It claims that such privileges as were granted to it, were not granted
to it for its own sake, but that it might be a source of blessing to
all nations: it assumes that they are on a lower religious level than
itself; that instead of each nation progressing equally along the line
of religious life, truth, and worship, other nations have fallen
backward and the Jew has been chosen out for a special privilege. It
is the principle that God works by 'limitation,' by apparent
'exclusiveness,' by that which is in its essence 'sacerdotalism'; the
principle that God does not give His gifts equally to all, but
specially to a few, that they may use them for the good of the whole.
This principle seems at first sight to offend some modern abstract
ideas of justice and equality; but the moment we examine the facts of
life, we find it prevailing universally. Each nation has its peculiar
gift: the Greek makes his parallel claim to be specially gifted with
the love of knowledge and the power of artistic expression; the Roman
with the power of rule and the belief in law. Or, again, within a
single nation, it is the artist who enables us to see the beauty of a
face or a landscape which had escaped us before:
Art was given for that,
God uses us to help each other so,
Lending our minds out.
It is the poet who interprets our inner nature or the magic of the
external world, and becomes
A priest to us all
Of the wonder and bloom of the world,
Which we see with his eyes and are glad:
he sings
Till the world is wrought
To sympathy with hopes and fears _it heeded not_[338].
And this principle does not stop short of religious influences
Conscience is itself a witness to it, as it implies that all parts of
our nature are not sufficient guides to themselves, but that God has
gifted one special faculty with power to control the rest. 'Men of
character,' it has been said, 'are the conscience of the society to
which they belong.' In the Jewish nation itself, the prophets were the
circle of Jehovah's friends; they knew His secrets, they kept alive
the ideal of the nation. 'What the soul is in the body, that are
Christians in the world' was the parallel claim of an early
apologist[339]. Analogies crowd in, then, on every side, to shew how
rational is this claim on the part of Judaism.
Revelation only accepts this fact, and adds to it the assertion that
it is no accident but a part of the Divine Purpose. It is the result
of God's election. The Jewish nation, and subsequently the Christian
Church, is not only a blessing to the rest of the world, but it is
conscious that it is a blessing. This truth has been revealed to it
partly to keep it ever mindful of its sense of dependence upon the
Giver of all good gifts, partly to give it tenacity and courage to
cling to a gift which it knows to be of inestimable value for all
mankind. 'The election was simply a method of procedure adopted by God
in His wisdom by which He designed to fit the few for blessing the
many, one for blessing all[340].'
It must be from considerations such as these that we approach the
foundation of the Christian Church and the Incarnation of our Lord
Jesus Christ on which it rests. We approach it with the expectation
that we shall find these principles embodied in it, for Christianity
sprang directly out of Judaism, and so would naturally inherit its
principles: and to go deeper still, the very essence of the
Incarnation lies in the consecration of human life and human means. He
who before had been acting invisibly upon the world as the Word,
implanting life and light in man, now entered visibly into human
flesh. All tendencies which made for the fulness of life and truth
before His coming, all that tended to enlighten, elevate, combine men,
had been His unknown working: now they are known to be His. The
Infinite appears in finite form; the spiritual takes the material in
which to express itself; human media are consecrated to deeper ends,
and charged with a fuller meaning than before: so that, in Hooker's
words, 'We cannot now conceive how God should, without man, exercise
Divine power or receive the glory of Divine praise[341].' 'What you do
now even after the flesh, that is spiritual' is the bold paradox of
S. Ignatius; and he adds the reason, 'for you do all in Christ
Jesus[342].' Thus--
In this twofold sphere, the twofold man
Holds firmly to the natural, to reach
The spiritual beyond it....
The whole temporal show related royally
And built up to eterne significance
Through the open arms of God[343].
The Incarnation, then, takes up all the three principles of which we
have spoken: but, from the very finality which it claims for itself,
it puts a mark of finality upon each of them, and so, in this respect,
marks off the application of them in the Christian Church from all
other applications of the same principles. The principle of
co-operation for spiritual life is taken up; the Jewish nation is
expanded into an universal brotherhood; this includes all men, without
any distinction of race; it includes the quick and the dead; it aims
at the highest spiritual perfection. It is final in this sense, that
nothing can be wider in extent or deeper in aim; but it is final also
in the sense that the life _has been_ manifested. Christians do not
combine to work up to some unsuspected ideal: they combine to draw out
and express in their common life the perfection that was in Christ.
The principle of association for the propagation of ideas is taken up,
but they are truths about God and His relation to human nature: they
are truths which have been revealed, which have been once for all
delivered to the saints. Finally, the principle of association for
worship is taken up; the worship is made as wide as humanity; it is to
be as spiritual as God; but it, too, rests on final facts, on the
facts of creation and redemption: it centres round the one complete
sacrifice for sin.
Let us consider each of these points more in detail.
