of other persons. We shall thank God for every sign of the Christian
virtues and graces shown in other persons who have not been brought to
baptism; we may believe that they are members of the Church in heaven;
but still, I would submit, we must say for all purposes of practical
working, that the Church on earth is the fellowship of the baptized.
II.--That fellowship exists in fragments and sections. What is the
peculiar mark of our fragment? This is authoritatively defined for us
in the Lambeth Quadrilateral,[#] but our special character may be
expressed briefly by saying that we are trustees for the Catholic order,
who yet reject what seem to us the accretions which the Church of Rome
upholds.
[#] (_a_) The Holy Scriptures of the Old and New Testaments. as
"containing all things necessary to Salvation," and as being the rule
and ultimate standard of faith.
(_b_) The Apostles' Creed, as the Baptismal Symbol; and the Nicene
Creed, as the sufficient statement of the Christian faith.
(_c_) The two Sacraments ordained by Christ Himself--Baptism and the
Supper of the Lord--ministered with unfailing use of Christ's words of
institution, and of the elements ordained by Him.
(_d_) The Historic Episcopate, locally adapted in the methods of its
administration to the varying needs of the nations and peoples called of
God into the Unity of His Church.
Now some such order as that which we maintain, is necessary, as it seems
to me, to the fulfilment of the duty of charity. I hope I am not unfair
to those who are separated from us, and are influenced by the ideals of
Puritanism; but it has seemed to me that their discipline is not always
charitable. Indeed, a Church must either excommunicate freely or else
possess a recognised order if it is to avoid becoming indistinguishable
from "the world" about it; if it is to be both holy and a friend of
sinners it must have an order. The order which we maintain is simply
that which has come down to us as the actual order of historic
Christendom.
III.--Thirdly, I would submit that the Body with its orders is a living
whole, and that it is illegitimate to discuss such a question as the
"validity" of Orders out of all relation to the historic life of the
Church. The question of Orders must be considered in relation to the
whole life of the Body of which they are an organic part.[#]
[#] See Appendix IV. _On Orders and Catholicity_.
Thus, if we take the famous Quadrilateral as our starting point, a body
which stands by the Canonical Scriptures, the Creeds and the two great
Sacraments, though not upholding the episcopal succession, is closer to
the ideal than one which is indifferent to any of these three as well as
to the succession; it has maintained many of the (ex hypothesi)
essential features of a true Church; it approximates to the complete
requirement. Moreover, within the field of the problem of Orders, there
are degrees of approximation; it is generally considered that an
agreement between the Anglican and Presbyterian communions could be far
more easily reached than between the Anglican and some other Protestant
bodies. We must, therefore, avoid two kindred errors. One is to set up
the abrupt dilemma--"Either a true Church or not," and the other is to
regard the possession of "valid" Orders as being the one and only
condition of the Catholicity of the body possessing them.
The Church Visible cannot be identical with the Church Invisible; it is
its sacrament. And the question resolves itself into one concerning the
degree of adequacy with which it expresses, _and thereby maintains
through the ages_, the fulness of the truth.
Our actual divisions in the West date from the Reformation. No one
disputes that the Church just before that time was corrupt to a horrible
degree. It is possible to hold that the corruption could have been
purged away without schism if the reformers had been wholly free from
pride and impatience; I see no means of reaching a sound judgment on
such a point; but at least it would seem that the guilt for the great
division was as much in Catholics as in Protestants. In so far as there
really was necessity of choosing between moral purity with schism on the
one hand, and organic unity with sales of indulgences and the like on
the other, there can be no doubt which the whole teaching of Christ
required His followers to choose. "I will have mercy and not
sacrifice"; "the Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath"; yet
the Sabbath and the sacrifice were of Divine appointment.
If then a fragment of the Church, confronted as it believes, with such a
choice, breaks off and organises itself afresh, intending to maintain in
purity all the Church's life and means of grace, I cannot assert that it
is for all its generations deprived of Christ's sacramental presence.
But assuredly the loss of the continuous order which so impressively
symbolises the Divine origin of the Church and of its Sacraments tends
to undermine the intention to preserve the whole truth and to obscure
belief in it. For Orders, as we understand them, are the pledge of the
unity of the Church across all space and through all time, so that the
priest who celebrates, does so as the organ and instrument of the
universal Church, and the congregation at every Eucharist is not the few
persons gathered together in that building, but Angels and Archangels
and all the company of Heaven, with whom we join in prayer and worship.
IV.--Consonantly with this I would come to my fourth principle--that the
whole question of Orders and Sacraments must be considered in reference
to the Church's life through the ages, and not with direct reference to
the gift received by any individual at any given service.
