CHAPTER III.
THE ACTUAL RELATION BETWEEN CHURCH AND STATE FROM THE DAY OF PENTECOST TO CONSTANTINE.
Transmission of Spiritual Authority from the Person of Our Lord to Peter and the Apostles, as set forth in the New Testament.
The Spiritual Power rests for its origin, so far as all Christians are concerned, upon the transmission of spiritual authority from the Person of our Lord to Peter and the Apostles.
That transmission runs up as a fact by a living unbroken line of men to our Lord Himself. It subsists as a kingdom subsists. As the governments of England, or France, or Russia, or China, occupy a portion of the earth, and by that fact are recognised quite independently of any records which attest their rise and growth, so the far greater and more widely spread government of the Church exists, and is in full daily action, independently of any records which attest its origin. Day by day in the sacrament of Baptism it admits children into the Christian covenant; day by day upon myriads of altars, from the rising to the setting sun, it offers the unbloody sacrifice of the Body and Blood of Christ; day by day in unnumbered confessionals it exercises in binding and loosing the sacrament of Penance; day by day its priests teach, support, console, uphold, in ways which it would exhaust the power of language to describe, a multitude of its people. This is its vital force as a kingdom, which it has gone on exerting for eighteen hundred and fifty years without a moment’s suspension. This vital force does not proceed from any record which attests it: it is not stored up in any book, but in a divine presence resting on a living succession of men, which perpetuates itself—which, as a fact, goes on increasing in volume and in the effects which it produces from age to age.
Nevertheless, it is desirable to draw out as accurately as we can the account of the first transmission of that spiritual authority by which this kingdom exists, as we have it recorded for us in the writings of the New Testament. For this purpose I shall quote the terms which express it as given in each of the four Gospels and in the Acts of the Apostles and the Epistles of St. Paul and in the Apocalypse.
First of all is the institution of that Priesthood which supports the whole spiritual superstructure, and from which, as the stem, all its branches spring. And this is seen to take place at a moment when our Lord’s Passion may be said to have begun—to be, as it were, the first act of it. The fullest record we have is that given by St. Paul in the First Epistle to the Corinthians, which runs thus: (1 Cor. xi. 23) “For I have received of the Lord that which also I delivered unto you: the Lord Jesus, the same night in which He was betrayed, took bread, and giving thanks, broke, and said, Take ye, and eat: this is My Body which shall be delivered for you: this do for the commemoration of Me. In like manner also the chalice, after He had supped, saying, This chalice is the new testament in My Blood: this do ye, as often as ye shall drink, for the commemoration of Me.” The Apostle adds in His own words that this was an everlasting memorial of the Lord’s death, to continue until His second coming, and that it so contained the Lord’s Body and Blood that he who ate or drank unworthily was guilty of the Body and Blood of the Lord. “For as often as you shall eat this bread, and drink this chalice, you shall show the death of the Lord until He come. Therefore, whosoever shall eat this bread or drink the chalice of the Lord unworthily, shall be guilty of the Body and Blood of the Lord.”
St. Luke in the Gospel mentions the institution in terms similar to those of St. Paul, especially in that he uses in respect of the Body the sacrificial words, “Do or offer this in commemoration of Me,” which St. Paul uses of the chalice also, while St. Luke omits them. St. Matthew and St. Mark record it more briefly still, not giving the sacrificial words in either case; and St. John passes over the institution itself of the Blessed Sacrament, while he adds very largely to the record of what was said by our Lord on the eve of his Passion, and gives three whole chapters which might almost be considered as a comment upon that act of divine love. Indeed, the opening words, “I am the true Vine,” seem to point to the rite as having just been accomplished, and to give a divine interpretation of the graces stored up in it. On the whole, it must be said of these four accounts, even including that of St. Paul, that they are rather an allusion to a thing otherwise well known to those for whom it was written than a description of it. When St. Paul wrote, the Priesthood and the Sacrifice had been in daily operation for twenty-five or thirty years, and every Christian knew by the evidence of his senses the full detail, both as to Priesthood and to Sacrament, of that to which reference was made. This is a consideration which it is requisite to bear in mind. Nothing could be further removed from the truth than to suppose that we were intended to obtain our knowledge of what the Priesthood, the Divine Sacrifice, and the Blessed Sacrament were, merely or mainly from the record of them in the Gospel narrative. When this was first published in writing, they were institutions upon which the Church had been already founded; every detail of them was imprinted upon the heart of every Christian, associated with his daily life, and enshrined in his practice. To a heathen reading the Gospel, the words, “Do this in commemoration of Me,” might be an enigma; while to a Christian they carried the power of which his whole spiritual being was the growth.
The institution of the Blessed Sacrament and of the Priesthood which is to offer the Sacrifice is enacted by our Lord on the eve of His Passion before the Apostles collected together, as He is about to make the offering in commemorating which forever, until His final coming, the Priesthood consists. Thus the moment of the institution is so chosen as to connect it most intimately not only with His Person, but with that act of our Lord wherein He is our High Priest, and in reference to which His own words of institution carry so deep a significance. That which was given by our Lord to His Apostles, that which they were to receive themselves and give to others to the end of the world, was precisely that which was to be offered on the same day for the sin of the world, which is very exactly intimated in the tense used in the original; not a future but a present tense: “Take, eat: this is My Body which is being broken for you;” as if the action of His immolation had begun.