II. But has the plan of Jesus Christ been carried out? Does

the kingdom of heaven exist on earth ?
(1.) The Church of Christ is the living answer to that question, Boileau says somewhere that the Church is a great thought which every man ought to study. It would be more practical to say that the Church is a great fact which every man ought to measure. Probably we Christians are too fami- liarized with the blessed presence of the Church to do justice to her as a world-embracing institution, and as the nurse and guardian of our moral and mental life. Like the air we breathe, she bathes our whole being with influences which we do not analyse; and we hold her cheap in proportion to the magnitude of her unostentatious service. The sun rises on us day by day in the heavens, and we heed not his surpassing beauty until our languid sense is roused by some observant astronomer or artist. The Christian Church pours even upon those of us who love her least, floods of intellectual and moral light; and yet it is only by an occasional intellectual effort that we detach ourselves sufiicietitly from the tender monotony of her influences, to understand how intrinsically extraordinary is the double fact of her perpetuated existence and of her continuous expansion.
Glance for a moment at the history of the Christian Church from the days of the Apostles until now. What is it but a history of the gradual, unceasing self-expansion of an institution which, from the first hour of its existence, deliberately aimed, as it is aiming even now, at the conquest of the world™? Com- pare the Church which sought refuge and which prayed in the upper chamber at Jerusalem, with the Church of which St. Paul
1 Isa. lv. 8. Cf. Bushnell, Nature and the Supernatural, pp. 231-233; Félix, ubi supra, pp. 134 139. m St. Luke xxiv. 47; Acts i. 8, ix. 16; St. Mark xvi. 20. [1 Ἐ01:
Continuous growth of the Church. 121
is the pioneer and champion in the latter portion of the Acts of the Apostles, or with the Church to which he refers, as already making its way throughout the world, in his Apostolical Epistles", Compare again the Church of the Apostolical age with the Church of the age of Tertullian. Christianity had then already penetrated, at least in some degree, into all classes οἵ Roman society 9, and was even pursuing its missionary course in regions far beyond the frontiers of the empire P, in the forests of Germany, in the wilds of Scythia, in the deserts of Africa, and among the unsubdued and barbarous tribes who inhabited the northern extremity of our own island. Again, how nobly con- scious is the Church of the age of St. Augustine of her world- wide mission, and of her ever-widening area! how sharply is this consciousness contrasted with the attempt of Donatism to dwarf down the realization of the plan of Jesus Christ to the narrow proportions of a national or provincial enterprise 4! In the writings of Augustine especially, we see the Church of Christ tenaciously grasping the deposit of revealed unchanging doctrine, while liturgies the most dissimilar, and teachers of many tongues’, and a large variety of ecclesiastical cus-
® Rom. i. 8, x. 18, xv. 18-21; Col. i. 6, 23; cf. 1 St. Peter i. 1, &c.
° Tert. Apol. 37: ‘Hesterni sumus, et vestra omnia implevimus, urbes, insulas, castella, municipia, conciliabula, castra ipsa, tribus, decurias, pala- tium, senatum, forum, sola vobis relinquimus templa,’ Cf. de Rossi, Roma Sotteranea, i. p. 309.
P Tert. adv. Judeos, c. 7: ‘Jam Getulorum varietates, et Maurorum multi fines, Hispaniarum omnes termini, et Galliarum diverse nationes, et Britannorwm inaccessa Romanis loca, Christo vero subdita et Sarmatarum, et Dacorum, et Germanorum, et Scytharum, et abditarum multarum gentium et provinciarum, et insularum multarum nobis ignotarum, et que enumerare minus possumus. In quibus omnibus locis, Christi nomen, Qui jam venit, regnat, utpote ante Quem omnium civitatum porte sunt aperte.’
4 St. Aug. Ep. xlix. ἢ. 3: ‘Querimus ergo, ut nobis respondere non graveris, quam causam forte noveris qué factum est, ut Christus amitteret hereditatem Suam per orbem terrarum diffusam, et subito in solis Afris, nec ipsis omnibus remaneret. Etenim ecclesia Catholica est etiam in Africd quia per omnes terras eam Deus esse voluit et predixit. Pars autem vestra, que Donati dicitur, non est in omnibus illis locis, in quibus et literee et sermo et facta apostolica cucurrerunt.’ In Ps. lxxxv. ἢ. 14: ‘Christo enim tales maledicunt, qui dicunt, quia periit ecclesia de orbe terrarum, et remansit in sola Africa.’ Compare S. Hieron. adv. Lucifer. tom. iv. pt. ii. p. 298: ‘Si in Sardinia tantum habet (ecclesiam Christus] nimium pauper factus est.’ And St. Chrys. in Col. Hom. i. ἢ. 2; in 1 Cor. Hom. xxxii. ἢ. 1.
