Project Canterbury

REPORT OF THE SECOND
ANGLO-CATHOLIC CONGRESS
LONDON, JULY 1923

General Subject: The Gospel of God

PUBLISHED FOR THE COMMITTEE OF THE CONGRESS

London, 1923
pp 14-22

God Above Us
I
God and Man

By Father Waggett, D.D.
The Society of St. John the Evangelist.

transcribed by Thomas J. W. Mason
AD 2002

I

Your purpose is the greatest and clearest possible. It is, first, to recall the Holy Name of God, to make that Name sound clearly in England, to set all out interests under its protection, to make all serve the Glory of God.

And secondly, you intend to serve the cause of the multitude of our own and of every land. Like the Patriarch you are indignant that of the Heavenly Bread, you should eat you morsel alone. [Job, xxxi, 17] You desire that what is known and loved by the few should be known and loved by all.

Your charity, extending over all classes and peoples, extends also to all their varied interests, capacities, genuine work; and while the whole real present is in your hearts, your love in God stretches out to the future, and is warm towards the young in whom the future is already beautifully enshrined.

By these two tests you judge all your doings,—by the glory of God and the good of the many; in one word, by the glory of God in the hearts of the many. You inscribe on your Congress Banner the great words, "For God and the People," and this motto will do more than retrain and guide. It will enkindle and animate your discussions. And you have ordained that these discussions shall begin with the thought of God alone.

My effort in response is not to offer a proof of God or even a description of the doctrine of God. I only try to state the place due to the thought about God in all Christian reflection, purpose, practice. That place is easily stated, not easily preserved.

It is altogether primary and fundamental; the first element and the foundation of all others; a living, moving, growing foundation. The truth about God does not grow, but our thought about him grows. It moves through all other thoughts and becomes, in all of them, more manifest, felt and operative. It is not only hidden securely as a root. It comes out as we look out on the world, springing like the leaves of a tree. It works as we work in it, nourishing like the fruit of a tree. And so the doctrine about Christ, the Spirit, Grace, the Church, the Saints, the Sacraments, the teaching about the behaviour of a Christian man and the action of a Christian state, all depend, not for a beginning only but for support all through their course, upon the great belief in God, One, Almighty, Holy, and Loving, Our Saviour. And those doctrines, or let us rather say all knowledge of the Person of our Lord, God made Man, and of his Church and work in us, give us a better approach to the one great Idea of God.

And so, the Christian’s knowledge of God is not first an abstract theism, upon which later the truth of Christ our Lord is inscribed. It is not the less profound, simple, and fundamental because we know all we know in and by Christ.

Of many things that should be added, let me secure one of great practical value. It is that this knowledge begins to be lost as soon as it ceases to grow; and that it can only grow in a life of prayer. those that seek God shall find him, and not those who, without seeking only talk or only think about God. A true thought of God is really the gift and presence of God, the operation of the Holy spirit in our minds as we are joined together in the Church "with all the saints," that is with the general body of Christians, the most part of whom are poor and undistinguished.

In the constancy of this belief in God and thought about God, our thoughts and words, our purposes and actions, attain reverence, wisdom, tenderness patience. It is for lack of such constancy that out actions are sometimes feeble and violent, our accents shrill and unconvincing, even our religious worship cold and earthly. In all life, "Reality" will be our watchword, and this reality is attained in the ever carefully cherished knowledge and awareness of the presence of God.

It is not easy to preserve thus a sense of the eternal. "We do not," said one who knew very well what he was speaking of, "We do not lift up our hearts by accident or casually." It needs courage and much sacrifice of curiosity and self-will to escape from the Dream of this world, with its bewildering detail, its thorny maze, to the Business, which is the worship of God in spirit and in reality.

But it is only when it is believed to be independently real, self-subsistent, and self-sufficing, that the world is a dream, a fascinating vision or a terrifying nightmare. Escaped to God and looking on the world from the presence of God, a man sees the world also to be real,—real in a second sense; for it is the object of God’s love and prepared as the scene and opportunity of our loving service. It is no longer then an impending grandeur, but now a real jewel made by God, depending on God, preserved by God.

