PREFACE

THIS little book is intended as a summary statement of the religion of the catholic church. It is intended to meet a need, which is just now clamorous--the provision of a manual of instruction for the members of the Church of England. It has been rapidly written, and, from the nature of the case, can supply little in the way, of proofs or justifications of its statements. But I can truthfully plead that there is nothing here written down that has not behind it the meditation and study of a lifetime; and in other books I have sought to supply the grounds, or a great part of the grounds, on which the statements of this book repose. I hope my critics will remember this.

My little book has had the advantage of the very careful criticisms and suggestions of Father Paul Bull, C.R. I have not seen my way to accept all his suggestions, and he has no responsibility for what appears in the book. But the help he has given has been invaluanle. I owe to the Rev. Wilfrid Cooper, my chaplain, the short index to the topics covered in the book.

C. OXON:
Michaelmas, 1916.

CHRISTIANITY is a certain kind of personal belief and a certain kind of personal life; but it is not a merely individual religion, "a private matter between a man's soul and God." It is membership, with all the responsibility of membership, in a society or brotherhood which Jesus Christ our Lord founded to bind together in one men of all classes and races and kinds. This society is the Holy Catholic Church, and the Church of England is a part of the catholic church.

Read the Gospels, and you will read of Jesus Christ founding His church and giving to it and to its officers authority over all its members, authority to "bind" and "loose"--that is to prohibit this and to allow that--with a divine sanction; and authority to "remit" and "retain" sins with divine ratification--that is to admit men into its fellowship or to exclude them if they are unworthy, and to readmit them when they show themselves penitent. Years before our present Gospels were written down, the Christian church was acting on this commission. Read the First Epistle of S. Paul to the Corinthians and you will find a vivid account of one of the first Christian churches. There is plenty of sin and wilfulness to be found there, but there is no mistaking the intense sense of membership. They had been brought at their baptism by the one Spirit into the one body, and they celebrated together the Holy Communion, the sacrament of continual membership. The authority of the whole body and of the apostle is asserted and acknowledged over every member. Any plainly unworthy member is to be judged and excluded from their company "in the name of the Lord Jesus," and one so excluded, when he is penitent, can be received back into communion or forgiven "in the person of Christ." Every member is expected to take a part and interest in the affairs of the church, its discipline, and its worship. For a "member" means a limb, and every limb of the body has to do part of the work of the body. And as they had learned from Christ the infinite worth of every human soul, so in their fellowship they recognized that the need of each is the care of all, and that "if one member suffer, all the members suffer with it." The great salvation in which they all rejoiced was a gift of God for all, which bound them into brotherhood: and they acted on the principle of all true brotherhood--"from f each according to his capacity: to each according to his need." Many things promoted the growth of the church in early days--the steadfast faith of Christians, the high moral level of their lives, the courage and joy with which they faced trouble or death; but, perhaps more than all else, it was the intense sense of membership, the spirit of mutual love, which drew men to them. And every local church in every age has been either an effective or an ineffective part of the body of Christ, just in proportion as the sense of membership and the responsibility of membership has been strong or weak.

When you come down the history of the church to the Church of England, as it was re-ordered at the Reformation, and read its Book of Common Prayer, you will see that it meant to maintain at a very high level the responsibility of membership. Those who are to be baptized are to recognize publicly before the congregation assembled their responsibility for renouncing what Christ forbids, for believing the common faith of the church, and for obeying the laws of discipleship. They are embarking, and that publicly, on a great adventure, and they must know what they are doing. If infants are to be baptized, then sponsors must be provided as sureties, to guarantee that the infants, as they grow to years of discretion, shall know the meaning of their religion. And they are to renew the vows of baptism through their own lips before they can be confirmed, by the laying-on of the bishop's hand, and so enter upon full membership in the strength of the Holy Spirit. The Lord's Supper or Holy Communion is the sacrament in which their membership is to be constantly renewed and reinvigorated, and it is to be guarded by the officers of the church from unworthy partaking. Those whose lives cause public scandal are to be warned or, if need be, excommunicated, or put out of fellowship, till they have shown themselves of a better mind, and "been openly reconciled by penance," and so can be readmitted to fellowship. And private confession and absolution is provided for those whose conscience is troubled by secret sins. And the needs of the poor and sick are to be relieved by the alms of the whole community. And the law of indissoluble marriage is to set its consecration upon the home. And the sick and dying are to be dealt with as responsible members who must be brought to a right faith and penitence, and make their peace with God and man, that, if they die, the words of confident hope, such as belong rightly to the holy fellowship of the church, may be spoken over their graves.

All this is natural and right. Every union or society which exists for any worthy object must maintain a high sense of the responsibility of membership; and all its members must recognize that, if they fail to keep its obligatory rules, they must fall out of membership and lose its advantages. A nominal membership is the curse of any union. What trade union could last if a large percentage of its members never obeyed its rules or fulfilled their obligations?

But if this is true, then indeed we know wherein lies the present weakness of the Church of England. It has cheapened membership till it has come to mean almost nothing. Of our soldiers we are told seventy per cent, recognize themselves as members of the Church of England, but it is only a small number whose membership has meant much in their lives. The sacrament of continual fellowship has been ignored. They have taken no interest in the affairs of the church. They have never been led to think of the management of the church as if it was their business. They have not felt it as a fellowship. It has not led them to expect that if they were wronged or unjustly treated, it would be the duty and privilege of the church to see them righted. They have the vaguest idea of the church's faith, and a very weak sense of either the joy or the responsibility of common worship. They have no idea that they wrong the church by evil living, or that the church has anything to do with the matter. For old associations' sake they like to be married in church, and to bring their children to be christened, and to send their children to the Sunday school, and they wish to be buried with the church's service. But for the rest, membership in the church means almost nothing. Now I have no doubt at all that the reform which is the most fundamental and necessary, if there is to be any effectual revival of religion in our old Church of England, is to recover the feeling of the obligations of membership. What we want first of all is not more Christians but better Christians, not more Churchmen but better Churchmen. Every one must understand that he or she cannot become or remain a member of the church without fulfilling the elementary responsibilities of membership. All Christians are called " kings and priests" in the New Testament, and they should exercise their kingship and priesthood by active participation in the affairs and worship of the church. Both their duties and their rights need to be much more fully recognized. A vast change is needed in this direction. But the first step is to revive the sense of membership; and because I believe this to be the most fundamental and necessary of all reforms, I have called this book, which attempts to explain the religion of the church according to the use and practice of the Church of England, a "manual of membership."

The church has lately had it brought home to it how small a proportion of " the workers" are practising Churchmen. At the same time the ideas and aspirations of brotherhood--that is, the spirit of mutual membership--are stirring the world of labour to its depths. There is, I am persuaded, only one way in which the church can commend its message to labour. It is not by lowering its doctrine or cheapening its claim. It is by making the spirit of brotherhood, the spirit of mutual membership, once again real and effective in the church, which indeed was founded to carry into every corner of the earth the witness of Christ to the worth and dignity of every human being for whom Christ died.

THREE preliminaries must first be considered.

1. The religion of the church is based upon a word (or revelation) of God.--The people of Israel was called by God among ancient peoples to be His people and to reveal His "name" and purpose among men. In the words of a great Christian father the Jews were, through their prophets, "the sacred school of the knowledge of God and of the spiritual life for all mankind." The Jews were thus the ancient and preparatory church of God. The church of Jesus Christ took its origin out of this ancient church, but it is catholic or universal, a super-national fellowship, based upon the fuller revelation of God which is given us in Jesus Christ. But the Jewish church and the church of Christ are really one church, and are alike based on the word of God-- that is, on God's revelation of Himself given first through His prophets and then finally through His Son: and to become, or remain rightly, a member of the church each one must accept the message of the church--its fundamental faith--as being truly "the word of God." There are solemn words of our Lord which sound strangely in our ears: "I thank thee, Father, Lord of heaven and earth, that thou didst hide these things (that is, His message) from the wise and understanding, and didst reveal them unto babes: yea, Father, for so it was well-pleasing in thy sight. All things have been delivered unto me of my Father: and no one knoweth the Son save the Father, neither doth any know the Father save the Son and he to whomsoever the Son willeth to reveal him."1 In this wonderful saying our Lord asserts His own community of nature with God His Father, and His unique claim to reveal God to men; and He'expresses a positive joy in the fact that while the learned refuse His message the simple accept it. He sees in this the fulfilment of a divine purpose, and S. Paul after Him, in different words, does the same thing. A little thought will enable us to understand our Lord's joy in what would at first sight seem to us to have been a grave disaster. It is that only so could a really broad and enduring church be founded or propagated. The learned, the intellectuals, of every age, instinctively claim the prerogative of their learning. They are, in this respect, like rich men who also instinctively expect a prerogative position because they are rich; whom, therefore, our Lord similarly treated as being under a special disadvantage in their approach to His kingdom. What is the claim made' commonly by a learned class f It is that they will only accept as true what commends itself to them as the conclusion of their own reasonings. But the intellectual methods and principles of learned men are not commonly intelligible to the mass of ordinary men, and also vary considerably, even profoundly, from age to age and nation to nation. Thus a religion which in any age should approve itself to the learned class as the conclusion of its own reasoning would be a narrow religion, unacceptable to the mass of men and still more unacceptable to men of another nation or another civilization. If there is to be a catholic church, a religion · for the common man, all the world over; and in every generation, it must be based ' not on human reasoning but on divine revelation, on God's disclosure of Himself, and must be received by men in simple faith as God's own word. Our religion is not to be an evolution from within, but a bestowal from above.; not a conclusion of logic, but a gift of God; to be welcomed on authority and then verified in experience-- our own experience fortified and supported by the experience of the whole church. That is what the Bible says, and truly, both Old Testament and New: "Canst thou by searching find out God? Canst thou find out the Almighty unto perfection? It is high as heaven; what canst thou do? Deeper than the grave; what canst thou know? " "In the wisdom of God the world through its wisdom knew not God." "Hath not God made foolish the wisdom of the world?"1 That is the claim of the Christian faith. A brilliant scientist, like Louis Pasteur, may be a devout Christian, but that is because, like Pasteur, he has been content in the first instance to receive his faith, like the most ignorant person, as the word of God from the church which is commissioned to bear it.

2. The purpose of this book is to expound this word of God.--To receive the message of Christ from His church in simple docility a man must be convinced that Jesus Christ really is the Son of God, and has really sent His church into the world.

In one who comes from outside this conviction will be brought about in one case mostly by intellectual, in another case mostly by moral considerations, in another case by personal influence. To produce this preliminary intellectual conviction is the work of what is called "apologetics"-- that is, the reasoned expression of the grounds of Christian belief. In this book I am not concerned with that. I assume in my readers that they are so far convinced, or willing to be convinced, about Christ either by tradition from their fathers, or by intellectual reasonings, or by their moral needs, as to be ready tp listen with docile hearts to the message of "grace and truth which came by Jesus Christ." My duty is to make it plain that the message claims to be based, not on human reason, but on a divine revelation given us finally in Jesus Christ; and my business is to explain the points and articles of this message, as the church, which is Christ's commissioned agent, delivered it from the first. Personal faith is a gift-- a priceless gift--wrought in the heart by the Spirit of God: " No man can say, Jesus is Lord, but in the Holy Spirit." But an important part of the preparation of our hearts for this gift is to be ready to listen attentively and patiently to what the message is. To reject it or despise it without having really, been at pains to understand what it is, after all that the message of the Gospel has done for the world, is a sort of insolence.

