associated themselves closely with their brethren, our Lord thus continuing that divine self-emptying which he had begun at the Incarnation. We are impressed with the completeness of this stooping of God when we see the offering that Mary brings, "A pair of turtle doves," the offering of the very poor. Our Lord has accepted life on its lowest economic terms in order that nothing in His mission shall flow from adventitious aids. He must owe all in the accomplishment of His work to the Father Who gave it Him to do. It will be the essence of the temptation that He must soon undergo that He shall consent to call to His aid earthly and material supports and base His hopes of success on something other than God.
Accidentally, there is this further demonstration contained in the poverty of the Holy Family, that, namely, the completest spiritual privilege, the fullest spiritual development, is independent of "possessions." It is no doubt true that "great possessions" do not of necessity create a bar in all cases to spiritual accomplishment; but to many of us it is a consolation to know that the completest sanctity humanity has known has been wrought out in utter poverty of life. We shall have occasion to speak more of this later; we now only note the fact that those whom we meet in the pages of the New Testament as waiting hopefully for the redemption of Israel are waiting in poverty and hard work.
What we find in S. Mary as she passes through the ceremony of her purification from a child-bearing which had in no circumstance of it anything impure, is the spirit of sacrifice which submission to the law implies. She has caught the spirit of her Son, the spirit of selfless offering to the will of God. It is the central accomplishment of the life of sanctity. The life of sanctity must be wrought out from the centre, from our contact with God. No one becomes holy by works, whatever may be the nature of the works. Works, the external life, are the expression of what we are, they are the externalization of our character. If they be not the expression of a life hid with Christ in God they can have no spiritual value, whatever may be their social value. The kind of works which "are done to be seen of men" "have their reward," that is, the sort of reward they seek, human approval; they have no value in the realm of the spirit.
But the life that is lived as sacrifice, as a thing perfectly offered to God, is a life growing up in God day by day. It is our Lord's life, summed up from this point of view in the "I come to do thy will, O God." Its most perfect reflection is caught by blessed Mary with her acceptance of God's will: "Behold, the handmaid of the Lord." But it is the life expression of all sanctity; for the saint is such chiefly by virtue of his sacrificial attitude. It is the completest account of the life of sanctity that it "leaves all" to follow a divine call. It is the response of the Apostles who, as James and John, leave their father Zebedee and the boats and the nets and the hired servants, to follow Jesus. It is the answer of Matthew who rises from the receipt of custom at the Master's word. It is the answer of all saints in all times. Sanctity means the abandonment of all for Christ: it means the embracing of the poverty of Jesus and Mary.
Is sanctity then, or the possibility of it, shut within the narrow limits of a poor life? Well, even if it were, the limits would not be so very narrow. By far the greater part of the human race at any time has been poor, as poor as the Holy Family. Unfortunately, Christianity is forgetting its vocation of poverty and becoming a matter of well-to-do-ness. But we need not forget that the poor are the majority. However, the fact is not that economical poverty is automatically productive of spirituality, but that accepted and offered poverty is the road to the heart of God. It is not denied that the rich man may consecrate and offer his goods to God and make them instruments of God's service; but in the process he runs great risk of deceiving himself and of attempting to deceive God--the risk of quietly substituting for the spirit of sacrifice the spirit of commercial bargaining, and attempting to buy the favour of God, and of ransoming his great possessions by a well-calculated tribute. It is not so much our possessions as the way we hold them that is in question; it is a question whether the inner motive of our life is the will to sacrifice or the will to be rich. "They that desire to be rich fall into temptation and a snare, and into many foolish and hurtful lusts which drown men in destruction and perdition,"
These dangers S. Paul noted as the besetting dangers of riches are counteracted by the possession of the spirit of sacrifice which holds all things at the disposal of God, and views life as opportunity for the service of God. And in so estimating life, we must remember that money is not the only thing that human beings possess. As I pointed out the vast majority of the human race have no money: it by no means follows that they have no capacity or field for the exercise of the spirit of sacrifice. There is, for instance, an abundant opportunity for the exercise of that spirit in the glad acceptance of the narrow lot that may be ours. Probably many, indeed most, poor are only economically poor; they fall under S. Paul's criticism in that "they desire to be rich," and are therefore devoid of the spirit of sacrifice that would transform their actual poverty into a spiritual value. But all the powers and energies of life do in fact constitute life's capital. A poor boy has great possessions in the gifts of nature that God has granted him. He may use this capital as he will. He may be governed by "the desire to be rich," or by the desire to consecrate himself to the will and service of God--and the working out of life will be accordingly. He may become very rich economically, or he may devote his life to the service of his fellows as physician, teacher, missionary, or in numberless other paths. Once more, the meaning of life is in its voluntary direction, and whatever may be his economic state, he may, if he will, be "rich toward God."
