Part 6

And this is also its distinction from the sects; for it endeavours to uphold the entire body of the truth, every particle of it that may be of service to anyone. I suppose there are very few of us to whom the whole of the Creed is a living reality. We may believe it all, but what we live by is usually a small part of it, and it is a different part with different persons. The essence of sectarianism, as I understand it, is the gathering together of those people who live by the same part of the Creed, in order that, like mingling with like, they may develop a great intensity and fervour of devotion. For a moment, indeed, they may be far more effective than the great body of the Church, and yet they cannot become universal. There is something lacking from what they uphold, which someone needs.[#] The aim of the Church is to be universal here also, and to uphold the entire body of the truth, presenting it in its entirety, even though the priest who is called upon to fulfil that office of presenting it to the people may himself be actually living by the slenderest portion of it. No doubt we shall present most forcibly that part of the whole truth which is most real to ourselves; and for that reason, if no other, we ought to try our utmost to gain a personal apprehension of the whole. But men's spiritual diseases are of many kinds, and all the healing truths must be offered by the Church in which all men are to find life.

[#] This is a description of Sectarianism, not of any particular Denomination. We are all infected with the sectarian spirit. In many respects Rome is far more sectarian than the great Presbyterian bodies in Scotland. With all its faults I sincerely believe that the Anglican Communion is, in spirit, more of a Church and less of a sect than any other body. But then it contains several sects within itself, both "High," "Broad," and "Low."

The truth which it thus presents, the Church believes to be the gift of God. This above all is the idea which it tries to safeguard by the outward signs of regular orders and sacraments.

Our belief about the communion service is that there Christ comes to us just as once the eternal Word, which was present with all His creation, none the less came in full manifestation under the limitations of time and space at a particular moment and in a particular country. So in the communion the Divine presence which fills the whole world ("Heaven and earth are full of His glory," as we say in the service itself) is offered to us, and draws near to us; and that not because of any virtue in us; it was while we were yet sinners that Christ came and died; it is while we are yet sinners that Christ offers Himself to us; and it is as guarding against any conception that we can determine how He shall come, or when and where, and that we can, as it were, manufacture His presence in our own way, that the Church maintains with the utmost emphasis the order that is necessary for that service.

It is to preserve the conception of spiritual life as a gift of God, and of the Church as the society which recognises and receives it as such a gift, in distinction from a mutual benefit society organised for the edification of its own members, that the Church insists upon the due order of its administration; and it is through concentration upon this idea of holiness, and all that it ought to mean in our personal lives, that we can make our greatest contribution towards bringing into existence again a real Catholic Church, a Church which shall genuinely include all the persons who believe in Christ in one order and fellowship. The first and indispensable condition of re-union is fuller dedication to the will of God in Christ. We shall be united to one another when we are all truly united to Him.

But, if that work is to be accomplished, we shall also need wisdom, in order rightly to counteract the effects alike of folly and of sin in the past history of the Church; and here every man must be willing to make what suggestions he can, merely submitting them for acceptance or rejection by the whole body of the Church; because unless people are prepared to speak of the problem as they see it, leaving the final judgment to be formed by the body of which they are members, there is no hope of our making any progress at all.

I will therefore, venture to suggest to you six principles, upon which, as my vision is at present, I think we might come near to agreement among ourselves; and if we should agree upon them, then we could offer these or whatever modifications of these the Church thinks fit, to those bodies which are at present in separation from us.

I.--First, what do we mean by the Church? Ideally and in its eternal reality it is the Body and Bride of Christ, the instrument of His will and the object of His love, worthy as both. But in the process of time and upon the stage of this world, what are we going to mean by it, and who are we going to account its members? When people begin to think of this question, they always start with various enthusiastic schemes. The members of the Church are the people who have faith, or the people who are conscious of the need of pardon, and the like; but all of this breaks down because you can never tell who these people are. We must have some perfectly plain outward sign if the Church is to be an operative agency in this world; and you will find, I think, that there is none which you can reach except that it is the fellowship of the baptized. Baptism is the Lord's own appointed way by which men should be received in the fellowship of His disciples. We must take that as our basis.

It is no business of ours to pronounce judgment upon the spiritual state of other persons. We shall thank God for every sign of the Christian virtues and graces shown in other persons who have not been brought to baptism; we may believe that they are members of the Church in heaven; but still, I would submit, we must say for all purposes of practical working, that the Church on earth is the fellowship of the baptized.

