CHAPTER IV. SACRAMENTS OF LIFE.

"THE Finger of God," wrote once Sir Thomas Browne, "hath left an inscription upon all His works." We have little skill to read that wondrous message, but from the very dawn of humanity men have tried to trace the writing, have sought to spell out the words, and as they came to perceive something of those spiritual forces that are at work in the world, and to look beneath the surface of things to that which lies deeper, they too have endeavoured to embody in outward forms for themselves and for others the truths which they would apprehend.

The course of the ages changes the meaning of even the simplest words which we use, for words, like men, are mortal; and so it has come about that the thought which rises in our minds as we speak of a sacrament is not that which came to those who used the word long ago.

In the ancient days a sacrament was simply a holy thing, something consecrated and set apart; in very early times it was especially a sort of judicial pledge deposited by the parties in a law [p.59] suit; then it came to mean the solemn oath of a soldier, pledging his loyalty to his commander on entering upon his military service. It was used by early Christian Latin writers to render the thought of the Greek mystery, /μυστήριον/, a word which we have failed to translate into English, as so often we must fail in any translation from one tongue to another to render thought for thought.

We think nowadays of a mystery as being something hidden, but to the Greek it was rather a revelation; an unfolding through symbol of that which could not be wholly expressed in any words. The mystery remained a secret to him who was without, to the uninitiate; but the initiate understood its meaning.

In the most famous mysteries of Greece, those which were celebrated at Eleusis, it would seem that along with the idea of revelation of truth went also the sense of upbuilding of the inward life, the purification of the soul and the assimilation of the Divine things imparted beneath the symbol. For revelation, the unveiling of truth, is no one-sided act; it involves response in the mind that receives; if the truth is apprehended, it must in part at least, be also assimilated. And so every mystery is something more than the unfolding of a hidden reality; it also implies the imparting of new life.[7] [p.60 ]

In the earlier Christian literature sacraments still bear this wide meaning. Tertullian often uses the word thus. In one passage he speaks of a woman known to him who was accustomed to go into ecstasies during the weekly service of the Church; "she converses with angels, sometimes even with the Lord, and both sees and hears sacraments" [8] He speaks of "the sacrament of allegory,"[9] "sacraments of metaphors," [10] in both cases alluding to Old Testament types, and again, he explains the wood by which Moses made the waters of Mara sweet (Exodus xv.), as a sacrament symbolizing the cross [11] <#_edn11>

According to Prudentius, the early Christian poet, the Evangelist tells us that Christ gave these [p.61] commands to His disciples: "Seek not carefully for words when ye shall have to descant of my sacrament," [12] "my Sacrament," being evidently here equivalent to "the Gospel."

But, as time passed by, the word sacrament became more and more used for certain mysteries of the Church alone, although far down into the middle ages even in this sense the word had a wider use than that of the seven sacraments of the Council of Trent.

Thus in 393 A.D. the synod of Hippo made a decree as to the use of the sacrament of salt at Easter by the catechumens, and in later times the ringing of bells and the use of the sign of the cross were regarded as sacraments. By the time of Augustine, however, the word sacrament was frequently used in its narrower signification, and already emphasis is laid on the saving power of the sacrament rather than on its significance as a revelation. Yet Augustine, though holding that the sacrament of baptism was necessary to salvation, once wrote thus: "For what else are each of the bodily sacraments, but, so to speak, certain visible words; most holy words it is true, but yet mutable and temporal ones?" [13] <#_edn13>

It is this wider sense of the word which we must [p.62 ]be careful not to lose, the use in which a sacrament means the unfolding and imparting of the spiritual and eternal through that which we see and hear and feel.