If what we are seeking is to follow the Gospel-life, if we are seeking to express toward man the spirit of the Master, we find abundant field for the exercise of this spirit of sacrifice in our daily relations with others. S. Paul's rule of life: "Look not every man to his own things, but every man also to the things of others," is the practical rule of the sacrificed will. It seeks to fulfil the service of the Master by taking the spirit of the Master--His helpfulness, His consideration, His sympathy--with one into the detail of the day's work. It is one of the peculiarities of human nature that it finds it quite possible to work itself up to an occasional accomplishment, especially in a spectacular setting, of spiritual works, which it finds itself quite impotent to do under the commonplace routine of life. The race experience is accurately enough summed up in the cynical proverb: "No man is a hero to his valet." It expresses the fact that in ordinary circumstances, and under commonplace temptations, we do not succeed in holding life to the accomplishment which is ours when we are, as it were, on dress parade. In other words, we respond to the opinions we desire to create in others; and the spirit of sanctity is a response not to public opinion, but to the mind and thought of God. When we seek the mind of Christ, and seek to reproduce that mind in our own lives, seek to be possessed by it, then we shall gladly render back to God all life's riches which we have received from Him, and acknowledge in the true spirit of poverty that "all things come of Thee, O Lord, and of Thine own have we given Thee."
The world has got into a very ill way of thinking of God asforce. Force seems in the popular mind to be the synonym ofpower. The only power that we understand is the power thatcompels, that secures the execution of its will by physical or moral constraint. With this conception of power in mind men are continually asking: "Why does not God do this or that? If he be God and wills goodness, why does He not execute goodness, use power to accomplish it?"
It ought to be unnecessary to point out that such a conception of power is quite foreign to the Christian conception of God. Goodness that is compulsory is not goodness. Human legislation, in its enforcement of law, looks not to the production of goodness but to the production of order, a quite different thing. But God's heart is set upon the sanctification of His children and is satisfied with nothing less than that. "This is the will of God, even your sanctification." But sanctification cannot be compelled. The divine method is, that "when the fulness of time was come, God sent forth His Son, born of a woman, born under the law, to redeem them that were under the law, that we might receive the adoption of sons. And because ye are sons, God sent forth the Spirit of His Son into your hearts, crying, Abba, Father." Through this method we "were reconciled to God by the death of His Son." The result is not that we are compelled to obey, but that "the love of Christ constraineth us." The account of the apostolic authority is not that it is a commission to rule the universal Church, but "now then we are ambassadors for Christ, as though God did beseech you by us; we pray you in Christ's stead, be ye reconciled to God."
The study of this divine method should put us on the right track in the attempt to estimate the nature of sanctity and the results we may expect from it. We shall expect nothing of spiritual value from force. We shall be quite prepared to turn away from the governing parties in Jerusalem as from those who have repudiated the divine method and are therefore useless for the divine ends. We shall turn rather to those who gather about the temple and there, in a life of prayer and meditation, wait for the redemption. It is to these, who are the real temple of the Lord, that the Lord "shall come suddenly," that the manifestation of God will be made. And their hearts will overflow with joy as they behold the fulfilment of the promises of God.
