The Formation of Christendom, Volume II

by T. W. Allies

Further, it was in and by their reception into this society that men received all the fruits of the Incarnation; it was in it that all the gifts of the Holy Ghost dwelt, and through it that they were dispensed. By hearing the truth announced by its ministry penitence was engendered in the listeners, itself a preventing grace of the Holy Ghost, which gave inward effect to the outward word. As a working of this penitence they came, according to [pg 144] the instruction of the teachers, to be baptised. By and in the act of baptism they were received into the divine society, and made partakers of the full operation of the Spirit who dwelt in it. They had the supernatural virtues of faith, hope, and charity infused into them, each according to the measure of the grace accorded to him, and to help the exercise of these virtues, that they might be borne as it were with the wings of a Spirit, the seven-fold gifts of wisdom, understanding, counsel, fortitude, knowledge, piety, and fear, were added to the soul. None of these virtues and gifts were possessed by believers as individuals; all of them came to men as members of her who was dowered with the blood of Christ,[115] and whose bridal quality imparted to her children all which that blood had purchased. In her was stored up that great, inexhaustible source of abiding life, the Body and Blood of her Lord and Husband: in her the redeeming Word gave direct from His heart the vivifying stream. In her was the gift of teaching which illumined the understanding, and not only drew from without, as we have seen, those who should be saved from the ignorance of the pagan or the carnalism of the Jew, but which erected in the world the Chair of Truth,[116] that [pg 145] is, the rule and standard of right belief, which was the continuance of the pentecostal gift, the illuminating and kindling fire, and the speaking tongue of unity, which the Body of Christ possesses for ever. It was by enjoying these endowments together in her bosom, by the actions of a life pervaded with these principles, by the joint possession and exercise of these supernatural powers which at once opened to the intellect a new field of knowledge and strengthened the will to acts above its inborn force, that men were Christians. And those who remembered what they had been as Jews, and what they had been as heathens, had no difficulty in recognising such a life as the effect of a divine grace, and no temptation to refer it to anything which belonged to them as individuals, since its commencement coincided with their entrance into a divine society, its growth depended on their membership in that Body. Their union with Christ in this Body was something direct and palpable; to them the several degrees of that one ministry constituted by Christ were the joints and articulations of the structure; the teaching thence proceeding as it were the current of life; by their being parts of the structure they were saved from the confusion of errors which swept freely round [pg 146] them without, through the craft of men and the seduction of deceit.[117] “Possessing the truth in charity,” or “sanctified in the truth,” was the expression of that divine life in common whereby they were to grow up into one, and be called by the name of their Lord,[118] because inseparably united to Him by the nerves and ligaments of one Body.

And this makes manifest to us how Christians, while scattered through every city of the great Roman empire, formed one Body. It was by virtue of the unity of spiritual jurisdiction which directed the whole ministry of that Body. The command of our Lord was, “Go, and make disciples all nations,” “proclaim the gospel to every creature;” the Body assembled and empowered at Pentecost was to carry out this command. How did it do so? The teaching and ruling power was distributed through a ministry wherein those of a particular order were equal as holding that order: bishops as bishops were equal, priests as priests. But not the less by the distribution of the places where the ministry was to be fulfilled, subordination was maintained through the whole Body. Had it been otherwise, as each Bishop had the completeness of the priesthood in himself, his sphere of action, that is, his diocese, would have constituted a distinct body. But no such thing [pg 147] was ever imagined in the Church of those first centuries. The Bishops were, on the contrary, joint possessors of one power, only to be exercised in unity.[119] The unity was provided for in the Apostolic body by the creation of the Primacy, without which the Body never acted, the Primate being designated before the Body was made; the Primate invested with his functions on the sea-shore of the lake of Galilee before the Ascension, the Body on which he was to exercise them animated on the day of Pentecost. Spiritual jurisdiction being nothing else but the grant to exercise all spiritual powers, two jurisdictions would make two bodies; a thousand would make a thousand; so that the more the Church grew, the more it would be divided, were it not that the root of all its powers in their exercise is one. A spiritual kingdom is absolutely impossible without this unity of jurisdiction; and in virtue of it the whole Church, from north to south and from east to west, was and is one Body in its teaching and its rule; that is, in the administration of all those gifts which were bestowed at the day of Pentecost, and which have never ceased to be exercised from that day to this, and which shall never cease to the end of the world. Thus as it is through the Body that men are made and kept Christians, so the Primacy is that principle [pg 148] of cohesion and subordination without which the Body cannot exist.

Let us carry on the history of the divine Body to another point. How was the Truth transmitted in it?