3. The word of God must be looked for in the first instance from the church.--The church was at work perhaps some twenty years before any of the books of the New Testament, as we now have them, were written, and some seventy years before they were all written. It will not surprise us, therefore, to find out that no one of the books of the New Testament was written to give to any one his first instruction in the Christian religion. "That thou mayest know the certainty of those things in which thou wast instructed" is the object with which St. Luke wrote his Gospel. And when S. Paul writes in his Epistle to the Corinthians about the resurrection or the eucharist it is to remind them of "the gospel which I preached unto you, which also ye received." "For I delivered unto you first of all that which also I received." That is the tone of the whole New Testament. It assumes and takes for granted the rudimentary instruction which had been already given to the converts to the church. Speaking generally, we may say that all that is contained in our catechism is, in the New Testament, taken for granted as already familiar ground among the Christians. And the different books of the New Testament were written as occasion arose by the apostles or their companions to record the tradition in its best form, or to reinforce and explain and defend the fundamental faith. It is thus the function of "the church to teach and of the Bible to prove" and confirm the faith. And so I complete are the books of Scripture taken together, and so full the inspiration of the Spirit of God under which they were believed to have been written, that it became the accepted principle of the catholic church from the first, as it still is of the Church of England, that nothing could be part of the necessary faith but what can be verified and proved in Scripture. "Do not believe what I say simply," says a great teacher of the early church to his scholars preparing for baptism, "unless you receive the proof of what I tell you from the Holy Scriptures." With these preliminaries I propose to give a summary of the faith of the church, which is also the faith of the New Testament Scriptures.

CHAPTER III
The Doctrine of God and of His Creatures

The centre and root of the catholic is the revelation of the Fatherhood of God-- the doctrine that the one power which made and preserves and guides the whole universe is the almighty will of a perfectly good God, who creates and knows and loves not only all but each.

THE FATHERHOOD OF GOD

Welcome as it is to the hearts of men, this is perhaps the hardest of all Christian doctrines to the speculative intellect. It is so hard to reconcile with the facts of suffering and injustice and cruelty, and with the seeming moral indifference of nature. The intellect of man would never have attained securely to this position by mere inquiry and investigation. It rests on God's own revelation of Himself -- a revelation given specially through a long succession of Jewish prophets who were inspired to proclaim as the word of God the goodness of the Almighty,1 and it received its final expression through the lips of one who was more than a prophet, who was the Son of God--who therefore not only proclaimed the truth, and claimed the right to declare it with infallible certitude, but also, as incarnate in our manhood, disclosed to us the real character and mind of God in the intelligible terms of a human life.

Our Lord was always bringing home to the minds and hearts of men the truth of God's fatherhood, His universal and individual love. Consider the following characteristic sayings: "It is not the will of your Father which is in heaven that one of these little ones should perish." "Not a sparrow shall fall on the ground without your Father: fear ye not therefore, ye are of more value than many sparrows." "Your Father knoweth what things ye have need of before ye ask him." "Your heavenly Father knoweth that ye have need of all these things." And He claims to speak with infallible assurance--"No one knoweth the Father save the Son, and he to whomsoever the Son willeth to reveal Him"--and not only to reveal in words, but in His own person to express God. "He that hath seen me hath seen the Father." Such sayings abound in the Gospels, and are the centre of our Lord's teaching. They are best summarized in the great sentence of S. John, "God is love."

It is an amazing paradox. And there is no question that what made it believable was that it was revealed in full view of all the experience which makes it seem so paradoxical. The Old Testament revelation of the one good God was given in a blood-stained world that was being trampled by the feet of fierce conquering armies-- Assyrians and Egyptians, Babylonians and Persians, who neither showed nor expected any mercy. It was given to a weak and enslaved people--the Israelites in captivity--who knew all that bitter experience can teach. And when the Lord Jesus Christ expressed and deepened and expanded the doctrine, it was as " the man of sorrows and acquainted with grief," who in His own person endured everything that has ever been an argument against the divine love, everything that in slow and embittering experience has ever soured the hearts of men, and turned philanthropists into cynics. He held and proclaimed the mighty truth even from the cross of failure and shame, on which He asked the great question, "My God, my God, why didst thou forsake me?" And His resurrection the third day from the. dead was God's vindication of Him; the central evidence in one significant act that the power of God, the one power which made and rules the world, is through all seeming weakness and failure on the side of Jesus of Nazareth.

These, then, are the attributes of God which it is always most important to have in mind.

1. Omnipotence--which means that the one all-creating and all-pervading power, which is both in the whole universe and over it, inexhaustible and eternal, is the sovereign will of God, who can do all things which are in accordance with His own nature and purpose. He has willed to create free beings, and therefore tolerates all the confusion which their rebellion has introduced into the world, but He is yet in His supreme wisdom guiding all things to a conclusion, an "end of the world," in which He will vindicate Himself in His whole creation. Thus from the truth of God's almightiness follows the confident expectation of the Day of the Lord, of which we hear so much in the Bible, when God at last is to come into His own in the person of Jesus Christ His Son; " whereof he hath given assurance unto all men, in that he hath raised him from the dead."

2. Righteousness. The special characteristic of the whole Bible is its insistence on the character of God--that He is absolutely righteous and holy, and claims of all free beings whom He has created a like righteousness in their relation to Him and to one another; and is to be propitiated by no gifts or sacrifices or ceremonies, but only by conformity with His own character; and has impressed a witness to His righteousness upon the consciences of men, who thereby know themselves to be under God's righteous judgement; and has enlightened their conscience by the teaching of His prophets and His Son, through His Holy Spirit.

3. Love. The tremendous severity of the divine righteousness must always sause men to fear Him with a holy fear. But the perfection of righteousness is love. And finally, in the revelation of Jesus Christ the Son, the ultimate nature of God is disclosed as pure goodness--such that He loves every creature that He has created, and intends nothing but good for every one, and is afflicted in every one's affliction, and shrinks from no sacrifice in order to redeem, and will one day manifest His sovereign love in the whole universe. What more about the nature of God is expressed in His revelation of His heart towards man will appear when we come to speak of the Holy Trinity.

It has already appeared how God revealed Himself at last through His own and only-begotten Son, Jesus Christ our Lord. Him men saw and heard as man among men, and they came to believe in Him first as prophet, then as the Christ of God, and then as His eternal Son or Word incarnate. The process of this belief is apparent in the New Testament, and its conclusion found expression in the Creeds. The belief of the church, then, which is confirmed in the New Testament, is that Jesus Christ is the eternal Son of God, "very God of very God, "that is "of one substance with -the Father;" by whom all things were made and are sustained in being; who for us men and for our salvation was, in the fullness of time, made man by a human birth, through the power of the Holy Ghost, in the womb of the blessed virgin Mary; so that He was born "perfect God and perfect man," differing in His manhood from other men in that He was sinless--God's new creation; true man in all that properly belongs to humanity, but new man--the second Adam, free from all the taint and hindrance of sin. In this our manhood, in the power of the Holy Spirit, He lived and taught and gathered disciples and founded His church: in this manhood He was rejected, and suffered and was crucified: upon the cross He truly died, and His dead body was laid in the grave, while His spirit went where all human spirits go-- to hell, or Hades, the place of the dead, where He preached His gospel to the dead also: and on the third day, by the power of God, He was raised from the dead--not resuscitated to His old manner of life, but transformed in His bodily nature into the condition of the "spiritual body," a state of existence which S. Paul declares to be the destiny of us all. In this risen body He appeared to His disciples during forty days for the confirmation of their faith and for their further instruction, and mounted out of their sight by an ascension above the clouds which represented to their eyes the spiritual truth of His assumption to the throne of all the world, whence He shall come again in the final Day of the Lord to be the judge of quick and dead.

These events in our Lord's human life which have fallen within the scope of human experience can be expressed in literal human language. Thus He truly was born of the Virgin, and truly died, and truly after His resurrection appeared to His disciples and ascended to heaven. But, so far as concerns what lies outside human experience, what concerns His going to the place of departed spirits, or hell, and His "sitting in heaven at the right hand of God," we can only use symbolical language, for we have no experience of any world but this, and consequently no human words properly to express either the abode and state of the dead or the abode of God. And the same applies to all statements about the being of God, except so far as He has appeared as man in human experience; and to much of the language used about angels and about the creation of the world and the last things. Of all matters which lie outside human experience we can only use symbolical or analogical language. "We see through a glass darkly"--an enigmatic reflection as in a metal mirror. The mercy is that in Christ God has so manifested Himself within human experience that we can speak of Him also in the language of literal historical facts. That is the glory of our creed.

The redemptive work of our Lord is manifold, but it may be summarized under three heads. It is example, atonement, new life--or the pattern set before us, the sacrifice offered for us, the new life wrought in us.

1. The example or pattern of human life. By His words He has taught us all that human life may be, when lived in the light of God. By His deeds He showed what power can work in human life to dispel disease and misery. By all His conduct He proved how rich and glorious a thing human life can be. Henceforth the world can never forget it. Cynics and pessimists stand for ever rebuked. There is the true Son of Man. The fruit of constant meditation on the Gospels is to fix in our souls indelibly an image which will never suffer us to be content in ourselves or others with sensuality or selfishness or bitterness or contempt or hypocrisy or worldliness.

2. Atonement. But what of the past, the horrible, ever self-renewing past of humanity and of myself? How can we escape the contagion of the world and of our own selves? How can we break the chain and sequence of sin? All the world over men have been seeking God and coming before Him with offerings and sacrifices, feeling that God must have of their best, and seeking to render themselves acceptable to Him. But the conclusion is ever the same--that God does not want those things, for they are His own already; and " the blood of bulls and of goats cannot take away sin." Meanwhile the man himself remains conscious in his innermost soul that he cannot break with his own past or the past of humanity to which he belongs: "I am a man of unclean lips, and I dwell among a people of unclean lips." It is to this sort of feeling that the preaching of the atonement has appealed. And there is no doubt how universal its appeal has been.

In Jesus Christ our manhood took a fresh start. He is true man, but new man--wholly free from the taint of sin. He alone realizes perfectly the guilt of sin, because He alone does not share it. He alone realizes perfectly what man ought to be towards God. His life from end to end is a perfect sacrifice. When the sin which is in the world refused Him and rejected Him, because men would not part from their selfishness, their indolence, and their pride--when sin in the people of Israel closed in upon Him and brought Him to the cross--He recognized in the cross the will of God, an3 was obedient unto death. There at last in blood and agony He accomplished His sacrifice of perfect obedience. This is the New Man's act of reparation for all the lawlessness and wilfulness of the old humanity. He offers Himself without spot to God, and the perfect sacrifice of self is perfectly acceptable to God. It frees the hand of God to give to man, in Him, all that He would give. This is why the atonement is called also propitiation. Not because it changes the disposition of God towards us, but because it enables Him freely to exhibit His mercy.

In Him mankind is reconciled to God. He stands in will and intention for every man, as on earth He identified Himself with every man and disowned no one. Actually it means that every one who will come with entire faith in Him and become by baptism identified with Him, however sinful or imperfect he may be, can claim the forgiveness of his sins in His name, and can make a fresh start from a new standing-ground--?n Christ. He is washed white in the blood of the Lamb. This is the doctrine of " Christ for us." There are no sins too many or too great for God to forgive. There is no one who cannot break with his past and start afresh. Wholly without reference to any merits of ours, simply by the free gift of God's unmerited love, we can, every one of us, identify ourselves with Christ by faith, and that a thousand times over after a thousand relapses, and in His name be reconciled to God--absolved and set free from all the guilt of the past: "I will run the way of Thy commandments, because Thou hast set my heart at liberty."

