Sts 7 i a see —2e8 Ds i en hi ee Ne ; ¥ we 1 ho iF ‘ i \ ‘fae ee en i hy y, UA AS * Wau we . ; nh a7, - ig |) Loca oes | ~ Report of the Anglo-Catholic Congress : London A ( ‘ LP itob ey Aik» ee AAMAS ect y yt Teye »' j Pia A a he vv. Y» a; £3 _Y x “OGIeA, gers Report of the ANGLO- CATHOLI CONGRESS SUBJECT: THE HOLY EUCHARIST London, fuly, 1927 The Society of SS. Peter & Paul, Limited Westminster House, 8 Great Smith Street London, S.W.1 Morehouse Publishing Company Milwaukee, U.S.A. IMPRINTED AT ESHER BY MESSRS. BILLING AND SONS, LTD., FOR THE SOCIETY OF SS, PETER AND PAUL WESTMINSTER HOUSE, GREAT SMITH STREET, S.W. I. & Foreword ® 3 HE commencement of the Third Pe) fiat Congress may be * reckoned from Sunday, July 3, when B=, Masses were offered at over ninety ib churches in the London distriét alone, 5 and special sermons were preached, ~ both at Mass and at the evening 5 i The first session of the Congress was held in the Albert Hall, on the following afternoon, Monday, July 4. The Rt. Revd. Bishop Chandler, as President of the Congress Committee, formally “ installed” the Bishop of Nassau as Chairman of the Congress, and the first papers on the Holy Eucharist were read according to programme. The Revd. Fr. Bull, S.S.J.E., made the appeal for contribu- tions to the Congress funds. In the evening the Revd. Geofirey Heald was the additional speaker. On the second day the sessions were three in number. In addition to the readers of papers, the Revd. C. E. Russell, the Revd. Fr. Tooth, the Revd. C. R. Deakin, Lord Halifax, and the Revd. G. D. Rosenthal spoke, the Bishop of Nassau pre- siding at each of the three sessions. Wednesday, July 6, marked an interval in the regular Con- gress programme, and in many respects was an experiment in organization. From all parts of England and Wales special trains brought in parties of one-day pilgrims, who were met at their respective London termini and taken in charabancs to the particular church which had been allotted to them. At various convenient hours High Mass was sung and Holy Com- munion given. At 11.30 a.m., in the Albert Hall, a special Congress meeting was held for these one-day visitors. The Bishop of Nassau presided, and the Revd. G. Heald, the Revd. Fr. Hughson, O.H.C. (whose speech is given in the Vv Foreword Appendix), and the Revd. L. A. Matthew were the speakers. At noon that same day a City meeting was held at the Cannon Street Hotel, with Sir Henry Slesser in the chair. The Revd. A. E. Monahan, Mr. Glass, and the Revd. G. D. Rosenthal addressed the meeting. - Meanwhile, in the Albert Hall, a meeting of the Foreign Missionary Association of the Congress was held in the early afternoon. Bishop Chandler presided, and was followed by the Bishop of London, who had come, at considerable incon- venience, from the Church Assembly, which, at that very moment, was in the midst of the crucial Prayer-Book revision debate. The Bishop’s determination so to visit the Congress was warmly appreciated. Sir Claude Severne, the Revd. V. F. Hambling, the Bishop of Damaraland, and the Revd. Canon Broomfield also spoke. At 5 p.m., immediately following the missionary meeting, a devotional meeting was conducted by the Revd. Fr. Vernon, S.D.C. Probably at no other time was there a larger attend- ance, the hall being densely crowded from gallery to arena. Finally, in the evening, the arena having been cleared, a “ Social,’ with music, both orchestral and vocal, was held from 8 p.m. onwards. A short meeting served as an introduction to the more informal proceedings, General Carleton-Jones, Secretary of the Organization Committee, taking the chair. The Revd. G. D. Rosenthal and Sir Henry Slesser (whose speeches appear in the Appendix), and the Revd. H. A. Wilson were the speakers. On Thursday, July 7, the regular sessions were resumed, three being held on both this and the following day. Mr. Humphrey Beevor, Miss Sheila Kaye-Smith, the Revd. Arnold Pinchard, and the Revd. G. C. Ommaney were the additional speakers. On this evening the first of the two Queen’s Hall sessions was held, Bishop Chandler presiding, and the Revd. K. E. Kirk, the Revd. C. R. Deakin, and the Revd. E. G. Selwyn addressed the meeting. On the concluding day the sessions were even more crowded than on the previous occasions, the Revd. F. L. Underhill making the appeal at the morning session. In the afternoon, Mgr. Germanos, the Metropolitan of Thyatira, the vi Foreword Archimandrite Constantinides, and the Revd. Chaplain to the ex-King of Greece were formally welcomed to the plat- form by the Bishop of Nassau. The Metropolitan of Thyatira and the Revd. Fr. Tribe, S.S.M., addressed the meeting in addition to the regular speakers. Friday evening marked the conclusion of the Congress sessions. The Revd. G. Heald and Mr. Sidney Dark addressed the meeting, and during the course of the evening a telegram was sent, by unanimous approval, to the Archbishop of Canterbury, conveying the respectful and affectionate greetings of the ten thousand Anglo-Catholics assembled in the Albert Hall, to his Grace, with an assurance of their love, honour, and prayers. During the Chairman’s final speech, which appears in the body of the Report, the following reply was received from Lambeth, and was read out by the Chairman and received with enthusiastic applause, the vast audience rising spon- taneously to its feet: “T thank you for your loyal message. I appreciate the high tone which seems to have marked your discussions and their welcome freedom from controversial reference to the problem which has been before the Church Assembly. I earnestly pray that we may all be enabled to work together to the glory of God and to the deepening and Strengthening of the faith we love.—RANDALL CANTUAR.” At the Queen’s Hall meeting that evening the chair was taken by the Revd. Dr. P. N. Waggett, S.S.J.E., the Revd. F. L. Underhill, the Revd. E. D. Merritt, the Revd. Dudley Symon, and the Revd. C. P. Hankey also addressing the meeting. A telegram was sent to the Archbishop of Canter- bury similar to that despatched from the Albert Hall. On Saturday, July 9, several Masses for children were held in Congress churches, and a Congress Pilgrimage proceeded to Canterbury, under the presidency of the Bishop of Nassau. On Sunday, July 10, Masses of thanksgiving were offered in all the Congress churches, Te Deums were sung at the even- ing services, and special sermons were preached, both in the morning and evening. In addition to the Albert Hall and Queen’s Hall sessions, simultaneous Congresses, at which selected Congress papers Vii Foreword were read, were held in forty-nine centres, including such far distant places as Falmouth, Truro, Edinburgh, Glasgow, Paris, Tokyo, Ottawa, Colombo, etc. The sum of over £23,000 was raised by the Congress for the various objects which have been described at length in other publications elsewhere. Over 21,000 Anglo-Catholics' enrolled themselves as Congress members. * * * * * The foregoing is but a formal record of the Eucharistic Congress of 1927, and, as such, it can convey no idea of the enthusiasm and devotion which it manifested. To attempt such a description is no part of the editors’ task. But, before concluding this Foreword, they feel bound to offer certain | explanations, by way of apologia. In the first place, the Congress of 1927 presents difficulties, from an editorial standpoint, which were not present in the former Congresses. A number of meetings, for example, were held outside the normal Congress sessions, meetings such as that of the Foreign Missionary Association, the “ Social,” the City meeting at the Cannon Street Hotel, and the two Queen’s Hall meetings. Only in a few cases has it been possible to include any report of the speeches and papers given at these funétions. Whereas the 1923 Congress lasted only for three days, this Congress consisted of eleven Albert Hall sessions. As it was essential that the Report should be issued at a reasonably low price, the editors have been compelled to exercise their editorial discretion, since the inclusion of every paper and every speech would have involved a far more unwieldy volume than the expense would warrant. Again, in 1923, there were a few special services at which sermons were preached, and which could be included precisely because they were few in number. In 1927 there were over 330 services at Congress churches, at all of which sermons were preached. Obviously these could not be contained in the Report. The editors, as they have read through the proofs, have been more than ever conscious of the dignity and importance vill Foreword of this Congress, and of the comparative responsibility, there- fore, which they themselves have incurred. They are confident that no one who reads this book will fail to realize how reverent and high a Standard was set. Indeed, the Congress marks clearly a new period upon which the Anglo-Catholic Move- ment has entered, and a period full of promise and oppor- tunity. Whatever problems the future contains, it is certain that the Movement possesses a spiritual virility and devotion which justifies a sense of thankfulness. Finally, the editors feel no hesitation in suggesting that the careful study of the papers which this Report contains is no small part of the immediate duty of Congress members, and of all, indeed, who profess their allegiance to the Anglo-Catholic Movement. CHARLES SCOTT GILLETT KENNETH INGRAM Editors tal an re VPa4 olin Riek, rune 9 - « Contents of this Report ® General Subject THE HOLY EUCHARIST ForEworRD 5 : . page PAPERS READ AT THE CONGRESS: I. WE Ii. THE BACKGROUND OF SACRAMENTAL BELIEF . The Christian View of the World . . page The Revd. Father P. N. Waggett, D.D., of the Society of St. John the Evangelist. The Christian Doétrine of Man. . page The Revd. N. P. Williams, D.D., Lady Margaret Professor of Divinity in the Unwersity of Oxford. THE CONTEXT OF THE EUCHARIST . Sacraments in other Religions , . page The Revd. Basil E. Butler, M.A., Tutor of Keble College, Oxford. Sacraments and the Presence of Godin Nature page N. K. H. A. Coghill, Esq., Fellow of Exeter College, Oxford. Sacraments and MySticism . F . page Miss Evelyn Underhill. x1 21 32 43 ae Il. Contents of this Report THE EUCHARIST AND REVELATION The Revd. Canon Darwell Stone, D.D., Principal of Pusey House, Oxford. Xil The Eucharist in the New Testament . page 51 The Revd. Sir Edwyn Hoskyns, Bart., Fellow of Corpus Christ College, Cambridge. THE IDEA OF SACRIFICE OUTSIDE CHRISTIANITY . Pre-Christian Sacrifice (Gentile) : . page 57 The Revd. E. O. James, D.Litt., F.S.A., Vicar of St. Thomas’ Church, Oxford. Sacrifice in the Old Testament . page 68 The Revd. Canon H. L. Goudge, D.D., Regius Professor of Divinity in the University of Oxford. THE CHRISTIAN SACRIFICE . On Calvary . page 80 The Revd. K. E. Kirk, DD. Sie of Trinity College, Oxford. In the Eucharist. . page go The Revd. E. G. Selwyn, D.D., Rector of Red Hill, Havant, and Editor of “ Theology. 4 THE REAL PRESENCE . Historically Considered : : . page or II. II. Il. Ill. Contents of this Report Theologically and Philosophically Considered Page Dr. A. E. Taylor, F.B.A., Professor of Moral Philosophy in the University of Edinburgh; and Will Spens, Esq., C.B.E., Fellow and Tutor of Corpus Christi College, Cambridge. THE APPROACH TO THE PRESENCE . The Holy Spirit and the Eucharist . page The Revd. A. E. J]. Rawlinson, D.D., Student of Christ Church, Oxford. Christian Priesthood Fhe Revd. C. '§.. Gillett, M.A. (Oxon page and Cantab); Fellow and Dean of Peterhouse, Cambridge; Examining Chaplain to the Bishop of Southwell. THE MEANING OF THE PRESENCE ‘ Preparation for Communion dd The Revd. Francis Underhill, M. ve Warden of Liddon House. Communion with Man page The Revd. Dudley Symon, Freadmate of Woodbridge School. Communion with God Pane The. Revd. C. P. Hankey, M.A., Vicar of St. Mary-the-Less Church, Cambridge. THE RESERVED SACRAMENT . Its Use for Communion page The Revd. Prebendary H. F. B. ieee M.A., Vicar of All Saints, Margaret Street. Xiil 109g I20 129 140 BOT: 162 If. if II. Il. Contents of this Report XIV, Its Devotional Aspect . page 172 The Revd. Father Lionel Theboioe of the Com- munity of the Resurrection. THE EUCHARISTIC LITURGY . Eucharistic Rites. . page 183 The Revd. K. D. Mico M. a late Fellow of Pembroke College, Oxford. Eucharistic Ceremonies ; . page 195 Stephen Gaselee, Esq., C.B.E., F. 5. A., and the Revd. Maurice Child, M.A., General Secretary of the Anglo-Catholic Congress. EUCHARISTIC WORSHIP . The Principles of Christian Worship . . page 204 The Revd. C. W. Hutchinson, A.K.C., Vicar of St. John’s Church, Waterloo Road, Lambeth. The Sunday Eucharist : . page 210 The Revd. G. H. Clayton, M. vi Vicar of Chesterfield. CoNncLUDING SPEECH . page 218 | The Bishop of Nassau (Chaiteuiay APPENDIX . Address by the Revd. Father Hughson, of the Order of the Holy Cross . . . page 221 . Address by the Revd. G. D. Rosenthal, M.A., Vicar of St. Agatha’s Church, Sparkbrook . page 227 Address by Sir Henry Slesser, K.C., M.P. . page 230 The Background of Sacramental Belief 3 1 & The Christian View of the World By P. N. WAGGETT, S.S.J.E. 27 F I quite understand what is expected 8° V4 of me, we are now, in preparation for wx. devout reflection upon the Eucharist, “os to mark some of the characteristics of i) Christian thought about the world, j that is to say, the scene of our mortal a life. Such a Study of Christian thought R92 2 might lead us a long way, in respect S.9, natural means. That is, through the SSO IVE consecrating touch, through the hallowing and special use of physical things—oil and water, bread and wine. A sacrament gives us the invisible Reality by visible ways. That is really the same as the definition of the Catechism: it is an outward sign of an inward grace. I think this definition will apply to all sacramental religion, and not only to the Christian Sacraments. Everyone who really uses a sacrament believes that by these physical things and physical actions spiritual work is truly done. What is a mystic? At first sight, it seems as though he were the exact opposite of a sacramentalist. For a mystic 43 : ; SY (aeAac The Context of the Eucharist is a spiritual realist: a person for whom the Invisible is a matter of more or less vivid first-hand experience, and not only of accepted belief. He feels and knows the Presence and Aétion of God; his relation with spiritual realities is personal and direét. He is conscious of the supernatural sun- shine to which most of us are blind, and of an intercourse which goes on in the deeps of his soul between his little dependent spirit and the infinite Spirit of God. Now it looks as though such a type of religion as this had no need of, and little contaét with, the sacramental sort of religious outlook and practice. Why seek and receive God through consecrated things and outward deeds? Why insist on the need of meeting him at the altar, of receiving his regenerating grace at the font, when he is so clearly present with his creature in the soul’s secret life? The mystic beyond all other men can say with absolute conviction: “ He is not far from any one of us, for in him we live and move and have our being.” So, why these special ritual actions? And why this consecrating of physical things, if all things are already felt and known to be immersed in his all-sustaining love and life? This sort of thing has, of course, been said, and these con- clusions have been drawn, by many hurried admirers of “pure” spirituality. It has constantly been assumed that there is an essential opposition between mystical religion and sacra- mental religion; and that persons who use external means of grace must be on a lower spiritual level than those whose com- munion with God is without means. But when we come to look at history—that remorseless deStroyer of religious generalities—and test these ideas by fa¢ts, what we find is that the very greatest Christian mystics, from the fourth Evangelist onwards, have also been great sacramentalists. They agree with Suso that it is a greater thing to be able to find the inward in the outward than only to be able to find the inward in the inward. It is perhaps the greatest glory of Catholic mysticism that it teaches souls to make that discovery, and so discloses the very principle of the Incarnation—God self-given to men in terms of our little human life—stll ceaselessly at work within the world. Just because of their deeper knowledge of God, 44 —— 2 Sacraments and Mysticism their fuller sense of his mystery and richness, the mystics find more, not less, reality than others do in his sacramental gifts. And because this deeper knowledge brings with it a sense of the distance which separates even the most spiritualized human nature from the Divine Nature, they know the soul requires something given to it from beyond itself—the actual food of Eternal Life—if it is to grow up to the fulness of the stature of Christ. Thus we find even such wonderful contemplatives as St. Catherine of Siena and St. Catherine of Genoa, whose souls were wide open towards the Eternal World, most humbly and gratefully receiving the gifts of that World in their daily communions. It is said of St. Catherine of Siena that Holy Communion was the very centre of her inner life, the gateway to ecstasy; and that even her bodily existence seemed to depend on it. For St. Catherine of Genoa, one of the least churchy and conventional, most platonic, most metaphysical of all the great women mystics, the Eucharist was the absorbing devotion of her life. She, who dwelt in God as in an ocean of love and life, called it “the heart’s true food,” and in a period when such praétice was rare, she obtained permission to be a daily communicant. Again, it is to St. Thomas Aquinas, a great philosopher and a great mystic, whose conception of the Nature of God went far beyond the symbols and images by which men try to express what he is, that the Church owes her greatest Eucharistic hymns. And Ruysbroeck, the most lofty of the great medieval contemplatives, with his wonderful accounts of the soul’s self loss in the fathomless ocean of the Godhead, yet never lost his passionate devotion to, and dependence on, the Blessed Sacrament; and Eucharistic language appears again and again in his most transcendental works. And while it is true that isolated groups have constantly arisen through Christian history, which have sought the inward at the expense of the outward, and violently rejected symbols, ceremonies, and sacraments in their quest of pure spirituality, it is certain that these groups have always tended to become narrow, in- tense, and sectarian, and their members have fallen short of the highest and humblest types of saintliness. In repudiating 45 The Context of the Eucharist external religion, they have somehow missed that full rounded richness of the myStical life, which is able to turn to spiritual use both the body and the soul of man. What, then, are we to make of this? Why is it that just those persons who most vividly realize the spaceless and infinite God present in the soul, those whom more than any others we can think of as speaking to him as one friend with another, are yet impelled to seek him most humbly and ardently in finite ways, and through homely, outward, and visible signs? I think the reason is given us in that great utterance of St. Augustine, the father of Christian mysticism, in which he says to God: “Thou wert more inward to me than my most inward part, and higher than my highest.” “Thou wert more inward than my most inward part ”’— that is the Quaker doétrine of the inner light; which, taken alone and unchecked, slides so easily into pantheism, and if regarded as the whole truth, of course leaves no place what- ever for the sacraments. But for St. Augustine and the great mystics of his tradition it is zot the whole truth. “Thou wert higher than my highest!’’ That is the adoring sense of God’s transcendent Perfection, the Holy, the Supernatural, the Un- changing: a level of Reality, wholly other than the soul, unreachable by man’s own effort, and yet for which the awakened soul longs and thirsts. That conception means something which we can never find by exploring our own souls; something so high that our utmost spiritual reach cannot attain it, and which must be given to us from outside ourselves. The great myStics, in pro- portion to the width and depth of their vision, are ever con- scious of this exceeding richness of God, beyond all his manifestations in Nature, and all that their souls can compre- hend; and of their own tininess, yet their need and longing to receive him. No unpacking of the soul’s portmanteau, however spiritual its contents, is going to satisfy their thirst for Reality; for they know themselves to be, not merely clever animals, specially good products of the immanent Life-force, but children of the living God with a capacity for Eternal Life; inheritors of the supernatural Kingdom of Heaven. And, therefore, for the full development of the seed of life 46 4 Ne. Sa ine Sacraments and Mysticism within them, they know they need the free gift of Eternal Life from beyond them; the grace that leads on to sanétity. This is not a result of the evolutionary process—it comes from beyond the world. “Thou givest them bread from heaven to eat.”” And if that gift is to be made to all faithful and loving souls, and not just to persons of spiritual genius; then it must be made in ways which are suitable to a creature who is Still immersed in physical life, who is living the life of the senses as well as the life of the Spirit, and is unable to draw too sharp a line between them. It must come, then, by visible signs and deeds, and not by spiritual intimations alone. Here, then, Christian mysticism expands to embrace not only the dim, but real discovery of the Spirit of God within the soul, inciting it to holiness; but also the discovery that God must come zo that soul along the channels of sense—that is, through sacramental grace—in order to make this holiness possible. Wherever man becomes spiritually awakened, it seems that these two great facts become clear to him. First, that God must come to him with supernatural gifts before he can even begin to move out to God. And, next, that God must continue to feed and support him from without, if he is to continue that movement towards God. In other words, Baptism and Holy Communion are sacraments which represent vital faéts in the myStical history of every soul. They mean that*no soul can achieve its full destiny simply by developing its own interior resources; that theories of evolution and emergence only tell half the truth. For man is an amphibious creature; he Stands on the borderland be- tween the natural and supernatural worlds, and his achieve- ment of the supernatural world is not just the crown of natural life, it is distinét—a new Stage of Reality. The sacra- ments register and emphasize this difference in kind of Creator and creature; the littleness and dependence of man, the transcendence yet outflowing generosity of God. We, im- mersed in a world of change, need the persistent appropria- tion of Eternal Life, of the Changeless; and because we are thus subject, we need it given to us under the accidents of that world of change, and in close union with the faéts of in- carnational religion, Just because God is wholly other than 47 The Context of the Eucharist ourselves, such crumbs of his life and glory as we are able to bear must come to us chiefly through history, through human nature, and through things. The mystics, because they realize more than others a little of what is meant by ‘Eye hath not seen and ear hath not heard,” realize, too, that we must be content to draw near by the humble pathways of sense: “Him verily seeing, hearing, touching, tasting,’”’ as Julian of Norwich says. In most men, the intuition of God’s presence within the soul never reaches the conscious level at all. Even in the greatest mystics, it only does so from time to time; and were we left dependent on a means of knowledge so cut off from our ordinary ways of intercourse with reality, our religious _ experience would always be vague, subjective, uncertain of itself——dependent, not on God but on our own moods. But every Christian can have, though, of course, in very varying degrees, some kind of sacramental experience of God. Here the Infinite One, who is the object of mystical experience, is self-given to his little creatures, on the human level and in human ways, to meet our specifically human needs. His love and action need thus to be self-presented in ways closely related to our sense-life, through and in our earthly environ- ment, if they are to be quite certain of being assimilated by our sense-conditioned minds. As, if we want to feed a living and growing plant, we must feed it through the soil in which it is growing and not root it up and shake it free of soil till it is “‘ pure plant ’— so it is dangerous and, indeed, impossible to shake the living soul free of all its bodily and physical attachments, and try to treat it as “pure” spirit. Our souls and our senses are closely allied, and the God who is the God of our most apparently spiritual experience is also the God of our sensory experiences. “‘ What do I love when I love thee?” said St. Augustine. “TI love a certain light, melody, fragrance, savour of the inner man!” Thus we are reminded that even the greatest mystic still has his feet on this planet, and is still, even in his most spiritual moments, using a brain which has been developed through contact with the physical world, and which understands the messages of the senses best. Therefore, 48 lS. ee ee Sacraments and Mysticism an arrogant refusal to recognize that God does come to us through things perceptible to the senses—here and not in some hypothetical “spiritual world” only known in some abnormal state of consciousness—is bad mysticism and bad religion too. Just..as bad as the opposite extreme, which distrusts all secret, inarticulate communion of spirit with Spirit—all invisible religion—and tries to limit God by his sacraments. Either of these exaggerations spoils the depth and splendour of the spiritual life. Indeed, in religion, all which tempts us to say “this or that” instead of “ this and that” is dangerous, and sins against the rich and generous freedom of the New Testament, so full of the homely and the transcendental, the mystical and the sacramental, so genial in its acceptance and care for the body as well as the soul. There is room for all possible degrees of contemplation, and also of all possible uses of the channels of sense and of the outward sign, in the myriad responses of man’s spirit to the incitements and invitations of God. The New Testament assures us that for those who composed and lived by its docu- ments, the Kingdom of God is indeed within us; and there is no place where God is not. Yet, none the less, that man needs the distinét revelation of that same God in human ways, and the perpetual self-giving of that supernatural life—the Living Water, the Vine, the Bread from Heaven giving life to the world—the Eternal entering with its gifts the limited life of our half-animal race. It is the most myStical of the Evangelists who feels this most Strongly; and it is St. Paul, for whom the “ mystery hid from ages and now made mani- feSt”’ is the purely myStical secret of the Indwelling Christ, who yet sets going the developed Eucharistic doétrine of the Church. Genuine mysticism, which is simply spiritual realism, is ever Stretching towards the one Beloved Reality, who is self- given in all these ways; transcending yet embracing and harmonizing all these diverse experiences of the soul. For it, sacramental religion opens a door through which the Infinite comes with its gifts right down into the common life. It cannot scornfully reject the outward means, however crude and simple; because for it there is no outward means E 49 The Context of the Eucharist which does not carry at least some inward grace, and it sees in the great sacraments of Catholicism the fullest develop- ment of a principle which it finds at work everywhere through life. The nearer the myStic in the prayer of union draws to the Living God, who despises nothing that he has made, so the nearer he draws to such an experience of the world as shall find everywhere his graded manifestations. St. Francis is, of course, the classic pattern of such a mySticism as this; able to recognize, welcome, and adore the coming of God to the soul along the most humble and most homely aths. Hite My God and all!” said St. Francis. “What art thou? and what am I?” Perhaps the answer of the mystic to that Stupendous question might be something like this: “Thou art the One Eternal and Transcendent Reality. I, a little fluctuating, half-animal creature, passing my short life upon a tiny planet, imprisoned in time and place—knowing only such fragments of thy great universe as are shown me along the channels of sense. Herein is the miracle of love; that here, on this narrow Stage, and along those very paths of sense through which I know and maintain my place in the natural world, thou, the Infinite, hast sought me, the finite, and satis- fied the deepest craving of my soul by the gift of thy Super- natural Life.” 50 The Eucharist and Revelation The Eucharist in the New Testament By EDWYN HOSKYNS cafe? C2 f-\\ HE Catholic Religion is the revelation GAT yes of the power and the wisdom and the Uy ON love of God in a living organism of Vi Te x flesh and blood. This concretion of ACY " HAQe the mercy of God is the divine nega- rt : tion of a dreamy idealism on the one eg hand and of pure materialism on the / ER, 0 other hand. From the heart of Catholi- Hideo SSS cism there emerges, therefore, quite consistently and naturally, a rite in which human language and action, and the material objects of bread and wine, become vehicles of the revelation of Truth and means of Salvation. The Catholic Christian rightly asks how the Catholic Re- ligion is related to the religion of the New Testament, and in particular how its worship is related to the worship of the Apostolic Church and to the teaching of our Lord. Since liturgical worship is the result of a long process of adjustment in order to secure a more and more adequate pro- clamation of the Gospel, it is obvious that we should not expect to find in the Apostolic age a fully developed Liturgy. If, however, Catholic worship be a legitimate development of Apostolic Christianity, we ought to find the Gospel to be identical in both, and we ought to be able to discover in the earliest Christian writings signs of an adjustment of worship so that the Gospel may be thereby expressed in concrete form. 51 The Eucharist and Revelation If, on the other hand, Catholicism be an illegitimate develop- ment, its illegitimacy will be made apparent by the impossi-’ bility of discovering this identity of Gospel or of tracing any signs of this adjustment. St. John declares the whole activity of the Christian Church to be the manifestation of the Incarnate and Crucified Son of God for the salvation of the world. Consequently, he defines Christian worship as eating the Flesh of the Son of Man and drinking his Blood” He is acutely conscious that this language is capable of a purely materialistic interpretation. The Jews roundly declare it to be blasphemous anthropophagy,* and all but the true disciples are shocked and leave the Church because of this language.t But St. John refuses to ease the. language. In repeating the saying he retains the word “flesh” and substitutes a more crudely material word mean- ing “munch” for the word “eat.”{ He is therefore referring to a rite in which physical eating is integral, and he is not prepared to compromise the fact. Then he provides the inter- pretation and shows that’the significance of the Eucharist rests upon the Incarnation. Flesh, blood, bread, wine, water are in themselves nothing; only the Word or the Spirit can make them life-giving.§ As the Son of God, the Word, made material flesh and blood means of salvation, and as his con- crete utterances transformed men and women, blind and dead in sin, so bread and wine are in the Christian rite consecrated to be the Bread of Life and the Cup of Salvation.v But the Eucharist rests not only upon the Incarnation but supremely upon the death of the Son of God, made to be the sacrifice for sin: The bread which I will give is my flesh for the life of the world. Divorce the Eucharist from the sacri- ficial death of the Son of God and from his life-giving word, and it becomes pure materialism; think of Jesus as anything but the Word or the Son of God Incarnate, and the Eucharist becomes pure anthropophagy; think of the Eucharist as any- thing but salvation from sin through the sacrifice of the Lamb of God, and it becomes blasphemy. This is St. John’s teaching. * John vi, 52. + John vi, 66-69. t John vi, 53-56. § John vi, 63. 52 In the New Testament Quite consistently St. John records the Last Supper as the occasion when the original disciples of the Lord were initiated into the truth, and heard the Lord’s solemn and formal dedica- tion of himself as the Sacrifice: For their sakes I consecrate myself, in order that they themselves also may be consecrated in truth.