IV

The invisible church is to be to us a source of insight. This means

that we must enter into some sort of communion with the faithful if we

are to enjoy the fruits of their insight. And, apart from one's own

life of loyal service itself, the principal means of grace--that is,

the principal means of attaining instruction in the spirit of loyalty,

encouragement in its toils, solace in its sorrows, and power to endure

and to triumph--the principal means of grace, I say, which is open to

any man lies in such communion with the faithful and with the unity of

the spirit which they express in their lives. It is natural that we

should begin this process of communion through direct personal

relations with the fellow-servants of our own special cause. Hence

whatever is usually said by those who belong to any section of the

visible church regarding the spiritual advantages which follow from

entering the communion of their own body may be accepted, from our

present point of view, as having whatever truth the devotion and the

religious life of any one body of faithful servants of the unity of

the spirit may give {292} to such statements when applied precisely to

their own members. But to us all alike the voice of the invisible

church speaks--it sustains us all alike by its counsels, not merely in

so far as our own personal cause and our brethren of that service are

known to us, but in so far as we are ready to understand the loyal

life, and to be inspired by it, even when those who exemplify its

intents and its values are far from us in their type of experience and

in the manner of their service.

You remember the rule of loyalty: "So serve your cause that if

possible through your service everybody whom you influence shall be

rendered a more devoted servant of his own cause, and thereby of the

cause of causes--the unity of all the loyal." Now the rule for using

the invisible church as a source of insight is this: "So be prepared

to interpret, and sympathetically to comprehend, the causes and the

service of other men, that whoever serves the cause of causes, the

unity of all the loyal, may even thereby tend to help you in your

personal service of your own special cause." To cultivate the

comprehension and the reverence for loyalty, however, and wherever

loyalty may be found, is to prepare yourself for a fitting communion

with the invisible church.

And in such communion I find the crowning source of religious insight.

What I say is wholly consistent then with the recognition of the

preciousness of the visible church to its members. Once more, {293}

however, I point out the fact that the visible church is as precious

as it is because it is indeed devoted to the unity of the spirit, that

is, because it is a part and an organ of the invisible church.

V

I cannot close this extremely imperfect sketch of our crowning source

of insight without applying to our present doctrine of the invisible

church, the eternally true teaching of St. Paul regarding spiritual

gifts.

As Paul's Corinthians, in their little community, faced the problem of

the diversity of the gifts and powers whereby their various members

undertook to serve the common cause--as this diversity of gifts tended

from the outset to doctrinal differences of opinion, as the

differences threatened to confuse loyalty by bringing brethren into

conflict--even so, but with immeasurably vaster complications, the

whole religious world, the invisible community of the loyal, has

always faced, and still faces, a diversity of powers and of forms of

insight, a diversity due to the endlessly various temperaments,

capacities and sorts and conditions of men. The Corinthian church, as

Paul sketched its situation, was a miniature of religious humanity.

All the ways that the loyal follow lead upward to the realm of the

spirit, where reason is at once the overarching heaven and the

all-vitalising devotion which binds {294} every loyal individual to

the master of life. But in our universe the one demands the many. The

infinite becomes incarnate through the finite. The paths that lead the

loyal to the knowledge of the eternal pass for our vision, with

manifold crossings and with perplexing wanderings, through the

wilderness of this present world. The divine life is won through

suffering. And religious history is a tale of suffering--of mutual

misunderstanding amongst brethren who have from moment to moment been

able to remember God only by narrowly misreading the hearts of their

brethren. The diversity of spiritual gifts has developed, in religious

history, an endless war of factions. The invisible church has

frequently come to consciousness in the form of sects that say: "Ours

alone is the true spiritual gift. Through our triumph alone is the

world to be saved. Man will reach salvation only when our own

Jerusalem is the universally recognised holy city."

Now it is useless to reduce the many to the one merely by wiping out

the many. It is useless to make some new sect whose creed shall be

that there are to be no sects. _The unity of the visible church, under

any one creed, or with any one settled system of religious practices,

is an unattainable and undesirable ideal._ The varieties of religious

experience in James's sense of that term are endless. The diversity of

gifts is as great as is the diversity of strong and loyal

personalities. What St. Paul saw, in the miniature case presented to

him by the {295} Corinthian church, was that all the real gifts, and

all the consequently inevitable differences of approach to the

religious problems, and all the differences of individual religious

insight were necessary to a wealthy religious life, and might serve

the unity of the spirit, if only they were conceived and used subject

to the spiritual gift which he defined as Charity.

Now the Pauline Charity is simply _that_ form of loyalty which should

characterise a company of brethren who already have recognised their

brotherhood, who consciously know that their cause is one and that the

spirit which they serve is one. For such brethren, loyalty naturally

takes the form of a self-surrender that need not seek its own, or

assert itself vehemently, because the visible unity of the community

in question is already acknowledged by all the faithful present, so

that each intends to edify, not himself alone, but his brethren, and

also intends not to convert his brother to a new faith, but to

establish him in a faith already recognised by the community. Yet

since the Corinthians, warring over their diversity of gifts, had come

to lose sight of the common spirit, Paul simply recalls them to their

flag, by his poem of charity, which is also a technically true

statement of how the principle of loyalty applies to a brotherhood

fully conscious of its common aim.

But the very intimacy of the Pauline picture of charity makes it hard

to apply this account of the {296} loyalty that should reign within a

religious family to the problems of a world where faith does not

understand faith, where the contrasts of opinion seem to the men in

question to exclude community of the spirit, where the fighting blood

even of saintly souls is stirred by persecutions or heated by a hatred

of seemingly false creeds. And Paul himself could not speak in the

language of charity, either when he referred to those whom he called

"false brethren" or characterised the Hellenic-Roman spiritual world

to whose thought and spirit he owed so much. As the Corinthians,

warring over the spiritual gifts, were a miniature representation of

the motives that have led to religious wars, so St. Paul's own failure

to speak with charity as soon as certain matters of controversy arose

in his mind, shows in miniature the difficulty that the visible

church, in all its forms, has had to unite loyal strenuousness of

devotion to the truth that one sees with tolerance for the faiths

whose meaning one cannot understand.

And yet, what Paul said about charity must be universalised if it is

true. When we universalise the Pauline Charity, it becomes once more

the loyalty that, as a fact, is now justified in seeking her loyal

own; but that still, like charity, rejoices in the truth. Such loyalty

loves loyalty even when race or creed distinctions make it hard or

impossible for us to feel fond of the persons and practices and

opinions whereby our more distant brethren {297} embody their

spiritual gifts. Such loyalty is tolerant. Tolerance is what charity

becomes when we have to deal with those whose special cause we just

now cannot understand. Loyalty is tolerant, not as if truth were

indifferent, or as if there were no contrast between worldliness and

spirituality, but is tolerant precisely in so far as the best service

of loyalty and of religion and of the unity of the spirit consists in

helping our brethren not to our own, but to _their_ own. _Such loyalty

implies genuine faith in the abiding and supreme unity of the spirit._

Only by thus universalising the doctrine which Paul preached to the

Corinthians can we be prepared to use to the full this crowning source

of insight--the doctrine, the example, the life, the inspiration,

which is embodied in the countless forms and expressions of the

invisible church.

The work of the invisible church--it is just that work to which all

these lectures have been directing your attention. The sources of

insight are themselves the working of its spirit in our spirits.

If I have done anything (however unworthy) to open the minds of any of

you to these workings, my fragmentary efforts will not have been in

vain. I have no authority to determine your own insight. Seek insight

where it is to be found.