Lures of Life

by Joseph Lucas

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.

But time works changes. As the story of the crucifixion of Christ receded with the lapse of lengthening years and became a distant tradition in Church history, the desire possessed men's minds for something tangible to nail their faith to; the desire was to bring Christ back again somehow into touch with living men and women. The blank of the long, silent ages grew intolerable. The chilling doubt of Thomas haunted men afresh; the longing to see and touch the wounded Christ gathered force. To gratify the religious devotion of the people, art did its best to portray in coloured pictures Jesus Christ the man who walked in Galilee and died in Jewry; and the Fathers of the Church responded promptly to the longing, and found to hand a ready-made mystery which answered the purpose and helped to stay the profound religious hunger of the day--a mystery which could be amplified to meet every expanding need of the people, and the people accepted with greedy faith the doctrine of the indwelling bodily presence of Jesus Christ in the bread and wine on the altar. These elements, they were assured, became changed into the real flesh and blood of Christ when consecrated by the priest, and the people acclaimed with reverent joy the wonderful transformation which brought Christ so near, and drew what religious consolation they could from the sacred illusion imposed upon them. The olden gods were returning in a new form.

The people did not know and did not want to know the truth about their creed. They had neither the leisure nor the brains to think for themselves. The cake is baked; it is eaten with relish. Hungry men at table do not analyze their food; they eat it and are thankful. The people did not know, but the people had feeling. The Church stirred their feelings to the uttermost, played upon the heart-strings of joy and sorrow, hope and fear, faith and love, until their tumultuous emotions were aroused and they believed blindly according to priestly orders. We would make neither more nor less importance of the Lord's Supper, only just what Christ made of it to His disciples and to plain people through all time. Let us try and possess the ancient feeling that possessed the disciples when they sat at table with the Master, and, stripped of ecclesiastical emblazonment, we touch the Supper in its primitive simplicity as instituted in the upper room with the shadow of death shrouding the Founder of the Feast. He commanded His disciples after His death to meet together thus and to break bread in remembrance of Him.

It is in memory of Christ, if the New Testament report of it is correct. Christ appointed the solemn rite to be an ever-living witness to His own love to man, and we in response make it our pledge of undying love and devotion to Him. It is the Sacrament of the ages. It never varies in purpose; it never stales by observance. The Lord's Table is the prepared place on earth where the Church Catholic should assemble to commemorate the great Sacrifice of Golgotha, and to commune with one another in spiritual fellowship and brotherly unity. It is a commemorative act, and as such, uncorrupted and undefiled by human inventions, it should have come down to us, but the Church has tampered with the holy thing. Christ did not intend us to idolize the bread and wine. It is the legend of the Brazen Serpent repeating itself in modern version. Human folly boasts of little originality. It borrows its sins from its ancestors and charges them up to the children's children. The Brazen Serpent that Moses lifted on a pole in the wilderness for the healing of the people was a symbol of God's saving mercy to the nation. Alas! the people turned the brass image into an idol and in course of time worshipped it, and so did evil in the sight of the Lord. Christ did not intend us to idolize the Sacrament; Christ commanded us to eat and drink the bread and wine, not to worship it. The Sacrament is in memory of Christ's sacrifice: it is not a repetition of it.

To many Churchmen it is the simplicity of the service that savours of an offence. Human vanity dearly loves display, pomp, emotion, with which to salt its devotion to the Almighty and make it palatable to the Deity and to itself. Naaman the Syrian is not the only man who demands splendour of ceremony to colour a religious function in which he engages. His pampered soul feeds on fulsome flattery, and if he does not get it he is angry to the uttermost.

BILLING AND SONS, LTD., PRINTERS, GUILDFORD, ENGLAND.