Second Sunday after Easter

“And let the peace of God rule in your hearts, to the which also ye are called in one body.”—Colossians iii. 15.

Justification was the subject of the Collect for the First Sunday after Easter: Christ’s Sacrifice is the subject of the Collect for to-day. Both are connected with the Resurrection; both are connected with human life and morality. The first directly concerns the peace of the individual conscience; the other concerns directly the peace to which we have been called in one body. They ought not to be confounded; they cannot be separated. To merge Justification in Sacrifice, is the error of the Romanist; to merge Sacrifice in Justification, is the error of the Protestant. The first makes that which has been done for the whole family a hindrance to the faith of the distinct man, the member of the family; the last makes the satisfaction which a man receives respecting himself, the measure of what has been done for all. Each, I conceive, has to a great extent failed of his own object by overlooking the other. The Romanist has been obliged to provide comforts to the individual conscience which have destroyed the universal character he glories in; the Protestant has been obliged to meet the social craving by expedients which have made his promise of peace to the man insincere and abortive.

I spoke last week of the way in which the Protestant truth of Justification by Faith asserted itself in the hearts of men who were brought up in the midst of a society which they believed to be Catholic and Divine. They had done what their system enjoined them to do; they thought they believed what their system enjoined them to believe. Their acts and their belief alike drove them to despair. A sense of unrighteousness was awakened in them by their efforts to become righteous. Their professions of a completed salvation drove them to ask, “How are we saved from this enmity to God—this perdition in which we find ourselves?” The doctors could make no answer to this demand. The Creed made a wonderful answer. They were to believe in the forgiveness of sins: they were to believe in Christ, the Forgiver. They did believe in Him, and rose up new men. The burden of death fell off; they were partakers of a nobler life. They were freed from the guilt, which had prompted all superstitious contrivances; which had hindered all godly thankfulness, and all manly obedience. They could serve God as a reconciled Father in pureness of living and truth.

These were the experiences of the sixteenth century; are they not good for the nineteenth? I maintained that they were, and that we are essentially the same men as our fathers were; that we have committed sins as they did; that the sense of evil is as real in us as it was in them; that the emancipation must come to us from the same Faith in God the Justifier; that Christ’s resurrection is the witness of this Justification now, as it was then. Those who look down with contempt upon the Reformers for that which they passed through, must also look with contempt upon St. Paul for that which he passed through. They must look with contempt upon that which is deepest and truest in themselves; they must look with contempt upon that to which Europe is indebted for not being utterly immoral, utterly atheistical.

But I dare not deny that there are other experiences which we can as little gainsay, and which are forcing themselves more directly upon our notice. Men and women who have been brought up in a Protestant atmosphere, who from their childhood have been taught that it is Faith which saves the soul, who have regarded with traditional horror the church which they suppose denied this doctrine in past time, and denies it now, who have looked upon that church as the enemy of the Bible, as tyrannical, as idolatrous,—men and women with all these feelings and prepossessions, have begun first to utter murmurs, not loud but deep, that they cannot gain peace of conscience by that belief which is said to secure it; then to express open suspicions that that peace is only promised to “one body,” as my text says; then to ask with doubt, which soon passes into indignant disaffection, whether we, with all our divisions, uncertainties about doctrine, absence of authoritative decrees, can belong to that body; then to wonder at the grandeur of the Latin Church, with its long prescription, its strange coherency, its mighty influence, its grand ceremonial, its roll of saints, its confessional for special transgressions, its exhibition of a continual sacrifice for the universe; then, finally, to affirm that all these phenomena can only be explained by the recognition of a common centre of light and wisdom in Rome, and that no blessings, individual or national, which we have lost, can be restored to us till we confess that same centre, and bring all our different systems to revolve about it.

You cannot be ignorant that feelings of this kind have been awake for many years, and are still awake amongst us; that they are to be found in minds of the most various complexion and character; that they affect some who are imaginative, almost as many who are severely logical; that they appear quite as often in the sceptical as in the credulous; that they mingle with the characteristics of an age which we should pronounce most hostile to them; that if you see reason for connecting them to-day with vanity, mawkishness, affectation, you may be startled tomorrow by discovering them in conjunction with earnestness, humility, self-sacrifice; that at all events they are producing the most serious consequences upon those who are impressed by them and upon those who are revolted by them; that they cannot be overlooked by any who care for the peace of men’s hearts, of families, of English society, of Christendom.

