personality of the man, so that he obeys out of love and devotion and
not from fear of penalty nor hope of reward, other than the reward of
realising the love of the Master, then surely it is in the true line of
development towards the perfected Christian civilisation if we demand
that these opportunities for the development of free personality shall
be afforded. No doubt it must be done with wisdom. Rough and ready
methods, however well-meant, might do far more harm than good, and leave
us in a situation even worse than that which we know. But the Church
has paid scarcely any attention to those things in England. It is very
difficult to persuade Church-people that, because they are followers of
Christ, and therefore might be assumed to recognise that they are
"members one of another" with all these others, they are therefore bound
(for example) in investing their money to find out the conditions under
which their dividends are going to be earned. In almost every
department of life we have left such things alone. Under the stress of
war, we have suddenly become acutely conscious of the drink evil. It
was there before; and we have been content that the great majority of
our fellow citizens should have no opportunity for gratifying those
instincts of social life and merriment, which are the birthright of all
God's children, except in places where the influence of alcohol was
supreme. We have been content with that. We have not thought it was our
duty to find a means of supplying them with other places of recreation
and amusement; we have saved our money. And then we have the
impertinent audacity to claim our own redemption by the blood of Christ.
One can go on with one evil after another in the same way. This is what
makes the Church weak. It is no sort of use for us to say that Christ
is the Redeemer of the world, and the Revealer of the way of life, if
with regard to just those evils which press most heavily on men we have
to say that for them He has unfortunately not supplied a remedy.
No doubt if these evils are to be dealt with on a large scale, the work
must be done by the State, for nothing else is adequate; and the Church
here has two main tasks. It is no part of the Church's task to advocate
general principles or particular maxims of economic science, though its
members, in their capacity of citizenship ought to be active in these
ways. The first task of the Church is to inspire the State, which after
all very largely consists of the same persons as itself, with the desire
to combat the evil; and the second is to counteract the one great
difficulty which the State experiences. When the State takes up such
work as this, there is one thing which we all fear: "Officialism." What
is "Officialism"? Simply lack of love; nothing else in the world. It
consists in treating people as "cases," according to rules and red tape,
instead of treating them as individuals; and the Church which must
inspire the State to want to deal with these things, must then supply
the agents through whom it may deal with them effectively, inspiring
them with the love of men which is the fruit and test of a true love of
God.
But beyond all this, the Church must be making demands far greater than
it has ever made upon man's spiritual nature and spiritual capacity, and
must then point to the organisation of our social life and say--"That
organisation, because and in so far as it deprives men of the full
growth of their spiritual nature, because and in so far as it prevents
them from taking the share which belongs to God's children in His
worship and the enjoyment of his gifts of nature and Grace, is proved to
be of the devil."
In our worship we find for the most part what we expect to find. There
may be gifts offered us, gifts from God, that we never receive because
we have not looked for them. It is in our intercourse with Christ that
we shall find the means of solving the horror of our social problem, if
we are expecting to find it; but we have not expected it. We have not
really believed that He is the Redeemer of the World; we have not looked
to Him for the redemption of Society. The State by itself, until the
Church comes to its help, can do something indeed, but something which
by itself is almost worthless.[#] It supplies the indispensable
foundation without which a spiritual structure cannot be built up; but,
if that building never comes, the foundation by itself is little more
than useless. To those whom the social order favours it offers real
liberty and life, but no inspiration; a perfect social order would offer
liberty to all, but still no inspiration. The State alone can never be
the house of many mansions wherein every soul is truly at home.
[#] It is to be observed that the State is by its very nature largely
limited to the regulation of those human relationships where men oppose
each other with rival claims; as soon as men rise to the reciprocity of
friendship the method of the State is inappropriate. People do not go
to law to determine whether either loves the other adequately.
*LECTURE IV*
*HOLINESS AND CATHOLICITY IN THE CHURCH*
"This is the law of the house: upon the top of the mountain the whole
limit thereof round about shall be most holy. Behold, this is the law of
the house."--Ezekiel xliii, 12.
"And I saw no temple therein: for the Lord God Almighty, and the Lamb,
are the temple thereof."--Revelation xxi, 22.
The Bible gives us two elaborately conceived pictures of the perfected
life of man. The first is that which occupies the closing chapters of
Ezekiel's prophecy; its leading feature is the immense separation which
is insisted upon between the Temple and the secular City. The Hill of
Zion has become a very high mountain; upon the top of it the Temple is
set, and there is a wide space, at least two miles, between it and the
City of Jerusalem, which has been moved away by that distance to the
south.
