to forget, to ignore, or to explain away the claim of Christianity to
penetrate the bodily life, and to affect the body itself, replenishing
it here with powers which are strange to it, lifting it out of the
reach or mastery of passions which falsely boast that they are
congenial with it, leading it on towards its everlasting rest, beyond
all weakness and dishonour, in the glory of God. This claim, with the
deeply mysterious but wholly reasonable hope which it engenders, has
been set forth by Hooker, with his unfaltering strength of thought and
words: 'Doth any man doubt that even from the flesh of Christ our very
bodies do receive that life which shall make them glorious at the
latter day, and for which they are already accounted parts of His
blessed body? Our corruptible bodies could never live the life they
shall live, were it not that here they are joined with His body, which
is incorruptible, and that His is in ours as a cause of immortality, a
cause by removing, through the death and merit of His own flesh, that
which hindered the life of ours. Christ is therefore, both as God and
as man, that true Vine whereof we both spiritually and corporally are
branches. The mixture of His bodily substance with ours is a thing
which the ancient Fathers disclaim. Yet the mixture of His flesh with
ours they speak of, to signify what our very bodies through mystical
conjunction receive from that vital efficacy which we know to be in
His: and from bodily mixtures they borrow divers similitudes rather to
declare the truth, than the manner of coherence between His sacred and
the sanctified bodies of saints[402].' The body, as well as the
spirit, is accessible to the Divine life: there are avenues by which
the energy of Christ's perfect and glorified manhood can penetrate,
inform, affect, transfigure our whole being, bodily and spiritual. His
prevalence in the life of the body and the change He works in it, may
be very gradual, discerned in incoherent fragments, interrupted by
surprising disappointments, hampered by limitations which it would be
unlike Him now to overbear: but the change is real. The body is not
left inert and brutish and uncheered, while the spirit is being
carried on from strength to strength, with growing light and freedom
and majesty: it also rises at its Saviour's touch, and finds from Him
the earnest of its liberation and advancement.
The work of grace upon the bodily nature of man may indeed be a matter
of which we ought not to think save very humbly and tentatively: it is
easy and perilous to overstate or to mis-read the evidence: but there
is peril also in ignoring it. The language of our Blessed Lord; the
clear conviction of His apostles; the intrepid quietude of His
martyrs; the patience of the saints; their splendid and unrivalled
endurance in His service; the change that may be marked in the looks
and voices and instinctive acts of some who seem to be most nearly
His:--here is such guidance for thought and hope as we ought not to
dismiss because we cannot make up a theory about it. There are real
facts--though they may be fragmentary, and require very careful
handling--to warrant us in praying that our sinful bodies may be made
clean by His body, as well as that our souls may be washed by His most
precious blood.
It is this truth, with the higher aspirations, the more venturous
hopes and efforts which it suggests, that the Sacramental system of
the Church keeps in its due prominence. It is at all events not
incongruous to think that the spiritual grace which is conveyed by
visible means may pass through our spiritual nature to tell upon that
which is visible. He who comes spiritually under a visible form may
well be believed to work spiritually upon a visible nature. It is not,
of course, to be thought for a moment that our bodies can at all after
their own manner receive that Food which is wholly spiritual: nor that
the visible element in a Sacrament gives to our bodies any hold upon
the invisible grace, any power to appropriate to themselves by their
own proper energies that which is incorporeal and supra-sensuous.
'Only the soul or spirit of man can take in and feed upon a spiritual
nutriment[403]:' it is only (so far as our thoughts can go) through
the avenue, by the medium of the faithful soul that the spiritual
force of the Sacrament can penetrate to the body. But the fact that
the spiritual virtue comes to us under a form of which our bodily
senses take cognizance is at least a pledge that the body is not
forgotten in the work of sanctification. And it is something more than
this:--it is an assurance of that invasion and penetration of the
material by the spiritual which is the very ground of all our hope for
the redemption of the body. There is in the very nature of a Sacrament
the forecast of some such hope as this:--that He who said of the
material bread 'This is My Body,' may, in His own time, through
changes which we cannot imagine, take to Himself and lift into the
transfiguring realm of spirit our material bodies as well as our
souls; seizing, disclosing, perfecting capacities which under their
present conditions we hardly suspect in them. And, perhaps, yet more
than this may be said: for there would seem to be warrant for trusting
that, in spite of all hindrance and delay, His word of power even now
goes forth towards this work, and in the holy Eucharist has its
efficacy throughout our whole nature. It is the thought to which
Hooker points in words of endless import: 'there ensueth a kind of
transubstantiation in us, a true change both of soul and body, an
alteration from death to life;' words which rest on those of
S. Irenaeus: 'As bread from the earth receiving the invocation of God
is no longer common bread but the Eucharist, consisting of two things,
an earthly and a heavenly; so our bodies also receiving the Eucharist
are no longer corruptible, having the hope of the Resurrection[404].'