II

This brings me to the second part of the proposition which is, in effect, put into my hands to-day. What is this proposition? It is double. First, God is God alone. Secondly, God hath given being to all that is.

If we welcome the Divine Name at the head of our thoughts, so we welcome the division that is proposed for those thoughts,—I mean the division of the subject into two parts; first God, the divine Glory and Being, and secondly God, the Creator of all and of us who worship him, and who now "have boldness" to speak to one another of him.

Other ways of speaking have sometimes been found useful. To-day we are content with familiar words enshrining immense and very awful realities, that God is himself supreme, perfect and self-sufficing, living from all eternity in a reality of mutual love; and that God, Father, Son and Holy Spirit, hath called into existence the whole universe of creation, according to the law and type of the Eternal Word, to be ordered and animated by the Divine Spirit.

And now give me leave to pass on directly from the thought of Creation in general, to the thought of the creation of moral beings, which for our purpose means the creation of man.

The creature in presence of the Creator—that is to say at all times, but consciously when the creature is brought in consciousness before the Creator,—is totally and absolutely dependent upon the Creator. From God the creature, man, has being, moral sense, an end, a purpose, the means of acting, the judgement to decide, the desire of good, the power to fulfil a good desire. How this is true in the mystery of the Redeemer’s Kingdom, we know. There, in redemption, we know that Grace alone, the Grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, makes us both to will and to do of God’s good pleasure.

But the same is true of the creature as creature, and not only as saved. While he is lost it is not true in every sense. But in a perfect unfallen creature, there would be that dependence and that reception of power and light to which the fallen creature is recalled by an act of mercy, lifted by a rescue and a translation in the Kingdom of Grace.

Dare I say that the natural power of the unfallen creature would be what we now know as Grace; that his natural knowledge would be inspiration, his natural science revelation, the knowledge and the love of God? Not quite. For such words might carry a meaning precisely opposed to mine. We must remember that in an unfallen man, there would still be a distinction between natural innocence and the supernatural bestowal of righteousness; between the gifts of ordinary reason that constitute in the man normal reaction to the world, and the gift of wisdom that receives the vision of divine Glory. Both the natural excellence and the supernatural endowment are constantly given by God and are ours only as gifts. And the true purpose of man unfallen, the end of creation was such a welcome of the Divine Glory as now we know as Grace.

III

I beg you to consider this as carrying with it two consequences. first, our present state of real dependence upon God and our present wisdom of conscious dependence upon God do not indicate a fall from perfection in the creature. Secondly, the sovereignty of God and our recognition of that sovereignty do not mean that our attitude,—rightly altogether subject and dependent,—is rightly altogether abject and self-contemptuous.

Let us take the second first. It is when confronted by a tyrant that a man is nothing. Confronted by a king he is noble. And certainly man is not humanly, morally, religiously, nothing over against God. We are the creatures of his hand, the sheep of his pasture. We hold from his loving purpose, being, hope ,reason, the soul’s life. We hold from his pardon everything that belongs to peace. His mercy is not an occasional resource. It is the sole and every necessary condition of our smallest tendency towards spiritual wealth. If we buy of him, we must buy with his own coin, like children of a father. His mercy is not required in rare crises. It embraceth us on every side. But on the other hand it does on every side so embrace us. We are compassed about with songs of deliverance, and these are the ordinary , the normal, the regular music of our march.

In this mercy,—the mercy of creation and redemption,—we are somewhat real. Our wills have another duty and function than that of self-obliteration. They are called to self-expression They are redeemed precisely for this. The purpose of the almighty mercy is that the creature whose feet are set on the lowest rung of reality should rise by genuine effort, God-inspired, to the height of self-determination in worship and in life; should mount the steps of a throne and receive a real crown of excellence and of freedom, the glorious liberty of the children of God; not less a crown because its end is to be cast by the redeemed, and now triumphant, will upon the sea of glass that is before the one Throne from which all thrones have their majesty; before the Fatherhood after which every fatherhood,—every new originating power,—in heaven and earth is named.

If in our thoughts we make man a puppet or slave, we diminish in our thoughts the glory of God, and describe his creative will as helpless, or else his creative act as illusory, denying the honour in the one case of his power, and in the other of his holiness.