Indeed, if we take the description as intended to be complete, the City
seems to exist chiefly to provide a congregation for the Temple's
services, and the Prince only to offer representative worship on behalf
of His people. All attention is concentrated upon the place of the
worship of God, and the holiness which is to be characteristic of that
place. By thus keeping the Temple holy, through separating it from the
body of the City and its secular life, the Prophet attains no doubt the
end he has in view, but he also, of necessity, though probably
unintentionally, leaves the suggestion that the secular life itself
cannot be wholly consecrated.
In sharp contrast with this is St. John's picture in the Book of
Revelation; here there is no specific place of worship at all, for the
whole City is the Temple of God; more than that, the whole City is the
very Holy of Holies, for it is described as being a perfect cube, and
the Holy of Holies in Solomon's Temple was a perfect cube.
"And the city lieth four square, and the length thereof is as
great as the breadth: and he measured the city with the reed,
twelve thousand furlongs; the length and the breadth and the
height thereof are equal. And he measured the wall thereof, and
it was one hundred and forty and four cubits."[#]
[#] Rev. xxi, 16, 17.
The City thus corresponds in symbolic form with the Holy of Holies. It
is become the dwelling place of God. No special shrine is needed, no
place to which men draw apart, because their whole life is an act of
worship, and God dwells among them in their daily activities.
There is one feature about this Heavenly City, which is obscured through
the use of the old terms of measurement, for this cube is described as
being 1,500 _miles_ high, 1,500 _miles_ broad, and 1,500 _miles_ long;
but the wall which stands for defence against foes without and for the
containment and order of the life within, and indeed represents in
general the principle of organisation--the wall is only 216 _feet_ high;
so small a thing is order in comparison with the life which it
safeguards.
It is between those two poles, which are set for us as the extreme terms
in a process, that the Church must live its life. There is truth in
both of them.
We were considering in the last lecture justice and liberty, which are
the supreme achievements of the National State. Let us to-day consider
the Holiness and Catholicity, which are the supreme treasures of the
Church.
Holiness must come first, Holiness which means absolute conformity to
the will of God. Whatever obstacles there may be to overcome, whatever
seductions to avoid, the Church is to remain absolutely devoted to the
Divine Will. Only so can it be catholic or universal. It might for a
moment achieve an all-embracing unity by giving up everything that is
offensive to men, and gathering all within it under the glow of a
comfortable sentiment; but then its life would be gone, and after a
little while the men who had all become members of it would be just as
though they had not. Only a Church which is perfectly loyal to the Will
of God, can possibly be the home for all mankind.
But Holiness has always had two meanings--an outward and an inward, a
ceremonial and a moral. We shall agree, I suppose, in saying that the
outward and ceremonial is in itself of no consequence, and exists only
in order to preserve and make possible the inward and spiritual
conformity to God's Will; but for that purpose, as all human experience
has always shown, it is quite indispensable. We are made of bodies as
well as souls, and if our whole being is to be permeated, there must be
bodily expression of that which our souls enjoy or need. We must
worship with our bodies as well as with our souls. So St. Paul, after
all his emphasis upon the spirit as against dead works, begins his
practical exhortation with the words, "I beseech you, therefore,
brethren, by the mercies of God to present your bodies a living
sacrifice."[#] The physical and bodily expression is always necessary,
in this human life of ours, to the full efficacy and to the survival
through the ages of the spiritual, though this no doubt is alone of
ultimate consequence.
[#] Rom. xii, 1.
If the Church is to maintain its Holiness, it must of necessity be to
some extent separated from the world; it cannot mix as a Church in all
worldly activities. It cannot simply set itself out to permeate the
general life of men, maintaining nothing that is separate and apart for
itself. If it does that, it will simply be lost in the general life of
the world.
In the last resort our characters depend almost entirely upon the
influences that play upon them in our environment; the one place where
we have effective choice is in determining the influences to which we
will submit ourselves. If there is no place in our society, or in the
world, where men may count upon finding the power of God in purity, then
men will inevitably fail to rise above that sort of character, which
their worldly environment happens to be forming in them.
The Church then, precisely in order to do this work in the world, must
keep itself in some sense separate from the world; but the vast majority
of its members are people in the daily life of the world, pursuing their
avocations there; and it would plainly be wholly disastrous to require
that all Christian people, in virtue of their Christianity, should
withdraw themselves from the ordinary concerns of men.
There is, therefore, no means by which this separateness of the Church
can be achieved unless there are certain persons set apart to be
representatives of the Church, and of the Church only; and who, because
they are official representatives of the Church are thereby deprived of
the right to take part in many worldly activities, though these in
themselves are right enough.
It is not because they are more truly members of the Church than others,
nor because there is a different moral standard for clergy and laity,
but because in the whole life of the Church there are certain functions
which are incompatible with others, just as in the State a man cannot be
at the same time an advocate and a judge, or commander-in-chief and
ambassador.
