June 21, 1857
“Endeavouring to keep the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace.” — Ephesians iv. 3.
The passage: Paul urges believers to make every effort to preserve the unity the Spirit gives, through the bond of peace.
Some recent editors, following certain early Fathers, punctuate this passage differently from our version, reading it so that “forbearing one another in love” goes with “endeavouring to keep the unity of the Spirit,” and “in the bond of peace” is joined to “one body and one Spirit.” This construction is awkward and needs strong justification. The only reason I can find is that “unity of the Spirit” and “bond of peace” are thought to repeat each other, or that it seems hard to see how the Unity of the Spirit could be in the bond of peace. Both objections may disappear on closer examination.
I. If “endeavouring” carried only the force we usually give it today, it would be a poor rendering of Paul’s word. Words like this quietly change meaning as a people’s mind changes. “Endeavour” once meant the fullest tension, the highest energy directed at a goal. For us it has come to mean the last feeble, hopeless attempt of someone who knows he can’t succeed but goes through the motions to show the failure isn’t his fault. This weaker sense is especially likely to attach to the text if we feel it addressed to ourselves: “Keep unity in a divided world — impossible! Paul can’t mean we actually do it, only that we try, which of course we can — we can avoid stirring up trouble, let others go their way while we go ours, so that if offense comes, the blame rests on them, not us.”
We must dismiss this idea of lazy neutrality at once. Paul means an active, zealous, deliberate use of all our thought, feeling, and power toward a fixed goal — one easy to miss, but attainable, and it is our own fault and sin, as well as our own misery, if we fail to attain it. If a man does not keep the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace, he can blame no one but himself; until he takes this home to himself, he has not understood what he is commanded to do, and will not see how to avoid breaking that command.
II. Notice that we are told to keep the Unity of the Spirit — so it is something we already have and may lose, not something we might get if fortune favors us. The endeavor is to preserve what has been entrusted to us. This is not just the sense of this one passage; it agrees with the whole language of Scripture — gifts bestowed, treasures in earthen vessels, “hold fast that which is committed to thee, let no man take thy crown.” Apparent exceptions resolve into this rule. There may be promises of future blessing, and it may be our duty to look for them, as a farmer looks for harvest — without which his heart and arm would grow weak. But the full corn in the ear is the same corn as the seed in the ground; once sown, watching and keeping it is the only duty left to the farmer or the earth. What comes of it depends on other influences, which neglect or misdirected effort may check or disappoint, but which offer no substitute for the seed, nor generally for the farmer’s watchfulness.
III. But “endeavouring to keep Unity” — who can claim this has been given us here in this world? Who can ignore the world’s endless disagreements and discords? What honest man would say Christianity has ended discord rather than produced fresh, deeper, seemingly more lasting discord? It may have taught us to long for peace, but to say we have it is the very sin Isaiah charged the false prophets with.
And yet can we look at the world and fail to see a Unity existing in it? I do not mean Nature — everyone admits, in some language or other, that it is there, despite countless jars and convulsions.
I mean not that, which often makes a painful contrast to the noise men bring everywhere, but precisely human society itself, which is torn by that very noise. There is a Unity in the midst of this strife, just as there is one amid the earthquakes and volcanoes of the natural world. Families have it, nations have it — not in some imagined golden age or dreamed-of Atlantis, but take them at their worst: a family torn by every kind of contention, even by mischievous institutions like polygamy — still there is a Unity there, or you could not recognize the contention as contention. There is a Family Unity to be kept, not created — one you destroy if you try to remake it on a scheme of your own. So with every nation, however torn by old class hostilities or new revolutions: something exists there to be destroyed, and in the heart of each lies the witness of an Order and Unity that cannot be lost. Each nation seeks unity in itself, asking what it has to do with others. This Unity has been lying in some deep well, more wonderful and mysterious than we supposed; governments did not create it, fraud and force cannot preserve it — but it is to be kept. All the effort of every heart would not be wasted in keeping it, yet a single heart may keep it when the rest have let it go.
