A Wayfarer's Faith: Aspects of the common basis of religious life

by T. Edmund Harvey

It is this wider sense of the word which we must [p.62 ]be careful not to lose, the use in which a sacrament means the unfolding and imparting of the spiritual and eternal through that which we see and hear and feel.

Because in times past the Church has tended to narrow the use of the word, and, by confining the Divine operations to certain channels, to misread the great sacrament of life, so lessening the mystery of the world, there is all the more reason that we should not rest content with seeing how inadequate such views have proved. It is true that over the doctrine of sacraments men have fought and wrangled, forgetting the name by which they were called. But it is true, too, that to countless souls it has seemed that through the sacraments the Church has offered them help which has come as in no other way to their lives. And surely this has not been all delusion. The error of the sacramentalist in the past has often rather been that he has confined the Divine presence and the Divine working to certain fixed channels and unchanging visible signs. Those of us who hold that these good men have narrowed down the freedom of the inner life need to meet them not by denying the Divine presence where they see it, but by trying to see and to realize that presence ourselves more fully throughout all our lives. We are called to the worship and the knowledge of the transcendent and immanent God, who is here in the midst of our lives, in the midst of His world and His works, yet is far more than all these. [p.63] When the stern old Tertullian looked out upon the pagan world around him and noted in its religious rites strange mimicry and rivalry of the Christian mysteries, he could perceive no good in what he saw. In the worship of Mithras he found a baptism for the remission of sins, and a sign made on the forehead of the soldier in this pagan army of salvation; a crown purchased by the sword, and the ritual offering of bread. But all this, like the ancient Roman rites of Numa, or the mysteries of Eleusis and of Samothrace, seemed to him but the work of the Evil One. It was the devil's part, he wrote, to invert the truth and make of it his own counterparts, as he seemed to do in much of the ritual of the heathen temple.[14]

In like manner, in more modern times the early missionaries in the far east learned with amazement of the way in which, in the mountains of Thibet, the devil had made his imitation of the ceremonies and offices of the Catholic Church, and wondered as they heard of the Buddhist monasteries with their abbots and hierarchy of clergy, and the celebration there of mysterious offices strangely resembling their own mass, to the sound of bells and amid the smoke of incense.

In our own day an even wider area opens before [p.64 ]the historian's vision, and across five continents men trace, under various forms, rites whose origin seems the same. It is not now the devil who is credited with inspiring these myriad devices, but perhaps not a few of the students who return with Dr. Frazer from the survey of this vast field are inclined to feel that they have reduced all alike to one origin, in primitive savage superstition at work in the presence of life, birth and death. But if Tertullian and his school lack charity in their judgment on the sacraments of the heathen, there is surely danger too that our modern men of science may lead us to believe that in tracing a custom to its primitive origin they have found its cause or explained its nature. We can under- stand a thing best, not merely by knowing its beginning, but by also viewing it in its full development, judged not only by what it is at its lowest, or when it is most degraded, but at its highest and best.

The world-wide use points surely to a world-wide need, expressing itself in different ways, but in essentials the same. Unconsciously, indeed, in all our lives we make use of sacraments whenever we apprehend the invisible and the higher through the medium of the visible and lower. And, in our very thoughts, metaphors and symbols are nothing else than sacraments expressing truth in pictorial form. Even when men deliberately attempt to explain all life on a basis of atheistic materialism they still feel the need of what might [p.65] truly be called a kind of sacrament. It is very significant from this point of view to find that some French secularists have found it desirable to publish a ritual of civil ceremonies, [15] in which model liturgies are provided for a secular baptism, a secular confirmation service, as well as secular marriage and burial services. A conscious recognition of this same need led Auguste Comte and his Positivist followers to devise an elaborate ritual which might make their worship of Humanity more real.

The Society of Friends itself, which is popularly supposed to represent a protest against all forms of sacraments, can illustrate in its history the value of the true sacrament, and the danger there is of doing worship to the form of the sacrament, rather than to the life which makes it of worth.

No other Christian community has proved so strikingly the value in worship of the beautiful sacrament of silence, that universal liturgy in which all nations can unite; where ignorant and learned men come together on a like basis. Yet the very fact that in speaking of this we need to emphasize the worth of "Living silence," shows that too often, even here, men have but honoured a dead silence, making an idol of the sacrament which was only a means to an end, not an end in itself.

We may see even more clearly how easy it is for the form to become a bondage in the history of [p.66] another strange Quaker sacrament, that of the "Plain dress" of the middle nineteenth century. There is no need to tell how, in the case of this custom, the protest against changing fashions became itself the most tyrannous of fashions. What is especially interesting to us now, is to note that the dress which was an outward sign of inward grace became to be considered as, in a sense, holy itself. A young man or woman would wear the ordinary dress of the day, and suddenly some time of decision would come, a crisis in the inner life, and perfectly naturally the change would be marked by the adoption in the plain dress of the older generation. And it even became customary to associate the length of the hat brim with the holiness of the wearer's life; the truer to Quaker principles he was, the longer was the brim. It has been said that you may find in a journal written seventy years ago such an entry as this: "I think I can honestly, yet in all humility, say that in the past year there has been a growth in grace, and I have ventured to add a quarter of an inch to the brim of my hat." We smile; yet for some of us at least that ancient costume is so redolent of beautiful memories that we can scarce bear to laugh at its vagaries; we know too well the sacramental efficacy of the old Friend's bonnet, which forever recalls the goodness and love of the face beneath it.

It is strange that in the ancient Church of Rome men should have come to think in much the same [p.67] way of the peculiar habits of the religious orders, regarding the monk's dress itself as something sacred, which an unworthy man dishonoured, and which actually helped its wearer to be holier in his life just as the old Quaker dress was felt by many to help them to be more consistent in all their ways with the ideal which they strove to realize. So strong was this feeling that men who were not members of an Order sometimes obtained as a privilege to wear for a time the cord, to die in the habit, or even to be buried in it, the dress itself being felt to be sacramental.

If these minor sacraments came to be so misunderstood, how natural it is that similar misunderstandings should arise as to sacraments in common use throughout the whole Church, and associated with the very deepest truths of the inner life. Yet if we go back to their origin we shall see that the two chief sacraments of the Church were most simple acts expressing in visible language the life of the spirit, acts perfectly natural and full of significance to those who first took part in them, but which in later days have too often lost their meaning because the mere form was held to have some magical efficacy in itself.