'Sacerdotalism, priestliness, is the prime element of her being[364].'
She is the source of blessing to mankind; she pleads and intercedes
and gives herself for all mankind. Christians, as a body, are 'a royal
priesthood.' Christ made them 'priests unto His God and Father,' they
can 'enter in into the holy place,' like priests, 'with hearts
sprinkled from an evil conscience and bodies washed with pure water.'
They are 'the genuine high-priestly race of God:' 'every righteous man
ranks as a priest:' 'to the whole Church is a priesthood given[365].'
This priesthood is exercised throughout life, as each Christian gives
his life to God's service, and the whole Church devotes itself for the
good of the whole world. But it finds its expression in worship, for
worship is the Godward aspect of life. It expresses, it emphasizes, it
helps to make permanent the feelings that mould life. It is the
recognition that our life comes from God: that it has been redeemed by
God; it is the quiet joyous resting upon the facts of His love; it is
the conscious spiritual offering of our life to God; it is the
adoration of His majesty. This worship the Church leads and organizes.
'In the Church and in Christ Jesus' is to be given 'the glory to God
unto all generations for ever and ever.' In the Apocalypse, it is
pictured as praising God alike for His work in Creation and in
Redemption. In the Eucharist the Church shews forth the Lord's Death
till He come[366]. Hence this act of Eucharistic worship, above all
others, has become the centre of unity. In it the Church has offered
its best to God: all the more external gifts of art, such as
architecture, painting, and music, have been consecrated in worship:
but deeper still, in it each Christian has taken up his own life, his
body and soul, and offered it as a holy, lively, and reasonable
sacrifice unto God, a service in spirit and in truth: and deeper
still, he recognises that his life does not stand alone; through the
common ties of humanity in Christ he is linked on by a strange
solidarity with all mankind; his life depends on theirs and theirs on
his, and so he offers it not for himself only but for all; in the
power of Christ he intercedes for all mankind: and deeper still, he
feels in the presence of the Holiness of God how unworthy his own
offering and his own prayers are, and he pleads, he recalls before the
Father, as the source of his own hope and his own power of
self-sacrifice, the one complete offering made for all mankind.
So the Church performs its universal priesthood[367]; so it leads a
worship, bright, joyous, amidst all the trials and perplexities of the
world, for it tells of suffering vanquished; simple in its essence, so
that poor as well as rich can rally round it; yet deep and profound in
its mysteries, so that the most intellectual cannot fathom it. It is
an universal priesthood, for it needs the consecration of every life:
and yet this function too of the Church naturally has its organs,
whose task it is to make its offerings and to stand before it as the
types of self-consecration. The Church has from the first special
persons who perform its liturgy, its public ministering to the
Lord[368]. It is in connection with worship, and the meetings of the
Church that S. Paul emphasizes the need of unity and subordination,
and dwells upon God's special setting of Apostles, Prophets and
Teachers in the Church[369]. The Epistle of Clement to the Corinthians
may be open to difficult questions of interpretation in its language
about the ministry, but this at least is clear that order and
subordination are treated as the necessary outcome of love, which is
of the essence of the Church; that this order and subordination is
specially needed in all details of worship; that it had been so in
Judaism, and must be so, _à fortiori_, in the Christian Church; that
as Christ came from God, so the Apostles from Christ, and their
successors from them; and therefore it must be wrong to throw off
subordination to those who were so appointed and who have blamelessly
offered the gifts[370]. 'The Church,' said S. Augustine, 'from the
time of the Apostles, through most undoubted succession of the
bishops, perseveres till the present moment, and offers to God in the
Body of Christ the sacrifice of praise[371].' As the teaching function
of the whole Church does not militate against the special order of
teachers, so the priestly function of the whole does not militate
against a special order of priests. We cannot speak of those who are
ordained as 'going into the Church'--and it is hard to estimate the
harm done by that fatal phrase--for that implies that the laity are
not of the Church, but we can call them priests in a special sense;
for they give themselves up in a deeper way to the service of God;
they are specially trained and purified for His service; they are put
as representatives of the whole Church in a way in which no other is,
able to know and to sympathize with its wants, its joys, its failings;
able therefore to intercede for it with God and to bring His blessings
to it. As the Church stands in relation to the world, so they stand to
the Church; they fill up that which is lacking of the afflictions of
Christ in their flesh for His body's sake which is the Church, whereof
they are made ministers; they convey spiritual gifts and benediction
to the Church.