* St. John omits the words of institution, partly be- cause they were well known, but partly because he wishes to bring out by paraphrase what is for fae their significance. The Eucharist is 5 consecration of the sacrifice immolated on the cross. It is in no sense and in no degree an independent rite. In the great Christian rite, therefore, each convert is transported to the upper room and is initiated into the signifi- cance of Christ’s death, and, with St. John and the Blessed Virgin, he stands beneath the Cross, and appropriates the benefits of the sacrifice on Calvary. Except ye eat the flesh of the Son of man and drink his blood, ye have not life in yourselves. He that eateth my flesh and drinketh my blood hath eternal life, and I will raise him up at the last day.t The language of St. John is not, as many maintain, an adjust- ment of the Gospel to Hellenistic sacramental mania; it is precisely the opposite, it is the completion of the first Stage of adjusting Christian worship to the Gospel. Throughout his Gospel, St. John is pointing out that the hostility of the Jews and semi-gnostic Christians to Christian language is, in fact, a denial of the Gospel that Jesus is the Son of God and had manifested himself in flesh and blood, and that his words, including his teaching concerning the Eucharistic bread and wine, are spirit and truth. An illustration of the same process of adjustment at an earlier date is provided by St. Paul in the First Epistle to the Corinthians. In the Corinthian Church the Eucharist had de- generated either into a common meal at which immorality and lack of charity tended to appear, or into a semi-mystical com- munion with an unseen Lord. In order to safeguard the rite from such abuse, St. Paul points out that the Eucharist is linked indissolubly with the sacrificial death of Christ. The cup is communion of the Blood of Christ, and the broken * John xvii, 19. t John vi, 53, 54. 53 The Eucharist and Revelation bread is communion of the Body of Christ. Since Christian fellowship and righteousness emerge only through appropria- tion of the benefits of Christ’s death, and since the Eucharist is the proclamation of Christ’s death, till he come, the coming together for such worship must be for the good and not for the worse. In order to enforce this intimate connection between the sacrifice of Chrigt and the Eucharist, St. Paul claims to have heard, by revelation as an Apostle, the words of the Lord addressed to his disciples in the night before he died, by which he made his death to be the sacrifice offered for their salvation, and initiated them into the benefits of that sacrifice. St. Paul thus claims for the adjustment of Christian worship to the Gospel, not only the authority of the Apostles, in so far as they remembered the Lord’s words and actions on that night and perceived their significance, but also the direét authority of the Lord himself. Here, again, the issue which St. Paul raises is not primarily the nature of the Eucharist, but the nature of Christian salva- tion. He is not vaguely moralizing a piety peculiar to the mystery-religions; he is insisting that the death of Christ is the only sacrifice for sin, and that righteousness and charity must be the marks of those who share in Christian worship, which is the proclamation of Christ’s death, till he come. Two difficult questions now arise. How is this Johannine- Pauline adjustment of Christian worship to the Gospel related to our Lord’s words and actions at the Last Supper? And how is it related to the worship of the primitive Church in Jeru- salem? Since St. Luke’s account of the Last Supper seems, as it Stands, to be in part influenced by the Eucharistic passage in 1 Corinthians, and since St. Matthew’s narrative depends upon St. Mark, the answer to the first question, if it can be answered, rests upon the exegesis of St. Mark’s record. The whole narrative is eschatological in form and strudture. Solemnly, in the presence of his disciples, and of no others, our Lord consecrates his death to be the sacrifice which was to inaugurate the Covenant which is to supersede and fulfil the old. He makes his Body and Blood to be for them, for the disciples there present, the Sacrifice, as St. Matthew no doubt rightly interprets, for the remission of sins. Mos 54 Ee In the New Testament significantly our Lord adds that this sacrifice will be effective for many. Through eating the bread which was his Body, and drinking the wine which was his Blood, the disciples were by anticipation incorporated in the new eschatological order, and made participators in the benefits of his sacrifice. As it Stands, St. Mark’s narrative is not the institution of a rite, nor is it a general statement that our Lord’s death is a sacrifice for the salvation of the world, still less is it merely a farewell meal. It is the record of the initiation of the dis- ciples into the benefits of the sacrifice about to be made on Calvary, and the revelation to them of its significance. Whether our Lord did or did not add words which sug- gested that a long period was to elapse between his death and the final coming of the Kingdom, and whether he therefore added any specific direction that his words and actions should be understood as instituting a rite, is an interesting historical and literary problem, but it is ultimately irrelevant.’ The point is that our Lord, according to St. Mark, did in the night before he died make his death to be for his disciples the Sacri- fice through which the Covenant of God, foretold in the Old Testament, was to be realized, and that the disciples were initiated into the benefits of that sacrifice through eating and drinking bread and wine, which he named his Body and Blood. » Consequently, when his words and actions were recalled and their significance perceived, and so long as the final Kingdom did not appear, all who desire righteousness and forgiveness of sins must inevitably seek them through a like initiation and through a like declaration of the significance of his death. The existing evidence provides no definite conclusion as to the nature of the pre-Pauline Apostolic worship in Jerusalem. St. Luke says that the Apostles and their converts met to “break bread,” but he nowhere tells us exaétly what he meant by that phrase. He presumes that his readers will understand the allusion. It is possible that in the earliest days the signifi- cance of our Lord’s references to his death remained obscure, and that the common meal was an act of fellowship not direétly conneéted with our Lord’s death, and that, conse- quently, St. Paul was a more important figure in the develop- ment of Christian worship than has usually been allowed. On 55 The Eucharist and Revelation the other hand, St. Luke’s omission of all the Markan incidents between the feeding of the five thousand and the confession of St. Peter suggests that he regards “the breaking of bread” as directly productive of Christian faith, and his description of the two disciples on the road to Emmaus, to whom our Lord declared the necessity of his death, and to whom he made himself known in the “breaking of the bread,” points in a similar direction. It appears, therefore, that for St. Luke as for St. John, the Eucharist was creatively effective, and that they both found in the conjunction of the feeding of the five thousand with St. Peter’s confession of faith, the appropriate prototype of that experience peculiarly associated with the Eucharist.* Whatever conclusion we may tentatively accept as to the significance of St. Luke’s language, it seems abun- dantly clear that the line St. Paul—St. John—Catholic wor- ship 1s one line, and that it finds its adequate explanation and origin only in our Lord’s death and in his words and a¢tions at the Last Supper taken together as forming one sacrificial act. - If this be in any way a safe conclusion, it follows that our controversy with the Bishop of Birmingham, and with those whom he represents, does not concern primarily the Eucharist, but the Gospel. In the controversy it appears that we are being attacked in the interests of a sincere piety, which is, however, emotionally and morally, foreign to the New Testament. For such piety not only is the Eucharist sacrilege, but the Christian Statement that salvation is by the Blood of Jesus, is also ex- ceedingly misleading and dangerous. In this particular con- troversy it must in any case be stated, and Stated quite clearly, that we Catholics have the New Testament wholly on our side. * Cf. Luke ix, 12-27 with John vi, 1-15, 68, 69. 56 SO The Idea of Sacrifice Out- side Christianity Gi 1 Pre-Christian Sacrifice (Gentile) By E..O. JAMES : : \ (ea d Oj Ds é >; ai: HEN the spirit of historical inquiry pervaded the study of religion during the latter part of the last century, it became apparent that the institution of sacrifice represents an almost universal ) feature of religious development in all Stages of culture. Hitherto the rite had Ys generally been interpreted in relation “WEF US eg ™ to the sacrificial system of the Old Testament, but actually this is only one example of the rite as it was practised in antiquity. To get a true perspective of the Hebrew and Christian ritual, it is therefore necessary to view it in the light of the institution as a whole. Thus, in the time allotted to me in this paper, I propose to deal very briefly with the principal aspects of sacrificial ritual outside Palestine, in the hope that thereby a clearer insight may be gained into the great subject to which this Congress is devoted. If to-day I adopt a somewhat different attitude towards the problem from that which I maintained in the article on “ Sacrifice,” Standing to my name in “ The Encyclopedia of Religion and Ethics,” it is because, in the ten years that have elapsed, a great deal of new material has come to light, making a revision of some of the working principles necessary to bring them into line with our fuller knowledge. ‘© Sg wR inl S Bf £ C “3 a \2> = cH J ’ 2) 57 Sacrifice Outside Christianity It is now clear, I think, that Robertson Smith was not correct when he concluded that in the earliest times sacrifices were really rites of communion rather than gifts to the Deity.* This notion he based on the practice of totemism—the belief that an intimate relationship exists between a group of kindred people on the one side, and a species of animal or plant or some inanimate object on the other side. But was this the earliest constitution of human society? We know that in the old Stone Age the first representatives of modern man—the Aurignacians and Magdalenians, as they are called—resorted to the innermost recesses of the limestone caves around Les Eyzies in the Dordogne, and in the Pyrenees, for the purpose of painting and engraving figures of certain animals such as — the bison, mammoth, and reindeer, often in the most inacces- sible spots. These undoubtedly were prehistoric san¢tuaries in which magical rites were performed to control the chase. Since the primitive mind does not distinguish between a picture and the object represented, a spell, it is supposed, can be cast upon an animal by drawing a design of it and marking it with arrows in the vital spot. In the great Struggle for food in which early man was en- gaged, it must have become apparent that loss of blood caused faintness, unconsciousness, and ultimately death in man and beast alike. It would therefore be an easy deduction from this observation that blood was in some mysterious way the essence of life, and, by the primitive law of associations, any substance that resembled blood, like red ochre, would be regarded as having a similar significance and potency. This explains the custom of burying the dead in red-Stained earth and covering the body with ochreous powder, as in the case of the Aurig- nacian ceremonial interments found in a cave called Paviland, in South Wales, and in the Grotte du Cavillon, near Mentone.t If blood or its equivalent was the vehicle of life and conscious- ness, its restoration to a dead body could but have the effect of revivifying it so that it might awake in the hereafter with * “The Religion of the Semites”’ (London, 1907), pp. 226 ff. + Sollas, Journal Royal Anthrop. Institute, XLIII., 1913, pp. 325 ff; Obermaier, “ Fossil Man in Spain” (New Haven and London, 1925), pp- 132 ff. 58 Pre-Christian Sacrifice (Gentile) renewed Strength. Similarly, sacred designs were painted in red to give them a greater potency in hunting magic, the heart being frequently depicted as the centre of vitality, near which arrows sometimes were painted in) réd:* In these Palzolithic cave paintings and interments we have the earliest example at present known of the fundamental conception of the institution of sacrifice—viz., the belief that blood is the vitalising essence charged with life-giving power. For just as it was efficacious in restoring life to the dead, so it was thought to have similar power with regard to the gods. As Sir James Frazer has shown, primitive people have been inclined to look upon gods and human beings as belonging to much the same order, the king himself frequently being thought of as attaining to Godhead even in his lifetime as well as after death.t Thus in Ancient Egypt, for instance, Osiris probably was originally a civilising king who in process of time became deified,} and from the Fifth Dynasty the Pharaoh was regarded as the physical son of the Sun-god, Re.§ Both Osiris and Re were therefore conneéted with the kingship, the one being probably the deified ancestral king, the other the progenitor of the reigning house. So complete, in fact, was this identification of the king with the gods that in the later texts he is unhesitatingly called Osiris and Re in the same passage. But if kings were regarded as divine, gods who began life as chiefs and hetoes - were also fiortals raised to divine rank but Still subjeét to human limitations. They grew old and died. Consequently in Egypt they share with man the in- eStimable benefit of undergoing mummification and reanima- tion. Every province had a mummy of its dead god, that of Osiris resting at Mendes, and of Toumon at Heliopolis. | Like- gy L’ Anthropologie,” XIX., p. 15. aes Sapna Bough,” third edition, Part I.; “ Magic Art”? (London, 1917) pp. 3 2 ff. Op. EG orhake IV. (“ Adonis,” II.), p. phd, Elliot Smith, “ Evolution of “Dragon” (Manchester, 1919), PP: 29 ff. § Breasted, Rates cris Ce) Religion and Thought in Ancient Egypt” (London, 1912), ee || A. Moret, ‘‘ Le Rituel du Culte divin journalier in Egypte” (Paris, 1912), pp. 219 ff. 59 Sacrifice Outside Christianity wise in Greece, the grave of Zeus was shown to visitors in Crete as late as the beginning of the Christian era,* while the body of Dionysus was buried at Delphi beside the golden Statue of Apollo, and his tomb bore the inscription, “ Here lies Dionysus dead, the son of Semele.’’+ Cronus was interred in Sicily, Hermes in Hermopolis, Aphrodite in Cyprus, and Ares in Thrace. Now all this was really very serious, because the world de- pended on the gods, notably the Sun, for the continuance of life upon it. Thus in Mexico the Sun was regarded as the source of all vitality and, therefore, it was called “He by whom men live.” But he also required nourishment from the earth, Tezcatlipoca, the god par excellence of the Nahuan » pantheon, alone being credited with “ perpetual juvenility by the conditions of his nature.” § It was this belief that lay at the root of the ghastly system of human sacrifice, which con- Stituted the characteristic feature of the cult of Central America. The heart, as the centre and symbol of life, was extracted from the body of the victim and presented to the Sun to enable him to continue his daily course across the sky, while in March a great ceremony was held directed to Itzamma, the god of life and fire, and to the rain-gods (chac), during which a large fire was made and animals of every kind were killed in this manner. The hearts were then cast into the flames, together with models in copal of the hearts of larger animals, such as jaguars, pumas, which were not so easily captured.|| In this way the vitality of the god was renewed, and his beneficent offices continued in causing the life-giving waters to descend upon the earth. The ancient Peruvians in South America offered llamas before the Statue of Thunder and Lightning with the words, * Callimachus, “‘ Hymn to Zeus,” pp. 9 f. + Plutarch, “Isis et Osiris,” p. 35. t “Golden Bough,” Part IV., “ Dying God” (1914), p. 4. § E. J. Payne, “ History of New World called America” (Oxford, 1892), I., p. 429. Cf. Brasseur de Bourbourg, “ Histoire des nations civilisée ”” (Paris, 1857), III. || Prescott, “ History of Conquest of Mexico” (London, 1843), I., p- 65 ff; Bancroft, “Native Races” (London, 1875), IL, pp. 740 f; oyce, “ Mexican Archzology ” (London, 1914), p. 68. 60 Pre-Christian Sacrifice (Gentile) “O Creator, Sun, Thunder, and Lightning, may you ever remain young, may you never grow old.” * It was hoped in this way to secure a plentiful supply of the fertilising rays of the sun, and rain as the result of thunderstorms. The power of the Sun-god to send warmth and fertility appears to have depended on the sacrificial sustenance he received “to give him Strength always to do so.”’f It was probably from this conception of a sacrificial offering of nourishment to the gods to Strengthen and reanimate them, that the sacramental idea arose. If man gave vitality to the gods, might he not expect to be similarly nourished and Strengthened by the divinity? Thus a sacramental element often occurred in sacrificial rites, as, for example, in the well-known Aztec practice of eating at their May festival, images of the god Huitzilopochtli made of dough as the body of the divinity. On occasions the dough was fortified with the blood of a youth selected to impersonate the deity Tezcatlipoca, and then slain on the altar as the god himself.{ The sacramental eating of human victims offered to the gods was a general custom in Central America and Peru, § and it was also prevalent in Africa|| and Vedic India.{ When, with the progress of culture, animals were substituted for human beings, the solemn meal on their flesh usually had a sacramental significance, especially if the animal happened to be itself sacred or divine, as in the case of a totem. It was at this Stage in the development of the rite that totem sacraments appear, and not at the beginning, as Robertson Smith lines Originally sacrifice, as it seems to me, was the food of the gods to augment their power and life, the sacramental aspect growing up later as a result of the worshippers eating the * C. de Molina, “ Relacion de las fabulas e ritos de los Incas” (Lima, 1916), p. 27. + Cobo, “‘ Historia del nuevo mundo” (Sevilla, 1895), IV., p. 81. t Brasseur de Bourbourg, “ Hist. des nat. civil.” II., pp. 510 ff, 31 ff. ; § Sahagun, “ Hist. général des choses de la Nouvelle Espagne” (Paris, 1880), pp. 75 ff, 116; J. Ranking, “ History Researches on Con- quest of Peru and Mexico” (London, 1827), p. 89. || C. Partridge, “Cross River Natives’? (London, 1905), p. 59. q A. Weber, “Indische Streifen”’ (Berlin, 1868-79), I., pp. 72 f 61 Sacrifice Outside Christianity remains of an offering after the blood had been poured out for the nourishment of the divinity. The belief that the special qualities of a man or beast could be assimilated by contact with his person or any objects intimately connected with him, is very widespread among primitive people, and may well go back to Palzolithic times. To the same category of ideas at a later Stage in religious development belongs the notion of getting life and power by eating the flesh and drinking the blood of a sacrificial victim or partaking of the first- fruits of the new crops. Food was the vehicle of super- natural properties, and, consequently, the recipient of the food of the gods would derive therefrom divine life and qualities. Thus in the sacrificial ritual of the higher religions of anti- . quity, the priests and worshippers feasted on the remains of the victim, and the meal came to be regarded as a means of getting divine nutriment.* How far anything which can be fairly called sacrificial communion, obtained in the Mystery religions which arose on the shores of the 4’gean and prevailed for several centuries before and after the beginning of the Christian era, has already been discussed in a former paper. This, happily, relieves me of an excursus on this obscure and highly controversial question. Tt now only remains to consider a third aspect of sacrificial ritual. The belief that the gods had a mortal nature similar to man, led to attributing to them other human qualities and feelings, such as like and dislike, love and aversion, friendship and hostility. Thus calamities that could not be traced to natural sources were regarded as due to divine agency, and gradually the custom arose of offering sacrifice—the so-called piacular—to propitiate the gods when they were angry and malevolent. This praétice has probably been over-emphasized by Dr. WeStermarckt and some other scholars, as the under- lying notion of sin and forgiveness is of comparatively late * II. 1, 457 f£; G. Wissowa, “Religion und Kulture der Rémer ” (Munich, Hunt pp- 353 £; H. Oldenberg, “La Religion du Véda,” trans. V. Henry (Paris, 1903), p. 279; M. Monier-Williams, ‘“‘ Brahmanism and Hinduism” (London, 1891), p. 145. t “Origin and Development of Moral Ideas” (London, 1906), I., pp. 471 £., 437. 62 Pre-Christian Sacrifice (Gentile) development. No trace of piacular expiation, for instance, occurs at all in Egyptian ritual, and the kippurin-rite (burnt- offering) was due to Semitic influence in the Nile Valley. In Greek religion, sin was piao~a—defilement in a non- moral sense—which separated man from the gods till expiation was made by the prescribed purificatory rites. Failure of crops, plagues and diseases, and other calamities were attributed to the anger of the gods; but while the notion of propitiation undoubtedly was present in the Olympian worship, it was the furies and spirits of the dead rather than the Olympian deities who were appeased.* In the Homeric poems no word for “atonement” occurs, nor are propitiatory rites mentioned as such. It was apparently just this absence of any tangible means of allaying the anger of the gods that the Dionysiac and the more organized Orphic mystery cult met by supplying a ritual of purification. Whether this ever gained a moral content it is difficult to say, but although ritual purity may have assumed an ethical character in the Eleusinia, most of the rites of purification had nothing to do with morality. It is true the Eleusinian ritual required the offering of a young pig after the novice had bathed in the sea,t and mention is made in an inscription of Andania in Messinia of the sacrifice of numerous animals.{ But these seem to have been connected with initia- tion and purification like the taurobolium. It was notably in Babylonia that the more definite concep- tions of sin and contrition developed at an early period. Although no formal treatise on the subject has come down to us from the Sumerians, the cuneiform literature reveals that sin was at first regarded in terms of ritual impurity which could be removed by materialistic means such as washing with pure water, or by herbs or aromatic woods. A faint echo of this may be heard perhaps in the words of the Hebrew Psalmist: ‘‘ Purge me with hyssop and I shall be clean; wash Pomen Anab..” Vil VIM), 4; Paus, IL, XXIV.,:1; Xen" °Hell:,” IV., I.5 p: 20; Paus. [X., VIIL.,. p. 1. + Aristoph., ‘“‘ Frogs,” p. 338. ¢ Sauppe, “ Die MySterieninschrift von Andania ” (Gottingen, 1860), pp. 261-307. Cf C. Michel, “ Recueil d’inscriptions Grecques ”’ (Brussels, 1897), IV., No. 694, pp. 596 ff 63 Sacrifice Outside Christianity me, and I shall be whiter than snow.” Conversely, the follow- ing extract from a Sumerian bilingual penitential psalm might suggest that the ethical conception of sin was realized by the earliest inhabitants of the Euphrates Valley: “Oh, Lord, my wrongdoings are many, great are my sins Turn thou into good the sin which I have done. May the wind carry away the error which I have com- mitted ! Strip off my many evil deeds as a garment! My god, my sins are seven times seven; forgive my sins! My goddess, my sins are seven times seven; forgive my sins !’?* ~ Yet actually there was no real sense of sin as an ethical con- cept, for the transgressions here bewailed were not moral faults, but ritual errors and negleét of things of which the worshipper may or may not be aware. “I know not the sin which I have done; I know not the error which I have com- mitted,” + cried the Sumerian penitent. It was not until a very much later period that a long list of sins, mostly of an ethical character, was recited in the expiation rituals in which it was declared: “My heart is distressed and my soul faileth. I cry unto thee, O Lord, in the pure heavens. Faithfully look upon me, hear my supplication.” { But in this highest development of Babylonian religion it sufficed for the sinner to appeal to the various gods to intercede for him with the god, whose anger he desired to appease without the former sacrificial offer- ing of water, bread, grain, and animals. From the conception of sacrifice as a gift to reanimate the gods, the transition is not difficult to the inward ethical sur- render of the soul in contrition. The worshipper offers of his best—the life of his flocks and herds or the firstfruits of his * Zimmern, “ Babylonische Busspsalmen” (Leipzig, 1885), IV., pp. 100-106. + Op. cit., pp. 19-21, 42-45. ft Zimmern, “ Beitrage zur Kenntnis der Babylonischen Religion ” (Leipzig, 1901), pp. 23, 58 ff; L. W. King, “ Babylonian Magic and Sorcery” (London, 1896), No. 6, 60-62. 4 Pre-Christian Sacrifice (Gentile) crops—and in consequence he is materially the poorer. When the Deity was no longer thought to require nourishment, the blood of animals and other vitalizing substances were in a sense superfluous. Nevertheless, alongside of the more ethical offering of the broken spirit and contrite heart, the custom of giving outward ritual sacrificial gifts continued among practic- ally all the higher religions of antiquity. Even when the prac- tice ceased for a while, as in Zoroastrianism, and possibly officially in pre-exilic Israel, because it conflicted with the ethical chara¢ter of the prophet’s reforms,* it was soon revived and syStematized. It is often maintained to-day, however, that sacrificial wor- ship really has no legitimate place in an ethical religion, belonging as it does to a lower Stratum of cult pra¢tice. Rationally and ethically, God desires righteousness and loving- kindness from his creatures, and not the flesh of bulls and the blood of goats. But whatever may have been the message the great reformers in Israel were inspired to deliver in the eighth century B.c., it has been the universal experience of mankind in all ages that ethical monotheism satishes only a small minority possessed of a special kind of religious tem- perament. For the majority in every community something more intimate and concrete is necessary to hold their allegi- ance. Even among so enlightened a people as the Greeks, philo- sophical monotheism proved to be too rigid, metaphysical and remote for the religious needs and sentiments of the people, who found in the mystery cults and the worship of the lesser deities the satisfaction of their psychological requirements. Man is so constituted that his spiritual nature is restless until it finds rest in a god with whom personal relationships may be eStablished. The average person is unmoved by the philoso- phical notion of an “ Unmoved Mover” behind the universe, however lofty and ethical the concept may be, and however dis- tinguished is the company of its adherents, from Plato to Bosanquet, and Bradley and Dean Inge. Even solar mono- theism, which arose in Egypt in the days of Tutankhamen, only triumphed for a few years, while the exultation of * J. H. Moulton, “Early Zoroastrianism ” (London, 1913), p. 395, Nn. I. F 65 Sacrifice Outside Christianity Marduk, the city god of Babylon and the personification of the sun, as head of the pantheon in the third millennium ..c. was equally short-lived. Among people in a primitive state of culture, like the aborigines of Australia, the ethical and remote tribal All-Father tends to degenerate into a bull-roarer or bogey to frighten the women* and children, because, being himself immortal, he has no need of revivifying sacrifices, and in consequence he plays no part in tribal affairs. But, alas! it is unnecessary to go to the ends of the earth or search antiquity for examples of this process, since in our own land we have suffered the Deity to degenerate in the eyes of the people into the “One Above,” while to the sophisticated he is often, apparently, little more than a complicated con- . Stellation of positive and negative eleétrons. Yet the unique achievement, first in Israel and later and more completely in Christianity, was the rescuing of the Supreme Being from isola- tion without sacrificing his universal sovereignty and exclusive claims to Godhead. As the elaborate system of poSt-exilic sacrificial worship and ceremonial observance in the central sanctuary at Jerusalem was fulfilled and re-evaluated in the Self-revelation of the Eternal Son, ethical ideals and objeétive worship found their proper place and true relationships. In the perfect offering on Calvary on Good Friday the sacrificial principle found its highest expression, just as on Christmas Day sacramental Self-giving reached its climax. Having emptied himself and made himself of no account in order to enter into the experience of human life, our Lord offered himself in complete surrender and obedience to the Will of the Father, pouring out sacrificially before God his life-giving Blood of the New Covenant. Here the inward ethical surrender of the will was perfectly combined with the ritual offering of the life of the Victim, who is none other than the Lamb of God. But sacrifice does not mean the death of the viétim only; it has to be continued and completed by the offering of the life, for it is this which gives significance to the rite. It is, in fact, this offering which is essentially the prieStly action. The death of Jesus on the Cross has been once and for * Spencer and Gillen, “Northern Tribes of Central AuStralia ” (London, 1904), p. 338. 66 Pre-Christian Sacrifice (Gentile) all, but the offering of it to the Father is a continuing a¢tion which is accomplished in the Mass. But here my task ends, and I must bring this rapid survey of a very big subject to a close lest I intrude upon territory of other papers. Through an avenue of many altars, with their tragic and sometimes barbarous rites, our Priest-Victim came. In him on Cross and Corporal, all those broken rays of sacrificial ritual meet in light. From crude conceptions of the reanimation of mortal gods we pass at length to the offering of the Perfect Life laid down in voluntary self-surrender. By the gift of his sacred Body with all its attributes and virtues, the perfected sinless Human Nature was made accessible to sin-Stained humanity; and through his Precious Blood incorporation be- came possible into the quickening Risen Life, permeating the ever Self-extending Organism of the Incarnate. To drink the blood of the Covenant was unthinkable to a Jew at the time when these momentous words were first spoken on Maundy Thursday, yet it was nothing less than this that the disciples were invited to drink. But however difficult the acceptance of this invitation may have been to the original hearers, the selection of this particular formula places the Eucharist in the very centre of the institution of sacrifice. The blood is the life, and to partake of it sacrificially is to assimilate the life-prin- ciple. Thus before the Lamb of God gave his Life on the altar of the Cross, he imparted his broken Body and poured out Blood to his disciples, and through them to us by Divine com- mand and prophetic anticipation. By his Self-identification with sin he made atonement, slaying sin in his own Body on the tree, and so “ passed through the veil” that separated man from God. Viewed thus, we see in Calvary the climax and per- feétion of the sacrificial principle all over the world and all down the ages; and to place Calvary in its rightful place in the history of religion is to realize that “‘ we have an altar” and a Holy Sacrifice. 67 Sacrifice Outside Christianity 3 Il & Sacrifice in the Old Testament By H. L. GOUDGE on an Story of Old Testament sacrifice is the Story of a long ascent. It had SZ St. Chrysostom says, but it rose high secqw at last; and it is in the contrast be- #2 tween the beginning and the end that te) ly we see the reality of the divine teach- 8, ing. Ever God Stoops to conquer us; Mahe takes us as we are that he may eee us ssh ir er aild have us be; and the Bible is the record of what he has borne with, as well as the record of what he has done. Now this Story of sacrifice is full, not only of interest, but of warning: for its Story in the Old TeStament Strangely anticipates its Story in the Christian Church. There is much from the first which is of abiding value. Most right it is that we should desire to give to God as well as to receive from him: most right also that we should desire the closest com- munion with him. But we see both into Israel and into the Church the world entering like a flood and deeply corrupting the use of sacrifice. Then comes the reaétion of the God- enlightened mind and conscience, and sacrifice seems on the verge of being repudiated altogether. This is, however, only for the time; the true line of progress lies, not in its abolition, but in its reformancn Both in Israel and in the Church sacri- fice abides. But the reaction has not been in vain; the dross has been largely purged away, while the gold remains. As Hegel would put it, there is thesis first, and then antithesis, and finally synthesis; and we may thank God for all three. 