τ In Ps. xliv. (Vulg.) Enarr. n. 24: ‘Sacramenta doctrine in linguis omnibus variis. Alia lingua Afra, alia Syra, alia Greeca, alia Hebreea, alia illa et illa; faciunt iste lingus varietatem vestis reginze hujus; quomodo autem omnis varietatis vestis in unitate concordat, sic et omnes linguz ad unam fidein,’ m1 |
122 Actual area and prospects of the Church.
toms §, find an equal welcome within her comprehensive bosom. Yet contrast the Church of the fourth and fifth centuries with the Church of the middle ages, or with the Church of our own day. In the fourth and even in the fifth century, whatever may have been the activity of individual missionaries, the Church was still for the most part contained within the limits of the empire; and of parts of the empire she had scarcely as yet taken possession. She was still confronted by powerful sections of the population, passionately attached for various reasons to the ancient superstition: nobles such as the powerful Sym- machus, and orators like the accomplished Libanius, were among her most earnest opponents. But it is now scarcely less than a thousand years since Jesus Christ received at least the outward submission of the whole of Europe; and from that time to this His empire has been continually expanding. The newly-dis- covered continents of Australia and America have successively acknowledged His sway. He is shedding the light of His doctrine first upon one and then upon another of the islands of the Pacific. He has beleagured the vast African continent on either side with various forms of missionary enterprise. And although in Asia there are vast, ancient, and highly organized religions which are still permitted to bid Him defiance, yet India, China, Tartary, and Kamtchatka have within the last few years witnessed heroic labours and sacrifices for the spread of His kingdom, which would not have been unworthy of the purest and noblest enthusiasms of the Primitive Church. Nor are these efforts so fruitless as the ruling prejudices or the lack of trustworthy information on such subjects, which are so com- mon in Western Europe, might occasionally suggest ¢.
Already the kingdom of the Redeemer may be said to em- brace three continents; but what are its prospects, even if we
5 Ep. liv. ad Januar. n. 2: ‘Alia vero [sunt] que per loca terrarum regionesque variantur, sicuti est quod alii jejunant sabbato, alii non; alii quotidie communicant Corpori et Sanguini Domini, alii certis diebus ac- cipiunt; alibi nullus dies pretermittitur, quo non offeratur, alibi sabbato tantum ‘et dominico, alibi tantum dominico; et si quid aliud hujusmodi animadverti potest, totum hoc genus rerum liberas habet observationes : nec disciplina ulla est in his melior gravi prudentique Christiano, quam ut eo modo agat, quo agere viderit ecclesiam, ad quam forte devenerit. Quod enim neque contra fidem, neque bonos mores esse convincitur, indifferenter est habendum et propter eorum, inter quos vivitur, societatem servandum est.’
t As to the Russian Missions, see Boissard, Eglise de Russie, tom. i. pp. 100-104; Voices from the East, by Rev. J. M. Neale, London, Masters, 1859, pp. 81-113. ' [eEcr,
Objection; Losses and divisions of Christendom. 123
measure them by a strictly human estimate? Is it not a simple matter of fact that at this moment the progress of the human race is entirely identified with the spread of the influence of the nations of Christendom? What Buddhist, or Mohammedan, or Pagan nation is believed by others, or believes itself, to he able to affect for good the future destinies of the human race? The idea of a continuous progress of humanity, whatever perversions that idea may have undergone, is really a creation of the Christian faith. The nations of Christendom, in exact pro- portion to the strength, point, and fervour of their Christianity, seriously believe that they can command the future, and in- stinctively associate themselves with the Church’s aspirations for a world-wide empire. Such a confidence, by the mere fact of its existence, is already on the road to justifying itself by success. It never was stronger, on the whole, than it is in our own day. If in certain districts of European opinion it may seem to be waning, this is only because such sections of opinion have for the moment rejected the empire of Christ. Their aberrations do not set aside, they rather act as a foil to that general belief in a moral and social progress of mankind which at bottom is so intimately associated with the belief of Christian men in the coming triumph of the Church.
