Let us proceed to examine how these two were both maintained, penetrating the divine work so far as to reach that intimate union which made one substance of outward regimen and inward belief by the force of an indissoluble life; for if the Episcopate had been a mere government, it would have had neither such unity nor such vitality, nor have been capable of supporting the Church’s fabric.
CHAPTER V.
THE ACTUAL RELATION BETWEEN CHURCH AND STATE FROM THE DAY OF PENTECOST TO CONSTANTINE.
The One Episcopate Resting upon the One Sacrifice.
One of the points on which Pope St. Clement most strongly dwells is the care with which our Lord communicated to His Apostles definite and accurate instructions as to the kingdom which they were to set up. And from this care he draws the conclusion that, if infringement of the Mosaic law was punished by death, how much more guilty were they who showed insubordination to a precept of Christ in the institution of Christian rule? Thus St. Clement affirms that our Lord, far from leaving the government of His Church to be evolved out of local circumstances or individual temperaments or political affinities, determined it from the beginning. We shall now further show that He enshrined in it the very life of His people; and so that their worship, their government, their belief, and their practice were wrapped up together. Their government contained their doctrine, and set before their eyes in distinct vision Him in whom they trusted, Jesus Christ and Him crucified. It was not a human device but a divine ordinance, and the preaching of Christ through it was His action also. His words were deeds as much in the teaching of His Church as they were in the days of His flesh.
Our Lord created the priesthood of His Church on the eve of His Passion. It is the basis on which all spiritual power and all doctrinal truth rest in His kingdom; and He willed that the episcopate should be the instrument to communicate both power and truth to His people, and that the priesthood should be stored up in the person of each bishop. This plant of life, complete in itself, but only as a sucker of the One Vine,[82] the Apostles deposited in every city and town by the inspiration of the Holy Ghost; as St. Clement says, they passed on themselves and left it to grow by virtue of the same Spirit. The result was that when Constantine gave the acknowledgment of the Civil Power to the great Spiritual Kingdom, its Episcopate had far outgrown the limits of his empire.
In what does the High-priesthood of Christ consist? In two acts, which it is well carefully to distinguish.
The first is that divine act of the Blessed Trinity by which the Second Person, the Eternal Son of the Father, assumed a created nature into the unity of His Person, and that the nature of man. The act whereby He became man is the act constituting His Priesthood.[83] Before His Incarnation He was not a Priest; in the divine nature in which alone He is from eternity, He does not offer but receive sacrifice. St. Paul describes the act, and the instantaneous acceptance by the Divine Son, as man in His human nature, of the mission to be High Priest for the human race in these words: “When He cometh into the world He saith: Sacrifice and oblation Thou wouldest not: but a body Thou hast fitted to me: Holocausts for sin did not please Thee. Then said I, behold I come: in the head of the book it is written of Me, that I should do Thy will, O God.” The whole purpose of His Incarnation and the whole course of His future human life are here summed up, as accepted by Him in the first moment of His human existence, when He says: “A body Thou hast fitted to Me—behold I come—that I should do Thy will, O God.” The whole Christian faith rests upon this divine act. It is the simply inconceivable humiliation of the Divine Majesty, the simply unutterable effect of the Divine Love. The angels, who have had it before them from their creation in vision, and for more than eighteen hundred years in effect, have not yet mastered its depths; nor is the Mother of fair Love herself—the nearest to it—equal to the task either of expressing it or of comprehending it. How, then, was it to be impressed on the human race in a manner which should cause its full force to be received by those who learnt it for the first time; and when it had been thus learnt what further provision was to bring about that it should never be forgotten, nor pass into the crowd of things which have once been and then cease to be?
We have, first, in these words of St. Paul, the Divine Son accepting His mission as the first act of His human nature, and, further, expressing the nature of His mission—to do the will of His Father, that will being that He should take the body which His Father had prepared for Him. In that acceptance is comprised all the labours and sufferings of the thirty-three years foreseen from the beginning, willed by the Father, freely chosen by the Son in His manhood, as the first act of that manhood, which yet is prolonged through His whole life.