June 21, 1857
“Endeavouring to keep the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace.” —Ephesians iv. 3.
Some recent editors of the New Testament have followed some of the early Fathers in adopting a different punctuation of this passage from that which we find in our version. They would read, “I therefore the prisoner of the Lord beseech you that ye walk worthy of the vocation wherewith ye are called, forbearing one another, in (or with) love endeavouring to keep the unity of the Spirit; in the bond of peace one body and one Spirit.” There is an awkwardness in this construction which requires strong reasons to justify it. I know of none, except it be that the expressions “unity of the Spirit” and “bond of peace” are thought to be tautological, or that it is difficult to understand how the Unity of the Spirit can be in the bond of peace. Each of these objections may perhaps disappear when we consider the passage more attentively.
I. If the participle “endeavouring” had no more force than that which we are wont to give it in our day, it would be a very inadequate rendering of St. Paul’s word. But there is nothing which is more significant of a change in the mind of a people, than that which gradually takes place in all phrases of this kind. Endeavour once denoted all possible tension, the highest energy that could be directed to an object. With us it means the last feeble, hopeless attempt of a person who knows that he cannot accomplish his aim, but makes a conscience of going through some formalities for the purpose of showing that the failure is not his fault. This sense it is especially likely to bear in the text, if we really feel that it is addressed to ourselves. “To keep unity in a world of division, how impossible! St. Paul cannot mean that we should actually do it. He only desires us to endeavour; and that we can do of course. We can avoid what will cause disturbance and quarrel: we can let others go their way while we take ours; so the burden of offence, if it comes, will rest upon them and not upon us.”
My brethren, we must at once dismiss the thought from our mind that the Apostle intends this kind of abstinence from effort; this lazy neutrality, by “endeavour.” He wishes us certainly to understand a very active, zealous, deliberate application of all the thought and feeling and power that is in us to a fixed end, which it is easy to miss, but which may be attained, and which it is distinctly our own fault, our own sin, as well as our own misery, if we do not attain. If a man does not “keep the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace,” he cannot lay the blame upon any one but himself; till he takes it home to himself he has not understood what it is which he is commanded to do, he will not understand how he may ever abstain from breaking the command.
II. For observe, we are bidden to keep the Unity of the Spirit. It is something then that we have, and are likely to lose; not something that we may possibly get, if fortune favours us. The endeavour is, to preserve that which has been entrusted to us and is with us. This is not merely the sense which a particular passage would suggest. It is the only sense which is in harmony with the uniform language of Scripture. Everywhere we are told of gifts bestowed, of treasures in earthen vessels; everywhere the exhortation is, “Hold fast that which is committed to thee; let no man take thy crown.” All seeming deviations from this rule are easily explained by it, and ultimately resolve themselves into it. There may be promises of great blessings hereafter; it may be one of our highest duties to expect them, just as it is a great duty to look for a harvest in the appointed season, just as the husbandman’s heart and arm would grow weak if he thought there would be no return for his labour. But the full corn in the ear is the same with the seed in the ground; after that has once been deposited there, to watch and keep it is the only duty which he or the earth can perform. What shall come, depends on other influences; they may be checked or disappointed by neglect or by misdirected activity. They will offer no substitute for the seed, nor, in general, for the farmer’s watchfulness.
III. But “endeavouring to keep Unity.” Who can pretend that this has been given to us here in this world? Who can shut his eyes to the infinite disagreements and discords of the world? What honest man will affirm that discords have been terminated by Christianity; that it has not been the source of fresh, of deeper, of seemingly more interminable discords? It may have taught us to sigh for peace; but to say we have it, is surely to be guilty of the sin with which Isaiah charged the false prophets.
And yet, brethren, can we look into the world and not see that there is a Unity existing in it? I do not speak of Nature, all are ready to confess in some language or other that it is there—there in spite of innumerable jars and convulsions.