The power of God is the power of love; and it is that love, and that love alone, that has won the victories of God. It is a very slow method, men say. No doubt. But it is the only method that has any success. The method of force seems effective; but its triumphs are illusory. Force cannot make men love, it can only make them hate. The world is being won to God by the love of God manifested in Christ Jesus our Lord. And it is as well to remember, when we are tempted to complain of the slowness of the process, that the slowness is ours, not God's. The process is slow because men will not consent to become the instruments of God's love for the world, will not transmit the crucified love of God's Son to their fellows. They continually, in their impatience, revert to force of some sort, for the attainment of spiritual ends. They become the tools of all sorts of secular ambitions which promise support in return for their co-operation. And the result may be read by any one not blinded by prejudice in the futility and incompetence of modern religions of all sorts. It is seen perhaps most of all in the pride of opinion which keeps the Christian world in a fragmentary condition, and which approaches the undoing of the sin of a divided Christendom with the preliminary announcement that no separated body must be required to admit that it has been in the wrong. Human disregard of the divine method of love and humility can hardly go farther; and the only practical result that can be expected to follow is such as followed from the negotiations of Herod and Pontius Pilate--a new Crucifixion of the Ever-sacrificed Christ.
We have risen to the divine method when we have learned to rely for spiritual results upon God alone. Then is revealed to us the power of sanctity. We turn over the pages of the lives of the saints, of those who have been great in the Kingdom of God, and we are struck by the growing influence of these men and women. They are simple men and women whose life's energy is concentrated on some special work; they are confessors or directors; they work among the very poor; they lead lives of retirement in Religious Houses; they are preachers of the Gospel; they are missionaries. The one thing that they appear to have in common is utter consecration to the work in hand. And we see, it may be with some wonder, that as they become more and more absorbed in their special work, they become more and more centres of influence. Without at all willing it they draw people about them, become centres of influences, arouse interest, become widely known. In short, they are, without willing it, centres of energy. Of what energy? Obviously, of the energy of love: the love of God manifested in them draws men to God. The man at whose disposal is unlimited force compels men to do his will; but he draws no one to him except the hypocrite and the sycophant who expect to gain something by their servility. The saint draws men, not to himself, but to God; for obviously it is not his power but God's power that is being manifested through him.
Unless we are very unfortunate we all know people whose attractiveness is the attractiveness of simple goodness. They are not learned nor influential nor witty nor clever, but we like to be with them. When we are asked why, we can only explain it by the attractiveness of their Christlikeness. What we gain from intercourse with them is spiritual insight and power. Their influence might be described as sacramental: they are means our Blessed Lord uses to impart Himself. They are so filled with the mind of Christ that they easily show Him to the world; and withal, quite unconsciously. For great love is possible only where there is great humility.
And this power of sanctity which is the outcome of union with God is a permanent acquisition to the Kingdom of God. God's Kingdom is ultimately a Kingdom of saints. The sphere of God's self-manifestation in human life increases ever as the saints increase; and the power of sanctity necessarily remains while the saint remains, that is, forever. The saint remains a permanent organ of the Body of Christ, a perdurable instrument of the divine love. To speak humanly, the more saints there are, the more the love of God can manifest itself; the wider its influence on humanity. And the greater the Saint, that is, the nearer the Saint approaches the perfection of God, to which he is called--Be ye therefore perfect, as your Father in heaven is perfect--the more influential he must be; that is the more perfectly he will show the divine likeness and transmit the divine influence. When we think of the power of the saints as intercessors that is what actually we are thinking of,--the perfection of their understanding of the mind of Christ.
