Yet to some at least there may come far other thoughts than these, as they ponder over what they have seen. Everywhere they behold men stretching out their hands towards something above them, beyond them, struggling with fears, oppressed by dim consciousness of wrong, hoping for some way of peace. The priest himself is a witness to this innate need of the soul, since his very presence speaks of man's dependence on the higher than himself, while it also shows men's interdependence upon each other. For the priest's position is impossible, unless he is in some way regarded as a means of communication between man and God, and a centre of fellowship among men. With this thought in his heart a man may look back, not without hope, upon the melancholy pageant of [p.100] the centuries, and watch the strange part that the priest has ever played in it. The modern sceptic joining in the sad cry of the old Roman poet — "So many are the ills that superstition has had power to urge men to" — has had, after all, like the rest of us, but an imperfect vision of the confused drama of history. He sees priesthood as a selfish influence playing upon human ignorance and baseness; he does not perceive the wider priesthood at work of which this is only a perversion, nor realize that priesthood and prayer underlie all that is highest and best in human life. For priesthood is the highest expression of man's social nature, by which he enters into communion with his fellows and with God. It is only because we narrow the use of the name of priest that we do not honour it aright, for in its essence priesthood is not a profession, but a high duty to which all are called.
If we were to try to define this true priesthood, might we not say that a priest is one who, reaching out after the higher and better than himself, helps others onward too, bringing to them something to which they could not of themselves have attained, who shares his good with his fellows and takes upon himself their ill, making communion possible for them, because he has entered into communion with them himself. But it is not easy thus to summarise in a sentence a work which is in truth as wide as human life; wherever a man interprets [p.101] in the terms of his own day the unseen and enduring realities, and helps those about him to view things in their true relations, he is performing a priestly function; whenever he takes up their disadvantages as his own, in fellowship with suffering, and shares with others willingly the result of their own wrong-doing, then is he doing a part of the priest's divinest work.
The germ of such an ideal of priesthood may be seen in far-off days. The family priesthood of the Hebrew patriarchs, and of the early ages of Israel, contains, unconsciously at least, the promise of it, and in a wider form it formed the subject of the noblest prophetic appeal: Israel was called to be a nation of priests, revealing to other peoples the message of God.[23] It may be said, too, that the later history of the Jewish nation has shown in practice the value of the simple family priesthood of the parent, in keeping alive a faith which from the destruction of the temple down into the late Middle Ages was cherished and maintained entirely without the help of a professional ministry. Even when after the time of Maimonides, the rabbis began to be paid for the time which they took from other work to devote to the exposition of the Law for the benefit of others, there was still no arbitrary division between clergy and laity. The human centre of Jewish religious life is not the rabbinic ministry, but the lay priesthood of the family. [p.102]
It was natural that the ideal of a universal priesthood should find expression in the earliest literature of the Christian Church, reviving and enlarging beyond the boundaries of race the appeal of the earlier Hebrew prophets: twice in one writing of the Apostolic Age [24] are Christian folk spoken of as a holy priesthood or a royal priest- hood, while in the vision of the Apocalypse the same ideal is held up for the Church that now is and for the Church that is to be, in the millennial reign upon earth of the faithful disciples of Christ. [25] In the Pauline epistles the disciples are not actually called priests, but both the individual Christians and the Church as a whole are spoken of as Temples of the Holy Spirit, and appeal is made to the Romans "that ye present your bodies a living sacrifice unto God, which is your reasonable temple-service."[26] Moreover, the body in such a passage does not mean so much the flesh and blood, as the whole visible personality of a man; in like manner in that triumphant paean which seems to have been written by the apostle in the conscious- ness of the nearness of impending martyrdom, the thought in the words "I am already being poured out as a libation" [27] is that his whole personality is being poured out and offered up as [p.103] a final priestly act of cheerful giving: for the libation was the glad offering made not merely by an official clergy, but by the head of the household as its family priest, or by the individual as sharing in the universal priesthood of humanity.
Priesthood was regarded, it would seem, in the earliest days of the Church as a function to which all its members were called, but even in the apostolic age certain officials were appointed to fulfil particular duties in the Church on behalf of their fellow members. Yet several generations appear to have passed before priest and presbyter were regarded as fully equivalent terms.[28] As Church organization developed, the gifts of the Spirit were conceived less and less as widespread throughout all the parts of the body, and more and more as confined to certain classes, while in course of time these classes became more official and professional in character. Yet if we remember how repeatedly institutions tend to fetter and destroy the ideal that has created them, we shall find cause to wonder not in the growth of clericalism in the Christian Church, but rather in the fact that all down the ages of her continuous life men and women both within and without the ranks of her officials have realized, in part at least, the higher ideals of true priesthood. [p.104]
It is easy for us to see the harm done by the official spirit, and the hypocrisy which is so often its shadow; still we must not forget that noble army of men who have looked with far other eyes upon their office, feeling themselves the representatives for the sake of order of the Church as a whole, and realizing more or less consciously that their duty is not to be the delegates and deputies of the layman in discharging his priestly functions for him, but to be a means to help him to realize them more fully, aiding him to think more, to do more and to pray more for himself. Especially true is this of prayer, which the true priest must ever aid in others as well as in himself, whether the prayer find utterance in words, or remain unformed even into the mental words of thought. For is not prayer, in this widest sense, the life breath of the Church and of the individual alike? Prayer is indeed too often spoken of as though it implied words: whereas it may exist even without conscious thought, going on whenever the soul's hand stretches out after God, whenever man seeks after goodness, in every act of will by which he is brought into touch with that Spirit from whom all right thoughts, "all holy desires, all good counsels, and all just works do proceed."