IV. The explanation of these contradictions lies in the words “Endeavouring to keep the Unity of the Spirit.” There was once a strong conscience in nations and Churches that they had a Unity to keep, and must strenuously endeavor to keep it. Strange acts came of this conscience — acts that might seem the devil’s work rather than conscience at all: Albigensian massacres, Smithfield fires. They were justified by an inward assurance that nothing is more precious to a nation, the Catholic Church, or any human being than Unity, and that no cost is too great to secure it. I cannot answer the underlying premise: if such massacres and fires truly removed the causes of strife and established peace and Unity, they would be a cheap price for so vast a blessing. But thanks be to God, in a world He governs we are not driven to such terrible alternatives. We can say fearlessly: neither these measures nor any like them ever promoted Unity or removed any obstacle to it. A thoroughgoing persecution like De Montfort’s or Alva’s is more honest, more reasonable, and more likely to succeed than a petty, affectedly moderate persecution such as our century might attempt — but either must equally fail for this purpose. I do not say such experiments never crushed opposition or made men submit unresistingly, even contentedly, to decrees. But exactly so far as they did this, they destroyed Unity — the Unity of our text, which the Catholic Church is pledged by Creed and oath to keep. For if these Creeds mean anything, the Unity we are to keep is a Unity of the Spirit — the Unity declared at Pentecost among men of every nation and tongue. We do not believe that sign if we do not believe true Unity is unity amid diversity of custom, habit, notion, and education — not the unity attempted at Babel, one tongue under one tyrant. We do not believe in the Holy Ghost if we do not believe He is the source of Unity, bringing men to be of one mind in a house, a nation, a Church. We do not believe the Holy Ghost has been given if we do not think He is carrying on this work daily in human society and in individual hearts — if we do not see all the events of providence, all our trials and joys, even the contradictions of human judgment and the perversities of will, as either His agents or the enemies whose overthrow displays His power.
Therefore we must say — not that Innocent the Third, or any Protestant or English cleric who has imitated his vast experiments on a smaller, clumsier scale, did too much to root out heresy, but that they did too little: a more thorough, root-and-branch system was needed then, and is needed now, for this purpose. If they wished to keep the Unity of the Spirit, they should have struck more resolutely at the principles causing disunion — seeking those principles first in themselves, asking what the Spirit of Truth was testifying against in their own hearts. Had they carried their inquisition into those depths, excommunicating and delivering to slaughter whatever they found there conspiring against peace, they would have found they had not lied in proclaiming Unity most precious in God’s sight, worth using His strength to protect. And with that assurance would come a sense of the baseness of the counterfeit, Babel-like Unity they had tried, in defiance of God’s Spirit, to create — a sense that might have led them to real, godly repentance.
This at least should be the effect on us of what we read of them, see in our age, and feel in ourselves. We should not rail at past times but imitate their vigorous effort to keep what it is death to lose, learning wisdom from their failures where our own vigilance is needed. It is a great mistake to think Unity was necessary in the Early or Middle Ages but is not necessary now, as though we had somehow learned to do without it. We have learned no such horrible lesson, reached no such degradation. Never was the sense of the curse of division stronger, never the cry for reconciliation stronger, than now. Blundering attempts to force embraces, to smother differences; abject searches for some human guide who will make us at one despite our reasons and wills — these show how vehement the passion is, willing to risk ridicule and defeat rather than find no outlet. What we need is a deeper conviction that nothing but real Unity, Unity of the Spirit, can satisfy us. Then the New Testament’s declaration, written in sunbeams across its pages, that the ascended Christ baptizes with the Holy Spirit, will come to us not as a hard dogma to accept but as news of a wellspring of life within — the answer to all our sighing, deliverance from the dry notions of intellect, from the dreary, disputatious, suspicious temper, from all in us that will not sympathize with others because it is itself cold and dead. We will find more and more that whatever is living in us flies out to meet what is living in others, that we have an interest in sustaining it even where it seems to clash with our own thinking, and that to kill a thought or hope in any man is to kill a germ of Unity which God’s Spirit planted and meant to grow. Some think their calling is to find whatever is untenable in others’ faith and expose or mock it. Such people have their reward; if it is a duty undertaken from conscience, not malice, perhaps some pleasure comes of it, though not a very keen one. But it is no less healthy an occupation to seek what is tenable — what has foundation in everyone’s faith — so that ours may grow clearer and more alive through fellowship with theirs, each giving and receiving, so that neither faith rests in itself but both in the Truth which both need.