To complete the conception of the Church, it would be necessary to add
the thought of the Church expectant and triumphant, the presence of
the blessed dead. For they too strengthen and complete each aspect of
the Church's work. The great cloud of witnesses, the heroes of faith,
who watch their brethren on earth, they, by their example, aid the
spiritual life and strengthen us to lay aside every weight and the sin
that doth so easily beset us: their virtues reflect parts of the
manifold glory of the Son of Man. With their heirs _noblesse oblige_;
each Christian born of such ancestry is able to be like the Athenian
Lycurgus, independent of the world, bold and outspoken, because of his
noble birth[372]. The record of their writings strengthens the witness
to the faith once delivered to the saints, and binds us to loyalty to
that which has stood the test of ages. They, 'the general assembly and
church of the firstborn enrolled in heaven,' themselves, we believe,
worship God with a purer worship than ours; the thought of their
presence in worship, as we join with angels and archangels and all the
company of heaven, lifts our hearts to a wider, more spiritual
adoration.
But for our present purpose it is with the Church militant we have to
deal: the Church on earth, the visible organ of the risen Lord, the
organ of redemption, of revelation, of worship; the chief instrument
designed by the Lord for the establishment of the kingdom of Heaven
upon earth. That is our ideal of it. But what of the reality? of the
historical facts? Has not the Church crushed out individual life and
freedom? has it not thrown its shield over laxity? has it not
repressed zeal and so driven piety into nonconformity? has it not
tried to check scientific truth and condemned a Galileo? has it not
made worship a matter of form and reduced it to externalism? So its
opponents ask, and its defenders admit that there is much of truth in
these charges. They admit that it has looked very different from its
ideal. 'It has looked like an obscure and unpopular sect; it has
looked like a wonderful human institution vying with the greatest in
age and power; it has looked like a great usurpation; it has looked
like an overgrown and worn-out system; it has been obscured by the
outward accidents of splendour or disaster; it has been enriched, it
has been plundered; at one time throned above emperors, at another
under the heel of the vilest; it has been dishonoured by the crimes of
its governors, by truckling to the world, by the idolatry of power, by
greed and selfishness, by their unbelief in their own mission, by the
deep stain of profligacy, by the deep stain of blood[373].' The Church
has, indeed, many confessions to make, of its failure to be true to
its ideal. But there are several considerations which must be borne in
mind when we pass judgment upon it.
In the first place, it was committed to human hands, 'the treasure is
in earthen vessels;' and while it gains thus in reality, in human
sympathy, in touching the facts of everyday life, it is exposed to all
the risks of imperfection, mistake, perversion. But further, as
S. Augustine said, we still can say, 'Non adhuc regnat hoc regnum.'
The Church has never had free play; it has never been in a position to
carry out its ideal. At first, a persecuted sect, it had not the
power; then, when it became established and gained the power, there
burst into it an influx of half-Christianized converts who lowered its
moral level or misunderstood its doctrines; then, with the break up of
the Roman Empire, it had to tame and civilize the new races of Europe;
and finally, the divisions of the Reformation have weakened its
witness in the world. But, more important still, the very greatness of
the ideal has caused the difficulty of its realization, and has
exposed itself to caricature and to one-sidedness. The richer, the
more many-sided, the more complete an ideal is, the less possible is
it for any one generation to express it completely, the more likely is
it that one side of truth will be pressed to the exclusion of some, if
not of all the rest.
This may be tested in each of the points which we have considered. The
Church is an organization for spiritual life, for holiness. It makes
the bold claim to be the society of saints; but at once there arises
the conflict between the ideal and the actual state of men. Press the
ideal, and you will narrow the Church to those who are externally
leading good lives or who are conscious of conversion to Christ. This
was the line taken by the Novatians, by the Donatists, by the
Puritans, by the Baptists, and the Church was thereby narrowed. On the
other hand, dwell only on the actual state, the weakness, the failures
of human nature, and you acquiesce in a low level of morality. The
Church aims at being true to both; it will not exclude any from its
embrace who are willing to submit to its laws; it takes children and
trains them; it takes the imperfect and disciplines them; it rejects
none, save such as rejoice in their iniquity and deliberately refuse
to submit to discipline.
