Again, when iniquity abounded and the love of many had waxed cold, there arose a defection in the West as terrible as that of the East 900 years before, and it was marked by special enmity to the Blessed Eucharist. It cast down and trampled under the feet of those who approached the desecrated churches the very altars at which for a thousand years the generations of a Christian people had worshipped. It denied the great mystery which was the heart of the doctrine; it enrolled the denial in the coronation oath of its sovereigns; it abolished the belief which had soothed all sorrows as it had made all saints. But that defection has broken into innumerable wavelets against the Rock of the Christian Church, upon which rises, as of old, the impregnable citadel of the faith—the faith which dispenses, as in the first ages, to the children of all the races of the earth that sacred Body and Blood, in virtue of which now, as in the upper chamber, the Word of God declares, “I am the Vine; ye are the branches: he that abideth in Me and I in him, the same beareth much fruit; for without Me you can do nothing.”
Can there be any proof of the Godhead of the Word made flesh to compare with that which has been the life of the living and the hope of the dying to sixty generations of men for eighteen centuries and a half? “For this is the chalice in My Blood of the new and everlasting testament, the mystery of faith, which shall be shed for you and for many, for the remission of sins.”
CHAPTER VI.
THE ACTUAL RELATION BETWEEN CHURCH AND STATE FROM THE DAY OF PENTECOST TO CONSTANTINE.
The Independence of the Ante-Nicene Church shown in her Organic Growth.
The foundation-stone of the Church of God is the Person of our Lord, a truth embodied with marvellous force and terseness of expression in that famous symbol of the Catacombs, the Sacred Fish, denoting by its initial letters the name of our Lord as Man, His office as Messiah, the two natures in the one Divine Person, the salvation which is their result, Jesus, the Christ, Son of God, Saviour.[110] As in that Divine Person the Godhead and Manhood are joined in that special union which constitutes personality, as He who governs and He who teaches, He who offers sacrifice and He who is sacrificed, is one and the same Saviour throughout, so He continues to be in the life of His Body the Church. And this is very manifest during the first stadium of the Church’s course, stretching from the Day of Pentecost to the decree of Constantino, which granted to it civil recognition as a lawful religion; for government and doctrine, like warp and woof, form the robe woven from the top throughout in which our Lord as High Priest appears to the world. According to the prophecy, “He builds a temple to the Lord, and bears the glory, and is a Priest upon His throne.”[111] His kingdom resides in this unity. It is one flock, and the pastures in which His people feed upon the truth make the domain of the government by which the kingdom is ruled, and to feed the flock is to rule it. It is the one temple in which the sacrifice offered is the Lord Himself, while in the sacrifice the people is fed and grows, and is reciprocally offered to the Lord.
In all this the Church continues the mystery of her Lord’s life, the Divine Incarnation, the suffering of the Nature assumed, the resurrection which follows. We have, then, to deal with one particular but complex fact, the outcome of this whole period in the government, teaching, and worship of the Church inseparably blent together, as borne into and upon the world by its hierarchy, as enacted in its liturgy, as contained in its sacramental life, as exhibited in the living Christian people, the invincible race,[112] which grew up in those centuries without interference by the State. It is a period during which the State’s legal position of undeviating hostility served as the guardian of the new spiritual kingdom’s independence.
That independence resided in a threefold sanctuary, which is one and the same, being the House, the Temple, the Tribunal which the Blessed Trinity, the source and model of the Church, had constructed for Himself in the hearts of His people. First there is the sanctuary of worship, in which Christ is Priest, the starting-point of the whole economy; secondly, the sanctuary of teaching, from which as Prophet He dispenses all that doctrine wherewith He is charged; thirdly, there is the sanctuary of government, whereof jurisdiction is a necessary and inalienable part, and in this He rules as King the distribution of all powers belonging to His kingdom.
We have to consider how, in the first three centuries, all this was actually carried out; and we shall best do so by placing ourselves at the remarkable point of history, the convocation of the Nicene Council in the year 325, and by summing up the result of the long conflict which preceded that event, as regards these three particulars.