Alike in us and in the Sacrament the powers of the world to come
invade the present, and already move towards the victory which shall
be hereafter.
(3) And thus, in the third place, the ministry of Sacraments is a
perpetual prophecy of the glory that shall be revealed in us; the
glory that shall pervade and transfigure our whole being. 'Till He
come;' 'until His coming again;' that note of expectancy, of looking
towards the east and watching for the return of a great light,
discloses a deep truth about the Christian Sacraments. They sanction
and confirm, as ever-present witnesses of a Divine assent, certain
thoughts which will not let men rest in any low contentment with the
things of time--with the approval, the success, the gratification, or
the systems of this world. They declare with a perpetual insistence
the mysteriousness of our present being: they have a certain
fellowship with those strange flashes and pulsations we have felt of a
life which seems astray and alien here, which yet somehow suggests the
thought that could we commit ourselves wholly to its guidance, could
we be replenished with its power, we should not walk in darkness, but
rather, even in this world, be as the children of light:--and so they
take the side of faith and patience against the attractions of
completeness and security and achievement and repose. For they offer
to guide into the way of peace, to welcome into an ordered, hallowed,
course of loving service and of steady growth, those passing thrills
of an intenser life, which if they be forgotten, denied,
misunderstood, or surrendered to the abuse of wilfulness and vanity,
may so subtly and terribly be unto us an occasion of falling.
It is given sometimes to a poet to sink a shaft, as it were, into the
very depths of the inner life: to penetrate its secret treasuries, and
to return, Prometheus-like, with a gift of fire and of light to men.
The venturesome words that record such a moment of penetration and
insight never lose their power: they seem to have caught something of
the everlasting freshness of that world of which they speak: and one
man after another may find in them, at some time of need or gladness
or awakening, the utterance of thoughts which else he might have been
too shy or too faint-hearted to acknowledge even to himself. There is
such a splendid venture of courage for the truth's sake in those lines
of Wordsworth which surely no familiarity can deprive of their claim
to reverence and gratitude; the lines in which he tells his
thankfulness,
For those obstinate questionings
Of sense and outward things,
Fallings from us, vanishings;
Blank misgivings of a creature
Moving about in worlds not realized,
High instincts before which our mortal nature
Did tremble like a guilty thing surprized:
.... Those first affections,
Those shadowy recollections,
Which, be they what they may,
Are yet the fountain-light of all our day,
Are yet a master-light of all our seeing;
Uphold us, cherish, and have power to make
Our noisy years seem moments in the being
Of the eternal Silence.
It may be doubted, whether any life is left wholly unvisited by some
misgiving, some dim, faltering instinct, some pulse of hope or sorrow,
which is akin to that which these words disclose; and the moments of
such visitation are the supreme opportunities of a human soul, the
crises of its tragedy. Then the things that belong to its peace are
being proffered to it; then the Sibyl stands before it with the
treasures of unimagined wisdom. We rise, and we live and grow and see
by the right understanding and employment of such moments; by the
fresh acts of self-committal which they render possible: and in all
the infinite pathos of this world there is no misery comparable with
this--that they should cease to trouble us. Whatever a man may believe
or disbelieve, he will do well to trust these moments when they come:
and, perhaps, if he has grace to know and use them, he may be nearer
to the kingdom of God than he at all suspects. But Christianity does
not leave such 'shoots of everlastingness' wholly unexplained or
unprovided for.
They are in truth the fountain light of all our seeing, for they are
the disclosure, the assertion, the stepping forward of His presence
who alone sustains our life, our thought, our love. And, being this,
they are therefore also the tokens, the emerging witness of a work
that has begun in us, a life that is astir, a process of change that
may be carried forward to an issue which, even faintly surmised, might
make all other desire die away in us.
