A 01 - Two Characteristics of the Age

Ryder PLHC: 01 Two Characteristics of the Age TWO CHARACTERISTICS OF THE AGE

Almighty and Everlasting God, by whose Spirit the whole body of the Church is governed and sanctified; Receive our supplications and prayers, which we offer before Thee for all estates of men in Thy holy Church, that every member of the same, in his vocation and ministry, may truly and godly serve Thee; through our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ. Amen.

Second Collect for Good Friday.

Ye also, as living stones, are built up a spiritual house, to be a holy priesthood, to offer up spiritual sacrifices, acceptable to God through Jesus Christ. 1 Peter 2:5. As we look out on the trend of religious thought at the opening of the twentieth century, we find that one of the subjects of most urgent importance is the position of the laity in the Christian Church.

If at the outset we deal with the position of the laity in some branches of the Christian Church, it is because their position in every land and in every age will be found in the last analysis to be dependent on the doctrine held as to the Priesthood of the Laity.

Christianity exists in the world as a law of love and truth. It is love and truth that inspire these two factors of modern civilisation, science and democracy. That we may make that civilisation Christian we welcome them, seeking to make them our own without reserve, without fear, appealing from the past to a past older still.

There are two characteristics of the present time which seem to call for an earnest and careful examination of an expression which is being heard with in creasing frequency, namely, the Priesthood of the Laity. Of these two characteristics, one is critical and the other is social. The first is critical.

We find in the last few years that the Old Testament writings have been subjected to severer tests than ever before, as literary criticism, archaeology, Egyptology, and con temporary history have dealt with each fact, date, and turn of expression. In the Old Testament the influence of the religion of Babylon has recently begun to loom large. The clay tablets also and the monoliths of Assyria tell their story, as well as the papyri, tombs, and temples of the Valley of the Nile. What the result has been does not enter into our consideration, except to this extent, that well - ascertained facts have emerged, and are recognised as having a value which is irrespective of all particular views and creeds.

Similarly the books of the New Testament have been weighed word by word, letter by letter. After Textual Criticism has ascertained the original reading, as far as it is possible, the phrases of each writer are freely handled by the Higher Criticism, which appears to decide on subjective grounds what was the original teaching of Jesus as to Himself and His work, and what elements were added by His followers. The latest instance is the Syllabus of Pius X. against Modernism, and the reply, "An Open Letter," from a group of priests. Slowly but surely the effects of the Higher Criticism are making themselves felt in every Christian community alike, irrespective of its peculiar tenets. In a third department of knowledge new light has fallen on the very grammar and vocabulary of the New Testament. Similar constructions and expressions are found in the papyri discovered amid the dust-heaps of Egypt. What was once considered bad Greek is now shown to be the vernacular of the ancient world, as it was Hellenised after the conquests of Alexander. In Egypt wills, contracts, private letters are found written in the vernacular Greek of the people. Thus the Greek of the New Testament falls into its place among the historic dialects of the world. The new linguistic facts now in evidence show with startling clearness that we have before us the language in which the apostles and evangelists wrote. The papyri exhibit a variety of literary education even wider than that observable in the New Testament. We can match each sacred writing with documents that in respect of Greek stand on the same plane.

Biblical Greek was simply the vernacular of daily life. The language of the New Testament is now shown to be that of the common life of the time.

It is thus a protest against the refusal of the use of the Scriptures to the men of our time in their vernacular tongue. The New Testament writers had little idea that they were writing literature. The Holy Spirit spoke absolutely in the language of the people, as we might surely have expected Him to do. The writings inspired by Him were those Which he may read who binds the sheaf, Or builds the house, or digs the grave, Or those wild eyes which watch the wave In roarings round the coral reef.

Here, too, a scientific basis to a true interpretation of the words used in the New Testament is established, quite irrespective of theological bias. Contemporary language, history, and philology all help to settle the exact sense of each word in the context.

