Part 9
Men often mistake the nature of religion through wrong teaching received in early years or no teaching received at all, thus giving the well-rooted weeds of error a long start to grow rampant in the human soil. Some people think religion is an isolated activity, like collecting old china, a hobby you can pursue, drop, and pick up again at leisure. Other people imagine it is the conventional badge of good society, giving tone to a life of fashionable respectability, like a carnation slipped into your buttonhole which adds a finishing touch to your evening dress. But they are not over careful, these conventional people, to apply its tenets in the privacy of their homes; religion is never enthroned as a domestic virtue. Lord Melbourne, the early Victorian Prime Minister, was one day coming from church in the country in a mighty fume. Finding a friend on the road, he unloaded: "It's too bad. I have always been a supporter of the Church, and I have always upheld the clergy. But it is really too bad to have to listen to a sermon like that we had this morning. Why, the preacher actually insisted upon applying religion to a man's private life!"
Their interior life is neither better nor worse for hitching on religion as a supplementary virtue. Such good people would never miss an opportunity of attending a missionary meeting at Caxton Hall or neglect an early morning service at the parish church, but the maid-of-all-work in the kitchen is not benefited by the religious fervour which perfumes her ladyship with the odour of sanctity.
Religion is a state of mind giving purpose and direction to the whole round of a man's activities. Religion is not like a red holly-berry in a tumbler of clear water, a hard, insoluble object, pretty enough seen through the crystal medium, but working no change in the water. Religion resembles a drop of cochineal falling into the water; it colours with rose hue the full contents of the tumbler; it tinges the whole character and conduct of a man; it permeates his thoughts and feelings and actions, changing the colour of his life for good and for ever. Religion works a change--a radical change--that is the point. It is not a question of drapery; it does not merely hang up a decoration here and there to improve appearances, leaving the secret chambers of the heart unclean. It makes a new man in Christ Jesus even out of the coarsest raw material to be found on the human market.
The Church as established in our midst to-day cannot work a social regeneration in the land, for it gives forth so little of the teaching of Christ to the people. The gold of truth it circulates is mixed with the dross of error of its own minting. It may bear the image and superscription of Christ on it and pass the world's counter as genuine metal, but it is counterfeit coin of the kingdom. The Church does not grip the people. It is a fashionable institution of conventional high-grade orthodoxy, but it is a thing apart from the people. Its clergy socially are a multitude of pleasant, amiable, guileless folk spread over the tennis-lawns and garden-parties of England on a summer's afternoon, mingling good-humouredly with their neighbours, but ecclesiastically they belt themselves in a compact phalanx of self-centred, intolerant men with a purpose in life, or by preference they are self-constituted "priests." They hold the Church as a close borough, consume its revenues, swear by its creed, and maintain its privileges. They are strong partisans; the same interest guides them which governs the business man in upholding his trade interests--the sacred rights of property. To defend their inherited rights they will fight doggedly, and surrender only in the last trench.
Outside the charmed enclosure of the Church the clergy esteem their Christian neighbours ecclesiastical inferiors, not to be consorted with on equal footing, and they leave the Almighty to take charge of outsiders here and hereafter. As a class long years of clerical assumption has sapped the humanness out of their nature, and only a priest is left in their skin.
There are honourable exceptions to this general rule. Many individual clergymen are thoroughly alive with the spirit of Christ. They are men of broad sympathies and of intense devotion to their work, but it is surprising how tightly the Church as an institution grips those who minister at her altars; the Church is the idol of their hearts, the centre of their adoration. If the centre of their adoration could be transferred to Christ; if they could love Christ as devotedly as they love the Church of England, the result of their ministrations amongst the people would be gloriously successful; if instead of coddling the one respectable sheep that never strayed away they rounded up the ninety-and-nine lost ones and settled them in the home pastures the work would make their hearts ring with joy.
I have heard sermons by clergymen in which the Church and the Prayer Book were exalted as the chief Divine oracles before which we all must bow in blind submission as though Christ and the Bible existed not in any corner of the preacher's mind; and the result of such degenerate doctrine is that preachers add good Churchmen to their flock, but not good Christians to the fold of Christ. A good Churchman thus becomes a superior being to a common Christian, as though it were more important to be a Churchman than a Christian. "Churchman" really is only the trade name for a man who believes in the State Church. To be a Churchman is good enough for some people.
Compare the spirit of Jesus of Nazareth with the harsh, unsympathetic system represented by the Anglican creed which caricatures the Saviour in our midst. The cruel system which refuses to bury an unbaptized baby with its dead mother, or would refuse to allow a man or a woman to have a chance of happiness in marriage because, through no fault of their own, they have already suffered great unhappiness; that would refuse relatives permission to carve the word "Reverend" on the tombstone of a Wesleyan minister buried in a village churchyard because the dead man was not of the Church of England.
