Chapter IX: The Church (1)

WALTER LOCK.

Christianity claims to be at once a life, a truth, and a worship; and, on all these accounts, it needs must find expression in a church. For, in the first place, the life of an individual remains dwarfed and stunted as long as it is lived in isolation; it is in its origin the outcome of other lives; it is at every moment of its existence dependent upon others; it reaches perfection only when it arrives at a conscious sense of its own deficiencies and limitations, and, therefore, of its dependence, and through such a sense realizes with thankfulness its true relation to the rest of life around it. Again, the knowledge of truth comes to the individual first through the mediation of others, of his parents and teachers; as he grows, and his own intellect works more freely, yet its results only gain consistency, security, width, when tested by the results of other workers; and directly we wish to propagate these results, they must be embodied in the lives of others, in societies, in organizations. Without these, ideas remain in the air, abstract, intangible, appealing perhaps to the philosophic few, but high above the reach of the many, the simple. 'All human society is the receptacle, nursery, and dwelling-place of ideas, shaped and limited according to the nature of the society--ideas which live and act on it and in it; which are preserved, passed on, and transmitted from one portion of it to another, from one generation to another; which would be merely abstractions or individual opinions if they were not endowed with the common life which their reception in a society gives them[333].'

These two principles are, obviously, not confined to religious questions. They apply to morality, to society, to politics. They are assumed in all ethical and political treatises. The need of co-operation for common life underlies the whole structure of the Republic of Plato; it is implied in Aristotle's definition of man as a social animal, and in his close association of Ethics with Politics: it has created the family, the tribe, the state; each fresh assertion of the principle, each breaking down of the barriers which separate family from family, tribe from tribe, nation from nation, has been a step forward in civilization. The strength of co-operation for the propagation of ideas is seen in the persistence with which certain nations retain hold on political theories or peculiar features of character; it is seen in the recurring formation of philosophic schools or religious sects or guilds, as soon as any new truth, intellectual or religious, has been discovered, or any moral quality, such as temperance or purity, has needed to be emphasized. The most individualistic of Christian sects have found themselves forced to be ecclesiastical, to define their creeds and to perfect their organization, as soon as they have begun to be missionary.

These principles are as wide as society; but religion takes them up and applies them on the highest level. Religion is, almost universally, the link which binds man to man, no less than that which binds man to a Power above him. So in the Christian Church--if we may anticipate, for a moment, our special application of the principle--the new-born child is taken at once and incorporated into a body of believers; from the first it draws its life from God through the body; it is taught that throughout life it must keep in touch with the body; it must be in a right relation to the other members; it must draw life from them; it must contribute life to them. And, further, this body has existed always and exists still as the home of certain _ideas_, ideas about God and about human life, which were revealed in Jesus Christ, and which it has to attest in its teaching and embody in its life. It is to be a body of visible persons, themselves the light of the world, expressing so that others can see the manifold wisdom of God, winning others to belief in the unity of God, by the sight of their own one-ness. The first principle might be expressed in the words of Festus to Paracelsus, when the latter had claimed to be God's special instrument in the world;

Were I elect like you,
I would encircle me with love, and raise
A rampart of my fellows: it should seem
Impossible for me to fail, so watched
By gentle friends who made their cause my own
They should ward off fate's envy:--the great gift,
Extravagant when claimed by me alone,
Being so a gift to them as well as me[334]:

the second principle by lines applied originally to the Incarnation, but which we may legitimately transfer to the Church, which continues the work of the Incarnation,

And so the Word had breath, and wrought
With human hands the Creed of Creeds
In loveliness of perfect deeds,
Store strong than all poetic thought[335].

But, further, religion adds a third application of its own to this principle of co-operation: for a church grows also out of the necessities of worship. The ritual needed for the offering of sacrifice almost necessitates of itself a number of persons for its performance. No doubt, an individual can worship God in private, but so his worship tends to be self-centred and narrow: for the full expression of his religious relation to others, for expiating a wrong done by him to his neighbours or to the whole community, for expressing gratitude for mercies which have come to him through others, there must be the common meeting: and the community as a whole has its great victories for which to thank God, its national dangers for which to pray, its national sins for which to offer expiation; and hence, common religious acts have been the universal accompaniment of national life, and have in their turn reacted upon it.

The idea of a Church, then, as conceived in its most general form, and without especial reference to the Christian Church, is this, that it widens life by deepening the sense of brotherhood; that it teaches, strengthens, and propagates ideas by enshrining truth in living witnesses, by checking the results of isolated thinkers by contact with other thinkers, and by securing permanency for the ideas; and that it expands and deepens worship by eliminating all that is selfish and narrow, and giving expression to common aims and feelings.