1. The Church is an organization for the purpose of spiritual life; an
universal brotherhood knit together to build up each of its members
into holiness; 'the only great school of virtue existing.' But if this
is so, if it is universal, is the principle of 'limitation,' of
'exclusiveness,' gone? Certainly not. It is there, and it is most
instructive to notice how it arises[344]. Christ chose a small body of
disciples to be in close contact with Himself, to share His work, and
to receive His deeper teaching. This will not surprise us after the
analogies of the prophets, the poets, the artists of the world. The
saints too may be few, and God may lend their spirits out for the good
of others. But, moreover, in the first formation of the Church we are
able to watch the process of limitation, as historically worked out;
and we see that it arises not from any narrowness, any grudging of His
blessings, on the part of Christ, but from the narrowness, the
limitations in man. Man is 'straitened' not in God, not in Christ, but
in his own affections. God willed all men to be saved: Christ went
about doing good and calling all to a change of heart, to a share in
the kingdom of Heaven: but such a call made demands upon His hearers;
it required that they should give up old prejudices about the
Messianic kingdom, that they should be willing to leave father and
mother and houses and lands for the truth's sake, that they should lay
aside all the things that defile a man, that they should aim at being
perfect, that they should not only hear but understand the word, that
they should trust Him even when His sayings were hard. And these
demands produced the limitations. The Pharisees preferred the glory of
men to the glory which came from God; the masses in Galilee cared only
for the bread that perisheth; many of the disciples turned back; and
so He could not commit Himself unto them, because He knew what was in
man. Not to them, not to any chance person, but to the Twelve, to
those who had stood these tests, to those who had, in spite of all
perplexity, seen in Him the Son of the Living God, to them He could
commit Himself, they could share His secrets; they could be taught
clearly the certainty and the meaning of His coming death, for they
had begun to learn what self-sacrifice meant; they could do His work
and organize His Church; they could bind and loose in His Name; they
could represent Him when He was gone. These are the elect; they who
had the will to listen to the call[345]; they who were 'magnanimous to
correspond with heaven'; to them He gave at Pentecost the full
conscious gift of the Holy Spirit, and so at last formed them into the
Church, the Church which was to continue His work, which was to convey
His grace, which was to go into the whole world, holding this life as
a treasure for the sake of the whole world, praying and giving thanks
for all men, because the unity of God and the unity of the mediation
of Christ inspires them with hope that all may be one in Him[346].
The day of Pentecost was thus the birthday of the Church. Before there
were followers of the Lord; now there was the Church: and this as the
result of a new act, for which all that preceded had been but
preparation: now the Church was born in becoming the possessor of a
common corporate life. The Spirit was given to the whole body of
Christians together: it was not given to an individual here and there
in such a way that such Spirit-bearing individuals could then come
together and form a Church. It was given corporately, so that they who
received the Spirit realized at once a unity which preceded any
individual action of their own. So the Church has gone forth offering
its message freely to all; in Christ Jesus there is neither Jew nor
Gentile; the message is given openly, 'without any veil,' to all; all
are accepted who will submit themselves to Baptism, i.e. all who
recognise the element of evil and of weakness in their own life, who
are willing to die to it and receive fresh life and strength from the
Risen Lord, and to submit their life to His discipline. That is the
Church as presented to us in the New Testament. Metaphor after
metaphor is lavished upon it by our Lord and by S. Paul in order to
make clear the conception of it. He is the Vine, His disciples are the
branches; they draw all their life from Him: apart from Him they can
do nothing; if in union with Him, they bear fruit. The Church is a
household, a scene of active work, of 'skilled and trained activity':
each member with his own work, some as mere members of the household,
others as rulers set over the household to give them meat in due
season, each with talents to be used faithfully for the Master. It is
a family, in which 'all ye are brethren,' laying obligations of love
between brother and brother, calling out self-sacrifice for the good
of others, deepening in each the sense of the value of the lives of
others. It is the Body of Christ, that which grows stronger and
stronger, that which draws its life from the Head and must hold to
Him, that in which Christian is linked to Christian in sympathy and
complete interdependence, that without which the Head would be
incomplete, the necessary organ for completing Christ's work on earth,
that which the Spirit takes as its channel for manifesting to the
world the very 'life of God.' It is God's Temple; visible, made up of
parts, which are fitted in to one another in symmetry; beautiful with
a spiritual beauty; for there a living God is present; there He speaks
to His own; there they offer to Him a rational service[347]. It is the
Bride of Christ, the dearest object of Christ's love, which gives
herself to Him for His service, which for His sake keeps herself pure
in life and doctrine; which receives from Him all the treasures of His
love, so that as He had received the fulness of God, 'the aggregate of
the Divine attributes, virtues, and energies' from the Father, the
Church receives all this from Him and manifests it forth to the world
of men and of angels.
