The passage: “And let the peace of God rule in your hearts, to the which also ye are called in one body.”
Justification was the subject of last Sunday’s Collect; Christ’s Sacrifice is the subject of today’s. Both connect to the Resurrection and to human life and morality. Justification concerns the peace of the individual conscience; Sacrifice concerns the peace to which we are called in one body. They must not be confused, but they cannot be separated either. The Romanist error merges Justification into Sacrifice, making what was done for the whole family a hindrance to the individual’s faith. The Protestant error merges Sacrifice into Justification, making one man’s private assurance the measure of what was done for all. Each has largely failed by neglecting the other: the Romanist has had to invent comforts for the individual conscience that destroy the universal character he prizes; the Protestant has had to meet the social craving with expedients that make his promise of peace to the individual hollow.
I spoke last week of how the Protestant truth of Justification by Faith arose in men raised within a society they believed Catholic and Divine. They had done and believed what their system required, yet both drove them to despair; trying to become righteous awakened in them a sense of unrighteousness. Their profession of a completed salvation only made them ask how they, personally, were saved from the ruin they found themselves in. The doctors had no answer, but the Creed did: believe in the forgiveness of sins, believe in Christ the Forgiver. They believed, and rose new men — free of the guilt that had driven them to superstition and had blocked all true thankfulness and obedience. Now they could serve God as a reconciled Father, in purity and truth.
Those were sixteenth-century experiences — are they not good for the nineteenth too? I say yes: we are the same kind of men as our fathers, sinning as they did, feeling evil as truly as they did, needing the same emancipation through faith in God the Justifier, with Christ’s resurrection witnessing that Justification now as then. To despise the Reformers for what they went through is to despise St. Paul for the same experience, to despise what is deepest and truest in ourselves, and to despise what has kept Europe from utter immorality and atheism.
But I cannot deny other experiences pressing on us just as forcibly. People raised in a Protestant atmosphere, taught from childhood that faith alone saves, taught to view the church that supposedly denies this doctrine with horror — as enemy of the Bible, tyrannical, idolatrous — such people have begun to murmur, quietly at first, that this belief does not in fact give them peace of conscience; then to suspect that such peace is promised only to “one body,” as my text says; then to ask, with a doubt that turns into indignation, whether we, with our divisions and uncertainties and lack of authoritative decrees, belong to that body at all; then to marvel at the grandeur of the Latin Church — its long history, strange coherence, mighty influence, grand ceremonial, roll of saints, confessional, its perpetual sacrifice offered for the world; then finally to declare that all this can only be explained by a common centre of light and wisdom at Rome, and that no blessing we have lost, individual or national, can be restored until we acknowledge that centre and make our various systems revolve around it.
You know that such feelings have been alive among us for years, in minds of every kind — imaginative and logical, skeptical and credulous alike — mixed in with traits of an age we’d think most hostile to them. What looks today like vanity or affectation may tomorrow appear alongside earnestness, humility, self-sacrifice. In any case these feelings are producing serious consequences both in those drawn to them and those repelled by them, and cannot be ignored by anyone who cares for the peace of hearts, families, English society, or Christendom.
Not ignored — but how should they be handled? By stifling them? Solemn denunciation? Ridicule? Half-concessions to placate them? Distraction with trifles? All these have been tried, and are still being tried. I believe they will fail exactly as the same methods failed in the sixteenth century against the thoughts then convulsing men’s minds and threatening society. There were strong reasons then for such tactics, reasons that moved good men like Sir Thomas More as much as arrogant doctors and papal schemers. Might not old loyalties be dissolved by these doubts? Might not thousands be set adrift without chart or compass? Were not many of the objections untenable, many of the objectors frivolous? It seemed natural to conclude: persuade the persuadable to contentment, offer the half-sincere something resembling satisfaction, and crush with power those who won’t be quieted and won’t accept half-measures.
Weak reasoning, poor philosophy. It could not succeed, because those who tried it were fighting not men but God. He had awakened these cries for justification and peace; only He could answer them. They might disturb Church, schools, or nations, but no pope, doctor, or king could suppress them — because none of the three could survive without them. Unbelief would have extinguished the Church, earnest thought would have died in the schools, and the crudest statecraft would have quenched the nations’ life, had a false peace been achievable by any of their acts.
