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THE TEACHING OF CHRIST: An attempt to appreciate the main linea- ments of the- Teaching of Christ in their Historical Proportion. By the Rev. EDWARD GORDON SELWYN, M.A., Warden of Radley, formerly Fellow of Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, and Examining Chaplain to the Bishop of London. THE PROBLEM OF EVIL. By the Rev. PETER GREEN, M.A., Canon of Manchester. PRINCIPLES OF CHURCHMANSHIP. By the Rev. G. E. NEwsom, M.A., Professor of Pastoral Theology in King’s College, London, Reader at the Temple Church, CHURCH AND STATE: An Historical Sketch of the Church of England in its relations with the State. By DouGLAs EyrE, B.A., Barrister-at-Law. LONGMANS, GREEN AND CO. LONDON, NEW YORK, BOMBAY, AND CALCUTTA SPIRITUAL RELIGION SPIRITUAL RELIGION ag HE et Mitea ee ae : i > nm, - ae BY ERNEST DAWSON, M.A. WORCESTER COLLEGE, OXFORD RECTOR OF CAIRNS, N. QUEENSLAND FORMERLY CURATE OF S. SAVIOUR’S, POPLAR LONGMANS, GREEN AND CO. 39 PATERNOSTER ROW, LONDON NEW YORK, BOMBAY, AND CALCUTTA 1914 All rights reserved CONTENTS CHAP, PAGE INTRODUCTORY , ; je ss Vil I. Tue Hoty Spirit in UNIVERSAL NATURE . I II, THe Hoty Spirir Werkinc IN THE CHURCH , 22 III, THe Hoty Spirir Workine THROUGH THE SACRAMENTS, ‘ ‘ : : reese IV. THe Ho.y Spirit in THE INDIVIDUAL CHRIS- TIAN A ; : : : : ‘ 94 V. THE Hoty Spirir in Human CHARACTER , 120 APPENDIX ., ; : ; : é “0 (E42 INTRODUCTORY THE aim of this little book is to set down in the light of the needs of to-day the doctrine of the Holy Spirit. A few years ago it might have been said, and indeed was said, that men as a whole were unconscious of the operation of the Holy Spirit. That is to say, men went about their work, their study, their prayers without much conscious realisa- tion that in so doing they were vehicles of the Spirit's power, or dependent upon His guidance. It was not merely a failure of consciousness, it in- volved a failure of spiritual power, an excessive trust in machinery, a lack of adventure in spiritual experience. In one direction there was a tendency to a false individualism in religion, because the Church as a body, with all its organisation and its Sacraments, necessarily seemed lifeless unless there was discerned within it the Holy Spirit, the Giver of life ; and at the same time, and in the other direc- tion, there was a failure of individual religious ex- perience and effort, because without the sense that their own bodies are the temples of the Holy Ghost men’s religion tended to take the form of mere vii Vill SPIRITUAL RELIGION membership in an association which happened to be called a Church involving aims, duties, and privileges, and certain doctrines to be held. Now though the past tense is used, of course the same facts are visible in the Church life of to-day, just as it is equally true that in the past all that was most living and productive was the work of the Holy Spirit, and through men and women who knew the secret of their power. | Under the operation of the Holy Spirit Himself Many Causes may be traced for the revival of spiritual life as it is in a measure revived at the present time. The numerous books of greater and less importance are at once expressions and causes of active interest in the subject. The quickening of the sense of corporate life in the Church and the use of the Sacraments is forcing men to discover the source of these realities, Missionary zeal and the missionary spirit have thrown men’s thoughts back to Pente- cost, and if such things also are to be regarded rather as results than as Causes, perhaps the ten- dencies of modern thought, with its reaction against materialism, point in the same direction. When philosophers are teaching that reality is movement, when a non-Christian, speaking to an audience of Church people, while flippantly deprecating the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ and the love of God, recommends them to cultivate the fellowship INTRODUCTORY 1X of the Holy Ghost, it is natural that Christians should examine with renewed interest what their Creed tells them of the indwelling Spirit of God. _One of the chief difficulties which people have felt, is in regarding the Third Person of the Blessed Trinity as a Person at all. It is not difficult to understand why this is so. : In the crude or obvious sense of the word “ per- sonal” (and that is the sense which matters to ordinary people), we represent the Son as a Person more easily than the Father or the Holy Spirit. Our conception of God the Son is affected by all our associations of personality which belong to a human person, because of the Incarnation. It is true of the Christian that he knows Jesus first. Start- ing from our knowledge of Jesus as we know Him in the Gospels, or as we think we arrive at Him through criticism of the Gospels—the figure of the Man of Nazareth—we pass on to the Christ of the Church’s, and of our own experience, to the Christ of the Blessed Sacrament, to the Christ whois in the midst of us, even to the Christ who is in our hearts and would be in our lives. He never ceases to be the Person. The later-mentioned experience of Christ will lead us to an apprehension of the Spirit’s personality. When theologically we consider the Second Person of the Trinity, so true is it that the personal associations belonging to Jesus Christ still hold us x SPIRITUAL RELIGION that it is actually accurate to say that having been Incarnate He has borne our human nature before the throne of God. It is the Glorified Christ that faith apprehends, no abstraction of passionless Deity. Once more, when we pass a little way from such a thought to that of the Word without whom nothing was made that was made, we are helped towards some understanding of the Person of the Holy Spirit. Again, in popular ideas personality is more easily conceived in relation to the Father than to the Holy Spirit. The divine attributes which we ascribe to the Creator tend to anthropomorphism. The thought of the Maker, Ruler, Controller, and the very name of Father, used much by the Jews, but emphasized and strengthened in the revelation of Jesus Christ, help us, whether rightly or wrongly, to conceive of God as an almighty Person. Difficulties abound ; our well-reasoned distrust of anthropo- morphisms, our recognition, it may be, of a vague First Cause, the doctrine of divine immanence, modify the crudity of unspiritual supernaturalism, but somehow we are left with a faith in a Father of Spirits and a soul of all things who is above all personal. Here again, in apprehending God who is not only above all, but through all, and in us all, we are approaching a conception of the person of God the Holy Spirit. INTRODUCTORY XI The Holy Spirit is God working in and through nature, mankind, Christ, Church, Sacraments. Perhaps for convenience of thought, the sphere of His operation, which of course in its entirety is the universe itself, may be divided into three: (1) Nature, including mankind as a whole; (2) the Church and its means of grace; (3) the heart of the individual man. The mistake has been made of over-emphasizing one part at the expenseof the others, as though the Spirit of God first came into existence at Pentecost, or had no interest in God’s creation outside the chosen people of Old or New Testament times; or again, He has been treated as a mere personification of the Christian spirit in the indi- vidual heart, and wearisome moralisings on love, joy, peace, and subtle disquisitions on wisdom, understanding, counsel are the result, leaving in the mind a sense of ingenious unreality. Any attempt to describe the working of God must necessarily be conditioned by the restrictions of a human outlook, and the method adopted in the following chapters will be frankly inductive. By examining the experience of the Church and of Christians, and setting that experience alongside of any knowledge which we may have derived from natural or moral sciences about the facts of the world, we learn to discern the particular manifesta- tions of the indwelling Spirit of God. It is un- xil SPIRITUAL RELIGION satisfactory to deduce His operations from texts: ~ even those words of His which S. John’s Gospel puts into the teaching of Our Lord about the Spirit must _be and are confirmed in Christian experience. Our need is to know the Holy Spirit, not with a view to accuracy of theological scholarship, but to give direction and force to our devotion, and to gain inspiration that we may give ourselves as means for His work. We want to look at the world, at the Church, and at Christian consciousness and character in such a way that we may discover therein the manifestations of Divine Purpose and Determination. If we succeed in that discovery, we shall have apprehended the Person of the Holy Spirit of God, for purpose and self-determination is what we mean by personality, and God working within the world, informing and determining it, is what we mean by the Holy Spirit, and this is the only sphere which, from the fact of our nature, we are able to explore. SPIRITUAL RELIGION CHAPTER I THE HOLY SPIRIT IN UNIVERSAL NATURE § 1. IN INANIMATE NATURE THE world has evolved and is evolving ; the phrase is indefinite enough. Evolution does not in itself involve purpose. The old argument from design helps us very little to understand the working of the Spirit of God. It is only another way of saying that the world is not chaos, and that things are determined by one another. It tells us nothing of an immanent spirit, it leaves us at the best with a deistic theory of the universe. Even if we boldly exempt ourselves from this divinely designed mechanism, and assume that we have that spiritual freedom which we experience, we find ourselves solitary in a universe which we cannot affect, cased as it were in bodies which are in no way subject | to ourselves, The discovery that things are not so much made to fit as become to fit is an advance, because it brings creation into the present. A universe