The passage: “Wherefore he saith, When he ascended up on high, he led captivity captive, and gave gifts unto men.”
Festivals like Whitsuntide stir a sad feeling in many of us. We say: these days once meant something. They stirred a strange gladness, marked fellowship among neighbors and even nations, worked into the fabric of life, fixed the times for solemn gatherings and great undertakings. Lawyers and politicians planned around them. Above all they were popular: the peasant and the mechanic, however little he grasped their deeper meaning, knew they had one. They spoke to him more plainly than books are ever likely to speak — perhaps more plainly than books speak even to their most careful readers.
So many say, and so most of us have thought at some time. Then, depending on our mood or education or opinions, we add privately that this is now over, only the shadow of the name remains and even that is fading. Or we console ourselves that what was tied to superstitious notions of miracle and priestly power deserves to perish. Or we point to the compensation offered, or someday to be offered, by wider book-learning. Or we congratulate ourselves that enough traditional reverence survives among us that, with care and perhaps some revived ceremony, the old affection might return.
These contradictory feelings mark not different men but the same man at different times. The zealous champion of old customs one year may denounce such revivals as unreal the next; the man who prizes nothing but what bears the stamp of this age may start sighing for the past; one who thought there was hope in Englishmen’s attachment to their fathers’ ways may pronounce them the most secular of peoples, absorbed in business, careless of anything not material. Sometimes this ends in indifference, sometimes in a stern Puritan resolve as most suited to our character, sometimes in casting off our cold island peculiarities altogether — for, we ask, what does a Church mean if it separates us from other peoples instead of uniting us with them?
There is still one possibility, and it is this I want to speak of. May not Whitsuntide mean far more to us than it ever meant to our forefathers — less a shadow, more a substance? May it not, in its inner meaning, mix with our everyday dealings as it once did outwardly, and still does in some measure? May it not sustain our practical habits, joining them to more life and joy than we usually think business can hold? May it not save us from dry bookishness by showing what lies beneath the letter, something our hearts can commune with? May it not deepen our reverence for the invisible and spiritual, our dislike of the idolatrous and merely external — the very things Puritanism has stood for? May it not give us a sense of the glory in nature and art that Puritanism has refused to see? May it not make us value, as we never have, all the gifts entrusted to us as a nation, everything distinctive of ourselves? May it not unite us to the whole of Christendom as no former age achieved, even when all confessed one visible head?
That this possibility will become real, I believe — not because I trust any effort of ours to preserve, recover, or acquire it, and not because I am blind to the contempt earned by those who have devised schemes for alliance with other Churches, or for walling ourselves off from all Churches, or for founding some new Church to replace them all — but because I find, in the very restlessness that invents such schemes and in their failure, proof that God is at work among us: rousing us to our need, humbling us by showing our helplessness, preparing us for outcomes beyond our imagining but foreshadowed in the past history of Church and nations, without which Scripture’s plainest statements and promises would prove empty.
I spoke last Sunday of Ascension Day as witness to a victory actually won for the human race over every power that held it captive, and to an actual glorification of Man in him who is declared Head of every man. These are the direct assertions of this Epistle to the Ephesians; deny them, or empty them of their force and universality, and all its doctrine and exhortation become pompous nonsense. That they have been denied and emptied, I acknowledge — not by one branch of Christendom but by both, the one that boasts its Catholicism and the one that boasts its Protestantism, through the same underlying apostasy working differently in each. The Headship of Christ over the body the Apostle describes has, in the one, been effectively disbelieved: that Church reconstituted itself under another head, made him the ground of its universality, and thereby split heaven from earth, the invisible from the visible — while keeping up a show of connection, substituting symbols for reality, galvanizing a beheaded corpse into mimicking a living body. No such substitution of a stand-in for the real Christ — a mortal given absolute power to hold men captive and forbid free thought — is sanctioned among us; we bear witness against it. We like to recall, even to overstate, the historical facts showing that the Monarch of Christendom has often been worse than an ordinary monarch — baser, greedier, more eager to aggrandize his own kin than rulers who make no such claims and yet may lawfully pass honors to their heirs. We gather these facts eagerly and turn away, not quite honestly, from anything that might weaken the case. And yet the same unbelief behind that Papal outrage against the Son of Man’s rights lives in our own hearts and shapes our thoughts and acts. We think of the Church as a set of religious parties, each with its opinions, bound by its own name. We talk piously of lamenting our divisions and wishing for unity, but we do not really believe all are united in one Head, that he has led captive the very sects and notions and names that divide us, that it is his purpose to gather all into one. In other words, we do not acknowledge the Ascension as St. Paul did, any more than those we denounce.