Not overlooked certainly; but how are they to be dealt with? Should we endeavour to stifle them? Should we solemnly denounce them? Should we turn them into ridicule? Should we seek for some half concessions which may content them? Should we divert them with playthings? All these methods have been tried. Numbers are still trying them. I believe they will fail just as completely as the similar methods failed which were used in the sixteenth century to put down the thoughts which were then convulsing the spirits of men and threatening to convulse society. There were strong motives at that time for resorting to one or another of these experiments; motives which acted as powerfully upon good patriots, like Sir Thomas More, as upon arrogant doctors and papal nepotists. Might not all old sympathies and affections be shaken and dissolved by these doubts and anxieties? Might not thousands be loosened from their moorings, and be driven about in a wide sea without chart or compass? Were not a number of the objections that were raised against the existing system untenable? Were not a number of the objectors frivolous and insincere? What more natural than to conclude—“The best course is to persuade those who can be persuaded to contentment; to give the half-sincere something that will look like a satisfaction of their cravings; to crush those who will not restrain their complaints, and who will accept no palliatives, with the arm of power.”

Weak reasoning all, and poor philosophy! It could not be. Those who took any of these courses were fighting, not against men, but against God. He had awakened the cries for justification and peace in men’s consciences. He only could meet them. They might be disturbing to the Church, or to the schools, or to the nations; nevertheless, no popes, no doctors, no kings could put them down. For, in truth, neither the Church, nor the schools, nor the nations, could have gone on without them: infidelity would have extinguished the Church; all earnest thought would have perished in the schools; the vulgarest policy of statesmen would have quenched the life of the nations, if a peace which was no peace could have been secured by the acts of any of the three, or of all together.

Why should it be otherwise now? Why may not the thoughts respecting a Universal Church, which we sometimes regard as pregnant with rebellion, sometimes as perilous to freedom—be the very instruments which God is using for leading us to a higher obedience, to a diviner liberty? Why should it be less dangerous to represent these longings as fantastical or Utopian than those? Why may it not be our duty, our interest, that we ourselves and that our brethren should understand thoroughly what this thirst in their hearts signifies, what contentment God has provided for it, so that we may not seek to slake it at any earthly fountains, which give forth waters not of life but of death?

There are some stock arguments, some favourite explanations, which we often resort to as means of curing the prevalent habit of mind, and which only show, I fear, our incapacity of understanding it, and our readiness to imitate the pious frauds of Romanism in our assaults upon it. Such, for instance, is the common statement, that there have been in all ages protesters against the evils of the visible Church, that these constituted the real spiritual Church, that so God’s promises of never letting it perish have been accomplished. The mere statement is unquestionably true. There have been evils in the Church always; there have been men to testify against them: those men have shown that they were believing in an invisible Being, and trusting in His might; that they were receiving all outward forms and institutions only as tokens of His presence. But you cannot say so much without saying more. You must tell us what the nature of the protest was which they bore; whether it intimated that they alone were possessors of certain spiritual privileges, or whether it affirmed that the men whom they addressed were sharers of those privileges, and were sinful for not using them. If it was of the former kind, one does not exactly see its reasonableness, nor who could listen to it. If it was of the latter, which would make it of the same kind as the protests in the Old and New Testament against the sins of kings and priests, and of Scribes and Pharisees, then it implied that there was a Church existing at that day, a Church still possessing an invisible foundation and invisible treasures. If so, what have you gained by putting this fact so prominently forward, and trying to make all ecclesiastical history merely the echo of it? The inquirer still demands—“What then is this body, with its sacraments, and its spiritual powers and energies, which I read of? Is it not the very one which these righteous and true men spake of, which they said God had established, and which men were treating as if it were only an earthly machine for advancing their fortunes, an earthly organisation which they might turn to the most earthly purposes?”