in which there is no becoming would land one in A 2 SPIRITUAL RELIGION dualism or pantheism. When we see that matter is all a phase of becoming, then we understand that it is the becoming which is real. First cause and final cause are strictly material conceptions, and neither explains either the being or the purpose of God; becoming, motion, life is a spiritual reality, and the Christian will not hesitate to call it the Spirit of God. Can God’s will be thwarted? From our limited point of view it is thwarted by the disobedience of man. Knowing the better, and that it will prevail, we follow after the worse and make it our action ; we negate the Divine Spirit within us. We can only look at a little part of the whole at one time. If we could see as God seeth, perhaps we should understand that nothing is outside His © purpose, but we must be content with a finite experi- ence and a larger faith. This does not suggest that God may be ultimately responsible for what we call our misdeeds, in short for sin. If there is such a thing as human personality, which is a fact of experience, the responsibility for sin remains with man. But sin means our conscious refusal of God’s will and our declining on some other choice. There is this other course of action which we can choose. Sin consists in choosing it. Matter is neither good nor bad in itself, moreover it is inert; but the material world is not inert, it is the sphere or the phase of motion. So is it not true to say things and events, even apart from human sin, appear and are to us less than gocd, as it were, blocking to the divine THE HOLY SPIRIT IN NATURE 3 motion? That other course which tempts us to sin, but is not sin until or unless we choose it, is at least relatively to us evil, and it appears manifest not only in relation to our action but in the universe as a whole. This may appear fantastic, and it is certainly clumsily expressed, but the question must be asked, “On what other grounds do we permit. — ourselves to pray for things which are entirely determined by physical causes?”’ The health of a sick friend, safety on a journey, rain, fair weather, and such things are as completely determined as anything can be. To pray to God to inter- fere with the order of nature which He has or- dained is both presumptuous and absurd. All prayer must be for the accomplishment of God’s will, therefore if a sick person is restored {o strength through prayer, the restoration is God’s will, and if that person had died it would, relatively to our view, have been contrary to God’s will. The real thing contrary to God’s will would be the lack of faith, the indifference or whatever it was that prevented the prayer being made; nevertheless from our standing-point it may be said that the prayer of faith may save the sick person, and that such an event is a more perfect fulfilment of God’s will than if the prayer were unsaid and the life of the sick man lost. All prayer, then, is for the accom- plishment of God’s will. But the accomplishment of His will is the action of His Spirit. Prayer, too, is the activity of the human spirit towards accordance or communion with the Divine Spirit ; it is a form 4 SPIRITUAL RELIGION of self-sacrifice which means the losing of our personality in God’s. But there is but one Holy Spirit. Hewho works mightily within us, to whom we surrender ourselves, is He who is moving through the order of suns, and planets, and rainfall, and volcanoes, and through the operation of the laws of physical health. We can pray, therefore, for a life, for weather, for an opportunity, because our prayer is an activity of our personal nature towards accordance with God’s will, and in so far as it is so it makes for the perfecting of God’s will—that is, in effect, for the answer to our prayer. Two notes may be added. First that there is nothing exaggerated in the idea that our prayers may so alter the course of things. Few of us would deny that a lancet, or quinine, or a good drainage system may in certain circumstances save a life, or that the planting of trees may increase rainfall, or even that scientists may discover a means of averting earthquakes. If it gives us no shock that the lives of “innocent persons’’ depend on such human activi- ties and discoveries, we need not think it impious to suppose that some seeming disaster would not have happened if only we had been able to pray with faith. Secondly, to pray with faith, if the essence of prayer is as described above, is not to pray with the conviction that God will grant the answer to the strength of our prayer ; thatisegotism. Praying with faith involves self-abandonment, and that very con- viction that it is God’s will which is to be accom- plished and not our own. THE, HOLY “SPIRIT: IN NATURE «5 Weare led then chiefly by the experience of prayer but also by reflection to grasp more directly the truth that the Holy Spirit is the living creative force in all that we call nature, and in Him we have relation to the rest of creation. There remains the one real problem, What is it which seems, as it were, to hinder the purpose of . God? We can at least say this: it is the spirit, the force which is the reality. The spirit is impressed in matter, and matter is only an expression of the spirit. Matter is not evil, only a happening can conceivably be evil, and that only in relation toa consciousness. When in the ascending scale of nature the evil action is done by a person possessing self-determination, it becomes a fall, a fall from the functioning of personality, i.e. of moral endeavour and control, to that of a lower determinant, and sin is original in man just because those lower deter- minants are present in his nature. But when we come to examine the lower determinant we see that the evil consists in the choosing of it, and it can only be described as evil itself on the ground that it is the negation of a higher possibility. So then the pantheist is right when he asserts that evil is negative, but the Christian is more right when he contends that sin is positive. Sin is positive because it is the determination of a conscious being, it has spiritual reality. The problem of evil apart from sin, though it remain unsolved in regard to sentient im- personal creatures, is fully explained in the most pressing case, human suffering, which is also the 6 SPIRITUAL RELIGION case on which we have the most right to expect ex- _ planation. The sufferings of a Job are the oppor- tunity of spiritual birth ; the sufferings of Christ, apart from their cause, which was sin, were the expression of His own self-sacrifice which through the Eternal Spirit He made. § 2. THE HOLY SPIRIT IN MANKIND So far we have surveyed the manifestation of the Holy Spirit as He works in the unconscious and out- wardly determined world. We have considered the Spirit as the Divine personality acting in that sphere in which there is no conscious resistance, though whether there is unconscious resistance our know- ledge seemed too relative for us to dogmatise. The second sphere of the Spirit’s work is mankind. Into questions whether it is possible to construct or to discover a personality in society as such it fortu- nately is unnecessary to go. But there is a progress in the history of mankind as a whole. Civilisations represent movement. The life of a nation has a meaning. Politics are a country’s morals. Now if the Spirit of God does work through nature, and it is meaningless to us unless we hold so, it is surely clear that we must look for and recognise His presence in the general activities of mankind. It is true that men, unlike beasts, have sinned and fallen from grace, but that does not imply that God has ceased to work His purpose out through them. On the contrary, in the most orthodox theology the Fall of man is the THE HOLY SPIRIT IN NATURE 7 occasion for the age-long preparation of the world for the Incarnation of the Son of God. That is the work of the Spirit moulding the destinies of nations from within until the time was fulfilled. If the world needed preparation then, it needs it still; the problems of Church extension are as great as ever, though different in kind. Secondly, not only is the Church to extend but it is to grow, and though ~ - by its own vigour it will absorb its food, the food which will thus supply new strength is the genesis of races and nations, and what has moulded this genesis but the Spirit of God ? Thirdly, unless the Holy Spirit is working in the world at large, the world and the Church are out of all spiritual relationship to one another, and the Church cannot hope to affect or to win the world. No amount of leaven will leaven the whole lump if the lump is partly composed of cast iron, It is true that the Church increases by individual conversions, also that the whole world is sunk in wickedness, but it is nevertheless true that there is good as well as evil in civilisation, that there are national and racial virtues, that politics may and do embody the designs of God. The motion of God’s Spirit is here dis- cerned. The acceptance of this truth is justified by the Incarnation, and moreover it justifies the hope that the world in its fullness can be saved to God. The appreciation of this truth is of enormous im- portance to Church life. If the Christian religion denies the direct religious value of human institu- tions and the expression of God’s will through them, 8 SPIRITUAL RELIGION _ Christians must either neglect them altogether as - outside the range of God’s purpose, or at least they must consider their religion as unconnected with them. In the former case Christianity is to be an esoteric cult, proclaiming the salvation indeed of the body, but denying the fellowship and common life of which the body is a part. In the second case we have formally promulgated the doctrine whose ruinous effects are only too common in the practice of the present day, that religion must not interfere with business, with social conventions, and with political undertakings. This