How are we to secure (this is our problem) that from generation to
generation men shall continue to feel that in the service of the Holy
Communion Christ comes to them as by His own appointment, and they have
only to be ready to meet with Him; and that in meeting with Him they are
united with the whole Church in the Holy Communion, the Communion of
Saints? I believe that the continued recitation of the Creeds in our
own and other branches of the Church is the main safeguard, not only for
ourselves but also for those who do not say the Creeds, against that
combination of Pelagianism and Unitarianism to which men always tend to
drift; similarly I can conceive that, just because we uphold the full
conception of sacramental worship, others are enabled to receive
sacramental grace at their communions. It may be so; I know not. Of
course it cannot be received if it is not there; but even if it is
there, its full benefit will not be enjoyed except by those who believe
in its full power. Two men may stand opposite the same picture; both
see the same lines and colours, the accidents; but it may be that only
one sees the artistic reality or substance--the Beauty--while the other
is blind to it. But the man who finds it does not put it there; the
artist put it there; and if he had not done so no one could find it
there; so too the reality of the Sacrament is the work of God. But our
fruition of it depends on our faith, and even on the exact content of
our faith. Now I do not for a moment believe that that faith in the
full doctrine of sacramental grace can survive through the centuries, if
it is once separated from the whole order which expresses it. Therefore,
while I am not entitled to deny, as I am equally not concerned to
assert, that the members of other denominations at their communion
service receive the same gift that we do; still I say that as trustees
for the Catholic order, and considering the matter in the light of the
centuries, we have no right to sacrifice any of those means by which
this full doctrine has been given to us, and by which perhaps it has
been also preserved for them.
V.--Fifthly, I would suggest that in any scheme for practical reunion no
man must be required to repudiate his own spiritual ancestry.
After all, if the Church is the fellowship of the baptized, then our
brethren of the separation, as we sometimes call them, are members of
the Church; but they are not members of our branch of the Church; and
their faith is corporate and active in their membership of their own
bodies; consequently we are bound to hold that they and their bodies are
parts of the Catholic Church in this time of the division--the division
which is due to sin.
If it is true that it was largely, and perhaps mainly, the fault of the
medieval Church that the split became a necessity; if it is true that it
was partly, and perhaps mainly, the fault of the Church of England that
the Wesleyan movement (for example) ever broke off, because we refused
to make room for what was in its early stages most undoubtedly a
movement of the Spirit of God in the world, then we have no right to
condemn those who by reason of our sin, at least as much as their own,
are outside our fellowship; and we must recognise that, just as in St.
Paul's argument about the true Israel, blindness in part happened to
Israel, and so God used the Gentiles to provoke them to jealousy--so
blindness in part happened to Catholicism, and God is using the
Protestant bodies to provoke us to jealousy.
We must, I believe, maintain that our order is for us the only possible
order for the reunited Church. But order is not everything. The wall
of the Holy City is minute. When the time for reunion comes, we must
insist upon our own part of the truth in such a way as to avoid all
condemnation of other bodies for having been separated during this
time--at least, all condemnation which we do not pronounce quite equally
upon ourselves. What has happened in the divisions of the Church is a
severance from one another of elements which are every one of them
necessary to the healthy life of the Body. If one set of people could
only get dry food and no drink, and another set could only get drink and
no food, neither would be healthy. They would have to combine their
stores before health was possible. Catholics have preserved perhaps a
fuller sense of worship and of the gifts of God; Protestants have
perhaps a truer zeal for righteousness and a more intimate access to God
in prayer. Let us not judge the past; God will judge. But let us
recognise our need of one another and accept from each other the
positive truth and life which God has given to either.
VI.--Meanwhile, in the time of the division, different bodies have
developed different types of religious life. There is a wealth of
spiritual activity in the world now such as it is difficult to imagine
under a rigidly united Church; but we can easily preserve that if we are
ready that there should be within the United Catholic Church different
Orders--an Order of St. George Fox for example, testifying to the great
ideal which Christ brought into the world, not as I think, and as I have
already explained, the right ideal to be followed by all men in all
sorts of circumstances, but undoubtedly the one method by which in the
end the work of God can be finally accomplished, and for testimony to
which I believe some men, and indeed the whole Society of Friends, are
even now called by God. Also there may well be an Order of St. John
Wesley, insisting more especially upon the need of individual
conversion, which the Church, as a vast organisation concerned with
world movements, is perpetually tempted to leave too much on one side.
These Orders can quite well govern themselves to a very large extent,
and order their worship in very many ways, just as is the case in the
Orders familiar in the medieval Church, and in the Church of Rome at
this time.
