Priests and Saints

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

What did these words, “Priests” and “Saints,” mean to a Jew? Why does the Psalmist perceive such a close connection between the righteousness of the one and the joy of the other? Are the names obsolete? Have they changed their signification? 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 is written to tell us what the Jewish priest was, and what work he did. All the books of the Pentateuch throw light upon his vocation. The history of the people, from the beginning to the end of it, is a living commentary upon their priesthood, as upon all their other institutions.

That the priest is first known to us in books of Law,—that Moses called Aaron for his helper,—is one indication respecting him which must not be overlooked. He could appoint nothing, devise nothing. He was told what he had to do. It was clearly shown him from the first what he had not to do. Laws did not issue from him; he did not administer them. He was called out, as every other officer of the commonwealth was called out, to be a witness of the Lord God of Israel—of Him Who was revealing Himself to the nation, delivering them, governing them, feeding them, judging them. The priest had no power whatever to make guesses about Him. If he invented any act of worship, or sanctioned the people in inventing any, he was a transgressor and a rebel. If, through pretence of any higher insight into the Divine purposes, he broke any statute or ordinance, he was as much liable to the punishment which that statute and ordinance had fixed, as the meanest soldier or tiller of the earth.

The offices of the Jewish priest were not apparently different from those of the priests in other lands. Like them, he offered sacrifices for those who felt they had offended against a Divine Ruler. Like them, he offered sacrifices for the whole Nation. Like them, he took cognizance of bodily infirmities, of such especially as were likely to spread through the land. Like them, he kept alive among the people, by his very existence as well as by his acts, the belief in a communion between the invisible and the visible world. Why might he not, on the strength of these services, have assumed all the influence which ever belonged to the Brahmin? Just because he could not pretend that by certain acts of his he was producing an effect upon the mind of the Being to Whom he brought the sacrifice. He was obliged to say, or he set at nought the foundation of his own authority, “God Himself is the author of this sacrifice. He has decreed—I have not—this way of confessing your wrong-doings to Him. He Himself has proclaimed an Atonement. All proceeds, not from you, through me, to Him, but from Him, through me, to you. I am but the witness of the pardon which He gives you, of the peace which He makes with you. I am but the channel through which it pleases Him to renovate your health of body or of spirit.” Those who believe that God actually revealed His mind and will to the chosen Nation, must, of course, think that this honour was really higher than the other. They must feel that for a man to be the witness of an actual union of God with His creatures, of an actual putting away of the wrong that was in them, is far greater and more glorious than for a man to be offering sacrifices, on the chance that they may avert some mischief; intercessions, in a vague, dim hope that they may be heard.

But the success of what we call Priestcraft depends on this uncertainty. It is the horrible doubt of what the gods may design against the men whom they have the power to crush to atoms in a moment, which lays the conscious sinner as a crouching slave before him who is likely to know the divine secrets, who is likely to have guessed the price at which a given amount of wrath can be bought off. It is the absence of fixed laws by which to ascertain the steps of a disease, that makes charms and incantations so much sought for and cherished. So that what we look upon as the distinction of the Jewish priest above the priest of other lands, was exactly that which crippled him when he was ambitious of drawing homage to himself.

Still more was this the case in reference to the public and general sacrifice,—to that great day of Atonement in which not the individual worshipper, but all Israel was interested. For this day proclaimed with a loud voice, that the people whom God by His covenant had declared to be holy, was holy in His eyes still; the sins which had divided it from Him, and which were so manifestly dividing the members of it from each other, were put away, not by some act of theirs, not by some act of the priests, but by His act. This grand service, in strict harmony with all the institutions to which it belonged, denoted that evil was not the normal state of the Nation, but was that which made it abnormal, which withdrew it from its own proper state. The Atonement-day testified that God’s will was a reconciling, renovating will, which could bring back the Nation from the misery and slavery into which, through disbelief in His word and assurance concerning it, it had fallen. The Atonement-day testified that the priest was holy, just as every man in the Nation was holy, because God had chosen him to be His servant, to do His work; and that he was bound to consider himself holy upon that ground and upon no other.

II. And thus then we have arrived at the sense of the other word which the text brings before us. We have learnt, in speaking of the Jewish Priests, what the Jewish Saints were. Were they the good men, the choice men of the land, those who stand out in such broad and startling contrast to the stiff-necked race about them? Surely they were these; but then only because they were Israelites, and believed themselves to be Israelites, and claimed the rights of Israelites. Therein—as I have often pointed out to you from a multitude of passages in the Bible, from the context of the history—lay their difference from those who were full of all corruption and baseness, from the most sensual of the kings, from the most proud and contemptuous of the Pharisees. These stood apart from their kind; these would not rest upon the common privileges of children of Abraham; these would wrap themselves in their earthly distinctions or their spiritual distinctions, and would not understand that they were merely trustees of both for the whole society of which they were members. And so, if they took to themselves the title of Saints, they were destroying their only claim to that title; they were doing what in them lay to destroy their countrymen’s claim to it.