is indeed one of the heresies which a really spiritual religion, a belief in God the Holy Spirit, must take in hand to overthrow. The open impiety of the doctrine that the Christian is not concerned with politics is only moderately veiled in the kindred pronouncement that the priest must not be mixed up in parties, Itis at least as doubtful whether a Chris- tian ought to be a member of the Stock Exchange or serve in the wars, or whether a priest ought to have a family or even a body at all. To say that a Christian or a priest in particular should have nothing to do with this or that party may be a well-reasoned moral judgment. But what is important to insist upon, because of the atheism of much conventional churchmanship on the matter, is that the Holy Spirit is working out God’s purpose in the affairs of men, with very much Opposition from men; that that purpose is commonly though partially expressed in party policy; and that the THE HOLY SPIRIT IN NATURE 9 Church as the special organ of the Spirit has a special responsibility for promoting that purpose. If it is a question of the unpopularity involved in adhesion to a party, it would seem that the priest, who is also the prophet in the Christian Church, is the very person to incur it. Thus belief in the Spirit’s universal mission brings _ on the members of the Christian Church the duty of work and labouring by themselves and with others in the common or public life of men. If they find themselves at times in queer company they know that Jesus did too, and so has the divine element in their own bodily organisation. There may well be room in the Spirit’s divine scheme for orders or individuals who forsake the world, but that is not the norm, and it remains true that reform of parties, as of every other organisation, must ordi- narily come from within, for that is the method of the Divine Spirit Himself. The duty of work includes the duty of prayer, and true work depends upon it. There is no excuse for the Christian, and still more the priest who throws himself into public affairs, ceasing to be a man of prayer, and a man of prayer, too, in respect of these public affairs. The Church, too, as a body must make social advance more regularly a subject of prayer. We do not want additional state prayers, nor do we want only authorised wails wrung from dismayed bishops when war, or a blow from the manual workers, brings a national catastrophe to disturb ite) SPIRITUAL RELIGION the careless indifference of the Church. We need _ the earnestness to apply the spiritual principles of the kingdom of God to social and economic organi- sation, which will naturally express itself in prayer to the Spirit. We could use and understand offer- ings of the Holy Sacrifice with special intention for the establishment of justice, or during local elections. We could prepare to vote at a general election by a day of continuous intercession. It is by activity of work and prayer, by courage in applying its own principles, and by facing unpopularity with its supporters, that the Church can show the spirit of self-sacrifice which makes it actually the instrument of the Spirit of God. § 3. THE HOLy SPIRIT IN THE HUMAN MIND What has already been said as to the Holy Spirit working in human affairs applies equally to the case of the human mind and knowledge. Just as it is necessary to appreciate His presence in the whole political and social movement of the world in order rightly to have faith in His guidance of the Church, so too, unless we are prepared to find His inspira- tion and to learn from Him through the ordinary channels of human knowledge, our belief in the truth of Christian doctrine and in His guidance thereof will be artificial and departmental. A dogma which is described as true for a Christian but not for, say, a naturalist is not really true at all. If the scientist and the historian on the one hand, THE HOLY SPIRIT IN NATURE 11 and ourselves on the other, do not mean the same thing by truth whatever we are talking about, and our definition of truth is discovered to be “what the Church teaches,” a respecter of truth will rightly be indifferent to anything which we include in the category of truth. It is equally clear that truth being necessarily in this sense one, the Christian _ who believes that the Holy Spirit is the teacher of — truth must necessarily believe that He is the teacher of all truth. Some very important considerations follow from this platitude, and they all bear on the Christian’s attitude to what is called secular knowledge. The distinction between secular and religious knowledge may be useful so long as it is understood that it is about as real as that between religious and profane music. The distinction, that is, lies in the purpose and in the temper in which the knowledge is used. Absolutely, no knowledge is secular, for natural science is knowledge of the Spirit’s method in one sphere, history in another, philosophy in another, we may add contemplation in another. Theology is scientia scientiarum, for all truth is but a depart- ment of the science which tells us about God, though for practical purposes we may be content to narrow the meaning of the term. Few religious people with any claim to intelligence would now be concerned to pronounce the theory of evolution to be impious, but it is questionable how far the temper in which the Origin of Species T2 SPIRITUAL RELIGION was met is still rife. People may be right or wrong - in condemning a new scientific hypothesis ; all that we are here concerned to point out is that religious obscurantism as a way of meeting scientific or his- torical theories is a virtual denial of the Holy Spirit. The way in which He would teach us of the origin of life would be biology, and if a theory seem impro- bable or otherwise objectionable, the arguments against it must be biological. The arguments in favour of the date or authority of any book, biblical or otherwise, must necessarily be literary and his- torical ; no other line of argument would really meet the case. If the Virgin birth of our Lord is im- pugned on scientific grounds or on the character of the evidence, it simply does not touch the argument to assert that it was necessary in order to cut off the entail of sin. That might be a possible hypothesis, though in my mind a very unconvincing one, to meet the argument that it was purposeless and there- fore did not occur. We must respect all the approaches to knowledge and desire to learn from them, and it is no loyalty to the Spirit of Truth to block the path which He seems to be opening for us with an obstacle which may be our own misunderstanding. No science ever established or refuted a spiritual truth ; from their nature they can only deal with the setting which occasions or expresses them. This setting it is their province to criticise, and if they can teach us anything of the facts it will help us to under- stand the truth more fully. THE HOLY SPIRIT IN NATURE 13 The Christian must not fear that science or thought, in so far as they are true, can be derogatory to faith. Faith is an activity of the same Spirit who purges or extends the content of faith by every advance in knowledge. Again, truth itself may not be progressive, but our apprehension of it certainly isso. There we recognise the movement of the Spirit. The attitude to which reference has been made is very largely a preference for what we know to any admission of movement at all. Logically that is a confusion of our know- ledge with absolute truth. As a religious condition it is a misconception of the nature of the Holy Spirit. But someone may say that notwithstanding all that can be said in favour of secular knowledge there are certain truths which have been revealed by the Holy Spirit of God Himself, which it is our duty to main- tain against all attacks ; ‘‘ we know beforehand,” he may say, “ that the reasoning or the premises of the attacks is false.’”’ That is perfectly true. No attack of a geologist can impair my belief in the One God, because any conceivable discoveries of geology only extend my knowledge of God’s method of creation, and do not touch my belief in God. My attitude will be that of the writer of Genesis, who took the Babylonian myth of creation, assuming it to be true in its facts though not in its reflections upon them, as being the best that the science of his time could offer him. He took the science and subjected it to his own monotheism. Again, no historical attack will be allowed by the 14 SPIRITUAL RELIGION Christian on the truth that Jesus is the Lord and _ that He is risen from the dead. That truth is some- thing far higher than an item of historical record, and history could only affect the form in which the truth is expressed. ! There are historical events which we are concerned to defend just because they do express some saving truth, but our faith is a very feeble activity of the Spirit if it depends on the support of some particular historical expression. History in this respect stands on the level of the sensuous perception. It may lead to faith, it may express faith, but it is not faith. “Because thou hast seen Me thou hast believed ; blessed are they who have not seen and yet have believed.” § 4. THE HOLY SPIRIT IN HUMAN CONSCIENCE Alongside of political and intellectual movement there is the ethical. The Gentiles who have not the law do by nature the works of the law. There is a very wide difference between ethical science and ethics considered as actual conduct. The former helps us to understand the Spirit’s movement in the adjustment of human nature. The rival theories of hedonism, utilitarianism, moral conscience, beauty, intuition, represent truths of a complex nature which is directed by the Spirit towards the divine. To represent the pleasure involved in moral action as “our incidental end” rather than as ‘the end”’ is valuable for the purposes of systema- THE HOLY SPIRIT IN NATURE 1 tisation rather than the actual description of facts. To rule out the