We pass from such _à priori_ ideas to the evidence of the Bible. There we find that these principles were embodied first in Judaism. There the whole nation was the Church. The Jew entered into the religious privileges of his life, not by any conscious act of his own, but by being born of Jewish parents; he retained his true life by remaining in contact with his nation. The union of the different members of the nation with each other is so intimate that the whole nation is spoken of as a personal unit. It is called 'God's Son, His 'first-born Son,' 'Jehovah's servant.' The ideal of prophecy is essentially that of a restored nation rejoicing in the rule of national righteousness. Again, the nation was chosen out specially to bear witness to truth, truth about the nature of God, the Almighty, the Eternal, the Holy; truth embodied in the facts of history, and deepened in the revelations of prophecy; truths which the fathers teach their children, 'that they should not hide them from the children of the generations to come[336].' In the striking phrase of S. Athanasius, the law and the prophets were 'a sacred school of the knowledge of God and of spiritual life for the whole world[337].' Their worship, too, was essentially social and national. From the first it centred round great national events, the fortunes of the harvest, or the crises of national history: the individual was purified from sin that he might be worthy to take part in the national service; the events of the nation's history were celebrated in religious hymns; the capital of the nation became the one and only recognised centre for the highest worship.

But Judaism adds to these principles a further principle of its own. It claims that such privileges as were granted to it, were not granted to it for its own sake, but that it might be a source of blessing to all nations: it assumes that they are on a lower religious level than itself; that instead of each nation progressing equally along the line of religious life, truth, and worship, other nations have fallen backward and the Jew has been chosen out for a special privilege. It is the principle that God works by 'limitation,' by apparent 'exclusiveness,' by that which is in its essence 'sacerdotalism'; the principle that God does not give His gifts equally to all, but specially to a few, that they may use them for the good of the whole. This principle seems at first sight to offend some modern abstract ideas of justice and equality; but the moment we examine the facts of life, we find it prevailing universally. Each nation has its peculiar gift: the Greek makes his parallel claim to be specially gifted with the love of knowledge and the power of artistic expression; the Roman with the power of rule and the belief in law. Or, again, within a single nation, it is the artist who enables us to see the beauty of a face or a landscape which had escaped us before:

Art was given for that,
God uses us to help each other so,
Lending our minds out.

It is the poet who interprets our inner nature or the magic of the external world, and becomes

A priest to us all
Of the wonder and bloom of the world,
Which we see with his eyes and are glad:

he sings

Till the world is wrought
To sympathy with hopes and fears _it heeded not_[338].

And this principle does not stop short of religious influences Conscience is itself a witness to it, as it implies that all parts of our nature are not sufficient guides to themselves, but that God has gifted one special faculty with power to control the rest. 'Men of character,' it has been said, 'are the conscience of the society to which they belong.' In the Jewish nation itself, the prophets were the circle of Jehovah's friends; they knew His secrets, they kept alive the ideal of the nation. 'What the soul is in the body, that are Christians in the world' was the parallel claim of an early apologist[339]. Analogies crowd in, then, on every side, to shew how rational is this claim on the part of Judaism.

Revelation only accepts this fact, and adds to it the assertion that it is no accident but a part of the Divine Purpose. It is the result of God's election. The Jewish nation, and subsequently the Christian Church, is not only a blessing to the rest of the world, but it is conscious that it is a blessing. This truth has been revealed to it partly to keep it ever mindful of its sense of dependence upon the Giver of all good gifts, partly to give it tenacity and courage to cling to a gift which it knows to be of inestimable value for all mankind. 'The election was simply a method of procedure adopted by God in His wisdom by which He designed to fit the few for blessing the many, one for blessing all[340].'

It must be from considerations such as these that we approach the foundation of the Christian Church and the Incarnation of our Lord Jesus Christ on which it rests. We approach it with the expectation that we shall find these principles embodied in it, for Christianity sprang directly out of Judaism, and so would naturally inherit its principles: and to go deeper still, the very essence of the Incarnation lies in the consecration of human life and human means. He who before had been acting invisibly upon the world as the Word, implanting life and light in man, now entered visibly into human flesh. All tendencies which made for the fulness of life and truth before His coming, all that tended to enlighten, elevate, combine men, had been His unknown working: now they are known to be His. The Infinite appears in finite form; the spiritual takes the material in which to express itself; human media are consecrated to deeper ends, and charged with a fuller meaning than before: so that, in Hooker's words, 'We cannot now conceive how God should, without man, exercise Divine power or receive the glory of Divine praise[341].' 'What you do now even after the flesh, that is spiritual' is the bold paradox of S. Ignatius; and he adds the reason, 'for you do all in Christ Jesus[342].' Thus--

In this twofold sphere, the twofold man
Holds firmly to the natural, to reach
The spiritual beyond it....
The whole temporal show related royally
And built up to eterne significance
Through the open arms of God[343].