For the Israelites—so the prophets tell them—were chosen by God to be a holy Nation, that they might be witnesses to all Nations concerning Him and His character and His purposes. The Israelites were to let all know that a self-willed Power was not ruling over the Universe; that they must not attribute its evils to an Evil Creator; that a right and just King was upholding their kingdoms; that all the wrong and injustice of visible kings and of peoples was warring against Him; that He would prevail against them; that He would reveal Himself as the Judge and Monarch of the whole earth. The prophets complained of them that they did not fulfil this work; that the heathens were more faithful to their gods whom they did not know, than they were to the God Who had chosen them to be a people of inheritance to Himself; that they were proud of their Temple and disgraced the Temple; that by reason of them the name of God was blasphemed in all lands. They were a nation of saints, choosing to be a nation of sinners.

III. The prophets who bring these charges against the Nation generally, trace many of its worst corruptions to the priests. They represented the holiness of the Nation; if they ever began to fancy that the holiness was their own, that it belonged to them as members of a caste, by hereditary right, one can fancy how soon security would take the place of vigilance, how easily they would learn to look in other men for the evils that were getting full possession of their own hearts, how gladly they would escape from the dreary routine of duties that had no meaning for them, to coarse animal indulgences. The effect of such spectacles in lowering the tone of the people at large, would be gradual and certain. Even those who did not witness them, or give credit to them, might yet feel that nothing in the Universe was so lifeless, so monotonous, as the worship of God. Then some would value themselves upon their going through this worship because they found it a penance; others would seek a wild delight in whatever was most alien from such a service. Then pleasures would themselves become a hard business, like the acts of religion. The pursuit of money, by honest means or base, would become the end of existence. In proportion as it prompted to crimes, there would come a fear of consequences which would be mistaken for a fear of God. A joyless, thankless spirit would be diffused through all hearts; visible on all countenances. Everywhere there would be a sense of death and a dread of it; a glow of life scarcely anywhere.

That such a state of things might not overtake his land—or, if it had begun, it might cease—the Psalmist prayed, “Let Thy priests be clothed with righteousness.” “Let Thy saints sing with joyfulness.” “If Thy priests regard Thee, not as a hard Power Whom they are obliged to serve, but as a Righteous Being Whom it is good to serve; if Right be the object which 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 become partakers of it as we partake of the sun which shines over us and the air which we breathe; then will there be a joy and liberty diffused through all Thy people; then will they feel themselves to be indeed Thy saints, a holy people, sealed, consecrated, sacrificed to Thee; then will they set forth Thy Name wherever they go, in whatever work they are engaged; then will all the families of the earth receive a blessing from them.”

IV. My brethren, I cannot see, as I have often told you, that the name Priest, in the sense in which I have just represented it, the sense of the Jewish Scriptures, has lost any of its force, any of its worth, for us. It seems to me that all which the Jew knew of the name was good and healthy; that what he wanted was the full knowledge of all that the office implied, the full power of performing its functions. Till the complete and voluntary sacrifice of the Son of Man and the Son of God had been offered; till the complete atonement of Heaven and Earth had been made and ratified; till the perfect representative of man at the right hand of God had been revealed; till all mankind and the whole Universe had been declared to stand in Him,—the priest could only bear half the testimony he was meant to bear on earth; he could only offer up a feeble sacrifice and broken intercession for his race to the Father of all. Then, when he knew that there was a High Priest Who was always presenting our nature before God, Who was always manifesting God’s nature to us; then, when he knew that the highest Sacrifice was that which God Himself had made, and that men’s sacrifices are good by the working of God’s Spirit in them; then, when they had been taught that the work of the Mediator and Head of the whole family, while He was wearing a mortal body, was to cure sickness, and conquer death,—then indeed he would feel that every duty of the Jewish priest was his, and that if some of them were delegated to other ministers, those, the physicians of the land, had a priestly trust, and were executing a priestly service. And so far as he understood these high functions to be his, so far I conceive he would not thrust himself into any office which was not his; so far he would be reluctant to mix himself with matters of ordinary administration, knowing that they had been assigned to other functionaries, and that he should weaken all the dignity and sacredness of their work as well as of his own if he confused them, and should bring equal mischief into both.