II.--That fellowship exists in fragments and sections. What is the peculiar mark of our fragment? This is authoritatively defined for us in the Lambeth Quadrilateral,[#] but our special character may be expressed briefly by saying that we are trustees for the Catholic order, who yet reject what seem to us the accretions which the Church of Rome upholds.

[#] (_a_) The Holy Scriptures of the Old and New Testaments. as "containing all things necessary to Salvation," and as being the rule and ultimate standard of faith.

(_b_) The Apostles' Creed, as the Baptismal Symbol; and the Nicene Creed, as the sufficient statement of the Christian faith.

(_c_) The two Sacraments ordained by Christ Himself--Baptism and the Supper of the Lord--ministered with unfailing use of Christ's words of institution, and of the elements ordained by Him.

(_d_) The Historic Episcopate, locally adapted in the methods of its administration to the varying needs of the nations and peoples called of God into the Unity of His Church.

Now some such order as that which we maintain, is necessary, as it seems to me, to the fulfilment of the duty of charity. I hope I am not unfair to those who are separated from us, and are influenced by the ideals of Puritanism; but it has seemed to me that their discipline is not always charitable. Indeed, a Church must either excommunicate freely or else possess a recognised order if it is to avoid becoming indistinguishable from "the world" about it; if it is to be both holy and a friend of sinners it must have an order. The order which we maintain is simply that which has come down to us as the actual order of historic Christendom.

III.--Thirdly, I would submit that the Body with its orders is a living whole, and that it is illegitimate to discuss such a question as the "validity" of Orders out of all relation to the historic life of the Church. The question of Orders must be considered in relation to the whole life of the Body of which they are an organic part.[#]

[#] See Appendix IV. _On Orders and Catholicity_.

Thus, if we take the famous Quadrilateral as our starting point, a body which stands by the Canonical Scriptures, the Creeds and the two great Sacraments, though not upholding the episcopal succession, is closer to the ideal than one which is indifferent to any of these three as well as to the succession; it has maintained many of the (ex hypothesi) essential features of a true Church; it approximates to the complete requirement. Moreover, within the field of the problem of Orders, there are degrees of approximation; it is generally considered that an agreement between the Anglican and Presbyterian communions could be far more easily reached than between the Anglican and some other Protestant bodies. We must, therefore, avoid two kindred errors. One is to set up the abrupt dilemma--"Either a true Church or not," and the other is to regard the possession of "valid" Orders as being the one and only condition of the Catholicity of the body possessing them.

The Church Visible cannot be identical with the Church Invisible; it is its sacrament. And the question resolves itself into one concerning the degree of adequacy with which it expresses, _and thereby maintains through the ages_, the fulness of the truth.

Our actual divisions in the West date from the Reformation. No one disputes that the Church just before that time was corrupt to a horrible degree. It is possible to hold that the corruption could have been purged away without schism if the reformers had been wholly free from pride and impatience; I see no means of reaching a sound judgment on such a point; but at least it would seem that the guilt for the great division was as much in Catholics as in Protestants. In so far as there really was necessity of choosing between moral purity with schism on the one hand, and organic unity with sales of indulgences and the like on the other, there can be no doubt which the whole teaching of Christ required His followers to choose. "I will have mercy and not sacrifice"; "the Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath"; yet the Sabbath and the sacrifice were of Divine appointment.

If then a fragment of the Church, confronted as it believes, with such a choice, breaks off and organises itself afresh, intending to maintain in purity all the Church's life and means of grace, I cannot assert that it is for all its generations deprived of Christ's sacramental presence. But assuredly the loss of the continuous order which so impressively symbolises the Divine origin of the Church and of its Sacraments tends to undermine the intention to preserve the whole truth and to obscure belief in it. For Orders, as we understand them, are the pledge of the unity of the Church across all space and through all time, so that the priest who celebrates, does so as the organ and instrument of the universal Church, and the congregation at every Eucharist is not the few persons gathered together in that building, but Angels and Archangels and all the company of Heaven, with whom we join in prayer and worship.

IV.--Consonantly with this I would come to my fourth principle--that the whole question of Orders and Sacraments must be considered in reference to the Church's life through the ages, and not with direct reference to the gift received by any individual at any given service.