But to return to this world and to the gathering in the temple on the day of the Purification. These are they in whom the hope of Israel rests. Israel is not a failure because it has brought forth these. God's work through the centuries has not come to naught because in these there is the possibility of a new beginning. The consummate flower of Israel's life is the Blessed Mother through whom God becomes man; and these who meet her in the temple are the representatives of those hidden ones in Israel who will be the field wherein the seed of the Word can be sown and where it will bring forth fruit an hundredfold. Jesus, this Child, is God made man; and these around Him to-day, Mary and Joseph, Simeon and Anna, are those who will receive His love and will show its power in the universe forever.
And so it will remain always; the good ground wherein the seed may be sown and bring forth unto eternal life is the spiritual nature of man, made ready by humility and love,--"In quietness and confidence shall be your strength." In the quietness that waits for God to act, the confidence that knows that He will act when the time comes. It is well if our aspiration is to be of the number of those who live lives hid with Christ in God; who are seeking nothing but that the love of God may be shed abroad in their hearts; who are "constrained" by nothing but the love of Jesus. It is true that this simplicity of motive and aim will bring it about that our lives will be hidden lives, lives of which the world will take no note. We may be quite sure that none of the rulers of Israel thought much about old Simeon who passed his time praying in the temple. And if we want to be known of rulers it is doubtless a mistake to take the road that Simeon followed. But the reward of that way was that he saw "the Lord's Christ," that it was permitted him to take in his arms Incarnate God, and then, in his rapture, to singNunc Dimittis. We cannot travel two roads at once. When the Holy Family goes out from the temple it can go, if it will, to the palace of Herod, or it can go back to Bethlehem. It cannot go both ways and we know the way that it took. And we in our self-examination to-night can see two roads stretching out before us. We can go the way of the world, the way that seeks (whether it finds or no) popularity and prominence, or we can join the Holy Family and in company with Jesus and Mary and Joseph go back to the quietness and hiddenness of the House of Bread where the saints dwell. With them, sheltered by the Sacrifice of Jesus and the prayers of Mary and Joseph we can wait for the Redemption in the full manifestation of the life of God in us, and for the time when the love of God shall be fully "shed abroad in our hearts by the Holy Ghost which is given us."
O Sion, ope thy temple-gates;See, Christ, the Priest and Victim, waits--Let lifeless shadows flee:No more to heaven shall vainly riseThe ancient rites--a sacrificeAll pure and perfect, see.Behold, the Maiden knowing wellThe hidden Godhead that doth dwellIn him her infant Son:And with her Infant, see her bringThe doves, the humble offeringFor Christ, the Holy One.Here, all who for his coming sighedBehold him, and are satisfied--Their faith the prize hath won:While Mary, in her breast concealsThe holy joys her Lord reveals,And ponders them alone.Come, let us tune our hearts to singThe glory of our God and King,The blessed One and Three:Be everlasting praise and loveTo him who reigns in heaven above,Through all eternity.
The angel of the Lord appeareth to Joseph in a dream, saying,Arise, and take the young child and his mother, and flee into Egypt.S. Matt. II, 13.
The angel of the Lord appeareth to Joseph in a dream, saying,Arise, and take the young child and his mother, and flee into Egypt.S. Matt. II, 13.
Deliver us, we beseech Thee, O Lord, from all evils past, present, and to come: and at the intercession for us of Blessed Mary who brought forth God and our Lord, Jesus Christ; and of the holy apostles Peter, and Paul, and Andrew; and of blessed Ambrose Thy confessor, and bishop, together with all Thy saints, favorably give peace in our days, that, assisted by the help of Thy mercy, we may ever be both delivered from sin, and safe from all turmoil. Fulfil this, by Him, with Whom Thou livest blessed, and reignest God, in the unity of the Holy Spirit, for ever and ever.
