Part 7

It is thirteen years (he writes) since I first spoke out in the form of a pamphlet. No man stood with me. Hard things were said of me. I believed it to be the will of the HEAD of the Church, the LORD JESUS CHRIST, that there should be union of His Church in Scotland, and primarily that its two great Churches should be one. I have never for a single moment doubted that His will would be fulfilled, or that it was the duty of these Churches to set themselves, under His guidance, with resolute purpose to work out its fulfilment.

Observe his "primarily": he quite recognises (I have his authority for saying so) the further obligation. And no wonder: he is clear as to the one great and supreme motive that should inspire all efforts for Church Reunion--faith in the Lord Jesus Christ, and the obedience of faith which the true confession of His Deity involves.

The will of the Lord in regard to the visible unity of His whole Church is plain: "Other sheep I have which are not of this fold: them also I must lead; and they shall hear My voice, and there shall be one flock, one Shepherd." No doubt there is a difference between a fold ([Greek: anlê]) and a flock ([Greek: poimnê]), between the racial unity of the Jewish Dispensation and the Catholic and international character impressed from the beginning on the Christian Church. But a flock is as visible as a fold is. We can see the one moving along the road under the shepherd's guidance just as distinctly as we see the other gleaming white on the hillside, or raising its turf-capped walls above the level of the moor. We can see, of course, if the walls of a fold are broken down; but we can see also whether a flock is united, whether it is moving forward as one mass, or is broken up and scattered. Such separations might be well enough if the different little companies were all going quietly on in one way; though even then their breaking up would argue on the one hand a portentous failure in that recognition of the shepherd's voice and the obedience to him which is due to his loving care, and on the other hand a strange lack of that gregariousness which is an instinct in the healthy sheep. But what if the sheep are seen running hither and thither in different directions: if they are found labouring to explain the inadvisability--nay, the impossibility--of their ever coming into line; if we see them instead crossing each other's path, starting from each other, jostling and butting one another, continually getting into situations provocative of fights and injuries?

Is this the kind of picture which the Lord Jesus has drawn of His Flock, His Church as He wishes, and intends, that it should be: is this what He promises that it shall be?

Christ made His Church one at the beginning: the rulers He set over it "were all with one accord in one place"; "the multitude of them that believed were of one heart and of one soul." And when the Gentiles had been brought in, what care did the Apostles take lest the new departure should cause a separation along a line made obsolete by the Cross of Christ; and with what adoring admiration does St Paul gaze at the delightful spectacle of Jew and Gentile made one new man in Christ Jesus--"where," he cries, "there cannot be Greek and Jew, circumcision and uncircumcision, barbarian, Scythian, bondman, freeman, but Christ is all, and in all."

In matters of rank and race and colour all our denominations retain this Apostolic Catholicity. How inconsistent to maintain it there, and repudiate it when we come to such differences as mostly separate us! These are differences far more of temper than of creed, or even of worship or government. We say, sometimes, that we are "one in spirit": not so; it is just in spirit that we have been divided. In creed and organisation both, and in temper as well, the Church of Apostolic times was visibly one. "See how these Christians love one another" was the comment of the heathen onlooker. This state of things continued for a long time. Gibbon enumerates the Church's "unity and discipline," which go together, as among the "secondary causes" of that wonderful spread of the Gospel in the first three centuries.

The revived, broadened, and more candid study, alike of the New Testament and of Church History throughout its entire course, is one of the ways in which the Good Shepherd has been leading us to see alike the disobedience of our divisions, and the small foundation there is for many of the points over which we have been fighting.

Happily too, we do not now need to argue in favour of visible and organic unity. "The once popular apologies for separation which asserted the sufficiency of 'spiritual' union, and the stimulating virtues of rivalry and competition, have become obsolete."

More happily still, we have learned practically to appreciate the difference between our Saviour's gentle I must lead ([Greek: dei me agagein]) and our forefathers' various attempts to produce "uniformity" by driving. The reproach of that sinful blunder is one that none of our greater Churches--Roman, Anglican, Presbyterian, or Puritan--can cast in another's teeth. Each of us committed it in our day of triumph. "What fruit had we then in those things whereof we are now ashamed?" The memory--one-sided, and carefully cultivated--of what each suffered in its turn of adversity has hitherto been a potent agency for keeping us apart. To-day those memories are fading. I was much struck by a remark I heard last spring from the Bishop of Southwark, that one reason why we are more ready nowadays to contemplate reunion is just that we belong to a generation to whom those miserable doings are far-off things outside alike our experience and our expectation.

In other ways also we discern leadings of Our Saviour to the same end.

