Gloria Crucis / addresses delivered in Lichfield Cathedral Holy Week and Good Friday, 1907

by J. H. Beibitz

We were made for holiness, union with God, eternal life. These are but different expressions for one and the same thing. For holiness is the realisation of our manhood, of that Divine Image which is the true self, expressing itself and acting, as it does in us, through the highest of animal forms. That perfect self-realisation is not merely dependent upon, but is union with God, at its beginning, throughout its course, and in its final consummation. And the life of self-realisation or holiness, which is the life of union with God, is eternal. Eternal life is not, as in the popular idea of it, an endless and wearisome prolongation of mere existence. Primarily, the idea is of the quality, not the duration of life. In the teaching of the New Testament, eternal life is a present possession of Christians. “These things I write to you, who believe on the Name of the Son of God, that ye may know that ye have eternal life.” Being as it is a moral and spiritual

reality, it is outside time and space. It is unaffected by “changes and chances.” It is for ever beyond the reach of the temporal processes of decay, corruption, death. Here it manifests itself in service, that service of our fellows which is the service of God. Hereafter, it will be manifested in higher and more exalted forms of service. “Have thou authority over ten, over five, cities.”

Now all this, the consummation and glorious fruit of our humanity, holiness, union with God, life eternal, we see already realised in Jesus Christ, the Son of man. We see it realised, as we have learnt, not in a separate, solitary, individual, isolated life, but in that common nature which “for us men and for our salvation” He assumed of the Virgin Mary.

All that is in Him was in Him first, in order that it might be in us. And this is the important point: it can only be in us by virtue of our union with Him. That union He describes under the vivid and forcible metaphor of eating His flesh, and drinking His blood. “He that eateth My flesh, and drinketh My blood, hath life eternal.” His flesh and blood—a common Jewish phrase for human nature—is precisely that common nature which He assumed, in which He died to sin, which He raised from the dead and exalted to the Right Hand of God, and which He imparts to us, by His Spirit given to dwell in us for evermore.

The doctrine of the Atonement is incomplete, it is irrational, until it is completed by the doctrine of the Spirit, the Giver of Life. As He is the source of life in all living organisms, so He is in Christians the source of the Christ-life. He comes to dwell in us, not simply as the Spirit, but as the Spirit of Christ—the Spirit Who first created, and then “descended” to abide in the Perfect Manhood. That gift of the Spirit of Christ as the indwelling source of the life of Christ, and the means of the Presence of Christ in us, is the characteristic gift of the New Dispensation. It is His work to make us ever more and more partakers of Christ, to be perpetually feeding us with His flesh and blood.

And, as we are about to speak of the Holy Communion, it is well to insist first on this, that the work of the Spirit in there feeding us with the flesh and blood of the Son of man is a continuous process. It is of the very essence of what is meant by being a Christian. “If any man have not the Spirit of Christ, he is none of His.” The sixth chapter of St. John’s Gospel is not a mere prediction of the Eucharist. It is the revelation of that principle of which the Eucharist is an illustration. Our Communions are the supreme moments, the crises, in a process which is for ever going on, the feeding of us, by the Spirit, with the flesh and blood, the holy and victorious manhood, of the Redeemer.

What relation, then, can this spiritual process have to the material substances, to the bread and wine which are used in the Eucharist? This question at once opens out into the larger one, as to the relation between matter and spirit. Now, that question could not be dealt with at all satisfactorily without undertaking a vastly larger task than we are prepared for at the present moment. We should have to ask, What is, after all, meant by “matter,” and what by “spirit”?

But something may be achieved on a much humbler scale. It will suffice for our present purpose to concentrate our attention on a remarkable fact which seems to underlie all our experience. And we will approach the statement of this fact by first recalling the familiar definition of a sacrament, which fastens upon the union of the outward and visible with the inward and invisible as being the essence of what is meant by a sacrament. Now, the fact we have in view is this: every outward object in the world is, in this respect, a sacrament. What we seem to see is everywhere spirit working through what we call “material” objects. That sacramental principle of the universe is the very principle which underlies our Lord’s parables of Nature. Speaking more accurately, we see in “matter” (1) the means of the self-revelation of spirit; (2) the instrument by which spirit acts.

The human organism may serve as a type of this.

Here is a spiritual being, the Ego, in its will, its thoughts, its affections, invisible, and it makes its presence manifest, and it acts, through the material manifestation and instrument of itself, the body. To believers in God, nature itself, in its deepest reality, is the revelation of the Divine Presence, and the instrument of the Divine action. A beautiful sunset is a veritable and genuine sacrament. In the light of this profound truth, of matter as the manifestation and instrument of spirit, we are enabled to see how futile was the ancient dispute concerning the number of the Sacraments. In view of the fuller and larger knowledge which has come to us, this, like so many other objects of theological strife, ought before this to have been consigned to the limbo of forgotten controversies.