AMBROSIAN.
hose who live in intimate union with God, the peace of whose lives is untroubled by the constant irruption of sin, are peculiarly sensitive to that mode of the divine action that we call supernatural. I suppose that it is not that God wishes to reveal Himself to souls only at crises of their experience or under exceptional conditions, but that only souls of an exceptional spiritual sensitivity are capable of this sort of approach. Communications of the divine will through dream or vision of inner voice are the accompaniment of sanctity; one may almost say that they are the normal means in the case of advanced sanctity. Most of us are too much immersed in the world, are too much the slaves of material things, to be open to this still, small voice of revelation. Our eyes are dimned by the garish light of the world, and our ears dulled by its clamour, so that our powers of spiritual perception are of the slightest. This is quite intelligible; and we ought not to fall into the mistake of assuming that our undeveloped spirituality is normal, and that what does not happen to us is inconceivable as having happened at all. If we want to know the truth about spiritual phenomena we shall put ourselves to school to those whose spiritual natures have attained the highest development and in whose experience spiritual phenomena are of almost daily happening.
To the man "whose talk is of oxen," whose whole life is absorbed in the study of material things, a purely spiritual manifestation comes as a surprise. His instinctive impulse is to deny its reality as a thing obviously impertinent to his understanding of life. But one whose life is based on spiritual postulates, who is, however feebly, attempting to shape life in accordance with spiritual principles, though he may never have attained anything that can be interpreted as a distinct revelation from God by vision or voice or otherwise, yet must he by the very basic assumptions of his life be ready to regard such manifestations of God as intelligible, and indeed to be expected. So far from regarding divine interventions in life as impossible, we shall regard the Christian life which has no experience of them as abnormal, as not having realised its inheritance. The degree and kind of such intervention in life will vary; but it is the fact of the intervention that is important: the mode in a special case will be determined by the needs of that case. As we think along these lines we reach the conclusion that what we call the supernatural is not the unnatural or the abnormal, but is a higher mode of the natural.
We are not surprised therefore to find that those whose spiritual development was such as to make it possible for God to choose them to fulfil special offices in relation to the Incarnation; who could be chosen to be, in the one case, the Mother of God-incarnate, and in the other, to be the guardian of the divine Child and His Blessed Mother, have the divine will in regard to the details of the trust committed to them, imparted to them in vision and in dream. So far from such vision and dream suggesting to us "a mythical element" in the Gospel narratives, they rather confirm our faith in that they harmonize with our instinctive conclusions as to what would be natural under the circumstances. We are prepared to be told that at this crisis in the Holy Child's life "the angel of the Lord appeareth to Joseph in a dream, saying, Arise, and take the young child and his mother, and flee into Egypt, and be thou there until I bring thee word; for Herod will seek the young child to destroy him. When he arose, he took the young child and his mother by night, and departed into Egypt."
Thus early in our Lord's life is the element of tragedy introduced. The Incarnation of God stirs the diabolic powers, the rulers of "this darkness" to excited activity. The companion picture of the Nativity, of the Holy Child lying in Mary's arms, of the wondering shepherds, of the Magi from a far country,--the shadow of all this idyllic beauty is the massacre of the Innocents, the wailing of Rachel for her children. It is, as it were, the opening of a new stage in the world-old conflict where the powers of evil appear to have the advantage and can show the bodies of murdered infants as the trophies of their victory.
But are we to think of the death of a child as a disaster? Has any actual victory redounded to the Prince of Power of the Air? One understands of course the grief and sense of loss that attends the death of any child, the breaking of the dreams which had gathered about its future. What the father and the mother dreamed over the cradle and planned for the future does not come to pass--all that is true. But in a consideration of the broader interests involved, does not the death of a baby have a meaning far deeper than a disappointment of hopes and dreams? It is true, is it not? that the coming of the child brought enrichment into the life of its parents? There was a new love born for this one child which is not the common property of all the children of the family, but is the peculiar possession of this child and its parents. Life--the life of the parents--is better and nobler by virtue of this love. They understand this, because when they stand by the side of the child's coffin they never feel that it had been better that this child had not come into existence. And more than that: as they commit this fragile body to the grave they know that there is no real sense in which they can say that they have lost this child. Rather, the child is a perpetual treasure, for the moment contemplated through tears, but presently to be thought of with unclouded joy. It is so wonderful a thing to think of this pure soul caught back to God; to think of it growing to spiritual maturity in God's very presence; to think of it following the Lamb withersoever He goeth. Yes: to think of it also as our child still, with our love in its heart, knowing that it has a father and a mother on earth, and, that, just because of its early death, it can be to them, what otherwise they would have been to it--the guard and helper of their Jives. In God's presence are the souls of children as perpetual intercessors for those whom they have left on earth; and they may well rejoice before God in that what appeared the tragedy of their death was in fact a recall from the field of battle before the testing of their life was made. We wept as over an irreparable loss,
While into nothingness crept back a hostOf shadows unexplored, of sins unsinned.