For the same reason, we are not touching the heart of this question at all, when we are producing arguments to show the great corruptions of the Church in the Middle Ages or in any other age. No doubt the facts ought to be stated exactly as they are, with no effort to heighten or abate their colouring, precisely as we would state any facts in the ancient history of Rome or Greece. No doubt it is right that all instances of baseness and corruption should be produced, as a set-off to fantastic and one-sided pictures of Arcadian innocence or transcendent heroism. But we must not delude ourselves with the notion that we have established any great truth, or corrected any radical falsehood, by this array of proofs. There were gross corruptions in the French or Italian Church of the twelfth or fourteenth century. But if we may believe St. Paul, there were gross and scandalous corruptions, corruptions of life as well as of doctrine, in the Corinthian and Galatian Churches of the first century. We may think that the later evil was much greater than the earlier. Most likely it was, though we have not been made judges of that point. But admit corruption, to any extent or degree, in bodies which the Apostle describes as elect, called, sanctified; and unless you are determined to make those divine and inspired words meet some theory of yours, and that they shall not signify what they seem to signify, you must acknowledge that a holy body can continue to exist, though a multitude of its members commit acts which are most unholy. And remember, that if you are fond of facts, you can also be encountered with facts; that it can be shown that every experiment to make bodies holy by cutting off the supposed holy portions from the rest, has proved the more unsuccessful and abortive, the more consistently and perseveringly it has been pursued.

But if these are arguments which we must cease to trust because they have been found ineffectual, we can depend still less upon the feeble efforts which some have made to appease the cravings of men for a universal and united Church, by introducing a more brilliant ceremonial, or an appearance of uniformity to which there is no corresponding substance.

It is no doubt rash and foolish to dogmatize respecting the degree in which spiritual worship may be assisted or retarded by appeals to the senses. Much must depend upon national or individual temperaments. There is scope for the exercise of charity and forbearance, in enduring any habits to which we have not been accustomed, and which we suspect of excess or defect; there is scope for the exercise of self-denial and spiritual prudence, in surrendering that which we prize, or adopting that which we dislike, for the sake of a brother’s conscience. If we are possessed by spiritual truths, we shall no doubt discover at last the most suitable methods of expressing them through the forms of the sensible world. What I say is, that such forms, let their worth or utility be what they may, never can afford the least contentment to a spirit really exercised by these doubts to which I have been referring. They may embrace them even greedily for awhile; soon, they will sicken of what will appear to them the embalming and dressing out of a dead body; they will say that we are naturalizing symbols which are precious in other countries on account of the truth which is embodied in them; that what we want is this truth itself; that we have lost, not the forms which denote the sacrifice, but the sacrifice itself; that we never can recover uniformity till we have the unity which it betokens; nay, that if we had the one, we might perhaps bear some deviations from the other. These are very great and grave statements, depending comparatively little for their effect upon the rhetorical ingenuity with which they are sometimes put forward, or upon the bitter scorn with which those who produce them treat their own past states of mind and the friends in whom they still discover traces of them. The rhetoric we need not fear; the scorn we may regret more for the sake of those who indulge it than of those who are the objects of it; but the testimony to what we need, the appeals to our consciousness of evil, we cannot pass over: these we are bound earnestly and gratefully to heed and to profit by.

1. We want, it is said, a Church of God, and not one of Man. Yes, that is our want, the want of us Englishmen, the want of people everywhere. We have believed, whatever we may have talked to the contrary, in a Church built on some human foundation, resting on some human authority, supported by some name or notion. And it will not do. We feel it will not. We find that there is no peace for us while we are trying to stand on this ground, no peace with each other, no peace in our own consciences. We must have a Church resting in the Name of God and in no other.

2. It is said, this Church must be one and indivisible. Certainly it must. If it stands on the Name of God, and not on some ground of ours; if Christ the Son of God is the foundation and corner-stone of it; then it is one, eternally, absolutely, necessarily one. Nothing can separate it. No powers of hell can prevail against it.

3. But such a Church, you say, actually exists. It existed in the first ages; it existed in the Middle Ages; it existed before the Reformation, and at the Reformation; it exists still. Most assuredly. No doctrine is so consolatory, so delightful, and I will add, so entirely in accordance with fact and with our ordinary language, the language which we all adopt when we are not theorizing. There was this Church, there had been this Church ever since the Gospel was preached. The forms and creeds which existed in every part of Europe testified of such a Church, a Church of which Latins, Greeks, bond and free, were all equally members.