Because in times past the Church has tended to narrow the use of the word, and, by confining the Divine operations to certain channels, to misread the great sacrament of life, so lessening the mystery of the world, there is all the more reason that we should not rest content with seeing how inadequate such views have proved. It is true that over the doctrine of sacraments men have fought and wrangled, forgetting the name by which they were called. But it is true, too, that to countless souls it has seemed that through the sacraments the Church has offered them help which has come as in no other way to their lives. And surely this has not been all delusion. The error of the sacramentalist in the past has often rather been that he has confined the Divine presence and the Divine working to certain fixed channels and unchanging visible signs. Those of us who hold that these good men have narrowed down the freedom of the inner life need to meet them not by denying the Divine presence where they see it, but by trying to see and to realize that presence ourselves more fully throughout all our lives. We are called to the worship and the knowledge of the transcendent and immanent God, who is here in the midst of our lives, in the midst of His world and His works, yet is far more than all these. [p.63] When the stern old Tertullian looked out upon the pagan world around him and noted in its religious rites strange mimicry and rivalry of the Christian mysteries, he could perceive no good in what he saw. In the worship of Mithras he found a baptism for the remission of sins, and a sign made on the forehead of the soldier in this pagan army of salvation; a crown purchased by the sword, and the ritual offering of bread. But all this, like the ancient Roman rites of Numa, or the mysteries of Eleusis and of Samothrace, seemed to him but the work of the Evil One. It was the devil's part, he wrote, to invert the truth and make of it his own counterparts, as he seemed to do in much of the ritual of the heathen temple.[14] <#_edn14>

In like manner, in more modern times the early missionaries in the far east learned with amazement of the way in which, in the mountains of Thibet, the devil had made his imitation of the ceremonies and offices of the Catholic Church, and wondered as they heard of the Buddhist monasteries with their abbots and hierarchy of clergy, and the celebration there of mysterious offices strangely resembling their own mass, to the sound of bells and amid the smoke of incense.

In our own day an even wider area opens before [p.64 ]the historian's vision, and across five continents men trace, under various forms, rites whose origin seems the same. It is not now the devil who is credited with inspiring these myriad devices, but perhaps not a few of the students who return with Dr. Frazer from the survey of this vast field are inclined to feel that they have reduced all alike to one origin, in primitive savage superstition at work in the presence of life, birth and death. But if Tertullian and his school lack charity in their judgment on the sacraments of the heathen, there is surely danger too that our modern men of science may lead us to believe that in tracing a custom to its primitive origin they have found its cause or explained its nature. We can under- stand a thing best, not merely by knowing its beginning, but by also viewing it in its full development, judged not only by what it is at its lowest, or when it is most degraded, but at its highest and best.

The world-wide use points surely to a world-wide need, expressing itself in different ways, but in essentials the same. Unconsciously, indeed, in all our lives we make use of sacraments whenever we apprehend the invisible and the higher through the medium of the visible and lower. And, in our very thoughts, metaphors and symbols are nothing else than sacraments expressing truth in pictorial form. Even when men deliberately attempt to explain all life on a basis of atheistic materialism they still feel the need of what might [p.65] truly be called a kind of sacrament. It is very significant from this point of view to find that some French secularists have found it desirable to publish a ritual of civil ceremonies, [15] in which model liturgies are provided for a secular baptism, a secular confirmation service, as well as secular marriage and burial services. A conscious recognition of this same need led Auguste Comte and his Positivist followers to devise an elaborate ritual which might make their worship of Humanity more real.

The Society of Friends itself, which is popularly supposed to represent a protest against all forms of sacraments, can illustrate in its history the value of the true sacrament, and the danger there is of doing worship to the form of the sacrament, rather than to the life which makes it of worth.

No other Christian community has proved so strikingly the value in worship of the beautiful sacrament of silence, that universal liturgy in which all nations can unite; where ignorant and learned men come together on a like basis. Yet the very fact that in speaking of this we need to emphasize the worth of "Living silence," shows that too often, even here, men have but honoured a dead silence, making an idol of the sacrament which was only a means to an end, not an end in itself.

