Quaker Strongholds

by Caroline Emelia Stephen

I must own at the outset that I have never been able clearly to understand the grounds upon which the “ordinances” in question are regarded as essential parts of Christianity, nor have I ever found it possible to arrive at a thoroughly satisfactory explanation of their precise (supposed) effects. I am, of course, not ignorant of the general nature of those grounds or supposed results. But a broad space of obscurity seems to separate the actual transactions out of which the “ordinances” arose from the earliest known records of the institutions themselves; and it is notorious that theologians differ very widely in their views of the spiritual results produced either by ordination or by a due participation in the sacraments, and also of the conditions necessary to their “validity.”

It is here that the practical pinch of the system is felt. Were the matter one of purely speculative interest, how gladly would I and other unlearned people have left it in the hands of those better qualified to deal with it! But it is a question of urgent practical importance, which, as regards at least one of the sacraments, no devout person can escape. Every adult member of the Church of England (every one, that is, who is so in a religious sense) is confronted with a solemn challenge to do, or to leave undone at his peril, an act involving vast and mysterious consequences for good or for evil to his spiritual welfare. No middle course is possible, and the Church Prayer-book promises no safety either in its performance or omission. To “partake unworthily” is represented as involving vague and awful dangers—dangers possibly, though not clearly, greater than those which would be incurred by omitting an act “generally necessary to salvation.” But how to be sure of partaking worthily? “A true penitent heart and lively faith ... a lively and steadfast faith in Christ our Saviour ... and perfect charity with all men,”—if these are the necessary preparations for being “meet partakers of these holy mysteries,” failing in which we do but “eat and drink our own damnation” by venturing to partake of them, is it any wonder if the troubled heart is held in a state of continual uneasiness, and shrinks almost equally from the act and from its omission?

Such, at least, was my own painful and long-continued experience. The injunction to “examine one’s self” as a safeguard against unworthy participation did but increase the perplexity and distress. For how can self-examination fail to increase the sense of unworthiness? and how is it possible for any one to imagine himself competent to be judge in his own case?

I do not forget that the Prayer-book suggests (not to say prescribes) a refuge from such perplexities in an application to “some discreet and learned minister of God’s Word” for “absolution, and ghostly counsel and advice.” I quite recognize the consistency of this suggestion, which seems to me to confirm the obvious remark already made, that the sacerdotal and sacramental system hangs together, and must be adopted or rejected as a whole. In my own case, Protestantism was too strong to allow of my accepting this legitimate corollary of the Church of England doctrine respecting the Lord’s Supper. To have recourse to confession and absolution was an impossibility to me, as I believe it to be even yet to the great majority of Englishwomen, and as it is assuredly likely always to be to Englishmen. But I doubt whether any satisfactory resting-place short of it is to be found for those who fully adopt the Anglican view of sacraments.

I do not mean to represent the perplexities and scruples I have spoken of as having constituted the whole of my experience in this matter, or to say that I was quite unable to meet them in a manner more or less provisionally satisfactory to myself. It is true that out of perplexities and scruples sprang doubts and questionings (with which, indeed, the very air I breathed was thick), so that during the twenty years in which I was a regular communicant in the Church of England, I was never able to feel that my own practice was based upon thoroughly clear and solid ground of ascertained truth. Yet in spite of, or rather alongside of, all scruples and questionings as to the real intention of our Lord—if, indeed, He had any intention at all—with regard to any special commemoration of His death by the use of bread and wine, I did earnestly, throughout those years, according to the measure of my ability, endeavour to solve the problem in practice—to make the act of outward “communion” a real occasion of renewed self-dedication, and of inward and spiritual feeding on the bread of life. Such times were, indeed, often occasions of deep spiritual blessing; but I never could discern that they were so in any other sense than that in which every real act of prayer, of penitence, of self-dedication, and of thanksgiving must necessarily be so. The whole blessing appeared to me to be of a spiritual kind, and due to spiritual causes. The connection between the use of bread and wine and these spiritual sources of blessing never became clear to me. The more profound the blessedness of communion with Christ and with His people, the less conceivable did it seem that it should depend upon the official performance of an elaborate rite.