3. But it is quite plain that the redemption of man must be something within him. If he is alienated from God nothing can restore him except such inward restoration as makes him once again Godlike. There is no fellowship with God possible except in likeness to God. This is the central and continuous witness of the Bible. Thus no view of our redemption by Christ would be tolerable which should find its sole or its chief expression in anything done for us. That can only be the prelude to what is done in us. The moral difficulties which have been felt so widely about the Christian doctrine of the atonement have been due in part to this consideration being ignored. Christ for us has been separated from Christ in us. But this is quite unjustifiable. Our Lord is represented in the Gospels as plainly instructing His disciples that their future enlightenment and inward renewal by His Spirit would be something far greater than anything which He could do for them while He was among them. Moreover, substitution is a very poor word to describe our Lord's relation to us even in His sacrifice.

He always appears as claiming men's identification with Himself in the spirit of His sacrifice. No idea of forgiveness which is consistent with a refusal on our own part of service and sacrifice can, for a moment, be read into Christ's words or those of His apostles. But His identification with men was very imperfect while He was still among them as one among many. Accordingly His glorification in heaven is represented as only the necessary beginning of His full activity among men. If the heavens cleaved around His ascending form and hid it from sight, it is but a few days before they cleave again; around the descending Spirit; and that Spirit comes not so much to supply His absence as to accomplish His presence, His presence with men in His body, which is the church.

THE HOLY SPIRIT

Spirit means breath or life. Thus the Spirit of God is that person of the ever-blessed Trinity who represents the breath or life of God. Thus "the Spirit of the Lord filleth the world." All the life of nature and all the activities of man, social, industrial, and artistic, are in the Old Testament ascribed to the Spirit. But because God's righteous character is the attribute of God which is there most emphasized, so the Spirit is before all else Holy Spirit, and He cannot dwell with unrighteousness and sin.

Only here and there a man, prophet or other, is recognized as possessed of the Holy Spirit. But a more abundant outpouring is anticipated not only upon the Christ who is to be, but also upon His people, universally, in the day of Christ. And it is this anticipation which is fulfilled through Jesus Christ, so fully that by comparison the Holy Spirit is spoken of as given for the first time in the great outpouring on the Day of Pentecost. Thus the distinguishing marks of the Pentecostal outpouring are two.

1. The Holy Spirit came down from the uplifted Christ, the head of the new and redeemed humanity, to fill the company and fellowship of men who are to carry on His work in the world; so that they shall be His organ or "body," in which He can live, and through which He can act, by His Spirit which He has given them.

2. The other distinguishing mark of this new gift of the Spirit is that it is freely given to all the members of the body. They are already, and are to continue to be, a body with different functions. There are apostles and other members, men and women. But on all alike is the Holy Spirit poured out for enlightenment and for strength, for work and for witness. And if an early Christian had been asked what, as distinguished from other men, a Christian is, he would have given one of two answers--either that he is a man who has come to believe in Jesus as Christ and Lord, or that he is a man who has, and knows he has, received His Spirit. But I must say more about this when I come, very soon, to write about the ministry of the Spirit.

THE HOLY TRINITY

Now we must pause for a moment reverently to consider the effect of all this redemptive work of God for men upon their thought of God. The name of God--the Jehovah or Lord of the Old Testament--has become to them now the name of the Father, about whom Jesus Christ had taught them so abundantly as His Father and theirs; and the name of the Son, Jesus Christ Himself, who had come out of the bosom of the Father to reveal Him, in whom they believed and whom they worshipped; and the name of the Spirit -- the Holy Spirit through whom they had abiding union with the Son and the Father.

The name of God is henceforth the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Ghost, three persons--so they came to express it, using the best word they could find--in one God. For "the Father is God and the Son is God and the Holy Ghost is God, and yet they are not three Gods, but one God." "In this Trinity there is no before or after, no greater or less, but the whole three persons are coeternal together and coequal"--Trinity in Unity and Unity in Trinity.

This formula was the outcome of the original experience of the church. At the side of the eternal Father was a Son, whom as man among men they had come to know, whom they had come to believe in as very God of very God; and from the Father and the Son had come forth the Spirit whom Christ had spoken of as "another," whom they had learned to think of as a living, divine person with whom they had to deal. And these divine three they knew were not three Gods. It was but the one God of Israel's old faith more fully disclosing Himself. The three moreover are not separable individuals. Wherever the Father acts, He acts through the Son, whether in creation or redemption, and by His Spirit. Wherever the Son acts, it is the Father who is acting in Him; and when He sends the Spirit, the Spirit in His coming brings the Son and the Father. It is one only God. Only as God has come nearer to men to redeem them something of His inner being has been disclosed. It is not a monotonous unity that reveals itself, but an eternal fellowship of Father, Son, and Spirit. That is to say, it is the sort of unity which we can think of as alive and real, even before ever the world was. In the mutual relationship of the divine persons we can understand how God in His eternal being is Love; and we can understand further why when He calls men unto fellowship with Himself it is always in society and not as isolated individuals: it is as a family, or a nation or a church; in any case as a fellowship of some sort. Because God Himself is eternal fellowship and eternal love, loneliness and selfishness cannot express Him.

HUMAN NATURE AND SIN.
ANGELS AND DEVILS

It is sometimes remarked that there is very little about man or sin in the Creeds, except just at the end. This is because it is the main purpose of the Creeds to summarize what God has done for man, and revealed about Himself in doing it. But there is much about man that is taken for granted; otherwise men could not have been the subjects of divine redemption, nor could the Lord of all have been made man.

What is taken for granted is that man was made " in God's image "--that is to say, that he is spirit as well as body, a personality and not a thing, endowed with intelligence and free-will, and made to be God's vicegerent in the world which was entrusted to his government. It is the tense of this great dignity of man which is renewed in our minds as we contemplate the Son of Man. And the motive of the divine redemption lies in the fact that our race, though created for so lofty a vocation, has plunged so deep into sin and has so deeply defaced in themselves the image of God, that only the self-sacrificing act of God in redeeming them can raise them from ruin or enable them to realize the purpose of God. "Neither is there any other name under heaven, that is given among men, save the name of Jesus, wherein we must be saved."

It is possible for one who thinks only of God's majesty to despise men. The overwhelming thought of the sovereignty of God in the mind of some of the greatest Christians, S. Augustine and Calvin for instance, has made them disparage or ignore man's right to be equitably treated.

But God has in fact given men such a right in making them persons and giving them a conscience. And the doctrine of the Bible as a whole, and of our Lord in particular, recognizes to the full the dignity bestowed upon every single child of man by his Creator, and the equitable and more than equitable love of God for each and every one--"who will have all men to be saved and to come to the knowledge of the truth"--"who is the saviour of all men," if they will only have it so.

And the Bible has a profoundly simple explanation of the terrible condition of humanity, which seems to cry out against the very idea either of man's dignity or of God's justice. The explanation is sin. The disorder of the world is due to sin. Voluntary correspondence with God is only possible if refusal of correspondence is also possible--that is lawlessness. This i is the Bible doctrine of sin. Sin is lawlessness. It is refusal to obey the will of God: and there is not in the whole' universe any other kind of lawlessness. It is the foolish claim of the creature to be independent of the Creator that has wrought all this havoc. That is why man needs to be redeemed.

And we must extend our view beyond the bounds of mankind. In this vast universe there is no reason to suppose that men are the only free and intelligent beings. Indeed it is almost unimaginable. Certainly our Lord and the prophets and apostles would have us believe that beyond man there are vast hosts of intelligent spirits, good and bad, angels and devils. And the struggle between good and evil in this world is thus thrown upon the background of a vaster scene of conflict.

"We wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against the principalities, against the powers, against the world-rulers of this darkness, the spiritual hosts of wickedness." "Your adversary the devil, as a roaring lion, walketh about, seeking whom he may devour: whom withstand steadfast in your faith." And the good angels are not only the worshipping host of heaven, not only mysterious forces in nature, but also "ministering spirits sent forth to do service for men.

But into this dimly-known background of human life we must carry back the same principle. All created beings were made by God in love and for good. If they have become evil, it is because they have used against God, by a perverted freedom, the power that was given them to use for Jrlim. Wherever sin is, it is lawlessness.

And it does not need any revelation, either in any other age or to-day, to tell us how deep and wide is the havoc which sin has wrought. All men have sinned. And sin has been disastrous in its effects, as is shown in experience. And because men are not entirely individual, but are united by physical and social bonds in families and races and the one common race, so sin has infected and disordered the whole race of mankind. It is already in us before the beginning of our personal consciousness. "In sin hath my mother conceived me." This is the Christian doctrine of sin, "actual" and "original," or individual and social.

No student of this doctrine, in particular no student of the teaching of Jesus Christ, will ever echo the foolish idea that sin is a survival in us of our animal ancestry which we are outgrowing. True it infects the body; but its seed is in the spirit. It is wilfulness and selfishness--the refusal of God. Our Lord will not let us think that bodily sins--drunkenness and lust--are worse than selfishness and pride, or that the sin of the barbarian is any way greater or more serious than the sin of the highly civilized man. In fact the opposite is the case. Sin accompanies every stage of human development, and threatens with disaster every individual and every civilization. And such is the respect with which God treats the freedom of man that He endures all the awful havoc which sin has made, while everywhere, in the soul of every human being, and on the great stage of the world, He is working for redemption--redemption which is by sacrifice.

That is the call of Christ, then--the call to redemption. There is no one who does not need to be redeemed. It is true that Christ does more than redeem us--He brings us to perfection. Man was created at the bottom of the ladder of progress. He was not created perfect, but only capable of attaining perfection by the grace of God. The humanity which is revealed in Christ is not humanity as it was created, but humanity at the very height of its possibilities. Christ consummates humanity as well as redeems it. None the less, every single human being is in sin, and needs redemption, and not merely development. He needs a fresh start--to be converted or turned; to be regenerated or grafted upon a fresh stock--the stock of Christ.

But this, and the great and eternal destiny of man, we shall have to consider in succeeding chapters.

CHAPTER IV
The Church and the Sacraments

WHEN the Holy Spirit came down from Christ in heaven on the day of Pentecost, He came to fill with Christ's own life the church which had been already gathered to await His coming. Henceforth the church is Christ's body, one organism (if I may so speak) with its Head in heaven,1 and His living instrument for His work in the world. Thus it stands a visible institution in history from the first chapter of the Acts .of the Apostles onward, awaiting the conversion of individuals to Christ. The individual converts did not combine to form the church. It was there before them. Conversion leads necessarily to incorporation in the church? It could lead to nothing else: for there is no belonging to Christ except by membership in His body. As the Gospel is preached in city after city churches arise--the church of Corinth, the church of Ephesus, and so on; but each of these churches is the local representative of the one church. It is all one gradually expanding fellowship: the church is one as Christ is one: holy because consecrated in Him by His Spirit: catholic because there can be in it "neither Jew nor Greek, male nor female, barbarian, Scythian, bond nor free." It is the destined home of all human beings simply in virtue of their being men or women. It is one all-embracing community, destined to extend itself to the ends of the earth, and bind in one faith and fellowship all kinds and classes of men.