The artists have imagined the souls of those who first died for Jesus attending Him on the way to Egypt as a celestial guard. In any case we are certain that the angels who watched about Him so closely all His life were with the Holy Family as they set out upon the way of exile. It would have been a wearisome march but that Jesus was there. His presence lightened all the toils of the desert way. Egypt, their place of refuge, would not have seemed to them what it seems to us, a land of wonder, of marvellous creations of human skill and intelligence, but a place of banishment from all that was dear, from the ties of home and religion. The religion which lay wrapped in the Holy Child was to break down barriers and hindrances to the worship of God; but the time was not yet. For them still the Holy Land, Jerusalem, the Temple, were the place of God's manifestation, and all else the dwelling place of idols. They must have shuddered in abhorrence at those strange forms of gods which rose about them on every hand. We cannot ourselves fail to draw the contrast between the statues which filled the Egyptian sanctuaries and before which all Egypt, rich and poor, mighty and humble, prostrated themselves, and this Child sleeping on Mary's breast. The imagination of the Christian community later caught this contrast and embodied it in the legend that when Jesus crossed the border of Egypt, all the idols of the land of Egypt fell down.
We cannot follow the thought of the Blessed Mother through these strange scenes and the experiences of these days. No doubt in the Jewish communities already flourishing in Egypt there would be welcome and the means of livelihood. But there would be perplexing questions to one whose habit it was to keep all things which concerned her strange Child hidden in her heart, the subject of constant meditation. Why, after the divine action which had been so constant from His conception to His birth, and in the circumstances which attended His birth, this reversal, this defeat and flight? Why after Bethlehem, Egypt? Why after Gabriel, Herod?
It brings us back again to the primary fact that the Incarnation is essentially a stage in a battle, and that the nature of God's battles is such that He constantly appears to lose them. He "goes forth as a giant to run His course"; but the eyes of man cannot see the giant--they see only a Babe laid in a manger. We are tricked by our notion of what is powerful.
"They all were looking for a kingTo slay their foes and lift them high;Thou cam'st, a little baby thingThat made a woman cry."
The battle presents itself to us as a demand that we choose, that we take sides. The demand of Christ is that we associate ourselves with Him, or that we define our position as on the other side. "The friendship of the world is enmity with God" is a saying that is true when reversed: The friendship of God is enmity with the world. An open disclosure of the friendship of God sets all the powers of the world against us. This may be uncomfortable; but there does not appear to be any way of avoiding the opposition.
Our Lord, in His Incarnation, not only stripped Himself of His glory, took the servant form, and in doing so deliberately deprived Himself of certain means which would have been vastly influential in dealing with men, but He also declined, in assuming human nature, to assume it under conditions which would have conferred upon Him any adventitious advantage in the prosecution of His work. He would display to men neither divine nor human glory: He would have no aid from power or position, from wealth or learning. He undertook His work in the strength of a pure humanity united with God. He declined all else. And He found that almost the first event of His life was to be driven into exile.
And they who are associated with Him necessarily share His fortunes. Unless they will abandon the Child, Mary and Joseph must set out on the desert way. They had no doubt much to learn; but what is important is not the size or amount of what we learn, but the learning of it. When we are called, as they were, to leave all for Christ, it often turns out as hard, oftentimes harder, to leave property as riches; and the reason is that what we ultimately are leaving is neither poverty nor riches, but self: and self to us is always a "great possession."