The Bible, to which in this Protestant country we are always referred for the solution of the difficulties as to which Catholics consult their priests, appeared to me to afford no help whatever in defining the conditions necessary to a right participation, nor in directing one’s choice between the various sacramental theories to be met with in our days. All schools of theology equally appeal to it, and it is obvious that a book cannot decide between rival interpretations of itself. It did, however, distinctly help me towards the conclusion that there might be no need to choose between these various theories at all. To my unassisted reason it appeared that the effect of comparing any, even the mildest, modern eucharistical theory with the accounts to be found in the New Testament of our Lord’s parting supper with his disciples, was chiefly to show that a vast and unexplained addition to, or at the least development of, the original idea had taken place since these accounts were written. The whole form of words used in the Communion Service seems to me to convey meanings almost immeasurably different from anything which I could myself have extracted from the one brief expression, “Do this in remembrance of me.” Left to myself and to Scripture, the Gospel narratives would never have suggested the idea of any intention to institute a ceremony at all, far less to invest its observance with possibilities so awful both for good and for evil, not only in case of omission, but even in case of inadequate observance. To my own mind, the narratives of the Last Supper in Matthew and Mark, which contain no allusion to any possible repetition of the feast, appeared quite as complete, quite as significant, as that of Luke, which gives the addition, “Do this in remembrance of me.” The allusions in the Epistle to the Corinthians to some disorderly practices in that Church certainly make it clear that they had adopted a practice of meeting to “show the Lord’s death till He come” by eating bread and drinking wine; and the apostle’s reference to a Divine communication to himself of the circumstances of the Last Supper certainly seems to show that he believed them to have sufficient ground for doing so; but, on the other hand, the words which he there ascribes to Christ, “Do this, as oft as ye drink it, in remembrance of me,” have always seemed to me to be distinctly incompatible with the idea of a command to eat bread and drink wine in order to commemorate His death, and would rather suggest a reverent remembrance of Him on all social occasions, and perhaps especially when meeting for the Passover or any other religious feasts. I was thus fully ripe for the view so vigorously put forth in Barclay’s “Apology,”[13] as held by Friends.

I have allowed my thoughts to fall into a somewhat autobiographical form, because the appearance of egotism seems to me preferable to the real presumption of going beyond one’s knowledge, and also because I am anxious to show how unavoidably (and at the same time, I believe, innocently) one may become entangled in questions too deep and too perplexing for ordinary minds, in the mere honest endeavour to obey at once the teachings of Jesus Christ and of the Church.

To myself it was the greatest relief, at a time when I had thus been driven to choose between obedience to my own conscience on the one hand, and outward communion with my fellow-Christians on the other, and when I had for two years, with pain and grief, excommunicated myself accordingly—it was at that moment the greatest relief to find a body of Christians who held the simple, and, to my mind, the one worthy view of Christianity, as a dispensation entirely spiritual in its nature; a state of enlightenment and true worship in which forms and shadows had passed away, and the substance alone was to be laboured for. It was in the quiet meetings already described that I myself first learnt the full meaning of the words, “baptizing into the Name ... and the communion of the body of Christ.” The outward observances by which these “holy mysteries” are typified in the devotions of other bodies had been to me rather a hindrance than a help. I cannot help suspecting that they are so to many.

For if not a help, they must be a hindrance. It may, to people in some stages of education, or in some countries, be a natural and real way of receiving or expressing truth, to perform ceremonial acts. I cannot think that it is the spontaneous language of intelligent devotion in our own time and country. To my own mind the great crowning lesson imparted by our Divine Master, in the solemn farewell hours of His last evening with His disciples, is lowered and eclipsed when considered as the institution of a ceremony, and shines out again in its fulness of majestic pathos when regarded as an embodied or acted parable. His repeated warnings to His disciples against their inveterate tendency to take His words literally, and to interpret them as referring to the meat that perishes instead of as being spirit and life, sound in one’s ears when one feels oppressed by what (forgive me the irrepressible truth) to some of us seems the unintelligent practice of continually repeating a form used by Christ once for all to show forth the central truth of His life-giving life on earth.

It is the fear that, in wrapping the “words of eternal life” in a garment of superstitious usage, they are being inevitably buried out of the reach of those who need them the most, which prompts me to speak thus boldly. Whatever lowers our religion to a matter of outward observance, whatever seems to give to unreasoning participation in outward acts a place on the same level with that inward continuance in the Word of Christ which makes His disciples free, is surely a human and a grievous barrier in the homeward path which He came to open to all.