The Incarnation, then, takes up all the three principles of which we have spoken: but, from the very finality which it claims for itself, it puts a mark of finality upon each of them, and so, in this respect, marks off the application of them in the Christian Church from all other applications of the same principles. The principle of co-operation for spiritual life is taken up; the Jewish nation is expanded into an universal brotherhood; this includes all men, without any distinction of race; it includes the quick and the dead; it aims at the highest spiritual perfection. It is final in this sense, that nothing can be wider in extent or deeper in aim; but it is final also in the sense that the life _has been_ manifested. Christians do not combine to work up to some unsuspected ideal: they combine to draw out and express in their common life the perfection that was in Christ. The principle of association for the propagation of ideas is taken up, but they are truths about God and His relation to human nature: they are truths which have been revealed, which have been once for all delivered to the saints. Finally, the principle of association for worship is taken up; the worship is made as wide as humanity; it is to be as spiritual as God; but it, too, rests on final facts, on the facts of creation and redemption: it centres round the one complete sacrifice for sin.

Let us consider each of these points more in detail.

1. The Church is an organization for the purpose of spiritual life; an universal brotherhood knit together to build up each of its members into holiness; 'the only great school of virtue existing.' But if this is so, if it is universal, is the principle of 'limitation,' of 'exclusiveness,' gone? Certainly not. It is there, and it is most instructive to notice how it arises[344]. Christ chose a small body of disciples to be in close contact with Himself, to share His work, and to receive His deeper teaching. This will not surprise us after the analogies of the prophets, the poets, the artists of the world. The saints too may be few, and God may lend their spirits out for the good of others. But, moreover, in the first formation of the Church we are able to watch the process of limitation, as historically worked out; and we see that it arises not from any narrowness, any grudging of His blessings, on the part of Christ, but from the narrowness, the limitations in man. Man is 'straitened' not in God, not in Christ, but in his own affections. God willed all men to be saved: Christ went about doing good and calling all to a change of heart, to a share in the kingdom of Heaven: but such a call made demands upon His hearers; it required that they should give up old prejudices about the Messianic kingdom, that they should be willing to leave father and mother and houses and lands for the truth's sake, that they should lay aside all the things that defile a man, that they should aim at being perfect, that they should not only hear but understand the word, that they should trust Him even when His sayings were hard. And these demands produced the limitations. The Pharisees preferred the glory of men to the glory which came from God; the masses in Galilee cared only for the bread that perisheth; many of the disciples turned back; and so He could not commit Himself unto them, because He knew what was in man. Not to them, not to any chance person, but to the Twelve, to those who had stood these tests, to those who had, in spite of all perplexity, seen in Him the Son of the Living God, to them He could commit Himself, they could share His secrets; they could be taught clearly the certainty and the meaning of His coming death, for they had begun to learn what self-sacrifice meant; they could do His work and organize His Church; they could bind and loose in His Name; they could represent Him when He was gone. These are the elect; they who had the will to listen to the call[345]; they who were 'magnanimous to correspond with heaven'; to them He gave at Pentecost the full conscious gift of the Holy Spirit, and so at last formed them into the Church, the Church which was to continue His work, which was to convey His grace, which was to go into the whole world, holding this life as a treasure for the sake of the whole world, praying and giving thanks for all men, because the unity of God and the unity of the mediation of Christ inspires them with hope that all may be one in Him[346].

The day of Pentecost was thus the birthday of the Church. Before there were followers of the Lord; now there was the Church: and this as the result of a new act, for which all that preceded had been but preparation: now the Church was born in becoming the possessor of a common corporate life. The Spirit was given to the whole body of Christians together: it was not given to an individual here and there in such a way that such Spirit-bearing individuals could then come together and form a Church. It was given corporately, so that they who received the Spirit realized at once a unity which preceded any individual action of their own. So the Church has gone forth offering its message freely to all; in Christ Jesus there is neither Jew nor Gentile; the message is given openly, 'without any veil,' to all; all are accepted who will submit themselves to Baptism, i.e. all who recognise the element of evil and of weakness in their own life, who are willing to die to it and receive fresh life and strength from the Risen Lord, and to submit their life to His discipline. That is the Church as presented to us in the New Testament. Metaphor after metaphor is lavished upon it by our Lord and by S. Paul in order to make clear the conception of it. He is the Vine, His disciples are the branches; they draw all their life from Him: apart from Him they can do nothing; if in union with Him, they bear fruit. The Church is a household, a scene of active work, of 'skilled and trained activity': each member with his own work, some as mere members of the household, others as rulers set over the household to give them meat in due season, each with talents to be used faithfully for the Master. It is a family, in which 'all ye are brethren,' laying obligations of love between brother and brother, calling out self-sacrifice for the good of others, deepening in each the sense of the value of the lives of others. It is the Body of Christ, that which grows stronger and stronger, that which draws its life from the Head and must hold to Him, that in which Christian is linked to Christian in sympathy and complete interdependence, that without which the Head would be incomplete, the necessary organ for completing Christ's work on earth, that which the Spirit takes as its channel for manifesting to the world the very 'life of God.' It is God's Temple; visible, made up of parts, which are fitted in to one another in symmetry; beautiful with a spiritual beauty; for there a living God is present; there He speaks to His own; there they offer to Him a rational service[347]. It is the Bride of Christ, the dearest object of Christ's love, which gives herself to Him for His service, which for His sake keeps herself pure in life and doctrine; which receives from Him all the treasures of His love, so that as He had received the fulness of God, 'the aggregate of the Divine attributes, virtues, and energies' from the Father, the Church receives all this from Him and manifests it forth to the world of men and of angels.