The idea that the essence of Christianity lies in a merely individual faith in Christ, and that church membership is a secondary thing, is not to be found in the New Testament. The fatherhood of God and the salvation wrought by Christ are to be realized only in the brotherhood of men, which is the church. It is very difficult for men, different as they are in temperament, class, and race, to become or to remain one brotherhood. The New Testament abundantly illustrates the difficulty. In overcoming it is to be found the real triumph of Christ. "He hath made both (Jew and Gentile) one." According to the New Testament all men by their true nature are intended for brotherhood, but only in Christ can they really become brothers. Thus, the church is "the brotherhood." S. Paul would not have tolerated for a moment the idea of two churches at Corinth or Ephesus, one for Jews and one for Gentiles, or one for free men and one for slaves. He would not have tolerated the idea that a man can first believe and then choose which church to belong to. There can be only one church to which all believers are, by their faith, bound to belong. It is Christ who by His sacrifice has broken down the barriers between man and man, and made it possible for men in Him to accomplish the difficult task of realizing and maintaining unity.

But we must stop to consider two difficulties which naturally present themselves to our minds.

1. The doctrine of "salvation only in the church" seems a narrow doctrine from two points of view--first, because it has been interpreted to mean that everlasting misery is the destiny of all who are not members of the church, whether heathen abroad or unbelievers at home. But this is a mistake. We know for certain the character of God as it is revealed in Jesus Christ. We know that in a real sense all men by their very nature belong to Christ in whom "all things,"and much more all rational beings, "consist." We know also that God's opportunities extend beyond the limits of this life. He will deal equitably with every soul. He alone can judge. He will never condemn any one who has tried honestly to be true to the best light he had: of that we may feel quite sure. But the great salvation which Christ brings is to be a visibly manifested thing, as Christ was visibly manifested. It is represented by "a city set on a hill." It is a great organized society going out into all the world in the saving power of Christ. When we say that salvation is to be found only in the church we mean not something reserved in the unknown depths of God's mercy, but something here and now covenanted, accepted, experienced and proclaimed.

2. But Christianity has been a long time in the world, and there are all kinds of Christian churches not in communion with one another. It is surely narrow to proclaim that there is only one church; for, whatever definition you may give of the church, you are sure to "unchurch" a number of very excellent Christians who belong to other communions which you do not recognize. This is the greatest of difficulties, and we must come back to it before we have done. But now I would ask you simply to consider, with a quiet and determined contemplation, what is the intention expressed in the New Testament, which is indeed the intention of Christ. He meant all His disciples to be one in a visible unity. There is no mention of any invisible church in this world. And to-day, amid the clamour of our class divisions, amid the horror of nominally Christian nations engaged in slaughtering one another, we turn again longingly to Christ's intention. It is schism that is narrow, not catholicity. It is schism--providing a separate church for each nation, a separate church for each class or each; distinctive disposition of men--it is schism; that makes the witness of Christ so feeble in the world. And the doctrine of the one catholic church, constraining all men who profess belief in Christ to discipline themselves enough to live in unbroken fellowship--a fellowship which transcends all natural divisions of race and class--it is this alone that can give us a really broad Christianity. "We are all one manhood in Christ Jesus." And, indeed, the world to-day would be far better off, the witness to Christ would be far better borne, if in every country we had but half the number that we now have of nominal Christians, but these maintaining the unity of the spirit in the bond of peace.

Our Lord, then, certainly meant all the believers in His name to feel the obligation of belonging to the one church. That is the unmistakable witness of the New Testament. The very difficulty of maintaining such a unity among all the differences of human nature is to be one main trial of the sincerity of our faith. And the reality of our obligation to maintain the unity of the society is brought home to us by the institution of visible sacraments as instruments of spiritual grace.

THE SACRAMENTS

The sacraments are "outward and visible signs of an inward and spiritual grace given unto us." In their principle they are in harmony with the whole system of the material universe. For everything visible in the world expresses some spiritual meaning and contains some spiritual force. We men ourselves are embodied spirits, and spiritual reality must come home to us, like all other reality, through our bodily organs. It is in accordance with the deep necessity of our being that "The Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us." And the church with its visible sacraments is the extension in idea and in reality of the incarnation. The gifts of God in Christ are not to depend upon our subjective feelings, but upon the will of God, and are guaranteed to our wills by the outward sign.

But also the sacraments are social ceremonies--ceremonies connected with membership. Baptism, as taken over by the catholic from the Jewish church, was regarded not only as a ceremony of personal cleansing, but also as admission into the holy community. "By one Spirit were we all baptized into one body." Confirmation is an outward blessing of each admitted member by the local head of the community, and conveys to him his equipment for full membership. The Holy Communion is a common sharing of'the one bread and the one cup--the speaking symbols of membership. Absolution is restoration to the fellowship of the community, Ordination is appointment to office in the community. Thus, by making sacraments, visible ceremonies of a visible society, to be the instruments of spiritual grace to the individual--by making these social sacraments to be the provided means of personal salvation--God has made it apparent that His salvation is no gift to isolated individuals, but a gift given to members of a body, a gift for membership.

Only it needs to be remembered that when we say that the great sacraments are "generally necessary to salvation" we do not limit the power of God to give to individuals what He wills to give, outside all sacraments, in this life or beyond it. We are speaking of salvation in the sense explained above as 'something open, covenanted, and proclaimed.

As to the number of the sacraments there has been much controversy. If you take the general definition of sacraments to be "outward and visible signs of an inward and spiritual grace given" you may reckon a large number of sacraments. If you add to your definition "ordained by Christ Himself"--that is, ordained by Him in their outward form during His earthly ministry as recorded in the four Gospels, then you must reckon them as two only. But, in accepting this definition, the Church of England, in our present Prayer Book, does not exclude the use of the word sacrament in a less restricted »ense. I propose in this book to treat as sacraments, besides the two great "sacraments of the Gospel" Baptism and the Holy Communion, also Confirmation--which is the apostolic completion of baptism,--the reconciliation of the penitent or Penance, Matrimony, Ordination, and Unction of the Sick, which, in the greater part of the catholic church, are reckoned as the sacraments.

I must add that sacraments were entrusted to the church, which has authority, under Christ, to "bind" and "loose," that is to legislate with divine sanction; and therefore, except so far as the outward ceremony was fixed once for all by the authority of Christ and His apostles, the church must be regarded as having authority to determine the conditions of administration--that is, to decide what constitutes a "valid" sacrament, meaning by the word "valid" a sacrament which the church recognizes and ratifies. A sacrament may be irregular in the conditions of its administration, but still valid and not to be repeated. I hope I need not add that God is not tied by conditions of validity, but can give His blessing where and how He sees fit. But every society must have for its official action conditions of validity.

Before I go on further I would seek to kindle the imagination of my readers with a sense of the profound adaptation of the whole system of church and sacraments to the moral needs of men. As fellowship in a nation supports each citizen and guarantees his freedom; as fellowship in a regiment sustains a soldier's courage when, alone, he might fail; as fellowship in a trade-union supports the solitary worker with the protection of comradeship--so fellowship in the church is meant to sustain the weakness of the individual, through all experiences of failure and disillusionment; the sympathy of a common creed is meant to carry him through periods of depression and vacillation; and the gifts of divine grace as embodied and guaranteed in sacraments are meant to lift him out of the vagaries of subjective emotion upon the solid ground of objective reality.

Now I propose to deal with the sacraments in detail, and because it is of their very essence to be definite ceremonies, I propose to state with regard to each what, in the common judgement of the church, is the outward part of the sacrament that is the matter or visible material and action, and the form or words defining the purpose and meaning of the sacrament; what the inward spiritual grace; of what sort is the appointed minister; and who are the subjects or proper recipients of the sacrament.

Holy Baptism.--Most respectable societies, existing for any permanent objects, have some ceremony of initiation or incorporation. Baptism, then, is the ceremony of incorporation into Christ and His church. Its outward matter is washing with water. Its form is "I baptize thee in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Ghost." The priest is the proper minister, but baptism by any baptized individual is allowed, and every Christian should be ready to baptize in an emergency. Its inward and spiritual grace, that is, the gift which, by the will of God, is declared to accompany the ceremony, is incorporation into Christ. The baptized person who has hitherto been only a member of our sinful humanity is hereby regenerated by the Holy Ghost; that is, he receives a new birth or incorporation into Christ and His body. He becomes a member of Christ's family, with all the privileges of membership; and can claim, in Christ's name, the forgiveness of his sins. "We acknowledge one baptism for the remission of sins." This is the plain teaching of the New Testament and of the Prayer Book. I say that he can claim, in Christ's name, the forgiveness of his sins: for sacraments are not charms. They are indeed in themselves effective instruments of divine grace; but, because we are rational beings, God can do nothing for us I without our co-operation. And baptism will do a man no spiritual good unless he, by faith, will claim as his own the gifts I which baptism has given him. Any un-baptized person may be the subject of baptism.

The baptismal services of the church were drawn up in the first instance for adults capable in their own persons of renouncing the life of sin from which Christ redeems them, and professing their belief in the Christian creed after due instruction, and their intention to obey and follow Christ. Solemn vows to this effect have always been required of those to be baptized. But, apparently from the first, the children of Christian parents have been admitted into church membership by baptism in their infancy, and sponsors representing the church have answered on their behalf, and have guaranteed their Christian education if they should survive infancy. Without some such guarantee the church does not authorize the baptism of infants. Indiscriminate baptism of infants is simply an abuse.

Confirmation, or the laying on of hands.-- From the beginning the laying on of hands by the apostles followed baptism. Thus baptism and the laying on of hands taken together (and sometimes called by the one name of baptism) were held in the early church to constitute the ceremony of initiation into the Christian society. And both together were solemnly administered only at the season of Easter each year. But the bishop's presence being needed for the second part of the ceremony, and not for the first, the desire not to defer baptism has led to the separation in the Western Church of the two parts--of confirmation from baptism. Nevertheless they should still be regarded as the two parts of the one ceremony, and it is intended that both should be publicly administered. The proper matter of confirmation is the laying on of hands (to which in early days unction with oil was added, but it is not necessary). The proper form is some formula of blessing which makes mention of or implies the gift of the Holy Ghost. The inward and spiritual grace is the gift of the Holy Ghost to strengthen the person confirmed, and to equip him or her for membership. For, as in ordination, the laying on of hands symbolizes consecration for service, and the confirmed person should be taught to regard himself as a fully-equipped member of Christ, that is equipped for service and endowed with all the duties and rights of membership, and as sharing the kingship and priesthood of the whole body of Christ. The minister of confirmation is the bishop. The subject of confirmation is any baptized person. In England, confirmation being reserved to the years of discretion, that is, the time when the child can understand and learn and choose for himself, and baptism being generally administered in infancy, the person to be confirmed is required before his confirmation to renew the promises of his baptism. The age of confirmation has been the subject of much discussion, but certainly the Prayer Book suggests an earlier age than has of recent years been customary among us.

The Holy Communion.--The greatest of all the sacraments of the church is the Holy Communion--the greatest because it sums up in itself such an incomparable richness of spiritual meaning and force; because of the glory of the presence and gift there vouchsafed; because it perpetuates both Bethlehem and Calvary; because it evokes all the powers and faculties of the worshipping soul; because it is commended to us as the Lord's own service--"This do in remembrance of me." As we read the four accounts of its institution,1 its elementary meaning becomes plainly intelligible. At the Last Supper with His disciples, Jesus took bread and blessed it, and brake, and gave it to them saying, "Take, eat, this is my body," and they all partook of the one bread. And He took the cup and blessed it, and gave it to them saying, " Drink ye all of this, for this is my blood of the new covenant which is poured out for you for the remission of sins." And they all drank of the one cup. This simple ceremony speaks for itself. It means sharing together; and that in which they are to share together is He Himself, whose body was broken and whose blood was shed to redeem them. When our Lord said, " Do this in remembrance of me," and so made this speaking ceremony the central sacrament of His religion, He must have meant that the communion (or sharing together) of all His people in Him, who died for them, was to be its governing idea. But we must examine the rite a little more closely to take in its meaning in different aspects.