(2.) But long ere this, my brethren, as I am well aware, you have been prepared to interrupt me with a group of objections. Surely, you will say, this representation of the past, of the present, and of the future of the Church may suffice for an ideal picture, but it is not history. Is not the verdict of history a different and a less encouraging one? First of all, do Church annals present this spectacle of an ever-widening extension of the kingdom of Christ? What then is to be said of the spread of great and vital heresies, such as the medieval Nestorianism, through countries which once believed with the Church in the One Person and two Natures of her Lord"? Again, is it not a matter of historical fact that the Church has lost entire pro- vinces both in Africa and in the East, since the rise of Moham- medanism? And are her losses only to be measured by the territorial area which she once occupied, and from which she has been beaten back by the armies of the alien? Has she not, by the controversies of the tenth and of the sixteenth centuries, been herself splintered into three great sections, which still con- tinue to act in outward separation from each other, to their own
π See Gibbon, Decl. and Fall, ch. xlvii. mm
124 Losses and divisions of Christendom.
extreme mutual loss and discouragement, and to the immense and undisguised satisfaction of all enemies of the Christian name? Are not large bodies of active and earnest Christians living in separation from her communion? Do not our mis- slonary associations perpetually lament their failures to achieve any large permanent conquests for Christ? Once more, is it. not a matter of notoriety that the leading nations of Christian Europe are themselves honeycombed by a deadly rationalism, which gives no quarter in its contemptuous yet passionate on- slaughts on the faith of Christians, and which never calculated more confidently than it does at the present time upon achieving
the total destruction of the empire of Jesus Christ ἢ My brethren, you do a service to my argument in stating these apparent objections to its force. The substance of your plea cannot be ignored by any who would honestly apprehend the matter before us. You point, for instance, to the territorial losses which the Church has sustained at the hands of heretical Christians or of Moslem invaders. True: the Church of Christ has sustained such losses. But has she not more than redressed them in other directions? Is she not now, in India and in Africa, carrying the banner of the Cross into the territory of the Crescent ? You insist upon the grave differences which form a barrier at this moment between the Eastern and the Western Churches, and between the two great divisions of the Western Church itself. Your estimate of those differences may be a somewhat exaggerated one. The renewed harmony and co- operation of the separated portions of the family of Christ may not be so entirely remote as you would suggest. Yet we must undoubtedly acknowledge that existing divisions, like all ha- bitual sin within the sacred precincts of the Church, are a standing and very serious violation of the law of its Founder. Nor is this disorder summarily ‘to be remedied by our ceding to the unwarrantable pretensions of one section of the Church, which may endeavour to persuade the rest of Christendom, that it is itself co-extensive with the whole kingdom of the Saviour. The divisions of Christ’s family, lamentable and in many ways disastrous as they are, must be ended, if at all, by the warmer charity and more fervent prayers of believing Christians. But meanwhile, do not these very divisions afford an indirect illus- tration of the extraordinary vitality of the new kingdom? Has the kingdom ceased to enlarge its territory since the troubled times of the sixteenth century? On the contrary, it is simply a matter of fact that, since that date, its ratio of τε has LECT,
Strength and weakness of modern unbeltef. 125
been greater than at any previous period. The philosopher who supposes that the Church is on the point of dying out because of her divisions must be strangely insensible to the higher con- victions which are increasingly prevailing in the minds of men. And the confessions of failure on the part of some of our missionaries are certainly balanced by many and thankful nar- ratives of great results accomplished under circumstances of the utmost discouragement.