But this picture, it will be urged, is only a prophecy of the future; the evidence of S. Paul's Epistles will also shew us a very different scene in real life, a body with tendencies to divisions, to selfishness, to sin. This is quite true, but the ideal is never thought of as something different from the real; the ideal is not simply in heaven nor the real simply on earth; the real is the ideal, though not yet completely developed; the ideal is the actual basis of the real as much as the goal to which the real is tending. The members of the Church have been consecrated; they are holy; they are 'unleavened'; they have put on Christ; they have by their self-committal to Him received a righteousness which they can work out into perfection. Again, they _are_ brothers; they have been made children of God by adoption: as they have realized the sense of sonship, they realize also the closeness of the tie between themselves and the other sons, their common sympathies, hopes and aims. True, they are not yet perfect either in holiness or in love: the very purpose of the Church is to make them perfect. It takes the individual at his birth, it incorporates him into its own life, it watches over him from beginning to end, it feeds him with spiritual food, it disciplines him by spiritual laws, it blesses him at all the chief moments of life, it takes him away from his own isolation, trains him in social aims and social duties by social sacraments, finally, gives him back to God with its benediction.

Such a conception of the Church as a nursery, a school, a home, implies of necessity that it should be visible, and that it should be one. It is a visible body, because it has in some sense to represent the Incarnate Lord. In the Incarnation spirit took material form and expressed itself thereby; in the risen Lord--and it is the risen Lord who gives the Spirit to the Church--there was still a spiritual body. This is not to deny the invisible reality of spiritual unity which underlies the external visible unity. It is only to say that completeness means both. In the language of S. Ignatius, as Christ Jesus was at once material and spiritual, so, the unity of the Church should be at once material and spiritual[348].

The idea of an invisible Church to express the body of true believers, who alone are the Church, to whatever community they belong, so that the visible Church becomes an unimportant thing, is an idea entirely at variance with Scripture and all pre-reformation teaching. The phrase is first found in almost contemporary writings of Luther and of Zwingli; it is akin to the teaching of Hus and of Wiclif; and, no doubt, there are thoughts and phrases in earlier writers that are more or less akin to it. From the first there was obviously a distinction between the true and untrue Christian, between the spiritual and the fleshly, between the vessels to honour and the vessels to dishonour, and the first of these classes, those who persevere to the end, whom man cannot know and God only knows, those who, if thought of in the light of God's eternal purposes, are the predestined, these were treated and spoken of as 'the Church properly so called,' 'the true body of Christ.' Christians 'who do the will of the Father will belong to the first Church, the spiritual Church founded before the sun and moon.' Those who have lived in perfect righteousness according to the Gospel 'will rest in the holy hill of God, in the highest Church, in which are gathered the philosophers of God[349].'

Again, the Church on earth is regarded as 'a copy of the Church in heaven in which God's will is done': but in each case there is no contrast between the visible and the invisible Church. The invisible Church is in these cases either the ideal of the visible; or that part of the visible organized Church which has remained true to its aims. So too with regard to those who are not conscious believers; the possibility of their salvation, in a qualified way, is heartily recognised, but the confusion is not made of calling them members of the Church.