1. It is the communication of Christ to each receiver. The priest, the officer of the church, repeating what Christ our Lord did and said when He instituted these holy mysteries, consecrates the bread to be His body and the wine to be His blood, that we receiving these outward things may feed on Christ, may eat His flesh and drink His blood. We cannot analyse the mystery. Christ is made present there in His body and in His blood under the humble form of bread and wine. While with our eyes we see nothing but the outward gifts, by faith we behold heavenly things made present amongst us. True, in the bread broken and the wine outpoured, separate the one from the other, we see the remembrance of a transaction upon this earth, the sacrifice of Calvary. But if we inquire into the spiritual reality, we know that it is not the dying Christ but the living Christ--Christ as He is in the heavenly places--who is here to feed us with His own life under these humble forms. " Christ herein imparteth Himself, even His whole entire person, to every soul that receiveth Him." He who was our example outwardly is now by His Spirit given to be our new and inward life, to dwell continually in our hearts, and to renew us into His own likeness, strengthening our weakness, and purifying our uncleanness. And in the whole process of the sacrament we recognize the characteristic work of the Holy Spirit, who in the consecration brings the presence of Christ, who Himself communicates Him to the receiver.

2. But it is not merely a gift to the individual receiver; it is a sharing together or communion in the body and blood of Christ. We share together, not merely with those who are kneeling at the same altar, but with all Christ's people, the living and the dead, the great company which no man can number, in one communion and fellowship. Thus the body of Christ renews the body which is His church, and the blood, which is the life of Christ, reinvigorates its common life. We need, more than can easily be said, to recall to the consciousness of each communicant that his every communion lays upon him the privilege and the obligation of behaving as a brother to every other communicant, "girding himself with humility to serve them." We have very few communicants amongst us compared to what we ought to have; but it would be a different England if every one of them behaved as if he really believed S. Paul's words1--"The cup of blessing which we bless, is it not a communion in the blood of Christ? The bread which we break, is it not a communion in the body of Christ? Seeing that we, who are many, are one bread, one body; for we all partake of the one bread." 3. Finally, the eucharist (as it is called) is the great Christian sacrifice. According to the doctrine of the Bible the only sacrifice acceptable to God is a spiritual sacrifice: that means the sacrifice of a person, and of words or things only as the expressions of a person. In the holy eucharist we come solemnly before God, as His people met for the commemoration of our redemption, to present to Him the sacrifice of our persons and our goods, our alms and our oblations, our prayers and our praises. And it is our own symbolic gifts of bread and wine that are consecrated to become the body and the blood of our Redeemer, the body that was broken and the blood that was shed for us. Thus, by His presence among us, all our imperfect and sin-stained sacrifices are brought into union with Christ's one full, perfect, and sufficient sacrifice, which was once offered for us, but is ever pleaded in the heavenly places. Thus in every eucharist the one perfect sacrifice is pleaded amongst us afresh. And, when we have fed upon Him, we ourselves are joined to His sacrifice; and in Him we offer ourselves, our souls and bodies to be all together a reasonable, holy, and lively sacrifice unto God who made us. This is indeed the end of our being. In this way we may strive imperfectly to summarize and express, what still remains inexpressible, the meaning of this august mystery. Here is the whole Christian truth in its every aspect. Here is the whole Blessed Trinity at work: here is the incarnation and the atonement perpetuated and applied; here is union with the heavenly Christ, and the eager expectation of His second coming--"Ye do show the Lord's death till He come;" here is the stimulus alike to divine worship and to human brotherhood; here is the satisfaction of the innermost longing of the heart of man for union with God.

It is a terrible mistake to have allowed the Lord's service to become anything else than the central service of the morning of the Lord's Day. As things are the vast majority of the members of the church never receive the blessed sacrament: millions of the baptized never join in the only divinely-appointed act of Christian worship--the most easily intelligible, because the most dramatic, of all services--and indeed are barely conscious of what is there enacted.

I know what is the obstacle to restoring the Lord's service to its proper place. It is the strength of the tradition which puts the chief service at eleven o'clock. Now that we have become more widely desirous to obey the rule of the ancient church, that the body of Christ should be the first food that passes our lips, the eucharist celebrated with music and a sermon at eleven o'clock as the chief service of the Sunday is apt to become a celebration with very few communicants, or none at all except the priest. And, in spite of the example of the Roman and Eastern churches, in their later course, a great many of us, even of those who have no prejudice whatever against the attendance at the service of the altar of those who are not communicating, feel that the chief service should be the corporate communion, the service at which the most communicate, as it was in the catholic church everywhere for wellnigh the first thousand years of its life. I am convinced that we cannot habitually separate the offering of the sacrifice from the act of communion without grave loss. I cannot help looking longingly, and not without hope, for a state of things when the chief service of the Sunday shall be at an hour when all can communicate who are qualified and prepared.

Before we leave this great theme it ought to be said that the matter of this holy sacrament is bread, leavened or unleavened, and wine or wine mingled with a little water; and the form the act and words of consecration; and the minister a priest; and the subjects (or proper recipients) all baptized and confirmed persons (or such as at least are ready and willing to be confirmed) who have not subsequently been put out of communion, but can approach the holy sacrament in faith and repentance.

Reconciliation of Penitents, or Penance.-- Sin is not only a private matter between the soul and God; it is a weakening of the whole life of the church--however secret it may be. The church is wronged by any and every sin. It is this feeling in part, I suppose, which causes S. James to exhort Christians thus--"Confess your sins one to another, and pray one for another, that ye may be healed." It is also certain that Christians from the beginning believed that our Lord had left to His church the power to absolve or retain sins. S. John records His solemn grant of this power to the eleven on the day on which He rose from the dead. "Receive ye the Holy Ghost: whose soever sins ye forgive, they are forgiven unto them; and whose soever sins ye retain, they are retained."' Whatever other applica tion these words may have, at least one principal application was to members of the church who fell into scandalous sin. Such persons were put cut of communion and, when they had shown marks of true penitence or " done penance," were readmitted to communion in some formal way, as by prayer and the laying on of hands of the bishop. This was done, as S. Paul says, "in the person of Christ," the action of the church being regarded as the action of Christ Himself in the church. That is the essence of the church doctrine of "penance"--the duty of the church to judge its members, and the authority of the church to retain or forgive their sins. And this is a properly sacramental action, because the formal action of the church in absolving or reconciling penitents carried with it the action of Christ. This system of penance was applied in the first instance, as I have said, to sins which caused scandal, to open sins. In the Church of England at the Reformation it was desired to restore, as far as possible, this system of public penance; and one of the Thirty-Nine Articles (the thirty-third) speaks of such notorious sinners as being excommunicated and then "openly reconciled by penance." In our old parish books there are frequent notices of such public penances down into the eighteenth century.

But besides this, from the beginnings of the church its members are found voluntarily confessing their secret sins--at first in the public congregation, later to the bishop or priest appointed to receive such confessions; and then doing penance and being absolved, at first publicly and then privately. In the Middle Ages such private or auricular confession of all grave or mortal sins was made obligatory, which it had not been in earlier times. At the Reformation all such obligation was removed, and the matter now stands with us thus. The authority of the priesthood to absolve is strongly maintained. The words of the ordination of a priest among us run thus: " Receive the Holy Ghost for the office and work of a priest in the church of God here committed unto thee by the imposition of our (the bishop's) hands: whose sins thou dost forgive they are forgiven, and whose sins thou dost retain they are retained," etc. And the following form of absolution is (in the Order for the Visitation of the Sick) given to the priest to use: " Our Lord Jesus Christ, who hath left power to His church to absolve all sinners who truly repent and believe in Him, of His great mercy forgive thee thine offences; and by His authority committed to me, I absolve thee from all thy sins, in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Ghost." As in the ancient church, it is strongly maintained in our Prayer Book, that all worthy penitence, without any sacramental confession or absolution, is met by the fullest forgiveness of God. But any one who cannot quiet his own conscience, but requires further comfort or advice, is exhorted to come to the parish priest, "or to some other discreet and learned minister of God's word, and open his grief; that by the ministry of God's holy word he may receive the benefit of absolution, together with ghostly counsel and advice, to the quieting of his conscience and avoiding of all scruple and doubtfulness." Besides this, on their sick-beds people are to be "moved" to confess their sins to the priest, if they feel their conscience "troubled with any weighty matter."

Circumstances have changed greatly since the Reformation. Public penance has become more and more and more difficult to administer. The sense of sin has fallen in most men to a very low level. It is necessary for a living church to give directions suited to present-day needs.

All that I am at present authorized by the church to say is that (where public notorious sin is not in question) no priest is justified in requiring any one to make his confession; and no priest is justified in refusing the ministry of confession and absolution to any penitent who desires it. There has been of late years an immense increase in the number of confessions made: but if the gravity of sin was more widely felt, I believe that multitudes more would desire to submit themselves to the judgement of the church through its ministers, seeing that the authority to judge and to absolve has been so explicitly and solemnly given it by Christ.

Of course, the ministers of the church may exercise judgement wrongly just as the preacher may misrepresent the divine message. Over all their mistaken judgements we must believe in the rectifying action of God. Still the fact remains that to bind us to His church Christ deliberately committed this tremendous authority to fallible men.

The outward sign of absolution is some formula or prayer of absolution spoken after the confession of the penitent has been made, and any necessary requirements, necessary as evidence of real repentance, have been accepted: the inward and spiritual grace is divine absolution and the removal of the barriers to Communion: the minister is a priest: and the subject is any baptized Christian who has sinned and repented.

Holy Matrimony--The religion of Christ centres in the home as much as in the church. And the sacredness of the home is based upon holy matrimony--the lifelong union of man and woman. By civil law marriage is required to be before an appointed officer, minister of religion or civil officer; and our ecclesiastical law requires the ministration of the priest. But its essence lies in the deliberate contract of the man and woman with one another. It is sacramental only because ratified and rendered indissoluble by God -- "Those whom God hath joined together let no man put asunder." By our church law in England a marriage, duly made and consummated, is strictly indissoluble except by death; and, while it admits of separation a mensa et thoro, allows of no such divorce as would free either party, during the lifetime of the other, to marry again. Of this there can be no question. It is the opinion of the best scholars that this indissolubility represents the intention of Christ; so the church in general has interpreted it; so the present writer believes. But there exists, apparently, in S. Matthew's Gospel the permission for the husband of an adulterous wife to divorce his wife and marry again.

This we must believe to be a declension from the standard of our Lord. But we cannot deny that it is within the competence of any national church to admit a relaxation so authorized. Those who desire such relaxation of our law must move for its formal adoption. Meanwhile our church law admits no exception. It upholds the strict standard of Christ, and the standard of the church at its best. And those who break in this important matter the law of the society to which they belong must expect to forfeit the privileges of communion. This law of indissoluble marriage has proved, as the first disciples anticipated, a very hard standard to maintain. All sorts of evasions have been adopted, and it is possible that nowadays it could not be strictly maintained as the law of civil society. But I believe that the church is doing the will of Christ in maintaining the law of indissoluble marriage as the requirement of its communion.