But this picture, it will be urged, is only a prophecy of the future;
the evidence of S. Paul's Epistles will also shew us a very different
scene in real life, a body with tendencies to divisions, to
selfishness, to sin. This is quite true, but the ideal is never
thought of as something different from the real; the ideal is not
simply in heaven nor the real simply on earth; the real is the ideal,
though not yet completely developed; the ideal is the actual basis of
the real as much as the goal to which the real is tending. The members
of the Church have been consecrated; they are holy; they are
'unleavened'; they have put on Christ; they have by their
self-committal to Him received a righteousness which they can work out
into perfection. Again, they _are_ brothers; they have been made
children of God by adoption: as they have realized the sense of
sonship, they realize also the closeness of the tie between themselves
and the other sons, their common sympathies, hopes and aims. True,
they are not yet perfect either in holiness or in love: the very
purpose of the Church is to make them perfect. It takes the individual
at his birth, it incorporates him into its own life, it watches over
him from beginning to end, it feeds him with spiritual food, it
disciplines him by spiritual laws, it blesses him at all the chief
moments of life, it takes him away from his own isolation, trains him
in social aims and social duties by social sacraments, finally, gives
him back to God with its benediction.
Such a conception of the Church as a nursery, a school, a home,
implies of necessity that it should be visible, and that it should be
one. It is a visible body, because it has in some sense to represent
the Incarnate Lord. In the Incarnation spirit took material form and
expressed itself thereby; in the risen Lord--and it is the risen Lord
who gives the Spirit to the Church--there was still a spiritual body.
This is not to deny the invisible reality of spiritual unity which
underlies the external visible unity. It is only to say that
completeness means both. In the language of S. Ignatius, as Christ
Jesus was at once material and spiritual, so, the unity of the Church
should be at once material and spiritual[348].
The idea of an invisible Church to express the body of true believers,
who alone are the Church, to whatever community they belong, so that
the visible Church becomes an unimportant thing, is an idea entirely
at variance with Scripture and all pre-reformation teaching. The
phrase is first found in almost contemporary writings of Luther and of
Zwingli; it is akin to the teaching of Hus and of Wiclif; and, no
doubt, there are thoughts and phrases in earlier writers that are more
or less akin to it. From the first there was obviously a distinction
between the true and untrue Christian, between the spiritual and the
fleshly, between the vessels to honour and the vessels to dishonour,
and the first of these classes, those who persevere to the end, whom
man cannot know and God only knows, those who, if thought of in the
light of God's eternal purposes, are the predestined, these were
treated and spoken of as 'the Church properly so called,' 'the true
body of Christ.' Christians 'who do the will of the Father will belong
to the first Church, the spiritual Church founded before the sun and
moon.' Those who have lived in perfect righteousness according to the
Gospel 'will rest in the holy hill of God, in the highest Church, in
which are gathered the philosophers of God[349].'
Again, the Church on earth is regarded as 'a copy of the Church in
heaven in which God's will is done': but in each case there is no
contrast between the visible and the invisible Church. The invisible
Church is in these cases either the ideal of the visible; or that part
of the visible organized Church which has remained true to its aims.
So too with regard to those who are not conscious believers; the
possibility of their salvation, in a qualified way, is heartily
recognised, but the confusion is not made of calling them members of
the Church.
The fatal danger is when the belief in the invisible Church is used to
discredit the visible Church and the importance of belonging to it. It
is scarcely too much to say, that all stress laid upon the invisible
Church tends to lower the demands of holiness and brotherhood. It is a
visible Church, and such a Church as can attract outsiders, which
calls out the fruits of faith into active energy; it is a visible
Church such as can combine Christians in active work, which tests
brotherhood, which rubs away idiosyncrasy, which destroys vanity and
jealousy, which restrains personal ambition, which trains in the power
of common work, which, as our own powers fail, or are proved
inadequate, for some task on which our heart had been set, still fills
us with hope that God will work through others that which it is clear
He will not work through us. It is a visible Church alone which is
'the home of the lonely.' Encompassed as we are now from our birth by
Christian friends and associations, we tend to forget how much we
depend on the spiritual help and sympathy of others. The greatness of
our blessings blinds us to their presence, and we seem to stand in our
own strength while we are leaning upon others. The relation of the
soul to God is a tender thing; personal religion, which seems so
strong, while in a Christian atmosphere, tends to grow weak, to
totter, to fall, as we stand alone in some distant country, amid low
moral standards and heathen faiths. Such solitude does indeed often,
in those who are strong, deepen, in a marvellous way, the invisible
communion with God and the ties that knit us with the absent; but the
result is often fatal to the weak. It throws both strong and weak
alike into closer sympathy with those who share a common faith. It is
a visible Church which supplies this sympathy, which gives the
assurance that each soul, as it is drawn to God, shall not stand
alone; but that it shall find around it strengthening hands and
sympathetic hearts, which shall train it till, as in the quiet
confidence of a home, it shall blossom into the full Christian life.