We may see even more clearly how easy it is for the form to become a bondage in the history of [p.66] another strange Quaker sacrament, that of the "Plain dress" of the middle nineteenth century. There is no need to tell how, in the case of this custom, the protest against changing fashions became itself the most tyrannous of fashions. What is especially interesting to us now, is to note that the dress which was an outward sign of inward grace became to be considered as, in a sense, holy itself. A young man or woman would wear the ordinary dress of the day, and suddenly some time of decision would come, a crisis in the inner life, and perfectly naturally the change would be marked by the adoption in the plain dress of the older generation. And it even became customary to associate the length of the hat brim with the holiness of the wearer's life; the truer to Quaker principles he was, the longer was the brim. It has been said that you may find in a journal written seventy years ago such an entry as this: "I think I can honestly, yet in all humility, say that in the past year there has been a growth in grace, and I have ventured to add a quarter of an inch to the brim of my hat." We smile; yet for some of us at least that ancient costume is so redolent of beautiful memories that we can scarce bear to laugh at its vagaries; we know too well the sacramental efficacy of the old Friend's bonnet, which forever recalls the goodness and love of the face beneath it.

It is strange that in the ancient Church of Rome men should have come to think in much the same [p.67] way of the peculiar habits of the religious orders, regarding the monk's dress itself as something sacred, which an unworthy man dishonoured, and which actually helped its wearer to be holier in his life just as the old Quaker dress was felt by many to help them to be more consistent in all their ways with the ideal which they strove to realize. So strong was this feeling that men who were not members of an Order sometimes obtained as a privilege to wear for a time the cord, to die in the habit, or even to be buried in it, the dress itself being felt to be sacramental.

If these minor sacraments came to be so misunderstood, how natural it is that similar misunderstandings should arise as to sacraments in common use throughout the whole Church, and associated with the very deepest truths of the inner life. Yet if we go back to their origin we shall see that the two chief sacraments of the Church were most simple acts expressing in visible language the life of the spirit, acts perfectly natural and full of significance to those who first took part in them, but which in later days have too often lost their meaning because the mere form was held to have some magical efficacy in itself.

To understand these sacraments aright do we not need to enter into the spirit of the Teacher in whose name they are celebrated, and who is believed to have instituted them? As we read the evangelists' record of the life and words of Jesus, [p.68] we must surely feel that to him all life was a sacrament, a continual unfolding of the Divine through the visible world and through human life. In his eyes the sunshine falling alike upon good and evil men is a constant revelation of the Divine love, compassing just and unjust, overcoming evil with good. The beautiful flowers of the field, blooming for a moment and then destroyed, bring to him no thoughts of gloom, as they did to the Greek poet, but the certainty that the Power which gives such loveliness to the creatures of an hour will provide for His higher creation too. The sparrows chirruping under the eaves, humblest of birds, fill him with a sense of the Father's care for these, and much more for man. As Christ walks across the fields, he sees messages for men in all the life about him: the parable of the seed, summing up the whole mystery of our nature in its life and growth; the sower at his work, the fishermen at their task, all are parables for him. And so it is with the relationships of our human life, which Christ takes up in his teaching and makes sacramental. Because he is in unbroken communion with the Father unseen, he constantly brings all the little things of daily life into relationship with Him.

Christ found the religious folk of his day intent on fulfilling certain duties; eager to guard the letter of the scriptures, the sacredness of the sabbath, and to fulfil the various acts which the law prescribed. He did not destroy the sacredness of [p.69] the one day by his treatment of the sabbath, but he raised the other days to its level: he did not secularize life by his attitude to the law, but rather recognised all life as holy. Religion was no longer to be something confined to certain acts and to special offices and places, but rather the attitude of the soul toward God and one's fellows, a spirit pervading the whole life and not concerned merely with the externals of duty or with certain special seasons of prayer.

Was it not natural, and even necessary, that One who looked thus upon the world, seeing every- thing in relation to God as the Author and the end of life, should make of the commonest acts a means to the Source of all strength? The water of purification, without which men could not live a clean and healthy life, the daily bread without which they could not live at all, the wine which stood for the inspiring fellowship which makes life worth living, were symbols ready to hand and full of spiritual meaning.

