Priests and Saints

“Let Thy priests be clothed with righteousness; and let Thy saints sing with joyfulness.”—Psalm cxxxii. 9 (Prayer-book Version).

The passage: The psalmist prays that God’s priests be clothed with righteousness and that His saints sing for joy.

What did “Priests” and “Saints” mean to a Jew? Why does the Psalmist see such a close connection between the righteousness of the one and the joy of the other? Are the names obsolete? Have their meanings changed? Do those who bear them still affect one another as they did in the old times? These are the questions I propose to consider this afternoon.

I. A whole book of the Pentateuch tells us what the Jewish priest was and what he did, and all the other books throw light on his calling. The history of the people, from beginning to end, is a living commentary on their priesthood, as on all their institutions.

We first meet the priest in books of Law, when Moses calls Aaron to be his helper, and this must not be overlooked. The priest could appoint nothing and devise nothing. He was told what to do, and from the first he was shown plainly what he must not do. Laws did not come from him, and he did not administer them. Like every other officer of the commonwealth, he was called to be a witness of the Lord God of Israel, who was revealing Himself to the nation, delivering, governing, feeding and judging it. The priest had no power to guess at God. If he invented an act of worship, or let the people invent one, he was a transgressor and a rebel. If he broke a statute on the pretence of higher insight into the Divine purposes, he was as liable to its penalty as the humblest soldier or farmer.

The Jewish priest’s offices were apparently no different from those of priests elsewhere. Like them, he offered sacrifices for those who felt they had offended a Divine Ruler, and for the whole nation. Like them, he took notice of bodily illnesses, especially those likely to spread. Like them, he kept alive, by his very existence as well as his acts, the belief in a communion between the invisible and the visible world. Why might he not, on the strength of this, have gained all the influence of the Brahmin? Because he could not pretend that his acts produced an effect on the mind of the Being to whom he brought the sacrifice. He had to say, or he undermined his own authority: “God Himself is the author of this sacrifice. He decreed this way of confessing your wrongdoing, not I. He has proclaimed an Atonement. Everything comes not from you, through me, to Him, but from Him, through me, to you. I am only the witness of the pardon He gives and the peace He makes. I am only the channel through which He chooses to restore your health of body or spirit.” Those who believe that God really revealed His mind and will to the chosen nation must think this the higher honour. To witness an actual union of God with His creatures, and an actual putting away of their wrong, is far greater than to offer sacrifices on the chance of averting some mischief, or intercessions in a vague, dim hope of being heard.

But the success of what we call Priestcraft depends on that uncertainty. The guilty man crouches as a slave before the one who seems to know the divine secrets, and to have guessed the price at which so much wrath can be bought off, because he dreads what the gods may plan against people they can crush in a moment. Charms and incantations are cherished where no fixed laws trace the course of a disease. So what we see as the Jewish priest’s distinction above other priests was exactly what crippled him when he wanted to draw homage to himself.

This was still more true of the public sacrifice, the great day of Atonement, in which all Israel, not the single worshipper, was concerned. That day proclaimed loudly that the people God had declared holy by covenant was still holy in His eyes. The sins that had divided it from Him, and were so plainly dividing its members from each other, were put away not by the people’s act or the priests’ but by His. This service, in harmony with all the institutions around it, showed that evil was not the nation’s normal state but what made it abnormal and drew it from its proper state. It testified that God’s will was reconciling and renewing, able to bring the nation back from the misery and slavery into which it had fallen through disbelieving His word. It testified too that the priest was holy, as every man in the nation was holy, because God had chosen him as His servant, and that he must consider himself holy on that ground and no other.

II. So we have reached the sense of the other word in the text. In speaking of the Jewish priests we have learned what the Jewish saints were. Were they the good and choice men of the land, standing in sharp contrast to the stiff-necked people around them? Surely they were, but only because they were Israelites, believed themselves to be Israelites, and claimed the rights of Israelites. As I have often shown you from many passages of the Bible, this was what separated them from the utterly corrupt: the most sensual of the kings, the proudest of the Pharisees. These stood apart from their kind. They would not rest on the common privileges of Abraham’s children. They wrapped themselves in earthly or spiritual distinctions and would not see that they were only trustees of both for the whole society to which they belonged. So when they took the title of Saints for themselves, they destroyed their only claim to it, and did what they could to destroy their countrymen’s claim as well.