The fatal danger is when the belief in the invisible Church is used to discredit the visible Church and the importance of belonging to it. It is scarcely too much to say, that all stress laid upon the invisible Church tends to lower the demands of holiness and brotherhood. It is a visible Church, and such a Church as can attract outsiders, which calls out the fruits of faith into active energy; it is a visible Church such as can combine Christians in active work, which tests brotherhood, which rubs away idiosyncrasy, which destroys vanity and jealousy, which restrains personal ambition, which trains in the power of common work, which, as our own powers fail, or are proved inadequate, for some task on which our heart had been set, still fills us with hope that God will work through others that which it is clear He will not work through us. It is a visible Church alone which is 'the home of the lonely.' Encompassed as we are now from our birth by Christian friends and associations, we tend to forget how much we depend on the spiritual help and sympathy of others. The greatness of our blessings blinds us to their presence, and we seem to stand in our own strength while we are leaning upon others. The relation of the soul to God is a tender thing; personal religion, which seems so strong, while in a Christian atmosphere, tends to grow weak, to totter, to fall, as we stand alone in some distant country, amid low moral standards and heathen faiths. Such solitude does indeed often, in those who are strong, deepen, in a marvellous way, the invisible communion with God and the ties that knit us with the absent; but the result is often fatal to the weak. It throws both strong and weak alike into closer sympathy with those who share a common faith. It is a visible Church which supplies this sympathy, which gives the assurance that each soul, as it is drawn to God, shall not stand alone; but that it shall find around it strengthening hands and sympathetic hearts, which shall train it till, as in the quiet confidence of a home, it shall blossom into the full Christian life.

The principle of the unity of the Church is very similar. That, again, is primarily and essentially a spiritual unity. The ultimate source is, according to the Lord's own teaching, the unity of the Godhead: 'that they may be one, even as we are one.' The effect of the outpouring of the Spirit is to make the multitude of them that believed 'of one heart and one soul.' Baptism becomes the source of unity, 'In one Spirit were we all baptized into one body:' the 'one bread' becomes the security of union. 'We who are many are one bread, one body, for we all partake of the one bread.' More fully still is the unity drawn out in the Epistle to the Ephesians. 'There is one body and one Spirit, even as ye are called in one hope of our calling, one Lord, one faith, one baptism, one God and Father of all.' The unity starts with being spiritual; it is the power of the One God drawing men together by His action upon their spirits; uniting them in the service of one Lord who has redeemed them, but it issues in 'one body.' Nothing can be stronger than the assertion of such unity. But in what does this unity lie, and what is to be the safeguard of it? No one answer is possible to this question. Clearly, one part of the answer is, a unity of spiritual aim, 'one hope of your calling:' another answer is, a common basis of belief, common trust in the same Lord, 'one faith;' a further answer is, common social sacraments, 'one baptism,' 'one bread.' All these lie on the face of these passages of S. Paul. Are we to add to them 'a common government,' 'an apostolical succession?' Was this of the essence or a late addition, a result of subsequent confederation intended to guarantee the permanence of dogma? No doubt, the circumstances of subsequent history moulded the exact form of the ministry, and emphasized the importance of external organization under particular circumstances; but this is no less true of the other points of unity; the unity of spiritual life was worked out in one way in the times of public discipline and penance, in another way when these fell into disuse: the unity of faith was brought into prominence in the times of the formulating of the Creeds. So the unity of external organization was emphasized when it was threatened by the Gnostic, Novatian, and Donatist controversies. But the germ of it is there from the first, and it was no later addition. The spiritual unity derived from the Lord is imparted through Sacraments; but this at once links the inward life and spiritual unity with some form of external organization. And so the writer of the Epistle to the Ephesians after his great description of Christian unity, goes on at once to speak of the ministry. The apostles, prophets, evangelists, pastors, teachers, these are special gifts of the ascended Lord to the Church; and they are given for the very purpose of securing unity, 'for the perfecting of the saints unto the work of ministering, unto the building up of the body of Christ, till we all attain unto the unity of the faith.' No less significantly, when S. Paul is applying to the Church the metaphor of the body and its members in order to emphasize the unity of the whole, does he rank apostles, prophets, teachers, as the most important members of the body[350].

The history of the early Church, so far as it can be traced, points the same way. The Lord appointed His body of twelve: He gave them the power to bind and to loose, the power to exercise discipline over offending members of the Church. At first, the Christian Church is a purely Jewish body; it continues in the Apostles' fellowship as well as doctrine; they distribute its alms; they punish unworthy members; they arrange its differences; they appoint subordinate officers; they ratify their actions, and sanction the admission of Samaritans and proselytes to the Church; but the various members throughout Judea, Galilee, and Samaria, are embraced in the single conception of one Church[351]. Then under the guidance of Paul and Barnabas, the Gentiles are brought in and formed into churches; the danger to unity becomes acute. According to the Acts of the Apostles, it is surmounted by reference to the Church at Jerusalem; the Apostles and Elders there decide the question, and the Gentile Churches are thus kept in communion with it. S. Paul's letters, with all the difficulty there is of reconciling every detail with the historian's account, present us with essentially the same picture. In dealing with his own Churches, he claims absolute right, as apostle, to hand on and lay down traditions, to punish, to forgive, to govern: he leaves some class of ministers in every Church under his guidance; each Church is to administer discipline over unworthy members. But the Churches cannot act independently: the Church at Corinth is not to act as though it were the fountain head of Christianity, or the only Gentile Church; it is to remember the customs in other Churches. Further than this, above 'all the Churches,' appears already as one body 'the Church,' in which God has set apostles[352]; within it there are separate spheres of work, Paul and Barnabas are to go to the Gentiles, the leading Jewish apostles to the Jews; S. Paul will not intrude beyond the province assigned to him; he makes his Gentile Churches to contribute to the needs of the Jewish Church, and realize the debt which they owe to them. Any divisions in a local Church cannot be tolerated, as being inconsistent with the unity of Christ, with His cross, and with the significance of baptism. Peter stands condemned when he wishes to separate himself and so causes division between Jew and Gentile.