We have a perfect instance, in the account given in the fourth Gospel of the washing of the disciples' feet, of the true nature of the sacrament, and we are able perhaps to see it more clearly because the actual form of this sacrament has never been in general use in the Church, and men have almost ceased to think of it as a sacrament at all. "Except I wash thee thou hast no part in me," the Master says to Peter; so necessary was the sacrament. Yet the mere form meant nothing, when the thought [p.70] and life beneath it was not entered into, for Judas too, submitted to the ordinance, and went out to betray his Lord. We are told how, when Christ had ended this visible parable, the disciples were bidden even so to wash each other's feet. Often possibly in after years one or another may have done a like act for his friend, and recalled the Master's words in doing it. But this sacrament never became fixed into a form, and so even now we can clearly see its meaning. Indeed, had it become a custom of the Church, Christians would have needed to have been very simple and humble if the ordinance were not to lose its significance. In the few instances where the rite of feet-washing is still observed, we see how far removed to-day the ceremony may be from the thought which once inspired it. The selected poor, who have first been carefully washed before the ceremony, are marshalled in stately order, attendant dignitaries are ready at hand with ewers of scented water and basins of precious metal; and so, yearly, do Pope and Emperor commemorate the scene in the upper chamber where in very different wise one whose kingdom was not of this world taught his followers the way they should serve him by serving one another.

The sacrament of baptism would seem to be one which comes naturally to the Eastern peoples: it has been in use for ages among the Hindus of India, and it was apparently in general vogue in Palestine in Christ's time. It would appear [p.71] to have been not so familiar to the Western world, for the evangelist Mark has to explain to his Gentile reader how it was the custom of the Pharisees to baptize pots and vessels, and even beds. Apparently, even in that day the symbol of purification had come to have a magical significance. The washing or purification as a symbol of initiation is common to many religions, and it was a natural pictorial language for the prophet John the Baptist to employ, to express the change of life that was to follow the repentance which he preached. Christ's disciples had, many of them, first been followers of John, and would readily continue to use this sign in their ministry. But though Baptism was to the early Church the natural expression of entrance into the new life of Christianity (as we see in the case of Philip and the Ethiopian eunuch), yet it is hard to imagine that if it were held to possess in itself the importance which in later time was attached to it, the Apostle Paul would actually rejoice in the fact that he had hardly baptized any converts at all himself. [16] <#_edn16> Already, however, the ceremony had a meaning deeper than the simple act of purification severing the old life from the new, which was probably that of the first baptisms of the disciples during the lifetime of Christ. We gather from Paul's words that in baptism the believer made real to himself, and to those about him, his [p.72] going down with Christ into the waters of death and his rising again with him into a new life, by the power of the resurrection. Some inherent virtue was soon thought to attach to the outward act itself, or else one can scarcely explain the origin of that strange custom of baptism for the dead, alluded to in the same epistle. [17] <#_edn17>

This thought of the inherent worth of baptism continued to grow until by the beginning of the fifth century it became generally held that without it salvation was impossible. The Christian con- science, however, discovered a way to remove what would have been the hardest application of such a belief by what was spoken of as the baptism of blood. If an unbaptized convert was martyred for the name of Christ (as often might happen), the martyr's death was held to be itself a baptism, and this idea was extended to what was called the baptism of desire, or the baptism of faith, whenever death occurred before it was possible for a convert to be baptized. The classical instance of this, discussed by St. Augustine and frequently cited by subsequent writers, is that of the penitent thief upon the cross, [18] And Tertullian, who called baptism the "seal of faith," goes so far as to say "we do not receive the washing of purification [p.73] in order to cease from sinning, since we had already been washed in our hearts." [19] The seal of baptism was in his view the legal and visible completion of the act, not the act itself. Still, he holds baptism to be the needful "vesture of faith," as he calls it in another passage, and accordingly discusses the difficulty raised by some heretics of his own time, that Paul being the only baptized apostle, the other apostles could none of them be saved; though he does not feel it needful to adopt the explanation of certain orthodox ritualists of his day, who held, he tells us, that the apostles were possibly baptized on the occasion when the waves beat in upon them in the little ship on the sea of Galilee.