For the prophets tell Israel that God chose them as a holy nation to witness to all nations about Him, His character and His purposes. They were to let everyone know that no self-willed power ruled the universe; that its evils must not be blamed on an Evil Creator; that a right and just King upheld their kingdoms; that all the wrong and injustice of earthly kings and peoples warred against Him; and that He would prevail and reveal Himself as Judge and Monarch of the whole earth. The prophets complained that Israel did not do this work. The heathens were more faithful to gods they did not know than Israel was to the God who had chosen them as His inheritance; they were proud of their Temple and disgraced it; because of them God’s name was blasphemed in every land. They were a nation of saints choosing to be a nation of sinners.

III. The prophets who bring these charges against the whole nation generally trace many of its worst corruptions to the priests. They represented the nation’s holiness. If they began to fancy the holiness was their own, belonging to them as a caste by hereditary right, one can imagine how soon security would replace vigilance. They would look for in other men the evils taking possession of their own hearts, and gladly escape the dreary routine of meaningless duties into coarse animal indulgence. The effect of such sights in lowering the people would be gradual and certain. Even those who never saw or believed them might feel that nothing in the universe was so lifeless and monotonous as the worship of God. Some would value themselves on going through it because they found it a penance; others would seek wild delight in whatever was furthest from such a service. Then pleasures would themselves become a hard business, like religious acts. The pursuit of money, honest or base, would become the end of life. As it led to crimes, a fear of consequences would arise and be mistaken for the fear of God. A joyless, thankless spirit would spread through all hearts and show on all faces. Everywhere there would be a sense of death and a dread of it, and scarcely anywhere a glow of life.

The Psalmist prayed that such a state might not overtake his land, or, if it had begun, might cease: “Let Thy priests be clothed with righteousness.” “Let Thy saints sing with joyfulness.” “If Thy priests regard Thee not as a hard Power they are obliged to serve but as a Righteous Being whom it is good to serve; if Right is the object they set before them and love to contemplate till it becomes the habit of their spirits; if they do not boast of it as their own but confess it as Thine, and so share in it as we share the sun and the air; then joy and liberty will spread through all Thy people. They will feel themselves truly Thy saints, a holy people, sealed, consecrated, sacrificed to Thee. They will set forth Thy Name wherever they go and in whatever work they do, and all the families of the earth will receive a blessing from them.”

IV. My brethren, as I have often told you, I cannot see that the name Priest, in the sense of the Jewish Scriptures, has lost any force or worth for us. All the Jew knew of the name was good and healthy; what he lacked was the full knowledge of what the office implied and the full power to perform it. Until the complete and voluntary sacrifice of the Son of Man and Son of God had been offered, the complete atonement of Heaven and Earth made and ratified, the perfect representative of man revealed at God’s right hand, and all mankind and the whole universe declared to stand in Him, the priest could bear only half his intended testimony. He could offer only a feeble sacrifice and a broken intercession for his race to the Father of all. Then he learned that there is a High Priest who always presents our nature before God and God’s nature to us; that the highest sacrifice is the one God Himself made, and men’s sacrifices are good by the working of His Spirit in them; that the work of the Mediator and Head of the whole family, while He wore a mortal body, was to cure sickness and conquer death. Then he would feel that every duty of the Jewish priest was his, and that if some were delegated to other ministers, those ministers, the physicians of the land, held a priestly trust and did a priestly service. And so far as he understood these high functions to be his, I conceive he would not thrust himself into offices that are not his. He would be reluctant to mix in ordinary administration, knowing it was assigned to others, and that confusing the two would weaken the dignity and sacredness of their work and his own and bring equal mischief to both.

V. In the same way, I should contend that the Apostles, being Jews, naturally took the Jewish idea of Saintship into the New Testament language, and that any other idea put in its place is feebler and narrower. They had believed themselves part of a called nation and been told it was a sin to think otherwise. Now they claimed all who were baptized in Christ’s name as Saints chosen by God, and told them it was a sin to think otherwise. They had understood that their nation was chosen to witness to all nations of the Living and Righteous God, and was about to be cast out for refusing. So they held that the Church, scattered in different cities and formed of Jews and Heathens, was chosen to witness to all men that the Righteous God was their Father. He had adopted them in His Only-begotten Son, bidden them renounce their separate idolatries, and given them His Spirit that they might become One Family. Each Church in its own city or nation, they seem to have thought, would do its work in the world so far as it held this faith, and each member his own special work. How then could they change the meaning of the name Saint, or limit it to a set of especially exalted individuals, instead of letting it expand as the Gospel expanded everything else in the Old Economy?