The nature God has called into being is not only real; it is significant, and significant of God. He speaks to us through it; and it is to our own grace loss that we neglect to hear the message. Let us encourage one another to conceive that this humanity, this human nature from which we sometimes wish to withdraw ourselves, may be, more than we think, a revelation of the Eternal, the Incomprehensible.

Do you think it is for nothing that the Almighty has called the creature man into existence, and made him, or allowed him to become, so convincing, so interesting, so noble, so base, so humourous, and so tragic? Do you say only tragic, humourous, base, noble, interesting, to us his fellow-dust? Very well: since he is all this to us, did God mean this significance to us to be misleading, this thrill that man gives us to be utterly uninspiring; this message man brings to us the fellow-man, to be utterly empty, a tale told by an idiot, all sound and fury, signifying,—nothing? I cannot believe it. I find it hard to conceive how any believer in the Incarnation can believe it. If Mary’s souls and Mary’s voice could magnify the Lord, I find it impossible to believe that my hard-featured, hard-handed neighbour gives no evidence of his glory. If Jesus is the Word of the Father, I find it hard to believe that his brethren,—so entitled you know, in Scripture,—give us no token of what the Father really is.

No. This human nature is not nothingness, and it is not machinery. It is not machinery ad it is not dead, perinde ac cadaver. It is alive and has a future; and I may learn something of God in its trials, its sorrows and joys, its efforts, failures, and partial successes. I must believe that if there are in many lives,—the lives of the saints,—shining proofs of the Divine Goodness and Power, sure there are in every life some great lights of revelation; some "forgiven injuries, conquered temptations (now and then, and difficulties conquered by endurance." [Thackeray, "Esmond."]

This life of the most ordinary poor man is a long course of such victories over circumstances as many of us would think to be remarkable and memorable if they occurred in one week or one day of our lives. Remember this, and then ask,—or rather, ask no more,—whether human life is indeed nothing, whether it yields no evidence of the glory of God. What we learn by the sincere watching of human lives—especially of the "rougher" or more "natural" kinds—is more certain and more important than some consequences drawn by tortured thought from documents or from tradition.

I have taken first the second consequence. Let us for an ending return to the first.

I said the condition and the knowledge of dependence are not marks of an inferiority to our own better selves or more honourable possibilities. They are the mark and the condition of our essential perfection, the guide to our only conceivable advance. What do I mean? I mean that the perfection of man cannot have been and never can be a solitary and self-subsistent perfection. That would be another perfection, a perfection additional to the perfection of God: that is to say it would be another God, which is impossible and unthinkable. The perfection that alone can come to be the creature’s perfection is God himself, no other, no less. He gives not his glory to a second, but he giveth himself to the creature whom he has called into being, not so that the creature may contain and measure his incomprehensible Majesty, but in order that the creature may become a partaker with many others, in Christ, of the gift of the Divine Nature, the advent not once for all achieved, but incessantly renewed, of the Divine Presence.

Is not dependence then great? Is not the fall of man the fall from dependence to a fancied and most unreal independence,—from a real wealth that is all made up of receiving, to a frozen poverty that is imagined private wealth?

And will not such a thought as this, so undeniable, so inevitable, guide us when we are inclined to forget God, and be a help to us when we come to consider with Father Huntington the meaning of sin, and the character of that rescue from sin which Christ has accomplished for us by his most Precious Blood,—that is to say not by a sentence of indulgence, not by a brief act of authority, as when a king enlarges prisoners at his accession, but by the laborious victory of a moral renewal and a moral re-establishment of that created nature, whose ruin is to live apart from God, and whose glory is an entire welcome of the majestic generosity of God’s self-bestowal.

But this, the first paper of our studies, must not end by taking you the smallest distance from the one thought of God, self-subsistent, all-sufficing. We end as we began, with that profoundly subject thought of God which we hope will fill the last instant of our dying life.

Sanctus Fortis, Sanctus Deus,
De profundis oro te.
Praise to the Holiest in the Height
And in the depth be praise.
Lord, thou hast been our refuge: from one generation to another.

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