Lux Mundi: A Series of Studies in the Religion of the Incarnation, / 10th Edition, 1890

by Unknown

In the truths then which the Church teaches we may distinguish two classes. First, there are the central truths to which it bears absolute witness; such as the Fatherhood of God, the Person and work of Jesus Christ, the Redemption of all mankind, the origin and purpose of human life. These it teaches authoritatively. Its conduct is exactly analogous to that of a parent teaching the moral law to his children; teaching the commandments authoritatively at first, till the child can be educated to understand the reason of them. So the Church says to her children, or to those who are seeking after truth 'there is an absolute truth in religion as well as in morality: we have tested it; generations of the saints have found it true. It is a truth independent of individual teachers; independent of the shifting moods of opinion at any particular period; and you must accept it on our authority first. Further, these are truths which affect life, therefore they cannot be apprehended merely by the intellect. You must commit yourself to them; act upon them; there is a time when the seeker after truth sees where it lies; then it must cease to be an open question. "You must seek till you find, but when you have once found truth, you must commit yourself to it[358]." You must believe that you may understand; but it is that you may understand.' The dogma is authoritatively taught, that the individual may be kept safe from mere individual caprice and fancifulness, but also that he himself may come to a rational understanding of his belief. No doubt the truth is so wide that to the end of our lives we shall still feel the need of guidance and of teaching. 'As long as we live,' said Calvin, 'our weakness will not allow us to be discharged from school.' Like S. Ignatius on his way to martyrdom, the Christian may feel at his dying day, 'Now I begin to be a disciple;' but the aim of the Church is to make each member have a rational hold upon his faith. When we are young we accept a doctrine because the Church teaches it to us; when we are grown up, we love the Church because it taught us the doctrine. 'The Churchman never surrenders his individual responsibility. But he may and must surrender some portion at least of his independence, and he benefits greatly by the surrender[359].' 'Submission to the authority of the Church is the merging of our mere individualism in the whole historic life of the great Christian brotherhood; it is making ourselves at one with the one religion in its most permanent and least merely local form. It is surrendering our individuality only to empty it of its narrowness[360].'

Secondly, there are other truths, which are rather deductions from these central points or statements of them in accordance with the needs of the age; such as the mode of the relation of the Divine and human natures in Christ, of free-will to predestination, or the method of the Atonement, or the nature of the Inspiration of Holy Scripture. If, in any case, a point of this kind has consciously come before the whole Church and been reasoned out and been decided upon, such a decision raises it into the higher class of truths, which are taught authoritatively; but if this is not so, the matter remains an open question. It remains a question for the theologians; it is not imposed on individual Christians; though it may at any time become ripe for decision. The very fixity of the great central doctrines allows the Church to give a remarkable freedom to individual opinion on all other points. Practically, how much wider is the summary of the rule of faith as given in Irenaeus (III. 4), or Tertullian (Praescr. 13), or Origen (De Principiis), or in the Apostles' or Nicene Creed, than the tests of orthodoxy that would be imposed in a modern religious, or scientific circle! S. Vincent of Lerins is the great champion of antiquity as the test of truth; yet he who lays it down that 'to declare any new truth to Catholic Christians over and above that which they have received never was allowed, nowhere is allowed, and never will be allowed,' also insists on the duty of development, of growth, within the true lines of the central truths. 'Is there,' he assumes an objector to urge, 'to be no growth within the Church? Nay, let there be growth to the greatest extent; who would be so grudging to man, such an enemy to God, as to attempt to prevent it; but yet let it be such that it be growth, not change of the faith.... As time goes on, it is right that the old truths should be elaborated, polished, filed down; it is wrong that they should be changed, maimed or mutilated. They should be made clear, have light thrown on them, be marked off from each other; but they must not lose their fulness, their entirety, their essential character[361]. So it has happened in the course of the Christian history; doctrines like that of the Atonement have been restated afresh to meet the needs of the age. So it is happening still; doctrines like that of the method of creation or of the limits of inspiration are still before the Church. The Church is slow to decide, to formulate: it stands aside, it reiterates its central truths, it says that whatever claims to be discovered must ultimately fit in with the central truths; creation must remain God's work; the Bible must remain God's revelation of Himself; but for a time it is content to wait, loyal to fact from whatever side it comes; confident alike in the many-sidedness and in the unity of truth. While he accepts and while he searches, the Churchman can enjoy alike the inquiry of truth which is the love-making or wooing of it, the knowledge of truth which is the presence of it, and the belief of truth which is the enjoying of it, and all these together, says Lord Bacon, are the sovereign good of human nature[362].