Thus, for example, as it seems to me, one who is called to be a priest
of the Church, inevitably forfeits the right to take part in the
hurly-burly of party politics; partly because, in a world which consists
of many parties, he is responsible for bringing before men the claim of
God to which all the parties ought to bow; partly also because a man's
activities inevitably affect the quality of his own mind, and if we are
to be as it were repositories of the Eternal truths, if we are to have
ready for dispensation all the treasures which God commits to His
Church, we need a type of mind which cannot, at least by most men, be
maintained, if we are engaged in heated controversy and frequent debate.
Another example may be found in the question whether a priest should
serve as a combatant in his country's army. He is called to represent
the Church; and the Church is essentially, not accidentally,
international; it is not international merely as a scientific society
may be, in that it is not concerned with political frontiers and men of
all nations are welcome within it; but it is international in the sense
that it exists to bind the nations of the earth in one. The officer of
such a society may be as patriotic in his feeling as anyone else, but,
just because he is an official, for him to take positive action on one
side of the other weakens the Church's international position, and is,
therefore, a more serious act than it is in the case of the layman. Here
again there are not two standards, but there are diverse circumstances.
If the Church called on all its members to refuse to serve, the result
would be to interfere with the freedom of the State to act in its own
sphere; if it allows everyone to serve, it is deprived of its Catholic
witness just when that is most vitally needed. The only way of doing
justice to the legitimate claims of both nationalism and Catholicity, is
to differentiate between persons; and there is no practicable or even
sensible way of doing this except to make the Church's officers
responsible for the Catholic witness and its lay, or unofficial, members
for the national.
But does this not involve the danger of a priestly caste? Yes, no doubt
it does; but there are two ways in which we may avoid falling into that
danger. The first is perpetually to remember that men are called by God
to the different kinds of work which He has for them to do; and we shall
avoid unctuousness, which is no doubt what men most dread about a
priestly caste, if we keep it perpetually in our mind that we are not
personally holy because our calling is. We are entrusted with this
great charge. We have to fulfil it. It is our work for Him. But there
are those whom He calls to serve Him as politicians and as soldiers; if
they do their work as in His sight, and to His glory, they are serving
Him every bit as much as we are. All the work of all the kinds of men
is needed in the world, and it is only if we suppose that we are made
more holy because our calling is concerned with the specifically holy
things that we shall fall before that danger.
And the other safeguard, paradoxical as it may sound, is a very complete
specialised training. One of the reasons, I am quite sure, why lay
people often find us rather stilted and uncongenial is because we have
not secured a sufficient grasp upon what is our own special subject to
feel full liberty in conversation and to speak naturally. We are
perpetually wondering at what point we shall be suddenly compromising
that for which we are responsible. We tend to utter (and even to hold)
merely conventional opinions and to express ourselves only in the
stereotyped phrases, because we have not sufficient grasp of spiritual
and moral truth to trust ourselves in forming individual opinions, or in
finding our own language for expressing the opinions which we form.
Precisely in the degree in which we know our own work and have full
possession of what is entrusted to us, shall we obtain liberty and ease
of manner, and be in general behaviour just like other people, which is
what we ought most to desire.
Still it is in the person of its priests that the Church must maintain
that outward holiness, that separation from the world, which alone makes
possible a concentration upon things divine; and without this
concentration it can never become a catholic or universal body.
"Universal," here does not, of course, mean all-inclusive. There are
those who definitely and deliberately reject the claim of Christ, and
those have never been submitted in any way to His influence. The
unbaptized heathen are not members of the Catholic Church; and if they
refuse the Gospel when it comes, they remain outside. Moreover, as we
have seen, there is possible a vicious as well as a holy catholicity.
There is nothing so seductive as the temptation to suppose that doctrine
which evokes a response is on that account true, or particularly to be
emphasised. Sometimes people dislike the truth. There are people who
are alienated by it; and the attractiveness of our gospel to people,
irrespective of their frame of mind, is no evidence of its divinity.
There is a picture in the Old Testament where Moses the Prophet is apart
upon the mountain top, communing with God, while at the foot of the
mountain, Aaron, the official priest, is ministering to the people the
kind of religion they like. He was encouraging them, as the Psalmist
satirically says, to worship: "the similitude of the calf that eateth
hay." There was nothing very dignified about it. But it was what the
people liked; and the response to his ministrations was immediate and
immense. Our task is to lay hold, so far as we may in our infinite
feebleness, of the truth that was given to the world in Christ in all
its sternness as well as its love--or rather in that sternness which is
an essential part of its love; and this is what we must present to men.
Again, it is not in proportion to their virtue in the ordinary moral
sense that men are drawn to the Church; it is in proportion to their
conscious need of God. It is perhaps worth while just now especially to
emphasise the peril of a faithless virtue, and the depth of error
involved in any attempt to take for the basis of a Church "the religion
of all good men." What will happen to a man who sets his effort upon
the building up of his whole character according to an ethical ideal?