It was not to be wondered at that, with such a view of baptism current in the Church, the Catholic missionaries of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries should have laid stress rather on the numbers whom they could baptize than any other result. It is indeed at once pathetic and amusing to turn over the leaves of the letters from the missions which the good Jesuit fathers wrote two centuries and more ago, describing the progress of their work among the American Indians. You may read there the words of a missionary spending laborious days amid all manner of hardships, baptizing the sick and aged when very near to death and therefore removed from the danger of possible relapse into infidelity, and especially [p.74] rejoicing in the number of souls won by the baptism of dying infants, who could not possibly fall away from grace.

To such almost ludicrous notions do men come through materialising the pictorial language of the primitive sacrament, and imagining that its visible words have magical efficacy in themselves. Yet the thought of the scene in the upper room on the night of the last supper makes us feel how much that visible language might mean in its first simplicity.

As simple and as natural was that other sacrament, when Christ took the bread from the supper table, and the cup of fellowship, and gave them to those friends of his as his body and very life, which he was giving for them and for their fellows. What could be more fitting than that they should henceforth remember this farewell supper, this supreme gift of himself, when their master was taken from their sight, whenever they partook again of the Passover, nay, whenever they met together as disciples to share in a common meal in the name of him they loved? The more fully they lived in his spirit the more simply would each meal they took with one another be hallowed by the thought of his love and his presence.

Thus did the disciples in the early days take together the Eucharist meal from house to house in Jerusalem: and so, in the midst of the storm, Paul took it, before wondering fellow-passengers and crew, mingling the prayer of joyful thanks-[p.75]giving with the remembrance of the Lord for whose name he was suffering hardship.

Already in the time of Paul the communion service was beginning to lose its first simple spontaneity, as we may note in his directions to the Church at Corinth, but for long afterwards the Eucharist was in a much wider sense sacramental, than when its meaning was defined and imprisoned in the formulae of theologians. How full of beauty must the eucharist have been in those little churches of Asia Minor, [20] for which perhaps the Didache, "The Teaching of the Twelve Apostles," was written, towards the beginning of the second century. The eucharist prayer of the Didache is a true prayer of thanks: "We thank Thee, our Father, for the life and knowledge which Thou didst make known to us through Thy servant Jesus; Unto Thee the glory evermore !" "For as this broken piece of bread was scattered over the mountains and brought together and became one, so may Thy church be brought together from the ends of the earth into Thy Kingdom, for Thine is the glory and the power through Christ Jesus evermore."

Thus was the eucharist meal to early Christians a symbol of the unity of the Church, and a means of drawing them nearer in thought to each other. [p.76]

It is sad to think that what in those days was a bond of union should have become in later times a source of bitter contention and misunderstanding; may we not resolve that for our part, however we may differ from each other, or from the majority of Christians, in our views about this observance, we will not let this hinder us from realizing that others may be helped by means which do not aid us, and that it is infinitely better to draw near to God through outward forms than to be without them and not to draw near to Him: that what we need is to realize and to claim the liberty by which a hundred forms may become sacramental, and not to deny the reality of the life which may underlie the fixed forms which others use.

Luther once said that God might have made a sacrament of a bit of stick, had He chosen; Pusey repeated the saying to a friend with a shudder, telling him that it showed an irreverent mind. [21] Yet surely Luther's words convey the very key to our comprehending the truth of the Real Presence, which may be revealed without outward form, or under innumerable forms, just because God is so much nearer than we think, ever at work in His world, still disclosing Himself to those who seek with humble heart, even though they call Him not by His name. What we need above all is the spirit which will fill our lives with such sacraments, revelations of God to us and to our fellows. Sometimes we may be helped by an [p.77] ancient usage of the Church, at others by some new symbol: what matter the shape of the chalice if the wine be there?