Thus far we have in this part considered the Church's function with regard to truth from the point of view of those whom it has to teach. Its function is no less important from the point of view of the truth itself. As spiritual life is a tender plant that needs care and training; so spiritual truth is a precious gem, that may easily be lost and therefore needs careful guarding. 'The gem requires a casket, the casket a keeper.' Truth is indeed great and will prevail, but not apart from the action of men: not unless there are those who believe in it, take pains about it and propagate it. This is the case even with scientific truths; à fortiori therefore, with moral and religious truths which affect life and need to be translated into life before they can be really understood. The comparative study of religions is shewing us more and more how much of deep spiritual truth there is in heathen religions, but it is shewing us equally how little power this truth had to hold its own, how it was overlaid, crushed out, stifled. The truth of the unity of God underlies much of the polytheism of India, Greece, and Rome; but it is only the philosopher and the scholar that can find it there. It is only in the Jewish Church, the nation which stood alone from other nations as a witness to the truth, that it retained its hold as a permanent force. The Fatherhood of God is implied in the very names and titles of most of the chief heathen gods; but what a difference in its meaning and force since the time of Jesus Christ! It is not only that He expanded and deepened its meaning, so that it implied the fatherhood of all men alike, and a communication of a spiritual nature to all; it is also, and much more, that He committed the truth as a sacred deposit to a Church, each member of which aimed at shewing himself as the son of a perfect Father, and which witnessed to the universal Fatherhood by the fact of an universal brotherhood.

The very truths of natural religion, which heathenism tended to degrade, found a safe home within the Church; the knowledge of the Creator, His eternal power and Godhead, which the nations had known but lost, because they glorified Him not as God, neither were thankful, has been kept alive in the Eucharistic services of the Church, repeating through the ages its praise of the Creator: 'We praise Thee, we bless Thee, we worship Thee, we give thanks to Thee, for Thy great glory, O Lord God, heavenly King, God the Father Almighty.'

III. We pass naturally to the third point: the Church is the home of worship. It is the Temple of the Lord. As a teaching body, it had carried on and spiritualized the work of the Jewish Synagogue: it also took up and spiritualized the conceptions of prayer and praise and sacrifice which clustered round the Jewish Temple. The Body of Christ was to take the place of the Temple when the Jews destroyed it[363]. And here, as in all other respects, the body is the organ and representative of the risen Lord. He, when on earth, had been a priest in the deepest sense of the word: He, as the representative of the Father, had mediated the Father's blessings to man: He, as one with man, had become a merciful and faithful high-priest for man; He had offered His whole life to God for the service of man; He had by the offering of His pure will made purification of sins: He lives still, a priest for ever, pleading, interceding for mankind.

And so the Church, His body, carries on this priestly work on earth. 'Sacerdotalism, priestliness, is the prime element of her being[364].' She is the source of blessing to mankind; she pleads and intercedes and gives herself for all mankind. Christians, as a body, are 'a royal priesthood.' Christ made them 'priests unto His God and Father,' they can 'enter in into the holy place,' like priests, 'with hearts sprinkled from an evil conscience and bodies washed with pure water.' They are 'the genuine high-priestly race of God:' 'every righteous man ranks as a priest:' 'to the whole Church is a priesthood given[365].' This priesthood is exercised throughout life, as each Christian gives his life to God's service, and the whole Church devotes itself for the good of the whole world. But it finds its expression in worship, for worship is the Godward aspect of life. It expresses, it emphasizes, it helps to make permanent the feelings that mould life. It is the recognition that our life comes from God: that it has been redeemed by God; it is the quiet joyous resting upon the facts of His love; it is the conscious spiritual offering of our life to God; it is the adoration of His majesty. This worship the Church leads and organizes. 'In the Church and in Christ Jesus' is to be given 'the glory to God unto all generations for ever and ever.' In the Apocalypse, it is pictured as praising God alike for His work in Creation and in Redemption. In the Eucharist the Church shews forth the Lord's Death till He come[366]. Hence this act of Eucharistic worship, above all others, has become the centre of unity. In it the Church has offered its best to God: all the more external gifts of art, such as architecture, painting, and music, have been consecrated in worship: but deeper still, in it each Christian has taken up his own life, his body and soul, and offered it as a holy, lively, and reasonable sacrifice unto God, a service in spirit and in truth: and deeper still, he recognises that his life does not stand alone; through the common ties of humanity in Christ he is linked on by a strange solidarity with all mankind; his life depends on theirs and theirs on his, and so he offers it not for himself only but for all; in the power of Christ he intercedes for all mankind: and deeper still, he feels in the presence of the Holiness of God how unworthy his own offering and his own prayers are, and he pleads, he recalls before the Father, as the source of his own hope and his own power of self-sacrifice, the one complete offering made for all mankind.