The principle of the unity of the Church is very similar. That, again,
is primarily and essentially a spiritual unity. The ultimate source
is, according to the Lord's own teaching, the unity of the Godhead:
'that they may be one, even as we are one.' The effect of the
outpouring of the Spirit is to make the multitude of them that
believed 'of one heart and one soul.' Baptism becomes the source of
unity, 'In one Spirit were we all baptized into one body:' the 'one
bread' becomes the security of union. 'We who are many are one bread,
one body, for we all partake of the one bread.' More fully still is
the unity drawn out in the Epistle to the Ephesians. 'There is one
body and one Spirit, even as ye are called in one hope of our calling,
one Lord, one faith, one baptism, one God and Father of all.' The
unity starts with being spiritual; it is the power of the One God
drawing men together by His action upon their spirits; uniting them in
the service of one Lord who has redeemed them, but it issues in 'one
body.' Nothing can be stronger than the assertion of such unity. But
in what does this unity lie, and what is to be the safeguard of it? No
one answer is possible to this question. Clearly, one part of the
answer is, a unity of spiritual aim, 'one hope of your calling:'
another answer is, a common basis of belief, common trust in the same
Lord, 'one faith;' a further answer is, common social sacraments, 'one
baptism,' 'one bread.' All these lie on the face of these passages of
S. Paul. Are we to add to them 'a common government,' 'an apostolical
succession?' Was this of the essence or a late addition, a result of
subsequent confederation intended to guarantee the permanence of
dogma? No doubt, the circumstances of subsequent history moulded the
exact form of the ministry, and emphasized the importance of external
organization under particular circumstances; but this is no less true
of the other points of unity; the unity of spiritual life was worked
out in one way in the times of public discipline and penance, in
another way when these fell into disuse: the unity of faith was
brought into prominence in the times of the formulating of the Creeds.
So the unity of external organization was emphasized when it was
threatened by the Gnostic, Novatian, and Donatist controversies. But
the germ of it is there from the first, and it was no later addition.
The spiritual unity derived from the Lord is imparted through
Sacraments; but this at once links the inward life and spiritual unity
with some form of external organization. And so the writer of the
Epistle to the Ephesians after his great description of Christian
unity, goes on at once to speak of the ministry. The apostles,
prophets, evangelists, pastors, teachers, these are special gifts of
the ascended Lord to the Church; and they are given for the very
purpose of securing unity, 'for the perfecting of the saints unto the
work of ministering, unto the building up of the body of Christ, till
we all attain unto the unity of the faith.' No less significantly,
when S. Paul is applying to the Church the metaphor of the body and
its members in order to emphasize the unity of the whole, does he rank
apostles, prophets, teachers, as the most important members of the
body[350].
The history of the early Church, so far as it can be traced, points
the same way. The Lord appointed His body of twelve: He gave them the
power to bind and to loose, the power to exercise discipline over
offending members of the Church. At first, the Christian Church is a
purely Jewish body; it continues in the Apostles' fellowship as well
as doctrine; they distribute its alms; they punish unworthy members;
they arrange its differences; they appoint subordinate officers; they
ratify their actions, and sanction the admission of Samaritans and
proselytes to the Church; but the various members throughout Judea,
Galilee, and Samaria, are embraced in the single conception of one
Church[351]. Then under the guidance of Paul and Barnabas, the
Gentiles are brought in and formed into churches; the danger to unity
becomes acute. According to the Acts of the Apostles, it is surmounted
by reference to the Church at Jerusalem; the Apostles and Elders there
decide the question, and the Gentile Churches are thus kept in
communion with it. S. Paul's letters, with all the difficulty there is
of reconciling every detail with the historian's account, present us
with essentially the same picture. In dealing with his own Churches,
he claims absolute right, as apostle, to hand on and lay down
traditions, to punish, to forgive, to govern: he leaves some class of
ministers in every Church under his guidance; each Church is to
administer discipline over unworthy members. But the Churches cannot
act independently: the Church at Corinth is not to act as though it
were the fountain head of Christianity, or the only Gentile Church; it
is to remember the customs in other Churches. Further than this, above
'all the Churches,' appears already as one body 'the Church,' in which
God has set apostles[352]; within it there are separate spheres of
work, Paul and Barnabas are to go to the Gentiles, the leading Jewish
apostles to the Jews; S. Paul will not intrude beyond the province
assigned to him; he makes his Gentile Churches to contribute to the
needs of the Jewish Church, and realize the debt which they owe to
them. Any divisions in a local Church cannot be tolerated, as being
inconsistent with the unity of Christ, with His cross, and with the
significance of baptism. Peter stands condemned when he wishes to
separate himself and so causes division between Jew and Gentile.