It is true that holy David declared that “he would speak even before kings and not be ashamed,” [9b] that S. John Baptist “confessed and denied not, but confessed;” [9c] that S. Paul, for himself, “continued witnessing to small and great,” [10a] and in the name of all Christians laid it down that “we believe and therefore speak,” [10b] and that “every tongue should confess.” [10c] But people on all sides are saying, “Not so—not confess, not witness, not speak,—any other test you please; number us as we sit here or stand there; but do not ask us to speak. We prefer to take our place with the ‘chief rulers who believed, but did not confess;’—we believe, but do not ask us to confess.”
And this resistance has two sides—one political, and the other quasi-religious.
Political men resist, because they say the Church of England holds them, and yet does not hold them. It holds them politically, gives them, if they demand it, baptism, or communion, or churching, or burial. Yet it does not hold them because they object to her services, and usages, and prefer preachers of their own, and other doctrines than hers. “We are Churchmen,” say these people, “in one sense, though not in another; and therefore we prefer not to define ourselves at all. We go to ‘meeting,’ but we have not parted final company with the Church. And as excommunication can alone sever the bond between us, we are glad that excommunication is now unknown.”
Such is one side of the opposition to the notion of defining their faith. How shall they define it? Once perhaps when the Catechism was fresh upon the soft and docile mind of their childhood they might have been able, but now that is a mere reminiscence. They know not to-day what they may believe to-morrow. Meantime they will hold on to the Church as to a secular institution, and do what they can to secularize it. It will become more useful and less mischievous in their opinion, just as men cease to regard it as a “witness” for the glory of God, and a training school for the salvation of souls.
The other side of the same opposition has more appearance of religious feeling about it. Men object to define their faith, because really and conscientiously they have no faith which they can define. “False shame,” “procrastination,” “self-distrust in honourable minds,” (as it has been mischievously called, [11]) “consciousness of imperfection,” such are the pleas with which they indulgently flatter themselves. They are not yet ripe for any “visible Church;” so they ignorantly and complacently express it; they mean to wait; they are not unchristian because they dare not make choice of a denomination yet. Surely not. By and by will be time enough. They will make a profession some day though not now.
When I hear on every side as I mix with my fellow men, and read in every newspaper, as I strive to note down the voice of the public press as it gains upon the popular mind, such sentiments as these, I am bound to say that if this be not spiritually the reproduction of the picture of Ephraim, as Hosea drew it in the days of Israel’s apostasy, and as such, if it be not the accomplishment among ourselves of a prophetic announcement which spiritually concerned the Church of Christ, I know not where to find a prophecy fulfilled. “Ephraim he hath mixed himself among the people: Ephraim is a cake not turned. Strangers have devoured his strength, and he knoweth it not; yea, grey hairs are here and there upon him; yet he knoweth not.” [12]
I will now presume to say something in the presence of this calamity which afflicts the Church of Christ in England.
I. First, I will say that as Truth is one and indivisible, so your faith as English Churchmen, with the Cross of Christ upon your foreheads,—and the bond of the “Apostles’ doctrine and fellowship” in your hearts,—and the Prayer Book with its Catholic witness in your hands, is fixed, and easily defined.
It is fixed, because otherwise it could not be the Truth. And you possess that which is fixed, because otherwise that which you possess could not be true. The Church of God is “the pillar and ground of the Truth;” [13] and you have the Truth from the Church of God.
The Church of God does not create the Truth. The Church of God does not even give force and power to the Truth. But the Church of God is the depositary of the Truth. The Church of God has the Truth to keep, and to maintain, and to hand down. The Church of God is the orb, out of which the glorious light of the Truth shines and overspreads the earth. The Church of God is the candlestick which holds the light. The Church of God is the pillar on which the proclamation of the Truth is written, and held up and heralded through the world. You learn truth from that pillar. And that pillar is the Church of God?