68 Sits origin from heathen grossness, as - ‘ EE ee Sacrifice in the Old Testament My subject is Sacrifice in the Old Testament, and I must not wander far afield. But I will so tell the Story as to suggest the parallel; and, at the close, point out the lesson for ourselves. I But, before I turn to the Story, there are two things which it may be well to say. First, I shall assume those results of Old Testament criticism which are almost universally accepted by modern scholars. I shall, e.g., assume that the developed system of sacrifice which we find in Leviticus is the system of the second temple, and not that presupposed in the early historical books. The reason why Samuel and David and Elijah, when they sacrifice, pay no attention to the Levitical code is that it does not yet exist; and, when the great prophets attack the sacrifice of their day, it is not the later syStem which they are attacking. Secondly, I would point out that, if we ask what the ceremonial of sacrifice was understood to mean, we must not expect a very definite answer. The ceremonial is fixed and traditional, but the meaning is fluid and progressive. The law of sacrifice says “ This do,” not “‘ This think”’; and the path of progress lies, not only in the abolition of what is meaningless or degrading, but in putting a better mean- ing upon what is retained. The same ceremonial may be differently understood in one age and in another, and even in the same age by the more carnal mind and by the more spiritual. If we may not interpret differently there can be no common worship. Our Lord himself said “This do,” not “This think ”’; and still to-day, if we do what he com- manded in remembrance of him, we may together claim his blessing, though we may not all see eye to eye. Now consider such sacrificial action as the offering of the blood. What that originally meant Dr. James has told us. The gods, like ourselves, faint and grow weary; if “the twilight of the gods” is not to fall, they must be invigorated with food, and above all with blood, in which is the essence of life. Did the people of Yahweh, or Jehovah, ever so Sacrifice Outside Christianity conceive of sacrifice? Undoubtedly. Yahweh smells the sweet savour of the sacrifice of Noah; flesh, meal, wine and broth are offered to him as well as blood; in the Old Testament “the Lord’s table’ does not mean the table from which God feeds man, but that from which man feeds God. But that is only the beginning; and, though the old ceremonial lives, the old interpretation dies. God speaks better things to the heart and conscience of his people: “'Thinkest thou that I will eat bulls’ flesh and drink the blood of goats?” And, when his people have learnt their lesson, they put a new meaning upon what they do. The blood, in which is the life, is for Yahweh alone, because life is sacred to him who alone can bestow it. Nay, more. The life of the offerer himself may be symbolized — by the life of the poor beast who has been like one of his family, and so the offering of the blood comes to mean: “Take my life, and let it be Consecrated, Lord, to thee.” Nor is even this all. If the soul, or life, of the poor beast may be given for another’s weal, may not the same be true of the life of a nation, or of some chosen servant of God; and the blood thus poured out “cleanse the conscience from dead works to serve the living God”? If sacrifice become self-sacri- fice, who may set a limit to its power? So we climb slowly from the gods whom we mutt feed, if they are to be Strong to help us, to the God who desires not ours but us; the God who, patiens quia aeternus, accepts at first the offering of victims slain, that we may learn at last to give in Christ and through Christ the living sacrifice of ourselves, holy and acceptable, which he truly requires. II We will consider sacrifice first as we find it before the rise of the great prophets of Israel. It takes two main forms. First, there are burnt-offerings, wholly consumed upon the altar; and these, though always gifts from man to God, are not always bestowed with the same purpose. They may, or 70 Se Se SS. — o Sacrifice in the Old Testament may not, have attached to them the thought of expiation for sin. Secondly, there are peace-offerings, and the main pur- pose of these is the Communion-feast. There God receives his portion, and that the best; but man receives his portion also. It seems to be the better opinion to-day, that gift-sacrifices are the earlier type. But did Moses appoint these. sacrifices for Israel? Jeremiah says no. “I spake not unto your fathers, nor commanded them in the day that I brought them out of the land of Egypt, concerning burnt-offerings or sacrifices; but this thing I commanded them, saying, Hearken unto my voice.”’ What Moses was inspired to give was a new revela- tion of God’s charaéter and moral demands; the old sacri- ficial syStem of the Semites went ‘on as before. Jeremiah himself was a priest, and he would not have denied that Moses sanctioned sacrifice; what he denies is that Moses in- stituted it. But of this we may be sure. The sacrificial teaching of Moses, if he gave any, was consistent with the ethical religion which he taught. Sacrifice had its proper place. But, as prophecy declared even in its early days, “Behold! to obey is better than sacrifice, and to hearken than the fat of rams.” Is this, however, the outlook which we find when Israel is eStablished in Canaan? It might have been, had Israel con- quered the whole land at once and deStroyed the Canaanite tribes. But the conquest was slow, and the people of God mingled with the old inhabitants. Soon we find ourselves in the Dark Ages of the Book of Judges, and the Middle Ages of the Books of Samuel and Kings. Strangely similar we find the narrative to that of the medieval chroniclers, except that it is so far superior as literature. And now what of sacrifice? Israel is no longer a people of the desert, fed by heavenly food, though there are those who, like the Rechabites, love the old desert ways. Israel looks now for its corn and wine and oil to the good land into which it has come; and can Yahweh, who has brought them in, feed and multiply them now that they are there? Not so, say the old inhabitants. It is their native gods, the local Baals, who bestow both the fruit of men’s bodies and the fruit of their fields. Israel must offer its burnt-offerings and peace-offerings at the high places, before 71 Sacrifice Outside Christianity the sacred obelisks and the sacred poles—yes! and take its part in moral abominations of which we need not think to- day; otherwise there will be no food and no children. But is not this apostasy? Well! that is not quite clear. For it is not a question of gods like Milcom or Chemosh, with names as distinctive as that of Yahweh himself. The word Baal only means lord or owner of the soil, as Melech, afterwards pro- nounced Molech in insult, only means king; and is not Yahweh himself lord and king? Moreover, there is little that is alien about the sanétuaries of Canaan; it is easy to adopt and to adapt them. The bones of Abraham are resting at Hebron; and, if you go to Bethel, you will see the holy obelisk on which father Jacob laid his head, and which he consecrated with oil to be the house of God. Why not worship at the old sanétuaries, round which the legends of the saints are gathering—Hebron and Bethel, Mizpah and Shechem and Gilgal—and let all go on as before? Call the local Baal Yahweh; or better—make Yahweh the Baal of Canaan. He, then, will give the corn and wine and oil. Now let us consider this. It is true that what matters is not the name by which we call our God, but our belief in his unity and our understanding of his character. We Christians are not apostates from Israel’s God, because we no longer call him Yahweh; while we do call him Lord, and even address him in one of our hymns as God of Bethel. But it is most dangerous to do what Israel did, and the Church both in East and Wet did a thousand years later, and put the new wine of ethical monotheism into the old bottles of unethical polytheism. The Baals were local Baals, and nothing could change their character. If Yahweh takes their place, Yahweh is no longer one; and the Yahweh of one place may be in fact, though not in theory, the rival of the Yahweh of another. Local cults have always that danger, as the Church has found. But this was not the worst. To identify Yahweh with the Baals was wholly to forget both his chara¢ter and his claims. Nature gods make no moral demands; our English nature- god, the “One above,” makes very few. What the Baals asked was sacrifices, and respect for a certain number of arbitrary taboos. If Baal received thousands of rams, and ten 72 Sacrifice in the Old Testament thousands of rivers of oil; if Melech received the fruit of our bodies for the sin of our souls, they were fully satisfied; whether we did justly and loved mercy was none of their business. To identify Yahweh with Baal and Melech was to lead men to think of him as they thought of Baal and Melech. It was to make sacrifice all-important, and morality a bagatelle. Now, it is this which the great prophets saw, and which caused that reaétion against sacrifice which is so Startling. Amos, Hosea, Micah, Isaiah, and Jeremiah all take sub- stantially the same view. “Thus saith Yahweh . . . I hate, I despise your feasts, and I will take no delight in your solemn assemblies. Yea, though ye offer me your burnt-offerings and meal-offerings, I will not accept them: neither will I regard the peace-ofterings of your fat beasts. . . . But let judgment roll down as waters, and righteousness as a mighty stream.” “T desire loving-kindness, and not sacrifice; and the know- ledge of God more than burnt-offerings.”’ But do the prophets reject sacrifice itself, or only the abuses connected with it? That is not easy to say. Perhaps Isaiah, who loved the temple so well, would have been less radical than the herdman of Tekoa. But they draw no fine distinctions. Do let us under- Stand—we Anglo-Catholics especially, when we speak of the Reformers of the sixteenth century—that, when corruption has gone deep and is long-established, what is required is the sledge-hammer of the prophet, and not the delicate instru- ments of the theologian. The exact thinking, the careful dis- tinctions, of the theologian will be very necessary when the time for synthesis comes; but that time is not yet. The great prophets are concerned with the system as they know it, and with nothing else. “Come to Bethel and transgress; to Gilgal, and multiply transgression; and bring your sacrifices every morning, and your tithes every three days; and offer a sacri- fice of thanksgiving of your dough, and proclaim freewill offerings and publish them: for this liketh you, O ye children of Israel.” That is what the awakened conscience cannot abide—the substitution of ever-multiplied sacrifices for the performance of our moral obligations, the insult to God’s holiness involved in attempting to placate him by offerings for our still-continued refusal to do his will, the notion that 73 Sacrifice Outside Christianity sacrifice works like a charm to bring the divine blessing, while we fulfil none of the conditions upon which blessing depends. When these delusions have taken possession of men’s minds, there is only one thing to do with sacrifice; and that is for the time to abolish it. That was the course which God for a time took; a people such as Israel had come to be was of no use for his purpose. Northern Israel proved hopeless, and it was swept away. Southern Israel was not hopeless. There the prophets made a real impression, and a real religious reforma- tion took place. Ruthless as Josiah was, we can understand his action. The destruction of the old shrines, and the concentra- tion of worship at Jerusalem did mean a return to one Yahweh, and only one, which could probably have been © effected in no other way; and a moral reformation was attempted at the same time. But there was almost immediate relapse, and Jerusalem, too, had at last to fall, and its people to be carried captive to Babylon. There they were in an un- clean land, where they could not sacrifice. There those who retained their faith had to come Starkly face to face with God and his moral demands. And now we turn to the time after the exile. The rain has descended, and the floods have come. It is but a tiny remnant that has returned, and what will its life be? Is sacrifice to have no place now? So some think that it should have been. The prophet and the priest, they think, must be ever at feud; up with the prophet, and down with the priest! But no such view is to be found in the Bible. Often in the heroes of the Bible Story prophet and priest are one. Abraham is both, Moses is both, Samuel is both, Elijah is both, Jeremiah and Ezekiel are both, and Christ our Lord is both. There is a false and degraded priesthood which the prophets denounce, but there is also a false and degraded prophecy; and if we ask - which is denounced the more fiercely, the answer is that it is false prophecy that is generally the basis of false priesthood, | and the blows fall more heavily upon the former. “ A wonder- ful and horrible thing is come to pass in the land; the prophets prophesy falsely, and the priests bear rule by their means; and my people love to have it so; and what will ye do in the end thereof ?”’ Now it is the glory of Israel’s reformation that in 74 Sacrifice in the Old Testament it pepe! and priest worked hand in hand. It was so even before the great disaster; behind Josiah’s aétion there is both Hilkiah the priest and Huldah the prophetess. It is so in that noble book Deuteronomy. Deuteronomy is all for sacrifice, but all, too, for righteousness and the circumcised heart; Israel’s worship is just one element in Israel’s consecrated life; the State is a religious State, and the worship is a moral worship. It is so after the exile in Haggai and Zechariah. Their teach- ing is as profoundly ethical as that of the earlier prophets; but to them the first task is the rebuilding of the temple, and the restoration of Israel’s worship, and they believe that the fulfil- ment of God’s purpose depends upon this. But it is so perhaps above all in that great prophet, Ezekiel, whom we so neglect, but to whom Israel’s reformation perhaps owed more than to anyone else. Ezekiel was, like Jeremiah, a priest; but he had the prieStly outlook as Jeremiah had not. His ideal for the Church of God was not only that of a holy people, but that of a worshipping people; witness must be borne by the Church to God, not only by a corporate life of justice and mercy, but by a noble worship and a disciplined religious life. So to Ezekiel what seem but the details of worship are full of interest and importance; and he sets himself to devise a new system of fast and festival and sacrifice for the restored people of God. Right worship is no substitute for right con- duct, but it is a part of right conduct, part of that duty to- wards God, the neglect of which is sure, in the long run, to mean the neglect of duty towards our neighbour also. Ezekiel did not altogether get his way; new Prayer-Books have a Stormy course. But the worship of the second temple owed a great debt to Ezekiel; and it is with a few words about it that I will close my survey. We observe first that, though the second temple has an elaborate system of sacrifice, the old evils have received a mortal blow. Old degrading rites and superstitions for a time live on, as the latest chapters of the Book of Isaiah show. But the work of Josiah as a whole stands. Apart from the Samaritans, there is in the Holy Land no sacrifice to Yahweh except at Jerusalem, and so no possibility of rival Yahwehs. Moreover, all is carefully regulated, as it is believed, by the divine com- 75 Sacrifice Outside Christianity mand; all is to be done thus, and not otherwise, at the appointed place and the appointed time; Israel can no longer multiply its sacrifices at its own will. Thus sacrifice is made to emphasize the importance of exaét obedience instead of substituting something else for it, and an obedient people in this Israel remained. Our Lord blames the Jews for many things; but never for the charaéter of their worship, or for too great attention to it in comparison with other things. If he quotes Hosea’s watchword, “loving-kindness and not sacri- fice,” he is thinking of the Sabbath, and not of worship. Moreover, the priest has now to be a teaching priest. See what Malachi says about that: there are few better subjects than | his book for a priest’s retreat. Malachi insists as fully as we could desire that all that belongs to the worship of God must be the best that we can offer, and that the laity must pay their tithes. But he has no use for priests that offer sacrifice, but do not teach or evangelize their people. The priest is the messenger of the Lord of Hosts to turn many from iniquity; his lips must keep knowledge; men must seek inStru¢tion from his mouth; and if he negleéts the work that really costs him labour and pain, God will make him “ base and contemptible before all the people,” and throw his sacrifice back in his face. Secondly, the reformed system, so far from deadening, deepens the sense of sin. In it—apparently for the first time —we find the sin-offering and trespass-offering distinguished from the burnt-offering, and given a place of their own. The great Day of Atonement seems to be new, though old elements may be found among its ceremonies. But let us observe this. The ordinary sin-offerings can only be offered for the most venial sins; for sins done with a high hand they provide no atonement. With the sacrifice of the Day of Atonement that is not so clear. It was offered primarily for the nation as a whole to remove the corporate guilt which Stained it in the eyes of God. The individual might, no doubt, share in it; but he was never—so taught the Rabbis—to presume upon it; or to suppose that, if he had sinned against his brother, the Day of Atonement would help him unless he made amends. What could be better than all this? The very fact that sacrifice was necessary, even for involuntary sin, emphasized the divine 76 — — ee ee ee ee eee eres Sacrifice in the Old Testament holiness, while the fact that it could be offered for that alone did so even more. If the law did not overcome sin, it kept it in continual remembrance; and so was our schoolmaster to bring us to Christ, who alone can deliver us from it. III We see, then, the history; and “these things,” St. Paul says, “happened by way of example, and were written for our admonition, upon whom the ends of the ages are come.” Did the Catholic Church understand the story? Very little, I fear; it was not then possible that she should; and because she understood it so little, it has been in part repeated in her own history. The Church had from the first her own profound doétrine of Sacrifice, though like other doétrines it was but slowly thought out and formulated. But, when she received the heathen multitudes into her fellowship without real con- version, what was likely to become of it? The Church did what Israel did. Everywhere she found “‘ gods many and lords many ”’; and she changed their names, without always greatly changing the character of the devotion offered to them. The change of names was easy. A saint may be as popular as a god if we offer him the same petitions and keep his festival in the old way. If Holy Church prefers St. Dionysius to Dionysus and St. Elias to Helios, we are ready to oblige her; and the Virgin Mother of the Lord will more than fill the place of the virgin goddesses and mother goddesses of our earlier devotion. At any rate there will be a blessed change in our local legends. But we are many, and our teachers are few; what will be our thoughts of sacrifice? Holy Church says that we must not offer animal sacrifices to the saints, and after a while we give up doing so, and are satisfied with the sacrifice of the Mass, offered to God alone. But how shall we think of it? Shall we always understand that our Christian sacrifice is one, and only one; that the Lord died for us once for all; and that, though his one offering abides, and he “is,” and not merely once was, “ the propitiation for our sins,” and as such is present with us in our highest act of worship, there is no new sacrifice, or repetition of what he did long ago. No 77 Sacrifice Outside Christianity doubt that is what our wisest teachers say, but it is not what we half-Christians think. Sacrifice we had before we were Christians, and we think of it much as we have always thought of it. Sacrifice, we suppose, is an act that we have performed for us by the priest; and it works its effect without further trouble to ourselves. Each aét of sacrifice Stands by itself, and has a power of its own, though that power may not be great. Thus the more acts the better. When Solomon offered two and twenty thousand oxen it had two and twenty thou- sand times as much effect as it would have had if he had offered one. And, of course, we can offer for mortal sins as for others, though in this case the sacrifices must be more numerous. That was the popular belief about sacrifice in the © Dark Ages and in the Middle Ages, as it had been long ago in Israel; the chief difference was that, since Christians believed in a future life, sacrifices were offered for the dead as well as the living. The moral result was as deplorable in the second case as it was in the first; and the moral rea¢tion, when at last it came, was even more violent. It is quite true that the teach- ing of the theologians in no way justified the popular belief. But the Church allowed the practice to which this belief led, profited by it, and at last attempted to justify it; and it was the popular pra¢tice with which the Reformers had to deal. If our task to-day is synthesis, if we like Haggai and Zechariah have to restore much that has been mistakenly destroyed, we must not forget our debt to the Reformers, and above all we must see that we restore the right things. If we are to win our Protestant brothers we must make two things absolutely clear. First, the Holy Sacrifice is essentially one. We multiply our celebrations, as Christians of the East do not, because we have taught our people the blessing of frequent Com- munion, as they have not. It would no doubt be better, if it were possible, to plead the One Sacrifice, and to feed upon it, together. We do not believe that each Mass is a separate sacri- fice, with an individual power of its own. Secondly, the Holy Sacrifice is a “‘ reasonable service,” which requires the activity of the mind and of the will. It cannot be pleaded for us, un- less it is pleaded by us; and it cannot be pleaded by us with acceptance before our Father, unless it is the expression of 78 Sacrifice in the Old Testament our own worship, our own penitence, our own thanksgiving, our own desire to do his will, and to forward his purpose for the world. I myself was brought up among the Evangelicals; I know them, and I dearly love them Still. I am sure that the best Catholics and the best Evangelicals are here far nearer one to another than either of them understand; it is words that divide us far more than our real convictions. 79 The Christian Sacrifice ec 1 & The Sacrifice of Calvary By K. E. KIRK I E are asked to consider this evening the Sacrifice of Calvary—or (as we ma by 52) the sacrificial aspect of the Re- deemer’s death and life—for all, I sup- pose, are agreed that life and death may not be separated in this great issue. And at once the question meets us: OK | Oy Sp, “What do you mean by ‘sacrifice’?” Oo vaeg Indeed, it is hard to say what we mean hie it; for the word has become all too vulgarized. Many of us make what we call “ great personal sacrifices” whereby no one Stands to gain but ourselves; and the “sacrifices” of the bargain sale catalogue are a mere conventionality of advertise- ment. Let us say, then, that by a sacrifice we mean, firstly, an expenditure of some real magnitude; and, secondly, an expenditure offered by the spender to another. Sacrifice is a surrender, an offering, a gift, small (often enough) in absolute value, but precious even so in significance. It is sometimes said, indeed, that for a valid sacrifice that which is offered must in the offering be destroyed. But all destrudction brings with it new creation, and no offering can be without expense to the offerer. We keep a more open mind if we say, with weighty authorities, that the transference of the gift to a new possessor, or its con- version to a new use and power, is that which lies at the root 80 } ; <4 : On Calvary of this idea of “ destruction.’’ Not the death of the victim, but the offering of its life, is that which matters.* Two things at least, therefore, are involved in a sacrifice— expense to the offerer and value to the recipient. That could be no true sacrifice which cost the offerer nothing at all —not even a moment’s thought or care. Nor could we call by the name a gift which could have no conceivable value to the recipient—not even in the giver’s mind. Once religion has grasped the truth that the Almighty does not eat bull’s flesh, nor drink the blood of goats, to offer these any longer is sacrilege and not sacrifice. At least, in the worshipper’s honest opinion, his sacrifice must mean something to its receiver— must have some dimly intelligible purpose. A surrender which cannot in any conceivable circumstances elicit a response from its recipient is the equivalent of something which he never receives—it is no gift to Aim. And so if our first question as to sacrifice must concern the offerer’s expense, the second must equally concern the recipient’s supposed need thereof; and that sacrifice becomes rational or appropriate in which the ex- pense is commensurate with the need, and the need with the expense. Nay, more, if the need is real and pressing, and no other expenditure can meet it, then the expenditure of which we are thinking is not merely appropriate, but necessary and indispensable for the setting right of wrongs. II The death of Christ, like many another martyrdom, is a terrible and moving thing. That does not make it a sacrifice. To see it in its sacrificial aspeét it is not enough that we should be moved to tears or horror, nor that we should take it simply as a symbol of the cruelty of men or the tragic element in human life. To see it as a sacrifice we must Steadily contem- plate it in those two aspects of which I have already spoken— the aspect of a gift which costs the offerer much, and the aspect of a gift which satisfies a need. * On this point see, e.g., W. Spens in “ Essays Catholic and Critical,” P453- G 81 The Christian Sacrifice That it was a gift—a royal gift—admits no question, A gift must be something freely given. A transa¢tion of contract or bargain, a tax we are constrained to pay—these are no ifts. The Bible rightly emphasizes this element in our Lord’s death; St. Paul rightly speaks of it as the “ free gift.” In this sacrifice Christ is not victim alone—for the victim has no choice in a sacrifice. It was not Isaac who offered himself upon the altar, but Abraham who offered him. Christ is not victim alone, but priest as well; and whatever other meaning that great phrase may have, at least it means that Christ gave him- self freely to die for us. The gift began when, though he was rich, he became poor for our sakes; when being in the form of God he thought it no prize to be equal with God, but humbled himself. Further gifts were added when in the desert, of his own free will, he chose the hardest and not the easiest way of Messiahship; added again in his free giving of himself in teaching, training, healing. At every turn of the Gospel Story we see the same portent—the picture of one who gives freely, unsparingly, of his best. It is the climax of that generosity without beginning and without end which char- acterizes a God who has given to each of us life and health and joy and comradeship and vocation; a God of whom itis rightly said that before we call he will answer, and while we are yet speaking he will hear. The “ gifts of God are without repentance,” says the old English text—there is in them no afterthought—no arriére pensée, no element of paying for services rendered or demanded. All the more significant is this freeness of the gift of Christ when we consider the cost to him who made it. Here it is wrong to centre our thoughts too narrowly on Calvary. It is true that the manner of a death, when placed in contrast to the life of which it is the close, will often achieve a significance | which no moment in that life, nor the whole life itself, could have in isolation. Death makes patent, sometimes, virtues or vices which were only latent in life. Treason loses some of its blackness if it can be said of the traitor that “ nothing in his life became him like the leaving it”; and a hero can “‘ mar the perfect picture of a life by one black smutch at closing.” We are right in isolating the death and cross of Christ some- 82 On Calvary times, and seeing in them an all-important and self-contained moment of the highest significance. But Calvary is not the whole story; we must look back in the record to Gethsemane and Jerusalem, to Galilee, Nazareth, and Bethlehem. At all those times and in all those places there was a crucifixion; a crucifixion in Gethsemane, when the agony closed round the Saviour; a crucifixion in Jerusalem, when the Chosen People rejected the Lord’s Anointed; a crucifixion in Galilee, when Pharisees cavilled, and crowds jostled and ebbed and flowed, and dis- ciples misunderstood. Above all, perhaps there was a cruci- fixion at Bethlehem and Nazareth, when the Son of God chose to be confined within the pitiful limitations of human ignor- ance and frailty, and to labour in the narrow surroundings of an upland hamlet. We have spoken once of the Temptation; let us think of it again. That the divine should submit to such humiliation as to make temptation—human temptation —possible; should be so conditioned as to suffer the impulse to be untrue to its own nature—is there not crucifixion there? By his holy Nativity and Circumcision; by his Baptism, Fast- ing and Temptation; by his Agony and Bloody Sweat—by all these, as by his Cross and Passion, Christ wrought out his sacrifice in its fulness. On Calvary all these crucifixions came to their focus and culmination; the spendthrift life of royal giving found its apparent issue in hopeless bankruptcy. Who can count the cost of the Incarnate Life and Death of Christ to the Godhead? For let us not forget that in the sacrifice of Christ the whole Godhead is involved. I do not wish to touch upon the mystery of the Holy Trinity or the problem of the suffering of God; but we are not going beyond the language of Scrip- ture if we remind ourselves that God so loved the world as to give his only-begotten Son, and that such a giving cannot be other than a sacrifice. Surely, too, the Spirit which groans and makes intercession with our feeble spirit must have groaned and interceded with Jesus? Nothing was held back that could be given when God gave himself for man; the sacrifice was as complete, as costly, as excruciating as God— and only God—could make it. 83 The Christian Sacrifice Ill So much, then, of the cost of our sacrifice to its offerer. What of the recipient’s need? But, first, who is the recipient? There is a sense—a very real sense—a sense which could not be more real—in which man’s need was satisfied by the life and death of Christ. Each one of us knows that only too well — it is the soul of Christian joyfulness—it is that to which we are met to testify. Let us try for a moment to throw off the fetters of conventional language, and realize once more what all true evangelicalism means by the “sense of sin.” Let us recall the meannesses, the emptinesses, the selfishnesses, the unkindnesses of to-day and yesterday, of this morning and afternoon—nay, of half an hour or even five minutes ago. Let us think of them not as a vague and generalized deviation from the ideal, which we pigeon-hole as “‘ rather sinful,’’ which causes us a transient uneasiness for the moment, but which we readily forget. Let them rather appear as an endless series Stretching back into the mists of our earliest years—each one of them a fall as terrible and dishonourable as Adam’s or David’s or St. Peter’s—each one of them an aét as hostile to our Father in Heaven as St. Paul’s persecution of the Church of God. Let us set side by side with them the half-hearted, inter- mittent, and never wholly disinterested reactions which we dignify by the names of “Struggles for righteousness” or “service of God.” So viewing our lives as a whole, can we dare to say that a single moment goes by in which our own efforts to lead Christian lives are sufficient—in which we do not need the life and death of Christ? At the very least we need them as an example and inspiration, and gladly profess ourselves of those who at the inStance of St. Peter and St. Paul set themselves to a life of the Imitation of Christ. Still more—if, as we believe, the power of the Holy Spirit co-oper- ates with men to dwell in them as the Spirit that dwelt in Jesus —does the triumphant life of obedience lived by Jesus, even to the death, satisfy a human need, giving not merely the example of great humility and patience, but also power to be partakers of his resurrection and to live henceforth in newness of life? 84 On Calvary Here is something, happily, in which Christians of every persuasion are agreed. In other matters they may be as widely separated as the poles, in this they are united. Christ’s death, with the life of which it was at once the summary and the climax, opened to all men the possibility of newness of life which shri would have been unattainable. It satisfied man’s deepest need, it was a gift of priceless value. Do we say, then, that man is the recipient of Christ’s sacrifice—that it was offered to him? Not for a moment would any Christian dare to say so. The name “sacrifice”’ is appropriate only where the receiver is worthy of the offering; and we are wholly unworthy that Christ should do anything for us. If there is any justifica- tion in using the word “sacrifice” of Calvary at all—if it is to mean to us anything more, in this connection, than just coStliness of effort—then it must be God to whom the sacri- fice was offered. And when this is said we are face to face with one of the greatest problems and mysteries of Chris- tianity. I know no better way of exploring it than by asking two simple questions. The first is, Why did God need a sacri- fice? The second, How does Christ's death upon the cross satisfy that need? IV Why did God need a sacrifice? The world is not as it should be; and the main reason why it is not is to be found in human sin. No soul is what God would have it to be, no soul as innocent as he created it; and the reason lies in the fact that every soul has sinned. Here, then, is a need of God; a need for a sinless world and sinless souls) Had God never created the Universe, it could not be said that he needed one; having created it, it must be true of him that he needs—desires—its perfection; and sin is that obstacle to its perfection for which man is responsible. If there is to be a race of men at all, we cannot say other than that God needs and desires that they should be sinless. “But surely,” it may be said, “once a man repents of his sin, puts it away and turns to God, the need is done away with —God has forgiven the sin, it is blotted out, abolished, for- gotten; penitence has satisfied God’s need. Penitence is the 85 The Christian Sacrifice sacrifice that God requires—‘ Meat-offering and drink-offering thou wouldest not; then said I, lo, I come.’”’ We cannot praise too highly the virtue of Christian penitence. In the sculptures of the great Abbey Church of Vézélay in Burgundy it is the repentant Magdalen who Stands at heaven’s gate with St. Peter to welcome in the elect. The greater joy in heaven is the joy over the sinner that repents; the fullest picture of divine for- giveness in our Lord’s teaching is in the parable of the Prodigal Son. But true as this most certainly is, it is not the whole truth. Twelve years ago a great patriot sent as her dying mes- sage to her fellow-countrymen the words “Patriotism is not enough.” It is no mere parody of that ringing epigram to say _ that great penitents throughout the ages have recorded for their fellow-Christians the conviction, “‘ Penitence is not enough.” Here is a truth to which Christianity is fully and absolutely committed. Penitence is not enough :— “Could my zeal no respite know, Could my tears for ever flow, All for sin could not atone; Thou must save, and thou alone.” We must dwell a little longer upon this cardinal conviétion of our faith that penitence is not enough to satisfy God’s need. In the economy of salvation, sin must be cancelled out. On the side of evil, on the debit side, sin is a positive faét; but on the side of righteousness, the credit side, penitence is no more than an aspiration, a possibility. It is not itself the new life of righteousness; it is only the first Step—the turning to God, the renouncing of the past—which makes the new life possible. And possibilities do not cancel facts; they only hold out the hope that the faéts may be cancelled. The possibility of refresh- ment does not cancel the fact of hunger; the possibility of relief does not cancel the fact of pain. So, I think, it must be with penitence and sin; penitence removes a barrier to the cancelling of sin, but sin itself is not cancelled by penitence alone. But, further, even if by a miracle of grace any one of us were able truthfully to say “ Now I sin no more,” he still On Calvary would have to add: “But I have been a sinner.” And what we have been leaves some trace or stain which the mere be- coming something else cannot wholly remove. This is the most difficult point in all our subject, and I know no way of express- ing it except by pictures. One such picture comes to my mind; that of a child—it is a well-known piece of fiétion—who through the fault of others rather than of himself had fallen into every kind of childish deceit and evasion. Won back to better things by the patience of a mother’s love, he gives way once more to a piece of naughtiness, saying in self-excuse : “ It’s all different now.” “ Not altogether different,” is the author’s comment, “for when young lips have drunk deep of the bitter waters of hate, suspicion, and despair, all the love in the world will not wholly take away that knowledge.” That was written of human love, and of divine love, in the end, I believe it is not true; but the Story has enough truth for our purposes. God builds a beautiful temple when he creates a human soul; he writes a beautiful story when he plots a human life. But you and I by sin have desecrated the temple and spoilt the Story in the telling; a new life—a converted life—may repair the damage (make reparation, as we say); it cannot efface it. ‘‘ All for sin could not atone’; if God’s need is to be satisfied, it will be satisfied only by other efforts than yours and mine. The life history of the best and saintliest of us is written in the story of the Prodigal Son. The Prodigal Son comes home from his disastrous journey. He is penitent; he is forgiven; and the Story fades away into the joy and feasting of its close. But are things, after all, exactly as they were before? No; for the substance wasted in riotous living has not been restored. Supplement the story by some of our Lord’s outspoken words about the loss that our lives cause to God—the saying that, even when we have done all that is commanded, we are unpro- fitable servants—we do not earn our keep; the parable of the slave who owed his master ten thousand talents—and it is easy to see that the son could never restore the possessions he had wasted. Should we, then, applaud him if he said: “I have repented, I have been forgiven; my father needs nothing more; all has been repaired”? Should we not rather say: “The loss 87 The Christian Sacrifice remains; and until it is repaired there is Still something which the father lacks’’? V So we come to our second question: Does the sacrifice of Christ satisfy God’s need, and, if so, how? Dismiss at once all thought of those old answers which have shocked the moral sense and alienated men from the Gospel; they were attempts to State the truth which may have helped for a moment, but thereafter missed their mark. Christ’s death does not satisfy God’s need, because more punishment had to be meted out, more suffering endured, more wrath appeased— _ metaphors like these border upon the blasphemous. They re- present God as a tyrant, raging till someone has been tortured —it matters not who; as a pedantic magistrate—a veritable Justice Shallow among gods—-so tied to his routine that, rather than remit a fine he has imposed, he will pay it himself. These are not Christian conceptions. Revert once more to the figures we have chosen. The temple which God built, the story he planned, were marred and made impossible by sin; and in the temple and the Story are signified the sinless human life lived, not by automatons, but by self-conscious free-willed men. Some- thing of infinite value to God was defiled, beyond all cleansing by human effort; men whom he had made upright sought out, and degraded themselves with, the many inventions of sin. Only one thing could restore to God’s sight the vision thus cloaked in darkness. That one thing was a Perfect and Sinless human life; and such a life was lived to its culmination in the obedience of the Cross by our Redeemer. He built a new Temple, more perfect than the first, which no hodtile effort could destroy: he made a new story—a Story which we Still call the good news of Jesus Christ. If by no other figure, then perhaps by this we may perceive, as in a glass, darkly something of the way in which Christ’s life and death satisfied God’s need, and so became the perfect sacrifice for sin. Think, then, of the Cross—and therewith of all that the Cross typifies in the life and death of Jesus—held up, as the words of the Gospel hint, like the brazen serpent between man and God. It is held up in man’s sight to give him an inspiration On Calvary to newness of life, and an assurance of grace to co-operate in its achievement. It is held up before God as restoring to him that which human sin deStroyed—the perfeét Pattern and Realization of all that he meant man’s life to be. It is a gift given by God-in-man for man to God-in-God; a sacrifice, if we may say so, by God to himself at his own charges. Is it not true, after all, that he himself needed such a sacrifice of himself if his work was to be complete? Is it not equally true that this sacrifice satisfied his need as no other could? Is there blasphemy or folly or immorality in the dodétrine of the Cross if we look at it in some such way as this? Does it surrender anything that the Christian Church holds dear? I cannot answer these questions; I have only tried to put before you what seems to me to be the truth of the Gospel in a manner free from offence; free also from that refining and minimizing of Christian truth which is so easy and unprofitable a method of meeting the challenge of our times. I leave it with you as a suggestion, but a suggestion only; a metaphor which you may discard or build upon according as it seems to you, in its measure, to point to falsehood or to truth. The seer of the Apocalypse saw the New Jerusalem, the heavenly city, coming down from heaven to take the place of the old guilt-ridden city which had added sin to sin until it crucified the Lord. The Christian Church has seen the Son of God descend from heaven as Son of Man, to replace on earth that travesty of manhood which is all that sin has left of true humanity. All the conditions of a sacrifice for sin are here complete. It is needed; it is costly; it—and it alone—cancels the offence of sin. We look to a Redeemer, crucified in death, but crucified in life as well, by reason of his sinlessness in the midst of a sinful world; and we know that the offence of the past has been blotted out by God in his own sight; that his eyes see—as do ours also—nothing but the perfect Realization of the Man. For our own sins we must Still repine; for the loss they caused to God we need repine no more; for that loss has been made good by Another. The wrong of the past has been righted; and we may turn to the future with grateful hearts, resolved by God’s grace not to repeat the wrong. 89 The Christian Sacrifice Il & The Christian Sacrifice in the Eucharist By E. G. SELWYN ie provides the necessary ground and 2 foundation for any exposition of the séca.o Sacrifice in the Eucharist. In a defini- f< tion which has been accepted as Zp classical in Christian thought, St. 2, Augustine laid it down that visible Baa _ESSS RS SES mS Wee wec the is the symbol of a sacrifice invisible, ae derives its significance in the first place from the interior intentions and dispositions of the heart of the offerer. In our Lord’s case, what we have to do with is a life which was at every point, and not only in death, sacrificial. There was no moment in his Incarnate Life in which he was “not offering to the Father, as the great High Priest of mankind, the sacrifice of adoration and obedience, of expiatory suffer- ings, of redeeming charity, of steadfast patience, of victorious joy—of all, in fact, that man owes of love to God and to his fellow-men. And I want to emphasize that faét of our Lord’s Person and Work before going further; for both the Cross and the Eucharist alike only have sacrificial meaning because they have to do with him who was—in the Baptist’s words—“ the Lamb of God that taketh away the sin of the world.” It is his offering to the Father in human life of all that i is due from man to God, both for God’s glory and for man’s redemption from sin andl guilt, that underlies both the Eucharist and the Cross. And yet we need to make a distinction. There are different go My f) subject of the Sacrifice on cee | 2 a ali at ae Ss 2 da PN a a Te eee ee en In the Eucharist moments in our Lord’s sacrificial activity, even while on earth —different modes in which it is realized. We feel, and all the Evangelists alike confirm us in feeling, that our Lord’s Passion and Death are in some sense sui generis—not simply the natural climax of his life of sacrifice, but the accomplishment of that self-offering in a distin¢tive setting and to distinctive ends. He is to offer himself now not in the sufferings of homelessness, of disappointment, of infinite sympathy with men; but in the special experiences of bodily torment and spiritual dereli¢tion and forsakenness which make up the misery of death. And he does that in expiation of sin; for the guilt of the world was laid on him. In the Story of the Passion we see our Lord voluntarily offering himself as a sacrifice for sin; and it was what he then made it that has determined its meaning for the world ever since. When we look upon the crucifix, we do not frame such words as “‘ murder,” or even “martyrdom,” though both would be just; only one word is felt to express its full meaning, and it is the word “ sacrifice.” But what do we mean by sacrifice? Let me give you an illustration from an obscure corner of history. About a century ago, the Island of Formosa, now a colony of the Japanese Empire, was governed by the Chinese. The natives, who were and are a very primitive people, suffered grievously from their rule, which was harsh and cruel; but there were exceptions. One such was a Chinaman, named Goho, who was so success- ful in handling the natives that he was appointed governor of the island. When he entered upon his task, the natives had been accustomed from time immemorial to offer once a year a human sacrifice; and previous governors had been used to humour their scruples by providing them with some condemned criminal as a victim. Goho could not bring himself to tolerate this custom, and he persuaded them to accept instead a pig or a goat for the sacrifice. Year after year, for forty years, this device succeeded; but at last the nation could brook it no longer. They came and told him that they must have now a human viétim and none other, and that if Goho would not himself provide them with a human victim, they would them- selves lay hold on a Chinaman for the purpose. The governor realized that he could prevail no longer, and that they could gI The Christian Sacrifice not be put off. And he gave his orders accordingly. “Go,” he said, “‘to the forest to-morrow morning at nine o’clock, and at such and such a place you will find a man tied up, wearing a red robe and a red hat, and a scarlet cloth over his face. Strike; for he is your victim.” Next morning the natives did as he bade them; and when they saw the man tied up, apparelled sacrificially as he had said, the blood-lust came upon them and they rushed upon their viétim. In a few moments all was over. Then, as the scarlet cloth fell aside, they saw the face; and it was the face of Goho. So Goho prevailed. It is said that from that day to this no human sacrifice has ever been offered in the Island of Formosa; instead the natives . gather every year to celebrate with solemn thanksgiving the anniversary of his death. Now there are three features, I think, in that Story which make it instructive as an example of sacrifice. There is first the faét—which is not found in any merely ceremonial sacri- fices, such as those of the Jewish law—that priest and victim are one and the same; it is ethically the highest kind of sacri- fice—viz., self-sacrifice. Secondly, you will note that, though the whole sacrifice is centred in a death, and a death which did literally expiate for sin, it was not those who did the kill- ing who offered the sacrifice; it was Goho who offered it. And, thirdly, he offered it not simply by being killed, but by giving to his death, by his own words and aéts—by the apparel he wore and by the command given previously to “ Strike, for he is your victim ”—a sacrificial significance. Let me apply this analogy to the far greater sacrifice which we are considering here. Of Christ as himself both Priest and Victim I have already spoken. It is a truth which lies latent beneath the Gospel Story, only to be fully worked out in the Epistle to the Hebrews. That Epistle represents our ascended Lord as our great High Priest for ever offering, pleading, pre- senting in heaven his own sacrifice of himself for man’s sin. Just as the Jewish high priest on the Day of Atonement entered into the Holy of Holies with the blood of the viétim slain outside and sprinkled this blood on and before the mercy-seat, in token of the reconciliation of Israel with God, so now Jesus has entered within the veil, not with the blood of a g2 In the Eucharist bullock in his hand, but with his own blood, which is the price of the world’s forgiveness. It is a notable fact that the Epistle which, more than any other book of the New Testa- ment, emphasizes the all-sufficiency and once-for-all-ness of our Lord’s oblation on the cross, should also have as its principal theme the continued pleading of this oblation in the timeless world of heaven. Yet the two truths correspond. So far as history and this world of successiveness are concerned, our Lord’s oblation of himself was consummated on the cross and cannot be repeated. But this unique oblation has also its time- less aspect, corresponding to the “indissoluble” and eternal life of him who offered it as Man, and as Man is for ever both the Priest and the Lamb; and it is that truth which we try to express when we speak of the eternal offering in heaven. I pass, secondly, to the death on the cross. Examination of the Jewish sacrifices, or of pagan sacrifices either, does not allow us to say that a victim’s death was always involved in a sacrifice. Gift or offering being the fundamental element in sacrifice, this sometimes took the form of corn or wine or some other staple food. But so far as expiatory sacrifices were concerned, it was otherwise; then a living victim, and that victim’s death, were necessary; and it is significant that it is only these sacrifices which are alluded to by the writers of the New Testament when they seek for analogies to the death of our Lord. Yet here, too, as in the case I quoted from Formosa, note that the death is not made to be a sacrifice simply in and through the act of killing. That Jewish crowd, those soldiers, Judas, Caiaphas, Pilate—what those men did who put our Lord to death was not to sacrifice him, or to offer a sacrifice at all. What they did was to commit a judicial murder. It was he and he alone, carrying through the oblation of him- self which he had made by word and deed at the institution of the Eucharist, who offered the sacrifice that day. But there is yet a third point, and for our present subject it is the most important. You will remember the red robe and hat which Goho wore, and the words which he spoke on the night before his death—“ Strike, for he is your viétim.”’ These words, these robes of ceremony, correspond to a feature which is common to all sacrifice, not least to those sacrifices of the 93 The Christian Sacrifice Covenant, of the Passover, and of the Day of Atonement which are most used in Scripture to illustrate the Christian Sacrifice. This feature consists in certain ‘‘ sacerdotal aéts”’ or ‘‘ acts of consecration’? which precede and follow the killing of the victim, and the purpose of which is to give to the viétim’s death its supernatural significance and to apply its blessings to the worshippers. Such were, for example, the presentation of the victim by the worshipper to the priest; the imposition of hands by the priest on the victim’s head with confession of sin, repre- senting the transfer of guilt from the worshipper to the victim —hboth these preceding the immolation; and, after the immo- lation, the sprinkling of the blood upon the altar, in token . of the worshipper’s union with God; the consumption of the fat by fire upon the altar, representing the divine acceptance | of the sacrifice; and, in some cases, a common feast upon the victim’s flesh, representing the fellowship of the worshippers both with God and with one another. Now for various reasons we must beware of pressing too closely the sacrificial analogies of Scripture. The sacrifices of the Jewish law were only “types and shadows,” and it is they which are to be interpreted by the realities of the Christian covenant and not vice versa. Again, those sacrifices were held to atone only for outward and “legal” faults: for wilful sin, sin ““ with a high hand,” they could not avail. At best, more- over, they secured from God only an “ overlooking” of sins, not his “forgiveness”: they could not cleanse the conscience from its guilt. And finally, we must not forget that, whereas in the case of the Jewish sacrifices we have only “ conven- tional”’ victims which have to be consecrated for their ritual purpose, in the case of our Lord the Victim is a divine Person whose essential attribute is holiness. Yet, with that premised, we may return to our question: are there, in the case of our Lord’s sacrifice, any words or acts corresponding to these “ aéts of consecration”’ which seem an indispensable feature of all other sacrifices? It is at this point that I bid you turn to the records of the Last Supper. I need not dwell, I think, upon the details of that scene in the Upper Room; for they are familiar to you. Jesus and his disciples constitute a chaburah or band of friends, who are 94 In the Eucharist met, according to Jewish custom,* to celebrate the Kiddush or service of Preparation for the Passover on the morrow. The candles are lit, and on the table, which is spread with a cloth, are set the rounds of hard-baked bread and a flagon of wine with a chalice. The bread and the wine were there for the ceremony of thanksgiving to God which, according to Jewish custom, each Jewish household observed at a “elena meal on the eves of Sabbaths as well as of great feasts; and there are reasons to suppose that our Lord had often held this meal with his disciples. But on this occasion he did that which he had not done before. Either as part of the customary benediction of the wine and of the bread, or in supplement to that customary ceremony, he blessed and broke and distri- buted, giving to these actions a clear sacrificial significance. “Take, eat: this is my Body. . . .” “This is my Blood of the new covenant, which is shed for many.” “‘ Body,” “‘ Blood,” “covenant,” “shed for many’; these words and phrases belong without question to the language of sacrifice. Remember that in every Jewish household that evening a similar supper was being held, and its main reference was to the Paschal sacrifice of the morrow. What Jesus did was, by his words and aéts at this supper, to show to his disciples that for him and for them the morrow’s sacrifice was to be other than they had thought. It was to be the sacrifice of a new covenant, not of the old; a real atonement, and not a ceremonial one; a sacrifice in the blessings of which they were here and now made most intimate partakers; and he himself was to be the Vidtim. In other words, at the Last Supper our Lord performed a¢ts and spoke words which made his death to be a sacrifice for sin, expressly investing it with this significance. Knowing, as St. John says, that his hour was come, and having loved his own that were in the world, he loved them unto the end. Death being plainly set before him, he took it upon himself as the price of the world’s pardon; offered himself to bear the burden of the world’s guilt and to expiate it in death; gave his own Body and Blood to his disciples in token that his self-offering to the * Cf G. H. Box in J.T.S., III., No. 11 (April, 1902), and W. O. E. Oesterley, “The Jewish Background of the Christian Liturgy,” pp- 156 ff 95 The Christian Sacrifice Father was then and for ever inseparable from the utterness of self-giving to man, thereby setting God and man at one. St. John himself, it is true, does not recount the inStitution of the Eucharist: but he does recount far more fully than the other Evangelists the substance of the conversations which our Lord then had with his disciples. I think you will find that those wonderful chapters, culminating in he high priestly prayer, take on a new poignancy and depth of meaning, if you read them as the accompaniment of the acts of self-offering made at the Last Supper : and indeed no comments of scholars or divines upon those acts throw half the light that shines on them from that one sentence of the Lord’s: “‘ For their sakes I sanctify . (that is, I consecrate) myself, that they also may be san¢tified (that is, consecrated) in the truth ”’ (St John xvii. 19). Let me sum up the argument to this point. The sacrifice of the death of Christ consists of two principal elements or parts —on the one hand, his death or immolation as Victim on the cross, which thus became the world’s altar; and on the other certain acts and words of consecration, known to us as the Eucharist, which invested his death with its supernatural sig- nificance and in which he consecrated himself as the Viétim offered for the world’s salvation. We have seen that these two elements appear to be involved in the definition of all pro- pitiatory sacrifice; and the sacrifice of Christ is therefore in line with the Jewish syStem of atonement which went before it. At the same time Christ’s sacrifice is distinguished from these other sacrifices in certain important ways. In the first place, he is himself both the Priest at the consecration and the Victim of the death, thus completing once for all in expiatory oblation that work of priesthood and sacrifice which char- acterized his Incarnate Life. Secondly, by reason of that end- less life which belongs to Christ as Son of God, he now appears in heaven for us with the marks of his Passion, con- tinually pleading his sacrifice once offered in the world of time; and his whole oblation has thus an eternal aspeét. But thirdly—and this brings us to the further step which we must now take—our Lord exercises his High Priesthood not only in the timeless order of heaven, but also in this world of successiveness and change which surrounds his Church on earth. 96 In the Eucharist For this presence of our Lord with his Church on earth, we have his own sure promise as guarantee. “Lo, I am with you always, even to the end of the world” (Matt. xxviii. 20). “T will not leave you comfortless, I will come unto you” (John xiv. 18). “ Wheresoever two or three are gathered together in my name, there am I in the midst of them ” (Matt. xviii. 20)— all these are promises of his presence in the Spirit, and the last more particularly, since it contemplates the Church at worship, of. his presence as our Priest. And it is in reliance on these promises, as well as on its own experiences, that the Church both in East and West, both in early and in recent days, has always believed that the unseen Priest, Celebrant, Conse- crator at every Eucharist was Christ himself. But there is yet more to be said than this. If we have been right in regarding the sacerdotal acts or acts of consecration as an integral and necessary part of every sacrifice, and in identify- ing these in the case of our Lord’s sacrifice with the Last Supper and the Eucharist, then the Eucharist, together with the ministry which descends through the ages from that Upper Room, must be regarded as the express provision which our Lord made for the participation by his Church on earth in his sacrifice. We are creatures of sense, and need what we can touch and see and hear; we live in fleeting moments of time, and need what can often be repeated: scattered over the globe, we need what can be multiplied in space. And so our Lord willed to consecrate his death to be the sacrifice of his people, not by a rite performed once and for all, but by a rite ever to be repeated, at all times and in all places, so long as the Church should remain on earth. That rite is the sacrifice of the Eucharist. At an earlier point in this paper, I entered a caveat against pressing too closely the details of ancient sacrifice in seeking analogies to the sacrifice of the death of Christ. There is, how- ever, another side to the matter: for the main features of sacrificial ritual among the Jews or other non-Christian peoples, however crude and even disgusting they appear to us to-day, yet represented deep-seated experiences and desires of the human heart which Sill crave for satisfaction. Since the Eucharist is a rite, made for the use of men, we shall expect H 97 The Christian Sacrifice to find in it outward expression of these impulses and their satisfaction no less clear than in the “types and shadows” which it supplanted. A brief outline of these fulfilments will bring this paper to its conclusion. (i) In the Jewish sacrificial system the oblation began when the worshipper brought the victim to the door of the taber- nacle and handed it over to the priest. The victim, moreover, must be a domestic animal, and the choicest of its kind— something, that is to say, that was really the worshipper’s own, almost part of himself, and as worthy as possible of its sacred purpose. So in the Eucharist the Church’s offering begins at the Offertory, when the priest takes into the service _ the people’s gifts of bread and wine; and these gifts belong to the Staple human foods and must be the best of their kind, the wine fermented and the bread of purest wheat. (ii) A further common feature of sacrifice, whether Jewish or pagan, was the imposition of hands by the priest upon the head of the victim, together with the confession of sins, his own and his people’s. The Eucharist has its counterpart to this in the emphasis upon confession of sin which, either as part of the liturgy or outside it, has always been closely connected with access to the Holy Mysteries. Some would go further Still, and see in the direction which requires the priest to lay his hands upon the bread and chalice at the Con- secration a symbol of the guilt-bearing of Jesus on the cross. (iii) Then followed in Jewish sacrifices the viétim’s death, usually not by the priest’s own hand. In the Christian sacri- fice this finds its counterpart in our Lord’s death on the cross, and there is no repetition of this in the Eucharist. It is true that an often dominant tradition of Roman Catholic theology has sought to find in the Mass a real “‘immutation” of Christ; but the main Stream of Anglican theology—and a constant if sometimes tenuous stream of Roman theology from the Middle Ages to our own day—has not endorsed the speculation. On the other hand, the Church has loved to see in the separate consecration of each species—in the sundering of the Body and Blood—a figure or representation of the Lord’s immola- tion on the cross. (iv) In the legal sacrifices the immolation was succeeded 98 SO ee In the Eucharist and crowned by rites of great importance which represented the achievement of the whole purpose of the oblation. Such were the consumption of the choice parts of the victim by the sacred fire upon the altar, which symbolized its acceptance by God; the effusion of its blood, now pure through the expiatory death upon the altar, which spoke of the union of the worshipper’s life with God; and (in some cases) a sacrificial meal, representing the sacred bond of fellowship in which the worshippers were now joined with God and with one another. This acceptance and union of the worshipper with the Object of his worship are the end and purpose of all sacrifice; and they are realized in the Eucharist, not in symbol, but in reality in the two great acts or “moments” of the rite, the Con- secration and the Communion. They are realized in the Con- secration, because then the Church in consecrating its gifts of bread and wine to be the perfect and accepted offering of Christ’s Body and Blood thereby consecrates his death to be our sacrifice. They are realized in the Communion, because therein there is effected a real union of ourselves with God, conditioned on our side, indeed, by our penitence and faith, and yet on his side absolutely sure. And finally, we have in the Communion of the faithful a feast of Christian fellowship which finds its whole nourishment in feeding by faith upon the once crucified and now glorified Humanity of our Blessed Lord. NOTES 1. Bibliography —The following writers and books will be found especially helpful in the Study of this subject: P. de la Taille, ““ MySterium Fidei”; Will Spens, “ Essays Catholic and Critical,” pp. 427 ff, and Art. in “ Theology,” vii, pp. 194 ff M. Lepin, “L’Idée du Sacrifice de la Messe’’; Fairbairn, “Typology of Scripture,” vol. 1i; Martensen, “ Christian Dogmatics,” §§ 156-169; Dorner, “System of Christian Doétrine,” iii, pp. 401-429. 