Through Whitefield and the Wesleys, and the Evangelical Revival, He re-awakened the peoples of England and America to a keen sense of the need for personal religion. Where these powerful agencies had the defects of their qualities, in their failure to appreciate aright His gracious ordinances of Church and Ministry and Sacrament, He rectified the balance by giving us in due course the Oxford Movement, whose force is not "spent," but diffused through all our "denominations." Let us be just to the Oxford Movement: without it, humanly speaking, we should not have been here to-day. If it had its own narrownesses, it revived the very studies which, while they have revealed the inadequacy of certain of its postulates, have also brought clear into the view of all of us the Divine goal which now gleams glorious in front of us--the goal of the great Apostle--"the building up of the Body of Christ: till we all attain unto the unity of the Faith, and of the knowledge of the Son of God, unto a full-grown man, unto the measure of the stature of the fulness of Christ."

A Scotsman may be excused for referring to the debt which the leaders of the Oxford Movement--Dr Pusey in particular was always ready to admit it--owed to Sir Walter Scott, particularly in re-awakening a more sympathetic interest in the Mediaeval Church. If Sir Walter's countrymen were slower to follow him in this matter, they are doing so now in unexpected quarters. We are full to-day of the American alliance: may I remind you that Sir Walter Scott was the first British man of letters to hail the early promise of American literature by his cordial welcome to its representative, Washington Irving? Scott was a devoted subject of the British Monarchy; but he saw, and he insisted on, the duty of Great Britain to cultivate a warm friendship with the United States.

In the same direction we have been led in days more recent by the large development, in all our denominations, of two main branches of Christian work. I refer to Missionary enterprise abroad and Social service at home. Our ecclesiastical divisions are a serious handicap to both. In a matter more vital still, that of the Religious--the Christian--Education in our Schools and Colleges, our divisions have sometimes proved well-nigh fatal. The one remedy is that we make up our differences and come together.

And now this War, so dreadful in itself, is helping powerfully, and in many ways, to the same end. It is bringing us together at home, and making us acquainted with, and appreciative of, each other in a thousand forms of united service. It has spread before our eyes the magnificent and inspiring spectacles of Colonial loyalty, of one military command over the Allied Forces, of the cordial and enthusiastic support of a fully-reconciled America. Shall "the children of this world be wiser than the children of light"? Shall the Church neglect the lesson read to her by the statesmen and the warriors? Then, again, the cause for which we are in arms is--most happily--not denominational. The present War is not in the least like those hateful, if necessary, struggles which historians have entitled "The Wars of Religion": but it is, on the part of the Entente, essentially and fundamentally Christian--more profoundly so than the Crusades themselves. That is why it is bringing us so markedly together. And, if this is its effect at home and in America, much more is it producing the same result among our chaplains and our Christian workers at the Front. They are finding, on the one hand, the limitations, or faults, of every one of our stereotyped methods of work and forms of worship; they are seeing on the other hand among each other excellencies where they only saw defects. They are brought together in admiring comradeship, which resents the shackles restrictive of its play. Let me read to you a passage from a letter I received a fortnight since from an eminent Anglican chaplain now serving with our troops in France:

I see (he says) in this great war all the excrescences--the non-essentials which up till now have masqueraded and misled so many religious and non-religious men--drop off in the light of great realities; and I have seen in the eyes of all true lovers of our LORD, chaplains and laity, a wistful longing to unite, and mobilize our spiritual forces now dissipated and ineffective through disunion. What we look for more and more is a man, so filled with the SPIRIT of GOD--so free from ambition, covetousness, denominationalism, with a big heart and deep love, to make a plunge and start. We may be able to start out here, if we have the good-will of our leaders at home.

I think I may safely assure my correspondent that he has the good-will of all the living leaders of all our denominations? May I write and tell him so from this present meeting? [Yes....] I think I shall remind him further of those words of the Angel of the Lord to Gideon when he threshed his wheat in the wine-press with a vigour suggestive of his wish to have the Midianites beneath his flail--"Go in this thy might, and thou shalt save Israel" from their marauding hands.

At home, then, as well as at the Front, the will is present with us; and where there is "the will" there is pretty sure to be "the way."

"The way" (I believe for my part) is substantially that laid down by the Pan-Anglican Conference of 1866, in the "Lambeth Quadrilateral." Its four points were:

I. The Holy Scriptures.

II. The Nicene Creed.

III. The Sacraments of Baptism and the Lord's Supper ministered with the unfailing use of the Words of Institution.

IV. The Historic Episcopate.

It is fifty-two years since these terms were put forth. Have they ever been formally brought before the "denominations" for whom presumably they were intended? Were they even once commended to the nearest of these Churches by a deputation urging their consideration? I doubt it.