But you insist most emphatically upon the spread and upon the strength of modern rationalism. You say that rationalism is enthroned in the midst of civilizations which the Church her- self has formed and nursed. You urge that rationalism, like the rottenness which has seized upon the heart of the forest oak, must sooner or later arrest the growth of branch and foliage, and bring the tree which it is destroying to the ground. Now we cannot deny, what is indeed a patent and melancholy fact, that some of the most energetic of the intellectual movements in modern Europe frankly avow and enthusiastically advocate an explicit and total rejection of the Christian creed. Yet it is possible to overrate the importance and to mistake the true sig- nificance of this recent advance of unbelief. Of course Christian faith can be daunted or surprised by no form or intensity of opposition to truth, when there are always so many reasons for opposing it. We Christians know what we have to expect from the human heart in its natural state; while on the other hand we have been told that the gates of hell shall not prevail against the Church of the Redeemer. But, in speculating on the future destinies of the Church, as they are affected by rationalism, this hopeful confidence of a sound faith may be seconded by the calm estimate of the reflective reason. For, first, it may fairly be questioned whether the publicly proclaimed unbelief of modern times is really more general or more pronounced than the secret but active and deeply penetrating scepticism which during considerable portions of the middle ages laid such hold upon the intellect of Europe’. Yet the medieval sceptics can- not be said to have permanently hampered the progress of the Church. Again, modern unbelief may be deemed less formid- able when we steadily observe its moral impotence for all con- structive purposes. Its strength and genius lie only in the direction of destruction. It has shewn no sort of power to build up any spiritual fabric or system which, as a shelter and a
¥ Cf. Newman, Lectures on University Subjects, pp. 296, 297; Milman, = Christianity, vi. 444. See too St. Anselm, Cur Deus Homo, i. 4. past
126 Undbelief, undesignedly the servant of the Church.
discipline for the hearts and lives of men, can take the place of that which it seeks to destroy. Leaving some of the deepest, most legitimate, and most ineradicable needs of the human soul utterly unsatisfied, modern unbelief can never really hope permanently to establish a popular ‘ religion of humanity*.’ Thus the force of its intellectual onset upon revealed dogma is con- tinually being broken by the consciousness, that it cannot long maintain the ground which it may seem to itself for the moment to have won. Its highest speculative energy is more than counterbalanced by the moral power of some humble teacher of a positive creed for whom possibly it entertains nothing less than a sovereign contempt. ‘Thirdly, unbelief resembles social or political persecution in this, that, indirectly, it does an inevitable service to the Faith which it attacks. It forces earnest believers in Jesus Christ to minimize all differences which are less than fundamental. It compels Christian men to repress with a strong hand all exaggeration of existing motives for a divided action. It obliges Christians, sometimes in spite of themselves, to work side by side for their insulted Lord. Thus it not only creates freshened sympathies between tem- porarily severed branches of the Church; it draws toward the Church herself, with an increasingly powerful and comprehensive attraction, many of those earnestly believing men, who, as is the case with numbers among our nonconformist brethren in this country, already belong, in St. Augustine’s language, to the soul, although not to the body, of the Catholic Communion. Lastly, it unwittingly contributes to augment the evidential strength of Christianity, at the very moment of its assault upon Christian doctrine. The fierceness of man turns to the praise of Jesus Christ, by demonstrating, each day, each year, each decade of years, each century, the indestructibility of His work in the world ; and unbelief voluntarily condemns itself to the task of maintaining before the eyes of men that enduring tradition of an implacable hostility to the kingdom of heaven, which it is the glory of our Saviour so explicitly to have predicted, and so consistently and triumphantly to have defied.
x The attempt of M. Auguste Comte, in his later life, to elaborate a kind of ritual as a devotional and esthetical appendage to the Positivist Phi- losophy, implies a sense of this truth. M. Comte however does not appear to have carried any large section of the Positivist school with him in this singular enterprise. But a like poverty of moral and spiritual provision for the soul of man is observable in rationalistic systems which stop very far short of the literal godlessness of the Positive Philosophy.
[ LEcT.
