Church and Nation / The Bishop Paddock Lectures for 1914-15

by William Temple

(c) The two Sacraments ordained by Christ Himself—Baptism and the Supper of the Lord—ministered with unfailing use of Christ's words of institution, and of the elements ordained by Him.

(d) The Historic Episcopate, locally adapted in the methods of its administration to the varying needs of the nations and peoples called of God into the Unity of His Church.

Now some such order as that which we maintain, is necessary, as it seems to me, to the fulfilment of the duty of charity. I hope I am not unfair to those who are separated from us, and are influenced by the ideals of Puritanism; but it has seemed to me that their discipline is not always charitable. Indeed, a Church must either excommunicate freely or else possess a recognised order if it is to avoid becoming indistinguishable from "the world" about it; if it is to be both holy and a friend of sinners it must have an order. The order which we maintain is simply that which has come down to us as the actual order of historic Christendom.

III.—Thirdly, I would submit that the Body with its orders is a living whole, and that it is illegitimate to discuss such a question as the "validity" of Orders out of all relation to the historic life of the Church. The question of Orders must be considered in relation to the whole life of the Body of which they are an organic part.[#]

[#] See [Appendix IV]. On Orders and Catholicity.

Thus, if we take the famous Quadrilateral as our starting point, a body which stands by the Canonical Scriptures, the Creeds and the two great Sacraments, though not upholding the episcopal succession, is closer to the ideal than one which is indifferent to any of these three as well as to the succession; it has maintained many of the (ex hypothesi) essential features of a true Church; it approximates to the complete requirement. Moreover, within the field of the problem of Orders, there are degrees of approximation; it is generally considered that an agreement between the Anglican and Presbyterian communions could be far more easily reached than between the Anglican and some other Protestant bodies. We must, therefore, avoid two kindred errors. One is to set up the abrupt dilemma—"Either a true Church or not," and the other is to regard the possession of "valid" Orders as being the one and only condition of the Catholicity of the body possessing them.

The Church Visible cannot be identical with the Church Invisible; it is its sacrament. And the question resolves itself into one concerning the degree of adequacy with which it expresses, and thereby maintains through the ages, the fulness of the truth.

Our actual divisions in the West date from the Reformation. No one disputes that the Church just before that time was corrupt to a horrible degree. It is possible to hold that the corruption could have been purged away without schism if the reformers had been wholly free from pride and impatience; I see no means of reaching a sound judgment on such a point; but at least it would seem that the guilt for the great division was as much in Catholics as in Protestants. In so far as there really was necessity of choosing between moral purity with schism on the one hand, and organic unity with sales of indulgences and the like on the other, there can be no doubt which the whole teaching of Christ required His followers to choose. "I will have mercy and not sacrifice"; "the Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath"; yet the Sabbath and the sacrifice were of Divine appointment.

If then a fragment of the Church, confronted as it believes, with such a choice, breaks off and organises itself afresh, intending to maintain in purity all the Church's life and means of grace, I cannot assert that it is for all its generations deprived of Christ's sacramental presence. But assuredly the loss of the continuous order which so impressively symbolises the Divine origin of the Church and of its Sacraments tends to undermine the intention to preserve the whole truth and to obscure belief in it. For Orders, as we understand them, are the pledge of the unity of the Church across all space and through all time, so that the priest who celebrates, does so as the organ and instrument of the universal Church, and the congregation at every Eucharist is not the few persons gathered together in that building, but Angels and Archangels and all the company of Heaven, with whom we join in prayer and worship.

IV.—Consonantly with this I would come to my fourth principle—that the whole question of Orders and Sacraments must be considered in reference to the Church's life through the ages, and not with direct reference to the gift received by any individual at any given service.