4. But a Church which is one and indivisible must have an infallible guide. Certainly, no other can possibly avail. “Yes, but not an infallible book; an infallible Person.” Even so. If Christ Himself is not with His Church, is not the guide of it, no book can avail it anything at all, no minister can avail it anything at all. If His guidance is only an imaginary guidance, and not a real one; if His guidance is not precisely that which we all crave for, a guidance of the Reason, the Will, the thoughts and instincts of our hearts, which no other can know or can look into, the idea of a Church is a dream. And it is no less a dream that there has been any human thought, any human literature. We have a common life, a common mind, because there is One Living Word who is the Head and Teacher of us all. The universe is an incomprehensible enigma without Him.

5. “But a Church involves a Sacrifice, a Sacrifice that actually unites man to God, that actually takes away sin.” Even so. I can conceive no other foundation for a Church than this. I cannot conceive how a Church can maintain fellowship among its members, or produce any sound Christian morals, which does not put forth a Divine Sacrifice as at the root of all human life; as the spring of all human action.

6. “And this Sacrifice ought to involve a universal Communion among men of all kindreds and ages, a Communion of quick and dead.” Surely, the New Testament affirms it. It says that we are come to an innumerable company of Angels, to the Spirits of just men made perfect, to God the Judge of all, to Jesus the Mediator of the New Testament, to the blood of sprinkling which speaketh better things than that of Abel. Can there be loftier language? Must not the Communion of the body and blood of Christ mean this or nothing?

7. “But besides this, there must be in the Church a power to absolve the consciences of men.” What else does the Church exist for, so far as men are concerned, but to absolve or set free their consciences from the chains with which they are bound? What greater negligence can it be charged with than that of not performing this office? What greater sin than that of forging chains instead of breaking them?

I have gone through what I believe are the principal allegations respecting a Church, which we are wont to hear. I have admitted the truth and the virtue of them all. And I do not utter this as a lazy admission. I say all these assertions ought to frighten us; to make us ashamed; to bring us to repentance before God. For it is not a false charge, but one thoroughly merited and established, that we have forgotten these characteristics of a Church,—not one of them, but all of them; that we have lived and acted as if there was no body to which they belonged; that we have built many of our arguments upon the denial that such a body is possible. I say we are bound solemnly to make this confession; that in fact every prayer we offer to God should be a renewal of the confession. But what confession? Is it that we are not yet members of such a Church? That we may bring ourselves into such a community by committing a certain act of separation from the one which is set up in our land? No, verily. That would be an easy, pleasant, self-justifying confession. It must be a much more humiliating one than that. It must be the acknowledgment that we are actual members incorporate of such a catholic, holy, united Society, under such infallible guidance, resting upon such an atoning sacrifice, demanding such a daily sacrifice of ourselves, implying such a communion with all in earth and heaven, holding forth such an emancipation to our own consciences, and to the consciences of our brethren; and that we have been shut up in our narrow selves, following our own guidance, or the guidance of some feeble fellow-creature, practically acknowledging no atonement between earth and Heaven, with fettered, guilty consciences, doing nothing to break the yoke from the necks of our brethren. And what fruit should be meet for such confession and repentance? Shall it be our acknowledgment of the Roman Bishop as centre of the Church? Again I say, no; if it is to be a Universal Church, then we dare not narrow it to his dimensions; we cannot circumscribe it by his Latin rules. If it is to be under infallible direction, we cannot submit it to his fallible direction. If it is to be based upon a universal Sacrifice made once for all, we cannot rest it on his notion of an incomplete Sacrifice, which priests on earth are to make perfect. If we are to be assertors of freedom of conscience, we cannot yield to one who exists to enslave the conscience. But this will be a true fruit of such Confession and Repentance. We may bid all men of all nations and Churches claim the liberty with which Christ has made them free; the full unity which they have in Him their ascended Lord and Head; the perfect Communion which they may all have in His Sacrifice. This will be our duty and reward, to tell ourselves and to tell all men that we are called to Peace in one body, and therefore that we may let that Peace, the Peace of Christ, rule in all our hearts.