I do not speak of this, which often suggests, and naturally suggests, the most painful contrasts to the noise and turmoil that men have brought into every region with which they have anything to do; but precisely of human society,—of that which ever is distracted by all this noise and turmoil. You have a Unity in the midst of this strife, just as much as one amidst the earthquakes and volcanoes of the external world. There are families, there are nations; I do not want to look for them in some distant golden age which never existed, or in some Atlantis you may dream of now. Take them in their worst condition: look at the family disturbed by all possible internal contentions, disturbed, if you will, by mischievous institutions, polygamy or any other. Still there is a Unity there, or you could know nothing of the contention, you would not feel it to be contention. There is a Family Unity; a Unity to be kept, not created; one which you destroy, if you seek to make it anew upon a scheme and platform of your own. It is so with every nation, however torn in pieces by old class hostilities or by new revolutions. The class hostilities threaten its destruction; but there is something to be destroyed: the new revolutions have scattered the warring elements; but in the heart of each there exists the witness of an Order and Unity which cannot be lost. Each one is trying to find a Unity in itself; each one is asking what it has to do with the other. The Unity has been lying in some deep well, it is much more wonderful and mysterious than we had supposed it to be; governments did not create it, fraud and force cannot preserve it. But it is to be kept. All the endeavour of all hearts would not have been wasted in keeping it; and yet a single heart may keep it, when the rest have been careless of it and have let it depart.
IV. The explanation of these contradictions lies in the next words of the text: “Endeavouring to keep the Unity of the Spirit.”
There was once a strong conscience in nations and in Churches, that they had a Unity to keep, and that they ought to make strenuous endeavours to keep it. Strange acts proceeded from this conscience; acts that might tempt us to think it was no conscience at all, but an inspiration of the devil. Albigensian massacres, Smithfield fires, were some of its fruits. They were justified to those who authorized and kindled them by an internal assurance that nothing can be so precious to a nation, or to the Catholic Church, or to every human being, as Unity; that no sacrifices can be too costly or enormous to secure it. Nor is there any answer, I conceive, to the major proposition. I cannot say that if these massacres and fires, however horrible, were removing causes of strife and division, were establishing peace and Unity in a land or in the Universe, they were not a cheap price for a blessing so vast and immeasurable. But, thanks be to God! we are not driven, in a world governed by Him, to such terrible alternatives as these. We can pronounce fearlessly: Neither these measures nor any measures such as these ever did promote Unity,—ever did remove any obstacles to the possession of it. A thorough exterminating persecution, such as De Montfort or Alva conducted and approved, is in all respects far honester, far more reasonable, far more likely to be effectual, than a petty, affectedly moderate and amiable persecution, such as the nineteenth century might witness and bear. But one or the other must be equally unsuccessful for this purpose; must tend to defeat it. I do not mean that such experiments have never crushed opposition, have never had the effect of making men bow to certain decrees unresistingly, with a certain contentment. But just so far as they have done this, just so far have they been instrumental in destroying Unity—the Unity of which the text speaks, the Unity which the Catholic Church is pledged by its Creeds and its oaths to keep and defend. For if these Creeds and oaths mean anything, the Unity which we are to keep is a Unity of the Spirit; the Unity which was declared to exist on the day of Pentecost between men of all nations and languages. We do not believe in that sign if we do not believe that the true Unity is a Unity amidst diversity of customs, habits of mind, notions, education. We do not believe in that sign if we do not believe that the true Unity is a Unity in the Spirits of men, and not a Unity such as was sought to be established at Babel, of one tongue, under one tyrant. We do not believe in the Holy Ghost if we do not believe that He is the source of Unity, that He brings men to be of one mind in a house, a nation, a Church. We do not believe that the Holy Ghost has been given, if we do not think He is carrying on that work day by day and hour by hour in the societies of men and in the hearts of individuals; if we do not regard all the events of God’s general providence, all the particular circumstances of our own lives, all trials, all joys, yes! all the contradictions of human judgments, all the perversities of human will, as either agents by which He accomplishes His gracious purpose or enemies in the overthrow of which He manifests His mighty power.
Therefore we are bound to say, not that Innocent the Third,—or that any Protestant or any English ecclesiastic who, on a very limited scale and in a very awkward style, has imitated his gigantic experiments,—did too much for the sake of extirpating heresy, but that they did too little—that a more root-and-branch system was then necessary, and is necessary now, for this essential object. If they wished to keep the Unity of the Spirit, they should have struck more resolutely and more deeply at the principles which are causing disunion. They should have sought for these principles first of all in themselves; they should have asked what it was that the Spirit of Truth and Unity was testifying against in their hearts and spirits. When they had carried their inquisition into these recesses, when they had, in the name of God and the Church, excommunicated and given over to the secular arm for slaughter all that they found secretly conspiring against peace and order there—they would have found that they had not believed a lie when they proclaimed that Unity is the most precious of all things in the sight of God, and that they might use His strength and His authority for the protection of it. And with this assurance there would have come such a sense of the beggarliness and baseness of the counterfeit Unity, the Babel Unity,—which they, in defiance of God’s Spirit, and in denial of His presence, had sought to create, as might have led them to an earnest, godly, fruitful repentance.
