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

by T. Edmund Harvey

To understand these sacraments aright do we not need to enter into the spirit of the Teacher in whose name they are celebrated, and who is believed to have instituted them? As we read the evangelists' record of the life and words of Jesus, [p.68] we must surely feel that to him all life was a sacrament, a continual unfolding of the Divine through the visible world and through human life. In his eyes the sunshine falling alike upon good and evil men is a constant revelation of the Divine love, compassing just and unjust, overcoming evil with good. The beautiful flowers of the field, blooming for a moment and then destroyed, bring to him no thoughts of gloom, as they did to the Greek poet, but the certainty that the Power which gives such loveliness to the creatures of an hour will provide for His higher creation too. The sparrows chirruping under the eaves, humblest of birds, fill him with a sense of the Father's care for these, and much more for man. As Christ walks across the fields, he sees messages for men in all the life about him: the parable of the seed, summing up the whole mystery of our nature in its life and growth; the sower at his work, the fishermen at their task, all are parables for him. And so it is with the relationships of our human life, which Christ takes up in his teaching and makes sacramental. Because he is in unbroken communion with the Father unseen, he constantly brings all the little things of daily life into relationship with Him.

Christ found the religious folk of his day intent on fulfilling certain duties; eager to guard the letter of the scriptures, the sacredness of the sabbath, and to fulfil the various acts which the law prescribed. He did not destroy the sacredness of [p.69] the one day by his treatment of the sabbath, but he raised the other days to its level: he did not secularize life by his attitude to the law, but rather recognised all life as holy. Religion was no longer to be something confined to certain acts and to special offices and places, but rather the attitude of the soul toward God and one's fellows, a spirit pervading the whole life and not concerned merely with the externals of duty or with certain special seasons of prayer.

Was it not natural, and even necessary, that One who looked thus upon the world, seeing every- thing in relation to God as the Author and the end of life, should make of the commonest acts a means to the Source of all strength? The water of purification, without which men could not live a clean and healthy life, the daily bread without which they could not live at all, the wine which stood for the inspiring fellowship which makes life worth living, were symbols ready to hand and full of spiritual meaning.

We have a perfect instance, in the account given in the fourth Gospel of the washing of the disciples' feet, of the true nature of the sacrament, and we are able perhaps to see it more clearly because the actual form of this sacrament has never been in general use in the Church, and men have almost ceased to think of it as a sacrament at all. "Except I wash thee thou hast no part in me," the Master says to Peter; so necessary was the sacrament. Yet the mere form meant nothing, when the thought [p.70] and life beneath it was not entered into, for Judas too, submitted to the ordinance, and went out to betray his Lord. We are told how, when Christ had ended this visible parable, the disciples were bidden even so to wash each other's feet. Often possibly in after years one or another may have done a like act for his friend, and recalled the Master's words in doing it. But this sacrament never became fixed into a form, and so even now we can clearly see its meaning. Indeed, had it become a custom of the Church, Christians would have needed to have been very simple and humble if the ordinance were not to lose its significance. In the few instances where the rite of feet-washing is still observed, we see how far removed to-day the ceremony may be from the thought which once inspired it. The selected poor, who have first been carefully washed before the ceremony, are marshalled in stately order, attendant dignitaries are ready at hand with ewers of scented water and basins of precious metal; and so, yearly, do Pope and Emperor commemorate the scene in the upper chamber where in very different wise one whose kingdom was not of this world taught his followers the way they should serve him by serving one another.

