the reaction of the individual on the society which is to keep the
common tradition pure and unnarrowed. The Church has in Holy Scripture
the highest expression of the mind of Christ. The familiarity of all
its members with this flawless and catholic image is to ward off in
each generation that tendency to deteriorate and to become
materialised which belongs to all 'traditions.' The individual
illumination is thus to react as a purifying force upon the common
mind of the Christian society. The individual Christian is to pay the
debt of his education, by himself 'testing all things and holding fast
that which is good.' Specially gifted individuals from time to time
will be needed to effect more or less sudden 'reversions to type,' to
the undying type of apostolic teaching[275]. But such a true reformer
is quite distinct in idea from the heretic. He reforms; he does not
innovate. His note is to restore; not to reject. And the absence of
necessity for fundamental rejection comes from this simple fact, that
the Christian Creed is rational and true. If any man comes to us and
says that he has studied and assimilated the Christian Creed with all
the care and reverence in his ability, and has rejected it because he
finds it irrational and false, we cannot complain of him[276]. We
cannot ask him to accept it though he thinks it false. We do not at
all complain of his having inquired and thought freely--only we
venture to assure him, with a confidence which can hardly fail to be
irritating, because it is confident, that he is mistaken, that he has
thought not only freely, but erroneously. When Christianity adopts, as
in the modern Romanist system, a different tone, proscribing free
inquiry as 'rationalistic,' and making the appeal to antiquity, in
order to test the present teaching of the Church, a 'treason and a
heresy[277],' it is abjuring its own rational heritage, and adopting a
method which Charles Kingsley had good reason to call Manichaean. It
is the test of the Church's legitimate tenure that she can encourage
free inquiry into her title-deeds.
3. Thirdly, the Spirit claims for His own, and _consecrates the whole
of nature_. One Spirit was the original author of all that is; and all
that exists is in its essence very good. It is only sin which has
produced the appearance of antagonism between the Divine operation and
human freedom, or between the spiritual and the material. Thus the
humanity of Christ, which is the Spirit's perfect work, exhibits in
its perfection how every faculty of human nature, spiritual and
physical, is enriched and vitalized, not annihilated, by the closest
conceivable interaction of the Divine Energy. This principle, as
carried out in the Church, occupies a prominent place in the earliest
theology; in part because Montanism, with its pagan idea of
inspiration, as an ecstasy which deprived its subject of reason, gave
the Church an opportunity of emphasizing that the fullest action of
the Spirit, in the case of her inspired men, intensified and did not
supersede their own thought, judgment, and individuality; still more
because Gnostic dualism, turning every antithesis of nature and grace,
of spirit and flesh, of natural and supernatural, into an antagonism,
forced upon the Church the assertion of her own true and comprehensive
Creed. That everything in Christianity is realized 'in flesh as in
spirit' is the constantly reiterated cry of S. Ignatius, who of all
men was most 'spiritual.' That the spiritual is not the immaterial,
that we become spiritual not by any change or curtailment of nature,
not by any depreciation or ignoring of the body, is the constantly
asserted principle of S. Irenaeus[278]. And the earliest writers in
general emphasize the visible organization of the Church, and the
institution of external sacraments, as negations of the false
principle which would sunder nature from God, and repudiate the unity
of the material and the spiritual which the Word had been made Flesh
in order to reveal and to perpetuate.
4. But the unity of the spirit and the flesh, of faith and experience,
of God and the world, is certainly not an accomplished fact. On the
contrary, dualism is always making appeals which strike home to our
present experience. Thus if the Church was to maintain the unity of
all things, it could only be by laying great stress upon the ravages
which sin had wrought, and upon _the gradualness of the Spirit's
method_ in recovery. The Old Testament, for example, presented a most
unspiritual appearance. Its material sacrifices, its low standard of
morals, its worldliness, were constantly being objected to by the
Gnostic and Manichaean sects, who could not tolerate the Old Testament
canon. 'But you are ignoring,' the Church replied, 'the gradualness of
the Spirit's method.' He lifts man by little and little, He
condescends to man's infirmity: He puts up with him as he is, if only
He can at the last bring him back to God.
