The passage: “Remember therefore how thou hast received and heard, and hold fast, and repent.”
Two Sundays ago I spoke on the strength of the Protestant principle; last Sunday, on the strength of the Catholic principle. What was the first? If we take the leader of the German Reformation as our standard—and we should, since no teacher has had so great an influence—Protestantism meant the individual conscience demanding peace and reconciliation with God, and demanding deliverance from anything, inward or outward, that interfered with that reconciliation and with a life built upon it. “God has justified me, a sinner, has made peace with me. No doctors, no ecclesiastical authority, no fears of my own heart, no memory of past evil, no sense of present evil, no conspiracy of dark powers, shall take that peace from me. I may believe in God the Justifier against all these. I must believe, or I sink into sin, death, hell.” This was Luther’s proclamation; this is living Protestantism. By its nature it resists dilution and clever compromise, and history proves it does: every attempt to soften it, however skilfully or charitably managed, has failed—pleasing only those who wanted an excuse for indifference, while the rest held their convictions and threw the compromises to the winds.
How was it with the other principle? We need not look abroad: here at home are cries for Catholic unity, guidance, absolution, sacrifice, sympathy with departed saints, hope for those who are not saints. Mixed with vanity and confusion as these cries are, no contempt puts them down. Mere token concessions, accepted gratefully one moment, are cast aside indignantly the next. Men sacrifice self-interest and old loyalties to get what looks like satisfaction of these cravings; some are even tempted by the half-belief that a certain Church holds what they seek to accept dogmas they hope one day not to think false. You may say the sixteenth century was an age of strong belief and exclusiveness, but here in the nineteenth, an age of trade and weak belief and desire for comprehension, you meet tendencies just as unwilling to be balanced or blended as those apparently most opposed to them.
Such a conclusion is disheartening, especially to members of the English Church, since many of our divines have held that we occupy a position which, on this showing, cannot be maintained—a view supported not only by theology and by the history of our Reformation and polity, but by that English instinct which feels there is something to be said on each side of a dispute, and that the truth lies not strictly with either but in a judgment weighing both. This temper favours compromise for a time, but being practical and impatient of anything merely on paper, it soon tires of arrangements that do not actually bring people into agreement—and then listens readily to those who explain why the Church of our fathers cannot do what it claims to do. “The Protestant,” say the English sects almost in one breath, “has an intelligible position: he lets each of us judge for ourselves. The Roman Catholic has an intelligible position: he demands unlimited submission. You have none. You plead for freedom of thought against Romanists, and for the Church’s right to decree belief against Protestants. The reason is plain: you will not simply call yourselves a sect with bishops ruling it, standing on our level and claiming our rights; instead, being a State-Church claiming rights above all other sects, and unwilling to admit these came by mere Acts of Parliament, you cling to notions of prescription and authority that belong properly to Rome, and that condemn your separation from her.” I state briefly arguments capable of endless variation and illustrated from every country where the State does or does not recognize a Church.
These opinions find support from another quarter, little sympathetic to Nonconformist reasoning. The men of progress say: “Bare Protestantism tends to advance—it has shed Luther’s fetters; the Bible is no longer its watchword, and justification by faith now means something quite different than in the sixteenth century. Bare Catholicism, meanwhile, carries thoughts of a comprehensive Humanity, sometimes even fraternizing with Democracy; but for soldiers and kings, the thought pent up in the Church would burst its creeds, just as Protestantism’s old symbols are already giving way. Both these systems, then, hold hope. But your Church is simply obstructive—clinging to the old faith in the Bible’s dignity and the dogma of justification, and to the notion of a Church guiding the world’s thought, while daily proving its incapacity for that work.”
This charge of incapacity draws the sympathy of a third group as well—people less concerned with religious or philosophical debate than with the physical and moral misery of our people. Seeing the contrast between our material wealth, and still more our talked-of spiritual powers, and the actual condition of those for whom both were given, they cry bitterly: “We would not ask whether you call yourselves Protestant or Catholic if you were doing something to remove the evils around you and renew society. Whatever body can and will do that has the true marks of a Church. But one perpetually arguing about its own right to exist and to be obeyed inspires no reverence, and hardly seems to believe in the very powers it boasts of. A real ship on real waves is a fine sight; but what is a painted ship on a painted ocean?”