How are we to secure (this is our problem) that from generation to generation men shall continue to feel that in the service of the Holy Communion Christ comes to them as by His own appointment, and they have only to be ready to meet with Him; and that in meeting with Him they are united with the whole Church in the Holy Communion, the Communion of Saints? I believe that the continued recitation of the Creeds in our own and other branches of the Church is the main safeguard, not only for ourselves but also for those who do not say the Creeds, against that combination of Pelagianism and Unitarianism to which men always tend to drift; similarly I can conceive that, just because we uphold the full conception of sacramental worship, others are enabled to receive sacramental grace at their communions. It may be so; I know not. Of course it cannot be received if it is not there; but even if it is there, its full benefit will not be enjoyed except by those who believe in its full power. Two men may stand opposite the same picture; both see the same lines and colours, the accidents; but it may be that only one sees the artistic reality or substance--the Beauty--while the other is blind to it. But the man who finds it does not put it there; the artist put it there; and if he had not done so no one could find it there; so too the reality of the Sacrament is the work of God. But our fruition of it depends on our faith, and even on the exact content of our faith. Now I do not for a moment believe that that faith in the full doctrine of sacramental grace can survive through the centuries, if it is once separated from the whole order which expresses it. Therefore, while I am not entitled to deny, as I am equally not concerned to assert, that the members of other denominations at their communion service receive the same gift that we do; still I say that as trustees for the Catholic order, and considering the matter in the light of the centuries, we have no right to sacrifice any of those means by which this full doctrine has been given to us, and by which perhaps it has been also preserved for them.

V.--Fifthly, I would suggest that in any scheme for practical reunion no man must be required to repudiate his own spiritual ancestry.

After all, if the Church is the fellowship of the baptized, then our brethren of the separation, as we sometimes call them, are members of the Church; but they are not members of our branch of the Church; and their faith is corporate and active in their membership of their own bodies; consequently we are bound to hold that they and their bodies are parts of the Catholic Church in this time of the division--the division which is due to sin.

If it is true that it was largely, and perhaps mainly, the fault of the medieval Church that the split became a necessity; if it is true that it was partly, and perhaps mainly, the fault of the Church of England that the Wesleyan movement (for example) ever broke off, because we refused to make room for what was in its early stages most undoubtedly a movement of the Spirit of God in the world, then we have no right to condemn those who by reason of our sin, at least as much as their own, are outside our fellowship; and we must recognise that, just as in St. Paul's argument about the true Israel, blindness in part happened to Israel, and so God used the Gentiles to provoke them to jealousy--so blindness in part happened to Catholicism, and God is using the Protestant bodies to provoke us to jealousy.

We must, I believe, maintain that our order is for us the only possible order for the reunited Church. But order is not everything. The wall of the Holy City is minute. When the time for reunion comes, we must insist upon our own part of the truth in such a way as to avoid all condemnation of other bodies for having been separated during this time--at least, all condemnation which we do not pronounce quite equally upon ourselves. What has happened in the divisions of the Church is a severance from one another of elements which are every one of them necessary to the healthy life of the Body. If one set of people could only get dry food and no drink, and another set could only get drink and no food, neither would be healthy. They would have to combine their stores before health was possible. Catholics have preserved perhaps a fuller sense of worship and of the gifts of God; Protestants have perhaps a truer zeal for righteousness and a more intimate access to God in prayer. Let us not judge the past; God will judge. But let us recognise our need of one another and accept from each other the positive truth and life which God has given to either.

VI.--Meanwhile, in the time of the division, different bodies have developed different types of religious life. There is a wealth of spiritual activity in the world now such as it is difficult to imagine under a rigidly united Church; but we can easily preserve that if we are ready that there should be within the United Catholic Church different Orders--an Order of St. George Fox for example, testifying to the great ideal which Christ brought into the world, not as I think, and as I have already explained, the right ideal to be followed by all men in all sorts of circumstances, but undoubtedly the one method by which in the end the work of God can be finally accomplished, and for testimony to which I believe some men, and indeed the whole Society of Friends, are even now called by God. Also there may well be an Order of St. John Wesley, insisting more especially upon the need of individual conversion, which the Church, as a vast organisation concerned with world movements, is perpetually tempted to leave too much on one side. These Orders can quite well govern themselves to a very large extent, and order their worship in very many ways, just as is the case in the Orders familiar in the medieval Church, and in the Church of Rome at this time.

