CHAPTER VII: PRIESTS AND PONTIFFS

SOME day we may hope to see among our great national museums one made to illustrate the religions of the world, from the rudest rites of the savage to the highest developments of Buddhism, Mohammedanism, Judaism and Christianity. This museum of comparative religions does already exist to some extent in embryo in every great collection of antiquities, and the students of ethnology and folklore have been long at work in preparing materials for its catalogues. A partial glimpse of what it would contain is given in such a world-wide missionary exhibition as that organised in connection with the work of the London Missionary Society at the Agricultural Hall in the early summer of 1908.

The survey of such a great collection cannot but be stimulating to every thoughtful student. Some of its visitors may see in the hideous idols of the South Seas and in the pictures of the medicine man at work at his craft only a further incentive to aid the spreading of their own faith, which they feel more strongly than ever to be immeasurably [p.99] raised above the rites and thoughts of the savage. Others may look with sad eyes at the long series of pictures that is spread out before them, for they see everywhere only the same superstition, the primitive fears of unknown forces, developing with the growth of civilization into religions which expand with man's own needs and conceptions, intermingling with his hopes and aspirations and refined by his thought into the creeds and theologies of the higher faiths. Through all they trace the same instincts, and feel that the savage kneeling before a blood-smeared stone explains to them the Nicene Creed, that the hierarchy of the Church has its origin in the spirit-doctors and fetish-men of a simpler age.

Yet to some at least there may come far other thoughts than these, as they ponder over what they have seen. Everywhere they behold men stretching out their hands towards something above them, beyond them, struggling with fears, oppressed by dim consciousness of wrong, hoping for some way of peace. The priest himself is a witness to this innate need of the soul, since his very presence speaks of man's dependence on the higher than himself, while it also shows men's interdependence upon each other. For the priest's position is impossible, unless he is in some way regarded as a means of communication between man and God, and a centre of fellowship among men. With this thought in his heart a man may look back, not without hope, upon the melancholy pageant of [p.100] the centuries, and watch the strange part that the priest has ever played in it. The modern sceptic joining in the sad cry of the old Roman poet — "So many are the ills that superstition has had power to urge men to" — has had, after all, like the rest of us, but an imperfect vision of the confused drama of history. He sees priesthood as a selfish influence playing upon human ignorance and baseness; he does not perceive the wider priesthood at work of which this is only a perversion, nor realize that priesthood and prayer underlie all that is highest and best in human life. For priesthood is the highest expression of man's social nature, by which he enters into communion with his fellows and with God. It is only because we narrow the use of the name of priest that we do not honour it aright, for in its essence priesthood is not a profession, but a high duty to which all are called.

If we were to try to define this true priesthood, might we not say that a priest is one who, reaching out after the higher and better than himself, helps others onward too, bringing to them something to which they could not of themselves have attained, who shares his good with his fellows and takes upon himself their ill, making communion possible for them, because he has entered into communion with them himself. But it is not easy thus to summarise in a sentence a work which is in truth as wide as human life; wherever a man interprets [p.101] in the terms of his own day the unseen and enduring realities, and helps those about him to view things in their true relations, he is performing a priestly function; whenever he takes up their disadvantages as his own, in fellowship with suffering, and shares with others willingly the result of their own wrong-doing, then is he doing a part of the priest's divinest work.

The germ of such an ideal of priesthood may be seen in far-off days. The family priesthood of the Hebrew patriarchs, and of the early ages of Israel, contains, unconsciously at least, the promise of it, and in a wider form it formed the subject of the noblest prophetic appeal: Israel was called to be a nation of priests, revealing to other peoples the message of God.[23] It may be said, too, that the later history of the Jewish nation has shown in practice the value of the simple family priesthood of the parent, in keeping alive a faith which from the destruction of the temple down into the late Middle Ages was cherished and maintained entirely without the help of a professional ministry. Even when after the time of Maimonides, the rabbis began to be paid for the time which they took from other work to devote to the exposition of the Law for the benefit of others, there was still no arbitrary division between clergy and laity. The human centre of Jewish religious life is not the rabbinic ministry, but the lay priesthood of the family. [p.102]

It was natural that the ideal of a universal priesthood should find expression in the earliest literature of the Christian Church, reviving and enlarging beyond the boundaries of race the appeal of the earlier Hebrew prophets: twice in one writing of the Apostolic Age [24] are Christian folk spoken of as a holy priesthood or a royal priest- hood, while in the vision of the Apocalypse the same ideal is held up for the Church that now is and for the Church that is to be, in the millennial reign upon earth of the faithful disciples of Christ. [25] In the Pauline epistles the disciples are not actually called priests, but both the individual Christians and the Church as a whole are spoken of as Temples of the Holy Spirit, and appeal is made to the Romans "that ye present your bodies a living sacrifice unto God, which is your reasonable temple-service."[26] Moreover, the body in such a passage does not mean so much the flesh and blood, as the whole visible personality of a man; in like manner in that triumphant paean which seems to have been written by the apostle in the conscious- ness of the nearness of impending martyrdom, the thought in the words "I am already being poured out as a libation" [27] is that his whole personality is being poured out and offered up as [p.103] a final priestly act of cheerful giving: for the libation was the glad offering made not merely by an official clergy, but by the head of the household as its family priest, or by the individual as sharing in the universal priesthood of humanity.