The importance attached to external organization is surely implied in all of this, and the circumstances of the second century forced out into clearness what was so implied. Gnosticism, Montanism, Novatianism all tended to found new bodies, which claimed to be the true Church. How was the individual Christian to test their claims? It was in the face of this question that Church writers, notably S. Cyprian and S. Irenaeus, emphasized the importance of historical continuity in the Church as secured by the apostolical succession of the episcopate. The unity of the Church came primarily, they urged, from God, from heaven, from the Father; it was secured by the foundation of the Church upon the Apostles; the bishops have succeeded to the Apostles and so become the guardians of the unity of the Church. As soon then as we find the Christian episcopate universally organized, we find it treated as an institution received from the Apostles and as carrying with it the principle of historic continuity. So it has remained ever since, side by side with the other safeguards of unity, the sacraments and the common faith. The Roman Church has added to it what seemed a further safeguard of unity, the test of communion with itself; but this was a later claim, a claim which was persistently resented, and which was urged with disastrous results. The Reformed Churches of the Continent, in their protest against that additional test, have rejected the whole principle of historic continuity; they have remained satisfied with the bond of a common faith and of common sacraments: but the result can scarcely be said to be as yet a securer unity. Even an Unitarian historian recognises heartily that the characteristic of the Church in England is this continuity. 'There is no point,' urges Mr. Beard[353], 'at which it can be said, here the old Church ends, here the new begins.... The retention of the Episcopate by the English Reformers at once helped to preserve this continuity and marked it in the distinctest way.... It is an obvious historical fact that Parker was the successor of Augustine, just as clearly as Lanfranc and Becket.'

This, then, is what the Church claims to be as the home of grace, the channel of spiritual life. It claims to be a body of living persons who have given themselves up to the call of Christ to carry on His work in the world; a body which was organized by Himself thus far that the Apostles were put in sole authority over it; a body which received the Spirit to dwell within it at Pentecost; a body which propagated itself by spiritual birth; a body in which the ministerial power was handed on by the Apostles to their successors, which has remained so organized till the present day, and has moved on through the world, sometimes allied with, sometimes in separation from the State, always independent of it; a body which lays on each of its members the duty of holiness, and the obligation of love, and trains them in both.

But two objections arise here, which must be dealt with shortly. It is urged first, this is an unworthy limitation: we ought to love all men; to treat all men as brothers; why limit this love, this feeling of brotherhood to the baptized, to the Church? True, we ought to love and honour all men, to do good to all men. The love of the Christian, like the love of Christ, knows no limits; but the limitations are in man himself. All human nature is not lovable: all men are not love-worthy. Love must, at least, mean a different thing; it must weaken its connotation if applied to all men; there may be pity, there may be faith, there may be a prophetic anticipating love for the sinner and the criminal, as we recall their origin and forecast the possibilities of their future; but love in the highest sense, love that delights in and admires its object, love that is sure of a response, the sense of brotherhood which knows that it can trust a brother--these are not possible with the wanton, the selfish, the hypocrite. Though man has social instincts which draw him into co-operation with others; he has also tendencies to selfishness and impurity which work against the spirit of brotherhood and make it impossible. Not till we have some security that the man's real self is on the side of unselfishness, can we trust him; and baptism with its gifts of grace, baptism with its death to the selfish nature, baptism with its profession of allegiance to the leadership of Christ, this, at least, gives us some security. Even Comte, with his longing for brotherhood, tells us that in forming our conception of humanity we must not take in all men, but those only who are really assimilable, in virtue of a real co-operation towards the common existence, and Mr. Cotter Morison would eliminate and suppress those who have no altruistic affection. We limit, then, only so far as seems necessary to gain reality; we train men in the narrower circle of brotherhood, that they may become enthusiasts for it, and go forth as missionaries to raise others to their own level. As for those who lie outside Christianity, the Church, like our Lord Himself in the parable of the sheep and the goats, like S. Paul in his anticipation of the judgment day, recognises all the good there is in them; like Justin Martyr and many of the early Fathers, it traces in them the work of the Divine Word; and yet none the less did these writers claim and does the Church still claim for itself the conscious gift of spiritual life, in a sense higher than anything that lies outside itself.