VI. If the name keeps this old divine force, subject to this inevitable widening, then the old connection also holds between the unrighteousness of the Priests and the joylessness of the Saints or the Church. The Psalmist’s prayer is still the one we most need to offer: “Let Thy Priests be clothed with righteousness, and let Thy Saints sing with joyfulness.” Throughout the history of modern Europe, I think, this truth is written in sunbeams: the degeneracy of the Priesthood is the main cause of the degeneracy of the nations. Another is that the Priesthood’s degeneracy always goes with unbelief in the Righteousness of God, a low estimate of what He demands of His Priests and the trusts He has given them, and an eager desire to claim powers He has not given and they cannot exercise.

VII. You will anticipate the application these circumstances suggest. All men, whatever their opinions, feel and confess that the most embarrassing complication now troubling kings, emperors and nations is what we have called the States of the Church. Whatever else is remotely involved, this is directly involved: whether priests have shown themselves even moderately good civil administrators, and whether the inhabitants of the Papal territory shall be forced to keep them in that role. On the first question, I suppose only a small minority in England would doubt. Without citing recent French writers, they would count the nearly uniform testimony of impartial travellers of every country as decisive. But in fairness we must confess that the proof is not confined to one country, age or mode of faith. With very few exceptions, wherever the experiment has been tried, whether the name Priest was accepted or carefully avoided, the results have been essentially the same. This confession must be made simply and broadly. In all countries and ages the Priests have craved to try tasks that experience declares them unfit for. Archbishop Laud called it the last and crowning effort of his work for the Church that he made Bishop Juxon Lord Treasurer. History may explain how far that and similar attempts to make the English kingdom priestly helped to secure his master’s throne. What was the government of the Kirk’s ministers in Scotland during the minority of James VI, and again when they proclaimed Charles Stuart King? What would the Westminster Assembly have done, had Cromwell not checked it, but the most tyrannical and abortive attempts at civil rule by ecclesiastics? These examples, which could be multiplied indefinitely, show that neither the impulse to such rule nor its consequences are confined to Romanist countries. They are at work in all of us, and it is God’s great mercy if we are kept from indulging the passion and enduring the punishment.

VIII. These reflections ought to keep us from harsh and contemptuous language when we see Roman Catholic clergy and prelates clinging fiercely to what strikes us as the most worthless of shadows, the most dangerous display of the weakness of a Power they suppose has the right to govern the world. We have no right to judge them, lest we be judged. If we understand our own position, we cannot wish them to separate the idea of a Vicar of Christ over the universe from his dominion over a little local principality. It seems to be God’s will that the falsity of the grand doctrine be shown through the practical comment of the anomalies and contradictions of the petty experiment. But what I have said this afternoon suggests another reason for keeping party and personal feeling out of a controversy in which the interests of one nation, indeed of all nations, are deeply involved.

What Italians see around them, and what they hear from Protestant theologians and Liberal politicians, makes them regard the very name and character of a priest with hatred or scorn. This is not a natural state of mind for any people, certainly not for a Southern people. Woe to those through whom the offence has come; but it is an offence, much loss may follow, and the gain is doubtful. To extinguish reverence for what has long been reverenced must be terrible at once, and a reaction of gross superstition is sure to follow. May it not be that what the priests of that land and of all lands need is not a sense of the meanness of their office but of its grandeur and awfulness? That they have never considered how little power it takes to degrade and stupefy a people, and how much divine power it takes to raise them and make them free, just and wise? That they have been mistaken not in saying they received their functions and gifts from God Himself, but in forgetting who He is, how He has revealed Himself to man, and what purposes toward man He has declared? May there not one day be an awakening in some of these priests to the belief that they are charged with a mighty commission: to keep alive in men’s minds the sense of a Perfect Reconciliation, a Finished Sacrifice and a never-ending Communion between God and His creatures? All this has been dwarfed, and its influence made ineffectual or mischievous, because they supposed they were to effect the reconciliation, make the sacrifice and create the communion. May there not be humble men on whose hearts this light, painful to agony at first, is just dawning, a light shining not from any Northern torches but from God’s own word? Can we not be sure that, as they gaze on it, they will more and more renounce the silly ambition of grasping an authority so much poorer than what they already have? May they not readily confess that a priest who aspires to be a policeman must be a very bad policeman, because he first consented to be a bad priest?