Why should things be different now? Why might not these longings for a Universal Church — which we sometimes read as rebellion, sometimes as danger to freedom — be exactly the instrument God is using to lead us to a higher obedience and a truer liberty? Why is it less dangerous now than then to dismiss these longings as fanciful or utopian? Why might it not be our duty and our interest to understand fully what this thirst in men’s hearts means, and what contentment God has provided for it, so that we do not seek to quench it at earthly springs that give only death, not life?
We often resort to certain stock arguments to cure this state of mind, which only reveal our failure to understand it and our readiness to borrow Romanism’s own pious frauds against it. One such argument: in every age there have been protesters against the evils of the visible Church, and these constituted the true spiritual Church, fulfilling God’s promise that it would never perish. True enough as far as it goes — such protesters believed in an invisible God and trusted His power, treating outward forms only as tokens of His presence. But you must say more: what was the nature of their protest? Did it claim they alone possessed certain spiritual privileges, or that those they addressed shared those privileges and sinned in neglecting them? If the former, it’s hard to see its reasonableness or who would heed it. If the latter — like the Old and New Testament protests against corrupt kings, priests, Scribes, and Pharisees — then it presupposes a Church already existing that day, with invisible foundation and invisible treasure. What, then, have you gained by making all church history merely an echo of this fact? The inquirer still asks: what is this body, with its sacraments and spiritual powers, of which these righteous men spoke as founded by God — while others were treating it merely as an earthly machine for their own advancement?
For the same reason, pointing to the great corruptions of the medieval Church, or any Church in any age, does not touch the heart of the matter. The facts should be stated exactly as they are, neither exaggerated nor softened, just as we would state facts about ancient Rome or Greece; instances of corruption should indeed be set against overblown pictures of past innocence or heroism. But we delude ourselves if we think this array of proofs establishes some great truth or corrects some deep error. Yes, there was gross corruption in the French or Italian Church of the twelfth or fourteenth century — but St. Paul shows gross corruption, in life and doctrine, in the Corinthian and Galatian churches of the first century too. The later evil may have been worse — likely it was, though we aren’t the judges — but if you grant corruption of any degree in bodies St. Paul calls elect, called, sanctified, then — unless you insist his inspired words don’t mean what they seem to mean — you must admit a holy body can go on existing even while many of its members act unholily. And if you like facts, here is one: every attempt to make bodies holy by cutting off their supposedly unholy parts has failed more thoroughly the more persistently it was pursued.
If these arguments have proved ineffectual, we can trust even less the feeble attempt to satisfy men’s craving for a universal, united Church by offering a more brilliant ceremonial, or an appearance of uniformity with no substance behind it.
It would be rash to dogmatize about how far spiritual worship is helped or hindered by appeals to the senses — much depends on national and personal temperament. There’s room for charity in bearing with unfamiliar practices we suspect of excess or deficiency, and for self-denial in giving up what we value, or adopting what we dislike, for a brother’s conscience. If we are possessed by spiritual truths, we will eventually find fitting ways to express them through outward forms. But whatever such forms are worth, they can never satisfy a spirit genuinely troubled by these doubts. Such a spirit may embrace them eagerly for a while, but will soon sicken of what will feel like dressing up a corpse; it will say we are transplanting symbols that are precious elsewhere only because of the truth embodied in them — that what is wanted is the truth itself; that what we have lost is not the forms signifying sacrifice but the sacrifice itself; that uniformity cannot be recovered until we have the unity it signifies — indeed, that having the one, we might tolerate variations in the other. These are grave claims, whose force has little to do with the rhetoric sometimes used to state them, or the bitter scorn some who make them show toward their own past, and toward friends who still hold to it. We need not fear the rhetoric; we may regret the scorn, more for those who indulge it than for its targets — but the underlying testimony, the appeal to what we truly lack, we must take seriously and learn from.