Yet the first three of these four conditions are already accepted by nearly all the English Nonconformists; and certainly by all the Presbyterian Churches, as fully as they are in the Church of England. The Presbyterian Church of England has set the Nicene Creed on the fore-front of its new Confession. Every word of the Nicene Creed (as the late Principal Denney pointed out) is in the Confession of Faith of all the Scottish Presbyterians. The Church of Scotland repeats it at its solemn "Assembly Communion" in St Giles'. Its crucial term, the Homoousion, is in the Articles now sent down to Presbyteries with the view of their transmission next May to the United Free Church.

In regard to the Sacramental services our _Directory_ is quite express in ordering the use in Baptism and the Eucharist of the Words of Institution. I never heard of a case in Scotland where they were not used: we should condemn their omission should it anywhere occur.

Undoubtedly the Fourth Article would have, till lately, presented difficulties; but, then, those difficulties were in great measure cleared away by the admission of the Lambeth Conference of 1908 that in the case of proposals for union, say of the Church of Scotland with the Anglican Church, reaching the stage of official action, an approach might be made along the line of the "Precedents of 1610." I had a recent opportunity of stating, in an Address[17] I gave at King's College, London, what these Precedents of 1610 were; how they included the unanimous vote of the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland in favour of the restoration of diocesan bishops acting in conjunction with her graduated series of Church Courts; how we thereupon received from the Church of England an Episcopate which then, and ever since, she has accounted valid, though neither the Scots bishops she then consecrated, nor the clergy of Scotland as a body, were required to be re-ordained; and how the combined system thus introduced among us gave us by far the most brilliant and fruitful period in our ecclesiastical annals; and how Learning, Piety, Art and Church extension flourished among us, as they have never done since. The system would in all probability have endured to the present day but for the arbitrary interferences--often with very good intentions, and for ends in themselves desirable--of our Stuart kings. A later restoration of Episcopal Church government under Charles II lacked the ecclesiastical authority which that of 1610 possessed, and was still more hopelessly discredited by its association with the persecution of the Covenanting remnant; but even under these disadvantages it was yielding not inconsiderable benefits to the religious life of Scotland. Under it our Gaelic-speaking highlanders first received the entire Bible in their native tongue; the Episcopate was adorned by the piety of Leighton and the wisdom of Patrick Scougal; while Henry Scougal in his _Life of God in the Soul of Man_ produced a religious classic of enduring value.

The reference by the Lambeth Conference of 1908 was meant as the opening of a door, and I understand there was some soreness among its supporters that more notice of it was not taken in Scotland. But it was never sent to Scotland: it was never communicated to the General Assembly. Our Scottish newspapers tell us very little of what goes on in England; and it must be admitted that too often, on both sides of the Tweed, things have appeared in the press not calculated to heal differences or make for peace. Sarcasm may be very clever: it is sometimes useful: it is rarely helpful to good feeling, or to the amendment either of him who utters it or of him against whom it is directed. The putting forth of the finger and speaking vanity are among the things which Isaiah declares they must put away who desire to be called the restorers of the breach, the repairers of paths to dwell in.

Now you have taken in England a further step. The _Second Interim Report_ of the Archbishops' Sub-Committee in "Connexion with the proposed World Conference on Faith and Order" is not, I presume, a document of the "official" character of a Resolution of a Lambeth Conference. It is nevertheless a paper of enormous significance and hopefulness, not alone as attested by the signatures it bears, but also on account of the exposition which it gives of the fourth point in the Lambeth Quadrilateral--its own condition "that continuity with the Historic Episcopate should be effectively preserved."

This _Report_ is, however, exclusively for England; while my concern to-day is with the kindred question of union between the Anglican Church and the Scottish Presbyterian Churches. The day I trust is not far distant when we shall see a similar document issued over signatures from both sides of the Tweed. Need I say that when this comes to be drawn up, we of the North (like Bailie Nicol Jarvie with his business correspondents in London) "will hold no communications with you but on a footing of absolute equality." In none of the branches into which it is now divided--Presbyterian or Episcopalian--does the Church of Scotland forget that it is an ancient national Church which never admitted subjection to its greater sister of the South. We may have too good "a conceit of ourselves," but we shall at least, like the worthy bailie, be true and friendly. And indeed we--or some of us--were already moving towards something of the kind. The _Second Interim Report_--it bears the title "Towards Christian Unity"--is dated, I observe, March 1918. In Scotland, so early as the 29th of January, there was held at Aberdeen (historically the most natural place for such a purpose, for it was the city of the "Aberdeen Doctors" and their eirenic efforts) a conference--modest, unofficial, tentative--yet truly representative of the Church of Scotland, of the United Free Church, and of the Scottish Episcopal Church, which drew up, and has issued, a _Memorandum_[18] suggesting a basis for reunion in Scotland, very much on the lines of the Precedents of 1610, but suggesting such arrangements during a period of transition as shall secure that respect is paid to the conscientious convictions to be found on both sides. We shall not repeat the blunders of 1637 which ruined the happy settlement of 1610.

