Church and State as Seen in the Formation of Christendom

by T. W. Allies

In this unity we must likewise comprehend the jurisdiction expressed in planting and maintaining belief and worship throughout the world. For our Lord is a King, and came to establish a kingdom; not several kingdoms, nor a confederation of states, but one kingdom, concerning which His people confesses for ever, in the words of the angel who announced His coming, “Of His kingdom there shall be no end.” But without jurisdiction, that is, without the power which says to one man, “Go here,” and to another, “Go there,” the first foundation of a kingdom was as impossible as was its continuance and permanence.

All the records of that ancient Church which fought a victorious battle with the Roman Empire and received a civil enfranchisement from the Emperor Constantine tend to show that the principle of hierarchical order was very strong in it, and was most severely maintained. It could not be well stated in a more absolute form than in the letter of Pope St. Clement above quoted. But the Church which met in representation at the great Nicene Council offers a perfect picture of what that order was, working itself out in absolute independence of the Civil Power through three centuries from the Day of Pentecost.

In the diocese the bishop’s jurisdiction was complete. No priest was independent in the exercise of his functions. Thus jurisdiction in the interior forum entered into the daily dispensing of the sacraments. For a long time the Holy Eucharist was dispensed by the bishop from one altar, and sent from him to the sick. He was the imposer of penance, and when, as churches and priests multiplied, the system of parishes and parish priests arose, they executed all their functions in complete subordination to the bishop, whose title in those early times was taken from the rite on which all his power rested, when he is called pre-eminently Sacerdos, i.e., the sacrificing priest. Within the limits of the diocese there can be no sort of doubt that the idea of jurisdiction was perfectly realised in practice.

But did it stop with the diocese? Was the bishop independent in the exercise of his powers? In the first place, he exercised them all within a certain district. He had no power to encroach upon the district of a neighbouring bishop, nor to execute therein functions which were perfectly lawful and usual in his own. It is plain that had he possessed any such power, the whole system established would not have made one kingdom of Christ, but would have been a congeries of similar governments, not tied together but agitated by perpetual rivalries. Nothing could be more unlike the actual system of government as disclosed by the bearing of the Church of Rome to that of Corinth in the letter of St. Clement, or to that orderly division into provinces which is seen in its full development at the Nicene Council. We may conclude that the tie which held the bishops together was at least as strict and as defined as that which formed the unity of the particular diocese.

We now behold that marvellous spiritual fabric of which St. Chrysostom and St. Augustine, at the head of the Fathers of the fourth century, spoke with such affection, acknowledging that its existence was to them an absolute proof of the Godhead of its Founder. It was not its material extension alone, but its inmost nature and character which moved them thus. It was the evolution of the one indivisible power in its threefold direction of Priesthood, Teaching, and Jurisdiction. It was that the one episcopate tied together in a hierarchy of several thousand bishops was but the outward regimen of an inward polity in which the One Sacrifice is offered, and the one Body of Christ communicated by the work of the one Priesthood, which lives upon and dispenses one doctrine, proclaiming it from age to age to the whole earth.

Thus the words of our Lord, spoken immediately after He had instituted the priesthood according to the order of Melchisedec, committing to it the sacrifice of His Body and Blood, were marvellously accomplished. “I am the true Vine, and My Father is the husbandman.—Abide in Me, and I in you. As the branch cannot bear fruit of itself, unless it abide in the vine, so neither can you, unless you abide in Me. I am the Vine, you the branches: he that abideth in Me, and I in him, the same beareth much fruit; for without Me you can do nothing.” The human nature which He had taken had sent forth, in virtue of the Person who took it, the triple power bestowed upon it: His priesthood, His teaching, and His rule had occupied the earth. All the nations composing the Roman Empire had brought in their first-fruits to form clusters of the mystical Vine. They had made the triple offering of the Eastern kings from the peoples of Europe, Asia, and Africa to the Royal Infant; to the King they had given their gold, for His sake and after His likeness becoming poor; to the God their frankincense, worshipping Him at the altar of His love; to the Victim their myrrh, presenting to Him their bodies as a sacrifice, in repetition of His martyrdom. It was the very scoff of the heathen philosopher and magistrate that any one could think to reduce to one worship the various rites of the Empire, a conglomeration of European, Asiatic, and African superstitions. Out of that seemingly hopeless diversity, that endless antagonism, He had constructed a divine unity, a table at which the children of Scipio knelt side by side with the vilest slave, at which many an Aspasia became a penitent, and a Boniface sent back as holy relics to his mistress, Aglae, the body in which he had sinned with her. The vine of the synagogue, planted of old with the choicest care, and protected from the inroads of wild beasts in the security of a single nation of brethren, had brought forth but wild grapes, and therefore it had been plucked up; its hedge had been broken down and its tower ruined. Instead of it, the Vine of His Body had grown abundantly, and from its single root, to use Tertullian’s application of the parable, suckers had been carried everywhere, and the harvest of its vintage rendered the earth fruitful; the hills and the valleys of many vast regions were covered with its grapes. But this itself was but the beginning of a vaster growth in the future, the first realisation of an ever-expanding kingdom. Only it was a complete specimen of all that should be. This generation of the Christian people from the person of Christ was the one miracle which St. Chrysostom thought no heathen could deny.