But again, this suggests another class of difficulties, all those
which are associated with the relation of the individual to the
society, difficulties which are parallel to the difficulties in
politics, which are not yet solved there, and which are always needing
readjustment. Here again it is possible to overpress either side: the
claims of the society may be urged to the detriment of the individual,
the central organization may crush out national life and give no scope
for individual development, and so there arises the imperial
absolutism of the mediaeval Church. On the other hand, it is equally
possible to exaggerate the claims of individualism, of independence,
of freedom, and the result is division and disaster to the whole
society; the individual is only anxious to save his own soul, and
religion is claimed to be only a thing between a man and his God;
common Church life becomes impossible, and the witness of the Church
to the world, and thereby its power for missionary work, becomes
weakened. As before, the Church ideal strives to combine both sides of
the truth. It values, it insists on, the rights of each individual
soul; its mission is to convey the Spirit to it, that is to say, to
waken it up to a consciousness of its own individual relation to God,
its own personal responsibility in God's sight; it does bid each
individual save his own soul. But it keeps also before him the claims
of the society; it says to him that in saving his soul he must lose it
in service for others; when his soul is saved, it must be used for
active service with others in joint work. It does say that the society
is more important for the world than any one individual member of it,
and that each individual gets real strength when he speaks and acts
not for himself but as representing the society behind him. It is
possible to think of the Church as an organization existing for the
spiritual good of the individual; but it is possible also, and it is a
deeper view, to think of the individual as existing for the good of
the Church, like a singer training himself not to display his own
voice but to strengthen the general effect of the whole choir. That is
the ideal of the Church, a body which quickens the individual into
full conscious life, that the individual may devote his life to the
service of the whole. Its life is like that of a great moving flight
of birds, each with its own life, yet swaying and rising and turning
as by a common impulse,
Their jubilant activity evolves
Hundreds of curves and circlets, to and fro,
Upwards and downwards; progress intricate
Yet unperplexed, as if one spirit swayed
Their indefatigable flight[374].
The Church, again, is the teacher of truth; but in the acquisition of
truth there are always two elements. There are the fixed facts of
life, with which theory deals, and the accumulation of past thought
upon the facts; there is also the creative spirit which plays upon
these, which re-adapts, combines, discovers. The teacher of any
science has to convey to his pupil the accumulated theories of the
past and to quicken in him fresh power of thinking: he speaks first
with authority, though of course with assurance that his authority is
rational, and that the pupil will understand it ultimately. The
teacher of morality, the parent, teaches even more strongly with
authority, though he too trusts that the child will ultimately accept
the law on rational grounds. The pupil needs at once a receptive and a
critical faculty. The absence or exaggeration of either is equally
fatal. Here again the Church ideal tries to combine both sides and to
insist upon the real unity of all truth, and this makes its task so
difficult. At times the whole stress has been laid on the permanent
elements in the faith, and the result has been, as often in the
Oriental Church, a tendency to intellectual stagnation: at other times
the present speaking voice of the Church has been emphasized, and any
theory has been hastily adopted as absolutely true, without due
consideration of its relation to other truths. At times authority has
been over-emphasized, and the acceptance of dogma has seemed to be
made the equivalent of a living trust in a personal God: at others the
duty of individual search after truth, of individual conviction has
been pressed; the traditions of the past have been ignored; nothing
has been of value except that which has commended itself to the
individual reason, and the result has been confusion, uncertainty, the
denial of the greatness and the mystery and the width of truth, and
too often a moral and spiritual paralysis. Meanwhile the Church has
tried to hold to both sides: it has insisted on the ultimate unity of
all knowledge: starting from the axiom that One is our teacher, even
Christ, and believing that all truth comes from His inspiration as the
Word of God, it has refused to acquiesce in intellectual
contradiction; it has ever held, with King Lear, 'that "ay" and "no"
too is no good divinity.' The truths of philosophy and religion must
be one: the truths of science and religion must be one[375]. In the
desire to see this, the Church has been hasty, it has rejected
scientific truth, because it did not fall in with its interpretation
of the Bible. It has made its mistakes, but it has done so out of a
noble principle. It would be easy to gain consistency by sacrificing
either side; it is hard to combine the two: and this is what the
Church has tried to do: it has upheld the belief of the ultimate
synthesis of all knowledge. In exactly the same way, the sects have
often gained force, popularity, effectiveness for the moment by the
emphasis laid on some one truth; the Church has gained strength,
solidity, permanence, by its witness to the whole body of truth.