2. Terminology.—Few problems of theology present more difficulties of terminology than that of the Eucharistic sacri- fice. This is largely due to the faét that any treatment of the problem has to take account, not only of the Eucharist itself, 99 The Christian Sacrifice but also of different traditions of liturgical usage which have grown up around it. The relevant factors might be represented in tabular form somewhat as follows :— The Parts of Sacrifice or Oblation, 1. Presentation of victim. Their Realiza- tion tn History. Their Realiza- tion tn the Liturgy. Nature of this Realization, Description. Our Lord’s re- solve to die, and The Offertory. Figurative. his journey to Jerusalem. The Crucifixion. of Immolation (sub- The separation of | Figurative. stantial obla- the species, 2. Immolation Victim. tion). | Consecration (for- The Last Supper mal oblation). and the Euchar- ist. The Resur- epi ae ion, Heavesly Plead. ing. The Consecration | Actual (Christ be- andCommunion.| ing both Priest and Victim), 3. Sacerdotal acts, investing the victim’s death with its super- natural signifi- cance, Both Anglican and Roman theologians show a tendency to apply the term “oblation” to one part only of the whole complex action of sacrifice, though in different ways: Roman theology tending to apply it to the verbal or ritual “ offer- ing” of the Host in the Eucharist, Anglican theology to our Lord’s “‘ offering” of himself in the death on the cross. There would seem real advantage, however, in using the word “oblation”” in a broad sense and as coterminous with “ sacri- fice,” “‘oblation” representing the purpose or form and “sacrifice” the matter of the whole complex action. The way is then open for a clear distinétion between the death or immolation of the victim (1.e., our Lord’s death on the cross), and the sacerdotal acts or consecration, which invest that death with its significance and apply its benefits to believers. This involves using “consecration” in a larger sense than, e.g., when we speak of “consecrating” the Eucharistic elements. But it is a sense which arises out of that other and more restricted sense, since it is precisely in and through the Church’s consecration of the species that our Lord, the un- seen Minister of every Eucharist, consecrates his death to be the sacrifice of our Redemption. The term has, moreover, the advantage of adequately representing the ritual aéts which accompanied the Jewish sacrifices; and of being attributed to our Lord himself at the Last Supper by the Fourth Evangelist. TOO The Real Presence i 1 The Doctrine of the Real Presence Historically Considered . By DARWELL STONE I > Sa (@ MARKED feature of the earliest State- R ments concerning the Holy Eucharist 43} is their simplicity. St. Paul, writing “4 WS before any of the Gospels, simply says . that the cup is “a partaking of ae <9 W blood of Christ” and the bread ‘ A Veg¥ partaking of the body of Christ,” mst ve to eat or drink unworthily is to be DS phi. CSS “guilty of the body and blood,” and that fe who e: eats and drinks “ without discerning the body ” “eats and drinks judgement” (1 Cor. x. 16; xi. 27, 29). The earliest of the four Gospels records our Lord’s words at the institution of the Sacrament: “‘ This is my body,” “ This 1 is my blood of the covenant which is poured out for many” (St. Mark xiv. 22-24; cf. St. Matt. xxvi. 26-28; St Luke xxii. 19, 20). The latest of the four represents our Lord as saying : “The bread which I will give is my flesh, for the life of the world” (St. John vi. 51). They are Statements plain enough, but statements without explanation. This simplicity is continued in representative writers of the second century. At the end of the first decade of that century, St. Ignatius of Antioch, without comment, describes the IOI The Real Presence Eucharist as “the flesh of our Saviour Jesus Christ, which suffered on behalf of our sins, which the Father in his good- ness raised” (Ad Smyrn., vii. 1). In the middle of the century, St. Justin Martyr, writing at Rome, in his description of the Eucharist as part of the service of the Church, says that the Christians of his time have been taught to regard the food ° received in it as “‘ both the flesh and the blood of the Jesus who was made flesh” (“‘ First Apology,” Ixvi. 2). Towards the end of the century, St. Irenzus, writing in Gaul, calls the bread the body of the Lord and the cup his blood (Adv. Har., iv. Xvili. 5). The language of these writers is like that of the New Testament. It States simply and plainly. It does not attempt — to explain. II It was not long before some attempts at explanation were made. At the end of the second century and in the opening years of the third, Tertullian, at Carthage, made use of a phraseology, a misunderstanding of which was destined to have deplorable consequences many centuries later. He described the Eucharistic bread as the “figure” of the Lord’s body, and explained our Lord’s words, “This is my body,” as meaning “ This is the figure of my body” (Adv. Mare., iii. 19, iv. 40). About the same time, Clement of Alexandria spoke of the “symbol of holy blood” (Ped., ii. 2. 29. 1); and a few years later a liturgy used in the Church at Rome called the Eucharistic elements the “ copy”’ and “antitype”’ of the body and blood of Christ (E. Hauler, “Fragmenta Veronensia Latina,” pp- 112, 117). To understand such phraseology, it must be remembered that in the language of the time the word “figure” denoted reality as well as appearance, and that by “symbol” was meant that which is what it signifies (see C. H. Turner, The Journal of Theological Studies, vii. 595-597; A. Harnack, “ History of Dogma,” ii. 144, iv. 289; D. Stone, “A History of the Doctrine of the Holy Eucharist,” i. 29-31, 66, 67). Later on, a further suggested explanation was that, through the consecration, the Eucharistic elements received a heightened or enhanced efficacy and power so as to be capable of producing spiritual effeéts and to become the body and 102 The Real Presence blood of Christ (see, e.g., St. Cyril of Jerusalem, “ Catechetical Lectures,”’ xix. 7). Such attempts at explanation show that the minds of Christians were pondering on the truth expressed in the original simple ways. Ill As time went on, the attempts at explanation which have been mentioned lent themselves to a diStinét cleavage of thought. In the fourth and fifth centuries there are two groups of writers on this subject among those whose works have been preserved. Both groups of writers agree that the consecrated Sacrament is the body and blood of Christ. They differ in their explanation. The one group maintains that the Eucharist is like the Incarnation, and the consecrated Sacrament like the incarnate life of the Lord, so that, as in the incarnate life the Godhead and the manhood are both there and both un- changed, similarly in the consecrated Sacrament the bread and wine continue to exist in all their reality while there is also the body and blood of the Lord. The other group minimises the continuance of the bread and wine, and lays stress on the change by which the consecrated elements are reordered or transferred or transformed or transmade into the body and blood (see D. Stone, “A History of the Doétrine of the Holy Eucharist,” i. 98-106). The writers of the first group are the precursors of those who in later times have said that the consecrated Sacrament is Still real and complete bread, real and complete wine, but also the body and blood of Christ. The writers of the second group are the precursors of those who, using the philosophy of the Middle Ages, have main- tained that at the consecration the substance of the earthly elements is so converted into the substance of the body and blood of Christ that the substance of bread and wine no longer remains. The latter doctrine is that known as TransubSstantia- tion. It was worked out with great skill and subtlety by the Schoolmen of the WeStern Church in the Middle Ages. The Schoolmen had to face great problems. They had inherited the traditional belief of the Church from the first that the consecrated Sacrament is the body of Christ. They were sur- 103 The Real Presence rounded by crude notions in which men could think of body only in the terms and after the fashion of the natural bodies of ordinary men and women in their present State. They had to deal with philosophies which demanded a reason and an explanation for all things. In the circumstances which thus existed the Schoolmen made a brave attempt to secure three results. First, it was their aim to maintain and protect the traditional belief that the consecrated Sacrament is the body of Christ. Secondly, they endeavoured to State and explain this belief in ways by which they might avoid a naturalistic or carnal way of underStanding it. Thirdly, they attempted to make their theological definitions and explanations such as to © be in harmony with the philosophy of their time. On the one side it was an appeal to tradition and authority. On the other it claimed the succour of reason and argument. In some re- spects this work of the Schoolmen had a great success. It succeeded in handing on the essential truth through a difficult period. It preserved the doctrine which made devotion possible and strong and deep. It laid the foundations of those systems of theology which sprang out of the Counter-Reformation and the Council of Trent. In other ways it had its weakness. Its very complexity and ingenuity made it an offence to some and caused a failure to produce its intended effect in others. If it gave its help to the Counter-Reformation and the Council of Trent, it also did something to bring about the Protestant revolt against Eucharistic doétrine. But, before we condemn it, let us remember that the scholastic theologians of the Middle Ages in the circumstances of their own times successfully maintained two great convictions. First, they preserved the truth that “‘ the rea} body and blood of the crucified and risen Lord, once slain and now living and glorious, are present under the species of bread and wine to be the spiritual food of those who worthily partake of the Sacrament.” And secondly, they taught that “ this presence is of a spiritual kind, not effected by any natural law, not of a body in any natural condition, uniquely wonderful, without true parallels else- where, though in harmony with the principles set up by the incarnate life of the divine Redeemer” (quoted ie the author’s “A History of the Doétrine of the Holy Eucharist,” 104 The Real Presence 1. 395). However they may have failed in some respects, they deserve our gratitude for that which they thus successfully did. IV Eucharistic doétrine was one of the chief subjects discussed in the Reformation controversies. From those controversies five principal opinions emerged, each with its own strenuous advocates. TransubSstantiation was one of them. Belief in the presence of our Lord’s body and blood in the consecrated Sacrament, together with the continued existence of the whole substance of the bread and wine, was another. The opinion that the consecrated Sacrament itself is no more than bread and wine, but that the faithful communicant at the moment of reception inwardly receives the body and blood of Christ, was a third. A fourth was that the faithful communicant receives, not the body and blood of Christ themselves, but their virtue and power. According to a fifth, the Eucharist is a merely symbolical: rite, a remembrance of the past. In view of these controversies, the Church of Rome at the Council of Trent affirmed TransubStantiation, and anathe- matized those who denied this doétrine. A different line was taken in the Church of England. Transubstantiation, probably in a carnal sense, not in the sense of the scientific theologians, was repudiated in the twenty-eighth of the Articles of Re- ligion. The opinion that the Eucharist is merely symbolical also was rejected. The phrasing of the formularies and the adtual course of events left any of the intermediate beliefs tenable within the English Church. A hundred years ago the belief that the consecrated Sacrament is the body of Christ was held by but few, and contrary opinions had become widely prevalent. During the last hundred years the number of those who believe the real presence in a proper sense has marvellously increased. V What comment is to be made on the facts of the past and the present history? Let us go back to the fifth century. I have mentioned the two groups of theologians then existing; 105 The Real Presence the one laying Stress on the continued existence of the bread and wine, the other emphasizing the change effeéted by consecra- tion, both agreeing that the consecrated Sacrament is the body of Christ. For my own part, I do not think the difference between the two devotionally or spiritually important. Neither do I think the difference between the successors of these two groups—be- tween, that is, the advocates of Transubstantiation in its proper theological sense, and the advocates of a real presence which does not confliét with the continued existence of the substance of bread and wine—important for Christian life and praétice. What in my judgement is important for the Christian soul is not whether the substance of bread and wine is absent, but whether | the Lord is present. Therefore, while I do not think the differ- ence between the two groups of theologians in the fifth century, or between their successors in later times, devotionally and spiritually important, I believe their common ground, the faét that the consecrated Sacrament is the body of Christ, to be of supreme importance. Here I may be met by a challenge—the challenge whether it is the case that a long and great succession of English theo- logians since the sixteenth century have missed something which really matters. It may be said: “So long as the faithful communicant receives his Lord, is it of consequence what the Sacrament itself is, apart from his reception of it?” It is the well-known appeal of the great English writer, Richard Hooker—‘ May we not concentrate on what the faithful communicant receives, and shelve all discussion as to everything else?”’—an appeal made by Hooker with splendid force and culminating in the famous words: “ What these elements are in themselves it skilleth not, it is enough that to me which take them they are the body and blood of Christ. . . . Why should any cogitation possess the mind of a faith- ful communicant but this: O my God thou art true, O my soul thou art happy!’ (“Of the Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity,” V. Ixvii. 12). It is a serious thing to take up a different position from that of the long succession of great and good men in the English Church who have found it sufficient to say that the faithful communicant, when he receives the Sacrament, receives also the 106 The Real Presence body of the Lord. But there are reasons—and in my judge- ment they are cogent reasons—for so acting. The first reason is that fidelity to history requires a fuller assertion. Simple as are the earliest Statements, they do not suggest a receptionist view. The words of our Lord, “This is my body,” do not lend themselves to an interpretation “‘ When you receive this, you will receive my body also.” Vague as some of the later statements may be, no fair explanation of them can make them mean this. As thought, both East and West, reached fuller expression, the voice of the Catholic teachers uttering the mind of the Christian consciousness made declaration that the con- secrated Sacrament is itself the holy gift, the body of the Lord. Secondly, a receptionist view would not bear the weight of the historical doétrine about the Eucharistic sacrifice. For in the Eucharistic sacrifice that which the Church presents to God the Father is the Lord himself. It is the Lord, and, there- fore, all that he is. It is his body, it is his blood, it is his life. It is all that he has taken to be his own from the beginning of his humanity in the womb of his holy Mother to its con- summation in his passion and death, his resurrection and ascension and heavenly glory. Before we receive the Lord into ourselves, we need to present him in sacrifice to God the Father. This sacrificial offering of the Lord himself needs not only that there is a gift to ourselves—albeit the holiest gift— in our own souls but also that the Sacrament which we offer to the Father before we receive it is itself the body of the Lord. And, thirdly, the development of Christian life in Western Christendom has made familiar a use of the Blessed Sacra- ment which many have learnt to value. In its simplest form we find it when the anchoress of the thirteenth century is bidden to say— ‘ “Glory to thee, O Lord, Thou Virgin’s Son,” as in the early morning she falls on her knees towards the high altar of the church where is the flesh and the blood of God (“ The Ancren Riwle,” pp. 13, 14 in the edition in “ The King’s Classics’’). In a more elaborate form it is found in those great processions of the Sacrament which Archbishop 107 The Real Presence Lanfranc instituted at Canterbury in the eleventh century. To these were added in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries the rites of Exposition and Benediétion, in which honour was paid to our Lord by the adoration of Christians. All these forms of worship, from the simplest to the most elaborate, from the most individual to the most corporate, demand that the con- secrated Sacrament is the body of the Lord. The ancient belief, the sacrificial offering, the medieval and modern developments, all depend on the same truth; and it is a truth which demands much. No one should decry the simple piety, the genuine faith, of those generations of English churchpeople who found it enough to say that in their Com- — munion they received the Lord, or his life, or at the least his power and virtue. No one should despise even those who were satisfied to keep in remembrance that the Lord has died and that he will come again. On such beliefs humble and reverent and devout and unselfish lives were built up. Such lives have their lessons to teach to those who are convinced that they have reached fuller truth. For this is the conviétion. It is fuller; but also it is truth. The meal in the Upper Room grew by the providence of God into the Stately ritual and high ceremonial of the later Mass. The simple words uttered at the institution of the Sacrament received their true develop- ment when in explicit language it was said that the bread and wine become at the consecration the body and blood of the Lord. The real lesson of history is that here is the truth of God. Those in the English Church who lay Stress on it may well be conscious with heartfelt pain that they are parting company with many of their brethren in the past, and many even in the present. But they are conscious also that they are being faithful to a wider and Stronger tradition, the tradition which is the historic belief of the Catholic Church of Christ. 108 The Real Presence 6 IL & The Real Presence Theologically and Philosophically Considered By A. E. TAYLOR anp WILL SPENS 6% HAT is chiefly at issue in regard to ; “ the doctrine of the Real Presence is not whether our Lord is present in some ) special sense in the Eucharist. The great majority of Christians are agreed » that he is in a most real sense the Minister of the Sacrament, that it is Ws% he who consecrates and distributes the mr” ¢ s “ sacramental gifts by means of those who are not only our representatives, but members in his MyStical Body set apart for that end. The great majority of Christians are agreed, also, that in some real sense our Lord is in the Eucharist not merely the Priest, but the Victim, given in that most holy rite to be our sacrificial food, the Bread of Life and the Cup of Salvation. The majority of Christians go further, recognizing that the Eucharist is not merely a feasting upon a sacrifice, but that in and through the Eucharist our Lord’s death is made to be our sacrifice, and that, in conse- quence, in the Eucharist he is himself our oblation. What is at issue is whether we must separate ourselves from what it is well to remember is also a majority of Christians and of Christian thinkers, or whether we do right when, in common with the Roman Catholic Church and the Eastern Orthodox Church, we think of the bread and wine as changed at consecration; and whether we do right when, after con- secration, we so identify the Sacrament with our Lord as to direct to the Sacrament those physical aéts by which we express 109 The Real Presence our adoration of him. It cannot be too strongly emphasized that it is this last question which is of primary importance. Analysis of the significance of consecration is but the necessary basis for Eucharistic adoration. We are concerned not with philosophical or theological discussion in itself, but with the vindication of our right to participate here on earth in the heavenly worship of the Lamb. No one who has (for example) seen even a reproduction of Van Eyck’s great picture of that worship, and who has any sense of the mean- ing of Christianity, can help feeling the desire both to adore him who was slain for our salvation and to give the fullest expression to this adoration; to see his Lord set before his eyes as the one true sacrifice, and to embody adoration in every action and every ceremony which has been devised to express worship. Nor are we concerned only to secure the fulfilment of an aspiration, but rather to maintain a deeply treasured experience. Precisely, in the degree of our temptation to sin, we are aware of two things: first, that sheer adoration is an experience so moving that the desire to preserve participation in that experience affords one of the strongest safeguards against sin; and, secondly, that for many at all times, and for all at times, sheer adoration is most possible when it is directed to some visible objeét which is reckoned an embodiment of God. That latter faét gave always the urge to idolatry. What we dare to claim is that in Christianity the divine wisdom has not ignored this faét of our nature, but has afforded to it at long last legitimate opportunity, and that without idolatry we may worship our Lord present on the Altar under the forms of bread and wine. At this moment it is important to point out that it is not we who assert this, but those who deny our right to assert it, who depart from the teaching of the Church of England and seek to narrow its bounds. When men denounce this doétrine as an illegitimate innovation in the Church of England, they habitually ignore the Bennett judgment. The Court of Arches, and even, on appeal, the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council, refused to condemn as unlawful in the Church of England Mr. Bennett’s position, either in respect of his state- ment, ““I am one of those who . . . myself adore, and teach IIo The Real Presence the people to adore, Christ present in the Sacrament under the form of bread and wine, believing that under their veil is the sacred Body and Blood of my Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ,” or in respect of his use of the phrase: “The real and actual presence of our Lord upon the altars of our churches.” But we are not content to claim, as we have the right to claim, that the doétrine for which we stand may legitimately be taught in the Church of England. We claim that it is the truth; and, in particular, that denial of this do¢trine depends on a materialism of thought, which has warrant neither in experience nor in philosophy. Sacraments are not peculiar to Christianity or even to religion. They are the ordinary coin of personal intercourse. Is a kiss primarily a physical act, or is it not a spiritual act having a certain physical expression? Is the Cenotaph nothing more than a block of Stone, and a Union Jack nothing more than a parti-coloured piece of cloth? In very truth all men’s deepest feelings find expression by means of actions and objects, which are made the vehicle of their expression. If there is danger in carrying this to excess, it is no Catholic invention, but one lesson to be learnt from modern psychology, that in the case of any deep feeling some such expression 1s conducive to a healthy emotional life. The problem for philosophy is how far we are justified in thinking of a sacramental action or object in terms of its whole significance, in regarding it as something which is fundamentally spiritual, but has a certain physical expression, or whether we mutt treat the physical expression as peculiarly real, or at the least as something which mutt be carefully distinguished in thought. In life we do not so distinguish. A newly dubbed knight never thought of the accolade as a physical aét with a certain symbolic significance, but rather as an aét of admission which had a certain ceremonial expres- sion. In precisely the same manner Catholics think of Baptism, not as a physical act with a certain symbolic significance, but as a spiritual act which has a ceremonial expression. Nor is the case different when we turn to objeéts which are “‘ effectual signs.” Take the commonest of such objeéts—a shilling or any other piece of token coinage. In this case emotions are III The Real Presence not involved, yet, even here, who ordinarily distinguishes in thought between the physical properties of the object and those other opportunities of experience which it affords as being a coin of the realm? A physical object is a complex of oppor- tunities of experience, including such experience as leads us to assign to the object shape, size, and position. We do not, in fact, separate in our thoughts those opportunities of experi- ence which admit of analysis and correlation in terms of the motion of electrons, and others which do not; provided always that these further opportunities of experience possess a comparable certainty. We feel assured that a shilling will continue to have its purchasing price, and, being so- assured, we think of the shilling as something round, hard, shiny, and with this purchasing power. Indeed, in our thought it is this last which is fundamental. The question remains as to how far this way of regarding objects can be justified when we try to think precisely. Cleariy the opportunities of physical experience have a more funda- mental basis and are more certain than the purchasing power. The opportunities of physical experience are determined b natural laws, the purchasing power merely by A& of Parlia- ment. The certainty of the latter is for ordinary purposes sufficient, but it is clearly less. Again, the association of the different physical properties is determined by natural law, the further association with these of a certain purchasing power is determined by Parliament. On grounds both of certainty and of the basis of association, we are bound to distinguish, if we think precisely, between the natural properties of the object and its properties as an effectual symbol. But the matter is different if, or when, the effectual sym- bolism of an object is determined by the Divine Will, and has therefore the same basis as has its natural properties. An earlier paper has advanced reasons why we may safely argue from the recorded words of inStitution, and from these as having a sacrificial background and therefore to be interpreted in terms of sacrificial conceptions. Men may have doubted, and did doubt, in our Lord’s day as in other ages, whether sacrifices really effeéted spiritual results. There is neither evidence nor probability that, if @ sacrifice was regarded as I12 SE ee ee ee eee The Real Presence securing spiritual results, ritual participation in an appointed manner and in a right spirit would not, as a matter of course, have been supposed to secure participation in those blessings. If our Lord meant men to regard his Death on the Cross as an effectual, and the one effectual, immolation, the words “This is my Body ” and “ This is my Blood” must be held to mean that, receiving the broken bread and the cup which has been blessed, we are made partakers in the blessings of that sacrifice. The words employed suggest also participation in the very life of Christ, and this is in any case involved in our participation in the blessings of his sacrifice. And this opportunity is afforded by the objeéts. On any Eucharistic doétrine—whether Zwinglian or Catholic—the significance of the aét of communion is drawn from a significance assigned antecedently to certain objects. If the symbolism is effectual, if we have no mere tokens but a sacra- ment, and if, in consequence, the consecrated bread and wine afford real spiritual opportunities, then these opportunities have the same basis as the opportunities of physical experience —namely, the Divine Will, and their further association with the opportunities of natural experience has also this same basis. There is no ground, either in regard to certainty of opportunity, or in regard to ultimacy of association, for treating the opportunities of physical experience as more fundamental. Nor is there any ground in the fact that the appropriation of the spiritual opportunities involves our co- operation. That is true also of the opportunity of physical nourishment, the only difference being that at the higher level of spiritual nourishment a higher and therefore conscious co-operation is required. Host, or Chalice, is a complex of opportunities of experience, some physical but some spiritual, all equally determined by the Divine Will and all associated by that Will. Accuracy of thought requires us to recognize, in consequence, that, in each case, these opportunities con- Stitute a single object. If it is difficult to recognize this, it is only difficult because we tend to think of matter as peculiarly real, and of things spiritual either as less real or, at least, as some separate realm. Yet, unless we learn to think of all our experience as a unity, I 113 The Real Presence which is partially, but only partially, analyzable in terms of electrons, there is no room for either freedom or immortality. On the other hand, if we do so think of all experience (physical or spiritual) as a unity, we are justified, in all but the last resort, in our ordinary everyday habit of regarding oppor- tunities of physical experience, and any opportunities of other | experience which may be associated with these, as constituting the object in question. Even in the last resort, we must so regard an object if, as in the case of the Blessed Sacrament, it is the Will of God which attaches opportunities of spiritual experience to certain pre-existing opportunities of material experience. Before consecration the Host has certain oppor-’ tunities of physical experience. We can see it as round and white; we can feel that it is round and hard; it affords physical nourishment. After consecration it is changed, not by any change in the opportunities of experience which previously constituted the object, not by any change in anything which can be correlated in terms of electrons, but by the addition of opportunities of spiritual experience in that, by devout com- munion, we are made partakers in Christ. We are guilty of gross materialism if we think of the Host, or Chalice, in terms only of their physical properties, as purely physical objects, rather than in terms also of the opportunities of spiritual experience they afford, opportunities which are no less funda- mental, and which are infinitely more significant. The bread and wine have been described as reordered, re- made, changed, and transubStantiated in and through con- secration. Enough has been said to explain and to justify our use of the first three of these terms. The complex of opportunities of experience which constitutes bread or wine is reordered, remade, and changed in and through the inclusion of opportunities of spiritual experience no less ultimate and associated no less ultimately than the pre-existing opportunities of physical experience. More must, however, be said in order to justify and to explain such use as can properly be made of the term “ transubstantiated.” Whatever be the difficulty, or impossibility, of applying the whole scholastic conception of substance and accidents to all sensible objects, the conception of an underlying non-material principle of unity is necessarily 114 The Real Presence involved in the Christian conception, at least of the bodies of men and women. That is involved in the doétrine of their immortality when immortality is understood