Chapter VI: Bianca’s Festa (9)

We give another characteristic statement of the Rev. Edward E. Hale’s opening sermon which must have grated harshly on the ears of the more staid and conservative portion of his audience; it is under the head of “The immanent presence of God.” He says:

“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!

But we would not have our readers think that all Unitarians agree with the Rev. E. E. Hale in his estimate of the visible or practical side of the church. We quote from a leading article in the _Liberal Christian_ of August last, under the head of “Spirit and Form in Religion,” the following passage:

“It seems painfully indicative of the still undeveloped
condition of our race that no truce or medium can be
approximated in which the two great factors of human nature
and society, the authority and supremacy of _spirit_ and the
necessity and usefulness of _form_, are reconciled and made
to serve each other or a common end. Must inward
spirituality, and outward expression of it in forms and
worship, be for ever in a state of unstable equilibrium?
Must they ever be hostile and at cross-purposes? Must all
progress be by a displacement in turn of each other――now an
era of honored forms, and then of only disembodied
spirituality? There is probably no entire escape from this
necessity. But, surely, he is the wisest man who can hold
this balance in the evenest hand; and that sect or school,
whether political, social, or religious, that pays the
finest justice and the most impartial respect to the two
factors in our nature, spirit and form, will hold the
steadiest place and do the most good for the longest time.
This is the real reason why Quakerism, with all its exalted
claims to respect, has such a feeble and diminishing
importance. It has oil in the lamp of the purest kind, but
almost no _wick_, and what wick it has is made up of its
_thee_-ing and _thou_-ing, and its straight coat and stiff
bonnet. These are steadily losing authority; and when they
are abandoned, visible Quakerism will disappear. On the
other hand, Roman Catholicism maintains its place against
the spirit of the age, and in spite of a load of discredited
doctrines, very largely because of its intense persistency
in forms, its highly-illumined visibility, its large-handed
legibleness; but not without the unfailing aid and support
of a spirit of faith and worship which produces a devoted
priesthood and hosts of genuine saints. No form of
Christianity can boast of lovelier or more spiritual
disciples, or reaches higher up or lower down, including the
wisest and the most ignorant, the most delicate and the
coarsest adherents. It has the subtlest and the bluntest
weapons in its arsenal, and can pierce with a needle, or mow
with a scythe, or maul with a mattock.”

The same organ, in a later number, in speaking of the Saratoga conference, says:

“The main characteristic of the meeting was a conscientious
and reverent endeavor to attain to something like a
scientific basis for our faith in absolute religion, and in
Christianity as a consistent and concrete expression of it,”

and adds that the opening sermon of the Rev. Mr. Hale “had the merit of starting us calmly and unexcitedly on our course.” Our readers will form their own judgment about what direction the course leads on which the Rev. Edward E. Hale started the Unitarians assembled at Saratoga in their seeking after a “scientific basis” for “absolute religion, and Christianity as a concrete expression of it”!

[89] “A Free-born Church.” The sermon preached before the
National Conference of Unitarian and other Christian
Churches at Saratoga, Tuesday evening, Sept. 12. The
_Liberal Christian_, New York, Sept. 16, 1876.

[90] _An Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine_, p.
14. Appleton, N. Y.

[91] Matt. xvi. 18.

[92] Matt. xxviii. 18.

[93] Eph. v. 25, 26, 27.

[94] St. Matt. xxviii. 18, 19.

[95] Dr. Newman.

[96] Rom. viii. 15.

[97] _Ibid._ v. 2.

[98] “Liquido tenendum est, quod omnia res, quamcumque
cognoscimus, congenerat in nobis notitiam sui. Ab utroque
enim notitia paritur, a cognoscente et cognito.”――St.
Augustine, _De Trinitate_, s. ix. c. xii.――Wherefore it must
be clearly held that everything whatsoever that we know
begets at the same time in us the knowledge of itself; for
knowledge is brought forth from both, from the knower and
from the thing known. Again, “Behold, then, there are three
things: he that loves, and that which is loved, and
love.”――s. viii. c. x., _ibid._

[99] Romans i. 20.

SIX SUNNY MONTHS.

BY THE AUTHOR OF “THE HOUSE OF YORKE,” “GRAPES AND THORNS,” ETC.