But many, who would follow thus far, would draw another line, and would include within the Church all the baptized, whether professing churchmen or not. Once more, so far as we draw any distinction within the limits of the baptized, it is for the sake of reality. We recognise that every atom of their faith is genuine, that so far as they have one Lord, one faith, one baptism, they are true members of the Church; that so far as they have banded themselves together into a society, they have something akin to the reality of the Church, and gain some of its social blessings. But then it is they who have banded themselves together into a society: and that means they have done it at their own risk. We rest upon the validity of our sacraments, because they were founded by the Lord Himself, because they have His special promises, because they have been handed down in regular and valid channels to us. Have they equal security that their sacraments are valid? Again, we must hold that schism means something of evil: that it causes weakness: that it thus prevents the full work of brotherhood, of knitting Christian with Christian in common worship: that so it prevents the complete witness of the Church in the world; that in so far as such Christians are schismatic, they are untrue and harmful members of the Church. The full complete claim of the Church is that it is a body visibly meeting together in a common life, and forming by historical continuity a part of the actual body founded by our Lord Himself. It would be unreal to apply this conception of a complete historic brotherhood to those who have separated themselves from the Church's worship, and whose boast is that they were founded by Wesley, or Luther, or Calvin. A Church so founded is not historically founded by Christ. It may have been founded to carry on the work of Christ, it may have been founded in imitation of Him, and with the sincerest loyalty to His person, but it cannot be said to have been founded by Him. Even if circumstances have justified it, it is at any rate not the ideal; and whatever confessions the historic Church may have to make of its own shortcomings, it still must witness to the ideal of a visible unity and historical continuity. Amid the divisions of Christendom, and in face of her own shortcomings, the Church of England does not claim to be the full complete representation of the Church of Christ. She is only one national expression of the Catholic Church: she feels that 'it is safer for us to widen the pale of the kingdom of God, than to deny the fruits of the Spirit[354];' she has ever on her lips the prayer, 'Remember not, Lord, our offences, nor the offences of our forefathers, neither take vengeance of our sins,' and yet she must make her claim boldly and fearlessly to have retained the true ideal of the Church; to be loyal to the essential principle that her life comes historically from Christ and not from man.

II. But the Church is the school of truth as well as the school of virtue. Its ministers form a priesthood of truth as well as a priesthood of sacrifice. Its priests' lips have 'to keep knowledge.' Christianity is, as the School of Alexandria loved to represent it, a Divine philosophy, and the Church its school.

This conception of the Church starts from our Lord's own words. His Apostles are to be as scribes instructed unto the kingdom of Heaven; they are to have the scribes' power to decide what is and what is not binding in the kingdom; the Spirit is to lead them into all truth; they are to make disciples of all the nations, 'teaching them to observe all things whatsoever I commanded you.' The function of the Church then with regard to truth is primarily to bear witness to that which has been revealed. It does not primarily reveal, it tells of the truths which have been embodied in the historic life of Jesus Christ or explained in His teaching. 'One is its teacher; One is its master, even the Christ.' It holds a 'faith once delivered to the saints.' Hence, from the first, there grew up some quasi-authoritative formula, in which we can see the germ of the later Creeds, which each Christian Missionary would teach to his converts. S. Paul himself received from others and handed on to the Corinthians, as his first message to them, some such half-stereotyped Creed, narrating the central facts of the Death and Resurrection of the Lord; his teaching was as a mould which shaped the lives of the converts as they were poured, like so much molten metal, into it. It was authoritative, not even an angel from heaven could preach another gospel. As time went on and false teaching spread, this side of the Church's work is emphasized more and more. The Church is to be the pillar and ground-work of the truth. Timothy and Titus are to hold fast the deposit, to prevent false teaching, to secure wholesomeness of doctrine no less than sobriety of life.