It is of the essence of the New Testament, as the religion of the
Incarnation, to be final and catholic: on the other hand, it is of the
essence of the Old Testament to be imperfect because it represents a
gradual process of education by which man was lifted out of depths of
sin and ignorance. That this is the case, and that in consequence the
justification of the Old Testament method lies not in itself at any
particular stage, but in its result taken as a whole, is a thought
very familiar to modern Christians[279]. But it is important to make
plain that it was a thought equally familiar to the Fathers of the
Christian Church. Thus S. Gregory of Nazianzus, speaking of God's
dealings with the Jews of old, describes how, in order to gain the
co-operation of man's good will in working for his recovery, He dealt
'after the manner of a schoolmaster or a physician, and while
curtailing part of their ancestral customs, tolerated the rest, making
some concession to their tastes, just as physicians make their
medicines palatable that they may be taken by their patients. For men
do not easily abandon what long custom has consecrated. Thus the first
law, while it abolished their idols, tolerated their sacrifices; the
second, while it abolished their sacrifices, allowed them to be
circumcised: then when once they had accepted the removal of what was
taken from them, they went further and gave up what had been conceded
to them--in the first case their sacrifices, in the second their
practice of circumcision--and they became instead of heathens, Jews,
instead of Jews, Christians, being betrayed as it were by gradual
changes into acceptance of the Gospel[280].' Again, S. Chrysostom
explains how it is the very merit of the Old Testament that it has
taught us to think things intolerable, which under it were tolerated.
'Do not ask,' he says, 'how these (Old Testament precepts) can be
good, now when the need for them is past: ask how they were good when
the period required them. Or rather, if you wish, do inquire into
their merit even now. It is still conspicuous, and lies in nothing so
much as what now enables us to find fault with them. Their highest
praise is that we now see them to be defective. If they had not
trained us well, so that we became susceptible of higher things, we
should not have now seen their deficiency.' Then he shews how under
the old law swearing by the true God was allowed to avoid swearing by
idols, the worse ill. 'But is not swearing at all of the evil one?' he
asks. 'Undoubtedly, now, after this long course of training, but then
not. And how can the same thing be good at one time and bad at
another? I ask rather, how should it not be so, when we have regard to
the plain teaching of the fact of growth in all things, fruits of the
earth or acquirements of man? Look at man's own nature; the food, the
occupations which suit his infancy, are repulsive to his manhood. Or
consider facts of history. All agree that murder is an invention of
Satan, yet this very act at a suitable time made Phineas to be
honoured with the high priesthood. Phineas' murder "was reckoned to
him for righteousness." Just in the same way Abraham obtained an even
higher honour for being not a murderer only but what was much worse, a
child-murderer. We must not then look at the facts in themselves only,
but investigate with attention the period also, the cause, the motive,
the difference of persons, and all the attendant circumstances: so
only can one get at the truth[281].'
Once more S. Basil: 'Surely it is absolutely infantile and worthy of a
child who must be really fed on milk, to be ignorant of the great
mystery of our salvation--that just as we received our earliest
instruction, so, in exercising unto godliness and going on unto
perfection, we were first trained by lessons easy to apprehend and
suited to our intelligence. He Who regulates our lives deals with us
as those who have been reared in darkness, and gradually accustoms our
eyes to the light of truth. For He spares our weakness, and in the
depth of the riches of His wisdom and the unsearchable judgments of
His understanding adopts this gentle treatment, so well adapted to our
needs, accustoming us first to see the shadow of objects, and to look
at the sun's reflection in water, so that we may not be suddenly
blinded by the exposure to the pure light. By parity of reasoning, the
law being a shadow of things to come, and the typical teaching of the
prophets, which is the truth darkly, have been devised as exercises
for the eyes of the heart, inasmuch as it will be easy for us to pass
from these to wisdom hidden in mystery[282].'