Or, if we count ourselves free of sectarian entanglements, refusing sectarianism whether outside the National Church or within it — even that phrase, National Church, becomes an excuse for forgetting the Universal Head, for the same unbelief that all powers are under his feet. A National Church ought to mean a Church that purifies and elevates a nation’s mind: that gives lawmakers, administrators, and citizens a sense of the grandeur of law and its source; that tells rulers and people alike that all false ways lead to ruin, that truth alone gives stability. It should make men tremble at the voice of God in their conscience, warning them that what he says to them will be proclaimed before the universe, that every hidden deed will be brought into the light. That should be its meaning: a nation needs a Church chiefly for this, and a Church betrays its trust by aiming lower. Is that our conception of it, or yours? If the Church became what I have described, would the comfortable men of England tolerate it? Do they not tolerate the Church only because they take it to be something quite different — supposing they have hired the clergy at a price to keep the lower classes in check, and that we, your servants, keep our wages only so long as we prove we confess no higher master, so long as we treat society’s passing conventions as more binding than the laws that come, not from yesterday, but from the mouth of the Eternal God? Can such a ridiculous, self-contradictory bargain hold? Must you not see that we fail the very work you say you hired us for, if we perform it on those terms? You want us to preach from the Bible — but the Bible tells us to say that Christ actually now lives as Head over all powers. Keep that back, and we deny the whole message; proclaim it, and what becomes of a bargain built on the opposite view of the universe?
I repeat these statements, and will not tire of repeating them, both because I believe this age especially needs them, and because the hopes I have expressed for what Whitsuntide can still give us are bound up with them.
The text speaks of gifts bestowed on man when Christ ascended and led captivity captive. Those gifts witnessed to a fellowship established between heaven and earth, a direct relation between human beings and their Father in heaven. If the Church on earth were divided from the Church in heaven, if it had another head than the Son of Man and Son of God, the nature of these gifts would have to change or vanish. Both possibilities have in fact become the faith, or unbelief, of parts of Christendom. The so-called Catholic portion holds that powers still descend, as of old, on the Church’s rulers — powers of absolution, of discerning spirits, of healing — all belonging to a purely miraculous order, exceptions to the law of human life, establishing the dignity and dominion of certain special persons: officers with transcendent functions, saints who work miracles, to be revered by an act of faith as unlike ordinary human beings. And such gifts, on this view, are more likely to come through what is dead than through the living: relics work wonders more readily than living men who speak and breathe.
Set these notions beside the chapters on spiritual gifts in Corinthians, or this chapter in Ephesians. Notice how carefully the Apostle grounds everything not in some exceptional break in Providence, but in a universal truth for which the Church exists to witness. Notice his warning against the mere love of strangeness and novelty in these gifts, to which people raised among heathen enchantments were prone. Notice how he tests the gifts by their usefulness, and how little he values the merely startling in them, calling such things transitory, belonging to childhood. Notice how throughout he opposes the living Spirit to dumb idols, to the dead things his hearers had once treated as sacred. Notice how, in Corinthians and even more here in Ephesians, offices and orders are declared to exist for the good of the whole family — signs of the Father’s care for it and of his intercourse with it through the Mediator. Notice how the Spirit to whom all these gifts are traced, ever ready to rouse those grown forgetful, is treated as the Spirit of Unity and Love, proceeding continually from him in whom he dwells fully, to strengthen every joint for the good of the whole body. Weigh this difference, and then ask whether gifts given because Christ ascended and led captivity captive can mean gifts that degrade nine-tenths of men into brutes so that a fraction may be raised into gods.