That we should be perfectly set free from sin; that God should so
dwell in us and pervade our whole being that no part should lag behind
the other; that whatsoever weakness or reluctance or coarseness may
have clung about the body here should utterly pass away, being driven
back by the victorious onset of the Spirit of God, claiming us wholly,
body, soul, and spirit for His own; that whatsoever pure and true
delight has here engaged us should be found, faultless and unwearied,
in that energy which shall be at once our work and our rest for
ever;--this is how Christianity represents to us the end of our
development: and if indeed the powers which are to achieve so vast a
change are already setting about their work in us, it is not strange
that we should be disturbed now and then with some suspicion of it. We
may understand alike the severity of external discipline, and the
sharp disturbance and upheaval of anything like complacency, in a
nature that is being here led on towards so splendid and inconceivable
a transfiguration.
But Christianity does not merely declare to us the origin and meaning
of these strange invasions of our ordinary life; these emergings, as
it were, of that which is behind our normal activity, when the light,
the strength, the love in which alone we live seems to push aside the
curtain on which the background of our daily life is painted, and to
appear unveiled among the things of time. He who telleth the number of
the stars and calleth them all by their names, He who sendeth the
springs into the valleys, and sweetly and mightily ordereth all
things; He would not have these moments of intenser life, of keener
consciousness, of quicker and more excellent growth, to be precarious
and unaccountable, to be abrupt and arbitrary as the rush of the
meteor which is gone before the eye has clearly seen it, or could use
its light. They come from Him; they are the moments in which He makes
His power to be known; in which His hand is felt, and His voice
pervades the soul; the moments when His presence advances, as it were,
and bends over us, and we know that it is He, Himself. And must we
merely wait in blank and idle helplessness for that which we so
greatly need; for that which is our only source of strength and
growth? Must we wait, flagging and fruitless, with just a vague hope
that the quickening presence may chance to visit us again, lighting on
us with arbitrary beneficence, as the insect lights upon the plant,
that it may bring forth fruit in due season? Must we wonder through
days and months, yes, and through years perhaps of dim and desolate
bewilderment, whether it was a real presence that came to us; with
nothing but the fading memory of an individual and unconfirmed
impression to sustain our hope, to keep the door against the gathering
forces of doubt and worldliness and despair? Must we find our way as
best we can, by guidance given long ago, imperfectly realized even
then, and more and more hazily remembered, more drearily inadequate as
time goes on, and the path grows rougher and less clear? Is the
greatest effort to be demanded of us just when our strength is least
and our light lowest[405]? Surely it is not His way to be thus
arbitrary in compassion, thus desultory and precarious in shewing
mercy. Surely He would not have us stray and faint and suffer thus.
No, His compassions fail not; and, with the orderliness of a father's
love, He has made us sure of all we need; and the historic Church and
the triumphs of His saints declare that He is true. He has, with the
certainty of His own unchanging word, promised that the unseen gift,
which is the power of saintliness in sinful man, shall be given to all
faithful, humble souls by ordered means through appointed acts. We
need not vaguely hope that we may somehow receive His grace; for He
has told us where and how we are to find it, and what are the
conditions of its unhindered entrance into our souls. We need not be
always going back to wonder whether our sins have been forgiven, or
laboriously stirring up the glow of a past conviction; for there is a
ministry which He has empowered to convey to us that cleansing glory
which is ever ready to transfigure penitence into peace and
thanksgiving. We need not live an utterly unequal life, stumbling to
and fro between our ideal and our caricature[406]; for He has prepared
for us a way which leads from strength to strength; and we know where
He is ready to meet us and to replenish us with life and light. There
is a glory that shall be revealed in us; and here on earth we may so
draw near and take it to ourselves that its quiet incoming tide may
more and more pervade our being; with radiance ever steadier and more
transforming; till, in this world and beyond it, He has made a perfect
work: till we are wholly ruled and gladdened by His presence, and
wholly wrought into His image. For not by vague waves of feeling or by
moments of experience which admit no certain measure, no unvarying
test, no objective verification, but by an actual change, a cleansing
and renewal of our manhood, a transformation which we can mark in
human lives and human faces, or trace in that strange trait of
saintliness which Christianity has wrought into the rough fabric of
human history, may the reality of Sacramental grace be known on earth;
known clearly enough, at all events, to make us hopeful about its
perfect work in those who shall hereafter be presented faultless in
body, soul and spirit before the throne of God.
[377] In _Rabbi Ben Ezra_ the true measure of such work's beneficence
is shewn:--
Not on the vulgar mass
Called 'work,' must sentence pass,
Things done, that took the eye and had the price;
O'er which, from level stand,
The low world laid its hand,
Found straightway to its mind, could value in a trice:
But all the world's coarse thumb
And finger failed to plumb,
So passed in making up the main account;
All instincts immature,
All purposes unsure,
That weighed not as his work, yet swelled the man's amount.