Priesthood was regarded, it would seem, in the earliest days of the Church as a function to which all its members were called, but even in the apostolic age certain officials were appointed to fulfil particular duties in the Church on behalf of their fellow members. Yet several generations appear to have passed before priest and presbyter were regarded as fully equivalent terms.[28] As Church organization developed, the gifts of the Spirit were conceived less and less as widespread throughout all the parts of the body, and more and more as confined to certain classes, while in course of time these classes became more official and professional in character. Yet if we remember how repeatedly institutions tend to fetter and destroy the ideal that has created them, we shall find cause to wonder not in the growth of clericalism in the Christian Church, but rather in the fact that all down the ages of her continuous life men and women both within and without the ranks of her officials have realized, in part at least, the higher ideals of true priesthood. [p.104]

It is easy for us to see the harm done by the official spirit, and the hypocrisy which is so often its shadow; still we must not forget that noble army of men who have looked with far other eyes upon their office, feeling themselves the representatives for the sake of order of the Church as a whole, and realizing more or less consciously that their duty is not to be the delegates and deputies of the layman in discharging his priestly functions for him, but to be a means to help him to realize them more fully, aiding him to think more, to do more and to pray more for himself. Especially true is this of prayer, which the true priest must ever aid in others as well as in himself, whether the prayer find utterance in words, or remain unformed even into the mental words of thought. For is not prayer, in this widest sense, the life breath of the Church and of the individual alike? Prayer is indeed too often spoken of as though it implied words: whereas it may exist even without conscious thought, going on whenever the soul's hand stretches out after God, whenever man seeks after goodness, in every act of will by which he is brought into touch with that Spirit from whom all right thoughts, "all holy desires, all good counsels, and all just works do proceed."

The aim of conscious prayer, in its highest form, must be communion, and a communion of will which may continue when the conscious prayer itself ceases, underlying the work and thought of everyday life. To this communion the true priest [p.105] will ever direct his fellows, knowing that as he and they come to share in it more fully they will be the better able to help those about them towards their goal. He knows too, by experience, that there is a law of spiritual magnetism, by which just as in the physical world a weak magnet is strengthened by contact with a strong one, so in the spiritual world the will to do the good and to live aright may be strengthened by coming into the presence of a stronger will, and most of all by contact with the Divine will.

To the Christian, Christ expresses in human form what this will stands for, and so for daily life he is still felt to be the High Priest of man- kind, the touch of whose spirit polarises and renews our wills, as they come into contact with his life. The one early Christian writer who has developed for his readers the thought of Christ's priesthood, the author of the epistle to the Hebrews, sees in the earlier Jewish priesthood with which he was familiar only a somewhat imperfect type of his ideal: with thoughts turned upon the pontifical acts of Christ, which he realizes to be the keystone and crown of human history, he does not stay to consider how the priestly function may, in some measure, though imperfectly, be shared by the humblest disciple, too. Yet this thought of participation in the highest priestly work of the Master seems to have been present with the Apostle Paul when he spoke of "filling up that which is lacking of the sufferings of Christ," and the same ancient [p.106] Catholic view which sees in the good deeds of the saints the continuance of Christ's work, the endless treasure flowing out from his life, would lead us also to see in their sorrows and hardships, where these have been willingly borne for the sake of God and man, a continuance of the redemptive love of the Cross. The thought of the High Priesthood of Christ is not lowered by the fact that priesthood, even in its highest mediatorial side, is to some extent shared, however faultily, by every good human life, but it is rather made intelligible to us, because it ceases to be something wholly alien from us. The life of Christ is not utterly isolated from the rest of the human race, for it could not be this and remain human; it is rather the key for the Christian to all other goodness, explaining the meaning of sacrifice, and the possibility of sorrow and pain being made steps by which men may be raised upwards towards God. And just as the supreme sacrifice of Christ cannot rightly be separated from the rest of his ministry, but rather is understood as its consummation, concentrating upon Calvary the work which was the aim of all his life, so is his High Priesthood not something foreign and separate from the life of man, but the manifestation of a principle which is at work wherever good men live and die. Yet the more truly his followers have become priests themselves, the more have they realized how imperfect their priesthood is, how deep their need to find it constantly renewed by contact with the [p.107] unique and perfect high-priesthood which they find in Christ.