I ask, "Can we not go a step farther? Is there not another field where both historic inquiry and recent discovery have been active, and are producing results, which have gradually won acceptance among scholars? Have we not the field of the early organisation of the Christian Church?" It remains that the same colourless, impartial, scientific sifting should be applied in turn to the primitive polity of the earliest Christian communities. In the present year we have received, as a New Year’s gift, an entire new treatise of St. Irenseus. It fills us with astonishment, and with larger expectancy with regard to similar discoveries. In Eusebius Ecclesiastical History, book v., section 26, we read: " Besides the works and epistles of Irenseus above mentioned, there is another also, which he dedicated to his brother Marcian, as a Setting forth of Apostolic Teaching. " Not a fragment of it was known to survive. We now possess it complete from beginning to end. It was found in a church in Erivan, and is edited, with a German translation, by two Armenian scholars the archimandrite Karapet, who discovered it in 1904, and Dr. Ervand Minassiantz. Dr. Harnack adds notes. The work forms vol. xxxii. of his Texts and Studies.

It is interesting to mark that as the long-lost Apology of Aristides was mentioned in the History of Eusebius, and for centuries remained but a title, and then the book itself was discovered, so in this case also Eusebius mentioned a work which in its turn has been found. The History of Eusebius has proved, and may again and again prove, a veritable mine for the titles of valuable works now hid in the dust of the ages. This is the latest, but there have been other discoveries more directly bearing upon primitive church polity. Our present revival of interest in the subject of the history of early Christian life, though not originated, may be said to have been quickened and accelerated by the discovery of the Didache "the missing link," as Harnack calls it, in the history of early church organisation. It is the most significant document in its bearing on primitive doctrine and practice which eighteen centuries of church history have as yet revealed to us. This find was followed by a succession, which is nothing less than phenomenal, of similar discoveries. Among them may be enumerated: The Testament of our Lord, The Apology of Aristides, Tatian’s Diatessaron, Some Apocryphal Gospels, and especially the fragments or recensions of the Sources of the Apostolic Canons, splendidly edited by Dr. Harnack. This last work confirms conclusions derived from the Didache. The Sources of the Apostolic Canons manifests an ampler knowledge of the general subject of ecclesiastical organisation or rather, the want of it as it existed in the Christian community. Special light is thrown on the office of Reader and of the purely didactic, as distinct from the sacerdotal, mission of the Church.

Several writers, such as Dr. Harnack, Dr. Wernle, Dr. Weizsacher in Germany, and Dr. Lightfoot, Dr. Hort, Dr. Hatch in England, have made early church organisation their particular study. The scientific criticism, so long occupied in handling the Biblical records, is going behind the mediaeval practices, and those introduced at the time of Constantine and subsequently. Men are trying to realise what was the organisation of the Earliest Church.

What would we not give to possess an account written by a contemporary writer of the services in the Primitive Church on a Lord’s Day, say, at Pella after the Fall of Jerusalem! What controversies would be for ever laid to rest! But we can reconstruct these early services in thought, as we read St. Paul’s First Epistle to the Corinthians, the directions given in the Didache and in the Sources of the Apostolic Canons, and the famous description of the Lord’s Day Service in the writings of Justin Martyr. A careful examination will bring with it a conviction as to the facts which will command acceptance. We can thereby see what an important part development has contributed to the organisation and ritual of the Early Church.

It will be my endeavour to show how by a careful examination of the words of the New Testament, by scrupulously questioning early documents, by laying aside prejudice in favour of preconceived views as to Christian ritual, it is possible to get behind controversy and party spirit. Scholars belonging to all Christian bodies may yet be able, though starting from different standpoints, to reach a truth which shall be acknowledged by all. The special study of early Christian organisation, like the critical study of the New Testament itself, may prove to be a common ground on which may meet the members of Christian bodies which are now, and have been too long, unhappily sundered. For we have seen in our own day the growth of a method of treating historical questions which at least limits, if it does not abolish, controversy. This method deals with the facts of history by processes similar to those successfully applied to the phenomena of Nature. Methods of research have proved their accuracy by becoming methods of discovery. Historical science has arisen. A habit of mind has been formed, which stands in the same relation to the facts of history as the mind of a practised judge in relation to evidence in a court of law. The subtle balance of a matured experience has taken the place of a roughly generalised rule. The historical temper has emerged. We should not read present meanings into the original institutions, but examine them in their true surroundings.