The same tendency may be shortly illustrated with regard to the
function of worship. That too is a complex act; in that there should
be the free conscious act of the individual, worshipping in spirit and
in truth a God whom he knows as a personal God; but clearly this is
not all; the whole society must express its corporate life in
corporate worship. Its influence is something over and above the
influence of its individual members, and that influence must be
exercised on the side of God; it must be recognised as coming from
God; it must be solemnly consecrated to God's service. The society has
a right then to call upon its individual members to join in this
corporate action. On the one hand lies the danger of the overpressure
of the society, where the service of the individual is unwilling or
apathetic: on the other hand the danger of individualism and
sectarianism, in which the whole conception of public worship is
lowered and the individual is never trained in religious matters to
feel the kindling power of a common enthusiasm, to be lifted above
himself in the wave of a common joy. The Church has aimed at combining
both; by the insistance on confession and absolution it has tried to
train the individual to a sense of personal penitence and personal
gratitude: but these have only prepared him to share in the common
worship of the society.
But the Church has had to do even more than this. Not only has it
aimed at keeping in due proportion the conflicting elements in life,
in truth, and in worship; it has also had to keep alive the three
sides at once, and to keep them in their true relation to each other.
To be at one and the same time the home of life and truth and worship,
this belongs to its ideal and this adds new difficulties. Sometimes
one element has preponderated, sometimes another: but its aim is
always to preserve the three. It has historically preserved the
synthesis of the three more than any other Christian body. It has
moved through the ages doing its work, however imperfectly. It has
kept historic continuity with the past: it has disciplined life and
raised the standard of morality and united the nations of the world.
It has been a witness to a spiritual world, to the fact that men have
interests above material things, and that these deeper spiritual
interests can combine them with the strongest links. It has gone out
as a _Catholic_ Church, knowing that it contains in its message truths
that can win their way to every nation; and therefore it has never
ceased to be a _Missionary_ Church, as it needs that each nation
should draw out into prominence some aspect of its truth, and reveal
in life some side of its virtue. It has enshrined, protected,
witnessed to the truth; both as an 'authoritative republication of
natural religion,' keeping alive the knowledge of God, and of His
moral government of the world[376], and as a revelation of redemption.
It has drawn up the canon of Holy Scripture and formulated its Creeds:
it still witnesses to the unity of knowledge: it has held up before
the world an ideal of worship, at once social and individual. Its
truths have indeed spread beyond itself, so that men find them now in
bodies opposed to it; and therefore are perplexed and do not know
where their allegiance is really due. It has indeed been itself often
untrue to its mission; but ever and again it has re-asserted itself
with a strange recuperative power, for, as the fountain of its life,
there is ever the power of the Holy Spirit, sent by the risen Lord; to
check temporary failures or accretions of teachings, there has been
the perpetual re-appeal to Holy Scripture and the Creeds; to control
idiosyncrasies of worship, there has been the permanent element of its
Liturgies. Its very failures have come from its inherent greatness;
they are the proof of great capacities, the omen of a greater future.
Like S. Paul, it holds on its way 'by glory and dishonour, by evil
report and good report, as deceiving and yet true, as unknown and yet
well-known; as dying and behold it lives; as chastened and not killed;
as sorrowful yet always rejoicing; as poor and yet making many rich;
as having nothing and yet possessing all things.'
Does the world need the witness of the Church's life less now than in
past ages? Less? nay, for many reasons more. The widening
opportunities of intercourse are opening up new nations, whose
existence had only been suspected before; they are bringing the
various parts of human kind into a closer touch with each other. The
problems of civilization are more complex; and the more complicated a
piece of machinery is, the more difficult it is to keep it in order;
so small a defect may throw the whole out of gear. The wider our
knowledge of humanity, the greater need of a Catholic Church, which
shall raise its voice above the din of conquest and the bustle of
commerce, and insist that all races shall be treated with justice and
tenderness as made of one blood; which shall welcome all men freely
into its own brotherhood, and conveying to them the gifts of the
Spirit, shall help them to shew forth in their lives fresh beauties of
the richly-variegated wisdom of God. The growth of our huge towns,
'where numbers overwhelm humanity,' and the accumulation of wealth
bring the danger nearer home: amidst social upheavings and the
striving of class with class, there is need of a Church to rise above
rich and poor alike, which shall embrace both; which shall teach both
a real visible brotherhood amid all external inequalities; which shall
teach the poor the dignity of labour wrought for the good of the whole
society, and teach the rich the duty and the blessing of the
consecration of their wealth. With the wider use of machinery and the
restless rush of money-getting, it is important that there should be
the appeal of the Church that no man or woman shall be degraded into
being a mere machine; because each is a living soul, capable of
personal responsibility, capable of a pure life, capable of a
knowledge of God.