conception of “higher pleasure” as qualifying pleasure by some other standard will not impress the Christian very much, for to him the “other standard” is the energy of the Holy Spirit within him, which is in the truest sense himself, The quality is in himself, not in the pleasure. Quantity and quality are the same thing when applied to motion. The Christian may say that it gives him more pleasure to relieve a poor man than to buy himself a meringue or a motor car, or higher pleasure, or it is more useful, or simply he must. In any case he means he is trying to live, and his life is through an Eternal Spirit to lose that life and find it in God. He will contemplate the same motives at work in human nature apart from the Christian consciousness, and see in them the movement of the Divine Spirit. When we come to the actual differences of con- duct, and even of ideals of conduct, between Christian morality and that by which it may be surrounded, we are face to face with one of the chief problems of the day. We appreciate the difficulty most in the case of a civilisation which, as a matter of history, has been largely moulded by Christian influences; though probably missionaries, especially those who work amidst established civilisations, feel their divergences as acutely. One law of the Spirit’s motion is that He works through men’s personality. They must co-operate ; 16 SPIRITUAL RELIGION His work must be their act. There is, in short, no ~ compulsion of the will. It would be well to bear this in mind in the doubts that arise through conflicting moralities. Christians may be in a position to force their moral code, though never their morality, upon a nation which is largely non-Christian. It would not appear to be God’s method to do so. Christian or Church discipline can only rightly be maintained among Christians or churchmen. Surely the reason of this is that being a Christian is in the ordinary sense perfectly voluntary, and unless discipline and rules of life and conduct rest somewhere on a voluntary basis they become legalism. The law of compulsion, equally with the law of obligation which S. Paul combated, is contrary to the religion of the Spirit. What is discipline, then, within the ranks of the Church is compulsory morality (a contradiction in terms) when applied to those without. This does not demonstrate that Christians are bound to support facilities for divorce for all outside the Christian Church, but it does make it clear that they must not impose the view of the marriage bond on the nation on the ground that it is the law of the Church. A nation as such frames its own moral customs, and the churchman as a citizen has as good aright as any other citizen to contribute his view to the national counsels on these matters. Nevertheless, being aware that his view is determined by his religion, not shared in a practical sense by his fellow-citizens, he may be quite willing to let them adopt their own THE, HOLY -SPIRIT- IN NATURE 17 standard, as being the best that their own conscience supplies. If the Church holds up and demands of its members a higher marriage law than carries the moral assent of the nation as a whole, it is perhaps a gain to the Church that it should in this example make clear that its morality stands on a different basis than the civil law, and that it makes a claim primarily on the will of those who share its common life. Much has been said about the inconvenience of variation between the civil and Church rule in such a matter, and no doubt it is a shock after many centuries of ecclesiastical law and establishment ‘ but it is by no means clear that just such variation is not required to bring home to churchmen “ what manner of spirit they are of.” As for the effect on non-churchmen and national life, we shrink from countenancing a moral retrogression, but the loss of the religious sense, which is patent, is a retrogression, and compulsory practice unsupported by conscience is non-moral and useless. If the state of affairs looks to us like degeneration in civilisation we need not therefore be pessimists. On the contrary, faith bids us be assured that this which seems to us a loss of morality is the working of the Holy Spirit to- wards the attainment of a higher morality, which shall rest not on enactment, but on spiritual freedom of choice. The standards of Christian and civil morality have been too much confused: we have yet to see what will be the effect upon the world of a Church which proclaims and lives upon a higher level of conduct than the law demands. — B 18 SPIRITUAL RELIGION Of course it need hardly be said that the attempt of the State to force its lower standard on the Church, or to interfere with the Church’s disposition of its Sacraments, is a condition of affairs which the Church must not tolerate for a moment. It is indeed sur- prising that any individuals or society should have the vulgarity to expect it. The case of the marriage law is only one example of moral conflict between Church and State. The question of religious educa- tion is another, the regulation of illicit sexual inter- course another. In these and other problems it will help us to true solutions to consider what we know of the Spirit of God, especially that force without will is contrary to His method in dealing with mankind, and that the voluntary embodiment of an ideal together with self-sacrifice is His way of winning the wills and energies of human beings. An altogether different subject under this heading of the Spirit in human conscience is the recognition of the movement of the Spirit towards a more just relationship between man and man. It is to be seen in the development of human society and the ideas that are governing it. It is to be seen again in the principles which govern the life of the Church with its order of duties, privileges, Sacraments, and fellow- ship. The Church is undoubtedly a socialistic organisation. Its members are equal, not in merit or honour paid to merit, yet equal in rights when the food of the soul is distributed, equal as brothers without distinction of rank; no members control the spiritual life of others, even paternally “for their THE HOLY SPIRIT IN NATURE 19 own good,” and its hierarchy of officials may only address themselves to the people as their “servants for Jesus’ sake.” If the Spirit who is responsible for such a constitution is the Spirit who is to inform the whole world, the principles which He has thus laid down must be universal, and they are to be applied to the social order of men, and_ their economic organisation. Socialism in theory is charming to many who are as far as possible from carrying out any of its designs. Curiously enough, many Christians belong to the class described. But to a Christian who has faith and believes in the Holy Spirit, theory without practice would be something perilously near that sin which has no forgiveness. Certainly such people are the hardest to convert, which is perhaps what that text means. It is not really difficult to distinguish proposals which have a socialistic tendency : several critics are quite ready to assist in that labour, and the Christian must have very good reasons for not supporting them. Again, though an opportunist or a sceptic might be frightened off by the local association of Socialism with inadmissible tenets or proposals, the Christian will never descend to such an argument, Rather he will throw himself with more vigour into socialistic circles because he knows that reform comes from within, and that the Holy Spirit of God Himself works His good purpose ina body which is the seat of many evil desires and wayward fancies, and it serves Him better than that body of respecta- 20 SPIRITUAL RELIGION bility which is opposed alike to all change, whether for the better or the worse. Goodness is regarded by philosophy usually as an end. To ordinary Protestantism it is The End; but in the Church idea and to the religion of the Spirit, it is rather a result or an expression of life. Eternal life, living by the Spirit, is the end, and morality is the fruit of a spiritual life, not the law at which we aim. “For when we were in the flesh, the sinful passions, which were through the law, wrought in our members to bring forth fruit unto death. But now we have been discharged from the law, having died to that wherein we were holden ; so that we serve in newness of the spirit, and not in oldness of the letter.” § 5. THE SPIRIT IN RELIGIOUS CONSCIOUSNESS There is in mankind a universal tendency to seek after and recognise God. If there are tribes which appear to have no consciousness at all of any form of divinity, the tendency is at least sufficiently widespread for us to say that it is potential in human nature. As we survey the races of the world we mark not only the fetish- worship and superstitions of primitive people, but the great religious systems of ancient civilisations independent of Christianity, and the broken types of those which have attained to knowledge of the One God. We must include the religious aims of many philosophers. All are manifestations that THE, HOLY. SPIRIT- IN’ NATURE \:21 the Spirit moves in that which is at once the most rudimentary instinct and the deepest energy of the human soul. It is the common ground of Christian consciousness of the Kingdom of God and the world which is to be subdued to Christ. This activity of the Holy Spirit is the bridge from His universal operation which we have been con- ~ sidering throughout this chapter to his activity through the Church and in the individual soul which we have yet to consider. We may sum up the position which we have been taking in these words: God is the highest Person, the type and ultimate source and end of all personality. Personality, self-determining active purpose is the ultimate reality. God’s Holy Spirit is known in that activity in relation to creation. The more we believe in the Spirit’s universal power and care, the more true will be our faith in His operation in the Church, the Sacraments, and the individual conscience, The Spirit of the omni- present God is not the private possession of God’s Church. The Church, informed by the Spirit, consciously and actively works out the purpose of God; the world, the unconscious sphere of the Spirit's energy, moves by the guidance of the Spirit towards the conscious realisation of His presence in the Kingdom of Christ. CHAPTER I THE HOLY SPIRIT WORKING IN THE CHURCH It will have appeared from the last chapter that the Church is to be treated here as the special organ of God the Holy Spirit. The real meaning of the Church is not to be found in what it was once. The phenomena of the past cannot explain the present, while the principle underlying the phenomena belongs as much to the present as to the past, so that present equally with past must be taken into account in order to discover it. Nor can the meaning of the Church be deduced from an ideal. Ideals are generally constructed by ignoring relations. The Church, in any mean- ing of value to us, exists in relation to the world, and religions, and knowledge, and ourselves as we are, and it is as it exists in this relationship that we desire to understand its meaning. The Church is an organism, or an organisation of human beings. If we do not know where it is or what it is, it is very little use to discuss “it” at all. For instance, when the Dean of S. Paul’s writes,! “The true ‘Church,’ as the depositary of 1 Faith and its Psychology, pp. 105 and 124. 