We are apt to conceive of the New City of God as coming down bodily from the sky, invisible to carnal sight, but to the eye of faith the only reality in a world of shadows. But when we descend from poetry to fact, we see the forces which welded Christian societies together. It is no derogation from its grandeur to say that it was out of antecedent elements of human institutions, by the action of existing forces of Christian society swayed by the breathing of the Divine Breath, controlled by the Providence which holds in its hand the wayward wills of men, no less than the courses of the stars that there came into being that widest, strongest, and most enduring of institutions which bears the sacred name of the Catholic Church. At the time when the majority of the sacred books were written that polity was in a fluid state. It has the elements of an ecclesiastical monarchy in the position which it assigns to the apostles. It has the elements of an ecclesiastical oligarchy, because the rulers of the Church are almost always spoken of in the plural. It has the elements of an ecclesiastical democracy, because St. Paul appeals in the case of the Corinthians on a question of ecclesiastical discipline, not to bishops or presbyters, but to the community at large. The notices of early church life offer a sanction to episcopacy in the fact that bishops are expressly mentioned and their qualifications described. The books of the earliest writers support the proposition that the Church should have a government, in the injunctions which they give to obey those who rule. They support, on the other hand, the claim of the Montanists of early days, and the Puritans of later times, in the pre-eminence which they assign to spiritual gifts.

We see the democratic element gradually fading out, and leaving a monopoly of power and influence to an oligarchy and even to a monarchy. In the rise of the monastic orders, and in their aims and early history, we may observe a curious recrudescence of democracy. Again and again by their influence they intimidated and coerced the Papacy.

We shall see the officers of the Church gradually formed into a class, standing apart from the mass of the Christian community, invested with a reputation for special sanctity, and living, or supposed to live, by a higher rule of life than those to whom they ministered.

I ask, Which was correct? The earliest spiritual democracy, or the latest infallible monarchy?

If an appeal were made to the first six centuries, or to the Ante-Nicene Age, or to the very earliest accounts of church life, they would show, first, that it is possible to mark the human and historical forces which moulded the Church; secondly, that the loss of the ideal of a spiritual democracy is the loss of the primitive ideal. The first consideration, then, is the desire for the scientific sifting of established views, which is to be found in every department of knowledge. This critical inquiry is slowly and surely bringing to light a doc trine which in some form is held by all scholars namely, the Priesthood of the Laity. This brings us to the second characteristic, which makes the examination of the doctrine of the Priesthood of the Laity a specially urgent one at the present day. As we look around us we see signs of unrest in every nation in Europe. In some places it takes the form of revolt of the State against the Church, the Secular against the Religious, the Laity against the Clergy. At first sight it may seem part of a democratic movement. Nowadays, no man is contented to be merely governed. He is not satisfied if he be not given the power of expressing his own opinion on each subject as far as it touches his life and liberty. Even those who approve of an autocratic form of government, either in religion or politics, seldom succeed in winning much enthusiasm in its support. It is from indifference on the part of its members, as much as from attacks of its enemies, that the Christian Church is now suffering. To speak first of the Church of Ireland. Our Church has at least the distinction of possessing a spiritual democracy modelled on the primitive ideal. The franchise might be extended to all communicants, irrespective of sex, and the tests of participation in the Holy Communion might be more systematically enforced; but still it is, I believe, nearer to the primitive ideal than many branches of the Anglican Communion. It is very interesting to read the Preface of the Bishop of Salisbury’s Bampton Lectures, delivered at the time of the Irish Church Disestablishment in 1869. Although in his admirable lectures he supported in theory the doctrine of the Priesthood of the Laity, in his Preface he speaks doubt fully of giving power to laymen. He holds that it is not a matter of benevolence or bounty, but a matter of debt and duty; that it is both necessary in practice and in theory indispensable to the full powers and efficacy of the Church. He says: "No doubt since the publication of these lectures the march of events has exhibited in a very marked way the opposite danger. We are now called upon, not so much to prove the propriety of admitting the lay element into some proportion of counsel, as to protest against its swallowing up and overwhelming the clerical by mere supremacy of numbers and social weight. God forbid that any words of mine should seem to sanction so fatal a danger. If the encroachment of sacerdotalism is full of evil on the one hand, the tyranny of lay usurpation is certainly not less to be dreaded on the other. Our brethren in Ireland are called upon to deal with the practical questions arising out of the subject very suddenly, and under circumstances of great difficulty and discouragement. May the Holy Ghost of God direct and sanctify their counsels, so that the grace and wisdom of the whole body, clerical and lay, may be united in due proportion to guide and govern its anxious course, suddenly deprived, as it has been, of the orderly but somewhat enervating direction of State Control."