Intensity of our Lord’s work in souls. 127
(3-) For these and other reasons, modern unbelief, although formidable, will not be deemed so full of menace to the future of the kingdom of our Lord as may sometimes be apprehended by the nervous timidity of Christian piety. This will appear more certain if from considering the extent of Christ’s realm we turn to the intensive side of His work among men. For indeed the depth of our Lord’s work in the soul of man has ever been more wonderful than its breadth. The moral intensity of the life of a sincere Christian is a more signal illustration of the reality of the reign of Christ, and of the success of His plan, than is the territorial range of the Christian empire. ‘The King’s daughter is all glorious within.’ Christianity may have conferred a new sanction upon civil and domestic relationships among men; and it certainly infused a new life into the most degraded society that the world has yet seen. Still this was not its primary aim; its primary efforts were directed not to this world, but to the next®. Christianity has changed many of the outward aspects of human existence; it has created a new religious language, a new type of worship, a new calendar of time. It has furnished new ideals to art; it has opened nothing less than a new world of literature; it has invested the forms of social intercourse among men with new graces of refinement and mutual consideration. Yet these are but some of the superficial symptoms of its real work. It has achieved these changes in the outward life of Christian nations, because it has penetrated _ to the very depths of man’s heart and thought; because it has revolutionized his convictions and tamed his* will, and then expressed its triumph in the altered social system of that section of the human race which has generally received it. How
Υ͂. 2 Thess. i. 11, 12, where the Apostle’s prayers for the moral and spiritual growth of the Thessalonians are offered ὅπως ἐνδοξάσθη τὸ ὄνομα τοῦ Κυρίου ἡμῶν Ἰησοῦ ἐν ὑμῖν.
* St. Aug. Ep. exxxviii. ad Marcellin. n. 15: ‘Qui doctrinam Christi adversam dicunt esse reipublice, dent exercitum talem, quales doctrina Christi esse milites jussit, dent tales provinciales, tales maritos, tales con- juges, tales parentes, tales filios, tales dominos, tales servos, tales reges, tales judices, tales denique debitorum ipsius fisci redditores et exactores, quales esse precipit doctrina Christiana, et audeant eam dicere adversam esse rei- publice, immd verd non dubitent eam confiteri magnam, si obtemperetur, salutem esse reipublice.’
® St. Hieronymus adv. Jovin. lib. ii. tom. iv. pars ii. p. 200, ed. Martian: ‘ Nostra religio non πυκτὴν, non athletam (St. Jerome might almost have in his eye a certain well-known modern theory) non nautas, non milites, non fossores, sed sapientiz erudit sectatorem, qui se Dei cultui dedicavit, et scit Sane sit, cur versetur in mundo, quo abire festinet.’
I
128 JLntensity of our Lord’s work in souls,
complete at this moment is the reign of Christ in the soul of a sincere Christian! Christ is not a limited, He is emphatically an absolute Monarch. Yet His rule is welcomed by His subjects with more than that enthusiasm which a free people can feel for its elected magistracy. Every sincere Christian bows to Jesus Christ as to an Intellectual Master. Our Lord is not merely listened to as a Teacher of Truth; He is contemplated as the absolute Truth itself. Accordingly no portion of His teaching is received by true Christians merely as a ‘ view,’ or as a ‘ tenta- tive system, or as a ‘theory, which may be entertained, dis- cussed, partially adopted, and partially set aside. ‘Those who deal thus with Him are understood to have broken with Chris- tianity, at least as a practical religion. For a Christian, the Words of Christ constitute the highest criterion and rule of truth, All that Christ has authorized is simply. accepted, all that He has condemned is simply rejected, with the whole energy of the Christian reason. Christ’s Thought is reflected, it is reproduced, in the thought of the true Christian. Christ’s authority in the sphere of speculative truth is thankfully acknowledged by the Christian’s voluntary and unreserved submission to the slightest known intimations of his Master’s judgment. High above the claims of human teachers, the tremendous self-assertion of Jesus Christ echoes on from age to age,—‘I am the Truth>” And from age to age ‘the Christian mind responds by a life-long endeavour ‘to bring every thought into captivity unto the obe- dience of Christ¢” But if Jesus Christ is Lord of the Christian’s thought, He is*also Lord of the Christian’s affections. Beauty it is which provokes love; and Christ is the highest Moral Beauty. He does not merely rank as an exponent of the purest morality. He is absolute Virtue, embodied in a human life, and vividly, energetically set forth before our eyes in the story of the Gospels. As such, He claims to reign over the inmost affections of men. As such, He secures the first place in the heart of every true Christian. To have taken the measure of His Beauty, and yet not to love Him, is, in a Christian’s judg- ment, to be self-condemned. ‘If any man love not the Lord Jesus Christ, let him be Anathema Maranatha4?’ And ruling the affections of the Christian, Christ is also King of the sovereign faculty in the Christianized soul; He is Master of the Christian will. When He has tamed its native stubbornness, He teaches it day by day a more and more pliant accuracy of
> St. John xiv. 6, 9.2 Corux: δ. 4 x Cor, xvi. 22. [ LECT.