22 THE HOLY SPIRIT IN THE CHURCH 2 inspiration in matters of belief and practice, is the whole body of men and women who have enlightenment in such matters,” the obvious answer is, “Then in that case let us not drag in the term ‘Church’ at all.” It may be true that the inverted commas imply that the true Church is not the actual Church. The dean is discussing the authority of the Church as a primary ground of faith, but as that notion implies a still more primary faith in the Church itself, the substitution of “body of enlightened men and women” for the word “Church” would appear to change the sense entirely, and the principle of the original phrase cannot be said to involve that of the latter. That the opinions of enlightened people in the past and present constitute a reason for faith is true, but this kind of authority is already provided for in the dean’s analysis. The use of the word ‘Church ”’ in the passage quoted is more misleading than illuminating, as it is in the following similar sentence: ‘The authority of the Church, rightly understood, is the authority of the redeemed race, the elect—the stored spiritual experience of humanity.” There are no bores in this Church, and no en- lightened men and women outside it. Such a body— to use the dean’s word—amorphous as it must be, has no logical connection with the Church of the Fathers or the Church of England. Again, a Church which is one thing in relation to faith, and another in relation to discipline, and something else for the purposes of history, is a conception or a bundle of 24 SPIRITUAL RELIGION conceptions which does not help me to think clearly ; - in fact the use of words strikes me as less than sincere. The confusion arises from supposing that there is no other alternative to an ultra-mechanical theory of the Church than this abstraction of the redeemed enlightened. The one is as static as the other, but the Church, as it actually is, is indeed a body, but it expresses movement, growth, and power. Lastly, the Dean of S, Paul’s says that the identifi- cation of the Church with the indwelling Holy Spirit is ancient, but it is far too great a privilege to be claimed by any ecclesiastical corporation. We have already said that the Church has no exclusive claim to the Holy Spirit, but on the contrary the value of its claim to be God’s instrument in the world depends on the truth of the Holy Spirit’s operation outside it; but to claim that it is as a body and an organism the instrument of the Holy Spirit for the salvation of the world is no more presumptuous than the claim that Jesus was the Word incarnate though there were other good and enlightened men about. That surely is what we mean when we repeat the words, “I believe in one Catholic and apostolic Church,” Having indicated what we mean by the Church, we can go on to discuss the contents of our faith, This is not the place to establish the Church’s claim by reference to Gospels and Epistles and history ; probably if we can understand the inner principles and character of the Church, external reasons for our faith will hardly be necessary. SHE CHOY SPIRIT IN: THE*CHURCH.- 24 The Church is to its members the Kingdom of God. In it they live a life on a different plane to the earthly life. It is a life of grace, of spiritual activity and spiritual help. The different plane is a plane of consciousness, not of things. The affairs of the world are the material environment, the concern, the opportunity, or the danger of the new life ; but the Christian is conscious that through all God is working out a purpose, and though he pro- bably cannot comprehend its bearings, he knows that that purpose is something to which he himself has already in faith and hope attained. It is the spiritual life, the life of communion with God, nourished by grace inspired by the Holy Spirit. This is the individualistic aspect of the Church’s life. Itis not irrelevant to our inquiry, for it is part of the corporate life. The Church is to its mem- bers a spiritual environment of this character. It is not the method of the Spirit of God to work only in the individual heart as such. Sometimes, it is to be feared, the Church is almost entirely or altogether only environment to its member who fails to actualise the character in his own experience. The Church is not composed of the perfect ; all its members have entered the Way, but not all walk in it. Indeed none do so perfectly ; their spirits fail to co-operate with the Divine Spirit who is the life of the Church. The corporate nature of the Church is not recog- nised only in its environment of individuals. It exists as a body to carry out, to embody the purpose 26 SPIRITUAL RELIGION of God. It has a constitution of which the mem- bers are component parts ; there is a strength of the Church as a whole to which the members contribute. It has internal principles which are to be applied to all the affairs of men. It has not only to win the world to its faith, it has to grow itself, in the unity of the faith, to a perfect man. It is indeed a body of which the Holy Spirit is Himself the soul. That He works through individuals outside the Church and outside Christianity is not denied by anyone with any spiritual discernment. Nor need the Church concern itself to deny that He works in and through other religious bodies as such. There seems no doubt, for instance, that He works through the Society of Friends even though Quakers themselves are at pains to emphasize His individual action. Their lesson of the Light Within, the Methodist's lesson of conversion, the Salvation Army’s of fervour and courage, the Unitarian’s of the desire for truth, may assuredly be inspired by the Holy Spirit. One might even say in the language of the prophets, which is relative not absolute, that they were raised up for the purpose of impressing truths which the Church through worldliness was in danger of neglect- ing. But the Catholic Church enshrines the prin- ciple of the unity of the Body of Christ in time and place, the principle of discipline and self-suppression, of grace distributed by God through human means, and therefore the churchman sees in the actual Church not only the type to which all other forms of religion must move, but the actual working of THE HOLY SPIRIT IN THE CHURCH 27 the incarnate Christ by the power of the Holy Spirit. The authority of the Church over the individual is the result of what the Church is to him. The literal truth of this statement is indeed very clearly illustrated © in ordinary observation. To the average Roman Catholic the Church means the very life of the soul, and the alternative is to be without God in the world. The authority of the Church in his case is unques- tioned. He conforms to the Church’s practice with greater or less spiritual energy, he confesses omissions, he submits toitsruling. To the average Englishman, who writes himself down as “Church of England” and attends Evening Prayer on Sundays to hear the sermon, the Church is nothing but a religious associa- tion for certain purposes of organisation. The very word “spiritual” does not even suggest to his mind what the Catholic calls grace; it suggests rather moments of tender sentiment, or the higher philo- sophy, or perhaps psychic phenomena. The Church as a living organism has no authority over him ; not living its life, he is not even aware that it is alive. He may be very much subject to authority, but it is the authority of custom and tradition. He might consent to call this authority the stored spiritual experience of humanity, but at the club he would probably prefer the expression “the religion of all sensible men.” He ignores new theology, keeps clear of missions, frowns on High Church practices, and gives pecuniary support to Church extension. He appreciates an interesting preacher and respects the 28 SPIRITUAL RELIGION office of a bishop. The authority of the Church is - in proportion to the degree in which a member is living the life of the Church. But the life of the Church is a spiritual life, and the authority is a spiritual authority. It rules a man because it presents itself to him as the expression of the life which he himself is living in the Spirit. This is the norm, but in either case the treasure is in earthen vessels. The Church may misrepresent its life, the churchman may mistake his inspiration, and there will be conflict. This we can examine when we come to consider the Holy Spirit’s work in order- ing the unity and the doctrine of the Church. § 1. THE SPIRIT OVERSHADOWING MARY The Gospel begins with “ Mary with child.” That the narrative at this point is unsupported by evidence matters nothing for our purpose. A mother certainly was with child, and that which was conceived in her was of the Holy Ghost. No evidence in the ordinary sense of the word could establish such a fact; at the best it would go back to the witness of the mother herself and her spouse to revelations to themselves, and there could be conceivably no proof of their substantiality. Suppose the two stories of the birth of Jesus were the meditations of Early Christian seers, they were meditations on an event which took place. If the Scripture had not told us that Jesus was con- ceived by the Holy Ghost, or if Mary had not re- counted her mystical experience to the Apostles, the URE WHOLLY. SPIRTECIN: THE ‘CHURCH? 