I have mentioned this remark incidentally as a voice from the past. The tyranny of lay usurpation, which Bishop Moberly of Salisbury dreaded in practice, though he supported in theory the co-operation of laymen, has by the blessing of God proved to be in many respects the loyal support and loving care towards the Church of Ireland on the part of her sons and daughters. His fears have been falsified by facts. May we not rather say that his prayers have been answered?

Though hopes be dupes, fears may be liars, It may be in yon smoke concealed;

Thy comrades chase e en now the fliers, And but for thee possess the field.

Bishop Moberly states it as his opinion: " I will venture to say, looking to the theory, as well as to the earliest practice of the Church of Christ, that while the office of teaching belongs specially to the ordained clergy, giving them the prerogative voice in matters of faith, yet the authority even in those great things belongs in such sort to the universal body, as that lay people too in their place and degree have the right and duty of sanctioning (and therefore, of course, of refusing to sanction) the determinations of the ordained clergy. In other subjects, more or less secular, their influence and counsel are of the greatest interest and importance. That they should be freely elected by the members of the Church; that they should be not members only, but communicants; that they should have authority real in all cases; that they should at least when required vote separately in their own order all these seem to be of the nature of principles, secondary no doubt to the main principle, but fundamental and necessary.

"The great and pressing object, painfully pressing and immediate in Ireland hardly less pressing though less immediate in Eng land, is that the Church should prepare itself to act as a united body gathering together its corporate strength, clerical and lay alike, in due proportion, so as to be ready, whether established or unestablished, to work with the full powers of the Holy Spirit, who, dwelling in the Church as the soul dwells in the body, giveth to every man severally as He willeth."

These fundamental principles now realised in exact detail in the Church of Ireland are the aspiration of the Church in many lands. In England, though on the subject of education and similar matters a lament able cleavage is observable, yet a House of Laymen has been recently established. After careful consideration by strong committees of the Canterbury and York Houses of Lay men the rules for lay franchise were adopted on July 3, 1907. By these rules every elector has to be qualified in two ways.

First, he must have the communicant status that is to say, he must be an actual communicant, or else have been baptized and confirmed, and not belong to any other religious body not in communion with the Church of England, and he must sign a declaration that he is so qualified. Secondly, if a male the voter must be a resident within the parish or area, but if a female the voter must be both resident and also in the position of one entitled by owner ship or occupation to vote at a vestry for the particular parish or area. This curious difference (a property qualification as well as residence being required for women but not for men) was framed to allow a number, but only a reasonable number, of women to vote. These electors send delegates who must be communicants to the Ruridecanal Conference, which in turn sends delegates to the Diocesan Conference, and the latter body selects the delegates to the Church Council. The volume Church Reform, edited by the present Bishop of Birmingham, is a powerful pleading for lay representation. In Russia the Emperor is about to summon a Council of the Russian Church in Moscow to make a change in her government. It has been finally agreed that the coming National Synod or Council shall consist of bishops, clergy, and laity, who will all sit together. Whatever may be said of this constitution, it is at least an honest endeavour that the National Synod should represent every interest in the Church. In France the story of the religious life is a distressing one. We have there the spectacle of a nation openly, ostentatiously, and of set purpose defying God. The cause, I believe, is that the realisation of the ideal of the Primitive Church has been too long delayed, and the delay has led to disastrous results. Two great forces are perpetually struggling for the mastery in France, the lay spirit and the sacerdotal spirit. The contest between them has rarely been so keen as it is now, though it is conducted without any other violence than occasional violence of language, and even this bears no proportion to the vastness of the contest, which is often silent or conducted with much propriety of form. The object which the lay movement has in view is to secure the political and scientific independence of laymen, so that they may manage their intellectual pursuits without asking the permission of Rome. The object which the sacerdotal regime has in view is to establish such a domination over laymen that they may not venture on any course of action or upon any course of intellectual study with out being authorised by the priesthood. The Law of the Associations Cultuelles, followed by the Separation Law, has disestablished the Roman Catholic Church in France. An offer that the Church should be recognised as a "Society for Worship " has been rejected, and the grounds of the rejection seem to be that power would be given to the laity.