The contests of the next centuries bring out this idea of witness into clearer prominence, and the Episcopate, as it had been the guarantee of unity, becomes now the guarantee of truth. Thus, S. Ignatius is face to face with Docetic and Gnostic teaching; with him the bishops are 'in the mind of Jesus Christ;' they are to be treated 'as the Lord;' to avoid heresy, it is necessary to avoid 'separation from the God of Jesus Christ, from the Bishop and the ordinances of the Apostles;' the one bishop is ranked with the one Eucharist, the one flesh of Jesus Christ, the one cup, the one altar, as the source of unity; submission to the Bishop and the Presbyters is a means towards holiness, towards spiritual strength and spiritual joy[355]. These are incidental expressions in letters written at a moment of spiritual excitement: but the same appeal reappears in calmer controversial treatises. S. Irenaeus argues against Gnosticism on exactly the same grounds. Truth is essentially a thing _received_; it was received by the Apostles from Christ. He was the truth Himself; He revealed it to His Apostles; they embodied it in their writings and handed it on to the Bishops and Presbyters who succeeded them; hence the test of truth is to be sought in Holy Scripture and in the teaching of those Churches which were founded directly by the Apostles[356]. With equal strength Tertullian urges that the truth was received by the churches from the Apostles, by the Apostles from Christ, by Christ from God; it is therefore independent of individuals; it must be sought for in Holy Scripture, but as the canon of that is not fixed, and its interpretation is at times doubtful, it must be supplemented by the evidence of the apostolic Churches; and he challenges the heretics to produce the origin of their churches and shew that the series of bishops runs back to some Apostle or apostolic man[357].

The Church is thus primarily a witness: the strength of its authority lies in the many sides from which the witness comes; but the exigencies of controversy, and indeed of thought even apart from controversy, rendered necessary another function in respect to truth. The Church was compelled to formulate, to express its witness in relation to the intellectual difficulties of the time. Christianity is indeed essentially a matter not of the intellect, but of the will, a personal relation of trust in a personal God. Its first instinct is, as the first instinct of friendship would be, to resent intellectual analysis and dogmatic definition. But as the need of telling others about a friend, or defending him against slander, would compel us to analyse his qualities and define his attractiveness; so it was with the Church's relation to the Lord. It bore witness to the impression which His life had made upon His followers that He was Divine; it bore witness to the facts of the life that attested it and to His own statements. But the claim was denied; it needed justifying; it needed to be shewn to be consistent with other truths, such as the unity of God, and the reality of His own human nature, and so definition was forced upon the Church. The germ of such definitions is found in the New Testament; the deeper Christological teaching of the Epistles to the Ephesians and to the Colossians, and of the prologue of S. John are instances of such intellectual analysis and formulation, and were evidently written in the face of controversy. The technical decisions of the great councils of the fourth and fifth centuries and their expression in the Nicene and 'Athanasian' Creeds are the outcome of the same tendency. Yet even in them, the Church acts, in a sense, as a witness; the Scriptures are appealed to as the ultimate authority; the Creed is the summary of its chief doctrines: the one aim is to secure and express the truth witnessed to by churches throughout the world, to eliminate novelty and caprice; the new definitions are accepted, because they alone are felt to express the instinct of the Church's worship. By this time the canon of Holy Scripture was fixed. It becomes thenceforth an undying fountain of life from which the water of pure doctrine can be drawn. Tradition and development can always be checked by that.

In the truths then which the Church teaches we may distinguish two classes. First, there are the central truths to which it bears absolute witness; such as the Fatherhood of God, the Person and work of Jesus Christ, the Redemption of all mankind, the origin and purpose of human life. These it teaches authoritatively. Its conduct is exactly analogous to that of a parent teaching the moral law to his children; teaching the commandments authoritatively at first, till the child can be educated to understand the reason of them. So the Church says to her children, or to those who are seeking after truth 'there is an absolute truth in religion as well as in morality: we have tested it; generations of the saints have found it true. It is a truth independent of individual teachers; independent of the shifting moods of opinion at any particular period; and you must accept it on our authority first. Further, these are truths which affect life, therefore they cannot be apprehended merely by the intellect. You must commit yourself to them; act upon them; there is a time when the seeker after truth sees where it lies; then it must cease to be an open question. "You must seek till you find, but when you have once found truth, you must commit yourself to it[358]." You must believe that you may understand; but it is _that_ you may understand.' The dogma is authoritatively taught, that the individual may be kept safe from mere individual caprice and fancifulness, but also that he himself may come to a rational understanding of his belief. No doubt the truth is so wide that to the end of our lives we shall still feel the need of guidance and of teaching. 'As long as we live,' said Calvin, 'our weakness will not allow us to be discharged from school.' Like S. Ignatius on his way to martyrdom, the Christian may feel at his dying day, 'Now I begin to be a disciple;' but the aim of the Church is to make each member have a rational hold upon his faith. When we are young we accept a doctrine because the Church teaches it to us; when we are grown up, we love the Church because it taught us the doctrine. 'The Churchman never surrenders his individual responsibility. But he may and must surrender some portion at least of his independence, and he benefits greatly by the surrender[359].' 'Submission to the authority of the Church is the merging of our mere individualism in the whole historic life of the great Christian brotherhood; it is making ourselves at one with the one religion in its most permanent and least merely local form. It is surrendering our individuality only to empty it of its narrowness[360].'