[#] See, for example, Van Espen, i. 16, 1. Council of Trent, Sessio xxiii., Cap. iv.
"An incidental result of this is that our attitude towards Sacraments of Nonconformist bodies will not partake of that rigid character which is so characteristic of some in the present day. We are glad to see that Dr. Sanday takes exception to these. 'It seems to me to be a very delicate matter, and, indeed, scarcely admissible for one Christian body to take upon itself to pronounce upon the validity or otherwise of the ministrations of another. I think that at least the question ought not to be put in that bald and sweeping form.' It is interesting to note that Dr. Pusey would have been equally averse to such language. He of course accepts the doctrine of Apostolic Succession in very definite form, but he writes as follows:
"'But while maintaining that they only are commissioned to administer the Sacraments who have received that commission from those appointed in succession to bestow it, we have never denied that God may make His own sacraments efficacious even when irregularly administered; we should trust it might be so.'
"It would be of great advantage if we were to speak of non-episcopal orders and sacraments as 'irregular,' which we know they are, not as 'invalid,' about which we know nothing."
With these words of Dr. Headlam I am in profound agreement. But there is another quite different matter to which I would allude. If the Church is indeed to be the vehicle of the power of Christ in its plenitude, it must be Catholic not only in principle and right, but in actual fact. Deeper than all divisions of "Catholic" and "Protestant" is the division of the great human family—European, Indian, Chinese, and so forth. These great civilisations must each bring its own gift, consecrated by the Spirit of Christ, to the life of the whole Body before that Body reveals the measure of the fulness of the stature of Christ. A merely European Church cannot be fully Catholic, nor can it ever do, even for Europe, what the Catholic Church is called by God to do for the nations which become its provinces.
APPENDIX V
ON PROVIDENCE IN HISTORY
The most outstanding facts in the history known to us, which plainly reveal the providential guidance of its course, are the careers of Alexander the Great and Napoleon. There had developed in Greece the whole spirit of civilisation in reference to the small problems of the city-state; the whole principle of civilisation which had been thus worked out was now established; Greek civilisation was so perfectly developed that it had even a perfect theory of itself in Plato and Aristotle. Just at this moment there appears upon the scene the absolutely amazing figure—Alexander of Macedon, himself the pupil of the man in whom the Greek spirit reached its final formulation. He carries that spirit in his astounding triumphs through Asia Minor and Syria to the Western Provinces of India. As a military achievement the mere leading of his troops to the banks of the Indus is one of the supreme wonders of the world. No doubt he was conscious of a mission to spread the gifts which Greece held in trust for humanity; but also no doubt he was very much concerned with the political fabric which his conquests set up. The moment his work is finished, he himself dies. Politically his Empire was not established and it immediately fell to pieces. Spiritually it remained. It supplied the inspiration of Chandra gupta, and the career of Asoka is unintelligible apart from Alexander. The arrival of the Greeks in India is, I am assured, the beginning of all that we now understand by Indian art. Far more important to the history of the world was the bringing of Greek culture into Palestine; this culture in itself was no doubt decadent, and the Chasidim and Pharisees were right enough to resist it: yet the leaven of this humanising influence is an essential part of the preparation for the Incarnation in the soil of Judaism. It is to be noticed that Galilee was a region particularly affected by the Greek influence and the settlement of Decapolis was still mainly Greek in the Gospel period. Asoka and St. Paul are not at all the kind of successors that Alexander would have anticipated or desired, but his conscious desires were utilised by Providence to serve an end of which he never dreamed. His early death before his Empire could be consolidated in a political sense is as markedly providential as his emergence at the precise moment of history when he appears upon the scene.
The case is similar with Napoleon. Alexander at his death was 32 years old. Napoleon was 52. He also appears at a critical moment, is active precisely as long as he can serve what we now see to have been the cause of progress, and is then removed. The great feature of the period is the growth of the sentiment of nationality. This is the sense of membership in a people united by common characteristics and a common purpose; it is therefore always democratic in spirit though it need not at all necessarily be democratic in machinery. The old European constitutions, which had been valuable enough in their time, were becoming a barrier to its further development; the flood of progress burst the dam in France, and soon after there appears the supreme genius, not himself a Frenchman, who was to carry the spirit of which France had just become consciously possessed through the entire length and breadth of Europe. Napoleon, like Alexander, was conscious of his mission; he thought of himself as being the organ of the Revolution; he is reported to have said that moral principles did not apply to him; they applied only to persons, and he was a force. But there can be no doubt that he was as much concerned with establishing a vast French Empire as he was with merely carrying the principles of the French Revolution into the other nations. He is allowed success so long as the work of destruction is still needed; his activities first as general and then as ruler began the unification alike of Italy and Germany; but as soon as the spiritual work which he was to do is fully accomplished, the political construction, which was as a great scaffolding surrounding it, falls to pieces, and he is driven into exile to end his days in solitude and impotence. Perhaps some day people will look back upon the horror that now lies upon the world and not only believe that God was active in it, but see the blessings which He was conferring by its means.
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