29 truth would have been apparent to all those believers of apostolic and modern times who have lived in consciousness of the power and working of the Holy Spirit of God. When the fullness of the time came, God sent forth His Son, born of a woman. He was con- ceived by the Holy Ghost. The incarnation of the - Son of God is the starting-point of the Church, the Body of Christ. It is by the operation of the Holy Spirit. For those who believe in the unity of the Spirit of God and the reality of the Incarnation, 7.e. that indeed ‘‘ He was made man,” there can be no talk of exalting the Church at the expense of its Founder, or of seeking the truth from the historical Jesus to the ignoring of the Church. Even if the most negative criticism of the Gospel were accepted, and Jesus was ignorant of what He was doing, it neither alters what He did nor our belief in the Power by which He did it. The real tendencies of the eschatological school seem to me to confirm or even to enhance the traditional impression of Our Lord’s consciousness, though it is to be hoped that the talk of His doing one set of things as God and another set as man is gone altogether to the rubbish-heap of heresies. Conflict rages round the phenomena accompanying His ministry and resurrection, but important as the issue of these historical controversies is, the Deity of Jesus Christ and the validity of Christianity do not seem imperilled by them to thosé who believe 30 SPIRITUAL RELIGION that He was conceived by the Holy Ghost, that through an Eternal Spirit He offered Himself to God, and that the Spirit Himself beareth witness with our spirit that we are the Sons of God. The truth spoken by the archangel Gabriel to the Virgin Mary is the first working of the Holy Spirit in the Church. But it has always been perceived that the Annunciation looks backward as well as forward. The fullness of time had come, the operation ful- filling it had been going on through the whole history of mankind. The whole world is the sphere of the activity of the Holy Spirit. We come back to a point already laboured. The more we recognise that universality, the more the Incarnation is to us, and the more we grasp the truth of it. The purpose of God converges in the Incarnation ; by this operation of the Spirit the Church is as it were gathered out of the world which it is some- day to absorb and include. It requires Christian faith and Christian ethic to see in Mary the fulcrum of the world’s develop- ment. It is not unimportant, the character with which the Church has invested the Mother of the Lord. “ Once and for ever didst thou show thy chosen ; Lift up your hearts, ye humble, and rejoice.” The preparation of the world for the coming of the Christ, the working of the Spirit, was universal; the languages of the superscription over the Cross are illustrative. We may trace it in His own nation. THE HOLY SPIRIT IN THE CHURCH 31 This may be reading the past in the light of what occurred afterward. Frankly, if there is a meaning in history it is best explained by what becomes through it. The choice of Israel, to use the conventional expression, was connected by the rabbis with faith —the faith of Abraham. From our point of view the most significant fact in the dawn of their religious history was the development of mono- theism. . The prophets of the canon never invented the idea of God, they defended it, whether against lingering polytheism or retrogression. The truth had not been proclaimed and established once and for all either at Charran or on Sinai. It was a long conflict of the Spirit of Truth, through ignor- ance and wilfulness of men. It was to be often forgotten, but the lesson was being learnt. It was Israel’s lesson of Faith. Then comes the period of the prophets, the religious backsliding, the national disasters. Out of that issues the expectation and the promise of national deliverance, the disappoint- ment of the return from exile, the purgation of desire, This was Israel’s lesson of Hope. National apostasy and punishment and suffering beget not merely an admission of disobedience but a sense of sin. It appears in the writings of the Isaiah of the Exile, and in the 51st Psalm; it is a sense of sin that brings with it the thought of a forgiveness and an atonement that is a renewal of love and union. This was Israel’s rudimentary lesson of Love. 32 SPIRITUAL RELIGION To show the progress of the eschatological idea is only a more partial or superficial way of reading the story of the preparation ; the mind, if the ex- pectation can be called mental, kept pace with the more hidden movement of the spirit. It culminates in Mary, and if the character which the Church has given to her in its sacred books is the fruit of imagination, which it seems irrational to believe, then imagination has marvellously pierced through facts to the very spirit which has not always seemed to dominate the outward Church, but is in truth the source of its life and its power. Out of this is born the Catholic Church. All the associations of Catholicism by which we explain what it is have their source on the human side from this ground, the positive purity, the spirit of sacrifice, courage, and trust that form the char- acter of Mary. The Church is a kingdom which cuts across all the bounds of nationality and race, a kingdom for which to fight or die. It is the depositary and channel of divine grace, supplying the spiritual life. It holds a great system of doc- trine by which it formulates and passes on its own principles. Yet of its actual coming the story is told in more simple words. It came through a maiden espoused to Joseph, and it comes now only through hearts like hers where there is personal purity, and aspiration, and obedience. It is not by mastery of a creed, by apprehension of metaphysical truth, by moral intention that the Church primarily “comes.” These are instruments THE HOLY SPIRIT IN THE CHURCH 33 which the Spirit may use. The Church comes by the Holy Spirit’s working in the sacrificed heart and mind and will. We are accustomed enough to the idea of our “belonging to” or “ entering” the Church. That is a perfectly true aspect of the fact. We enter a spiritual organism and share its life. Just because that life is a spiritual life, it follows that it is only — another aspect of the same fact, and equally true, that the life enters into us. To be in the Spirit is the same thing as the Spirit being in us. To live in Christ is the same as Christ living in us. To state the case thus emphasizes a side of the truth that churchmen as such are too ready to neglect, but it certainly does not imply that the Church is any the less a coherent and actual body or society. The expression, “Christ liveth in me,’ does not reduce Christ to an abstract principle. We believe the Catholic Church to be a living body which lives in us, and of which we are members, § 2. THE SPIRIT CONSTITUTING THE UNITY OF THE CHURCH By the unity of the Church we mean a spiritual unity, which does not mean a unity that is unreal or even ideal, The Spirit is not an unaccomplished ideal. It is the actual presence and energy of God. When we say in the Creed “ | believe in One... Church,” we use the word in the Same sense as we have used it twice before in speaking of One God Cc 34 SPIRITUAL RELIGION and One Lord Jesus Christ. A rival conception to God must be either sin, which is not God, or a partial recognition of God. A recognition of a part of God would perhaps give the sense better. Mind, matter, beauty, force may be all of God; to regard them as independent amounts to infidelity. God is necessarily One. To hold that there is any other name whereby we may be saved but Jesus renders one not a Christian. The Catholic Church similarly is necessarily one. The truth of salvation which the Creed outlines—the Creed is based on the formula, “I believe,” not “There is ”__demands that there should be One Church as a means of salvation. An answer is made that this is true, but there is no saying what constitutes a religious body part of the One Church. As a matter of fact, this reply does not meet the case, for the common belief, against which every Catholic has to contend, is that every Christian has the right to worship as he likes, to believe as he likes, and to practise as he likes, so long as he believes in Our Lord, the Unitarians being thrown overboard for the sake of lightening the ship. This is a thinkable theory, but it is not that of the Creed. There would be no reason in so succinct a document for adding the words “I believe in the Holy Catholic Church” if all that was involved was already implied in the words ‘and in Jesus Christ, His only Son, our Lord.” There are three theories concerning the unity of the Church. One may be called the abstract theory, THE HOLY SPIRIT IN THE CHURCH 35 viz. that the Church is all who are enlightened, or all who believe in God or in Jesus Christ, or all whom God knows or chooses. It has already been pointed out that this is a valueless conception. It does not correspond with any recognisable reality, it only adds a name. No two persons would agree on its differentia ; indeed it would probably be found