At all events, my brethren, this should be the effect upon us of what we read about them, of what we see in our age, of what we feel in ourselves. We ought not to rail at past times, but to imitate them in their vigorous endeavours to retain what it is death to lose; we should learn wisdom by their failures, understand where our vigilance is necessary from the misapplication of theirs. It is the greatest of all mistakes to suppose that there was a kind of necessity for Unity in the Early Ages or the Middle Ages, and that there is no such necessity now; that we have somehow learnt to dispense with it. We have learnt no such horrible lesson; we have arrived at no such horrible point of degeneracy and degradation. Never was the sense of the curse of division stronger than now; never was the crying for reconciliation stronger than now. Blundering attempts to force embraces, to smother differences; abject attempts to discover a human guide who will make us at one in spite of our reasons and wills, are proofs how vehement the passion is which will rather subject itself to ridicule and court defeat than not find some vent for itself. What we want is a more thorough persuasion that nothing but a real Unity, a Unity of the Spirit, can satisfy us. Then the assertion that Christ, being ascended on high, has baptized and does baptize with the Holy Spirit,— which is the assertion of the New Testament, which is written in sunbeams in its pages,—will come to us, not as a hard dogma which must be accepted, but as the news of a well-spring of life within us; the answer to all we had been sighing for; the promise of deliverance from the dry notions of our intellects; from the dreary, disputatious, suspicious temper which so quickly becomes the predominating one in our hearts; from all in us that will not sympathise with others, because it is itself cold and dead. For we shall more and more discover that whatever is living in us does fly out to meet what is living in our fellow-men; that we have an interest in sustaining that, however at first it may seem to clash with our experience and modes of thinking; that to kill a thought, a conviction, a hope in any man, is to kill a germ of Unity,—is to kill something which the Spirit of God has planted, and which He would cause to grow and to bring forth. Some persons appear to think that it is their function and calling to find out whatever is untenable in the faith of their fellow-creatures, and to expose it or to make sport of it. No doubt such persons have their reward; if their work is one which God has set them, and they undertake it from duty, and not malice, they may even derive a kind of pleasure from it, though I should imagine not a very keen or elevated pleasure. But it is surely not a less healthful or genial occupation to seek for what is tenable,—for what has a foundation in the faith of all people—to the intent that ours may become clearer and more vital by intercourse and fellowship with theirs, and may give back as much as it receives; to the intent that each may communicate something which the other wants; to the intent that their faith may not dwell in them, nor ours in us, but both in the Truth, which both want.
V. And thus I am led to those words which some appear to have found unnecessary or inconvenient,— “In the bond of Peace.” Is not this a repetition? Is not the Unity of the Spirit the bond of peace? I think not. I think there could be no Unity of the Spirit if there were not a bond of peace; but that they are as completely distinct as the breath is from the air we breathe,—as the eye is from the light that shines into it. By the Unity of the Spirit I understand that which is produced in us by the Spirit of God,—the infinitely various efforts of desire, faith, hope, which He awakens and cultivates in different men, and which He makes them feel to be the movements and struggles of a common life. By the bond of peace I understand that whereto He shows them that all these movements are tending, that wherein He leads them to feel that they all may rest. As there are some who would build the Church upon the grave of all active thoughts, energies, aspirations,—who make this most dreary solitude, and call it Christian peace—so there are those who think a Church can be built upon exertions and energies; that it requires no absolute Truth for its foundation, but only certain holy desires, good counsels, just works. I cannot believe that any man in whom such desires, such counsels, such works, are begotten, will feel satisfied with them. The yearning after Truth, after that which is, never can be long separated in any earnest mind from the affection for what is pure and right. There are instances of this division, instances of men who would have died for goodness, and yet scarcely perceived the worth of Truth. But they are scarcely possible in our time. The pursuit of natural science has had this blessed effect, that men demand something which is not hypothetical, which their own thoughts and conceptions do not supply, as a ground for their thoughts and conceptions to stand upon. The Spirit of God, I am sure, urges them to make this demand, in the spiritual world as much as in the natural. They must find something common there; or the spiritual consciousnesses, of which we hear so much, will simply turn in upon themselves and exhaust themselves in a perpetual search after—nothing.