Therein, I suppose, lies the solution of the problem of the relation of property and Christianity in the common life. Idleness is sin; every one is bound to some useful labour, no matter what his material resources may be. And if we work for our living, if our labour is to be such as will support us, then there at once arises the problem of possessions. Useful, steady labour will ordinarily produce more than "food and raiment." Under present social arrangments accumulated property is handed on to heirs. A man naturally wants to make some provision for his family. Or he finds himself in possession of considerable wealth and the impulse is to spend in luxuries of one sort or another,--modern invention has put endless means of ministering to physical or aesthetic comfort within his reach. He can have a motor car, a country house, an expensive library; he can have beautiful works of art. And then he is confronted with the picture of the Holy Family which can never have lived much beyond the poverty line. He realises the nature of our Lord's life of poverty and ministry. And though the plain man may not feel that he can go very far in imitating this life, he does feel that there is a splendour of achievement in those who take our Lord at His word and sell all to follow Him.
But the literal abandonment of life to the ideal of poverty is clearly not what our Lord contemplated for the universal practice of His followers. He nowhere indicates that all gainful labour is to be abandoned, or that having gained enough for food and raiment we are to idle thereafter, or even give ourselves to some ungainful work. The Kingdom of heaven does not appear to be society organised on the lines of socialism or otherwise. Our Lord contemplated life going on as it is, only governed by a new set of motives. It has as the result of the acceptance of the Gospel a new Orientation; and as a result of that it will view "possessions" in a new way. The acceptance of the Gospel means the self surrendered utterly to the will of God, and all that self possesses held at the disposal of that will. We may expect that God's will for us will be manifested in the events of life and its opportunities, and we shall hold ourselves alert and ready to embrace that will. It may be that the call will come to sell all, and we need to beware lest the thoroughness of the demand terrify us into the repudiation of our Lord's service; lest the thought of the sacrificed possessions send us away sorrowing. Ordinarily the call is less searching than that; or perhaps the mercy of God spares us from demands that would be beyond our strength. In any case, the truly consecrated self will regard luxury as a dangerous thing, replete with entanglements of all kinds, that it were well to avoid at the expense of any sacrifice. One does well to hold "possessions" in a very loose grip, lest the hold be reversed, and we become their servants rather than they ours. And it is well to emphasise again that the mere size of possessions is of small importance. There is a not very rational tendency to think of this as being a matter of millions, for the man of moderate income to think that there is no problem for him. The problem is as pressing for him as for any man. His minimum of comfort may be as tightly grasped as the other man's maximum. The only solution of the problem will be found in the converted self. Those who have really given themselves to God hold all things at His disposal. They are not thinking how they can indulge self but how they can glorify God.
Egypt to many will stand for another sort of abandonment which much perplexes the immature Christian: that is, the sort of isolation in which the new Christian is quite likely to find himself when first he attempts to put Christian principles into practice. We imagine one brought up in the ordinary mixed circles of society, where there are unbelievers and lax Christians mingled together, and where there are no principles firmly enough held to interfere with any sort of enjoyment of life which offers. Such an one--a young woman, let us suppose--in the Providence of God becomes converted to our Lord, and comes to see that the lax and indifferent Christian life she had been leading was a mere mockery of Christian living. Speedily does she find when she attempts to put into action the principles of living which she now understands to be the meaning of the Gospel that a breach of sympathy has been opened between her and her accustomed companions; that many things which she was accustomed to do in their society and which made for their common fund of amusement are no longer possible to her. The careless talk, the shameless dress, the gambling, the drinking, the Sunday amusements--such things as these she has thrown over; and she finds that with them she has thrown over the basis of intimacy with her usual companions. It is not that they are antagonistic but simply that their points of contact have ceased to exist. Her own inhibitions exclude her automatically from most of the activities of her social circle. She finds herself much alone. Her friends are sorry for her and think her foolish and try to win her back, but it is clear to her that she can only go back by going back from Christ.