The Kikuyu Conference is typical of our bishops' lack of Christ-like charity and shortage of that kindly touch of nature that makes the whole world kin. The question lying before the bishops in conference was "the promotion of a brotherly spirit and the adoption of practical steps toward unity" in the mission-field; or, should the Church of England retain its old crusted conventions as an exclusive institution and cold shoulder all outsiders. The bishops consulted in Lambeth Palace over this aggravating question, and finally decided that their first duty was to protect the Church of England in all its ancient sanctities, to retain the proud boundary-walls isolating those within in strict spiritual seclusion, and to warn trespassers off their private ecclesiastical preserves. Their duty to the State Church was clear-cut and formulated--viz., to maintain its high-cast principles and to avoid the contagion of the sects. None of the beautiful roses of charity growing in their garden-close must run over the wall for the wayfarer to pluck. Their fraternal duty to native Christians won to Christ by missionary zeal remains obscure. However, no loose form of brotherly love or Christian fellowship can be permitted in the mission-field or elsewhere. State Church principles must be upheld. As a sweetmeat and as a goody-goody sample of what Jesus Christ meant by brotherly love, an occasional hospitality to other Christian communities may be practised without prejudice to Church principles; you may come and partake of Holy Communion with us in our Church, but we cannot partake of Holy Communion with you in yours. For you to come to us is a privilege, for us to go to you would be _infra dig_.
On these liberal lines the bishops expound the teachings of Jesus Christ and uphold Church principles, and if Christ's principles clash with Church principles, so much the worse for the principles of Jesus Christ. The Church is the orthodox institution, and must hold itself inviolate even against the heterodoxy of Jesus Christ. The Kikuyu Conference and its deliberations may be summed up briefly as a study in Church principles and how to maintain them.
Such harsh decisions bring contempt upon the Church, and widen the gulf which divides the rubric from the gospels and the clergyman from Christ. Jesus of Nazareth differs essentially from the Church on earth which to-day flies His banner and breaks His commandments. Christ declared for character and conduct as essentials in life; the Church favours creed and ceremony. Christ worked undogmatically, and the Church, overweighted with dogma, fails hopelessly in its Christly work.
Observe the generous, liberal, broad-minded traits which even in the scanty records of the gospels mark Jesus Christ as the kindliest and most humane of men. Where there was a choice, He stood on the side of charity and common sense. He was no misanthrope; He was of social temperament. He knew well the joy of life, and He did not hesitate to participate in it. He drank wine Himself, and exerted miraculous power that others might drink it. In argument upon Sabbatarianism He took the more liberal view. He instantly and frankly forgave the woman taken in adultery. His heart went out in gentleness to children, to the poor, and to everybody who needed support and comfort. It is that golden thread of kindliness running like flashes of sunlight through His ministry which wins the love and adherence of disciples to His name.
A few years ago an English ship foundered on the coast of Ushant. Many of the crew were drowned and the bodies washed ashore. The villagers of Ushant showed no little kindness to the shipwrecked strangers. The interment of the drowned sailors was a memorable scene. The deceased were all Protestants, the villagers were all Roman Catholics, yet the villagers performed the ceremony with all the ritual shown to those of their own faith. The cure officiating had qualms of conscience in admitting the bodies to the church and reading the Catholic service over them. An Englishman standing by remarked, "God has no creed." The cure waved his hand as if to dismiss the objections which perturbed his mind, and the service proceeded.
This is a refreshing lesson in humanity furnished by the simple-minded, good-natured fishermen of Ushant. The spirit of Jesus breathes in it victoriously over the narrowness of creed and the hardness of heart which separate men in much party bitterness.
*XIV*
*THE LURE OF THE EUCHARIST*
A beautiful spectacular ceremonial the Church has wrapped around the Sacrament of the Lord's Supper, smothering it under the pomp of a religious service, which works upon the nerves like a subtle, mastering spell. The senses of the worshipper become drugged with incense, dazed by the glitter of broidered vestments, charmed with the strains of alluring music, spellbound with the deep droning voice intoning at the altar, and all the splendid equipments and sacred associations of the sanctuary, which tighten you up until a wrapt ecstasy of feeling intoxicates you in the midst of it all, and you are drenched in the luxury of strong, dreamy religious emotion.