The aim of conscious prayer, in its highest form, must be communion, and a communion of will which may continue when the conscious prayer itself ceases, underlying the work and thought of everyday life. To this communion the true priest [p.105] will ever direct his fellows, knowing that as he and they come to share in it more fully they will be the better able to help those about them towards their goal. He knows too, by experience, that there is a law of spiritual magnetism, by which just as in the physical world a weak magnet is strengthened by contact with a strong one, so in the spiritual world the will to do the good and to live aright may be strengthened by coming into the presence of a stronger will, and most of all by contact with the Divine will.
To the Christian, Christ expresses in human form what this will stands for, and so for daily life he is still felt to be the High Priest of man- kind, the touch of whose spirit polarises and renews our wills, as they come into contact with his life. The one early Christian writer who has developed for his readers the thought of Christ's priesthood, the author of the epistle to the Hebrews, sees in the earlier Jewish priesthood with which he was familiar only a somewhat imperfect type of his ideal: with thoughts turned upon the pontifical acts of Christ, which he realizes to be the keystone and crown of human history, he does not stay to consider how the priestly function may, in some measure, though imperfectly, be shared by the humblest disciple, too. Yet this thought of participation in the highest priestly work of the Master seems to have been present with the Apostle Paul when he spoke of "filling up that which is lacking of the sufferings of Christ," and the same ancient [p.106] Catholic view which sees in the good deeds of the saints the continuance of Christ's work, the endless treasure flowing out from his life, would lead us also to see in their sorrows and hardships, where these have been willingly borne for the sake of God and man, a continuance of the redemptive love of the Cross. The thought of the High Priesthood of Christ is not lowered by the fact that priesthood, even in its highest mediatorial side, is to some extent shared, however faultily, by every good human life, but it is rather made intelligible to us, because it ceases to be something wholly alien from us. The life of Christ is not utterly isolated from the rest of the human race, for it could not be this and remain human; it is rather the key for the Christian to all other goodness, explaining the meaning of sacrifice, and the possibility of sorrow and pain being made steps by which men may be raised upwards towards God. And just as the supreme sacrifice of Christ cannot rightly be separated from the rest of his ministry, but rather is understood as its consummation, concentrating upon Calvary the work which was the aim of all his life, so is his High Priesthood not something foreign and separate from the life of man, but the manifestation of a principle which is at work wherever good men live and die. Yet the more truly his followers have become priests themselves, the more have they realized how imperfect their priesthood is, how deep their need to find it constantly renewed by contact with the [p.107] unique and perfect high-priesthood which they find in Christ.
The close vital connection between the disciples' work and that of their Master is one of the thoughts most prominent in the last great discourse of Christ to his disciples as pictured in the Fourth Gospel, and it is emphasized in what commentators have called the great priestly prayer. The disciples' lives are to be in close union with their Master's as the vine branches with the parent stem, and beneath all their deeds must flow his living spirit. They must be in union with each other as he is one with the Divine Father, so making real to others the continuance of his life. Their whole lives are to be one great act of priesthood realizing itself through fellowship. For without fellowship priesthood cannot be, and Christianity could not exist. The Church is a society in which men are linked to each other and to God through Christ; there is no place in it for the selfishness of isolated individualism, or the centring of thought upon personal salvation alone. Its members belong to each other in belonging to their head. The metaphors used in the apostolic writings to describe the Church are all social; it is a body, a building, a city, a kingdom, in which every part is in relation to others, and only thus can join to make the whole. The more the children of the Church realize this, the more truly will they become a fellowship of friends, and show themselves such in daily life; theirs will be [p.108] no exclusive friendship, but one which overflows to all, in honest sincerity, because they cannot but work for all men's good.
When Christ went about in Galilee and told men. that the Kingdom of Heaven was at hand, was he mistaken? Or is the fellowship which he founded not itself a part of that kingdom, the seed which is already growing and spreading throughout the whole earth? Many strange fowls, perhaps, we may think, have lodged in its branches already; but if the fellowship be strong and true they cannot do it great harm, and under its shelter may live not only these but a host of singing birds. The great thing that all have to remember is that members of the fellowship must needs hand on to others the life that has been given to them. That great title by which the Pope is known as Vicar of Christ upon earth is not an idle one: every good Christian Pope has been that to some extent, and so, too, has every Christian disciple, in so far as he lives in the Master's spirit. For language grows old so quickly, that we forget that the vicar is one who acts instead of another, in his place, just as vicarious suffering is suffering borne by one on behalf and instead of another. But we need to explain and translate the appellation "Vicar of Christ" into daily life by means of that other noble title which shines like a jewel at the head of every Papal bull and rescript "servus servorum Dei," servant of the servants of God. The Vicar of Christ will show himself such by serving his [p.109] fellow-men with his whole life, ungrudgingly and gladly, knowing that every act and thought given to their welfare is given to God, and that the Father would have men seek Him not afar from human life and labour, but amidst the toil and sorrow of that sinful humanity for whom Christ died.