Those who on these various grounds condemn our position as false, or at best precarious, are earnest and often benevolent people. What of those who defend it? Are they equally in earnest? Do they know, or care, what they are defending? Is the Church as dear to them as their party or their club? Do they look to it for help or guidance, or merely expect it to keep the public in order by some magic while letting them do as they please? Many, I am sure, could answer honestly; something deeper than our words lies in all our hearts, or these words should make us shudder. Bitter rebukes or baseless slander that show some sense of the standard clergy ought to meet, and some feeling that the Church is a common refuge, are more welcome than compliments implying that evil is part of God’s order and that His Church exists chiefly to guard its own privileges. Most dangerous of all is the notion that we are safest when Protestant and Catholic elements in our body are kept feeble, merely balancing each other—when in truth we need both at their fullest strength, that we may fulfil our task, keep what we have inherited, and remain a Nation and a Church at all.
So I take this afternoon the words once addressed to the Church of Sardis, one of seven. The writer of the Apocalypse lives among them, known as the beloved disciple, the last apostle—yet he claims no authority over them. He tells them of one living centre, the High Priest of the whole family, the source of light to each part and its teacher. Christ Himself speaks to each Church: warning it of its dangers, awakening it to its own calling, telling it that in overcoming its own temptations and doing its own work it enters fellowship with the whole society, with Him its Elder Brother, with the Father of all. He assures them of His presence and power; where He sees feebleness and heartlessness, as in Sardis, He foretells the outcome and calls to repentance. If the Gospel is not an idle tale, what was true then is true now: the Son of God and Man, once dead and now alive, is the centre of all the divided portions of the Church; their unity depends on acknowledging His presence, and to each portion He speaks words of strength, warning, or comfort. Are these not the words He speaks now to the Church of England: “Remember how thou hast received and heard, and hold fast, and repent”?
I. How have we received and heard? We sense something different in our position from other Churches—sometimes boasting of it, sometimes ashamed of it, but always aware it is a fact we cannot escape, along with the responsibility it lays on us. We received the Reformation in the sixteenth century, but England passed through that crisis differently from any Continental Church, whether it stayed obedient to Rome or threw off her yoke. The same craving for justification and peace was awake, equally unquenchable by divines or politicians—yet we all recognize that English sovereigns had a direct hand in the work, giving it a more national character. The king’s emancipation from the Pope was its aim and result; a Bible and Common Prayers in the nation’s own tongue followed as its signs and pledges. Alongside came more doubtful signs, such as the dissolution of the monasteries, which reveals both the national preference for practical, domestic life over the “religious” life opposed to it, and the fatal belief of the upper classes that wealth needed by the nation might fairly be seized for private gain.
Let all this be remembered, for us and against us. We received the Reformation under these mixed conditions; and long before, under conditions different but not wholly so, we had received the Gospel itself and the message of a Church—from the first a Gospel to the nation through its Kings, bound up with domestic life and Anglo-Saxon respect for women; from the first a message about a divine kingdom set up in the land, not about opinions. Our people were never deep in controversy but always vigorous in action, valuing thought for its results, better able to appreciate a ruler than a dogmatist, demanding to be treated as men, not things. They revered the past but discarded its traditions, reluctantly, when these hindered present business. They showed a fierce individualism that could turn to selfishness, but also a national feeling, sometimes exclusive and contemptuous, yet bound up with courage, manliness, and godliness. From this character and these circumstances came the preservation of our social order through every danger of that time: bishops lasted alongside kings, both tied to the nation’s life. The Bible was received as a national book, teaching our relation to the King of whom David and Isaiah spoke, and God’s government and judgment of England. The Prayer Book too was national, though not exclusively so, drawing on Greek and Latin sources from men who never spoke our tongue; yet it bound rich and poor together in the same praises, giving all a right to call God Father in Christ and to call themselves fellow-citizens of a heavenly kingdom.
- These things we must remember. Must we also hold them fast? I believe so strongly. If we let go of them, or hold them with trembling hands, we cannot fulfil our trust, cannot do justice to the divided parties in our land, cannot reconcile them or unite them against what is destroying us, cannot show Romanists or Protestants abroad a way of peace. Even where I say it most reluctantly, I say it: our claim to be a State Church—holding a position different from others no worse than ourselves—how often one longs to be ashamed of it and abandon it, especially when it is used for boasting or contempt! How often it seems we would strengthen our cause by stripping it of every external advantage! But if this position, whatever we owe it to, however abused, lets us say to our countrymen, “We will not call you a sect, because we do not want you to think of yourselves as one; we want you to know you are members of a Church, of Christ, children of God—and we would rather bear the seeming humiliation of resting our cause on accidents we know in our hearts we do not really rest it on, than abandon even this insignificant height at the risk of making you think we defend a mere opinion, not a great truth in which you share as much as we”—then, so long as God gives no clear sign that He removes us from it, I believe our allegiance to Christ binds us to hold it fast.