[378] Cf. A. Knox, _Remains_, ii. 138.
[379] Cf. Plato, _Phaedo_, 85 C, D.
[380] H. P. Liddon, _Some Elements of Religion_, pp. 116, 117. Cf. the
wonderful venture towards a conception of the disembodied soul and of
its manner of life, in the _Dream of Gerontius_: and also in _Battle
and After_, by R. St. John Tyrwhitt, p. 7.
[381] Lotze, _Microcosmus_, Bk. III. c. i. § 2.
[382] Cf. T. H. Green, _Prolegomena to Ethics_, Bk. II. ch. ii. §§
125, 126.
[383] A. Knox, _Remains_, vol. ii. pp. 228, 229. The writer of this
essay desires to acknowledge with gratitude the help he has found in
the remarkable treatise here referred to.
[384] Cf. Hooker, V. liv. 6.
[385] Cf. A. Knox, ii. 210.
[386] H. P. Liddon, _Bampton Lectures_, pp. 101-105.
[387] Cf. S. John iii. 3-13; vi. 51-67.
[388] 1 Cor. x. 17; Gal. iii. 27, 28; Eph. iv. 5.
[389] Acts ii. 38, 41, 42.
[390] Cf. Rom. vi. 3, 4; Gal. iii. 27, 28; Col. ii. 12, 20-23.
[391] Cf. 1 Cor. x. 17, xii. 25, 26.
[392] W. Shirley, _The Church in the Apostolic Age_, p. 103.
[393] Moberly's _Bampton Lectures_, pp. 29, 30.
[394] 1 Cor. xv. 44.
[395] Cf. Professor Milligan, _The Resurrection of Our Lord_, Lect.
vi. Pt. i. § c.
[396] Bright's _Ancient Collects_, p. 152.
[397] C. Gore, _Roman Catholic Claims_, p. 170.
[398] S. Th. iii. Qu. LXV. Art. 1, 4, 3.
[399] Calv. _Inst._ IV. xiv. 20.
[400] Conc. Trident. Sess. VII. Can. iii.
[401] Richard Baxter, _Confirmation and Restauration_ pp. 88, 89;
_Ecclesiastical Cases of Conscience_, Qu. 99. Cf. J. S. Pollock,
_Richard Baxter on the Sacraments_, § 58.
[402] Hooker V. lvi. 9: cf. E. B. Pusey, _University Sermons_, p. 11,
'This is (if we may reverently so speak) the order of the mystery of
the Incarnation, that the Eternal Word so took our flesh into Himself,
as to impart to it His own inherent life; so then we partaking of it,
that life is transmitted on to us also, and not to our souls only, but
our bodies also, since we become flesh of His flesh, and bone of His
bone, and He who is wholly life, is imparted to us wholly. The Life
which He is, spreads around, first giving its own vitality to that
sinless flesh which He united indissolubly with Himself, and in it
encircling and vivifying our whole nature, and then, through that
bread which is His flesh, finding an entrance to us individually,
penetrating us, soul and body and spirit, and irradiating and
transforming us into His own light and life.'
[403] J. B. Mozley, _Lectures and other Theological Papers_, p. 204.
[404] Hooker V. lxvii. 11; S. Irenaeus iv. 18.
[405] Cf. A. Knox, ii. 234-6.
[406] Cf. Martensen, _Christian Dogmatics_, p. 182.
XI.
_CHRISTIANITY AND POLITICS._
W. J. H. CAMPION.
The aim of this essay is to investigate some of the relations of
Christianity to human society, and to point out some of the main lines
of influence which the Christian Church brings to bear on the
organized centres of social life.
We are met at the outset by two widely-differing conceptions of the
mode and direction in which Christianity acts as a regenerating
influence on the life of mankind. On the one side, Christianity is
identified with civilization, and the function of the Church is
regarded as simply the gathering up, from age to age, of the higher
aspirations of mankind: her call is to enter into, to sympathize with,
and to perpetuate whatever is pure, noble, and of good report, in laws
and institutions, in art, music, and poetry, in industry and commerce,
as well as in the moral and religious usages and beliefs, of mankind.