One other matter must also be mentioned. The church has so believed in the union of husband and wife as to treat the relatives of either party as the relatives of the other--to treat "affinity" as equivalent to "consanguinity." More than that, the church has believed this principle to be divine. At the Reformation the legitimacy of Queen Elizabeth depended on the doctrine that no ecclesiastical authority could dispense from it. Our modern state hat broken through this principle at one point by sanctioning marriage with a deceased wife's sister; but our part of the church retains the old principle, and refuses sanction.

Unction of the Sick.--There ought to be no question that our Lord would have us regard sickness and disease as (at least for the most part) an invasion of the evil one which we ought to resist and repel. And as a part of sanitary science, side by side with the ministry of the physician, we ought to recognize spiritual influences for the healing of the body. There certainly is such a thing as faith-healing. And of this ministry S. James speaks thus: "Is any among you sick? let him call for the elders of the church; and let them pray over him, anointing him with oil in the name of the Lord. And the prayer of faith shall save him that is sick. And if he have committed sins, it shall be forgiven him."1 In accordance with this passage, the church has generally administered Unction of the Sick: and though, unfortunately as some of us think, its misuse led to its abandonment as an authorized and sacramental ordinance at the Reformation, it is being restored among us, with the sanction of many individual bishops, who are willing to bless the oil for this purpose, wh«n any sick person claims what S. James so plainly counsels. Let us indeed pray that its restoration may be accompanied by the restoration all along the line of the right attitude of the church towards disease, as being not only an infliction to be patiently borne, but an aggression of evil to be resisted both by science and by faith, and expelled both from the society and the individual, as far as possible. The wise know well how far that expulsion might go.

Holy Orders.--Bishops and priests, as ministers of Christ, have been already mentioned repeatedly. Christ Himself instituted a ministry in the persons of His apostles, intended plainly to endure to the end; and the apostolate stands at the beginning of the Acts with an unquestioned authority. Thus the church did not appoint the ministry; it was there to start with, as appointed by Christ. There were the Twelve and men of like authority, such as Barnabas and Saul, who exercised a general ministry and a general authority; and when local churches arose, "presbyters" (also called "bishops") were ordained by the apostles in each church, with deacons and, perhaps, deaconesses. In the New Testament there are also other figures, such as prophets and evangelists and teachers, whose exact position is not easy to define. And in the earliest period when the church was undoubtedly expecting the advent of Christ immediately, there was naturally no thought for the future. But even before the end of the apostolic age, whec the church felt compelled to contemplate a longer future, it threw itself on the principle of succession--that is, the principle that the ministry as instituted by Christ was intended to be perpetual down the ages; so that every minister, who could rightly claim to be such, in any grade of office, must have received ordination from those in the church before him who had authority to ordain and who had in their turn received it step by step from the apostles. The history of the way in which the ministry of the later church emerged out of the apostolic ministry cannot be exactly traced. But we must insist that in this, as in all other matters not precisely ordered by Christ, the church has authority to bind and loose; and with an extraordinary unanimity of judgement--a unanimity which lasted down to the sixteenth century--it was held for certain that the three chief orders of the ministry were bishops, presbyters, and deacons: that of these the bishops held in succession from the apostles the full authority and ministry of the word and sacraments, with sole authority to ordain the other ministers; that priests held a minor priestly authority, especially authority to celebrate the holy eucharist and to absolve and to preach; and that the deacons held a ministry of assistance.

The democratic principle in the appointment to the ministry was very fully recognized in early times: the people, it was commonly agreed, should appoint the persons whom the bishops should ordain, and should choose the bishops themselves. But the act of ordination--the laying on of hands with accompanying prayer or formula -- was regarded as sacramental, an outward and visible sign of an inward and spiritual grace thereby given. So it was regarded from the beginning, as S. Paul had spoken to S. Timothy of "the gift that was in him by the laying on of his (S. Paul's) hands."

It will be plain to any one that the principle of the succession in the ministry is even a necessary element in the idea of a visible church. If there is one church, one visible society, to which all who are Christ's must needs belong, it must be made manifest where that church is to be found.

Continuity of doctrine is a great thing; but it is not enough. There must also be continuity of persons. Otherwise any group of dissatisfied individuals might go off by themselves and still say "We are the church." The obligation to continue in communion with the bishop provided the necessary bond. The succession of bishops guaranteed the continuity of the church, and the communion of bishops with one another was intended to guarantee the unbroken fellowship of the church.

What has been done in this chapter is to outline the doctrine of the one holy catholic church, with its ministry and sacraments, as it was believed and taught with astonishing unanimity for more than fifteen hundred years in Christendom, and as it is still maintained in the Church of England. That it is maintained under difficulties and in the face of objections we know; and some of these difficulties and objections, as urged both from the Roman Catholic and from the Protestant side, I hope briefly to consider in a later chapter.

Meanwhile, what I have tried to do is to give Churchmen a sense of the way in which the doctrines of the visible church and of the sacraments and of the ministry hold together as parts of one whole, and how that whole is rooted in the intention of Christ and in the very idea of the incarnation.

CHAPTER V
The Last Things and the Communion of Saints

THE END OF THE WORLD

THE church looks forward to an "end of the world "--that is, an end of the present familiar order of things, which is to usher in the future state, " the world to come "--that is, the kingdom or reign of God, when all rebellion and evil has been utterly overcome and purged away, and God shall be all in all. There are passages in the New Testament in which the visible church is identified with the kingdom, and other passages in which they are distinguished. Thus, while we belong to the church, we are taught to work and pray that God's kingdom may come, implying that it is not here at present. Perhaps on the whole we may say that the kingdom is something larger than the visible church, but that both are of one piece: that the church represents the kingdom in the present world and by its prayers and activities prepares the way for its future coming. Thus the church is to expect with the most profound desire the " day of God," when God is to come into His own in the whole universe of things, and the undisputed and universal reign of His Christ is to begin.

As I have already said, the end of the world, like the beginning of the world, is presented to us in forms and images which are symbolical. But they are symbolical of what is to be actually true. In fact, it follows inevitably from any real belief in God as the one only creator and sustainer of the world, that one day He must vindicate Himself in His whole creation. Thus whenever the prophets of God in the Old Testament or the New see any kingdom or empire or institution or individual flouting God in arrogance and pride, they anticipate with assurance for such an institution or person, if not repentance, then overthrow. That is God's day. And the prophets treat each particular overthrow of an insolent creature of God, which has used against God the powers which come from Him, as a specimen of fhe great final day of the Lord in the whole universe; and they commonly describe it in terms of the final universal convulsion. We must recognize that the prophets had an inspired ana assured insight into the principles of God's government of the world, and accordingly they foresee what must happen in a particular case--for instance, that Babylon or apostate Jerusalem or persecuting Rome must be overthrown. Thus they utter real predictions, which have been fulfilled. But they have no general knowledge of future history given to them. In their anticipations they constantly foreshorten the future and give freedom to their imagination in describing the details. This is characteristic of Biblical "apocalypses" or unveilings of the future. There is an element of true and definite prediction and also a large element of symbolical scenery. It is only in a very restricted sense that prophecy can be described as "history written beforehand." And those, for instance, who have tried to construct history beforehand out of the materials of S. John's "Revelation" have proved in almost all instances remarkably wrong.

The really important point is that the prophets were inspired to assure the faithful people of God that nothing should prevail against God or His Christ, and that, in spite of all seeming failures, the day of the Lord and of His Christ was sure. Our Lord Himself uses the apocalyptic method. He has a definite prediction to make--that is, the destruction of apostate Jerusalem. This He predicts as about to occur in the present generation, and His prediction was fulfilled. It occurred in what we call the ordinary course of history, and there does not appear to be anything specially miraculous about it. But, after the manner of ancient prophets, our Lord treats this overthrow as God's act of judgement on the city which had rejected not only the servants of God, but the Son Himself; and He throws this overthrow of the apostate city and temple upon the background of the end of the world and His own coming in glory, as the triumphant Christ, to judge the quick and the dead. His language is symbolical, like that of the prophets; and, like theirs, His vision of the end is quite independent of time. He told His disciples before His passion that even He Himself did not know "the day or hour"; and, after His resurrection, He told them that the times and the seasons were reserved in the Father's own power. Moreover, in His own discourses as recorded in the Gospels, we find our Lord frequently using language which suggests gradual development in the future, and perplexing delays, as well as language which anticipates the great day of final divine intervention as if it were immediately to be expected.

That the first Christians did in fact expect "the end" in their own lifetime does not admit of doubt. And the belief that it must soon come has characterized most religious revivals. To converted souls it has seemed inconceivable that God should any longer tolerate the insolence of men. We may well believe that it would have come much more speedily than in fact it has, if the church had been faithful in maintaining its witness and extending it into the whole world, instead of falling back into a fatal acquiescence in things as they are. But our Lord had prepared the minds of His disciples to see the assurance of "the end" in His resurrection, and its actual realization (in a sense) in His ascension and the mission of the Spirit and the establishment of the church; so that when in actual experience the fall of Jerusalem came and "the end was not yet," the mind of the church was not perplexed. Their attention was turned to the next adversary--the insolent, persecuting empire of Rome; and, taught of John, the seer of "the Apocalypse," they waited for the judgement of God upon Rome. By the time of the fall of Rome, however, the church had got too much at home in the world to be as zealous for the end as it had been in its bright beginnings.

To-day there are not many of us, I fear, who really and passionately desire the end of the world and the consummation of the kingdom. But it remains true always and everywhere that every institution which ignores or resists God--every civilization which seeks to build itself up on a merely secular basis or on a basis of self-interest, individual or corporate--on pleasure, or avarice, or pride--must be overthrown. It remains true that we are led, both by revelation and experience, to expect the vindication of God not merely by a gradual development of the world into perfection, but by a cataclysm or series of cataclysms in which the forces of evil are overthrown and God manifestly triumphs over them. On a universal and final scale this is to be the end of the world. It may well be that the final manifestation of divine victory will follow upon a state of things in which God has seemed to be utterly defeated all the world over, just as the resurrection of Christ followed upon the seeming total failure of the cross. But the wise Christian is content to wait and see, while he holds the confident faith that Christ reigns, supreme and unquestionable, and will one day come into His own in the whole scene of creation.

On the whole, the anticipations of the New Testament do not lead us to transfer the scene of the kingdom of God from earth to some other sphere called heaven. Rather it describes a "return" of Christ from heaven to earth, and (so to speak) a fusion of heaven with earth, or a new heaven and a new earth wherein dwelleth righteousness, the centre of the whole new world being the New Jerusalem, the perfected fellowship of humanity, the city of God. I am sure that we make a mistake if we attempt to translate the symbols of the end into literal anticipations of history. But the matter of greatest importance is that it is this creation of God, and the humanity which we now know, that, purged and transformed, are to supply the material of the kingdom of God. Whatever the catastrophe through which the world must pass, whatever the purging process of judgement, whatever the transformation of matter, it is this world that is to become the kingdom of God. Thus no labour will ever really be lost which we spend here upon the preparation for the kingdom. All faithful work done in Christ's name, however much it seem to fail, is really laid up in God's treasury, and its fruits will at last appear. It will become a stone in the New Jerusalem. " Blessed are the dead which die in the Lord from henceforth: yea, saith the Spirit, that they may rest from their labours; for their works follow with them."