The sacrament of baptism would seem to be one which comes naturally to the Eastern peoples: it has been in use for ages among the Hindus of India, and it was apparently in general vogue in Palestine in Christ's time. It would appear [p.71] to have been not so familiar to the Western world, for the evangelist Mark has to explain to his Gentile reader how it was the custom of the Pharisees to baptize pots and vessels, and even beds. Apparently, even in that day the symbol of purification had come to have a magical significance. The washing or purification as a symbol of initiation is common to many religions, and it was a natural pictorial language for the prophet John the Baptist to employ, to express the change of life that was to follow the repentance which he preached. Christ's disciples had, many of them, first been followers of John, and would readily continue to use this sign in their ministry. But though Baptism was to the early Church the natural expression of entrance into the new life of Christianity (as we see in the case of Philip and the Ethiopian eunuch), yet it is hard to imagine that if it were held to possess in itself the importance which in later time was attached to it, the Apostle Paul would actually rejoice in the fact that he had hardly baptized any converts at all himself. [16] Already, however, the ceremony had a meaning deeper than the simple act of purification severing the old life from the new, which was probably that of the first baptisms of the disciples during the lifetime of Christ. We gather from Paul's words that in baptism the believer made real to himself, and to those about him, his [p.72] going down with Christ into the waters of death and his rising again with him into a new life, by the power of the resurrection. Some inherent virtue was soon thought to attach to the outward act itself, or else one can scarcely explain the origin of that strange custom of baptism for the dead, alluded to in the same epistle. [17]

This thought of the inherent worth of baptism continued to grow until by the beginning of the fifth century it became generally held that without it salvation was impossible. The Christian con- science, however, discovered a way to remove what would have been the hardest application of such a belief by what was spoken of as the baptism of blood. If an unbaptized convert was martyred for the name of Christ (as often might happen), the martyr's death was held to be itself a baptism, and this idea was extended to what was called the baptism of desire, or the baptism of faith, whenever death occurred before it was possible for a convert to be baptized. The classical instance of this, discussed by St. Augustine and frequently cited by subsequent writers, is that of the penitent thief upon the cross, [18] And Tertullian, who called baptism the "seal of faith," goes so far as to say "we do not receive the washing of purification [p.73] in order to cease from sinning, since we had already been washed in our hearts." [19] The seal of baptism was in his view the legal and visible completion of the act, not the act itself. Still, he holds baptism to be the needful "vesture of faith," as he calls it in another passage, and accordingly discusses the difficulty raised by some heretics of his own time, that Paul being the only baptized apostle, the other apostles could none of them be saved; though he does not feel it needful to adopt the explanation of certain orthodox ritualists of his day, who held, he tells us, that the apostles were possibly baptized on the occasion when the waves beat in upon them in the little ship on the sea of Galilee.

It was not to be wondered at that, with such a view of baptism current in the Church, the Catholic missionaries of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries should have laid stress rather on the numbers whom they could baptize than any other result. It is indeed at once pathetic and amusing to turn over the leaves of the letters from the missions which the good Jesuit fathers wrote two centuries and more ago, describing the progress of their work among the American Indians. You may read there the words of a missionary spending laborious days amid all manner of hardships, baptizing the sick and aged when very near to death and therefore removed from the danger of possible relapse into infidelity, and especially [p.74] rejoicing in the number of souls won by the baptism of dying infants, who could not possibly fall away from grace.

To such almost ludicrous notions do men come through materialising the pictorial language of the primitive sacrament, and imagining that its visible words have magical efficacy in themselves. Yet the thought of the scene in the upper room on the night of the last supper makes us feel how much that visible language might mean in its first simplicity.

As simple and as natural was that other sacrament, when Christ took the bread from the supper table, and the cup of fellowship, and gave them to those friends of his as his body and very life, which he was giving for them and for their fellows. What could be more fitting than that they should henceforth remember this farewell supper, this supreme gift of himself, when their master was taken from their sight, whenever they partook again of the Passover, nay, whenever they met together as disciples to share in a common meal in the name of him they loved? The more fully they lived in his spirit the more simply would each meal they took with one another be hallowed by the thought of his love and his presence.

Thus did the disciples in the early days take together the Eucharist meal from house to house in Jerusalem: and so, in the midst of the storm, Paul took it, before wondering fellow-passengers and crew, mingling the prayer of joyful thanks-[p.75]giving with the remembrance of the Lord for whose name he was suffering hardship.