The close vital connection between the disciples' work and that of their Master is one of the thoughts most prominent in the last great discourse of Christ to his disciples as pictured in the Fourth Gospel, and it is emphasized in what commentators have called the great priestly prayer. The disciples' lives are to be in close union with their Master's as the vine branches with the parent stem, and beneath all their deeds must flow his living spirit. They must be in union with each other as he is one with the Divine Father, so making real to others the continuance of his life. Their whole lives are to be one great act of priesthood realizing itself through fellowship. For without fellowship priesthood cannot be, and Christianity could not exist. The Church is a society in which men are linked to each other and to God through Christ; there is no place in it for the selfishness of isolated individualism, or the centring of thought upon personal salvation alone. Its members belong to each other in belonging to their head. The metaphors used in the apostolic writings to describe the Church are all social; it is a body, a building, a city, a kingdom, in which every part is in relation to others, and only thus can join to make the whole. The more the children of the Church realize this, the more truly will they become a fellowship of friends, and show themselves such in daily life; theirs will be [p.108] no exclusive friendship, but one which overflows to all, in honest sincerity, because they cannot but work for all men's good.

When Christ went about in Galilee and told men. that the Kingdom of Heaven was at hand, was he mistaken? Or is the fellowship which he founded not itself a part of that kingdom, the seed which is already growing and spreading throughout the whole earth? Many strange fowls, perhaps, we may think, have lodged in its branches already; but if the fellowship be strong and true they cannot do it great harm, and under its shelter may live not only these but a host of singing birds. The great thing that all have to remember is that members of the fellowship must needs hand on to others the life that has been given to them. That great title by which the Pope is known as Vicar of Christ upon earth is not an idle one: every good Christian Pope has been that to some extent, and so, too, has every Christian disciple, in so far as he lives in the Master's spirit. For language grows old so quickly, that we forget that the vicar is one who acts instead of another, in his place, just as vicarious suffering is suffering borne by one on behalf and instead of another. But we need to explain and translate the appellation "Vicar of Christ" into daily life by means of that other noble title which shines like a jewel at the head of every Papal bull and rescript "servus servorum Dei," servant of the servants of God. The Vicar of Christ will show himself such by serving his [p.109] fellow-men with his whole life, ungrudgingly and gladly, knowing that every act and thought given to their welfare is given to God, and that the Father would have men seek Him not afar from human life and labour, but amidst the toil and sorrow of that sinful humanity for whom Christ died.

When we seek to find how far this ideal is being carried out within the Christian Church, we may well be saddened by our own failure, and by the way in which organizations intended for the common service have come to be treated as an end in themselves. Yet we must remember that in the ancient liturgies, which seem sometimes hard for the democratic modern mind to under- stand, the priest does not speak or act for himself, but as a representative of the whole fellowship of the Church; the cries and prayers and strivings of long generations of human lives are joined in the words of the prayers that he uses, and the beautiful ritual of the altar is intended to be a living picture of spiritual symbols, full of meaning not only for himself, but for all who worship with him.

This view of prayer finds fitting expression in a sonnet of Hartley Coleridge on The Liturgy, which deserves to be better known.

/Oft as I hear the Apostolic voice/

/Speaking to God, I blame my heart so cold,/

/That with those words, so good, so pure and old,/

/Cannot repent, nor hope, far less rejoice./ [p.110]

/Yet am I glad, that not the vagrant choice,/

/Chance child of impulse, timid or too bold,/

/The volume of my heart may dare unfold/

/With figured rhetoric or unmeaning noise/

/Praying for all in those appointed phrases,/

/Like a vast river, from a thousand fountains/

/Swoll'n with the waters of the lakes and mountains,/

/The pastor bears along the prayers and praises/

/Of many souls in channel well defined,/

/Yet leaves no drop of prayer or praise behind./

We cannot but sympathize with the poet: so powerful and attractive are the ancient words that have come to us down the ages fraught with the memories of man's need and spiritual striving, so unworthy often do we feel the language of extempore prayer. Yet if we have only once or twice experienced what unpremeditated prayer may be, when it is offered in the true priestly spirit, in deep sympathy with the needs and longings of those present, diverse though they be, and in close harmony with the peculiar demands of the time and place, we know how such prayer can, as nothing else, gather up our hidden desires and bring our whole souls with it into the sense of communion with the source of the strength and help that we need, towards which our arms stretch out as we listen, and are not stretched in vain.