Christianity is thus not a higher order, standing over against and
correcting a lower, but is itself the product or rather the natural
outgrowth of the progressive moral consciousness of mankind. The value
of this mode of thought is in emphasizing the sacredness of secular
interests and duties, and in its protest against dividing the field of
conscience, and assigning to the one part a greater sanctity than to
the other. 'As our salvation depends as certainly upon our behaviour
in things relating to civil life, as in things relating to the service
of God, it follows that they are both equally matters of conscience
and salvation[407].' Its weakness lies in its not sufficiently
recognising one decisive fact of human nature, the fact of sin. No
one, as it seems to us, looking at human nature, in himself or others,
with clear, open, unprejudiced eyes, can doubt the existence of sin,
its corrupting influence on the whole nature, and yet its fundamental
unnaturalness. But if states and societies are as the individuals who
compose them, then any theory of society must rest on a theory of man;
and the theory of man is imperfect unless it recognises the fact of
sin.
On the other hand, the recoil from secularism, or the overwhelming
sense of the power and destructiveness of sin in the lives of men and
of societies, leads others to draw sharp the distinction between
things sacred and things secular. The order of things, it is said, of
which the Incarnation is the starting-point, is admittedly higher than
that secular order which existed before it, and which even now
surrounds it as darkness encompasses light. Let us put on one side
political life, local and national interests, all that sphere of mixed
social relations, which is so imperfect, so full of fierce passions,
of strife, envy, and ambition, so productive of distractions and
entanglements. Let us concentrate our own thoughts on sin, and devote
our own lives to its remedy. Let us at least keep our own hands clean,
and use for our own discipline that narrower sphere which is
sufficient. No doubt individuals will find their vocation in some such
attitude as this: and for some it may be wise to abstain from
political and social interests, in order thus to strengthen their
influence in other directions. But we are not now considering the call
of individual Christians, but the attitude of the Christian Church as
a whole: and it would be easy to accumulate references to shew that
the leading minds of Christendom have declined to recognise, except in
cases of special vocation, as the duty of Christians, the abdication
of responsibility for the problems, the entanglements, the more or
less secular issues of the ordinary social life of mankind.
Christianity, in the words of a modern writer, has both to deliver
humanity from its limitations, and to bring it to a true knowledge of
itself[408].
These two conceptions of the relation of the Christian society to the
issues and interests of the life amid which it moves, correspond to
two aspects of the Incarnation, which the deepest Christian thought
holds in solution. On the one side, the human life of the Word of God
may be regarded as a fulfilment, the restoration of an order, marred,
indeed, and broken, but never completely lost, the binding together of
all truth, all goodness, all beauty, into one perfect life; on the
other, it is a reversal, the beginning of a new order, the undoing of
a great wrong which has eaten deep into human nature, the lifting up
of mankind out of the helpless slavery of sin into the freedom of
righteousness. These two aspects of the Incarnation are not
contradictory but complementary. However difficult it may be for us to
find their unity in thought, they had their unity in a life.
In the same way, the problem with which Christianity has to deal in
its relations to human society has two sides. It cannot hold itself
aloof from the great currents and movements of that ever-flowing and
ebbing human life, in which it shares, which it has to redeem, to
purify, and to quicken. 'In the great sea of human society, part of
it, yet distinguishable from it, is the stream of the existence of the
Church[409].' And yet it has to maintain, as a debt it owes to future
generations as well as the present, the purity of its own moral
standard, the independence of its own deepest life.
To spiritualize life without ceasing to be spiritual, to maintain a
high morality while at the same time inter-penetrating a non-Christian
or very imperfectly Christianized society with its own moral habits
and manners, is a task which presupposes great cohesion and tenacity
on the part of the Christian Church. And it is for that reason that in
speaking of the Church we shall have mainly in view that solid, highly
articulated, permanent core of Christendom[410], which, however broken
into fragments, and weakened by its own divisions, maintains a
clearly-marked type, on the side of doctrine in its creeds and sacred
writings, on the side of worship in its sacraments and traditional
liturgies, on the side of organization in its ministry, as well as
holding the life of Christ its standard of perfect living. Those
Christian bodies which float, more or less closely knit together,
around the central core of the Church, have often rendered great
services in advancing on special points the standard of social and
personal morality, and they are more flexible, and able rapidly to
throw themselves into new crusades; but it may well be doubted if
their work could have been done at all without the more rigid and
stable body behind them, with its slow movements, but greater
Catholicity of aim and sympathy; and certainly it would in the long
run have been better done, if, like the great monastic bodies, they
had remained as distinct organizations within the Church.
What, then, is the attitude of the Church towards human society, and
especially towards human society as gathered up and concentrated in
States? What duties does it recognise towards nations, towards human
society as a whole?