So the Church performs its universal priesthood[367]; so it leads a worship, bright, joyous, amidst all the trials and perplexities of the world, for it tells of suffering vanquished; simple in its essence, so that poor as well as rich can rally round it; yet deep and profound in its mysteries, so that the most intellectual cannot fathom it. It is an universal priesthood, for it needs the consecration of every life: and yet this function too of the Church naturally has its organs, whose task it is to make its offerings and to stand before it as the types of self-consecration. The Church has from the first special persons who perform its liturgy, its public ministering to the Lord[368]. It is in connection with worship, and the meetings of the Church that S. Paul emphasizes the need of unity and subordination, and dwells upon God's special setting of Apostles, Prophets and Teachers in the Church[369]. The Epistle of Clement to the Corinthians may be open to difficult questions of interpretation in its language about the ministry, but this at least is clear that order and subordination are treated as the necessary outcome of love, which is of the essence of the Church; that this order and subordination is specially needed in all details of worship; that it had been so in Judaism, and must be so, à fortiori, in the Christian Church; that as Christ came from God, so the Apostles from Christ, and their successors from them; and therefore it must be wrong to throw off subordination to those who were so appointed and who have blamelessly offered the gifts[370]. 'The Church,' said S. Augustine, 'from the time of the Apostles, through most undoubted succession of the bishops, perseveres till the present moment, and offers to God in the Body of Christ the sacrifice of praise[371].' As the teaching function of the whole Church does not militate against the special order of teachers, so the priestly function of the whole does not militate against a special order of priests. We cannot speak of those who are ordained as 'going into the Church'—and it is hard to estimate the harm done by that fatal phrase—for that implies that the laity are not of the Church, but we can call them priests in a special sense; for they give themselves up in a deeper way to the service of God; they are specially trained and purified for His service; they are put as representatives of the whole Church in a way in which no other is, able to know and to sympathize with its wants, its joys, its failings; able therefore to intercede for it with God and to bring His blessings to it. As the Church stands in relation to the world, so they stand to the Church; they fill up that which is lacking of the afflictions of Christ in their flesh for His body's sake which is the Church, whereof they are made ministers; they convey spiritual gifts and benediction to the Church.

To complete the conception of the Church, it would be necessary to add the thought of the Church expectant and triumphant, the presence of the blessed dead. For they too strengthen and complete each aspect of the Church's work. The great cloud of witnesses, the heroes of faith, who watch their brethren on earth, they, by their example, aid the spiritual life and strengthen us to lay aside every weight and the sin that doth so easily beset us: their virtues reflect parts of the manifold glory of the Son of Man. With their heirs noblesse oblige; each Christian born of such ancestry is able to be like the Athenian Lycurgus, independent of the world, bold and outspoken, because of his noble birth[372]. The record of their writings strengthens the witness to the faith once delivered to the saints, and binds us to loyalty to that which has stood the test of ages. They, 'the general assembly and church of the firstborn enrolled in heaven,' themselves, we believe, worship God with a purer worship than ours; the thought of their presence in worship, as we join with angels and archangels and all the company of heaven, lifts our hearts to a wider, more spiritual adoration.

But for our present purpose it is with the Church militant we have to deal: the Church on earth, the visible organ of the risen Lord, the organ of redemption, of revelation, of worship; the chief instrument designed by the Lord for the establishment of the kingdom of Heaven upon earth. That is our ideal of it. But what of the reality? of the historical facts? Has not the Church crushed out individual life and freedom? has it not thrown its shield over laxity? has it not repressed zeal and so driven piety into nonconformity? has it not tried to check scientific truth and condemned a Galileo? has it not made worship a matter of form and reduced it to externalism? So its opponents ask, and its defenders admit that there is much of truth in these charges. They admit that it has looked very different from its ideal. 'It has looked like an obscure and unpopular sect; it has looked like a wonderful human institution vying with the greatest in age and power; it has looked like a great usurpation; it has looked like an overgrown and worn-out system; it has been obscured by the outward accidents of splendour or disaster; it has been enriched, it has been plundered; at one time throned above emperors, at another under the heel of the vilest; it has been dishonoured by the crimes of its governors, by truckling to the world, by the idolatry of power, by greed and selfishness, by their unbelief in their own mission, by the deep stain of profligacy, by the deep stain of blood[373].' The Church has, indeed, many confessions to make, of its failure to be true to its ideal. But there are several considerations which must be borne in mind when we pass judgment upon it.

In the first place, it was committed to human hands, 'the treasure is in earthen vessels;' and while it gains thus in reality, in human sympathy, in touching the facts of everyday life, it is exposed to all the risks of imperfection, mistake, perversion. But further, as S. Augustine said, we still can say, 'Non adhuc regnat hoc regnum.' The Church has never had free play; it has never been in a position to carry out its ideal. At first, a persecuted sect, it had not the power; then, when it became established and gained the power, there burst into it an influx of half-Christianized converts who lowered its moral level or misunderstood its doctrines; then, with the break up of the Roman Empire, it had to tame and civilize the new races of Europe; and finally, the divisions of the Reformation have weakened its witness in the world. But, more important still, the very greatness of the ideal has caused the difficulty of its realization, and has exposed itself to caricature and to one-sidedness. The richer, the more many-sided, the more complete an ideal is, the less possible is it for any one generation to express it completely, the more likely is it that one side of truth will be pressed to the exclusion of some, if not of all the rest.