In the same spirit was the Church's answer to the difficulties which
facts of personal experience were constantly putting in the way of her
claims. Churchmen were frequently seen to be vulgar, ignorant,
imperfect, sinful. If, in spite of manifold evils existing within her,
the Church could still appeal to her fruits, it must be by comparison
with what was to be found elsewhere, or by taking in a large area for
comparison, or by appealing to her special grounds of hope. In fact,
what she represented was a hope, not a realization; a tendency, not a
result; a life in process, not a ripened fruit. But then she claimed
that this was God's way. 'He loves us not as we are, but as we are
becoming[283].' Let but a man once lay hold of the life-giving
principle of faith, and God sets a value on him, life has a promise
for him, altogether out of proportion to present attainments. For God
estimates him, in view of all the forces of a new life which are set
loose to work upon him, and he can assure himself that the movement of
recovery which he has begun to feel stirring within him will carry him
on through eternal ages, beyond what he can ask or think.
It is because of this gradualness of the Spirit's method that it lays
so great a strain on human patience. The spiritually-minded of all
ages have tended to find the visible Church a very troubled and
imperfect home. Most startling disclosures of the actual state of
ecclesiastical disorder and moral collapse, may be gathered out of the
Christian Fathers. Thus to found a 'pure Church' has been the instinct
of impatient zeal since Tertullian's day. But the instinct has to be
restrained, the visible Church has to be borne with, because it is the
Spirit's purpose to provide a home for the training and improvement of
the imperfect. 'Let both grow together unto the harvest.' 'A bruised
reed will He not break, and smoking flax will He not quench.' The
Church must have her terms of communion, moral and intellectual: this
is essential to keep her fundamental principles intact, and to prevent
her betraying her secret springs of strength and recovery. But short
of this necessity she is tolerant. It is her note to be tolerant,
morally and theologically. She is the mother, not the magistrate. No
doubt her balanced duty is one difficult to fulfil. At times she has
been puritanical, at others morally lax; at times doctrinally lax, at
others rigid. But however well or ill she has fulfilled the
obligations laid on her, this is her ideal. She is the guardian, the
depository of a great gift, a mighty presence, which in its essence is
unchanging and perfect, but is realized very imperfectly in her
experience and manifested life. This is what S. Thomas Aquinas means
when he says 'that to believe _in_ the Church is only possible if we
mean by it to believe in the Spirit vivifying the Church[284].' The
true self of the Church is the Holy Spirit, but a great deal in the
Church at any date does not belong to her true self, and is obscuring
the Spirit's mind. Thus the treasure is in earthen vessels, it is
sometimes a light hid under a bushel; and the Church is the probation
of faith, as well as its encouragement.
It will not be out of place to conclude this review of the Spirit's
method in the Church by calling attention to the emphasis which, from
the first, Christians laid upon the fact that the animating principle
both of their individual lives and of their society as a whole, was
nothing less than the Holy Spirit Himself. To know Him was (as against
all the philosophical schools, and in a sense in which the same could
not be said even of the Divine Word) their peculiar privilege, to
possess Him their summary characteristic. Under the old covenant, and
in all the various avenues of approach to the Church, men could be the
subjects of the Spirit's guidance and could be receiving gifts from
Him; but the 'initiated' Christian, baptized and confirmed, possessed
not merely His gifts but Himself. He is in the Church, as the 'Vicar
of Christ,' in Whose presence Christ Himself is with them. He is the
consecrator of every sacrament, and the substance of His own
sacramental gifts. The services of ordained men indeed are required
for the administration of sacraments, but as ministers simply of a
Power higher than themselves, of a Personal Spirit Who indeed is
invoked by their ministry, and pledges Himself to respond to their
invocations, but never subjects Himself to their power. Therefore the
unworthiness of the minister diminishes in no way the efficacy of the
sacrament, or the reality of the gift given, because the ministry of
men neither creates the gift nor adds to or diminishes its force. He
is the giver of the gift, and the gift He gives is the same to all.
