“The Roman Church will acknowledge it, and St. Francis and St. Vincent and Fénelon will illustrate it. But, at the same time, the Roman Church has much else on her hands. She has to be contending for those seven sacraments, for this temporal power, all this machinery of cardinals and bishops, and bulls and interdicts, canon law and decretals, so that in all this upholstery there is great risk that none of us see the shrine. So of the poor little parodies of the Roman Church, the Anglican Church, the Lutheran Church, and the rest of them.”
Again:
“All our brethren in the other confessions plunge into their infinite ocean with this hamper of corks and floats, water-proof dresses lest they be wet, oil-cloth caps for their hair, flannels for decency, a bathing-cart here, a well-screened awning there—so much machinery before the bath that one hardly wonders if some men refuse to swim! For them there is this great apology, if they do not proclaim as we must proclaim, God here and God now; nay, if they do not live as we must live, in the sense of God here and God now. For us, we have no excuse. We have stripped off every rag. We have destroyed all the machinery.”
The Rev. Mr. Hale regards the seven sacraments, the hierarchy, the canon law—briefly, the entire visible and practical side of the church—as a “hamper,” “machinery,” “rags,” and thinks there “is great risk that none of us see the shrine.” The difficulty here is not where Mr. Hale places it.
“Night-owls shriek where mounting larks should sing.”
The visible is not the prison of the invisible, as Plato dreamed, but its vehicle, as St. Paul teaches. “For the invisible things of God, from the creation of the world, are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made, his eternal power also and divinity.”[99] The author of this sermon is at least consistent in his error; as he believes in an abstract God, so he would reduce “the church of the living God,” “the body of Christ,” to an abstract non-existence. Suppose, for example, that the Rev. Edward E. Hale had reduced “all the machinery” of his curiously-devised body to an abstraction before the Unitarian biennial conference was held at Saratoga; the world would have been deprived of the knowledge of that “simplicity which it is the special duty of the Unitarian Church to proclaim.” Think of the loss! For it was by means of the complex “machinery” of his concrete body that the Rev. E. E. Hale came in contact with the “machinery” of the Unitarian biennial organization at Saratoga, and, thus “upholstered,” he publicly rants against all “machinery.”
There may be too complex an organization, and too many applications of it, and too much made of these, owing to the necessities of our times, in the Catholic Church, to suit the personal tastes and the stage of growth of the Rev. Edward E. Hale. But the Catholic Church does not exist solely for the benefit of Mr. Hale, or for any peculiar class of men, or any one race alone. He has and should have, and they all have, their own place and appropriate niche in her all-temple; for
the Catholic Church takes up in her scope every individual, and the human race entire. But there are others, with no less integrity of spiritual life and intelligence than he, who esteem those things of which he speaks so unappreciatingly as heavenly gifts and straight pathways to see more clearly the inner shrine and approach more nearly to the divine Presence. Are the idiosyncrasies of one man, though “thoroughly furnished and widely experienced,” to be the norm of all other men, and of every race? Men and races differ greatly in these things, and the church of God is not a sect or conventicle; she is Catholic, universal, and in her bosom, and in her bosom alone, every soul finds its own place and most suitable way, with personal liberty and in accord with all other souls and the whole universe, to perfect union with God.
The matter with the Rev. E. E. Hale is, he has missed his vocation. His place evidently was not in the assembled conference at Saratoga; for his calling is unmistakably to a hermit life. Let him hie to the desert, and there, in a forlorn and naked hermitage, amid “frosts and fasts, hard lodgings and thin weeds,” in an austere and unsociable life, “unswathed and unclothed,” in puris naturalibis, “triumphantly cease to be.” The Rev. E. E. Hale is one-sided, and seems to have no idea that the Catholic Church is the organization of that perfect communion of men with God and each other which Christ came to communicate and to establish in its fulness upon earth, and is its practical realization. God grant him, and others like him, this light and knowledge!