1. We are told we want a Church of God, not of Man. Yes — that is our want, the want of Englishmen, of people everywhere. Whatever we say, we have believed in a Church resting on some human foundation, authority, or name — and it will not do. We feel it will not: there is no peace on that ground, not with each other, not in our own consciences. We must have a Church resting in the Name of God alone.
2. Such a Church, it’s said, must be one and indivisible. Certainly. If it rests on God’s Name, not ours, with Christ the Son of God as its foundation and cornerstone, then it is one — eternally, absolutely, necessarily. Nothing can divide it; no power of hell can prevail against it.
3. But, you say, such a Church actually exists — in the first ages, the Middle Ages, before and during the Reformation, and now. Quite so. No doctrine is more comforting, more delightful, and more in accord with fact and our ordinary language — the language we use when not theorizing. This Church has existed since the Gospel was first preached; the forms and creeds across Europe testify to a Church of which Latins, Greeks, bond and free were all equally members.
4. But a Church that is one and indivisible must have an infallible guide. Certainly, no other will do. “Yes, but not an infallible book — an infallible Person.” Even so. Unless Christ Himself is present with His Church, guiding it, no book or minister can help at all. If His guidance is imaginary rather than real — if it isn’t guidance of Reason, Will, thought, and heart’s instinct, which no one else can know or see into — then the idea of a Church is a dream. And it is equally a dream that there is any common human thought or literature at all. We have a common life and mind only because there is one Living Word who is Head and Teacher of us all; without Him the universe is an unsolvable riddle.
5. “But a Church requires a Sacrifice — one that actually unites man to God and actually removes sin.” Even so. I can conceive no other foundation for a Church. No Church can sustain fellowship among its members or produce sound Christian morals without a Divine Sacrifice at the root of all human life and the spring of all human action.
6. “And this Sacrifice should mean a universal Communion of men of every kindred and age, of the living and the dead.” Surely — the New Testament says as much: we come to an innumerable company of angels, the spirits of just men made perfect, God the Judge of all, Jesus the Mediator, the blood of sprinkling that speaks better things than Abel’s. Can language reach higher? Must not communion in Christ’s body and blood mean this, or nothing?
7. “But besides this, the Church must have power to absolve men’s consciences.” What else does the Church exist for, as far as men are concerned, but to set consciences free from their chains? What greater failure could there be than neglecting this office — what greater sin than forging chains instead of breaking them?
I have gone through the main claims commonly made about a Church, and admitted the truth of them all — not as a lazy concession. All these claims should frighten us, shame us, bring us to repentance before God. It is a fair and established charge that we have forgotten every one of these marks of a Church — lived and argued as if no such body existed, even built arguments on denying it could exist. We must confess this solemnly — indeed, every prayer should renew the confession. But what confession? Not that we are not yet members of such a Church, and might become so by some act of separation from the one established in our land — that would be an easy, self-justifying confession. It must be far more humbling: the admission that we are already actual members of just such a catholic, holy, united Society, under infallible guidance, resting on an atoning sacrifice, demanding daily self-sacrifice, implying communion with all in heaven and earth, offering emancipation to our own consciences and our brothers’ — and that instead we have shut ourselves up in narrow selfishness, following our own guidance or some weak fellow-creature’s, acknowledging in practice no atonement between earth and heaven, keeping fettered, guilty consciences, doing nothing to loose the yoke from our brothers’ necks. What fruit should come from such confession and repentance? Should it be acknowledging the Roman Bishop as the Church’s centre? No — if it is to be a Universal Church, we cannot narrow it to his measure or bind it by his Latin rules. If it needs infallible direction, we cannot submit to his fallible one. If it rests on a sacrifice made once for all, we cannot found it on his notion of an incomplete sacrifice that priests must complete. If we assert freedom of conscience, we cannot yield to one who exists to enslave it. But this will be the true fruit of confession and repentance: we may tell all men, of every nation and Church, to claim the liberty Christ has given them, the full unity they have in Him their ascended Head, the perfect communion they may share in His Sacrifice. This is our duty and our reward — to tell ourselves and all men that we are called to Peace in one body, and so may let that Peace, the Peace of Christ, rule in all our hearts.