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 be _infra 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 cure 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 cure
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 Caesars, 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.
BILLING AND SONS, LTD., PRINTERS, GUILDFORD, ENGLAND.
* * * * * * * *
*OUR VILLA IN ITALY*
*BY JOSEPH LUCAS*
_New and Revised Edition. With 25 full-page
Illustrations. Cloth, 5s. net._
"Full of the lure of Florence and, indeed, of all Italy.... Mr. Lucas
has written a book which will delight every English lover of that
country."--_The Guardian_.
"Mr. Lucas has much to tell us of the Italian people, and the
descriptions of his neighbours and servants bring them very vividly
before us."--_The Outlook_.
"The author has a good knowledge of Italian furniture, which is rare
even among Italians.... His account of his search for rare 'cassoni' and
Tuscan sideboards, chests of drawers ('cassettoni') and chairs is
delightful; and the photographs of his finds, which include a noble
'cassapanca' and two very fine tables, are among the most interesting
features of his book."--_The Athenaeum_.