These are the principles which I would venture to submit. Probably not
one of them will win universal assent even in our own communion. But
amid all our amiable sentiments it is time for somebody to say something
definite, or as definite as the complexity of the problem allows. In
criticising and rejecting individual utterances we may at last reach a
corporate mind.
But let me add one particular warning about the way we go: for in my own
mind I am quite sure that the Communion is just the place where we need
to be divided until our unity is real. People say "How terrible to be
separated there." Yes, terrible indeed! It is the measure of the sin
of schism. But we must not try to escape the consequences of the sin
until we have got rid of the sin itself. I say nothing of the problem
of the mission field or of the possibility of exceptional occasions.[#]
But I am quite sure that in normal Church life, where all people have
access to their own services, intercommunion can only be disastrous, as
tending to obscure the need for real unity, and the difference between
the various excellences whose combination is to be desired.
[#] It must of course be recognised that the problem of intercommunion
in the mission field is of urgent practical importance. On the present
situation, the Archbishop of Canterbury's statement, _Kikuyu_.
But let us come back to what after all is the only true guarantee and
the only condition of reunion--the achievement of holiness; that
holiness needs, as we have seen, to be safeguarded, and the safeguarding
of it is peculiarly entrusted to us, the ministers of the Church. What
need then for personal dedication! For upon the degree in which we are
wholly given to our work depends in large measure the time when God will
reunite His Church.
We keep separate even from many right activities, but only in order to
keep pure that spirit by which we are to permeate the whole life of the
world, bringing it to bear, so far as we are able in our detachment,
upon every sort of problem, private or public--industrial, commercial,
political, international--till at last the whole world is governed by
that spirit, and there is no need for separation any more nor for any
special place of worship nor special order of religious ministers; for
then the world and the Church will be indistinguishable in the Holy City
of God, wherein is no temple, because the Lord God Almighty and the Lamb
are the temple of it.
*LECTURE V*
*THE CITIZENSHIP OF HEAVEN*
"Our citizenship is in heaven."--Philippians iii. 20.
"He that hath seen me hath seen the Father."--S. John xiv. 9.
We have considered in outline the functions of the State and of the
Church, the two great instruments of God for the furthering of His
kingdom. Let us now turn to consider, still in mere outline, for
nothing more is possible, the nature of that Kingdom itself.
There are very many ways in which the subject might be approached, but I
think that it will be most consonant with the general line of our
thought in these meditations that we should consider it as the home of
man's spirit, the fulfilment of his spiritual being. And to that end,
inasmuch as the Kingdom can only be known by living according to the
principles of its citizenship, and our present effort is by its very
nature intellectual only, we must try to reach it in thought as the goal
towards which the whole spiritual life of man is tending.
No life can be set forth in scientific terms. The moment it is analysed,
the vitalising power is gone. And even the poet, who has far more
chance than the logician of making us realise what the life signifies
for those who live it, is still speaking of it from outside. It is only
by life itself that we can truly know the Kingdom of God.
We find, all through the New Testament, a contrast drawn between earth
and heaven. And it is worth while to consider the logical principle of
that contrast, even though the result is somewhat dry and barren. The
place of careful analysis here is analogous to that which criticism
holds in relation to art. The critical analysis of a work of art will
never of itself enable us to appreciate it, if we are without the
cultivated artistic faculty; but it may enrich our appreciation. We may
thereby find more than we should otherwise have found of the elements
that are combined together to make up the total effect. And then in the
unity of the renewed experience we receive more enjoyment than we had
done before. So, too, the Kingdom of God, which for us is something
that we still hope to reach, and of which the foretaste that we have as
yet received is a very slight earnest of the glory that shall be
revealed, may be a goal more potent in its attraction to our wills, when
we have seen it as the fulfilment of the principles of our whole
spiritual life as these are discoverable in other departments and
activities.
The goods of this world, as we have already noticed, are such that the
more one has the less there is for others. The goods of heaven are of
such a kind that the more one has the more there is on that account for
others. So it is with the true virtues of the spiritual life, with love
and joy and peace, the fruits of the spirit. So it is too with other
excellences which belong to man as a spiritual being, and which are out
of the reach of our animal nature: loyalty, beauty and knowledge.
Now the principle of this whole spiritual life is precisely the
principle of unity, not as distinct from variety but as distinct either
from antagonism or transitoriness. The two things that distress the
soul of man are enmities, and the passing away of that which he loves.
It is by rising above these evils, which beset us in this earthly state,
that the satisfaction of the soul is found.