ultimately to have none, for all men are in some degree, or potentially, enlightened, and the Spirit of God moves and works in all. It is neither useful nor true to treat the world as the Church. If the name Church applies to anything actual we must seek it further. The second theory is that of the man in the street. He has no use for abstractions—does not know what they are. As a fictitious person he also may be said to have little scholarship and little spiritual perception, having no time to spare for such matters. To him, the Church, with a big C, includes any person or church with a small c that cares to claim to belong to it. This theory is used by divines in addresses on public morality, and also by newspapers in alluding to a potent factor in civilisation, though they often give away the real facts by phrasing it “the Churches.” The case is frivolously put, because such a theory is really frivolous. Who could tell what such a unity includes or excludes? and if it is suggested that this is not necessary, what principle unifies those bodies which may be included? Not belief in the name of Jesus, In the first days when the phrase 36 SPIRITUAL RELIGION was coined, this meant being turned out of the synagogue and joining a despised and persecuted sect, but in any case the expression needs defini- tion before it can form a principle. It is not really possible to exclude Unitarians ; they are quite as excellent as many sects who in one respect are more orthodox (if that word retains any meaning). If so, ethical Theists and perhaps Mohammedans may establish a claim. The Jews themselves cer- tainly cannot be denied in that case, and Buddhists are more spiritual than many that have so far entered. In opening the doors of the Church we must not be hampered by insular prejudices. This is ridiculous, though the theory holds the field in Protestant areas. The intellectual abstraction theory was more reasonable ; there is no tenable alternative to it but the third theory. The third is that amid all the forms and bodies of Christian or religious belief and practice which eighteen centuries have begotten, there is one Church which may claim to represent Christ to the world, and.alone can offer to those who believe in Him the membership of His mystical body. The religious ask for a sign to attest such a claim, and the intellectual question its rationality, Yet it is altogether reasonable to those who have the wisdom of Christ. Our Lord left neither a system of doctrine nor a system of ethics to the world, He left a very close body of imperfect men. Our spiritual perception leads us to exalt this fact into a principle, for it seems to us in line with the basic THE HOLY SPIRIT IN THE CHURCH BK truth of the Incarnation, and therefore we look for the spirit of Christ now, not primarily in an intel- lectual or ethical abstraction, but in a body of men and women continuing that life to which the Apostles | called adherents. If the few score people who mourned for Stephen had claimed the exclusive use of the Holy Spirit, the claim would have been too unjust, but all the same that community was the Way of the Spirit. The Incarnation sanctified for ever not merely humanity but matter itself, yet the Church as the Apostles understood it was the method and the pledge of His continued presence. This theory of the Church’s unity is held by those bodies of Christians which claim to be the whole or part of the Catholic Church. Their use of the name Catholic does not determine their doctrine of unity, but vice versa their doctrine of unity makes them claim to be Catholic. The Protestant sects do not in any practical sense hold the doctrine of the unity of the Church. This is not begging the ques- tion, Of course they all profess to follow Christ, but one cannot imagine the Free Church Council considering the question whether the Baptist Church is part of the true Church. The Vatican Council might conceivably do so, though its deliberations would not probably be prolonged. A study of the way of God’s working through His Spirit would lead us to the same faith in one actual Church. His working in the body of the Church comes naturally, as it were, between His universal working and His working in the individual. We experience the latter, 38 SPIRITUAL RELIGION but we know that we are not merely individual. We are naturally formed to be members of a body, and we expect to find that spiritual life of which we are conscious in the individual to be the spirit and life of the body of which we are members. That brings us so far as to believe that the Holy Spirit may animate any body of Christians, which is true. But further, we believe that Christianity is a unit, destined to be an all-embracing unit, and a body is not just an aggregation of individuals, but an organism im- parting life to them all as members. In human relationships at least—and it isa human relationship which we are considering—unity implies exclusion and the possibility of breaking off from it, and so the churchman is led to believe in One Church, human in its limitations, divine in its purpose, which is the organ of the Holy Spirit, who is the divine movement in all mankind and creation. It is His organ for the salvation of the world. It is the way, the truth, and the life. If this is so, one of the clearest ways of co-operat- ing with the Spirit of God is to work and pray for reunion. We may be sure that all efforts will be blessed, but it is an endeavour in which we should especially seek the Spirit’s own guidance. The re- union of our endeavour must be a spiritual union. The joining together of Christian bodies on any other principle than that of the essential unity of the Church would do more harm to the Body of Christ than good. Corporate union must mean a necessary organic unity, otherwise the combination THE HOLY SPIRIT IN THE: CHURCH « 36 of Christian bodies can only be desired for zsthetic and economical reasons, The Orthodox, Roman Catholic, Old Catholic, and English Church mean the same thing by unity. Comparatively to that argument the method of drawing the line is a detail. Still it is a stubborn detail, and it will help us | if we can inquire somewhat further into the nature of the Church’s unity. There are many analogies and metaphors, as there are for the Unity of the Holy Trinity ; in either case analogies fail in particulars, though they may help to illuminate :— An elaborate mechanism whose efficiency depends on adjustment which unifies the different actions : A living body whose well-being and activities depend upon the harmony of the members: A society of such a character and organisation that its acts are the expression at once of its nature and of its corporate will: Such is the Church. The Holy Spirit is the soul of the living body, the spirit of the society, the governor of the mechanism. To admit that there are divisions is to admit that the Church is in whole or part fallible. There is a sense in which the Church is infallible. Christ is infallible—the Way and the Truth—and the Church is the Body of Christ in more than a metaphorical sense, As in the case of the individual: “How shall we who are dead unto sin, live any longer therein ?”’ yet the member of Christ does not always live in Christ, so the Church does not always live 40 SPIRITUAL RELIGION up to its true nature. It is the organ of the Holy Spirit, but He works still through weakness to strength, through error to truth. It is perfectly conceivable that there should be divisions within the unity of the Church, as well as divisions which break off from the unity. It is the wrong way of putting it to say that the test of unity is adherence to particular doctrines such as the divinity of Our Lord or Apostolic Succession, As a matter of argument it is indeed begging the question. All the formulze of faith are the Church’s expression of its nature which 1s dynamic. Its nature lies in its purpose, in the movement of the Holy Spirit. The Church is a spiritual society, maintaining a spiritual life, and we keep in the unity of the Body by keeping within the sphere of the Spirit, that is by drawing from and contributing to that life. There can be no question that either the East or the West of Europe was withdrawn from the spiritual life and unity of the Church when the great schism divided the Church. Our membership of the English Church depends on our belief that we too were not separated from that unity when the break with the Roman see occurred. In spite of pressure from some quarters the intention of the Church, as it made itself felt, was to remain as it always had been, part of the One Church. We invoke the Holy Spirit not only as the Spirit who moves in all mankind, but as the Giver of Life to the One Church, and we share the life which he imparts THE HOLY SPIRIT IN THE CHURCH 41 through the Sacraments. Ordination is indeed one of the Sacraments, both it and the other Sacraments involve and imply the authority in the Body to minister it. The question, Is Apostolic Succession necessary ? like similar questions about confirma- tion and absolution, are signs of a perverted mind. No one who desires to be in the unity of the spiri- tual life of the Church would desire to be without them. . The Church’s articulate voice, the ruling which has the authority of the whole Church behind it, is or would be a manifestation of its unity; but the unity itself resides in the soul, not in the voice, and it energises. in ways superior to the mechanical expression of authority. Unity gives authority to the voice; the power of speaking does not create or constitute unity. It is possible to mistake mechanism for life- giving spirit. A mechanical theory of Church unity has the merit of simplicity. If the mechanism be sufficiently perfected, the question who is and who is not in the Church is answered almost automati- cally. The mechanical theory cannot be swept on one side offhand as impossible. Spiritual does not mean vague and is not opposed to human, Organisa- tion