But have we escaped that danger simply by confining these gifts of the Spirit to the Church’s first age, withdrawn once the mission of Jesus and his apostles was sufficiently proved? I do not see that we have escaped the danger of exalting some persons and depressing the mass — and I think we have run into other dangers just as bad. We have not escaped the arrogance of priestcraft; we have only changed its objects. Men have special talents, which by an old habit they sometimes still call gifts. They know they have them. Told not to trace them to any inspiration of God, they have no reason to see them as anything but grounds for feeling above their fellows. The weak grow merely puffed up; the strong become tyrants, in a narrower or wider circle. What good is variety of gifts if all become excuses for pretension and rivalry, rather than trusts we must answer for?
Meanwhile we have misrepresented the gifts we suppose confined to apostolic times, as much as we misuse our own. What was the special Pentecostal gift? The power to speak to men of different tribes about the wonderful works of God. Surely that was a sign that a barrier was broken down, not raised — that all human beings stand in the same relation to God, not that a few were admitted to a fellowship denied the rest; that the most sacred language is the most common one, not that a few are glorified by their unlikeness to the majority. What of the powers of healing? “In the name of Jesus Christ of Nazareth” — in the name of him exalted to be Head of every man — they said to the cripple at the Temple gate, “rise up and walk.” This was a sign that the Lord and Giver of Life was stronger than disease and death, and could be defied in his strength. What of the powers to preach, govern, baptize, give the bread and wine of life? All pointed the same way, toward a universal human dispensation; all were, in the Apostle’s words, “for the perfecting of the saints, for the work of the ministry, for the edifying of the body of Christ: till we all come in the unity of the faith… unto a perfect man.” What can this mean but that these gifts carried the Apostles beyond themselves, making them servants of every generation, not just their own — that their glory lay in their fitness for men everywhere, for all time?
How much truer, then, has been the common faith and joy that Whitsuntide has stirred in one country and another, Roman and Protestant, than the narrow limits each side has set upon it! What deep faith has lived in men’s hearts — not owed to the learning of doctors and casuists, but overriding it — that Christ, having gone up on high, has indeed received gifts for men! What we need now is for this faith to stop being blind and to justify itself, as it can when the plain facts of human life are set beside Scripture’s plain words, each interpreting the other. We have among us, in varying measure, gifts of speech, of healing, of governing, distributed unevenly as St. Paul describes, some richly endowed where others are nearly bare. But speech itself — that wonder, sign of our fellowship with each other and our relation to a spiritual world, as sight and hearing and touch signify our relation to the physical world — this is shared by rich and poor, high and low alike. Our great failing is that we do not feel the weight of these gifts, what they imply, what they owe to God and man. We measure special gifts by the money they bring, or, among finer spirits, by vanity rather than gain. The common gift of speech is turned to slander and lies. Words — though their name comes from him who is the Word of God — are declared by the world’s wise men, generalizing from what they see done, to be mere counters to be traded, tools for hiding thought rather than revealing it. What can break such notions and the acts that spring from them? What can make us honest and true, not in some extraordinary sense but in the plainest meaning of those words? Nothing, I think, but the enlightening of the understanding that St. Paul prayed for the Ephesians — that we might grasp the greatness of our calling, the reality of our gifts, the law governing their use, and the power present with us at every moment to guide us in using them. Has it ever struck us, in some hour of our lives: the words I learned as a child were not lies; a Spirit has been with me night and day — the Spirit of God himself — enabling me to use powers I was always tempted to waste, prompting me to turn to right and truth what I would have sold to selfishness, giving every true social impulse, reminding me of a Father’s house I have strayed from, a family I belong to, a kingdom of righteousness and love I am heir to? If such a thought has ever dawned on us, even for a moment, have we not felt certain, for that moment: this must be true; though all else prove deceptive, this will stand revealed in the fires of the last day. And is it not true, then, for every moment, not just that one? Is it not the truth of our lives — the truth that makes life more than a passing shadow, that lets us face an Eternal Substance we touch at every instant?