V. In like manner, I should contend that the Jewish idea of Saintship is the one which the Apostles, who were Jews, naturally adopted into the New Testament phraseology, and that any other which has been substituted for it is feebler and narrower. They who had believed themselves to be parts of a called Nation,—who had been told that it was a sin to think otherwise,—now claimed all who were baptized in Christ’s name as Saints, chosen of God; and told them that it was a sin to think otherwise. And, as they had understood that their special Nation was chosen to be a witness to all Nations of the Living and Righteous God, and that it was about to be cast out because it had refused to be such a witness, so they held that the Church, scattered in different cities, formed out of Jews and Heathens, was chosen to be a witness to all men that the Righteous God was their Father, and had adopted them in His Only-begotten Son, and had bidden them renounce all their separate idolatries, and had given them His Spirit that they might become One Family. Each Church in its own city or nation, so they appear to have thought, would do its work in the world so far as it held this faith; each member of the Church would do his own special work so far as he held it. How, then, could they alter the signification of the name Saint, or limit it to a set of particularly exalted individuals, or do anything but let it expand itself, just as in all other respects the Gospel had expanded the Old Economy?

VI. But if the name retain this old divine force,—subject to this inevitable dilatation,—so also, I conceive, is there the same connection as in former days between the unrighteousness of the Priests and the joylessness of the Saints or the Church; so is the prayer of the Psalmist still the one which we have most need to offer: “Let Thy Priests be clothed with righteousness, and let Thy Saints sing with joyfulness.” Throughout the history of modern Europe this truth, I think, is written in sunbeams, that the degeneracy of the Priesthood is the main cause of the degeneracy of the Nations: and this other, that the degeneracy of the Priesthood is always connected with unbelief in the Righteousness of God; with a low estimate of that which He demands of His Priests, and of the trusts which He has committed to them; with an eager desire to claim powers which He has not committed to them, and which they are incapable of exercising.

VII. You will anticipate the application of these remarks which the circumstances of the present time suggest. All men, whatever their opinions may be, feel and confess that the most embarrassing of the complications which disturb the minds of kings, emperors, nations, at this time, is the one which refers to what we have been used to call the States of the Church. Every one feels that, whatever other questions are remotely involved in that subject, this is directly involved in it,—whether priests have shown themselves to be even moderately good civil administrators, and whether the inhabitants of the Papal territory shall be forced to receive them still in that capacity. About the answer to the first of those questions, I suppose only a small minority of men in England would express any doubt. Without appealing to the evidence of any recent French writers, they would count the almost uniform testimony of impartial travellers of all countries to be decisive. But we ought, I think, in fairness, to confess that the proof is not confined to one country, or age, or mode of faith. With very few exceptions indeed, wherever the same experiment has been made, whether the name Priest has been accepted or diligently eschewed, the results have been in all essentials the same. And this confession must be made simply and broadly. In all countries and ages alike there has been a craving in the Priests to try whether they could not undertake the tasks for which experience appeared to proclaim them incompetent. Archbishop Laud speaks of it as his last and crowning effort for the Church, that he succeeded in making Bishop Juxon the Lord Treasurer. How far that and similar attempts to render the English kingdom sacerdotal contributed to the stability of his master’s throne, history may explain. What, again, was the government of the ministers of the Kirk in Scotland, during the minority of James VI., and again, when they proclaimed Charles Stuart King? what would have been the actions of the Westminster Assembly, if they had not been checked by Cromwell, but the most tyrannical and abortive attempts at civil rule by ecclesiastics? These are examples—and they might be multiplied indefinitely—which show that neither the impulse to desire this kind of rule, nor the consequences which proceed from it, are confined to Romanist countries; they are at work in all of us; it is God’s great mercy, if we are withheld from indulging the passion and enduring the punishment.

VIII. These reflections ought to prevent us from adopting any harsh and contemptuous language, when we see Roman Catholic clergymen and prelates clinging with intense tenacity to what strikes us as the most worthless of shadows, as the most dangerous exhibition of the weakness of a Power which they suppose has a right to govern the world. We have no right to judge them, lest we should be judged. If we understand our own position, we cannot wish that they should separate the idea of a Vicar of Christ over the Universe from the attendant notion of his dominion over a little local Principality, because it would seem to be the Will of God that the falsity of the grand doctrine should be made manifest through the practical comment which is supplied by the anomalies and contradictions of the petty experiment. But what I have said this afternoon may suggest another reason why we should be careful of allowing any party or personal feelings to disturb a controversy in which the interests of one nation—nay, of all nations,—are deeply involved.