in the manner which we seek to express when we speak of the resurrection of the flesh. No one now holds that there will be a re- assembling of certain material particles. We do hold that behind and determining the physical objects which constitute our bodies lies a nature common in general character to men, but unique in detail to each individual; that this nature is something which we have through our generation here on earth; but that it is something which is ours to all eternity, and which requires that again in another world it will have no less, but more perfect expression. We are not merely spiritual beings. We are spiritual beings who have a particular nature. We came into existence and acquired at the same time that nature in and through the order in which we now live, through the fact that others had like natures and that these found expression, in objects, in that order. It is such expres- sions that we identify with the personalities in question. Not any and every complex of opportunities of experience which exists in whole or part because of your or my being and nature, even if the opportunities in question are determined and not merely determinable; but those immediate expressions of in- dividual personalities which are secured when certain specific opportunities of experience, and the resulting complexes, have come into being as an immediate consequence of that law, of that determination of the Divine Will, which affords and conditions the a¢tualization of essential elements in the nature of the personalities in question. What we are bold to claim is that the sacramental gifts have this character. It is an essential part of the nature of man that he should be in relation to his fellows, influencing them and being influenced. He is a social animal. His nature in- volves of necessity ability for this; and, so long as man is in our order, his natural body affords the normal and necessary expression of this ability. In the case of our Lord, because he was a Divine Person, and in part because of his resurrection and ascension, this mutual relation involves something in- finitely more than is involved between man and man. He is II5 The Real Presence the Vine, we are the branches; the source and Stay of our regenerate life; the Bread from Heaven. It is, as we believe, an essential element in our Lord’s humanity that he should be, not only the source, but the Stay of the supernatural life of all the regenerate, and, therefore, of those on earth as well as those in heaven. So far as we on earth are concerned, the a¢tualization of this necessary element is secured in and through the institution of the Eucharist, and, therefore, as we have seen, in and through certain visible objects which afford opportunities of spiritual as well as natural experience. The Divine Will determines that our Lord © shall be the stay of our life and that he shall thus be so. It is not that there is any change in his nature. His incarnation determined once and for all, as an essential element in his human nature, that he should be the Stay of our supernatural life. What was determined in and by the Divine institution of the Eucharist was merely the manner in which this is actualized in the regenerate order as it is on earth. Host and Chalice involve no change in our Lord’s nature. They involve no “impanation.” But each is an immediate expression of his being and nature, and a no less immediate expression than in his heavenly body, which also involves no new nature, but only the necessary actualization of elements in that nature which he took of Mary. We may speak of our Lord’s sacra- mental body and of his natural body as we speak of his heavenly body and his natural body. We may thus distinguish different expressions of his humanity. But it is essential to recognize that if we are thinking not of the mode of expression, if we mean by “body” not a particular objeét, a particular complex of opportunities of experience, but that which determines and necessitates the existence of this, then there is but one such reality—namely, that nature which our Lord assumed at his incarnation and which is ever his. That nature found a necessary expression in accordance with natural law in his natural body; it finds a necessary expression in accordance with laws which, as yet, we do not know in his heavenly body; it finds a necessary expression sacramentally in Hott, or Chalice, and that in a manner no less directly determined by the Divine Will. At consecration, bread and wine are not 116 The Real Presence only changed, but they become objeéts which are what they are in virtue of, and because of, that same reality, that same sacred humanity, which lay no more direétly behind our Lord’s natural body and which lies no more direétly behind his heavenly body. It is as asserting this truth that we can speak of the bread and wine as transubStantiated. On the other hand, that term cannot be accepted in any sense which “ over- throweth the nature of a sacrament” by treating consecration as effecting a nature miracle rather than a miracle of grace, or which seeks to treat as de fide the scholastic theory as to the relations of accidents and substance after consecration, a theory which involves a particular philosophy and is open to grave objections. In common with the theologians of the Eastern Orthodox Church, we can accept the term “ transubstantiated ” as serving to express a truth which is of great importance; but, in common with these theologians, we may well rejoice that we are not committed to a particular philosophy, and to certain deductions from that philosophy, to the extent which is the case in the Roman Catholic Church. Before passing, in conclusion, to deal specifically with the adorable presence which thus results, we would wish to safe- guard Anglo-Catholic belief from misunderstanding on one point which is of great importance. It has been said earlier that the institution of the Eucharist determines and conditions the manner in which our Lord is given to be our spiritual food, thus actualizing an essential element in his nature. It does not follow that the grace which is received in communion is not given otherwise if or when communion is impossible, or if and when in all good faith men fail to recognize communion as the divinely appointed means of securing this grace. There is involved, however, that even such abnormal bestowal of grace is dependent on the fact that participation in the blessings of our Lord’s sacrifice and in his life is obtainable through communion. It is as being the One Sufficient Sacrifice for sin that our Lord is given normally, or abnormally, to be the source and stay of our supernatural life. It is in and through the Eucharist that down the ages he consecrates his death to be our oblation; and, in consequence, any bestowal of the grace of communion, otherwise than by communion on bread and 117 The Real Presence wine consecrated by his authority and on his behalf to be his Body and Blood, results from the fact that in the Eucharist he does thus make his Death to be our sacrifice, and from a general law of the Divine economy that God freely gives grace to men according to the measure of their ability to receive. The abnormal beStowal of the grace of communion, partial or complete, and any part played by objets in such be- Stowal, depends thus on that determination of the Divine Will, which determines the normal beStowal of that grace in com- munion, but does so mediately and not diredtly. There remains the specific question of Eucharistic adora- tion. It is worth while to State the issue quite formally. When — a complex of opportunities of experience, which constitutes an object, exists as a complex in immediate dependence on a law which directly determines the aétualization of essential elements in our Lord’s nature, does such a relation exist between that object and our Lord as to justify our identifying the object with him, in so far as such identification is involved in directing to the object those aéts by which we express our adoration? In brief, when we genuflect are we guilty of idolatry? Now there is no doubt that our Lord is not cor- poreally present in the sense in which he was present in Gali- lee. The shape of the object, and all those other opportunities ‘of experience which can be correlated in terms of electrons, are not determined by our Lord’s human nature. In tradi- tional language, our Lord is said to be present, but to be present under the forms of bread and wine. The difference is thus safeguarded; but an adorable presence is asserted. And this may, and indeed mutt, be asserted. The fundamental faét, which justified identification of our Lord’s natural body with him, was that certain opportunities of experience were directly determined by laws which secured and conditioned the neces- sary actualization of essential elements in his nature, and that these laws direétly determined the emergence of the complex as such and as including these opportunities. Whether or not physical opportunities are thus direétly determined is a secondary matter, unless a supreme reality is given to physical experience. This fundamental consideration is no less true in regard to the Blessed Sacrament as it comes to be upon the 118 EE ———_- oe eee The Real Presence Altar through the consecration of bread and wine. Here also the object comes to be what it is, and certain of the oppor- tunities it affords come to be, through a law, through a de- termination of the Divine Will, which direétly secures and conditions the necessary actualization of essential elements in our Lord’s nature. It must be added that the Blessed Sacra- ment affords and mediates a far closer relation to our Lord than did his natural body. In such circumstances Eucharistic adoration is not only legitimate, it is the inevitable conclusion of the whole matter unless we allow our thought to be subtly influenced by current materialism. We engage in theology in order that we may adore, and theology justifies our adoration. But one consideration must ever be remembered. All adora- tion is in the last resort due to God and to God alone. It is because our Lord is very God as well as man that we both may, and mutt, adore. Lastly, we are bound to maintain that the opportunity for adoration does not, if the Sacrament be reserved, pass with the ending of the Mass. If the Reserved Sacrament 1s capable of giving communion; if there is in the tabernacle That, the devout reception of which unites us to our Lord, then all which has been said of the Sacrament is true of the Sacrament when reserved. “Thee we adore, O hidden Saviour, thee, Who in thy Sacrament dost deign to be.” 119 The Approach to the Presence a 1 & The Holy Spit and the Eucharist By A. E. J. RAWLINSON Pisee RS calar C7 eao\ HE Christian doétrine of the Holy KFT ax, NY) Spirit, theologically and metaphysic- Cal Gq 1 ER2S*& ally considered, presents problems of mae se P B%. a profound and difficult character aariik which I do not ignore, but upon the % discussion of which it is no part of my x EY Any present purpose to embark. I shall ER ®, assume simply that we worship one = 5 pe Cooks EO SYSVGE God in Trinity, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit; and I propose in the first instance to say a few words from the point of view of a New Testament Student about the New Testament doétrine of the Spirit. By the New Testament writers the Holy Spirit is regarded primarily as being the Divine Agent of inspiration, life, power, supernatural guidance, and grace. The Spirit is known, and his working is recognized, because men have experienced in manifest and manifold ways his a¢tivity and power. The Spirit, in other words, is the source of that element in the lives of Christians individually, and of the Christian Church cor- porately, which the Church itself recognizes as being plainly supernatural. The Spirit, moreover, is the Spirit of unity. Gifts, super- natural endowments, capacities, functions, bestowed by the 120 ; Holy Spirit and the Eucharist Spirit upon individuals, are all meant to be used, according to the teaching of St. Paul, in the interests of unity, and with a view to the edification or upbuilding in love of the one Church, which is the one body of the Christ. The Holy Spirit—and this is a point which has been recently emphasized afresh by the Presbyterian writer, Dr. Anderson Scott, of Cambridge—is the source and the living bond of the Christian kowevia or Fellowship.* St. Paul writes not merely of “ unity of spirit” in the modern weakened sense of that phrase: he speaks rather of “the unity of the Spirit”;+ and he would have Christians regard as “ Ante ” of the Spirit’s working and power not merely such apparently miraculous phenomena as inspired prophecy, speaking with tongues, and the rest, but such virtues and graces as love, joy, peace, long-suffering, kind- ness, goodness, faithfulness, meekness, and self-control,t which to his thinking are in the end more important and not less supernatural than the gifts which were over-valued at Corinth. Without charity or love, the culmination and crown of them all, there is no other “ gift”’ which is of any significance or value whatsoever.§ I have begun in this way, because I desire to say a few words about a certain theory of ministry. It has been held by some scholars that the ministry of the Church was not origin- ally official, but “ charismatic’; by which it is meant that in the first days of the Church the authority to minister, and among other things to celebrate the Eucharist, was dependent not upon ordination, but upon the possession by individuals of a “charisma,” or “ gift” of the Spirit, which the Church recognized but did not bestow. It is impossible to prove upon the basis of historical evidence that the Eucharist was never in early times celebrated by unordained men; and the early document known as the Didache contains some evidence which is calculated, as far as it goes, to suggest that the Eucharist was occasionally celebrated by “ prophets.” With regard to this theory I would say certain things. In the first place, what is described as the “charismatic” * C. A. Anderson Scott, “Christianity according to St. Paul,” pp. 158 sq. + Eph. iv. 3. t Gal. v. 22. 8x Cor. 13, I2I The Approach to the Presence theory of ministry, in so far as there is justification for it at all, appears to me to involve a one-sided and disproportionate emphasis upon certain aspects of the New Testament evidence, to the exclusion of others; and those who in modern times are the advocates of a “prophetic,” as contrasted with an “institutional,” system of ministry are really attempting (to adapt some words of the present Dean of Wells) “to live, so to speak, in the apostolic age without the unifying control of the Apostles.” In the second place (as the same theologian has pointed out) the antithesis suggested by the contrasted use of the terms “charismatic” and “ institutional” is a thoroughly false one. © St. Paul believed that every Christian, as such, had his “ grace- gift’ from God.* Bishops, presbyters, and deacons, solemnly ordained by the laying on of hands, have as clear a right to be called “charismatic”? as has anybody else. As the Dean remarks, it is inconceivable that St. Paul “should have sup- posed that a Bishop, a presbyter, or a deacon could fulfil his function, if no ‘charisma’ were his to enable him’”’;f and, indeed, in the Pastoral Epistles St. Timothy is enjoined to “Stir up” the “charisma” which is in him, and which was given him through the laying on of hands.t In the third place—and this is perhaps a more important point still—the Church corporately, upon any adequate theo- logical theory, is under the guidance and inspiration of the Spirit; and the development from apostolic beginnings of the episcopate and priesthood, and the relative decline of the supposed primitive régime of free prophecy, must itself (I would suggest) be ascribed to the inspiration and guidance of the same Spirit by whom the prophets themselves were in- spired. The “ goodly fellowship of the prophets” has never wholly died out in the Church, and men prophetically inspired to be the bearers of a religious message for their brethren have been in some cases clergy, and in some cases laymen. With an Old TeStament writer we may say, “ Would God that all the SPM ACOL Via. t “Essays on the Early History of the Church and the Ministry,” edited by the late Dr. H. B. Swete, p. 75. 1/2 Tim.'i, 63'cf. 2° Timiavina4. | ee dB) Holy Spirit and the Eucharist Lord’s people were prophets.”* We may believe, nevertheless, that the Church, taught by the Spirit, has been right in deter- mining that the minister who celebrates the Eucharist, and who in so doing is the representative agent at once of the Church and of the Lord of the Church, shall act not merely in virtue of any claim which he may possess to be regarded as a man of prophetic gifts or conspicuous power, but in virtue primarily of an authority bestowed by the Spirit through the laying on of hands at his ordination. According to the Catholic or “‘ in- Stitutional”” conception of the ministry, the purely personal “gifts” and qualifications of the minister are in Stri€tness irrelevant. The celebrant a¢ts, not in virtue of them, but in virtue of his office. At the same time, it must be claimed that his office itself is essentially “charismatic,” that the ministry is the gift of God to his Church, and that it is in the power of the Spirit that the ordained minister is enabled to aét. I pass now to a different theme altogether. It is maintained in much modern theological literature that according to the real thought (if not also a¢tually according to the language) of the writers of several of the New Testament books the conceptions of the risen Christ and of the Holy Spirit are for all practical purposes one and the same. St. Paul in a number of passages ascribes functions to Christ which he elsewhere ascribes to the Spirit, and the words “ Now the Lord is the Spirit”? are not infrequently quoted as pointing to a clear and explicit identification of the two. I have given expression elsewhere to my conviction that this view is mistaken, and that St. Paul’s real thought is more nearly expressed by the Statement that the risen Christ indwells his Church through the Spirit.t The Spirit, according to the thought of the New Testament writers, must, I believe, be regarded as actualizing and making real in the hearts of believers and in the fellow- ship of the Christian Society the presence of Christ, who, except in so far as he is thus operative in the Church through the Spirit, is to be thought of (to use the language of metaphor and symbol) as being “ seated at the right hand of God.” The * Num. xi. 29. 72 Corry, ¢t A. E. J. Rawlinson, “The New Testament Doéttrine of the Christ,” pp. 158 sq. 123 The Approach to the Presence distinction, familiar to later Christian theology, and already more or less manifest in the language of the New Testament, between the Lord and the Spirit is, I believe, more than a verbal one. We hold communion with Christ: we are inspired by the Spirit. It is through the operation of the Spirit that we are enabled to know Christ, or to call Jesus Lord; but the Lord and the Spirit are distinét. There is, I think, a real and actual basis in experience (quite apart from the mere language of Scripture) for the kind of distinétion which the mind of the Church, under the guidance of the Spirit himself, came eventually to draw more and more clearly between the Spirit | and Christ, while at the same time affirming the unity of Both with the Father in the ultimate myStery of the Being of | God. My third and final theme—that of the relation of the Spirit to the Eucharist—may perhaps usefully be introduced by a reference to certain words which in the Fourth Gospel are ascribed to the Lord Jesus himself. The Lord in that Gospel is represented as having prophetically foreshadowed, in the course of a conversation with a woman of Samaria, the coming into the world of a new kind of worship. It is a worship no longer in any sense limited to a particular sanctuary or shrine. And it is a worship which is real, in a sense in which the older worship was not. It is described as a worship of God “in spirit and in truth ”*—that is to say, the new worship Stands, as contrasted with the old, upon a higher level of reality and truth, for the reason that it is based upon a fuller revelation, and, indeed, upon the alone finally adequate revelation, of the divine grace, truth, and power. The Church, taught and indwelt by the Spirit, has found access to the Father through Christ, who in this same Gospel is represented as saying emphatically: “I am the Way.”+ Through the Lord Jesus Christ, it is implied, and in fellow- ship with him through the Spirit, is the true living reality of worship. Of such worship, the true worship, offered by Christians through Christ to the Father in the power of the Spirit, the * John iv. 23 sq. + John xiv. 6. 124 Holy Spirit and the Eucharist Holy Eucharist is the centre and core. It is offered in the power of the Spirit, and the Holy Spirit, here as elsewhere, is the Source and the inspiring Agent of all true Christian prayer. It would be an interesting and profitable task to draw out and to exhibit the parallelism between the character and mind of the Spirit as expressed and reflected in the utterances of the New Testament, and the expression of the character and mind of the same Spirit in the actual language of Christian liturgies. Something along these lines has, indeed, recently been attempted by a group of writers who are con- nected with the so-called “ liturgical movement” in Southern Germany.* It is a fruitful and valuable mode of approach, though I cannot dilate upon it now. It is not, however, the only sense in which it has been commonly held by theologians that in the Church’s Eucharistic action the Holy Spirit is concerned. The Holy Spirit, it has been maintained, is not only the Inspirer of Christian liturgical prayer, and the Source of the reality and power of such prayers as are genuinely and effectively offered. He is also (it has been believed) the Divine Agent of whatever spiritual change is effected in the significance of the Elements as the result of their consecration, and in response to the prayers of the Church. That a spiritual change of some kind is effected appears to me to be the real conviction of practically all com- municants of all “ schools of thought’’; if only for the reason that no one (so far as I am aware) would believe that he had genuinely received Holy Communion, if he merely attended the liturgy and proceeded (instead of going up to the altar rails to receive) to consume privately a piece of unconsecrated bread. There is divergence of view within the Church as to what the precise change is which is effected; but there is general and widespread agreement (I would suggest) that consecration is necessary, and that some change is involved. I am persuaded that the best Christian theology refers instinc- tively the effects of consecration (however precisely they are to be defined or understood) to the work of the Spirit. I make this statement deliberately, notwithstanding the * See especially Guardini, ““ Vom Geist der Liturgie” (Freiburg im Breisgau, 1922). 125 The Approach to the Presence well-known faét that in the actual language of the New Testa- ment there is explicit reference made to the work of the Spirit only as the Inspirer either of Christians individually or of the Christian Church as a corporate whole. It has been pointed out by Bishop Gore and others that the cosmic functions associated, for example, with the idea of the universal activity of God in Nature, which in the Old Testament and in the deuterocanonical Book of Wisdom are ascribed to the Spirit, are in the New TeStament ascribed to the Logos or Word;* and it has been argued from this that the Holy Spirit is the Consecrator only of persons, and not of things. I can only. express my conviction that, from the point of view of a thought-out Christian theology, the limitation implied by this Statement is not to be maintained. I believe that the Word of God becomes operative through the active Energy of the Divine Spirit, that the activity of the Holy Spirit is effective throughout the length and breadth of the creation, and that whatever is wrought by the power of God in the Holy Com- munion is wrought through the Spirit’s agency and power. There was admittedly in early times some confusion in the mind of the Church between the functions of the Holy Spirit and those of the Word, a confusion which was not definitely cleared up until after Nicaa, when the foundations of a more fully thought-out Trinitarian doétrine were laid by the group of writers who are known as the Cappadocian Fathers. It is this confusion, I think, which accounts for the fact that the earliest form of liturgical invocation or epiclesis of which we have evidence—that, namely, which is contained in the Sacramentary of Serapion—is rather an epiclesis of the Logos than in the proper sense an epiclesis of the Spirit. The Church’s eventual doétrine, as it came to prevail more particularly in the Eastern part of Christendom, and as it finds devotional expression in the liturgies of the East, is the doétrine to which utterance is given in a familiar passage of St. Cyril of Jerusalem: ‘“ We call upon God, who loves man, to send forth his Holy Spirit upon the gifts now before him, that he may make the bread to be the Body of Christ and * Gore, “ The Holy Spirit and the Church,” p. 9. 126 Holy Spirit and the Eucharist the wine the Blood of Christ: for assuredly whatsoever the Holy Spirit has touched is sanctified and changed.’* I would submit that it is precisely this do¢trine—the doétrine that whatever change is effected in the significance and efficac of the Eucharistic elements, as the result of which they be- come, in whatever sense, Christ’s Body and Christ’s Blood, is a change wholly wrought by the activity of God through the Spirit in response to the prayers of the Church—it is this doétrine which is the true safeguard of Christian Eucharistic belief against any kind of association with such ideas as might properly be called magical. I have long been accustomed to think, rightly or wrongly, that the liturgy contained in our present English Prayer Book (more particularly if we take into account the extraordinarily jejune provision which it makes for a supplementary conse- cration to be effected by means of a bare recital of our Lord’s words of institution) is perhaps more immediately open to magical misunderstandings than any other liturgy which is known to me. A simple mind, I believe, might very easily run away with the idea that the Church teaches that consecration is effected by means of the recital over the elements of the words of our Lord as a kind of charm. It is for this reason that I personally would welcome the new alternative liturgy of the Deposited Book, which at length brings us into line not only with our brethren of the Orthodox Church of the East, but with those also who are in com- munion with us in Scotland, and in the United States of America, and in South Africa. The new liturgy is, to my mind, an enormous improvement. I am aware that in saying this I am saying something with which not everyone who is here present will be disposed to agree. There are those who are wedded to what are known as WeStern ideas, and who do not desire any change. But I would point out that from a doétrinal point of view there is in any case little ultimate difference. I suppose that many WeStern theologians, despite the fact that the words of the canon are in form a prayer addressed to the Father, have been * Cyril of Jerusalem, “ Catech. MyStag.,” v. 7. 127 The Approach to the Presence accustomed to think of the Lord Jesus himself as being the true Consecrator of the Eucharistic gifts. We are sometimes told that the priest who utters the words of the canon is speak- ing at once in the person of the Church and in the person of Christ, that it is Christ himself ultimately who utters the words, and that it is his word of power which makes the elements to be what they are; and no one can deny that that is a noble and Christian belief. I would, however, point out that, even upon this theory of consecration, it is of importance to remember that the Christ who thus utters the words is himself the Anointed of the Spirit, and that it is in the power of the Spirit that he speaks. Of his life, as incarnate upon earth, it is written that it was in the power of the Spirit that he was enabled to exorcize demons,* and that it was because the Father had given unto him the Spirit without measure that he was enabled to speak words such as “never man spake,’ words which the Church recognizes as being the utterances of God.t I would suggest, then, that in the Holy Eucharist also, if his words are with power, it is because they are words uttered in the power of the Spirit. But having said this, Iam nevertheless constrained to repeat in this conneétion my own personal preference for what I suppose to be the Eastern, as contrasted with the specifically Western, concep- tion of the modus operandi of Eucharistic consecration. I believe that the Eastern tradition is theologically right in laying the emphasis upon the effectual power of the Holy Spirit, and that the structure of the proposed new consecratory prayer in the alternative liturgy contained in the Deposited Book, which proceeds, after an address of praise to the Father, to an anamnesis or commemoration of the work of the Son, and then to the prayer that God with his Holy and life-giving Spirit may bless and sanctify the Eucharistic gifts that they may be unto us the Body and Blood of his Son our Saviour Jesus Christ, is, from the point of view of theology and right reason, a notable advance upon anything which the Church of England has possessed hitherto. * Matt. xii. 28. + John iii. 34; cf. John vii. 46. 128 ss Il & Christian Priesthood By CHARLES SCOTT GILLETT I Ze HE saddest reflection for all the By. ) children of the Church in England is wy: Fis S that they are not yet—and for many years to come, perhaps, dare hardly qv hope to be—wholly “of one mind” in their “house.” But it is a happy ee g~ 2, and hopeful sign, I think, that the aha field of conflict is being gradually AES LE sharp and serious, but they are not so many. Within the life- time of living men, some have been settled by the mere growth of knowledge; some have lost all their meaning and relevance by the mere lapse of time; some were the fruit of prejudices or misunderstandings now dissipated; yet more have been seen to have, at most, a subsidiary and derivative importance—to be aspects (so to speak) or fragments of some primary, some more central, problem whose solution would condition and include their own. Thus, in regard to the sub- ject now before us, it is no longer demanded of a speaker that he should discuss at length whether the Catholic Church is a visible or an invisible Society; for there remains only a small and dwindling band of Christians who would not admit that it is both. More and more Christians would admit not only that that Church, in so far as it is a visible corporate body, must needs be organized and must needs have officers for its organization, but also that the view of its charaéter and its claims which was held by the Apostles and their converts was, in historical fact, that which in our current discussions would be called the ‘‘ Catholic”? view. Indeed, K 129 The Approach to the Presence many educated observers (in particular, many modern Students of psychology) who would certainly regard that view as erroneous, do, nevertheless, praise handsomely enough the Catholic’s grasp of the idea of institutional and corporate unity as generating a disciplined enthusiasm and effectiveness hardly to be attained by other means. And yet the real con- . troversy remains unsettled. For the eulogist, however compli- mentary to the Church and its ordered Ministry, is merely acknowledging that organization is in practice a condition and a means of usefulness—as who should be singing to a bridegroom the praises of marriage and the home, on the score that he will find his wardrobe the better cared for and his meals the more pundtually prepared! The Catholic’s central claim is quite remote from this; being no less than that the Ministerial government of the Church was actually given to it by God; that its institution was neither accidental nor due merely to the practical exigencies of a particular moment in its early history, but had—and has—the immediate and continuous san¢tion of a divine commission. It is clear that that claim implies certain definite and dis- tinctive beliefs, both historical and doétrinal. Historically, we believe that the words and actions of Christ himself and of his Apostles, as the New TeStament records them, are evidence that he instituted not only a Stewardship of grace, but grades and varieties of funétion and service amongst the Stewards: a hierarchy recognized and accepted by the whole Apostolic Church. We believe, further, that he provided not merely a temporary Ministry divinely qualified and commissioned to serve immediate evangelistic needs, but a means whereby the whole Church could have assured possession, for all time, of a Ministry having that same qualification and commission continuously unchallengeable and unimpaired; that he instituted for the Church such an instru- ment for the exercise of its representative and redemptive function in the world as should be no less permanent than that function itself; and, finally, that such an instrument did, as a fact of history, emerge and become eStablished, under the guidance of the Holy Ghost, in the three offices of Bishop, Presbyter, and Deacon. 