‘ Christ is Christianity? 129
movement in obedience to Himself. Nay, He is not merely its rule of action, but its very motive power; each act of devotion and self-sacrifice of which it is capable is but an extension of the energy of Christ’s Own moral Life. ‘ Without Me,’ he says to His servants, ‘ye can do nothing®;’ and with St. Paul His servants reply, ‘I can do all things through Christ Which strengtheneth Mef.’
This may be expressed in other terms by saying that, both intellectually and morally, Christ is Christianity 8, Christianity is not related to our Lord as a philosophy might be to a philo- sopher, that is, as a moral or intellectual system thrown off from his mind, resting thenceforward on its own merits, and implying no necessary relation towards its author on the part of those who receive it, beyond a certain sympathy with what was at one time a portion of his thought». A philosophy may be thus abstracted altogether from the person of its originator, with entire impunity. Platonic thought would not have been damaged, if Plato had been annihilated ; and in our day men are Hegelians or Comtists, without believing that the respective authors of those systems are in existence at this moment, nay rather, in the majority of cases, while deliberately holding that they have ceased to be. The utmost stretch of personal alle- giance, on the part of the disciple of a philosophy to its founder, consists, ordinarily speaking, in a sentiment of devotion ‘to his memory. But detach Christianity from Christ, and it vanishes before your eyes into intellectual vapour. For it is of the essence of Christianity that, day by day, hour by hour, the Christian should live in conscious, felt, sustained relationship to the Ever-living Author of his creed and of his life. Christianity is non-existent apart from Christ; it centres in Christ; it radiates, now as at the first, from Christ. It is not a mere doctrine bequeathed by Him to a world with which He has ceased to have dealings; it perishes outright when men attempt to abstract it from the Living Person of its Founder. He is felt by His people to be their Living Lord, really present with them now, and even unto the end of the world. The Christian life springs from and is sustained by the apprehension of Christ present in His Church, present in and with His members as a πνεῦμα (worooivi, Christ is the quickening Spirit of Christian
9 St. John xv. 5. APPIN vet 3 5: Cl. 1. Τοῦ
& See Newman, Grammar of Assent, p. 457.
h Luthardt, Grundwahrheiten des Christenthums, p.227: ‘Er ist der Inhalt seiner Lehre.’ 1 y Cor. xv. 45. 1 | K
130 Ls the Sermon on the Mount a dead letter ?
humanity; He lives in Christians; He thinks in Christians; He acts through Christians and with Christians; He is indis- solubly associated with every movement of the Christian’s deepest life. ‘I live,’ exclaims the Apostle, ‘yet not I, but Christ liveth in mej. This felt presence of Christ it is, which gives both its form and its force to the sincere Christian life. That life is a loyal homage of the intellect, of the heart, and of the will, to a Divine King, with Whom will, heart, and intellect are in close and constant communion, and from Whom there flows forth, through the Spirit and the Sacraments, that supply of light, of love, and of resolve, which enriches and ennobles the Christian soul. My brethren, I am not theorizing or describing any merely ideal state of things; I am but putting into words the inner experience of every true Christian among you; I am but exhibiting a set of spiritual circumstances which, as a matter of course, every true Christian endeavours to realize and make his own, and which, as a matter of fact, blessed be God! very many Christians do realize, to their present peace, and to their eternal welfare. | Certainly it is not uncommon in our day to be informed, that ‘the Sermon on the Mount is a dead letter in Christendom.’ In consequence (so men speak) of the engrossing interest which Christians have wrongly attached to the discussion of dogmatic questions, that original draught of essential Christianity, the Sermon on the Mount, has been wellnigh altogether lost sight of. Perhaps you yourselves, my brethren, ere now have repeated some of the current commonplaces on this topic. But have you endeavoured to ascertain whether it is indeed as you say? You remark that you at least have not met with Christians who seemed to be making any sincere efforts to turn the Sermon on the Mount into practice. It may be so. But the question is, where have you looked for them? Do you expect to meet them rushing hurriedly along the great highways of life, with the keen, eager, self-asserting multitude ? Do you expect, that with their eye upon the Beatitudes and upon the Cross, they will throng the roads which lead to worldly success, to earthly wealth, to temporal honour? Be assured that those who know where moral beauty, aye, the highest, is to be found, are not disappointed, even at this hour, in their search for it. Until you have looked more carefully, more anxiously than has probably been the case, for the triumphs of our Lord’s work in
J Gal. ii. 20, [τ ον.