Where then shall we find this bond of peace? I tried last Sunday to show you, by a series of instances, how men in our time, starting from the most opposite points, engaged in the most dissimilar occupations, holding what seemed to be quite irreconcilable opinions, might find in that Name into which we are baptized, the reconciliation, the σύνδεσμος of their most inward and radical convictions, the deliverance from the intellectual dogmas which had kept them asunder. Evidence, then, furnished by our experience,—entirely irrespective of the traditions of our forefathers,—leads us back to their conviction, that we have here the living Truth which underlies and sustains both the natural and the spiritual world. If indeed those forefathers held that the Church stands upon Confession of that Name, either with the lip or in a written document, they used dangerous language, derogatory to the honour of Him Who is and was and is to come, and Who Himself bears up the pillars of the earth; Who is the only rock on which any house can be built, if the rains and winds are not to carry it away.
A united Confession of the Name, a united Worship of the Father, the Son, and the Spirit,—such a Confession,—such a Worship as the past contains only a dim shadow and prophecy of,—we have a right to look for. It may come when we least expect it; it will probably come after a period of darkness, fierce contention, utter unbelief. But the confession will only be united when we cease to confound our feeble expressions of trust and affiance, our praises and adorations, with Him to Whom they rise, from Whom they proceed; when we are brought to nothingness, that He may be shown to be all in all.
Therefore, if we would keep the Unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace, we must endeavour to maintain in our own hearts, and make others feel, this great distinction. We must show that we do not want them to adopt any tenets of ours; that we are aware of the impotence of physical force to do more than suppress the signs of disagreement—a result not only paltry, but for the most part mischievous,—and that we believe the moral force of arguments addressed to the understanding, or appeals addressed to the heart, is abused and desecrated when it is employed to make captives for our triumphs. For all powers of reasoning and of speech we are bound to hold as gifts of the Spirit of God, Who is working to deliver us from all our narrow and partial conclusions, and to bring us into the clear and full light of God’s countenance. What we ask of Him is, that He will purge our ears, that we may hear the myriad voices which are speaking in His Universe, because they all proceed from that Creative Word by Whom the Father made the world; but chiefly that He will enable us to have fellowship with the poorest child of man, seeing that he is compassed by the Father’s Love, bears that nature which the Son took, and in which He died, and is not unworthy that the Holy Spirit should dwell with him, and embrace him and comfort him, and raise him to eternal life.
Therefore no one shall persuade us, for the sake of Unity, to part with this Name or explain it away, or substitute some other bond of union in the place of it. For the sake of our brethren and companions, for the sake of those who differ with us most, we dare not take this course. For by taking it we sever ourselves from both, we destroy the bond of peace in which we feel that God has made us and will prove us to be eternally at one with them. We want to be more, not less, zealous for this Name than the men of old were, because, if we have availed ourselves of all the teachings of God in these later centuries, we ought to know better than they did that it is a name of inclusion, not of exclusion; that there is eternal life in it, inasmuch as there is eternal love in it. We will not be unthankful that it has been handed to us in a form of words which peasants and children can repeat; for so we learn that it is revealed to us, not discovered by us; that it is not for one age, but for all ages; that we only apprehend it because it first apprehends us. We will teach it to the youngest, because we are sure that the youngest are compassed about by this mystery, as they are surrounded 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 the growing youth, not that we may hinder him from going forth and learning all that men have thought and written, to whom it was unknown, or who have disbelieved it; but precisely that he may draw profit from all, that he may not be obliged to turn away from them in disgust and despair, by reason of their conflicts and contradictions. We will speak of it to the grown man, who is more busy with the controversies of life than with the controversies of the schools, because the more he has to encounter the strifes in others and himself, the more needful is it that he should keep in his own heart the Unity of the Spirit; the more needful is it that he should feel there is a bond of peace which has never been broken, and which will last for ever and ever.