This is the common case of the young whether boy or girl to-day, and the practical question is, Can they endure the isolation? It is easy to say: Let them make Christian friends; but that is not always practical, especially in the present state of the Church when there is no cohesion among its members, no true sense of constituting a Brotherhood, of being members of the same Body. We have to admit that the attempt to hold a high standard usually ends in failure, at least the practical failure of a weak compromise. But there are characters that are strong enough to face the isolation and to readjust life on the basis of the new principles and to mould it in accord with the new ideals. The period of this readjustment is one of severe testing of one's grasp on principles and one's strength of purpose. But the battle once fought out we attain a new kind of freedom and expansion of life. We look back with some amusement at the old life and the things that fascinated us in the days of our spiritual unconsciousness much as we look back at the games that amused us in our childish hours. The desert of Egypt that we entered with trepidation and fearful hearts turns out not to be so dreadful as we imagined, and indeed the flowers spring up under our feet as we resolutely tread the desert way.
These trials must be the daily experience of those who attempt to put their religion into practice, and these perplexities must assail them so long as the Christian community continues to show its present social incompetence; so long, that is, as we attempt to make the basis of our social action something other than the principles of the spiritual life. A Christian society, one would naturally think, would spring out of the possession of Christian ideals; and doubtless it would if these ideals were really dominant in life, and not a sort of ornament applied to it. Any social circle contains men and women of various degrees of intellectual development and of varying degrees of experience of life; what holds them together is the pursuit of common objects, the objects that we sum up as amusement. Now the Christians in a community certainly have a common object, the cultivation of the spiritual life through the supernatural means offered by the Church of God. One would think that this object would have a more constraining power than the attractions of motoring or golf; but in fact we know that this is not so save in individual cases. There is not, that is to say, anywhere visible a Christian community which is wrought into a unity by the solidifying forces of its professed ideals. Those very people whose paths converge week by week until they meet at this altar, as they leave the altar, follow diverging paths and live in isolation for the rest of their time.
One of the constant problems of the Church is that of the loss of those who have for a time been associated with it--of those who have for a time seemed to recognise their duty to God, and their privileges as members of His Son. They drift away into the world. We pray and meditate and worry over this and try to invent some machinery which will overcome it. But it cannot be overcome by machinery, especially by the sort of machinery which consists in transferring the amusements that people find in the world bodily into the Church itself. It cannot and will not be overcome until a Christian society has been created which is bound together by the interests of the Kingdom of God, and in which those interests are so predominant as to throw into the shade and practically annihilate other interests. And especially must such spiritual interests be strong enough to break down all social barriers so that the cultured and refined can find a common ground with the uneducated and socially untrained in the spiritual privileges that they share in common. When the banker can talk with his chauffeur of their common experience in prayer, and the banker's wife and her cook can confer on their mutual difficulties in making a meditation, then we shall have got within sight of a Christian society; but at present, while these have no spiritual contact, it is not within sight. The primitive Christian community in Jerusalem made the attempt at having all things in common. Their mistake seems to have been that they, like other and more modern people, by "all things" understood money. You cannot build any society which is worth the name on money, a Church least of all. It is unimportant whether a man is rich or poor; what is important is his spiritual accomplishment: and it is common spiritual aims and accomplishments which should make up the "all things" which possessed in common will form the basis of an enduring unity. But not until accomplishment becomes the supreme interest of life can we expect to get out of the impasse in which we at present find ourselves; in which, that is, the person can be converted to Christianity and enter into union with God in Christ and become a citizen of the Kingdom of Heaven, and wake to find himself isolated from his old circle by his profession of new principles; but not, by his new principles, truly united to his fellow citizens in the Kingdom of God! One is tempted to write, What a comedy; but before one can do so, realises that it is in fact a tragedy!