M. Briand on the Separation Law, December 9: "Three words (Les associations cultuelles) express the new regime, to which all the religious bodies in France (tous les cultes) must shortly conform. These three words seem alarming to the Roman Church, for they announce that which is nothing short of a revolution the intrusion of a lay element into the direction of ecclesiastical affairs. Protestantism receives these three words without serious misgiving, because they belong to an order of events which our forefathers, as it were, saw and realised some centuries ago, so true is it that they were forerunners in all that concerns social and religious liberty" (Foi et Vie, no. du 1 aout 1905). The Archbishop of Besançon writes: "As to the association with statutes pro posed by the bishops, the Pope decided that he could not authorise the experiment, so long as he should have no certain and legal guarantee that in these associations cultuelles the constitution, the rights, the hierarchy, and the property of the Church should be fully safeguarded. The bishops were unable to give this guarantee. The State would not. There lies the difficulty."

There is no country in which unbelief is so strong and so vindictive as in France so much a passion of hate, a fanaticism, if not against religion, against that Church which claims to be its authoritative vehicle and exponent. The Anti- Clericals of the twentieth century are more extreme than those of the eighteenth. The resolute and rough-handed antagonism of the senate and workshop has superseded the free criticism of the study and the well-spiced raillery of the salon.

It was when Domitian’s tyranny interfered with the safety not of the nobles, but of the man in the street, that he was assassinated.

Sed periit postquam cerdonibus esse timendus, Coeperat: hoc nocuit Lamiarum csede madenti.

JUVENAL, Satires, iv. 153-4. In Portugal swiftly and suddenly a monarchy has given way to a republic, and the cause has been proved to be an ecclesiastical one by the fresh laws passed by the new Government. In Belgium the conflict is going on under our eyes, political on the surface, religious beneath it. In Spain political aspirations are wedded to denials of ecclesiastical authority. In Italy, where thought is most active, the claims and dogmas of the Church are handled most freely. Senor Fogazzaro has published three connected books (of which II Santo is one) which witness to an up rising of intelligent and cultured laymen. In one of his works he says: "The Church is not the hierarchy alone, but the universal assembly of the faithful (gens sancta). The Church is not the hierarchy with its traditional concepts, but she is also lay society, perpetually in contact with the reality of things, and perpetually reacting upon official theology."

Again, in a passage of great interest, Fogazzaro not only pleads for the right of personal initiative and independent action, but even points to the possibility of certain changes in the administrative system of the Roman Church. He says: "The worst is the suppression of the ancient liberty, the desire to force admissions that are contrary to conscience the desire, the moment a group of men combine for a good work, to assume the command of them, and if they decline dictation to refuse them countenance the tendency to extend religious authority beyond the religious do main. Italy knows something of this, and the whole Catholic world too." From such words it would appear that both in the circumstances of the time and in the nature of Latin religion there are forces which make strongly for the realisation of the ideal of faith without superstition, and obedience without servility, which leaders like Fogazzaro set before the whole Catholic Church. In pursuing this ideal they are hourly working to promote the visible Kingdom of God, for whose coming the Lord taught His people to pray. The Kingdom of God is a kingdom of spirits, in that its rule is founded on the free consent of the governed. None are coerced, nor are any excluded, save by their own act. Liberty is the rule, but in its divinely ordered and disciplined society service is the condition of liberty. Christian liberty is not licence, and does not by any means exclude authority. Our obedience is not servile. Our authority is not tyrannical. Authority is but the means of safeguarding and securing liberty. It is to liberty in this sense that such Roman Catholics aspire, namely, the heritage of the citizen rights of the City of God. The second consideration, then, is that this unrest among European nations points to a failure in carrying out the ideal of the Church. Something is wrong. Some truth has been forgotten or ignored. It is the great truth of the Priesthood and Primitive Position of the Laity. It is the solidarity of all those called to be saints. The teaching of Christ, and the safety of the Church, both require us to realise the high position of all members of the Body of Christ. All are called to holiness. There are not two standards of spiritual life in the Christian community. The secular has been too long divorced from the sacred. All have their place in working harmoniously to advance the Kingdom of God. As it is in the human body, so it is in the corporate body of the Church.

Let us not always say "Spite of the flesh to-day I have made head, Gained ground upon the whole." As the bird wings and sings, Let us say "All good things Are ours, nor soul helps flesh more Than flesh helps soul."