My friends, it may seem strange and ridiculous to some of you that I speak of such a conviction working in a poor friar in a lonely cell, as if it might cut a knot that monarchs and statesmen cannot untie. But is there no historical experience to support such a dream? I do not know what power or wit is at work in the councils of Europe, civil or ecclesiastical, but I do not suppose there is more than was engaged in settling the condition of Italy, the Popedom and mankind when Charles V, Francis I and Leo X were occupied with the problem. Surely the monarch of a country that had recently overrun the sacred soil, the lord of Spain, Germany and the Indies, the man who brought all the craft and learning of the Medici to sustain the Holy See and free it from the scandal of promoting ignorance, might have found, if anyone could, some adjustment of the difficulties at the start of the sixteenth century. Yet all these mighty forces were thrown into confusion, and the whole question of Italy and Europe took a new form, because a miner’s son, a poor monk, cried aloud in bitterness of soul: “Lord, I am one of Thy priests, yet I am not righteous. Oh that Thou wouldst clothe me with a righteousness that is Thine, and not mine!” When he had found deliverance himself, he declared to all his fellow-sufferers that the unrighteousness of the priest crushed all hope among men and made it impossible for God’s saints to sing with joyfulness. That message sounded through all lands, and that prayer went up from multitudes of hearts. The Reformation that followed was imperfect and limited, but it was one that all the contrivances of all the sovereigns in Christendom could not have wrought.

There is nothing wild or irrational in supposing that like causes may produce like effects in our times. But our business is with facts, not anticipations, and first with our own land, not others. Intelligent foreigners who travel in England and mix with its most cultivated classes probably hear remarks about us not unlike what we hear from them about their priests. The English priest may not be feared in the same way; he may be seen as tamed and domesticated, his wings too clipped for dangerous flights. Still there will be complaints, painful because too just: sometimes of our impotence, sometimes of our pretentiousness; of our effort to spread a morality not based on the broad, practical distinction between right and wrong; of our appealing to the weaker elements in human nature and repudiating the strong and vital; of our ignoble contentions; of our injustice to all outside our circle, and often to those within it. When we hear such things, or learn they are said out of our hearing, I suspect we are as often tempted to side with our accusers as to defend ourselves. We admit all that is said of the necessary abuses of a priestly order, plead special exceptions in our own cases, and perhaps recriminate on other classes who, if ours is bad, cannot be shown to be better. Such excuses, however natural, are unmanly and unlawful. No one who knows himself and reviews his acts fairly can claim to be exempt from any of the evils his order has been prone to, or to have avoided them as opportunity served. No one has a right to say the fault lies with his office and not with him. Each of us ought to magnify that office, to feel the vastness of its responsibilities, the sevenfold gifts that surround it, and the mighty work it might do for our land and all lands if its stewards were found faithful. Do not, I beseech you, my lay brethren, try to strip us of that faith or weaken it; for your own sake, work hard to deepen and confirm it. If we have it rooted and grounded in us, we shall honour your callings and urge you to honour them more and count them more sacred than you have ever done, so that you may be delivered from the pettiness, trickery and vanity that go with a low estimate of their object and nature. If we ask earnestly that God’s priests may be righteous, we shall extend the definition of His saints much further than we are used to. We shall tell you that you are, one and all, called and sealed to be His soldiers and servants; one and all bound to consider yourselves members of a holy Nation; one and all bound, in your different vocations, to see that this nation fulfils the work for which it is set apart. We shall tell you that you must join us in a holy war against all that degrades our English life and our English righteousness. You must show all the countries under our sway or within our influence that they have a righteous God and a loving Father over them, and so deliver them from their miseries and oppressions and make them sing with joyfulness.