John Henry Newman, in his early Protestant days, was wont to make use of the sign of the cross and to find it helpful. It is a sacrament which loses its meaning the moment one thinks of it as having any magical effect in itself, but if it be used to remind oneself of that which it stands for, as the symbol of the perfect deed of self-sacrifice, it may well help many learners in the school of Christ.

In like manner to-day, the wearing of a badge of membership in some society, or adult school (as twenty years ago a piece of blue ribbon), may doubtless prove an effectual sacrament to many men, aiding them to be faithful to a resolution made, as well as showing forth their belief to others. The sign is in itself useless, yet may mean much to the men who make it their symbol of comradeship.

The more worth living our lives prove, the fuller they will be of true sacraments, in little things and in great. The immense sacrament of nature is ever about us, and our human intercourse is made up, in all that makes it of worth, of count- less lesser sacraments. What meaning there may be in a simple handshake, and how much help and strength it may pass on to another! The mere physical act is as nothing in itself, yet it may avail to alter a whole life. Nevertheless, [p.78] we must see even here how easily mere custom may diminish or destroy the use of such a thing. In the studied greeting of formal civility the sacramental character disappears. Or worse still, that which was intended to be a medium of friendship becomes a means of undoing friendship's work. For so long as wrong exists in our lives we must beware of the sacraments of evil by which the ties which bind us to each other and to the world about us become the Devil's bonds instead of God's leading-strings.

The act, or the thing which forms the sacrament, may be in itself used either for good or ill. To one man even it may be good, while to another it may be a means of harm. The greater need, therefore, have we neither to judge our neighbour, nor ourselves to do lightly things which may be a means of good for him, but for us a sacrament of ill.

To take a single instance: Wandering in his father's library, a boy comes upon a book which he begins to read; and suddenly the conviction comes to him that he ought not to go on. The book is full of interest; perhaps in later years he may return to it and find its thoughts most helpful. And yet it may be that this book, which at a later time might prove a sacrament of good, may be for him now nothing but a sacrament of evil, since his mind is not ready to understand its teaching.

In the world without us there are some things so constantly associated with thoughts of goodness [p.79] and beauty that they seem almost naturally God's sacraments. Such are the flowers, which constantly call to our minds thoughts of joy and kindness; the sunlight, which cheers and invigorates; and drives away the disease that is the symbol of wrongdoing; the light, whose essence is so pure that it has become an image of the Divine nature. These are among nature's sacraments, and in the life of man we have, above all, the sacrament of the family, which at its best is an image of the love of the All-highest, and a foretaste of His Kingdom among men, of the city which is to be, in which all are members of one another, living to serve each other.

It may comfort us to think that the devil's sacraments are not so all-pervading; for night, which we think of as the cloak of evil, may itself be to the devout soul a symbol of the mysterious peace of God. One thinks of those wonderful lines of Vaughan:

/Dear Night! the world's defeat;/

/The stop to busy fools; care's check and curb;/

/The day of spirits; my soul's calm retreat/

/Which none disturb!/

/Christ's progress, and His prayer-time;/

/The hours to which high Heaven doth climb./

/God's silent, searching flight;/

/When my Lord's head is fill'd with dew, and all/

/His locks are wet with the clear drops of night;/

/His still, soft call;/

/His knocking time; the soul's dumb watch,/

/When spirits their fair kindred catch. [p.80]/

/Were all my loud, evil days/

/Calm and unhaunted, as is thy dark tent,/

/Whose peace but by some angel's wing or voice/

/Is seldom rent;/

/Then I in Heaven all the long year/

/Would keep, and never wander here./

/* * * */

/There is in God — some say —/

/A deep, but dazzling darkness; as men here/

/Say it is late and dusky, because they/

/See not all clear./

/O for that Night ! Where I in Him/

/Might live invisible and dim!/

or we may remember the "Hymns to Night" of Novalis, and that experience known to so many saints, which St. John of the Cross speaks of as "the obscure night of the soul," the darkness which we needs must traverse before we come to know the greater light beyond. The stern angel of pain seems to many a fiend; but some have found him to be a friend at the last, and certainly there is something in the heart of sorrow that no other experience brings to us, unless it be great joy, and as we feel it, we seem to understand that the spirit of joy and the spirit of sorrow are angels near akin.