130 Christian Priesthood Doétrinally, we believe that each minister, as being authorized to represent God to man and man to God in functions distinét from those which are common to all baptized Christians, receives the Holy Ghost in a special way for this special work: that he receives from God, that is, in the Sacrament of Holy Order a specific endowment for a specific purpose, and that, since the “character” conferred by that Sacrament is “indelible,” when once he has received episcopal ordination he cannot be ordained again. Now it is clearly impossible for me to discuss or defend in detail the assumptions on which these claims are based. That has been done with expert thoroughness and elaboration by many distinguished theologians, whose books are easily avail- able. I would wish rather to remind you that, in the matter of the Azftorical claim, it is not essential to its establishment that we should offer dogmatic solutions to every historical problem. What was the exact nature of the office held by Timothy and Titus? Was it local or general in its exercise? How precisely is the Nevroupyia tév moodytav, of which the Didache tells us, to be interpreted? Were all presbyters also bishops in Apostolic times? At what date and by what Stages did the title émiaKomos come to be used in its ultimately re- Striéted sense? These and a hundred other questions of historical detail have not yet been, and perhaps will never be, definitely and finally settled. Similarly, we are in no way bound to assert that the early Church as a whole was com- mitted to any particular theory of the reasons for the emergence of the threefold Ministry, or, indeed, had any clear perception of its importance in the divine economy. It is probable that the Apostles themselves, in their ordinations to the offices from which its final form was developed, were conscious only of a desire to meet obvious and immediate needs. And as with our historical, so also with our doéfrinal belief: I do not think we need, even if we dare attempt, any exact and rigid definition of the nature and effects of the grace of Holy Order. We are not competent to determine narrowly the mutual relation and interdependence of the two qualifications—the individual gift from God and the official authorization by men: the personal endowment and the 13I The Approach to the Presence ecclesiastical commission. We may justly claim that both are needed and both received: that the Church commissions its ministers because Christ has done so: that God empowers the priest because he is chosen to serve and represent the people. I would maintain, in short, that we have neither need nor warrant to tie ourselves to any unalterable or | mechanical theory of “succession”? or “transmission,” by which to account for or exactly to trace and analyze the emergence of the Apostolic Ministry as Catholics accept and believe in it. The important point is that such a Ministry did in faét emerge: that it inherits the authority and commission of the government originally instituted, as having preserved with that government a clear historical continuity; and that its unanimous adoption in all Christian communities at a very early date, together with its unshaken stability and persistence up to the present time, points irresistibly to a divine purpose in its origin and a divine guidance in its development. II Now when we examine the attacks which have been made upon what is essential (as distinct from what is merely sub- sidiary or corroborative) in the Catholic doétrine of the Priesthood, they will be seen to have originated in a most honourable insistence—an insistence which has constituted the real Strength of Protestantism from its beginning—upon three very important principles: (1) That “ Sacerdotalism ” is the greatest of all dangers to individual Christians and to the cause of Christ; (2) that no need is more clamorous than the need of unity among Christian people; and (3) that the highest possible moral and spiritual Standard must be de- manded of and maintained by the Christian Minister. I do not doubt that it is because they fear that the acceptance of the Catholic claim may serve to obscure or belittle these prin- ciples that ProteStants in every generation have so firmly and so fiercely resisted it. I would ask you, therefore, to consider very briefly whether, if that claim be fully appre- hended and rightly interpreted, these forebodings, though 132 ee Christian Priesthood wholly genuine and intelligible, are not in faét unwarranted and unnecessary. 1. Sacerdotalism.—This word, as applied to the Catholic doétrine of the Priesthood, may cover many kinds of accusa- tion. If it is a charge that we believe the Church to have a sacerdotal chara¢ter and a sacerdotal system, we admit it eagerly. That a sacrifice is the central fact of our religion; that Christ’s own sacrifice upon the Cross summed up all earlier sacrifices; that by its virtue every human being is empowered to offer his own life as a sacrifice to God—so much is common ground to all of us. It is true that, by theory and tradition, our opponents would dispute our further claim that the Eucharist (like the Last Supper) has the most intimately interdependent connection with the sacrifice of Calvary; and yet I believe that even of this perennial controversy the field is become narrower and the bitterness less. There are not now, I think, many “Evangelicals”» who would deny that in the apostolic age the principle of sacrificial worship was accepted as normal to Christianity and given a normal ritual expres- sion, or that the Eucharist is, in some real sense, the Christian’s sacrifice. But the Catholic religion is “ woven without seam”’; we cannot tear from the texture of it this fragment or that and leave the strength of the whole fabric unimpaired. And the centrality of sacrifice in Christian doétrine as manifested in the Eucharist as the central sacrificial aét of Christian worship, does clearly mean that the celebrant ministers of the Lord’s ded are priests in fact, whatever—at various periods and for various reasons—they may have been in name.* In this sense, then, as in others, “‘it is the Mass that matters.” For the institution of a rite whereby we may— not reiterate, but appropriate and “perceive the fruits of ” (and, in that sense, complete) a sacrifice which was, in its essence, independent of time and place: a rite which is to be continued always and everywhere “until his coming again,” involves the institution also of a means divinely sanétioned whereby that rite shall be duly, orderly, and permanently cele- * For English Christians it is een that those English Reformers who (after the example of Bucer) would gladly have seen the word expunged from our Ordinal were not allowed to have their way. 133 The Approach to the Presence brated. Thus, although—as Dr. Moberly warned us thirty years ago™—-we may not arbitrarily isolate the different functions of the Christian pastorate, yet we believe that the Apostles were divinely inspired, and that to celebrate and to ordain for celebrating the Holy Mysteries are two central corporate functions of the Church of Christ, and that for their fulfil- ment (even though not for that alone) the emergence and development of the Christian Ministry was sanctioned and directed by the Holy Ghost.t Now in regard to this—which I call the Catholic—helief about the Priesthood, I am not now primarily concerned to argue that it is true; I am concerned rather to assert that, when it is rightly understood, the sacerdotalism which it involves is not the sacerdotalism of which it is popularly accused. The word “ magic,” for example, is meaningless in its con- nection; for magic means such a mechanical coercion of the divine by the human will as no sacramental doctrine imagin- able by any educated Christian could conceivably embrace. ft Again, it is true that, by a special grace received, the Priest represents Christ as the giver of divine gifts, as teaching and feeding the flock, in a sense and manner different from that in which the whole Church is pledged to represent him to the world; but this has never meant, and can never mean, that the unique High-Priesthood of our Lord himself is be- littled or ignored. It is just because, and only because, the divine Priesthood is supreme, and the divine commission directly given, that the human Priest dare meddle with these mysteries at all.§ * Dr. R. C. Moberly, “ Ministerial Priesthood.’ Murray, 1897. + A detailed exposition of this thesis is to be found in vol. ii. of Dr. Hamilton’s “The People of God.” Oxford University Press, 1912. t “It is doubtless the fear of priestly power and its intrusion into politics which has determined (from, say, Wyclif until now) the quite unphilosophical ‘magic’ scare among so many Protestants” (Baron F. von Hugel: “ Essays and Addresses on the Philosophy of Religion.” Dent, 1921). § All sacramental acts have a heavenly and an earthly side; and though many Christian Fathers will use of priests or bishops such words as “tradere Spiritum Sanctum” or “ conficere corpus Christi” 134 Christian Priesthood Similarly, it is quite untrue that the ordained Priest “ comes between ”’ the individual soul and God, save in the very sense in which Christ himself thus ‘“‘came between,” to give Still easier access. All Christians are priests partaking of his Priest- hood: the whole Church is to be Chriét’s representative agent and instrument in the world; and the official Ministry is but the organ through which they are enabled freely and surely to fulfil their proper function. The “Priesthood of the laity” does not exclude but actually involves a ministerial Priesthood, through which it is formally manifested and expressed.* 2. Christian Unity.—Let us turn, then, to the second charge—the charge that the stiffness and narrowness of our doétrine is a hurt and hindrance to the unity of Christendom. The true unity of Christians, we are to understand, is a spiritual thing—a thing which no kind or form of organiza- tion can concern or affect. Why, then (it is asked of us), do you talk pedantically of “valid” and “invalid” Eucharists? Why do you not rather welcome generously such unhampered intercommunion between all separated Christians as alone can give us any hope of bringing or keeping them together? Dare you say that thousands of Nonconformists have not received God’s grace through sacraments administered by men whom no Bishop has ordained? that thousands have not received it apart from any sacraments at all? Dare you thus arrogantly measure the mind of God by your traditions, or so set limits to the range and method of his working? And to all this I think our answer is clear. The unity of the (vide F. W. Puller, “‘ Orders and Jurisdiction,” pp. 52, 53), yet there is not one of them but could use the words of Hooker—‘“O wretched blindness if we admire not so great a power: more wretched if we consider it aught, and, notwithstanding, imagine that any but God can bestow it” (“‘ Ecclesiastical Polity,” V., Ixxvii. 1). * The whole Gospel, the whole story of man’s redemption and his hope, is the Story of mediation—of an approach to God through human agency; and to repudiate the official Priesthood of the Church is either to forget the oneness of all its members in the one Mediator, or foolishly to confound an equality of spiritual heritage with an identity of ecclesiastical function. It is permissible also to point out the strange lapse of logic by which some Protestants will attack the Catholic theory “4 the ministry, first on the ground that no one can share the Priesthood of Christ, and then on the ground that it is shared by every Christian. 135 The Approach to the Presence Church is indeed a spiritual unity: it is grounded in the one Life of the ascended Christ, imparted by the one eternal Spirit. And yet the Church on earth is visible, and in its earthly aspect that unity must be organic—its essence the mutual love and service of its members within the visible society, its fruit the conversion of the visible world outside. And so St. Paul, after his great Statement of Christian unity to the Ephesians, goes on at once to speak of the Ministry in its ordered grades and funétions as given for this very thing— “the perfecting of the saints unto the work of ministering, unto the building up of the body of Christ till we all attain. unto the unity of the faith” (Eph. iv. 11-13). And since, above all things, the Lord’s Supper is the sacramental expression of this organic unity (so that no Eucharist can be “ solitary,” but is the aét of the whole Church, the bond between all— both living and departed—whom Christ has redeemed), it is in this great act especially that the Church dare tolerate no un- certainty or confusion—must be wholly satisfied that its per- formance is rightly ordered and its ministers duly accredited. If there exist such conditions to be fulfilled, the word “validity” does no more than describe their fulfilment. For us, then, the Episcopate and the Priesthood are not a bar to Christian unity: they are the very ground and centre of it. That we do not give an equal recognition to other Ministries does not mean that we deny that grace is given through their agency or that God can work his own will in ways of his own choosing; it means that for us there is no choice.* I do not doubt that if we had dared to be “ generous” with our trust, had tried to “heal the hurt” of God’s people “lightly, saying Peace, peace, when there is no peace,” the way of many * Two types of theological conundrum are popular in some circles. One (in which a party oF shipwrecked communicants usually figures) asks whether there are not Sater emergencies which a Strict appli- cation of the do¢trine of Apostolical Succession would fail to meet. The other asks what precisely happens at a Communion service celebrated in good faith by a layman or a Nonconformist minister. The answer to the first is that there probably are such emergencies. They are ex hypothesi abnormal, and therefore irrelevant; and no deductions from them con- demnatory of the doétrine itself are legitimate. The answer to the second is that we do not know. 136 Christian Priesthood a missionary would be made far easier, many of his perplexities far more smoothly solved. But this at least is certain: that the loss by this or that community of Christians of the Catholic Ministry, in its historic form, has meant for Christendom not the Strength and freedom of a spiritual unity, but a most pitiful confusion and weakness: a tragedy of heresies and heartburnings, of crippled energies and divided counsels and conflicting aims. It is true that the Church of England has never committed its members to any particular theory of episcopal succession, nor formulated any particular theory of the grace mediated by non-episcopal Ministries; but at a Church Congress seven- teen years ago Bishop Gore said that on the day when any non-episcopally ordained Minister was formally allowed, with- in the Anglican communion, to celebrate the Eucharist, the Anglican communion would be rent in twain; and if we remember what the claim of that communion is: if we do not forget the Church of Rome and the Church of the East and the ground on which it can ever hope to meet them: if, in short, we realize what, in its reality and completeness, the reunion of Christendom must mean, we cannot doubt that what he said was true. 3. The Priestly Life——And, lastly, what shall we say of the charge that our doctrine would lessen for the priest the sense of his personal obligation, or lower the standard de- manded of him in his moral and spiritual life? Here again I think our answer is clear. We do, indeed, hold that the un- worthiness of the Minister cannot hinder the effect of the Sacrament; for on no other principle could the Christian lay- man be assured that he shall receive the covenanted gifts of grace as God has promised and appointed them. On no other principle, indeed, would any man dare to accept the priestly office; for the worthiest would be the moét conscious of his unworthiness.* Neither do we deny that there are moral dangers and temptations which especially beset the Christian _ * The principle applies, of course, to the officers of a State no less than to those of a Church (cf. St. Paul, Rom. xiii. 1-6). Our Lord him- self applied it, in a Still closer parallel, to the Scribes and Pharisees (Matt. xxiii. 2, 3). 137 The Approach to the Presence minister—a kind of legalism and officiousness, a kind of arrogance, a kind of hardness and narrowness of mind; and if in every office and profession you may find a Bumble, he is doubtless least tolerable when found in the Ministry of the Church. But these vices are not confined to men who hold a particular doétrine of the sacraments, or banished merely ~ by rejecting it: the prophet or the preacher may contract them no less easily than the priest. And, indeed, the very height and boldness of the priest’s own claim—that his office is not from men but God, that its authority is not modified by his own virtues or his own defeéts, that Christ is the fount of | all his dignity, this in itself —symbolized and emphasized as it is by the official ritual and the official dress—must school him (more sternly the more Sstoutly he asserts it) to an ever-deepen- ing humility and self-distrust. And I do not think it doubtful that the march of the Catholic Movement in the English Church—the wider accept- ance of Catholic doétrine and Catholic order—has, in fact, not lowered but incalculably heightened, for the English Priesthood, the standard and ideal of the priestly life. It is no accident that more and more of the men who are ordained to the Sacred Ministry in our communion have set for them- selves a Sternly ordered life of discipline and devotion. Their rule of prayer and penance, their yearly period of Retreat, their daily Mass, their deliberate abjuring of marriage*— all this has not come by the formal teaching of Anglican seminaries, or the force of any Anglican convention; it has * I am not asserting either that the custom in this country of the priest’s daily Mass is, even for the Roman Priesthood, of more than comparatively recent origin, or that the aye Church was wrong to abrogate the rule of compulsory celibacy for its clergy. My point is merely that both these tendencies or instinéts spring, not from sacerdotal arrogance, but from a genuine eagerness to deepen devotion and grow in holiness. That eagerness would be praiseworthy, even if the particular form of its expression were undesirable. It may be noted also that there is a curious inconsistence between the suspicion shown by the older type of Protestantism of celibacy, monasticism, and similar Catholic expres- sions of other-worldliness, and its tolerance of a Puritan asceticism as expressed in a condemnation of dancing, play-going, and the use of fermented liquor. Ultimately the distinction is based on a prejudice rather than a principle. 138 Christian Priesthood come by the secret pressure and influence of a great idea— the Catholic idea of a divine commission, of a Priesthood moulded upon the pattern of the Priesthood of Christ him- self. Here, if nowhere else, in the society of our modern world, Noblesse oblige. Nowhere but here—in the Priest- hood conceived as the Catholic Church conceives it—may a man find lowliness so blended with a royal dignity, a pride so rooted in self-sacrifice, a life so humbling and so supremely happy. | ‘The Meaning of the Presence I & Preparation for Communion By FRANCIS UNDERHILL ra ye Church of England lays down four ~, Nee. points as necessary in preparation for 5 ys; > receiving Holy Communion. 5 “What is required of them who lod\ come to the Lord’s Supper?” pW “To examine themselves, whether Soll |\vo © )» they repent them truly of their former ee! Z ww RS a steadfastly purposing to lead a AS SED PH new life; have a lively faith in God’s mercy through Christ, with a thankful remembrance of his death; and be in charity with all men.’ It is all too plain that in twenty minutes I can do little more than suggest headings for thought on subje¢ts so vast as these, while dwelling in some slight detail on one or two matters of difficulty which arise. I. PENITENCE And first, Repentance. You will notice that the Catechism, in accordance with Christian tradition, puts this first among the requirements for a devout preparation for the Sacrament. “To examine themselves, whether they repent them of their former sins.” In this the Church is strongly supported both by 140 Preparation for Communion the Scriptures and by the rest of the Book of Common Prayer. The peculiar solemnity of the accounts of the institution of the Holy Communion, given to us by the Synoptists and St. Paul, make perfectly clear to us the importance attached by the Church from the first to the Sacrament, and the great peril of unworthy reception. But I need not press the general point of our duty to make the best possible repentance in preparation for our Communion. The question which must of necessity arise here in our day and circumstances is that of “ going to Confession,” as it is popularly expressed; more theologically, the use of the Sacrament of Penance. This matter has come to be one of the keenest controversies known to Christian history, especially in the Church of England. It is natural enough that it should be so; for the act of making one’s Con- fession is a supreme surrender of the individual will to the judgment of the Church. It is true that the controversy is clearing up. I think most people, at least most people whose thoughts are up-to-date, have abandoned the old-fashioned pre- judice against Confession in general. They consider that in some circumstances, at least, it is good and necessary. Two considerations arise here for members of the English Church. First, that the Prayer-Book, revised and unrevised, encourages in case of need private Confession in the presence of a priest; and, secondly, that it does not make it compulsory. There is no need to tell an Englishman that he is not com- pelled to “go to Confession”’; he knows that perfectly well. But surely this is not the real issue. Whether it is a good or a bad thing that Confession should be compulsory is an arguable point, which has, in fact, been endlessly argued. What a serious Christian who wishes to live the Catholic life in its fulness has to ask himself is not “ Must I go to Confession?” but, “Is it the Will of God for me that I should make this great surrender? Shall I in this way best find and express the penitence which will help to fit me for union with God?” There are three stages here. It may help us to deepen our penitence if we think of them a little carefully. There is in Confession the clearing of ourselves; the definite desire to cleanse the life of those elements which by defiling it make it unfit for union with God. In order that this clearing may 141 : The Meaning of the Presence be as complete as possible, we undergo the process known as “ Self-examination,” by which we face ourselves unflinchingly, that we may find out what in us is displeasing to God. This is followed by the aét of Confession. And here it is necessary to remind ourselves of an important fact. The large majority of Christians in the world to-day understand by the term Con- fession the telling out of our sins privately in the presence of the priest, who is at once the minister of God and the repre- sentative of the whole Church. There normally follows upon such Confession sacramental Absolution, conveyed as in the other sacraments by an outward sign—in this case the word spoken—to assure of our forgiveness, and our restoration to © the life of Grace. The validity of our forgiveness, however, depends upon our sincere intention to live better. But there is more than that. In Absolution strength is given by God, as we believe, to enable us, the past being put away, to amend our life as we purpose to do. Thus we are prepared by the deepest repentance of which we are capable, not only for a holier life, but for the supreme act of union with Christ. We are doubly fortified to go forward in confident resistance against the attacks of temptation, and in a sincere resolve to be more wholly devoted to God’s service and conformed to his Will. Il. Fasting CoMMUNION We must now pass on to another disciplinary aspect of our preparation for Holy Communion. The origin of Fasting Communion—that is, of receiving the Holy Sacrament as the first food of the day—is obscure; but it certainly goes back into the early ages of the Christian Church. It is very ancient, though it does not belong to the first days of all. It would appear to have arisen from a desire to safeguard the act of Communion and to surround it with the sense of quiet and the acceptance of self-denial. It has been observed for many centuries, and is Still observed to-day by the great majority of living Christians. It is recognized by a large and growing number of members of the Anglican Communion. The rule of Fasting Communion, as IJ have said, is ancient, widespread, and valuable; it has long commanded the obedi- 142 Preparation for Communion ence of the faithful in East and West; it deserves the most serious consideration of those who wish to live the Catholic life of obedience to authority. Salutary discipline is much to be desired in these days. We should surely wish to surround our Communion with every element which can make it for us the greatest moment in life. We are far too apt to seek in our religion the minimum of discipline combined with the maxi- mum of comfort. Here is a point at which in deference to the Church Catholic we can bring in something of the bracing air we need. There are too many young and healthy persons who “come late,” or take the comfortable and unnecessary cup of tea, who could and ought to come fasting. Yet we can never forget that there are people who by reason of weak health really cannot, for a time or permanently, go out in the early morning without some food. It is no answer to say to many of these persons that they can receive Communion at home; circumstances would make such recep- tion too infrequent. Still more difficult is the advice to make spiritual Communions. We must recognize that for many simple souls the idea of a spiritual Communion is one which is remote, and requires a height of apprehension which the cannot reach. Surely this is why our Lord instituted the Sacra- ment. Are we to say, then, that such persons must not receive Sacramental Communion, or must receive only very infre- quently? I cannot think so. Other parts of the Church have found it necessary to make provision for dispensation in certain circumstances from the Strict rule of Fasting Communion. We are bound to think out this matter corporately as Anglo- Catholics. Historically and ecclesiastically it is a knotty problem, and we would ask those who regard the whole question as a ridiculously small one to try to realize that there are persons who are conscientiously troubled by it. I do not suggest at the moment a solution of the problem; it is, in fact, to-day engaging the attention of Anglo-Catholic theolo- gians. It is time, however, that tender consciences were in some way relieved from what is to them a burden and a perplexity. I regret that it has been necessary to take up so much of my short time on these two matters. You will recognize, how- on, The Meaning of the Presence ever, that the circumStances of the day and the expectation both of Anglo-Catholics and of other members of the Church of England have made it inevitable that I should do so. III. Cuariry I am reversing the order of the last two requirements of the Church Catechism from those who come to the Lord’s Supper. We are to be “in charity with all men.” But of all the criticisms brought against communicants to-day by the general world, and indeed by ourselves, the most painful and disabling is that of uncharity. Its very painfulness is largely caused by the fact that we are unable to deny the large element of truth in the accusation. The phrase, “ How these Christians love one another,” was at first extorted admiringly from an unwilling pagan society. It has in process of time so passed into a bitter sarcasm that we have forgotten its different and happier birth! We are almost all of us guilty, and not least we of the clergy. Yet of all the common faults which beset us, it is much the least realized and deplored by those who fall into it. We shall be hearing presently of that union with man which is one of the foundations of the Eucharist. Would it be ossible for us to do better than to go home and make the strictest possible self-examination in regard to this matter? The outside world will only be attracted into our fellowship when the saying I quoted just now changes again from being a sarcasm levelled against us, and becomes once more a note of admiration. ‘‘ See how these communicants love one another!”’ would soon lead men to another saying: “Come, let us join a band of men and women whose hearts God has so certainly touched !” IV. Farr AND THANKFULNESS On the last point, of faith and thankfulness, we are again in some danger of misunderstanding one another in our English Church. Christians see things differently, even when they think of that “lively faith” which they express in their Communion. Well, we are Catholics, and we believe with all 144. Preparation for Communion our hearts in the sublime truth of the Catholic doétrines of the Eucharistic Sacrifice and the Real Presence. But we also believe that he who comes to the Lord Christ in faith will in no wise be cast out. And we thank him with all our hearts that certain beautiful and familiar words belong to us all, whatever our form of do¢trine may be. We pray side by side “ that our sinful bodies may be made clean by his Body, and our souls washed through his most Precious Blood, and that we may evermore dwell in him and he in us.” The supreme prayer belongs to us all. Let us draw near, then, in full assurance, having “a lively faith in God’s mercies through Christ, with a thankful remem- brance of his death.” Let us come to him for the strengthen- ing and refreshing of our souls, as penitent as we can be; taking upon ourselves the discipline he lays upon us whose yoke is easy and whose burden light. Let us come full of the sense of the love and the needs of our brethren. We live in per- plexing times; yet in days when there is an always growing desire for better understanding and closer unity. All this centres at the Table of the Lord. With such thoughts in our minds, thankfulness comes of it- self; thankfulness for that saving death of which every Mass and every aét of Communion are the continual remembrance; thankfulness for our union of love with our fellow-communi- cants at God’s Altar; thankfulness, above all, for the taking up of our poor life into the Divine Life; for our dwelling in him and he in us; thankfulness because our life is hid with Christ’s in God. The Meaning of the Presence se§ I] & Communion with Man By DUDLEY SYMON << PEGE le — 8) HE Body of our Lord Jesus Chritt, aw é On yey which was given for thee, preserve Za thy sbody and soul unto everlasting C en in Z at life.”» You are kneeling at the altar a ss =) | Ss 4QW rails to be made a sharer in the Divine vr =< Life, to become sacramentally one <8 Sb} iee & — with Christ himself. “Beside you kneels We x another human being, known to you EQ SON e8 or unknown, to whom these same words are said, this same gift is given. ‘And outside, in the early hours of a Sunday morning, there is the great world of men, asleep or awaking to a new day, for the most part indifferent to what you are doing, remote and incurious. Or, perhaps, on some week-day you are receiving the Holy Sacrament at an early Mass, and through the doors of the church there comes already, subdued but unmistakable, the hum and clatter of the day’s labours. As you kneel there, the whole mighty system of industry, commerce, and labour is gathering its momentum, fed by the hands and brains, the bodies, minds, and souls of myriads of men and women, and roars to its appointed end when the lights of Street or house call men to their pleasure or their rest. How are we to relate these three: the communicant, his neighbour at his side, and the world around? What unseen bonds thrill and tighten between you and your fellow as you receive the holy gifts? With what revived and reasserted obligations towards your brother man do you leave the sacred Presence? To what fellowship are you thereby summoned with all men, for whom, equally with yourself, the Body is given 146 Communion with Man and the Blood outpoured? As you pass from the church, newly touched by the sacred fire from the altar, what mission to humanity is yours in virtue of the consecration and bene- diction you have received? The first Step in our consideration is all-important, and in this, fortunately, we are guided by the teaching of the Church. The act of communion, says theology, unites us to the sacred Humanity of our Lord. MyStically his perfeét Manhood en- velops ours. Our own human nature, incomplete, sinful, and weak is energized and illuminated by his. So by Holy Com- munion we are in the way of becoming—looked at from this angle—not mere pale imitations of Divinity, but more truly and more fully men. We approach the Complete Man—Christ himself. We approximate to human nature as God meant it to be, but as it cannot now be unless touched by the supernatural. God means each man to be a complete, unique, and beautiful expression of his Creative Mind; complete and beautiful we certainly are not, unique, as a rule, we would much rather not be; so the communion of Christ’s Body is to help us to fulness of life, beauty of character, and the development of the talents entrusted to us. In self-examination, instead of the stupid little questions we are sometimes invited to ask, we had much better accuse ourselves of narrowness of vision, culpable ignor- ances, ugly dispositions, and facile acceptance of the Standards of the herd in which we happen to live. But there is, of course, no quality or virtue that can be con- sidered purely self-regarding. At once, the reality of our com- munion finds the material for its testing and consolidation in | our relations with other people. Our conduét towards others, our attitude to our neighbour, are the direct judgment as to whether we have “discerned the Lord’s Body” or not. By virtue of the sacramental Presence we are Christ to the next person we meet. Whatever else the world expects, it does ex- pect what may be called the “neighbourly virtues” from the Christian communicant—sympathy, kindliness, good temper, and generosity—all those things that make and keep life tolerable. Man’s nature is social, and through Holy Com- munion there should be a heightening of all the qualities that form the basis of the social life. 147 The Meaning of the Presence Is this, then, the whole matter? It can hardly be denied that it does seem sufficient to many people; and considering the triumph involved in gradually overcoming a mean dis- position or a bad temper, I am far from wishing to depreciate it. But take the matter further. To think of the Holy Sacra- ment as merely or primarily a gift to the individual, which has its repercussions, as it were, in the individual’s relations to other individuals, is, surely, so one-sided as to be almost a travesty of the true faéts. It is a reflection in the Catholic sphere of that individualism which we all condemn when we find it among “ Bible-loving”’ Protestants, but not so readily when it busies itself with candles and incense. To avoid com- plications in matters of taxation, I read that nowadays several wealthy landowners have followed the intelligent example of the Duke of Plaza-Toro, and have turned themselves into limited liability companies; it would seem that to avoid com- plication in the spiritual sphere many Christians have also pro- pounded and practised a doétrine of “limited liability ”’ as regards the scope of the Holy Communion. God, however, is even less easily mocked than the Chancellor of the Exchequer. For the point is surely this. The Holy Communion—to- gether with all the other sacraments—presupposes a social organization of which it is the “ effectual sign ””—that is, a witness to something which itself it helps to create. It witnesses, that is to say, to the Catholic Church, the Body of Chri&t. It is the gift of the Church, which, as we know, guarantees and guards its validity. Given first in the community and fellowship of the Upper Room, it ever after bears the stamp of its social origin and purpose. And the Church gives it to us, not simply for our edification and growth, but for her own. Every communion is an act of allegiance to the divine community, a witness to the claims of the whole body upon its members, a constructive aét towards the extension of the Church’s realm, a “ geSture” of fellowship, a proclamation of belief in our need of and responsibility for one another in the Divine Family. This at once takes us further than a merely increased sense of duty to our “neighbour.” For the Church is the fellowship of all the baptized, it is potentially, if not actually, the whole human race, it transcends time and 148 ee ee Communion with Man place, its frontiers pass into eternity. Even where the effect of Holy Communion may seem to be most obviously private and personal, it is the Church that is the ultimate objective; even where, by virtue of my communion, I try to be more considerate, more patient, it is the Church, more clearly appre- hended, that speaks through me and reveals to others some- thing of the glory of that fellowship and the beauty and dignity of her moral laws. ’ We cannot, therefore, in any intelligible sense consider the act of communion as affecting the individual apart from the whole Body of Christ.,The words of administration are indeed “individual” and personal, for the individual must, for one exalted moment, realize himself as the link in the chain, the soldier on whom for an instant his general’s eye is fixed, sum- moning him to the utmost of his loyalty and strength. Yet it is as soldiers that we take our “Sacramentum,” not as free- lances: men who are called to effort, discipline, and endurance on behalf of something greater than ourselves, apart from which we have no value or meaning, whose service is our own satisfaction and free and purposive life. And thus, through the Church, every communion points to our responsibilities on behalf of the Kingdom of God, the Divine Order of things, towards which we are to Struggle in the world of space and time, onward to that sphere where we believe it will be perfeétly realized. The Blessed Sacrament is an acceptance of Divine “value,” and of God’s purpose for mankind. Of Divine values—for where else do goodness, beauty, and truth receive so unqualified an affirmation? Put side by side with the Blessed Sacrament, the society of which we are a part and what it accepts as normal—the love of money, the passion for pleasure, the degradation of human life, the cynical demoralization of politics, the ugliness of industrialism, the vulgarity of wealth—it is almost meaning- less to talk of their being “ different ’—unless you think that word is adequate for contrasting heaven and hell. There are very few current standards or values in the world to-day which we are not pledged by our communion to oppose and destroy. Of God’s purpose for mankind—the « Freaking down of the partitions” between man and man, nation and nation, the 149 The Meaning of the Presence building of Christendom, the creation of social organizations that are sacramental expressions of Christian ethics, and at least a comity between the nations based on a common Faith. If Christianity is not purposive, nine-tenths of human life seems to be left without guidance and without a goal; if it is, then there is no point at which we can stop short of the complete World-Order of the Kingdom of God. And of this redemption, consecration, and re-ordering of human life, the Blessed Sacrament is the most perfect symbol that can be conceived. For the bread and wine, the expression of all man’s achievements and his joy in them, become the Body and Blood of Christ. Things natural, accepted, ordinary, while not withdrawn from their own sphere, are not allowed to find their sole meaning and value there; they become modes by which we realize the supernatural, the Divine. Seen in that light, there is nothing in your life or my life or the life of the body politic that is not Eucharistic—raw material whose fulfil- ment is transubstantiation into the fabric of the Kingdom of God. This is our proper activity, not merely as individuals, but in and through the Church. For just as you cannot isolate the individual from the Church, so the Church cannot exist in a kind of vacuum, self- - contained and self-regarding. Her creative activity, the activity of love, must seize on the vast material of human life to mould and fashion it in accordance with herself. Love is creative, and the Church’s task is neither to ignore, nor to seek to control, but to “‘ recreate’”’ the world. “In the Gospels,” says a modern writer, “the Kingdom is inseparable from the Church, and the Church is integrated into the very Structure of the Kingdom. The Church is the sacrament of the Kingdom and the sacraments of the Church are sacraments of the Kingdom. The business of the Church is to train the citizens of the Kingdom, to develop in men Kingdom-capacity and to exorcise the evil spirit which enslaves human society. It cannot allow its members to treat it as an end in itself—to find their satisfaction in its services, sacraments and institutional interests. It is to be the generating Station of those sacrificial powers which can redeem human life and lift the secular on to the spiritual plane.’’, 150 Communion with Man So the aét of communion involves us in a threefold rela- tionship with our fellow-man. First, by an immediate deepening of the Christ-life within us, it helps to destroy all that is fundamentally anti-social and unneighbourly in our per- sonalities and to strengthen all those characteristics that make for unity, fellowship, and friendliness among men. Secondly, it is a creative act within the fellowship of the Church, build- ing up the fulness of the stature of Christ, binding us to special responsibilities towards those who are of the household of faith, linking us myStically with the whole Church, militant, expectant, triumphant, and attaching to that fellowship the Strongest obligations of service and mutual aid. Thirdly, since the Holy Sacrament is the Shrine of every value, human and divine, it is an acceptance of the Will and Purpose of God for the whole life of man, spiritual and material, in time as well as in eternity; it commits us to the quest of the Kingdom of God, it compels us to examine, and, if need be, challenge the institutions of the society in which we live; it summons us to enter into the whole life of men, not as those who would dominate and rule, but as those who would serve their genera- tion and win them as fellow-workers towards the supreme end of man. “The Word was made Flesh.” The mystery of the In- carnation is the mystery of the Mass also. He took our nature upon him; so we, in communion with that same Divine Man- hood, are made one with humanity. We, who receive the Blessed Sacrament, are not only men but man; we take upon ourselves, even as he did, the joys and sorrows of the human race; we are his Body, and that Body is ever for the service of others, never for its own private needs. The Divine Presence in our souls is no private possession, but, as with him, an irradia- tion that warms and comforts and inspires our brethren. “Homo sum, humani nihil a me alienum puto” (“I am a man, I deem nothing that concerns mankind foreign to me”’), said the Roman in the play of Terence, rising to a noble height both of eloquence and dignity. With what fervour ought we to re-echo these words, we whose manhood has been glorified, not by a cold Stoic Pantheism, but by the in-dwelling of the very Incarnate God! 151 The Meaning of the Presence It was, without any doubt, the inspiration of the Blessed Sacrament that during the last two or three generations pro- duced the great mission priests of the English Church and the bands of faithful laity who supported them. “ Much cheered with thoughts of Christ, the Living Bread,” our Dollings, Stantons, Pollocks, Richard Wilsons won their way into the hearts of men, received love in return for love, revealed to many the beauty of fellowship and brought comfort and con- solation to souls in darkness and cruel habitations. The need for priests such as these has not ceased, will perhaps never cease. The comfortless sighing of the poor, in their mean and | dismal dwellings, still challenges our complacency and summons our service. Still we must hear the voice of the “Lover of souls” who calls men to that personal self-sacri- ficing work in obscure parishes, which is the heart of this movement. Still we must thrill to the prophetic words of the late Bishop of Zanzibar, who bade us seek the “naked and hungry Christ in the slum” and pray that every generation of priests and laity may find those who will respond. Yet, as we gaze at and consider the human scene and the needs of the world, some of us, I think, are conscious that, with all its greatness and nobility, this ideal of the past does not exactly coincide with the angle of our vision to-day. It is not that the older appeal has become obsolete, Still less that it has been proved false, but that it has to be fitted into a new setting, a fresh eStimation of the man’s needs, and that in this adjustment its proportions are somehow changed. For one thing, it has become impossible to think that one section of the community more than another needs the fellowship and inspiration of the Holy Sacrament. The rich need it, and need it sorely, that they may be helped to acquire a true sense of values in material things and break down the barriers that wealth creates between man and man; the middle classes need it that they may be set free from. the bonds of their besetting sins of convyentionality, insularity, and snobbery; the Public Schools need it (how they need it!) that in place of their “ muffled Christianity’ (as Mr. Wells calls it) they may know the power of the supernatural and the glory of him “ qui letificat inventutem meam.”’ 152 Communion with Man But, above all, it is the revived and newly interpreted thought of the Kingdom of God that has altered our point of view, widened and deepened it. The enthusiasm for humanity, whose motive power lies in the love of Christ, for us set forth and em- bodied in the Holy Sacrament, has in our modern times found fresh means of expression and opportunities for its realization. The vision of the past was that of Strong centres of sacra- mental life in the wilderness of our induStrialized civilization, Storehouses of humanity, brotherliness and virtuous living in a world in which these things were often sadly lacking; or of a Church, reinvigorated by Catholic truth and worship, uphold- ing these same qualities before society. Some men, indeed, went farther. They asked themselves whether the system that produced the slums, the unemployment, the bad housing, the wretched deStitution, the degradation and impoverishment of life and all the other evils they deplored, could be itself arraigned before the Christian conscience and judged by Catholic Standards. They found it intolerable to be expected to accept the position of the ambulance corps of industrialism, mitigating as far as they could its worst evils, or, more de- grading still, acting as moral policemen, inculcating patience and submission to the unhappy victims of Mammon. “Religion,” says one of the Revd. Elmer Gantry’s deacons, “is a fine thing to keep people in order. They think of higher things instead of all these Strikes and big wages and the kind of hell-raising that’s throwing the industrial system all out of kitter.”” These men had not so learned the Faith. They saw industrialism not as something indifferent, but based on the exploitation of many of the worst human passions; not as eternally existing, but cradled in the breakdown of the medieval synthesis and the foster-child of Protestantism; not as exempt from religious judgment because concerned with economics, but Standing at its bar as outraging human per- sonality, destroying liberty and making the Gospel of Christ of none effect. So there arose those great prophets of the Christian-social movement—Stewart Headlam, Shuttleworth, Marson, Scott Holland, to name only those who are no longer with us—men whom this Congress should be proud to honour, men who in 13 The Meaning of the Presence the face of prejudice, obscurantism, and malice, descended from their altars to witness for social righteousness. Some of their followers may be criticized—as who may not be?—for accept- ing too readily current economic remedies, for too much will- ingness to ally the Church with secular forces. But the spiritual _ and intellectual insight of these men remains as one of the great glories of their time and of the Catholic revival in our land. And the heart of their vision was this: the Church must return into the sphere of politics and economics from which it has withdrawn for over two hundred years. It must return, - for two centuries of secularized politics and materialistic economics have brought the world to the verge of disaster. It must return, for religion, cribbed, cabined, and confined in narrow bounds, fenced and warned off from great tracts of human life, has itself become sickly, anemic, and self-centred. It must return. But how? Not in alliance with any party or any secular policy, Still less as the tool of any, but as an inde- pendent force, developing and appealing to its own specific principles, seeking to understand the implications of its dog- matic theology and moral standards, drawing its inspiration and enlightenment from its sacramental life and worship. This is a far bigger and more august conception of our duty than any before. For it means the revival of the idea of the unity of life with a religious basis, of a Christian Commonwealth in which the Church is not a society but the society and the very soul of the whole social order as the sacramental expression of the Will of God revealed to men in the Body of Christ. Nothing less than this can be an adequate answer from the Church to the need of the world to be saved from itself and the calamitous yet glorious responsibilities with which we are faced to-day. If greater, more august and glorious—then infinitely more difficult and completely dependent on the might of the Holy Spirit. No paper scheme can be drawn up to present in detail the Will of God for the social life of man in this or in any generation. Just as after the chaos of the Dark Ages, centuries went to build up the great Structure of medieval Christendom, so centuries may have to pass before we shall achieve a fresh 154 ee Ee eg ee ee ee ee priors eee ee Communion with Man synthesis. But let us realize at least that it is to this task that God is calling us, to be pioneers, however humble, in the great reconstruction of Christendom. Have I seemed in all this to be straying from my subject, to be losing sight of the theme of the Blessed Sacrament and Man? I hope not. For surely what we are all learning is this: that life cannot be unified, cannot be refashioned so to allow full play to fellowship and co-operation, except on a supernatural foundation. That supernatural foundation is the Church, which, according to Catholic philosophy, is not, in its true being, an incidental organization, but the soul of the world, the instru- ment of the Kingdom of God, the conscience, heart, and will of the Empire of Man. And at the centre of that supernatural power, in the shrine where the eternal fires blaze upon the altar, is the abiding mystery of the God made Man, of the divine power that makes all things new, and of the voice that says of common bread “This is my Body.” It is from that experience that the new revolution must spring, the ex- perience of those who have found the Body of Christ in the Holy Bread of the Mass and thence have had the vision of the world itself as the Host ever consecrated anew on the High Altar of Heaven; who, in Communion with the Lover of men, have thereby passed into a new solidarity with their brothers; who, through their offering of the Divine Sacrifice, have, however dimly, learned that no fellowship among men is possible apart from the sacrifice of self for the good of others.” Let this Eucharistic Congress bring home to us that every time we dare to receive that Holy Food we are committing ourselves to tremendous affirmations, we are accepting a cer- tain kind and quality of life, we are declaring that there is no human a¢tivity that has not to be recaptured and reformed in accordance with the verities therein disclosed. Let our task begin with the Household of Faith. The Church here in England is our heritage and appointed instrument for the work of the Kingdom. May we so accept our service, not grudgingly, but with passionate loyalty, that every altar may be a dynamic force, every Communion a creative act for the coming of the new Christian Commonwealth—the gift that God awaits our response to bestow. 155 The Meaning of the Presence 3 Ill & Communion with God By C. P. HANKEY eV SANZ, oad ZOE OMMUNION with God is the goal 2 ay FAB ve towards which any religion that can » ) 1b eAass claim respectful attention directs its HOF [TNA @BDbpy followers. A religion that could not 2 (Ac ®S hold out a reasonable hope of such AV \\ ve s ‘} communion would have small chance {Xo \ “wa\\ of receiving the continued allegiance of WSs NESTS thoughtful people. No doétrine of im- only if it includes both the Beatific Vision of God and some kind of communion with him. The means by which mankind has sought to achieve this communion have varied because men vary in their idea of what it is which principally prevents their union with God. We shall have to consider, then, what exactly it is which we, as Christians, believe separates us from God, and the means which we believe that Christ has provided for doing away with this obstruction. But before we do this it will be useful to consider briefly what those people who have not received his revelation have felt about the’ matter, as this may help us to distinguish more clearly the nature of his revelation. Looking back over the history of religion, and observing the means by which men have sought to attain this end, we find, in the first place, a class of bizarre practices, through the use of which, it is claimed, men have drawn near to God. We find men dancing, for instance, in a frenzied, der- vish-like way; we see them using outlandish music or the rhythmical repetition of movements of the body, arms or legs, and so forth. There are examples of such things in the 156 Communion with God pages of the Old Testament, and they may be discovered to-day among certain rather unusual Christian communities. Such behaviour seems to us absurd in view of its high pur- pose, but it is really the natural outcome of a theory as to what specific thing it is which separates man from God. For the theory on which these people are working is that the gulf which separates man from God is primarily the gulf between the finite and the infinite, between finite man and infinite God. If that gulf is to be crossed it appears to them evident that somehow man must escape from his mind and his body; for it is these which appear to hold the spirit of man to this earth. By these barbarous methods you can get into a condition in which you lose all sense of the limitations of finite existence —into a State of ecstasy. Then your freed spirit can commune with its Maker. There are other beliefs about this subject of a very different kind. We find those who hold that the limitations imposed by everyday life constitute no bar to intercourse with God. God and man can enter into fellowship, no matter what the dispositions of the latter may be. Man has not to bother about his moral condition, or his psychological State, for he can use a magic which will bring God into communion with him. In this case man is not seeking to hitch his waggon to the star of the infinite, but to obtain protection and strength for the living of his life on earth. God is power, and through com- munion with him man can get power to contend with his enemies, material and spiritual. I have not mentioned these ideas only that they may be set in contrast with the Christian belief. In both of these there are elements which have a place within the Christian teaching on this subject. For there is a lifting up of the heart to God in prayer, which is an attempt to bridge the gulf which separates finite man from infinite God. There is also some- thing that corresponds with the belief that somehow the power which lies in God can reach man, even though he be so unruly and the prey of such odd illusions. There is a divine invasion, a Strength which comes to us from without, and its coming does not depend upon ecstatic conditions. But these ideas are Strangely transmuted in the teaching of Christ. The impetus 157 The Meaning of the Presence to seek communion with God does not arise in Christians be- cause they are oppressed by the sense of the limitations under which they live on this earth, since our Lord himself submitted to them. Nor is it the desire for power which Stimulates them, because, again, Christ came among them “as he that doth serve.” What is it then which distinguishes the Christian belief from others? First of all, we observe that it begins quite differently. We have just seen how those others have begun by emphasizing the unlikeness of God to man. The Christian begins by em- phasizing their “keness—that is to say, he begins with the memory that man was created in the divine image. If there is to be communion between them it must be on the basis of that likeness, for such intercourse can only be between like and like. You cannot know a person with whom you have nothing in common. His next thought is: “ But that divine image was lost by man, or largely lost, through his deliberate sin.” The gulf, then, which must be bridged for the reStora- tion of this communion is not so much that between the finite and the infinite, as between that which is and that which ought to be—in faét, that which lies between sinful man on the one hand and Holy God on the other. It is primarily because of the consciousness of corporate and individual sin that communion with God seems to the Christian an unattainable wonder. He Stands like Alice in Wonderland looking into a garden he cannot enter. How could communion ever be thought of with- out lowering one’s conception of God? If such a thing is really possible, either the prophetic conception of God’s holi- ness is surely wrong, or else man is more capable of a radical moral change than his history suggests. Such are the alternatives which confront us as we close the Old Testament. And when we open the New, that dilemma might seem at first sight to have become more pronounced than ever. For if the death of Jesus is the price of sin, God’s holiness must be even more awful than the prophets perceived it to be.” But the New Testament does not merely deepen that impression of God’s holiness which we inherit from the Old. That very death of Jesus taught us something further about 158 Communion with God God which we could not otherwise have believed, for he died not only as a man does, for his friends, but as God does, for his enemies. We learn, in fa¢t, that God is more than holi- ness—that his nature is expressed most richly and deeply by the word “love.” And we learn further that this inmost nature of God has received concrete expression in “the one mediator between God and man, himself man, Christ Jesus, who gave himself a ransom for all.” And here we come to the great wonder of the Christian faith, the source of our hope that human beings may have communion with Deity. Christ Jesus, “ himself man,” holds perfect communion with the Father. On the Cross God and man are absolutely at one. The conditions are at last fulfilled, for like is holding communion with like. The divine image is expressed as perfectly as it can be on Calvary, and the Christian faith really begins with this accord between the Mind of Christ on the Cross and the Heavenly Father. The thing is possible then; but what about ourselves? Can we, in whom that divine image has, to say the least, been smudged, can we have what Jesus had? That, too, is possible through Christ’s redeeming act. If, by the power of that act and the Strength which the love of that act engenders, we share the Mind of Christ, we may attain, through union with him, what he attained. But we must be endeavouring to share the thoughts of that Mind towards the Father, towards the brethren and towards ourselves; we must be hating sin and loving righteousness, for like can only hold communion with J like. It is not our business here to show how man may come to perceive within himself the fruits of Christ’s redemption through such individual aéts as penitence and prayer and adoration. Such means must be imperfect by themselves just because they are individual aéts, whereas we are, in his Mind, a family. As a family, a race, a people, our means of union with God mutt be a social aét—mutt be, in fact, that rite the first purpose of which is the continual remembrance of the death of his Son. The Eucharist would be for this purpose efficacious, even though it were a rite unauthorized by Christ, and bare, since its object is that remembrance. Offered with 159 The Meaning of the Presence that terribly serious intention, it would be a true vehicle of communion with the Mind of Christ, which is to say a com- munion with God. It is not, however, a bare rite, but a service with a promise. The Eucharist is an integral part of that sacrifice which the Son offered on the Cross; it is that by the Will of Christ himself: “Take, eat,’ he said, “this is my Body.” We can no more separate the Mass from the sacrifice on Calvary than we can separate the institution of the rite on Maundy Thursday from the Altar of the Cross on Good Friday. Now, this supreme a¢ct of worship is the confession by the Christian family, first, of God’s holiness, and, second, of the awfulness of sin—just those two facts which we have seen rise before the consciousness of our family when it seeks com- munion with God. So far are we from seeking that com- munion, by forgetting or glossing over the uncomfortable reality of sin, that the very rite itself which Christ provided is a public recognition of our acknowledgment of it, since nothing less than the death of the Son of God could avail for its overthrowing. But also in this holy sacrifice we are taught how that which separates can be done away, because in it God is set forth as Self-giving, and we are allowed to partake of that which he gives in the new life which comes from his death, to drink of “the fountain opened to the house of David and to the inhabitants of Jerusalem for sin and for unclean- ness.” These unruly subjects of God are allowed to unite themselves with that offering on the Cross, which is the Mind of Christ, the human likeness of God. Communion with God! That must be the greatest of human experiences, and it is nothing less than this that happens when we receive Holy Communion. But when we approach that sacrament, whatever may be the joy we experi- ence, it falls short of the wonder which the words “‘ com- munion with God” would surely lead us to expeét. We have been taught only that our communions must be made with devotion; why were we not also taught that they should be made with ecstasy? For the very simple reason that a dis- cipline of preparation for communion which would ensure such ecstasy would need to be a discipline which severed soul and body—a discipline which would free our spirits from the 160 Communion with God trammels of earthly existence. Remember, therefore, the words which are said as we partake of that holy food: “ The Body of our Lord Jesus Christ which was given for thee preserve thy Jody and soul unto everlasting life.” It is our whole person, body and soul, which is to be brought within the sphere of redemption, not the spirit only. Our mental and physical condition is bound to play an important part in this experience. It is for this reason that those who receive Holy Communion with very little sensible devotion, feeling far colder than they would wish about it, may yet be drawing near with greater profit to their souls than those whose experi- ence appears more thrilling. The former may be trying to bring the whole of their lives with all their crippling dis- abilities; the latter may be cutting their life in two and offering only that part of it which we call spirit, an at which may be unaccompanied by any moral effort. It is “ ourselves, our souls and bodies” to which the promise has been given, and it is ourselves, our souls and bodies which we pray may some time enter into rapt communion with their Maker and Redeemer. ‘If we approach this aét with self-forgetful minds we shall not be seeking ecstasy therein, but a moral change to the like- ness of Christ through his redeeming power. We discover, then, that there are no easy consolations to be had through Holy Communion, for the deeper our experience of it the greater we find the call upon our fortitude, since in that life which gives access to God there is pain. The Body was broken and the Blood was shed for the remission of sins. It is a communion with God through receiving that which, by Christ’s own will and act, conveys himself to us, not as he lived once in Galilee, but as he is and was and ever will be, the Lamb slain before the foundation of the world. » M 161 The Reserved Sacrament 1 & Its Use for Communion By H. F. B. MACKAY 20837 HAVE been asked to deal with a wy, small practical point in connection : Sa? with the subject of the Fioly pa Eucharist. The title of my paper is avd \ “The Reserved Sacrament: Its Use ; for Communion.” ye’ You have been reminded again