THE RESURRECTION OF THE DEAD

All this belief in the kingdom to come has involved a belief in a life beyond death. It became plain with the flash of inspiration to the soul of Isaiah that the dead Israelites, who had died without seeing the great deliverance, must be raised again to share in it. " Thy dead shall live; my dead bodies shall arise. Awake and sing, ye that dwell in the dust: for the earth shall cast forth the dead."2 It is most interesting to see how the ancient people of Israel came to that belief in a future life which before our Lord's time we find prevailing amongst them, with the exception of the small and aristocratic section of the Sad-ducees. It was not through dealings with the dead. They .originally shared with all their neighbours a background of belief in the pit of ·" sheol," where the spirits of the dead--pale shadows of their former selves --subsist drearily somewhere underground. But they were sternly debarred from any attempt to have intercourse with the dead. Their religion was to be a religion of the active, sunlit world; they were to see God's reign here and now. And they did see it; but only partly. It dawned upon their collective mind, and was confirmed to them by here a prophet and there a psalmist, (1) that if there be a God, almighty and righteous, there must be some larger sphere than that of this world--this "wild and irregular scene"--for God to realize and reveal Himself. This world cannot be the end; (2) that the intimate spiritual relationship into which God admits His saints -- Abraham and Isaac and Jacob, Moses and Samuel and David -- cannot end with death. This intimacy must be continued in the beyond. By constant dwelling on these two lines of thought and expectation the Jews came to believe not merely in "the immortality of the soul," but in "the resurrection of the dead." Among the Greeks there was always the feeling that the body was something degrading--the prison-house of the soul and its pollution. They were content to expect a survival of souls only.

But by a much healthier instinct, anticipating the future of a still remote science, the Jews felt that the body is an essential part of the man. They were healthily unashamed of the body and the bodily functions. Thus, if they thought of a future life, they wanted a complete life: they wanted a better body perhaps than this present flesh, but certainly a body--and for each man his own body to match the more perfect world in which he should find himself. And it was this anticipation, itself wrought into their minds by divine inspiration, which was confirmed in our Lord's teaching, and which received its first realization in experience in His resurrection from the dead.

Any one who reads the records of the forty days after our Lord's resurrection will see that He is represented as having been raised to life in His body, but in that body transformed into a quite new state. He no longer lives here or there, in Jerusalem or Galilee, so that the disciples could find Him by calling there. He has not to pass by walking from one scene to another. Closed doors are no obstacle to Him. He seems to be existing on some higher plane from which He manifests Himself, in different forms and guises, according to His spiritual purpose. He can walk with the two disciples to Emmaus, and even eat with the eleven in Jerusalem. But we are not to suppose that He needs food or depends upon locomotion. It is suggested in the narratives that He had, on the morning of the resurrection, left the tomb before it was opened, and that the body had passed out of the grave-clothes, leaving them to collapse in their places. All this corresponds very well with S. Paul's teaching of a spiritual body--a body which is no longer the "flesh and blood" of our present experience, but has been transmuted into a higher state: still material, but sublimated in such sense that its matter is no longer the restraining and hampering medium that we now know, but the perfect instrument and vehicle of the spiritual will.

Our Lord's own resurrection is spoken of by S. Paul as " the resurrection of the dead " (in the plural), because His resurrection is the foretaste and assurance of the destiny of all men. He is the Man-- our real representative. In His resurrection we see the issue of life for all of us who belong to Him. This is a commonplace of the New Testament.

There are three further remarks which I should wish to make about the Christian doctrine of immortality.

1. As to the basis on which it rests. It rests on moral considerations raised to the point of certain conviction by the resurrection of our Lord. Nothing is more certain than that, if the supreme and only governor of the world is a perfectly just and good God, we do not see the end of His operations upon individuals or upon society in this world. It must be that "the more parts of His works are hid," and the fulfilment of justice and righteousness is not seen on this side of death. The most extreme instance of this incompleteness would be the life of Christ ending at Calvary in consummate failure and shame. There must be, we feel, something more. And thfc other moral argument is equally forcible. If there be an eternal God who raises men into intimate communion with Himself, it cannot be imagined that He will leave the human person who has been allowed to become His friend to perish like a worm. We watch a good old man's faculties failing, his faculties physical and intellectual. But there is something which shows no signs of failing--that is the assurance of communion with God and the quiet confidence that beyond death he is going to a still more intimate fellowship with his divine friend. These and the like considerations have made the belief in immortality seem inseparable from the higher kind of faith in God. It is this sort of longing confidence which first the teaching of Christ and then His resurrection confirmed. It is in this sense that S. Paul declares that God "brought life and incorruption to light through the gospel."

2. It must never be forgotten that that ancient people amongst whom our faith was developed, as we believe under divine leading, were definitely debarred by their laws from what we call spiritualism. They were not to seek to have dealings with the dead. We should be loath indeed to limit scientific curiosity or to deny the lawfulness of any kind of serious investigation into facts. But spiritualism is very prevalent in our time, and we can watch its effects on men and women over a wide area. It seems to stimulate in them exactly that sort of excitement and curiosity which needs to be repressed, and to tend to a morbid sort of religiousness which is very unlike Christianity. I cannot help often feeling that, if the experiences which spiritualists report are true experiences, it is more likely that they are the victims of clever demons than in real communication with the spirits of just men being made perfect. At any rate it is of the greatest importance that we should keep it clearly before men's minds that the Christian's belief in immortality should follow from and depend upon his belief in God.

3. No doubt over a large area of Christianity the resurrection of the body has been supposed to mean that the material atoms of our present bodies are to be re-collected and become the resurrection bodies. This to a more scientific age is inconceivable, and the appeal to divine omnipotence is very unsatisfying. So it is a comfort to feel that some early Christian thinkers held a more reasonable view, and that this rather than the cruder belief is suggested by S. Paul in his treatment of the resurrection. He there contemplates three sorts of resurrection. There is the resurrection of Christ on the third day, which we must suppose to have involved the transformation of His dead body in the tomb into the spiritual body of His resurrection. Secondly, there is the sudden transformation "in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trump," of those whom the last day shall find alive. This he speaks of as "a mystery, "doubtless remembering that "we see through a glass darkly" the experiences of the last day. Intermediate between these two he speaks of the resurrection of those who had fallen asleep in Christ, and whose bodies had "seen corruption."

Specially in view of their case he conceives that the earlier "natural" bodies were, to speak in a figure, the seeds of the spiritual bodies that should be. Death and corruption, while it dissolves the natural body, enables God to give to each his own proper spiritual body. This suggests a continuous personal identity, but it does not suggest the re-collection of material particles. It makes us prefer the phrase the "resurrection of the body" or "of the dead" to the phrase the "resurrection of the flesh"; for "flesh and blood," S. Paul says, "shall not inherit the kingdom of God." But it leaves us with the assurance that perfected manhood in us, as in Christ, shall have its perfect spiritual organ and expression, its spiritual body.

JUDGEMENT AND HELL

We have spoken of the blessed dead; but there is another and an awful side to our belief about the end. It is not the idea of our religion that "we are all going to the same place." Life is represented to us in the Bible, and nowhere with more penetrating simplicity than in our Lord's teaching, as an awful choice between two alternatives. We are always choosing life or death, light or darkness, good or evil. By choosing the evil or the darkness we pass under divine judgement. Judgement on the evil choice is not to be considered as an arbitrary act of God, but as the inevitable consequence of the choice itself. Acts form habits, and habits stereotype into a settled character which becomes more and more fixed. And if the character be determined by lust or pride or hatred or falsehood, if these things become the man's real self, death does not change him. The awfulness of death is that it does not change us, but only sets us naked and bare in the presence of the holiness of God.

In a famous passage of Isaiah the coming of God to Israel in His awful holiness is described by the metaphor of fire. The sinners in Zion are afraid. "Who among us," they cry, "shall dwell with the devouring fire? Who among us shall dwell with everlasting burnings?" The answer is that only the righteous man can dwell with God. God cannot change Himself. He cannot take the character which has become determined for evil into union with Himself. He is indeed infinitely merciful, but He cannot save us in spite of ourselves. That is the terrible prerogative of our freedom. And if words mean anything we are assured by our Lord and His apostles that obstinate refusal of the light, obstinate adherence to the wrong, may bring the soul to a spiritual ruin so complete as to become final and irreversible. I do not think it is possible to attach any other sense to the tremendous language of the New Testament.

Our Lord means us to take this warning to ourselves, rather than to inquire about others. But hell, since there is a hell, becomes part of the scene of the future, and must be fitted somehow into our whole picture of the universe as it shall be. The last judgement, which is depicted in tremendous imagery, leaves men divided into "saved" and "lost."

There has been a vigorous reaction against the "old-fashioned" teaching of hell. This was in part quite legitimate, for God had been represented by current Calvinism as creating multitudes of men irreversibly doomed to hell from their creation, and even more generally as condemning to hell those who, through no fault of their own, had failed to believe and be baptized--even the heathen, for instance, who had never heard of Christ, and unbaptized infants, who had no capacity for choice. Now we who believe in Christ know nothing more certainly than the character of God. We know that He is perfect love, perfect equity. We are quite justified in refusing to believe about Him anything which would be inconsistent with the highest goodness that we can conceive. We can be quite sure that He will do the best possible for every soul whom He has created. And we know that He has worlds beyond this--ages of ages--in which He can carry out His hitherto unfulfilled designs. Any idea of souls destined for hell by an irreversible decree of God we may quite dismiss out of our horizon. " God will have all men to be saved, and to come to the knowledge of the truth."

Thus, if souls are to be lost, it must be through their own fault. Those who have had no opportunity can be supplied with opportunity, we must suppose, in some unknown world. Of course the Bible is written for those who have opportunity. For them indeed "now is the accepted time; now is the day of salvation"; and they have no right to expect another opportunity if they reject this one. But we are glad to notice that S. Peter speaks confidently of our Lord in Hades as preaching the Gospel to the dead, with the intention that, though they were judged according to men in the flesh, they might live according to God in the spirit. And we rightly resent on behalf of the church the closing of any avenue of hope which the Divine Spirit has not closed, and the pretension to any fuller knowledge than in fact is given to us.

If I am to lay down definite conclusions I should say--(1) that the universalism which is so popular to-day--the belief that every created spirit must ultimately be recovered to fulfil the end of its being in God, though it is supported by some early Christian authorities, and though it has never been formally condemned by the church with any ecumenical judgement, is flatly contrary, plainly contrary, to the language used by our Lord about the destinies of men, and generally to the language of the New Testament.

(2) That I do not think that, by excluding universalism, we are absolutely shut up into the almost intolerable belief in unending conscious torment for the lost. The language of the Bible does not necessarily suggest this.9 I do not think that it supplies us with any ground for the dogma that the consciousness of a man once created is indestructible. Final moral ruin may involva, I cannot but think, such a dissolution of persoaality as carries with it the cessation of personal consciousness. In this way the final ruin of irretrievably lost spirits, awful as it is to contemplate, may be found consistent with S. Paul's anticipation of a universe in which ultimately God is to be all in all--which does not seem to be really compatible with the existence of a region of everlastingly tormented and rebellious spirits; while at the same time the awful warnings of our Lord and his apostles as to the inevitable consequences of wilful final sin supply to every one who chooses to think at all a most powerful motive to prefer any effort to the risk of "losing his own soul."