It is easy for us to see how often priesthood in worship has come short of its ideal; still sadder surely has been our failure to make real the priest- hood of daily life. A family priesthood of the simplest kind has been for centuries characteristic of Hebrew religious life, and this household priest- [p.111] hood of the father, or of both father and mother, is a very real thing in Christendom, especially where the influence of the Reformation is strongest. But we need not only this intimate and beautiful priesthood, but one which shall extend to the wider families of the city, the nation and mankind. We have to remember that our lives are not our own, that we are each representatives, and that every act of ours must have pontifical significance for others; more than that our very thoughts and desires go out far beyond our own lives and help to weave cords which shall pull others upwards or drag them down to our level. The words of Christ's prayer in the Gospel "For their sakes I sanctify myself" are full of significance. If the Master thus consecrates his life and overcomes the evil, thrusting aside the temptation to take the lower and easier path and dedicating his whole will and nature to the Divine will, in order that his disciples may be helped to reach unity with each other and with him, then must the disciples too understand that their own efforts after a better and cleaner and more unselfish life are not made for themselves alone. There is no man that fights in the secret of his own life against evils and temptations, of which others can know nothing, but may feel cheered to remember that his is, after all, no lonely battle. He is an outpost, hidden from his fellow combatants perhaps, but his welfare concerns the whole company, his victory is not for one life, but for all. In this spirit surely [p.112] in every act and thought of life a man may be made a priest.

How beautiful an idea that was which in ancient Rome made of bridge-building a religious deed, so that the chief bridge-builder, the Pontifex Maximus, was also the chief priest. Nor was the thought that bridge-building was a sacred act wholly lost with Paganism, for in the middle ages amongst the many religious societies which existed to promote human welfare and to lessen by sharing them the burdens of life, was the Order of Pontiff Brothers or bridge-builders. Perhaps such societies as this came into being more especially to make easier the perilous pilgrims' roads along which men must pass to visit the holy places and shrines of the Saints. Sometimes a pilgrim who had made the journey would join himself with others who had realized its hardships to make the way lighter for those who should follow in their steps. Sometimes, it may be, men who had not the time or money and perhaps lacked even the courage to make the perilous voyage themselves, yet gladly gave of their labour to help to build the bridge. They could never make use of it, but they hoped that others, better men and more fortunate than they, would pass over it to behold the holy sights which they themselves might never see, and long after they were dead their work would thus stand fast. Thus the great bridge of Avignon still rests on the piers built seven hundred years ago by the Pontiff Brothers, and the feet of [p.113] the little children dance over the arches which the pilgrims used to tread.

To many of the early bridges there still cling memories which tell of some noble founder, but there is a peculiar beauty in the story of the building of the Bridge of Avignon by Saint Benezet. Of this Saint Benezet, or Little St. Benedict, for the friendly pet name can but imperfectly be rendered into English, we know only a little; but across the mists of tradition we catch a glimpse of him, a boy tending the sheep upon the distant hillside and there receiving a strange heavenly call, bidding him go build a bridge where none had yet been, across the broad river at Avignon, where hitherto men had crossed the Rhone often with peril, and always with toil. Shepherd's staff in hand, the lad came to Avignon and entered the church; there he spoke his message to bishop and people, and pleaded with them to help build the bridge. Bishop and people were incredulous, and so too was the mayor when appeal was made to him, but Benezet persisted, and little by little men began to help him. They tell of how he was in some way able to raise the big stones and to lift weights which others failed to move. The first piers began to rise; Benezet and others joined the Order of Pontiff Brothers and under his guidance the work went on. It was the labour of years, and of immense effort, and before the bridge was completed its boy builder died and they buried him in a little chapel above one of the great piers. But [p.114] the building went on, the spirit that Benezet had brought to it did not die with him, and in due time the bridge was built, where men would have toiled and struggled still with the waters, but for the faithfulness of a shepherd boy.

In the old Pagan days, at least in many lands, the priestly act of bridge-building had its darker side. Here and there a curious tradition still survives to show that once the making of a bridge was accompanied by the sacrifice of a life. The victim was offered to propitiate the jealous powers which otherwise might wreak their vengeance upon a larger number, destroying the bridge and the passengers upon it by some sudden storm or earthquake.

We have ceased to think the gloomy thoughts which made men build their bridges thus in the ancient ages. But still, if the bridge of life is to be well and truly laid, there must be sacrifice at its foundations. The thought of the architect, the beauty of the curving arch, all may crumble and fall in the time of stress when the floods are out and the river rushes in boisterous strength against the piers, if the bridge-builder has not done his priestly duty. It is good that man's life should be well ordered, clean and happy, useful to others and harmonious in itself, but deep down in it, if the life is to stand the strain of evil days and to do its full service, there must surely be the strength of willing sacrifice. The ideal of such Christian sacrifice is no sullen, grudging surrender [p.115] of desire, no mutilation of man's true nature, but the glad gift of life to life, which mingles vicarious sorrow with vicarious joy. And as this spirit spreads with the growth of that Kingdom of God which Christ proclaimed to men, the human race will realize more and more fully all that is meant by the priesthood of humanity.

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