Peter and his brethren having received through the great forty days from our Lord the complement of His teaching concerning His kingdom, were empowered by the descent of the Holy Ghost to commence its propagation. And for this work they use the same instrument which their Lord had used—the living spoken word. They labour together for some time; after several years they divide the world between them; but in both these periods they found communities and supply them with everything needful for complete organisation and future increase and progress by their spoken teaching, which therefore contained the whole deposit of the truth. The gospel of which S. Paul so repeatedly speaks was that which he communicated by word of mouth, and S. Peter and all the rest did the same. Communities were planted by Apostolic zeal over a great part of the Roman empire before as yet anything was written by their founders. The whole administration of the sacraments, and the order and matter of the divine service, were arranged by this personal teaching of the living word. All that concerned the Person of our Lord, all that He had taught, done, and suffered, was so communicated. One reason of this is plain. It [pg 149] was not the bare gospel, but the “gospel of the kingdom,”[120] which was to be proclaimed to all nations. It was not a naked intellectual truth of which they were the bearers, but a kingdom which they were to build. They were not disseminating a sect of philosophy, but founding an empire. They were a King's heralds, and every king has a realm. Thus the Kingdom of the Word was proclaimed by the word spoken through many voices, but as the outpouring of one Spirit given on the day of Pentecost. This whole body of their teaching, therefore, was one Tradition; that is, a delivery over of the truth to them by inspiration of the Spirit, as the Truth who had become incarnate taught it, and a delivery of this truth from them to the communities which they set up. The first communication of the Christian faith to the individual was never made by writing. How, said the Apostle, should they invoke one whom they did not believe, but how believe in one of whom they had not heard, and how hear without a preacher, and how preach except they were sent?[121] It did not occur to him to ask how should they believe in one of whom they had not read. On the contrary, he gives in these few words the whole order of the truth's transmission. He conceived not heralds without a commission, any more than faith without trust in the word of the heralds. But here is the great sending, at and from the day [pg 150] of Pentecost, the root of perpetual mission from which the heralds derive their commission; they are sent, they proclaim, they are heard, they are believed, and this faith opens the door for the admission of subjects into the kingdom, according to the law which they proclaim. Thus are described to us at some length the acts of that wise master-builder whose words we have just cited; but though he laboured more abundantly than all, all acted after the same manner. The Church was founded by personal teaching, of which the living word was the instrument, and the whole truth which was thus communicated was termed the Tradition[122] or Delivery.

We now come to the second step. Before the Apostles were taken to their reward, the same Spirit, who had instructed them that they were to found the spiritual kingdom by means of the living word, inspired them to commit to writing a portion of that great tradition which they had already taught by mouth.[123] But they never delivered these writings to men not already Christians. [pg 151] One evangelist expressly says that he drew up a narrative in order that his disciple might know the certainty of what he had already been instructed in catechetically, that is, that by that great system of oral teaching by question and answer, that grounding of the truth in the memory, intellect, and will, which Christianity had inaugurated, and that he wrote after the pattern of those who had delivered over the word to us, having been its original eyewitnesses and servants.[124] A second evangelist declares that what he was putting into writing was a very small portion indeed of what his Lord had done.[125] Another very remarkable thing is that the Apostles are not recorded to have put together what they had written themselves, or others by their direction, so as to make it one whole; far less that they ever declared what was so written to contain the complete tradition of what they had received. But what they did was to leave these writings in the hands of particular churches, having in every case addressed them to those who were already instructed as Christians, and not having left among them any document whatever intended to impart the Christian faith to those who were ignorant of it. These writings were in the strictest sense Scriptures of the Church, which sometimes stated, and always in their form and construction showed that they were adapted to those who had been taught the [pg 152] Christian faith by word of mouth. Moreover, it was left to the Church to gather them together, and make them into one book, which thenceforward should be the Book; it was left to the Church to determine which were to be received as inspired writings, and in accordance with the teaching already diffused in her, and which were not. And this collection of the several writings from the particular Churches to which they were addressed into one mass would seem not to have taken place until at least three or four generations after the whole order and institutions of the Church had been established by oral teaching, which filled as with a flood the whole Christian people. Then, finally, the authority of the Church alone established the canon of Scripture, and separated it off from all other writings.

Now as the planting of the Church by oral teaching was a direction of the Holy Spirit, from whom the whole work of mission proceeded, so all these particulars concerning the degree in which writing was to be employed, and the manner in which that writing was to be attested, and the persons to whom it was to be addressed, were a direction of the same Spirit. That a spiritual kingdom could not have been established save by oral teaching Christians may infer with certainty, because, in fact, that method was pursued. That a portion of the great Tradition should be committed to writing they may for the same reason [pg 153] infer to have been necessary for the maintenance of the truth, because it was so done. That these writings were the property of the Church—her Scriptures—may be inferred with no less truth, because they were addressed only to her children, and presupposed a system of instruction already received by those who were to read them. And, finally, that they were to be understood in their right sense only by the aid of the Spirit who dictated them, is, their being given in this manner once admitted, an inference of just reasoning. It is plain, when once these things are stated, that these writings were not intended to stand alone, as ordinary books, and to be understood by themselves. Not only were they part of a great body of teaching, but a portion of a great institution, to which they incessantly alluded and bore witness. They would speak very differently to those without and to those within the kingdom of which they were documents. They would remind the instructed at every turn of doctrines which they had been taught, corroborating these and themselves explained by them. Some of them indeed were letters, and we all know how different is the meaning of letters to those who know the writer and his allusions, and to those who do not. A word of reference in these documents to a great practice of Christian life would kindle into a flame the affection of those who possessed that practice, while it would pass as a dead letter to those who [pg 154] had it not.[126] Such word, therefore, would be absolute proof of the practice to the former, while it would seem vague and indeterminate and no proof at all to the latter.