V. And so I come to the words some have found unnecessary or awkward — “in the bond of Peace.” Is this mere repetition? Is not the Unity of the Spirit the same as the bond of peace? I think not. I think there could be no Unity of the Spirit without a bond of peace, but the two are as distinct as breath from the air we breathe, or the eye from the light shining into it. By Unity of the Spirit I mean what the Spirit of God produces in us — the countless varied movements of desire, faith, and hope He awakens in different people, which He makes them feel as the struggles of a common life. By the bond of peace I mean that toward which He shows these movements tending, in which He leads them to feel they may all rest. Just as some would build the Church on the grave of all active thought and aspiration, calling that dreary solitude Christian peace, so others think a Church can be built on energy and exertion alone, needing no absolute Truth as foundation, only holy desires and good works. I cannot believe that anyone in whom such desires are stirred will remain satisfied with them alone. The yearning for Truth, for what is, cannot long stay separate in an earnest mind from the love of what is right. There have been instances of such division — men who would have died for goodness yet scarcely valued Truth — but they are scarcely possible now. The pursuit of natural science has had this good effect: men now demand something not hypothetical, not supplied merely by their own thoughts, as ground for those thoughts to rest on. I am sure God’s Spirit presses this same demand in the spiritual world as much as the natural. They must find something common there, or our much-discussed “spiritual consciousnesses” will simply turn in on themselves and exhaust themselves searching for nothing.
Where then shall we find this bond of peace? I tried last Sunday to show, through examples, how people starting from opposite points, in different occupations, holding apparently irreconcilable opinions, might find in the Name into which we are baptized the reconciliation of their deepest convictions, and deliverance from the intellectual dogmas that had kept them apart. This evidence, from our own experience and quite apart from the traditions of our forefathers, leads us back to their conviction: that here is the living Truth underlying and sustaining both the natural and the spiritual world. If our forefathers held that the Church stands on Confession of that Name, whether spoken or written, they used dangerous language, dishonoring to Him who is and was and is to come, who Himself upholds the pillars of the earth, who alone is the rock on which any house can be built to withstand rain and wind.
A united Confession of the Name, a united Worship of Father, Son, and Spirit — of which the past holds only a dim shadow and prophecy — we have a right to expect. It may come when least expected, likely after a season of darkness, fierce contention, and utter unbelief. But the confession will be united only when we stop confusing our feeble expressions of trust, our praises and adorations, with Him to whom they rise and from whom they come — when we are brought to nothing, that He may be shown to be all in all.
Therefore, to keep the Unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace, we must maintain in our own hearts, and help others feel, this great distinction. We must show that we do not want others to adopt our particular views; that we know physical force can only suppress the outward signs of disagreement — a paltry and often harmful result; and that moral force, whether argument to the understanding or appeal to the heart, is abused when used to make captives for our triumphs. All powers of reasoning and speech are gifts of God’s Spirit, working to free us from narrow, partial conclusions into the full light of God’s countenance. What we ask of Him is that He purge our ears to hear the countless voices speaking in His Universe, since they all proceed from the Creative Word by whom the Father made the world — but above all, that He enable us to have fellowship with the poorest child of man, who is embraced by the Father’s love, bears the nature the Son took and died in, and is not unworthy that the Holy Spirit should dwell with him, comfort him, and raise him to eternal life.
Therefore no one shall persuade us, for Unity’s sake, to give up this Name, explain it away, or substitute some other bond of union. For the sake of our brethren, and for the sake of those who differ from us most, we dare not do this — by doing it we would sever ourselves from both, destroying the bond of peace in which God has made us, and will prove us, eternally at one with them. We want to be more zealous for this Name than the men of old, because if we have profited from God’s teaching in these later centuries, we ought to know better than they did that it is a name of inclusion, not exclusion — that there is eternal life in it because there is eternal love in it. We will not be ungrateful that it has come to us in words that peasants and children can repeat, for so we learn that it is revealed to us, not discovered by us — meant not for one age but for all ages — and that we grasp it only because it first grasps us. We will teach it to the youngest, sure that they are surrounded by this mystery as by the common air, and that their spirits are freest the more they enter into it and draw life from it. We will teach it to growing youth, not to keep him from learning all that men have thought and written who never knew it or disbelieved it, but so that he may profit from all of it without being forced to turn away in disgust at its conflicts and contradictions. We will speak of it to the grown man, busier with life’s controversies than the schools’, because the more he meets with strife in others and in himself, the more he needs to keep the Unity of the Spirit in his own heart, and to feel that there is a bond of peace which has never been broken and will last forever.