Yes — the assurance that Pentecostal gifts are not withdrawn, that we receive them fresh every day from him who first gave them, would not by itself be joyful; it would be overwhelming. To feel such a stewardship is to recall an unfaithfulness no confession can utter and no repentance undo. But beneath this lies a deeper assurance, expressed in the Psalm St. Paul quotes: “that the Lord God might dwell among them.” This is the Pentecostal revelation, which alone makes the Pentecostal gifts intelligible or blessed. The Spirit of God dwells among us, dwells in us. Rain and dew fitly picture his influences, but they cannot express that Living and Personal Presence, that abiding Friend and Comforter proceeding from Father and Son, the bond of their unbroken union, who makes men heirs of God and joint heirs with Christ. That he is the gift the Son received for men upon his ascension is the truth the Holy Catholic Church exists to declare. Churches have dared to invert God’s revealed order, transposing the Creed’s articles, putting faith in the Church before faith in the Holy Ghost, making the Spirit depend on the body he quickens rather than the body on him. So the divine gifts have shriveled into enchantment and sleight of hand. So men have been taught to shut God out of his own universe, confining him to sudden, casual, trivial interferences, and so science has been divorced from faith and the empire of Chance set up against the Kingdom of Heaven. Those who sow this wind will reap the whirlwind. Those meant to show that God’s order has triumphed over magicians and soothsayers have themselves taken up magic and soothsaying, and will meet new and stronger conjurors who will overpower them — for as it was said, “Jesus they knew, and Paul they knew, but who are these,” practicing devilries in the name of Jesus and Paul instead of casting out devils?
Nor can we escape that same danger. Faith in spiritual agency is too strong in men’s hearts for the most resolute materialism to defeat. Eighteenth-century wit could banish the Gospel from drawing rooms and universities, but it could not keep Cagliostro out of either. Nineteenth-century money-worship may prove a stronger enemy of the Gospel than wit ever was — but does it hinder the growth of spiritual impostures? Are they not growing under its very influence, becoming part of its own routines?
To proclaim the Spirit of Truth against these lying spirits — to declare that the Spirit truly strives with us, cultivating every faculty he has given, bringing us to repentance, shaping us into God’s image, making us helpers rather than destroyers of one another — this is the Church’s remaining task, the one hope for our age. And it is a hope that will not disappoint, for it joins the deepest convictions of past ages to the deepest needs of this one. Pentecost taught the Jews to rejoice at the miracle of buried seed springing up in its season by God’s beautiful order, and to link this with the Law he gave to guide their steps. Whitsuntide keeps both lessons and lifts them higher: the Spirit who first brooded over darkness and made it fruitful still quickens whatever seems dead and brings the hidden to light; that same Spirit writes God’s laws on men’s hearts, that they may be his people and he their God. Do we not need such a quickener of our deadness, such a guide from restlessness to peace? Do we not need one to fix God’s law daily in our deepest affections, to pierce our hearts and make us cry, “Men and brethren, what shall we do?” — and to answer that cry as no human voice can, by working in us to will and to do what pleases God? And will not the belief that such a One has been given, and remains with us, once he has worked in us true repentance, bring us the joy and singleness of heart in our daily duties and common life that the disciples knew, when they learned to call nothing their own, but God their Father and all men their brothers?