From what has been said we may determine the relation of the Church to the Scriptures. She having been planted everywhere by the personal oral teaching of the apostles and their disciples, being in full possession of her worship and her sacraments, filled by that word which they had spoken to her, and ruled by that Spirit in whom they had spoken, accepted these writings which they left as conformable to that teaching which they had delivered by word of mouth, esteemed them, moreover, as sacred, because proceeding from the dictation of the one Spirit, and finally put them together and severed them off from all other books, as forming, in conjunction with that unwritten word in possession of which she passed this judgment upon them, her own canon or rule of faith. Thenceforth they were to be for all ages a necessary portion of the divine Tradition which was her inheritance from the Incarnate Word, [pg 155] distributed by His Spirit. They were to be in her and of her. To her belonged, first, the understanding of them; secondly, the interpreting them to her children, out of the fund of that whole Tradition lodged in her, and by virtue of that indwelling Spirit, who, as He had created, maintained her; as part and parcel, moreover, of that whole kingdom, of that body of worship and sacraments, which she is.

And this brings us to a further point of the utmost importance. For the Truth, which is the subject matter of all this divine Tradition or Delivery from the Incarnate Word, in order to be efficacious and permanent, approached men in the shape of a society invested with grace.[127] It was not proposed as a theory which is presented simply to the reason, and accepted or rejected by it. True, it was addressed to the reason, but only when illuminated by faith could the reason accept it. Here, again, it showed itself manifestly as “the gospel of the kingdom.” It was the good tidings proclaimed, not simply and nakedly to man's intellect, but as the gift and at the same time the law of that kingdom which accompanied its publication by the bestowal of power to accept it, and to make it the rule of conduct. There were many whom the word, though proclaimed to them as to others, did not help, because it was not mixed with faith in those who heard it. S. Paul [pg 156] preached to many when the heart of one Lydia was opened to receive what he announced.[128] Thus with the first hearing of the message coincided the beginning of grace to accept it. But so likewise the Church supplied a storehouse of grace for the continuance of the truth in those who had once received it. Truth and grace, as they come together in her, so they remain together inseparable. Wisdom, understanding, counsel, and knowledge, which perfect the intellect, are linked in her with fortitude, piety, and fear, which perfect the will. And this which is true of the individual is true of the mass. In the Body, as well as in each single member of it, and the more because the Body is an incomparably grander creation, it is the sanctified intellect which must receive, harmonise, and develope the truth. If the sevenfold fountain of the Spirit's gifts is one in the individual, much more is it one in that Body out of whose plenitude the individual receives. Thus wherever the Apostles preached the word, if faith made it fruitful, they bestowed the sacraments.

We shall see, if we observe it closely, that it is a triple cord through which the Holy Spirit conveys His life perpetually to the Body; and in His life is the Truth.

First, there is the succession of men. As the Word Incarnate taught, so men bear on His teaching. [pg 157] Personal labours, intercourse from mouth to mouth, the action of men on men, the suffering of men for men, this was from the beginning, this is to be for ever, the mode of spreading His kingdom. It is not a paper kingdom, it cannot be printed off and disseminated by the post. But from His own Person it passed to Peter and the Apostles, and from them to a perpetual succession of men, whose special work it is to continue on this line by a chain never to be broken. These are the messengers, or heralds, or stewards, or ministers, or teachers, or shepherds. They are all and each of these according to the manifoldness of the gift which they carry. Through the unbrokenness of this line the continuity of the gift is secured. Through it the Redeemer, King, and Head touches, as it were, each point of time and space, and with a personal ministry lays hold of each individual through the vast extent of His kingdom in time and space. And the gift is as living and as near to Him now as it was when S. Paul spoke of it as communicated by the imposition of his hands to his disciple; nay, as it was when He himself breathed on His Apostles together assembled, and said, “Receive the Holy Ghost;” and will be equally living and direct from Him to the last who shall receive it to the end of time. And all this because these men who are taken up into this succession are the nerves of His mystical Body, through which runs the supply to [pg 158] all the members. This is the indestructible framework which He has wrought for carrying on to men His own teaching, until the whole mass grow up to that fulness of the perfect stature which He has foreseen and determined.