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

by William Temple

How are we to secure (this is our problem) that from generation to generation men shall continue to feel that in the service of the Holy Communion Christ comes to them as by His own appointment, and they have only to be ready to meet with Him; and that in meeting with Him they are united with the whole Church in the Holy Communion, the Communion of Saints? I believe that the continued recitation of the Creeds in our own and other branches of the Church is the main safeguard, not only for ourselves but also for those who do not say the Creeds, against that combination of Pelagianism and Unitarianism to which men always tend to drift; similarly I can conceive that, just because we uphold the full conception of sacramental worship, others are enabled to receive sacramental grace at their communions. It may be so; I know not. Of course it cannot be received if it is not there; but even if it is there, its full benefit will not be enjoyed except by those who believe in its full power. Two men may stand opposite the same picture; both see the same lines and colours, the accidents; but it may be that only one sees the artistic reality or substance—the Beauty—while the other is blind to it. But the man who finds it does not put it there; the artist put it there; and if he had not done so no one could find it there; so too the reality of the Sacrament is the work of God. But our fruition of it depends on our faith, and even on the exact content of our faith. Now I do not for a moment believe that that faith in the full doctrine of sacramental grace can survive through the centuries, if it is once separated from the whole order which expresses it. Therefore, while I am not entitled to deny, as I am equally not concerned to assert, that the members of other denominations at their communion service receive the same gift that we do; still I say that as trustees for the Catholic order, and considering the matter in the light of the centuries, we have no right to sacrifice any of those means by which this full doctrine has been given to us, and by which perhaps it has been also preserved for them.

V.—Fifthly, I would suggest that in any scheme for practical reunion no man must be required to repudiate his own spiritual ancestry.

After all, if the Church is the fellowship of the baptized, then our brethren of the separation, as we sometimes call them, are members of the Church; but they are not members of our branch of the Church; and their faith is corporate and active in their membership of their own bodies; consequently we are bound to hold that they and their bodies are parts of the Catholic Church in this time of the division—the division which is due to sin.

If it is true that it was largely, and perhaps mainly, the fault of the medieval Church that the split became a necessity; if it is true that it was partly, and perhaps mainly, the fault of the Church of England that the Wesleyan movement (for example) ever broke off, because we refused to make room for what was in its early stages most undoubtedly a movement of the Spirit of God in the world, then we have no right to condemn those who by reason of our sin, at least as much as their own, are outside our fellowship; and we must recognise that, just as in St. Paul's argument about the true Israel, blindness in part happened to Israel, and so God used the Gentiles to provoke them to jealousy—so blindness in part happened to Catholicism, and God is using the Protestant bodies to provoke us to jealousy.

We must, I believe, maintain that our order is for us the only possible order for the reunited Church. But order is not everything. The wall of the Holy City is minute. When the time for reunion comes, we must insist upon our own part of the truth in such a way as to avoid all condemnation of other bodies for having been separated during this time—at least, all condemnation which we do not pronounce quite equally upon ourselves. What has happened in the divisions of the Church is a severance from one another of elements which are every one of them necessary to the healthy life of the Body. If one set of people could only get dry food and no drink, and another set could only get drink and no food, neither would be healthy. They would have to combine their stores before health was possible. Catholics have preserved perhaps a fuller sense of worship and of the gifts of God; Protestants have perhaps a truer zeal for righteousness and a more intimate access to God in prayer. Let us not judge the past; God will judge. But let us recognise our need of one another and accept from each other the positive truth and life which God has given to either.

VI.—Meanwhile, in the time of the division, different bodies have developed different types of religious life. There is a wealth of spiritual activity in the world now such as it is difficult to imagine under a rigidly united Church; but we can easily preserve that if we are ready that there should be within the United Catholic Church different Orders—an Order of St. George Fox for example, testifying to the great ideal which Christ brought into the world, not as I think, and as I have already explained, the right ideal to be followed by all men in all sorts of circumstances, but undoubtedly the one method by which in the end the work of God can be finally accomplished, and for testimony to which I believe some men, and indeed the whole Society of Friends, are even now called by God. Also there may well be an Order of St. John Wesley, insisting more especially upon the need of individual conversion, which the Church, as a vast organisation concerned with world movements, is perpetually tempted to leave too much on one side. These Orders can quite well govern themselves to a very large extent, and order their worship in very many ways, just as is the case in the Orders familiar in the medieval Church, and in the Church of Rome at this time.

These are the principles which I would venture to submit. Probably not one of them will win universal assent even in our own communion. But amid all our amiable sentiments it is time for somebody to say something definite, or as definite as the complexity of the problem allows. In criticising and rejecting individual utterances we may at last reach a corporate mind.

But let me add one particular warning about the way we go: for in my own mind I am quite sure that the Communion is just the place where we need to be divided until our unity is real. People say "How terrible to be separated there." Yes, terrible indeed! It is the measure of the sin of schism. But we must not try to escape the consequences of the sin until we have got rid of the sin itself. I say nothing of the problem of the mission field or of the possibility of exceptional occasions.[#] But I am quite sure that in normal Church life, where all people have access to their own services, intercommunion can only be disastrous, as tending to obscure the need for real unity, and the difference between the various excellences whose combination is to be desired.

[#] It must of course be recognised that the problem of intercommunion in the mission field is of urgent practical importance. On the present situation, the Archbishop of Canterbury's statement, Kikuyu.

But let us come back to what after all is the only true guarantee and the only condition of reunion—the achievement of holiness; that holiness needs, as we have seen, to be safeguarded, and the safeguarding of it is peculiarly entrusted to us, the ministers of the Church. What need then for personal dedication! For upon the degree in which we are wholly given to our work depends in large measure the time when God will reunite His Church.