For nineteen centuries the spectacle has been growing in significance, and it is not finished growing yet. Every age adds a decorative touch to embellish its colossal splendours. Finality in ecclesiastical evolution lies a long way off in the distance. If one of the twelve disciples who supped with our Blessed Lord on that historic night could slip out of paradise and for a few minutes witness a modern high celebration of the Holy Eucharist, he would marvel much at the imposing function, and marvel more at men's credulity in mistaking an ecclesiastical pageant for a simple act of devout obedience to Jesus Christ. The plain and homely meal which our Lord instituted to be a remembrance of Himself and His death on the Cross has flowered into an ornate and flamboyant religious function striking wonderment and awe in the hearts of mankind by the glitter of its barbaric and imposing splendours. The Church has worked up the Lord's Supper into a supernatural mystic rite run on old pagan lines; in fact, it amalgamates Christianity with ancient magic, and so the spirit of Christ escapes from the service, and only His traditional dead body reposes on the altar like the cold ashes of an extinct fire.
Recall the simple and unpretentious meal of which our Blessed Lord partook with His disciples on the eve of His betrayal and death. There in an upper room in the city of Jerusalem is the small assembly, consisting of the Master and His twelve disciples, and during the meal Jesus took a piece of bread, "and when He had given thanks, He brake it and said: 'Take, eat: this is My body, which is broken for you; this do in remembrance of Me.' After the same manner also He took the cup, when He had supped, saying: 'This cup is the New Testament in My blood; this do ye as often as ye drink in remembrance of Me; for as often as ye eat this bread and drink this cup, ye do show the Lord's death till He come.'"[*]
[*] 1 Cor. xi. 24-26.
On this plain foundation the amazing and pernicious rite of Transubstantiation has been reared--a veritable temple of divination, and cloistered within its shadowed recesses the priest casts his spell, dispensing religious consolations to credulous and confiding mortals tangled in the coils of the seductive creed.
Transubstantiation is a pagan heresy grafted on to Christian stock. In ancient times, when the pagan priest muttered an incantation over the idol of his god, the spirit of the god was supposed to enter the idol, and so when the Christian priest now utters a prayer over the bread and wine it is affirmed they become the real flesh and the real blood of Christ.
A brief glance back on the early history of the Church shows us the door through which this sacerdotal error slipped into the sacramental service, and how the Church drifted from the words of Jesus Christ and sought other and strange gods for counsel. For three centuries after the Crucifixion the disciples held closely together in little groups or churches in the towns where they abode. Many of them dwelt in Rome, down in the dark subterranean city of the catacombs, with its maze of narrow lanes, blind alleys, and cryptic sanctuaries, hidden under the gay, cruel city of sunlit streets and open air. Here they lived, striving faithfully and patiently to attain pure, blameless, holy lives before God in a pagan world, whose sins they renounced and whose hatred they courted by thrusting the new and unwelcome society of Christ into their hostile midst. Christians were mistaken for criminals--but there, Christ was crucified as one. Through all persecutions they held fast to the teachings of Jesus of Nazareth. Nothing daunted them, nothing disheartened them. The words of Christ refreshed them in all the weariness of spirit. In teeth of deadly opposition they grew in number until a questionable honour was conferred upon the Church which changed its fortunes and marred its simplicity. The Roman Emperor Constantine became a convert to the new religion, and now and henceforth the religion of Jesus Christ is honourable in the sight of all men. It is the fashionable craze of Rome. The Emperor's Court followed the Emperor's example and joined up. The Roman world followed the royal lead and professed conversion. This is the flowering-time of Christianity. The Christian sect, yesterday the outcasts and scum of the earth, are now received into polite society, dine in the best houses, and are welcomed everywhere. The bishops of the Church are dug out of their deep burrows in the stuffy underground where they practised the simple life; they put off their poverty of pocket and meekness of spirit, and are robed in gorgeous raiment and rank amongst the rulers of the earth. They are transfigured men in mind and in manners. The Bishop of Rome leaps into fame, wins for himself a palace and a throne in the city of the Caesars, and a court of red-robed cardinals surge round him with royal observances and diplomatic intrigue. Our bishops in England become princes of the Church, have princely palaces, and princely revenues to maintain the dignity of their princely estate. These gilded grandees of the Church are considered to be spiritually the lineal descendants of the Peasant of Galilee who at nightfall had not where to lay His head. Flattery worked the Church's undoing, for in the hour of her worldly triumph she gave away all that the early Christian martyrs had died to win.
The mass of people who obsequiously played up to Constantine and joined the Church were not converted to the Christian faith; they did not believe in Christ with all their heart. To many of them Christ was only a new Deity added to the many gods they already worshipped. In heart they remained pagan, but behaved prudently and changed their coat at the Emperor's bidding. They did not forsake their old religion when they accepted the new creed; they amalgamated the two. They carried their pagan superstitions with them into the Christian Church, and, planted in new soil, there they took root and flourished vigorously in the garden of the Lord. The old gods became saints; the pagan shrines and images and festivals were whitewashed and christianized and given a place in the Church calendar; the magic by which their pagan priests trained the spirit of the gods to enter the idol at call, the same priestly magic transferred to the new religion brought the body of the Lord into the bread and the wine at the service of the Lord's Supper.