THE INTERMEDIATE STATE AND PURGATORY

It is certainly the case that the revelation of the New Testament is not given us to satisfy our curiosity or to let us feel that we know or can know the future state

prophet, confessedly symbolical figures, as well as to the devil. And in this book all the measures of time are symbolical otherwise than "in part." What is told us is sufficient to make faith firm and hope active, and (we must add) to strengthen the natural fears of an evil conscience--but certainly not to enable us to anticipate the experience of another world. Certainly the final bliss of man is identified with the kingdom which is to come after the end of the world and the day of judgement; and we are led to believe in an intermediate state of (in some sense) disembodied souls, in a condition of waiting or expectancy, following on the "particular judgement"--that is, the disclosure of a man's real state which appears to be associated with each one's death. About this intermediate state we are told exceedingly little, but we are led to suppose that there is such a state both for good and bad, and that it is a state of conscious life, and for those who have departed in Christ a state of greater nearness to Him, a being "in Christ" and "with Christ."

It is a state where the souls of just men are made perfect. There is infinite satisfaction about such phrases. But how much they are allowed to know about us who remain on earth, and about the incidents of earth, we are not informed. Nor can we tell at all what the lapse of time, as we know it, may mean to them. It was one view held in the early church that souls at death are made suddenly and instantaneously perfect for good or evil. But this idea has not proved acceptable. We almost all instinctively tend to believe in some sort of purgatory, a state of cleansing and gradual emancipation and enlightenment for the imperfect. As regards any such purgatorial state, however, we must confess that the New Testament is absolutely silent. S. Augustine allows it with a "perhaps." And we cannot get beyond that. It is rather a conclusion of our natural reason than a revealed truth. And inasmuch as the Roman church is specially identified with the teaching of purgatory, it is important to notice that the ameliorative aspect of purgatory is not that on which the Roman church has laid stress. According to the Roman doctrine, though all bad habits and vicious inclinations of the soul be instantly purified away by the momentary fire of the particular judgement, or the accompanying vision of God, and though the soul be rendered instantly fit for heaven, yet it is detained in pain simply to work out the temporal punishment due to its sins. The Roman purgatory is thus predominantly penal or vindictive. What we moderns desire is the purgatory, penal indeed, but predominantly educative and ameliorative, which certain great Christian teachers have imagined. In that we may--nay, I feel, we must--believe; but it is rather a conclusion of our reasoning than a part of what is revealed.

THE COMMUNION OF SAINTS

This article of belief was added as an expansion of the article about the holy catholic church. It means that all the redeemed, living and departed, are in one fellowship, which death does not interrupt. The visible catholic church is only a part of the whole church. Only the lower limbs of the body of Christ are visible to us. We are in communion also with the dead, "with the spirits of just men made perfect"; and we are not prohibited from adding--with the spirits of just men being made perfect. How are we to exercise this fellowship?

There can be no real question that in the Middle Ages a superstructure of largely rotten material but of very portentous weight had been built upon the basis of the belief in the communion of saints. Current ideas about purgatory and indulgences and invocation of saints, and current practices based on these ideas, were most urgently in need of amendment and reform. But the reaction of Protestantism was culpably unguarded, and the Church of England shared in this lamentable reaction, so that, in result, we almost forgot in our practical and public religion our continued fellowship with the blessed dead. One may question whether mediaeval superstitions have not been preferable to our blank ignoring of the communion of the saints. We must aim at living without superstition, but also in the full light of truth. And the communion of saints, as its name implies, is pre-eminently a matter for public recognition and not merely private memory.

There are in particular two expressions of the communion of saints on the restoration of which in our common as well as our private worship we ought to insist.

1. We must recover without apology or concealment the practice of prayer for the dead. It is matter of revelation that the departed are alive and waiting their final perfection. They need something as we need something. And therefore we may pray for them. That is a practice inevitably resulting from the revealed belief about the efficacy of prayer for others in all their real needs. I should contend that S. Paul prayed for his dead friend Onesiphorus. I am sure that the church has always prayed for the dead, for light and refreshment and peace, and that they may receive forgiveness and mercy of the Lord. I do not want to define. But I must insist upon my right to pray, leaving all unknown things in God's hands. And I must demand this right, by legitimate authority, in the public services.

2. Besides praying for our dead generally, besides keeping again our All Souls' Day, we should remember specially the heroes of our faith, those whom in a special sense we call saints. The ancient church used to commemorate them solemnly by name. Moreover, believing that nothing could be more practically certain than that the perfected spirits were occupied in properly spiritual activity, and that their larger love, in the unseen world, must lead them to pray for us who remain in this world, the ancient church desired to have them for its intercessors, and solemnly asked God that it might be allowed to benefit by their intercessions.

S. Cyril of Jerusalem speaks thus of the commemoration of the dead, which in his days followed the consecration of the eucharist. "Afterwards we make mention also of those who have fallen asleep, first of patriarchs, prophets, apostles, martyrs, that God by their prayers and intercessions will receive our supplications. Then also (we pray) on behalf of our holy fathers and bishops, and generally of all those who have fallen asleep amongst us, believing that there will be the greatest benefit to the souls of those on whose behalf our prayer is offered up while the holy and tremendous sacrifice is amongst us."'

I should earnestly wish to see restored amongst us the public commemoration, as in the First Prayer Book, of "the wonderful grace and virtue, declared in all Thy saints from the beginning of the world: and chiefly in the glorious and most blessed Virgin Mary, mother of Thy Son Jesus Christ our Lord and God, and in the holy patriarchs, prophets, apostles, and martyrs"; and I would have this general commemoration accompanied not only as in the First Book, by direct prayers for the dead generally, but also by a specific request to God that we may be allowed the benefit of the intercession of the saints.

This has been called comprecation. But the main body of the church, since the fifth century of its life, has not been satisfied without directly asking the saints for their prayers (invocation), though it was long before these direct invocations were admitted into the public services. As to this I do not feel that anything could be more natural; but it cannot be denied that, to sustain it, we need the assurance that we can have direct access to the saints, and that they can directly hear us; and it is exactly this which the church, by the admissions of its theologians, is not authorized to give us. The theologians of the mediaeval church tell us only that the saints are allowed to see us and our needs in God; which I suppose may be expressed in other words by saying that, if we cannot get at them to address them directly, yet we can be sure that God will disclose to them what He sees fit that they should know. But, if this is so, it would seem to follow that we had better make our prayers to God that He will be pleased to let the saints know our needs and let us profit by their prayers. The instinct of invocation, however, has been widespread and almost irresistible. It is not only Romish: for the Christians of the East use it as much as the Christians of the West. They address with familiar confidence not only the famous saints but their own departed friends. Certainly we are not called upon to forbid such invocation. But the sense of what is not revealed to us should restrain our use of it, even in private, and, following the practice of the ancient church, we should admit into our public services no prayers but those addressed to God.

PREOCCUPATION with the dead and a curiosity about the world of the dead must, if we are to judge by a Biblical standard, be pronounced morbid features in religion. The New Testament gives us indeed the most complete assurance about the state and prospects of "them that are fallen asleep," and the abiding sense of communion with them; but information about their state is given us with such reserve as to direct our faculties towards this world, which really lies open before us, and which God has given into our charge. Thus the unworldliness of Christians is to make them only more effective in the world. God is to be first in their lives--in unquestioned and undisputed supremacy; but they are to test the reality of their love of God only by their conduct towards their fellow men. Their manner of life is to be heavenly; it is to draw all its motives and power from that heavenly place where Christ is seated at the right hand of God it is to measure everything by the issues of eternal life and eternal death; but all this "other-worldliness," so far from making them indifferent to this world, is only to make them feel the importance of everything that happens in this world, because of its divine origin and eternal issues. And it is the spectacle of what Christians are in the life which they share with all other men which, by its moral attractiveness, is to draw men to Christ: that "wherein they speak against you as evil-doers, they may by your good works, which they shall behold, glorify God in the day of visitation."

Thus we come to consider Christian morality or ethics--the principles of Christian life, individual and social. And, of course, we must make our beginning from Him who sets the standard for Christians--from Jesus Christ our Lord.

THE MIND OF CHRIST

What we have to consider is the spirit of our Lord's human life and teaching. Great mistakes have been made through forgetting both what our Lord, in the place in history which He filled, was able to assume, and also what He deliberately refused to anticipate. Forgetting these considerations, very different classes of people have argued, mistakenly as I think, from the silence of Christ. "He never occupied Himself with social legislation or reform," says one group; "therefore the Christian church ought not to do so." "He said nothing to inspire patriotism or to justify war, and much to require personal meekness and non-resistance," says another group; "and therefore no Christian can rightly be a soldier." "He said nothing about church building or religious ceremonial; therefore," says yet another group, "it is not really proper for the Christian to be much occupied in the external organization of worship." But all these groups of people who use the same arguments from different points of view forget what is of great importance. Our Lord assumes not only the lofty personal morality but also the social order of the Old Testament, to which he ascribes divine authority, and which was full of detailed social legislation and social instruction. What He sets Himself to do within the Jewish people is to restore and perfect the spirit which lies behind legislation--the spirit of humanity. And, so far as He contemplated the future, He seems deliberately to have abstained from making laws for His disciples in the main; but He intends His society to legislate in His own name and Spirit after He should have gone out of sight. And He said, "He that heareth you heareth Me."

Again, war will doubtless cease when the mass of men are really, even if imperfectly, Christians. For their inter-, national fellowship will then be based on something better than selfishness, individual or corporate. But meanwhile each nation has a vocation and a divine right to exist. In the recent memory of Israel, when our Lord came, the Maccabees had been their national heroes, who had fought for their national existence when it was threatened, and had waged a great war of self-defence. Every patriotic Israelite gloried in them. There is not the slightest reason to think that our Lord would have repudiated them; and, though He made it evident that political independence was not now the vocation of Israel, there is no reason to think He would have forbidden a nation which had received the faith He came to impart to defend its boundaries against invaders or assist in defending some other nation. Our Lord does indeed repudiate pride and corporate selfishness, and requires us to love our neighbours as ourselves. This is to repudiate a great deal that has paraded itself as patriotism in human history. But there is a true patriotism which believes in the divine purpose for each nation, and cannot, for the sake of all, allow the insolent aggression of others upon its legitimate liberty. It seems to me to be idle to argue from what our Lord says about personal submission to injuries that He would have refused to allow a man to defend either his wife and children or his country.

Once more, ceremonial observances belong to human nature everywhere. "Duties of religion," says Richard Hooker, "performed by whole societies of men ought to have in them a sensible excellency correspondent to the majesty of Him whom we worship." Our Lord shows not the slightest antipathy to the religious ceremonialism of Israel. There is not a word against it. He condemns not forms but empty forms. When His own redemptive action had so deeply changed the basis of religious observance, it would be the function of His church to provide for suitable religious ceremonial. Meanwhile He contents Himself with refashioning the spirit of worship as of human life generally.

How shall we seek to describe the moral spirit of Jesus?

1. He bases morality in the heart and will. Every settled society must have legislation both negative and positive in order to protect itself, and such legislation is concerned exclusively with outward acts. For the Jews this legislation had a divine sanction. Moreover every settled society develops standards of respectability which its public opinion sedulously maintains. Nowhere was this more marked than in Jewish society. But our Lord absolutely refuses to be content with such external standards. He insists on forcing back the standards of personal purity and mutual duty into the inner sphere of motive and desire--into the heart of man, which only God can see. He would have us regard the deliberate will to commit adultery as equivalent to the act itself; and the first movement of anger in the heart as a sin deserving of punishment; and He carries back the sin of swearing falsely till its correction is found in a universal truthfulness. He will not allow that outward observances can be the source of moral defilement, but only the inward will of the heart. This He applies equa