Is the Sermon on the Mount a dead letter? 131
Christian souls, you may do well to take upon trust the testi- mony of others. You may at least be sufficiently generous, aye, and sufliciently reasonable, to believe in the existence at this present time of the very highest types of Christian virtue. It is a simple matter of fact that in our day, multitudes of men and women do lead the life of the Beatitudes ; they pray, they fast, they do alms to their Father Which seeth in secret. These are Christians who take no thought for the morrow. These are Christians whose righteousness does exceed that worldly and conventional standard of religion, which knows no law save the corrupt public opinion of the hour, and which inherits in every generation the essential spirit of the Scribes and Pharisees. These are Christians who shew forth the moral creativeness of Jesus Christ in their own deeds and words; they are living witnesses to His solitary and supreme power of changing the human heart. They were naturally proud; He has enabled them to be sincerely humble. They were, by the inherited taint of their nature, impure; He has in them shed honour upon the highest forms of chastity. They too were, as in his natural state man ever is, suspicious of and hostile to their fellow-men, unless connected with them by blood, or by country, or by interest. But Jesus Christ has taught them the tenderest and most practical forms of love for man viewed simply as man; He has inspired them with the only true, that is, the Christian, huma- nitarianism. Think not that the moral energy of the Christian life was confined to the Church of the first centuries. At this moment, there are millions of souls in the world, that are pure, humble, and loving. But for Jesus Christ our Lord, these millions would have been proud, sensual, selfish. At this very day, and even in atmospheres where the taint of scepticism dulls the brightness of Christian thought, and enfeebles the strength of Christian resolution, there are to be found men, whose intel- ligence gazes on Jesus with a faith so clear and strong, whose affection clings to Him with so trustful and so warm an embrace, whose resolution has been so disciplined and braced to serve Him by a persevering obedience, that, beyond a doubt, they would joyfully die for Him, if by shedding their blood they could better express their devotion to His Person, or lead others to know and to love Him more. Blessed be God, that portion of His one Fold in which He has placed us, the Church of England, has not lacked the lustre of such lives as these. Such assuredly was Ken; such was Bishop Wilson; such have been many whose ai have never appeared in the page of history. Has not one OL | - K 2
132 Social results of Christianity,
indeed quite lately passed from among us, the boast and glory of this our University, great as a poet, greater still, it may be, as a scholar and a theologian, greatest of all as a Christian saint ? Certainly to know him, even slightly, was inevitably to know that he led a life distinct from, and higher than, that of common men. To know him well, was to revere and to love in him the manifested beauty of his Lord’s presence; it was to trace the sensibly perpetuated power of the Life, of the Teaching, of the Cross of Jesus ¥,
4. On the other hand, look at certain palpable effects of our Lord’s work which lie on the very face of human society. If society, apart from the Church, is more kindly and humane than in heathen times, this is due to the work of Christ on the hearts of men. The era of ‘humanity’ is the era of the Incarnation. The sense of human brotherhood, the acknowledgment of the sacredness of human rights, the recognition of that particular stock of rights which appertains to every human being, is a cre- ation of Christian dogma. It has radiated from the heart of the Christian Church into the society of the outer world. Chris- tianity is the power which first gradually softened slavery, and is now finally abolishing it. Christianity has proclaimed the dignity of poverty, and has insisted upon the claims of the poor, with a success proportioned to the sincerity which has welcomed her doctrines among the different peoples of Christendom. The hospital is an invention of Christian philanthropy!; the active charity of the Church of the fourth century forced into the Greek language a word for which Paganism had had no occasion. The degradation of woman in the Pagan world has been exchanged | for a position of special privilege and honour, accorded to her ᾿ς by the Christian nations. The sensualism which Pagans mistook for love has been placed under the ban of all true Christian feeling ; and in Christendom, love is now the purest of moral impulses; it is the tenderest, the noblest, the most refined of the movements of the soul. The old, the universal, the natural feeling of bitter hostility between races, nations, and classes of men is denounced by Christianity. The spread of Christian truth inevitably breaks down the ferocities of national prejudice, and prepares the world for that cosmopolitanism which, we are told, is its most probable future. International law had no real
* The author of the Christian Year had passed to his rest during the interval that elapsed between the delivery of the second and the third of these lectures, on March 29, 1866.