Such galloping progress did the heresy make amongst the mixed multitudes who mingled their devotions with the elect in the Church that before long the bread and wine were given to the dead. The Sacrament, it is supposed, was placed on the breast of dead persons, as a charm against evil spirits. This superstitious custom was rooted deeply in the religion of the day, for the Church was compelled to legislate on the subject. The custom was forbidden in Africa by the Council of Hippo, A.D. 393; the Council of Carthage, A.D. 397; and in Gaul at the Council of Auxerre, A.D. 578; yet it lingered tenaciously in the hearts of the people as a sacred custom to be observed regardless of hostility to it in high places. Again at the Council in Trullo, A.D. 691, it was forbidden. An incident in the life of St. Benedict, who died about the year 540, discloses much to us. A boy who had been disobedient died suddenly, and his corpse could not rest, in the grave, so St. Benedict ordered the body of the Lord (the Sacrament) to be placed on the breast of the boy, and the corpse rested immediately, and remained quietly buried.
The miraculous legend of the Lord's Supper obtains in the Church to-day with perfumed pomp and splendour of worship. The magic of the Real Presence bites deep into the core of the Church's creed. As the ages roll the legend develops new forms of expression. Its inferences are not always expressed, nor is its significance posted on the surface, but it is the deeply sunk tap-root of the green bay-tree of sacerdotalism which flourishes in the Church of Christ and binds the people round and round with disciplinary fetters of steel, captives to priestly power.
The consecrated bread and wine still are worshipped as being the body of the Lord. When the priest consecrates the bread and wine on the altar for the Communion Service, sometimes a part of it is reverently kept back and is called the reserved sacrament; this reserved sacrament is conjured with. It is placed in a small box of ornate workmanship called a shrine or tabernacle, and is deposited on an altar in the church, which is called "God's resting-place," and is worshipped as the body of our Lord.
In preference, a secluded and quiet place in the church is chosen for the altar of the reserved sacrament. "Admirable arrangements have been made in some English churches. In one church there is a side-chapel somewhat out of sight from the main entrance of the church. In another there is a crypt chapel.... In another there is a chapel reached by steps ascending from the church. By such arrangements, when the door of the chapel is kept unlocked and the fact of reservation is known, there is at once protection to the sacred presence of our Lord, and accessibility to those who will use it well." To these lonely side-altars in shadowy places of the sanctuary at any hour during the day stray worshippers come and kneel before the tabernacle and worship the body of Christ enclosed therein. "All that Christ can claim of human love and adoration is due to Him in His sacramental presence," says an Oxford advocate of the intruding heresy; "the worship which the Christian soul pays to Him when the sacrament is consecrated is paid also as it is reserved. It includes the utmost response of which the soul is capable."
In past times plain-speaking people called these worshippers of the sacrament idolaters. That word may reveal the thoughts of many hearts to-day. Dr. Darwell Stone, in his book "The Reserved Sacrament," advocates an ample toleration widely extended in the Church of England on behalf of these idolaters. Facing the accusation of idolatry cast by his opponents, he throws out a challenge. Speaking of those who make the charge of idolatry, "from their own point of view," he states, "they are perfectly right. If the consecrated elements are only bread and wine after consecration as before, whatever gifts or virtues may be attached to the profitable reception of them, those who imagine that they are worshipping our Lord are wholly wrong in seeking the object of their adoration in His presence in the Sacrament. But if it be true that by consecration the bread and wine become His Body and Blood, if our Lord Himself, eternal God, very Man, glorified, spiritual, risen, ascended, is present in the Sacrament, then in the adoration there is no idolatry, but rather the worship which is the bounden duty of a Christian."
Back to the New Testament, back to the words of Christ, and in reading them we find no evidence that Jesus at that farewell meal He partook with His disciples founded an elaborate and miraculous ordinance; we cannot read into the words of Christ any intention on His part to place in the hands of Churchmen a spiritual weapon to be used offensively and defensively in all their struggle and strategy for the Church's temporal aggrandizement, as it has been used to subdue and flatten down the people under their spiritual charge. The miracle of the Real Presence is of man's device. It is an offspring born of priestcraft and pride. Christ has no part or lot in it. The impression the gospels compel in us is that Christ was fighting the sacerdotal error in religion throughout His whole ministry, and for the Church to claim Him as its founder is the greatest irony of Christianity.