One of two things. Either he may in part succeed, perhaps as much as he
himself desires to succeed, and then he may become self-satisfied and a
Pharisee; or else he will find himself either failing altogether, or,
having succeeded in part, incapable of carrying the success to its full
completion, and not knowing where to find the power that will take him
further; and so he ends in despair.
No, the appeal of the Church, as universal, is simply that it has within
it that which answers the real and deepest need of every human being.
There everyone will find his home, when once he has found his need of
God, if indeed the Church is holy.
And this is also its distinction from the sects; for it endeavours to
uphold the entire body of the truth, every particle of it that may be of
service to anyone. I suppose there are very few of us to whom the whole
of the Creed is a living reality. We may believe it all, but what we
live by is usually a small part of it, and it is a different part with
different persons. The essence of sectarianism, as I understand it, is
the gathering together of those people who live by the same part of the
Creed, in order that, like mingling with like, they may develop a great
intensity and fervour of devotion. For a moment, indeed, they may be
far more effective than the great body of the Church, and yet they
cannot become universal. There is something lacking from what they
uphold, which someone needs.[#] The aim of the Church is to be
universal here also, and to uphold the entire body of the truth,
presenting it in its entirety, even though the priest who is called upon
to fulfil that office of presenting it to the people may himself be
actually living by the slenderest portion of it. No doubt we shall
present most forcibly that part of the whole truth which is most real to
ourselves; and for that reason, if no other, we ought to try our utmost
to gain a personal apprehension of the whole. But men's spiritual
diseases are of many kinds, and all the healing truths must be offered
by the Church in which all men are to find life.
[#] This is a description of Sectarianism, not of any particular
Denomination. We are all infected with the sectarian spirit. In many
respects Rome is far more sectarian than the great Presbyterian bodies
in Scotland. With all its faults I sincerely believe that the Anglican
Communion is, in spirit, more of a Church and less of a sect than any
other body. But then it contains several sects within itself, both
"High," "Broad," and "Low."
The truth which it thus presents, the Church believes to be the gift of
God. This above all is the idea which it tries to safeguard by the
outward signs of regular orders and sacraments.
Our belief about the communion service is that there Christ comes to us
just as once the eternal Word, which was present with all His creation,
none the less came in full manifestation under the limitations of time
and space at a particular moment and in a particular country. So in the
communion the Divine presence which fills the whole world ("Heaven and
earth are full of His glory," as we say in the service itself) is
offered to us, and draws near to us; and that not because of any virtue
in us; it was while we were yet sinners that Christ came and died; it is
while we are yet sinners that Christ offers Himself to us; and it is as
guarding against any conception that we can determine how He shall come,
or when and where, and that we can, as it were, manufacture His presence
in our own way, that the Church maintains with the utmost emphasis the
order that is necessary for that service.
It is to preserve the conception of spiritual life as a gift of God, and
of the Church as the society which recognises and receives it as such a
gift, in distinction from a mutual benefit society organised for the
edification of its own members, that the Church insists upon the due
order of its administration; and it is through concentration upon this
idea of holiness, and all that it ought to mean in our personal lives,
that we can make our greatest contribution towards bringing into
existence again a real Catholic Church, a Church which shall genuinely
include all the persons who believe in Christ in one order and
fellowship. The first and indispensable condition of re-union is fuller
dedication to the will of God in Christ. We shall be united to one
another when we are all truly united to Him.
But, if that work is to be accomplished, we shall also need wisdom, in
order rightly to counteract the effects alike of folly and of sin in the
past history of the Church; and here every man must be willing to make
what suggestions he can, merely submitting them for acceptance or
rejection by the whole body of the Church; because unless people are
prepared to speak of the problem as they see it, leaving the final
judgment to be formed by the body of which they are members, there is no
hope of our making any progress at all.
I will therefore, venture to suggest to you six principles, upon which,
as my vision is at present, I think we might come near to agreement
among ourselves; and if we should agree upon them, then we could offer
these or whatever modifications of these the Church thinks fit, to those
bodies which are at present in separation from us.
I.--First, what do we mean by the Church? Ideally and in its eternal
reality it is the Body and Bride of Christ, the instrument of His will
and the object of His love, worthy as both. But in the process of time
and upon the stage of this world, what are we going to mean by it, and
who are we going to account its members? When people begin to think of
this question, they always start with various enthusiastic schemes. The
members of the Church are the people who have faith, or the people who
are conscious of the need of pardon, and the like; but all of this
breaks down because you can never tell who these people are. We must
have some perfectly plain outward sign if the Church is to be an
operative agency in this world; and you will find, I think, that there
is none which you can reach except that it is the fellowship of the
baptized. Baptism is the Lord's own appointed way by which men should
be received in the fellowship of His disciples. We must take that as our
basis.