Still more confidently I would hold fast the prayers, creeds, and catechism which the men of progress tell us to sacrifice to a general Humanity. For the sake of that very Humanity—which I believe is in danger of being trampled on, or reduced to an empty name—I would keep these treasures entrusted to us. I can believe in a universal Humanity while believing in Jesus Christ our Lord, born of the Virgin Mary, who suffered, was crucified, died, was buried, descended into Hell, rose again, sits at God’s right hand, and will come to judge the living and dead. I can assert that Humanity in the very words of the Creed, against those who would separate believers from the rest of mankind, exalting the sect of Christians above the race that the Church, and Christ Himself, represents. But strip me of this faith, and “Humanity” becomes either an ideal never realized, or a sentiment for a few refined people, or simply the sum of all the world’s sin and suffering.
Again, holding fast our Catechism, we can say to the Protestant: “We are poor logicians; we cannot follow your fine distinctions about Faith and Justification. But we are members of Christ; we believe He died for our sins and rose for our justification. Do you want some other faith, some other justification, not in Christ? We do not intend to seek one—we mean to hold this fast, certain it is what you want as well as we.” And to the Romanist: “We are children of God, adopted into this universal family in His beloved Son, baptized with His Spirit. Is that not the family you belong to, the Spirit you are baptized with? It was the family of Bernard and Francis and Bonaventura. They confessed a Pope as you do, but they believed in Christ, claimed to be members of His body and sons of His Father; and the Spirit that let them look beyond themselves, their narrow opinions, and their age, uniting them still to every country and time, was the Spirit not of the Pope but of the Father and the Son. Seeking that together, you and I will have a unity no Pope ever gave even to his greatest admirers—a unity those who put him in God’s place must lose entirely.”
If the most resolute Protestant and the most resolute Catholic accept this justification and this unity, they can go together—in the strength of truths learned through their different, even contradictory, discipline, and in the strength of the truth that now binds them—to those perishing of excess and luxury, and to those perishing of toil, sorrow, and neglect, calling both to rise as men, casting away whatever has robbed them of manliness and freedom or kept them from sympathy with each other. They can tell both of their birthright, making them good citizens of a soil they had regarded only as revenue or grievance, and tell them of an incorruptible inheritance reserved for them at God’s right hand. And why should not the same witness, in substance, be borne to all the peoples England rules or among whom her sons have settled—the witness of a kingdom of righteousness and truth, of which all kingdoms, so far as they practice righteousness and truth, are but images, and from which all their good and strength is derived?
- But He who told Sardis to “remember and hold fast” also said “repent.” We cannot heed the first command without the second. I have had to admit that the charges brought by all our opponents are true. We have turned the unsectarian position God gave us into a plea for sectarianism. We have treated the Bible not as the guide and lamp to our path, the awakener of understanding and affection, the witness to sound, manly, national morality, but as a book of dead sentences. We have not rejoiced in our common prayers as prayers that level us all before God, that let us plead for all and claim communion even with those furthest from us in opinion, that teach us to pray for mercy on all men and carry us beyond our own notions to the final triumph of good over evil; instead we have turned them into selfish prayers, excuses for self-glory, proofs of our difference from the rest of the world. We have not been valiant for God’s truth, but merely clever at turning it into a see-saw of opposing notions—so we have been exciters of strife rather than peacemakers among those unwilling to abandon a partial belief for what looks to them like no belief at all. We have not taught tradesmen and politicians that cheating and lying destroy their own souls and the nation’s soul. We have not preached a gospel to the poor, but let them think Christ came to bind chains on them rather than free them. We have not made worshippers of cruel and false gods understand that we are sent, in word and deed, to testify of a God of Truth and Love.
Nor should I forget that Christ’s warnings of sin and coming judgment were addressed first to the angels of the Church. The ministers are treated as first in fault, and so must expect to be first in punishment, first called to repent, for themselves and for all. This lesson applies to our Church and age here too. How poor and useless, then, are any words of admonition from us! How much you need to hear not what we say but what the Spirit says to the Churches! And how impossible that any good should come to you, to us, or to the land, unless He who opens and none can shut, who shuts and none can open, in whose hand are the seven stars, from whose mouth comes the two-edged sword, has Himself been raised on high to give repentance to Israel—repentance to England—and the remission of all our sins!