We have in view a method which shall neither deprive Scottish Episcopal congregations of the services they love, nor attempt to force a Prayer-Book on Presbyterian congregations till they wish it for themselves. We shall do nothing either to discredit or disparage our existing Presbyterian orders; we shall be no less careful not to obtrude on the Episcopal minority the services of a ministry they deem defective; which shall arrange that in the course of a generation the ministry of both communions shall be acceptable to all, while in the meanwhile it will be possible for both to work together. Alike in England and in Ireland this Memorandum, where it has been seen, has been favourably received. In Scotland it--and doubtless other plans--will probably be discussed in the coming winter by many a gathering similar to that which drew it up; and thus we shall be ready, by the time our union with the United Free Church is completed, to go on together to this further task.

By that time you in England will have made some progress towards the healing of your divisions. The wider settlement of ours would be greatly facilitated by an overt encouragement from you. England is "the predominant partner" in our happily united Empire: it is the Church of England that should take the initiative in a scheme for a United Church for the United Empire. She should take that initiative in Scotland.

Could there be a more appropriate occasion for proposing conference with a view to it at Edinburgh, than the day which sees the happy accomplishment of our present Scottish effort? Might not the Church of England, the Church of Ireland, and the Scottish Episcopal Church (all of which have given tokens of a sympathetic interest in our union negotiations) unite to send deputations for the purpose to our first reunited General Assembly? Such deputations would not go away empty. And they would carry with them what would help not only the Cause of Christ throughout the ever-widening Empire He has given to our hands, but the fulfilment of His blessed will that all His people should be one. Auspice Spiritu Sancto. Amen.

FOOTNOTES:

[17] This Address, along with another delivered in St Paul's, has been published by Mr Robert Scott, of Paternoster Row, under the title _Reunion, a Voice from Scotland_.

[18] Printed in _Reunion, a Voice from Scotland_, pp. 101-107.

UNITY BETWEEN CLASSES

I

By the Right Rev. F. T. WOODS, D.D.

INTRODUCTION

He would be a dull man who did not respond to such a theme as the one with which I have been entrusted.

Before the war, in spite of much enlightenment of the social conscience, unity between classes was still far to seek. Indeed, the contemplation of the state of English society in those early months of 1914 was perhaps more calculated to drive the social reformer into pessimism than anything which has happened since. The rich were hunting for fresh pleasures, the poor were hunting for better conditions. The tendencies which were dragging these classes apart seemed stronger than those which were bringing them together. Then came the war, and it has done much to convert a forlorn hope into a bright prospect. This has happened not merely, or even mainly, owing to the fact that men of all classes are fighting side by side in the trenches, but rather owing to the fact that the war has cleared our minds, has exposed the real dangers of civilisation, and has placarded before the world, in terms which cannot be mistaken, the things which are most worth living for.

I propose to ask your attention to my subject under three heads. First I shall say something of the basis of class distinction, then I shall put before you some attempts which have been made at social unity, and in closing I shall try to estimate the hope of the present situation.

I

THE BASIS OF CLASS DISTINCTION

Birth and Property have been during most of human history the chief points on which class distinction has turned. Behind them both, I fear it must be confessed, there is that which lies at the root of all civilisation, namely force. I presume that the first class distinction was between the group of people who could command and the group who had to obey. The second group no doubt consisted in most cases of conquered enemies who were turned into slaves. They were outsiders, the men of a lower level.

But the master group, if I may so call it, would have its descendants, who by virtue of family relationships would seek to keep their position. This, I conclude, is the fountain head of that stream of blue blood which has played so large a part in class distinction. It is not difficult to make out a strong case for it from the point of view of human evolution. The processes of primitive warfare may have led to the survival of the fittest or the selection of the best. At a time when the sense of social responsibility was limited in the extreme, it may have been a good thing that the management of men should have rested mainly in the hands of those who by natural endowments and force of character came to the top. It is unnecessary to dwell at length on the immense influence both in our own country and elsewhere which this blood distinction of class has exercised. It is writ large in the history of the word "gentleman," both in the English word and its Latin ancestor. The Latin word "generosus," always the equivalent of "gentleman" in English-Latin documents, signifies a person of good family. It was used no doubt in this sense by the Rev. John Ball, the strike leader, as we should call him in modern terms, of the 14th century, in the lines which formed a kind of battlecry of the rebels:

When Adam delved and Eve span, Who was then the gentleman?

A writer of a century later, William Harrison, says: "Gentlemen be those whom their race and blood or at least their virtues do make noble and known."