1 Hallam’s Middle Ages, chap. ix. part i. vol. ii. p. 365. [
LECT,
Perpetuity of the Church. 133
existence until the nations, taught by Christ, had begun to: feel the bond of brotherhood. International law is now each year becoming more and more powerful in regulating the affairs of the
‘civilized world. And if we are sorrowfully reminded that the
prophecy of a world-wide peace within the limits of Christ’s kingdom has not yet been realized; if Christian lands, in our day as before, are reddened by streams of Christian blood; yet the utter disdain of the plea of right, the high-handed and barbarous savagery, which marked the wars of heathendom, have given way to sentiments in which justice can at least obtain a hearing, and which compassion and generosity, drawing their inspirations from the Cross, have at times raised to the level of chivalry.
But neither would any improvements in man’s social life, nor even the regenerate lives of individual Christians, of themselves, have realized our Lord’s ‘ plan’ in its completeness™. His design was to found a society or Church; individual sanctity and social amelioration are only effects radiating from the Church. The Church herself is the true proof of His success. After the lapse of eighteen centuries the kingdom of Christ is here, and it is still expanding. How fares it generally with a human under- taking when exposed to the action of a long period of time? The idea which was its very soul is thrown into the shade by some other idea; or it is warped, or distorted, or diverted from its true direction, or changed by some radical corruption. In the end it dies out from among the living thoughts of men, and takes its place in the tomb of so much forgotten speculation, on the shelves of a library. Within a short lifetime we may follow
m A reviewer, who naturally must dissent from parts- of the teaching of these lectures, but of whose generosity and fairness: the lecturer is deeply sensible, reminds him that ‘Our Lord came to carry out the counsel of the Eternal Father; and that counsel was, primarily, to establish, through His sacrificial death, an economy of mercy, under which justification and spiritual and eternal life should be realized by all who should penitently rely on Him.’ St. John iii. 16, vi. 38-40. Undoubtedly. But this ‘economy of mercy’ included the establishment of a world-embracing church, within which it was to be dispensed. Col. i. 10-14. Our Lord founded His Church, not by way of achieving a vast social feat or victory, but with a view to the needs of the human soul, which He came from heaven to save. Nevertheless the Church is not related to our Lord’s design as an ‘inseparable accident.’ It is that design itself, viewed on its historical and social side; it is the form which, so far as we know, His redemptive work necessarily took, and which He Himself founded as being the imperishable result of His Incarnation and Death. St Matt. xvi. 18. Cf. Wesleyan-Methodist Magazine, Dec. 1867, p. 1086. un |
134 How to account for the success of Christ's ‘plan,’
many a popular moral impulse from its cradle to its grave. From the era of its young enthusiasm, we mark its gradual entry upon the stage of fixed habit; from this again we pass to its day of lifeless formalism, and tothe rapid progress of its de-- cline. But the Society founded by Jesus Christ is here, still animated by its original idea, still carried forward by the moral impulse which sustained it in its infancy. If Christian doctrine has, in particular branches of the Church, been overlaid by an encrustation of foreign and earthly elements, its body and sub- stance is untouched in each great division of the Catholic Society; and much of it, we rejoice to know, is retained by com- munities external to the Holy Fold. If intimate union with the worldly power of the State (as especially in England during the last century) has sometimes seemed to chill the warmth of Christian love, and to substitute a heartless externalism for the spiritual life of a Christian brotherhood; yet again and again the flame of that Spirit Whom the Son of Man sent to ‘glorify’ Himself, has burst up from the depths of the living heart of the Church, and has kindled among a generation of sceptics or sen- sualists a pure and keen enthusiasm which confessors and martyrs might have recognised as their own. The Church of Christ in sooth carries within herself the secret forces which renew her moral vigour, and which will, in God’s good time, visibly re- assert her essential unity. Her perpetuated existence among ourselves at this hour bears a witness to the superhuman powers of her Founder, not less significant than that afforded by the intensity of the individual Christian life, or by the territorial range of the Christian empire.