The effect of what Italians see around them, the effect of what they hear from Protestant theologians and Liberal politicians, is to make them regard the very name and character of a priest with hatred or else scorn. Yet this is not a natural state of mind for any people, certainly not for any Southern people. Woe to those, no doubt, through whom the offence has come; but it is an offence: much loss may follow from it; the gain is doubtful. An extinction of reverence for that which has been long and habitually reverenced, must be terrible immediately; a reaction of gross superstition is certain to succeed. May it not be, that what the priests of that land and of all lands want, is not a sense of the meanness of their office, but of its grandeur and awfulness? May it not be that they have never considered how little power is needed to degrade and stupify a people, how much and what divine power is needed to elevate them, and make them free and just and wise? May it not be that they have been mistaken, not in saying that they had received their functions and gifts from God Himself, but in forgetting Who He is, in what character and in what relation to man He has revealed Himself, what He has declared His purposes towards them to be? May there not one day be an awakening in the minds of some of these priests of the belief that they are charged with a mighty commission, to keep alive in men’s minds the sense of a Perfect Reconciliation, and a Finished Sacrifice, and a never-ending Communion between God and His creatures,—that all these ends have been dwarfed, and their influence made ineffectual or mischievous, because they have supposed that they were to effect the reconciliation, that they were to make the sacrifice, that they were to create the communion? May there not be humble men upon whose hearts the light of this discovery, painful even to agony at first, is just dawning; a light not shining from any Northern torches, but coming forth at God’s own word? May we not be sure that, as they gaze upon it, they will more and more abjure the silly ambition of grasping at an authority so much poorer than that which they are endowed with already, and which they are privileged to put forth? May they not readily confess that a priest, who aspires to be a policeman, must be a very bad policeman, because he has first consented to be a bad priest?

My friends, it may seem to some of you strange and ridiculous that I should speak of such a conviction, working in some poor friar, in some lonely cell, as if it might at last be the means of cutting a knot which monarchs and statesmen are not able to untie. But is there no historical experience to support such a dream? I do not know what power or wit may be at work in the councils of Europe, civil or ecclesiastical, at this time; but I do not suppose there is more power or more wit than were engaged in settling the condition of Italy and the Popedom and mankind, when Charles V. and Francis I. and Leo X. were occupying themselves with that problem. Surely the monarch of a country which had recently overrun and occupied the sacred soil,—the lord of Spain and Germany and the Indies,—the man who brought all the craft and all the learning of the Medicean house to sustain the cause of the Holy See, and to relieve it from the scandal of promoting ignorance,—might have succeeded, if any could, in finding some adjustment of the difficulties which beset the commencement of the sixteenth century. And yet you know that these mighty forces were all thrown into confusion, and that the whole question of Italy and of Europe assumed a new form, because a miner’s son, a poor monk, was led to cry aloud, in the bitterness of his 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!” and because that poor monk, when he had found a deliverance for himself, declared to all his fellow-sufferers that it was the unrighteousness of the priest which crushed all hope among men, and made it impossible for God’s saints to sing with joyfulness. That message sounded through all lands; that prayer went up from multitudes of hearts. And though the Reformation which followed was imperfect and limited, yet it was such a one as all the contrivances of all the Sovereigns in Christendom could not have wrought.

There is nothing wild or irrational in the supposition that the like causes may produce like effects in our times. Our business however is not with anticipations, but with facts; not first with other lands, but first with our own. Intelligent foreigners who travel in England, and mix with the most cultivated classes in it, probably hear remarks about us not very unlike what we hear from them about their priests. There may not be the same fear of the English priest; he may be looked upon as tamed and domesticated, his wings too much clipped to allow of his making any very dangerous flights. Still there will be complaints, painful because too just, sometimes of our impotence, sometimes of our pretentiousness; of our effort to cultivate and spread a morality which is not based on the broad and 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 who lie beyond our circle, often to those who are within it. When we hear such things, or find that they are spoken out of our hearing, we are as often tempted, I suspect, to side with our accusers, as to take up a position of defence; to admit all that is said of the necessary abuses of a priestly order; to put in special pleas of exception in our own cases; possibly to recriminate on other classes, which, we say, if ours is bad, cannot show themselves to be better. Such apologies, however natural, are, I conceive, unmanly and unlawful. No one has a right to say—no one can dare to say, if he knows himself, and reviews his own acts fairly—that he is exempt from any one of the evils to which his order has been prone, that he, so far as opportunity has served, has not fallen into them. No one has a right to say that 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 with which it is encircled, the mighty work for our land and for all lands which it might help to perform, if the stewards to whom it is committed were found faithful. Do not, I beseech you, my lay brethren, seek to divest us of that faith, or to weaken it in us; for your own sake strive hard to deepen and confirm it. If we have it rooted and grounded in us, we shall honour your professions, and shall conjure you to honour them more, and count them more sacred than you have ever done; that so you may be delivered from all the pettinesses and chicaneries and vanities which accompany the low appreciation of their object and their nature. If we ask earnestly that God’s priests may be righteous, we shall extend much further than we are wont to extend the definition of His saints. 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 that nation is fulfilling the work to which it is set apart. We shall tell you that you are bound to take part with us in a holy war against all that is degrading our English life and our English righteousness; that you are bound to show all the countries which are subject to our sway or within the range of our influence, that they have a righteous God, a loving Father, over them, and so to deliver them from their miseries and oppressions, so to make them sing with joyfulness.