Amid the increasing specialization of studies, amid all the new
discoveries of science and historical criticism, with all the
perplexities that arise as to the interpretation and inspiration of
the Bible, now, if ever, there is need of a Church, which conscious of
its own spiritual life, knowing that its spiritual truths have stood
the test of centuries, has patience and courage to face all these new
facts and see their bearing and take their measure; which all the
while shall go on teaching to its children with an absolute but
rational authority the central facts of the spiritual life, and shall
never doubt the ultimate unity of all truth.
Amid the uncertainties of individualism, the fantastic services of
those who tend to reduce worship to a mere matter of emotion, amid the
sorrows and perplexities of modern life, the world needs the witness
of a rational and corporate worship, which recognises the deepest
sufferings of human nature enshrined in its very heart, yet recognises
also the way in which suffering when accepted freely, is blessed of
God; which worships at once a crucified and a risen Lord. Over against
the divisions of race and continent the Church raises still its
witness to the possibility of an universal brotherhood: over against
despair and dispersion it speaks of faith and the unity of knowledge:
over against pessimism it lifts up a perpetual Eucharist.
[333] The Dean of S. Paul's on _The Christian Church_. Oxford House
Papers, No. xvii. where this truth is excellently worked out and
applied to the Church.
[334] Browning, _Paracelsus_, ii. p. 30, ed. 1888.
[335] Tennyson, _In Memoriam_, xxxvi.
[336] Ps. lxxviii. 3, 4.
[337] _De Inc._ 12.
[338] Browning, _Fra Lippo Lippi_: M. Arnold, _The Youth of Nature_:
Shelley, _The Skylark_.
[339] _Ep. ad Diogn._ vi.
[340] Bruce, _The Chief End of Revelation_, p. 116.
[341] _Eccl. Pol._ v. 54. Cf. Iren. _adv. Haer._ iii. 20: 'Gloria enim
hominis Deus; operationis vero Dei et omnis sapientiae Ejus et
virtutis receptaculum homo.'
[342] Ign. _ad Eph._ viii. ἃ δὲ καὶ κατὰ σάρκα πράσσετε, ταῡτα
πνευματικά ἐστιν ἐν Ἰησοῦ γὰρ Χριστῷ πάντα πράσσετε.
[343] _Aurora Leigh_, vii. p. 302.
[344] Cp. H. S. Holland, _Creed and Character_, Sermons III-VIII.
[345] Πάντων τοίνυν ἀνθρώπων κεκληένων, οἱ ὑπακοῦσαι βουληθέντες,
κλητοὶ ὠνομάσθησαν, Clem. Alex. _Strom._ I. xviii. 89.
[346] Cp. 1 Tim. ii. 1-6.
[347] For the whole of this last paragraph cf. H. S. Holland, _On
behalf of Belief_, Sermons VI and VII.
[348] S. Ignatius, _ad Eph._ vii. εἷς ἰατρός ἐστι, σαρκικὸς καὶ
πνευματικὸς, as compared with _ad Magn._ xiii. ἵνα ἕνωσις ᾐ σαρκική τε
καὶ πνευματική.
[349] Pseudo-Clem. Rom. _Ep._ ii. 14; Clem. Alex. _Str._ vi. 14;
iv. 8. For these and other illustrations cf. Seeberg, _Der Begriff der
christlichen Kirche_ (Erlangen, 1885), cap. i; and Gore, _Church and
the Ministry_, ed. i. pp. 19, 28, 136.
[350] 1 Cor. xii. 28.
[351] Cp. Acts ix. 31 ἡ ἐκκλησία καθ᾽ ὅλης τῆς Ἰουδαίας καὶ Γαλιλαίας
καὶ Σαμαρείας.
[352] 1 Cor. xii. 28, xv. 9; Gal. i. 13; Phil. iii. 6; Eph. i. 22,
iii. 10, 21; Col. i. 18, 24; 1 Tim. iii. 15.
[353] _Hibbert Lectures_, 1883, p. 311.