Only the meagreness of human faith and love restrains the largeness of
His bounty and conditions the Thing received by the narrowness and
variability of the faculty which receives it. According to our faith
is it done to us, and where there is no faith and no love there the
grace is equally, in S. Augustine's phrase, present and
profitless[285].
II. In something of this way the early Christian writers--and it has
seemed better to let them speak for us--teach the doctrine of the Holy
Spirit. What they teach is grounded in part on actual experience, in
part on the revelation of the being and action of God made once for
all in the Person of Jesus Christ and recorded in the New Testament.
On this mingled basis of experience and Holy Scripture they passed
back from the doctrine of the Holy Spirit as He is operative in the
world, to the Theology of His Person. They passed back but slowly,
with great hesitation, even unwillingness. Nothing, we may say, was
further removed from the Fathers than the easy-going assumption that
because we are the subjects of a revelation, therefore we are able to
speculate with tolerably complete information about the mysteries
which lie beyond experience. The truth that 'we know in part,' we see
'in a glass darkly,' was profoundly impressed upon their minds. God
manifested Himself, S. Gregory of Nazianzus tells, in such a way as to
escape the nets of our syllogisms, and to shew Himself superior to our
logical distinctions. If we expect to find our logic equal to express
Him, we shew only our mad presumption, 'we who are not able even to
know what lies at our feet, or to count the waves of the sea, or the
drops of rain, or the days of the world, much less to fathom the
depths of God, and give account of His nature which transcends alike
our reason and our power of expression[286].' Besides this, the early
theologians realized the obligation of keeping to Holy Scripture--of
not being wise 'above that which is written'--and they were conscious
of the danger of building on isolated texts of Scripture or of
treating its 'simple and untechnical' language as if it was the
language of a formal treatise[287].
For these reasons they were cautious in theological speculation. Yet
the facts and relationships introduced into the world of experience by
the revelation of the Son represent eternal realities, if under great
limitations yet still truly, and thus make possible a real security up
to a certain point on what lies beyond the unassisted human knowledge.
Thus, first, when the Arian movement passed from the denial of the
true Godhead of Christ to a similar position with reference to the
Holy Spirit, the Christian Church felt itself fully justified alike by
its past traditions[288], and by its Scriptures, in emphasizing the
personal distinctness and the true Godhead of the Holy Spirit. Unless
all Christ's language was an illusion, the Holy Spirit was really
personal and really distinct from Himself and the Father; nor could
One who was associated with the Father and the Son in all the
essentially Divine operations of nature and grace, be less than truly
and really God, an essential element in the Eternal Being. The Arian
controversy in its earlier stages had disposed of the notion that
Christian theology could at any cost admit the conception of a created
personality, clothed with Divine attributes and exercising Divine
functions.
Secondly, the consideration that the relations manifested in the
Incarnation in terms of our experience between the Father, the Son,
and the Holy Ghost, express transcendent and eternal relations, led
the Church to speak of the Holy Ghost as proceeding from the Father,
as the unique fount of Godhead, through the Son: or in somewhat less
nicely discriminated language 'from the Father and the Son[289].' In
the fifth century there is a tendency to use in the East the former,
in the West the latter mode of expression, but without any essential
difference. Nor can it be said that the causes which were at work
later to divide the Eastern and the Western Churches on the subject of
the procession of the Holy Ghost, were so much really theological as
ecclesiastical and political.
Thirdly, the accurate consideration of the language in which is
expressed the relation of Christ to the Holy Spirit, helped the Church
to guard the doctrine of the Trinity from the associations of
Tritheism. For the coming of the Holy Spirit is clearly spoken of in
Holy Scripture as coincident with and involving the coming of Christ.
'While we are illuminated by the Holy Spirit, it is Christ who
illuminates us: when we drink in the Spirit, it is Christ we drink.'