In the world that man has made there is one thing above all others through which the influences of evil seem to work, the devil's sacrament of money. When one thinks of the hatreds and lusts springing to birth around it, and the curse it so often seems to bring alike to "him that gives and him that takes," when one sees wealth, [p.81] remorseless in its pride of power, worshipped and cringed to by its recipients and its courtiers, it is easy to understand how a simple Christlike man like St. Francis would have no dealings with money, and shunned to touch it as we might some plague-infected garment. And yet how often has this hateful thing been redeemed from its base use to be the minister of right. Even money is not hopelessly lost for good. The sacramental efficacy of the widow's mite has not ceased through all the centuries since she cast it, in her humility, into God's treasury. The sand hides the gold of Pharaoh, and the imperial treasures of Augustus are vanished and forgotten, but that poor woman's gift still goes on: she gave to God, to the best and highest that she knew, and in giving, little thought that through the word of the Master of Masters, her tiny coin could become for ever a sacrament to humanity.

So may a little thing and a base thing be made a symbol of good; most of all then should we find a channel of revelation in the highest thing we know; not only in the sacrament of nature, but in the sacrament of man.

Surely to us the most wonderful thing in life is personality, and it is human personality which may be the highest sacrament of good, or the most terrible sacrament of ill. Our deeds are often at their best poor clumsy acts that stray in the dark; our thoughts are all imperfect, and our words fail to express them fully. But in spite of all [p.82] this failure, soul acts upon soul, we know not how, and the influence of one life upon another goes out continually like the myriad rays of a lamp. Silently men are changed and transformed by this influence. And there is no man but is doing his part for good or ill in this transforming work, whatever he may be, wherever he may go. Is it not thus that God's self-revelation in Christ becomes real to the Christian? God speaks to us in Jesus through human personality. We draw near to him as a man, we see his life and listen to his words, and as we gaze and listen, we feel that God has taken hold of us.

We are very near now to the greatest of sacraments. Did not the apostle speak of the union of the Church with Christ as μέγα μυστήριου, /magnum sacramentum/? The follower must bear, in some measure, in his life, the likeness of his master; the nearer we draw to him, the more his presence will mould our lives with the impress of his character.

In the ideal marriage, even as we know it realised sometimes now, husband and wife live in such close communion, so share their thoughts, and feelings, so enter into each other's lives, that each character, reacting on the other, grows ever more like to it. May not this thought help us to understand something of what is meant by Christ's union with his Church? The Church is humanity in its ideal form, humanity as a whole striving after its true goal, and the human race comes to [p.83] understand and realize its aim by union with Christ, thus gradually growing to be more like him and to share his nature. The end and the means to it are no mere rapture of holy emotion, no selfish joy of idle contemplation. The relation- ship is much deeper; it must affect our whole character. It is not a rush of sentiment but a union of will.

After years of discipleship, and when he had gone through many things that he might draw nearer to the spirit of Christ, there came to St. Francis that wonderful crowning vision of the Saviour crucified, and amidst the joy of the vision there was pain. From that hour to the day of his death, the record tells us, did Francis bear in secret upon his body the marks of the passion. It does not matter how his frail frame came to respond to the thoughts that so dominated his mind: the important thing for us is not the accidental consequence to the body, but the attitude of mind and spirit, the union of will with a Christ suffering for humanity, bearing the sins of the world. He who has come to be made thus, in the humblest way, the comrade of Christ, must be the comrade too of all his fellow-men. Church and individual alike must show in character and life the meaning of this fellowship — fellowship in joy and in sorrow, too, willingness to learn, to give and to serve. Sharing the burdens of rich and poor, feeling the bonds that bind their lives, accepting ourselves responsibility and blame [p.84] for all ignorance and failure and wrongdoing, we may realize that the spirit of Christ is still at work in the world, that closer than our thoughts is the infinite love, and beneath our weakness the infinite strength of the Father's arms.