The Eucharistic Sacrifice is the centre and instrument of all this work; the other Sacraments lead up to it or attend upon it. That which is most intimate in man, the forming his soul after a divine type, and the sanctifying it with all its affections; that which is most intellectual, the doctrine of God made man, surpassing all knowledge in its development as in its conception; that government which is necessary to the well-being of every kingdom; that worship which is most exalting, the worship of the Infinite One, the source, example, and giver of personality, which is the last and highest gift of the Creator to the rational creature,—all these were here joined together by the simple act of God when He perpetuated in a visible rite the double power of His High-priesthood, the assumption of our nature, and the dying for our sins, and brought out of it the generation of His people, wherein the resurrection of one Man to bodily life became the resurrection of a countless host to spiritual brotherhood, and created the Family of the Incarnate God.

I have been exhibiting the institution of the most blessed Eucharist, and the planting of it throughout the Church in the three centuries which ended with the Nicene Council. Throughout these it was the life of the Church; all the marvels of faith, endurance, zeal, and charity spring from it; the works of the Saviour were hidden in it. But since then fifteen centuries and a half have elapsed, and the Church which filled the Roman Empire has dilated itself over the whole earth. In all the countries which it has thus occupied, in all the races of which it has converted the first-fruits, the same blessed Eucharist—that divine banquet of the Flesh and Blood of the Word made man—has continued to be the life of the Church. Upon it the race of martyrs, saints, doctors, and virgins have been nurtured, and the power which in each one of them was supernatural has to be also estimated in its aggregate. Among all the proofs of the Godhead of the Son of Man, that Divine Food which He foretold to the multitude satisfied with the miraculous multiplication of the natural food on the shores of the Lake of Galilee, and which He first gave to His Apostles in the upper chamber on the eve of His Passion, is in its results the most transcendent. It is enough by itself to quench all the doubts of unbelief, to kindle all the fires of an endless charity. It is the Church’s unparalleled possession, of which no false religion possesses even a shadow; her testimony, which grows not old; her youth, which never fails. Unnumbered myriads of people of all times and countries have been supported by it through the desert of this world, and been led in its strength to the Paradise in which the Son of God in the glory of His humanity communicates Himself face to face to those whom He has redeemed, and imparts to them the vision of God in His Unity and His Trinity.

But if this Church, possessing this Divine Sacrifice and Sacrament, was a wonder to minds such as St. Chrysostom and St. Augustine in their day of the fifth century, what ought it to be to us at the end of the nineteenth? The Roman Empire broke up, and the tribes of the North dashed into fragments its unrivalled organisation, and destroyed that peace under which the fairest regions of the earth, washed by the inland sea, dwelt for centuries, rich in all the arts of commerce, in all the security of civilisation. The Blessed Eucharist survived this convulsion; far more, it restored this ruin. By founding religious houses through the whole extent of the countries occupied by the German tribes, whose indwellers, in virtue of it, lived the common life under the safeguard of the three great vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience, it produced a Christian France, Spain, Italy, Germany, England, and Poland out of the torn and bleeding members of the Empire. This was its work in the Western half of the Roman broken statue.

In the Eastern the savage power of the Mahometan Califate arose, denying at once the redemption of Christ, and the sacrifice in which He had enshrined that redemption, and the divine banquet which ensued upon it. Thousands of Christian Sees fell not before its persuasive power, but its ruthless sword of conquest. The Mahometan Califate has for hundreds of years trampled on the fairest regions of the earth, and turned the Roman peace into a desolation. At length it trembles for its existence; the divine Eucharist remains unimpaired in strength, and is ready to enter into the desolated territory and repeat its work of restoration, to turn the foulness of the Mahometan harem into the sanctity of the Christian home.