The Spirit is distinct from Christ--'another Paraclete'--yet in His
coming, Christ comes: in His indwelling is the indwelling of the
Father and the Son[290]. How can this be? Because the 'Persons' of the
Holy Trinity are not to be thought of as distinct individuals, as
three Gods. No doubt in our ordinary language, persons are understood
to be separate, and mutually exclusive beings. Even in regard to
ourselves deeper reflection shews us that our personalities are very
far from being as separate as they appear to be on the surface: and
with regard to God, it was only with an expressed apology for the
imperfection of human language that the Church spoke of the Divine
Three, as Three _Persons_ at all. But 'we have no celestial language,'
and the word is the only one which will express what Christ's language
implies about Himself, the Father, and the Spirit. Only while we use
it, it must be understood to express mutual inclusion, not mutual
exclusion.
Wherever the Father works, He works essentially and inevitably through
the Son and the Spirit; whenever the Son acts, He acts from the Father
by the Holy Spirit; whenever the Holy Spirit comes, He brings with Him
in His coming the Son and the Father. Thus when an image was necessary
to interpret in part the Divine relationships, the Fathers sought it
nowhere so much as in the three distinct yet inseparable elements of
man's spiritual nature; the triune character of which Plato had
already brought into notice, and which is in fact an earthly image,
however inadequate, of the Triune God[291].
III. Hitherto nothing has been said about that part of the Holy
Spirit's work which is called the inspiration of Scripture. It has
been kept to the last because of the great importance of putting it in
context with less familiar truths. The Scriptures have, it is a
commonplace to say, suffered greatly from being isolated. This is as
true whether we are considering them as a source of evidence or as the
sphere of inspiration.
As a source of evidence they contain the record of historical facts
with some of which at any rate the Creed of Christendom is inseparably
interwoven. Thus it is impossible for Christians who know what they
are about, to depreciate the importance of the historical evidence for
those facts at least of which the Creed contains a summary. But the
tendency with books of historical evidence has been, at least till
recently, to exaggerate the extent to which the mere evidence of
remote facts can compel belief. What we should make of the New
Testament record, what estimate we should be able to form of the
Person of Jesus Christ and the meaning of His life and work, if it was
contained simply in some old manuscripts, or unearthed in some way by
antiquaries out of the Syrian sand, it is impossible to say. In order
to have grounds for believing the facts, in order to be susceptible of
their evidence, we require an antecedent state of conception and
expectation. A whole set of presuppositions about God, about the
slavery of sin, about the reasonableness of redemption, must be
present with us. So only can the facts presented to us in the Gospel
come to us as credible things, or as parts of an intelligible
universe, correlated elements in a rational whole. Now the work of the
Spirit in the Church has been to keep alive and real these
presuppositions, this frame of mind. He convinces of sin, of
righteousness, of judgment. He does this not merely in isolated
individuals however numerous, but in an organized continuous society.
The spiritual life of the Church assures me that in desiring union
with God, in feeling the burden of sin, in hungering for redemption, I
am not doing an eccentric, abnormal thing. I am doing only what
belongs to the best and richest movement of humanity. More than this,
it assures me that assent to the claims and promises of Jesus Christ
satisfies these spiritual needs in such a way as to produce the
strongest, the most lasting, the most catholic sort of human
character. The historical life of the Church thus in every age
'setting to its seal' that God's offer in Christ is true, reproduces
the original 'witness,' commends it to conscience and reason, spans
the gulf of the ages, and brings down remote and alien incidents into
close and intelligible familiarity. Lotze speaks of revelation as
'either contained in some divine act of historic occurrence, or
continually repeated in men's hearts[292].' But in fact the antithesis
is not an alternative. The strength of the Christian Creed is that it
is both. It is a revelation continuously renewed in men's hearts by an
organized and systematic operation of the Spirit in the Church, while
at the same time it finds its guarantee and security in certain Divine
acts of historic occurrence.