These are the principles which I would venture to submit. Probably not one of them will win universal assent even in our own communion. But amid all our amiable sentiments it is time for somebody to say something definite, or as definite as the complexity of the problem allows. In criticising and rejecting individual utterances we may at last reach a corporate mind.

But let me add one particular warning about the way we go: for in my own mind I am quite sure that the Communion is just the place where we need to be divided until our unity is real. People say "How terrible to be separated there." Yes, terrible indeed! It is the measure of the sin of schism. But we must not try to escape the consequences of the sin until we have got rid of the sin itself. I say nothing of the problem of the mission field or of the possibility of exceptional occasions.[#] But I am quite sure that in normal Church life, where all people have access to their own services, intercommunion can only be disastrous, as tending to obscure the need for real unity, and the difference between the various excellences whose combination is to be desired.

[#] It must of course be recognised that the problem of intercommunion in the mission field is of urgent practical importance. On the present situation, the Archbishop of Canterbury's statement, _Kikuyu_.

But let us come back to what after all is the only true guarantee and the only condition of reunion--the achievement of holiness; that holiness needs, as we have seen, to be safeguarded, and the safeguarding of it is peculiarly entrusted to us, the ministers of the Church. What need then for personal dedication! For upon the degree in which we are wholly given to our work depends in large measure the time when God will reunite His Church.

We keep separate even from many right activities, but only in order to keep pure that spirit by which we are to permeate the whole life of the world, bringing it to bear, so far as we are able in our detachment, upon every sort of problem, private or public--industrial, commercial, political, international--till at last the whole world is governed by that spirit, and there is no need for separation any more nor for any special place of worship nor special order of religious ministers; for then the world and the Church will be indistinguishable in the Holy City of God, wherein is no temple, because the Lord God Almighty and the Lamb are the temple of it.

*LECTURE V*

*THE CITIZENSHIP OF HEAVEN*

"Our citizenship is in heaven."--Philippians iii. 20.

"He that hath seen me hath seen the Father."--S. John xiv. 9.

We have considered in outline the functions of the State and of the Church, the two great instruments of God for the furthering of His kingdom. Let us now turn to consider, still in mere outline, for nothing more is possible, the nature of that Kingdom itself.

There are very many ways in which the subject might be approached, but I think that it will be most consonant with the general line of our thought in these meditations that we should consider it as the home of man's spirit, the fulfilment of his spiritual being. And to that end, inasmuch as the Kingdom can only be known by living according to the principles of its citizenship, and our present effort is by its very nature intellectual only, we must try to reach it in thought as the goal towards which the whole spiritual life of man is tending.

No life can be set forth in scientific terms. The moment it is analysed, the vitalising power is gone. And even the poet, who has far more chance than the logician of making us realise what the life signifies for those who live it, is still speaking of it from outside. It is only by life itself that we can truly know the Kingdom of God.

We find, all through the New Testament, a contrast drawn between earth and heaven. And it is worth while to consider the logical principle of that contrast, even though the result is somewhat dry and barren. The place of careful analysis here is analogous to that which criticism holds in relation to art. The critical analysis of a work of art will never of itself enable us to appreciate it, if we are without the cultivated artistic faculty; but it may enrich our appreciation. We may thereby find more than we should otherwise have found of the elements that are combined together to make up the total effect. And then in the unity of the renewed experience we receive more enjoyment than we had done before. So, too, the Kingdom of God, which for us is something that we still hope to reach, and of which the foretaste that we have as yet received is a very slight earnest of the glory that shall be revealed, may be a goal more potent in its attraction to our wills, when we have seen it as the fulfilment of the principles of our whole spiritual life as these are discoverable in other departments and activities.

The goods of this world, as we have already noticed, are such that the more one has the less there is for others. The goods of heaven are of such a kind that the more one has the more there is on that account for others. So it is with the true virtues of the spiritual life, with love and joy and peace, the fruits of the spirit. So it is too with other excellences which belong to man as a spiritual being, and which are out of the reach of our animal nature: loyalty, beauty and knowledge.

Now the principle of this whole spiritual life is precisely the principle of unity, not as distinct from variety but as distinct either from antagonism or transitoriness. The two things that distress the soul of man are enmities, and the passing away of that which he loves. It is by rising above these evils, which beset us in this earthly state, that the satisfaction of the soul is found.