There are four main departments of the spiritual life which aspire in
this way to rise above the evils which beset our mortal state. They are
Science and Art and Morality and Religion. As we know them in our
experience, they are all of them due on the human side to a
dissatisfaction with our experience as we find it. The scientific man
is disturbed by the apparent chaos in his experience, and he sets out to
give order to it, and he is satisfied in so far as he discovers that all
the while it was not chaotic, as it seemed, but orderly. The artist is
craving for a beauty which, in his ordinary experience, he does not
find. He selects, he concentrates attention on certain aspects, to reach
a satisfaction which the world otherwise seems not to give. The man of
moral aspiration is dissatisfied with the world as he sees it, and he
sets himself therefore to alter both himself and it, that it may be
modelled more in accordance with the heart's desire. And the religious
man finds all of these sources of dissatisfaction working together
within his soul; he seeks, and in faith finds, that which gives him both
peace and power.
Let us then begin with what is in itself the least rich of these forms
of human activity, and consider how it is that Science reaches its
unity. Let us first recall that there are two forms of multiplicity or
division which we are seeking to overcome: that which arises from the
clash of various ideals or desires, the antagonism of man with man; and
that which arises from the changeableness of the world as we see it.
With regard to the latter, science does indeed reach real unities; but
they are unities which leave Time out of sight. Sometimes, no doubt, the
subject matter which is handled is itself non-temporal, but not in the
sense of being eternal. So, for example, geometry is entirely without
relation to time. There is no temporal sequence between the equality of
the sides and the equality of the angles in the isosceles triangle. But
where the subject studied is something that changes in Time, it remains
true that the aim of science is to reach an unchanging principle. So,
for example, the student of biology may be trying to discover the
unchanging principle which governs the successive variations of species.
But when he has found it he has not really mastered the transitoriness;
he has not in any way gathered up the past and dead into his present
experience; he has merely found the principle which applies to every
stage as that stage comes. He reaches some superiority to the
transitoriness of things, only by abstracting from Time altogether.
And, similarly, the unity between men which is produced by a common
absorption in such pursuits does not strike very deep. For a man's
temperament has nothing in the world to do with his scientific
conclusions, or at least ought not to have. In the ideal pursuit of
knowledge, all of the things that set men at variance count for nothing
whatever. Consequently the differences, just because they are ignored,
are not overcome, with the result that, as at the beginning of this war,
we may find professors of the various nations, who had been linked
together, as one might think, closely enough in the pursuit of
knowledge, hurling manifestoes at one another across their national
frontiers.
When we pass to the second of the great departments, a real progress may
be noted in just these points. For in the experience of the artist Time
is genuinely mastered. We get some illustration of this from the
absorption which marks the aesthetic contemplation of a picture or a
statue. For the time that we are really held by it, we forget about
time altogether. But the case is clearer with regard to those arts
which handle temporal processes--music and poetry. For it is the whole
point, let us say, of a drama, that it shall follow a certain
succession; it is vital to its significance that the scenes shall be in
that order and no other. If you have two plays, each in three acts, in
one of which the first act is cheerful in tone, and the second is
neutral, and the third depressing, while in the other the first act is
depressing, the second neutral, and the third cheerful, the total effect
of the two plays is not the average of the three acts in each case,
which would be neutral for both, but is in the one particularly
depressing, and in the other particularly cheering. For the play is
grasped as a whole. It makes a single impression, if it is a good play.
We know what it means--not indeed because we can state it in other
words, for it is the only expression of its own meaning; but it has a
definite significance for us. And the name of the play comes to stand
for that significance. This is especially noticeable in tragedy, where
the Greeks, with their sure instinct, chose a story whose plot is known
to the spectator in advance, so that we have throughout the play both
the impression of the entire story and the particular impression of each
scene as it comes and passes. It is significant that the Greeks did so
choose for tragedy stories whose plot was known, while their comedians
invented their own plots. And most will agree that we enjoy a great
play better when we have read it in advance, or when we have already
seen it on the stage before; because then we do reach something that may
serve perhaps as the nearest image that we can get for eternity--a grasp
of the whole stretch of time, realised in its successiveness and in the
meaning which that successiveness gives to it, and having the sense of
the whole throughout and seeing each moment, as it comes, in the light
not only of the past but of the future too.
On this side, then, art is able, for the moment at least, and with
regard to a period definitely limited by our capacities of
comprehension, to master Time and give us a unity which includes its
successiveness within it; so that the past, and even the future, are
gathered up into the real experience of the present, and we are not only
conscious of what is before our eyes, but are conscious of it as a part
of the whole to which it belongs.