requires mechanism. If materialism could support religion at all, materialists would most logically be ultramontanes. But as we reject pan-materialism as the order of the universe, so we reject bare mechanism as the spiritual order of the Church. It does not 42 SPIRITUAL RELIGION correspond with our experience, history for instance does not bear it out. It makes a desirable effect into a formal cause. It creates a schism between — the Spirit that works in the Church and the Spirit of Truth. The unity of the Church is to be found then in the common spiritual life. This life includes the common faith, the common sacramental means of spiritual life, a ministry authorised by the Church to minister its Sacraments. Asa result of its unity the Church has authority in all matters of faith and practice, the whole over the whole and the part over the part, for it is the Church’s function to manage its own affairs. The part or the whole may tem- porarily err, but even if it does so we believe that by the Spirit’s guidance it will come to the truth. The individual member will desire above all things to live within that unity, and should a conflict arise in which the Church seems to him in error, he will seek to teach the truth from within ; excommunica- tion must be the Church’s act not his. The Church itself should not be above humility. It should be ready to acknowledge error. Forbear- ance with individuals is not incompatible with strength, for strength is the attribute of truth and ‘‘citius emergit veritas ex errore quam ex con- fusione,”’ § 3. THE INSPIRATION OF THE SCRIPTURES From one point of view this work of the Holy Spirit would seem more appropriately discussed THE SIOLY SPIRIT IN: THE: CHURCH, *'43 under the head of His work in the individual soul. _ The Bible is many books not one, and each was occasioned by special needs. The volume which we call the Bible is not a series of pamphlets setting forth in systematic form the history or the dogma of the Church, it is rather a record of how men rose to the occasion by the inspiration of the Holy Spirit. Such a description perhaps would apply better to the Prophets and the Epistles than to the Proverbs or the Revelation of S. John, and one would express it differently in referring to the ‘Gospels ; still the Bible is pre-eminently the story of the Spirit’s work. In this sense we can and do consider and rever- ence the Bible as a whole. We may not regard the statements of fact to be accurate, or the com- mands given to be binding ; the mental or spiritual attitude of heroes and of psalmists may not accord with our present conception of morality ; we may think that the writers were mistaken in their in- terpretation of events; but in spite of all this, or rather because of it, the Bible is a living record of the movement in mankind leading up to and including the beginning of the Kingdom of God. If the books of the Bible were made up of intel- lectually accurate propositions, and if the rules they embody were all permanently valid, the Bible would not be a true book in the sense that we now value it: for though truth is in itself absolute, human apprehension of it is relative, and such a book therefore would not carry us to the life as it was 44 SPIRITUAL RELIGION lived, through which God worked His divine pur- pose. Or to put it differently, if the books of the Bible were verbally accurate it would not be spiri- tually true, for it would make of revelation a com- munication to men from without, whereas the Spirit of God works through men and within by their co-operation and the use of their natural faculties. One need not at this time of day labour the case against verbal inspiration. Protestants embraced it to supply the place of the authority of the Church which they had disowned, and they cling to it as a principle of unity, having lost the unity of the living body. The Roman Church of to-day, or the ruling tendency of it, goes out of its way to maintain the doctrine which is on all fours with the mistaking of mechanical contrivance for the Spirit's operation. The doctrine taught by many of the Fathers, though perhaps equally unsatisfac- tory, is not really very closely related to the modern doctrine of verbal inspiration because it involved the mystical inspiration of the exposition of the Scriptures, The meaning of inspiration is to be found in spiritual energy, whether directed to action or to contemplation. Spiritual energy means the action of the Holy Spirit through the human spirit. The Inspiration of the Scriptures does not only mean the energising to write down the words or to think the thoughts or compile the records which were written down. That is part of the truth and is perhaps primarily what is meant by Biblical inspi- THE HOLY SPIRIT IN THE CHURCH 4g ration. We may well indeed believe that in a true sense “they were written for our admonition,” though the idea in the writers’ minds was very different. This gives us the Bible as a whole, the record of the gradual working out of God’s purpose, of the growth of the religious sense from primitive imperfection to the fullness of time when God sent forth His Son, and the Spirit of His Son into our hearts, the Gospel record of the person of Jesus, and the ground plan of the Catholic Church. It is the Church’s concrete document teaching of that manifestation of the Holy Spirit which we have already examined. The Inspiration of Scripture is further the par- ticular inspiration of the actors and thinkers relative to the occasions and circumstances of their time of whom Scripture is the record. This is obviously a secondary meaning of the expression “ Biblical in- spiration,” and it seems sometimes hardly fair to emphasize it to the total exclusion of the more natural sense. It is in virtue of this that through the Scriptures we come into touch with the very life of the Spirit as He moved in men long ago in contingencies whose effects on history are felt to-day by ourselves, and in circumstances akin in their nature to our present experiences, These two meanings of inspiration suggest two main uses to be made of the Scriptures. The first gives us a sort of history of the Spirit, _ that is of the working out of God’s purpose. It 46 SPIRITUAL RELIGION is a book to study, to criticise, to compare with other literature. It will teach us to know ourselves, for it reveals our own history. The truer our understanding of it in all its bearings, the clearer will be our apprehension of the work of the Spirit of God. The second gives us not a single book, not a library even, but rather a picture gallery of spiritual life. It is a gallery for contemplation and medi- tation. To view it as it should be viewed, the Spirit’s inspiration must be sought afresh to renew those actions in the consciousness of the beholder. Whether it be the spirit of heroes, or the message of prophets, the mystic experience of apostles, or the living and dying of the Son of Man, these are fruits of inspiration which are to be reinspired through the mind and soul in meditation, and “ lived into”? in human life. The first use concerns the life and growth of the Church, the second in the first instance is for the individual. It is the individual use of the Bible, yet it puts before the eyes of faith the life of the Church, the words or the actions of the Lord as He lived that life in the power of the Spirit, the message which the Spirit said unto the Churches, the poems and meditations which the individual meditates anew in the light of the Christian revelation. It is the fashion in some quarters to deprecate this use of the Bible, but if Christianity is essentially a spiritual life, such deprecation is mistaken. Medi- tation will come before us again under the subject THE HOLY SPIRIT IN THE CHURCH 47 of prayer ; it is sufficient to say here that the Scripture is in the experience of churchmen the most power- ful stimulus to that spiritual exercise. The actual inspiration is doubtless in the person meditating, but in the passage which he puts before him he encounters the Spirit as He was manifested in the words or acts of Our Lord, or as He worked in the mind of the writer, to the creation of new life and energy in his own soul. The Bible, whether used in meditation or for the study of the Holy Spirit’s action in the progressive life of religion, is not in itself the authority for faith or practice. It has just as much authority as the Church chooses to give it, that is, the authority is derived from the Church. The saying, “The Church to teach, and the Bible to prove,” means very little, and is rather misleading than otherwise. The Bible cannot prove or approve what the Church teaches, if the Church is to teach what the Bible means, It is an unwarrantable restriction on the Church’s duty of teaching, to suppose that it must not teach any- thing which cannot be proved from the Bible. The chief fact of the Church’s teaching is not what we must believe, but how we may best live, and no document can prove such teaching. The Bible may state facts, and the Church may teach the advisability of similar action on our part, but it is a stretch of language to call this proof by the Bible of the Church’s teaching. For instance it is possible that the Acts narrative implies infant baptism, though if it be left to private interpretation the 48 SPIRITUAL RELIGION point is doubtful. It cannot possibly be argued by a serious person that either this doubtful impli- cation, or the Gospel which we read at an infant baptism, proves the Church’s teaching on the subject. Incidentally the Gospel is at least as good an argu- ment for infant communion. The Church in short is perfectly at liberty to make its own arrangements in this respect, as it does; it has one custom in England, and another in China, presumably because circumstances differ. The saying, ‘The Church to teach, and the Bible to prove,’ amounts to this, that the Church or part of it restricts itself to teaching as necessary to salvation what there is evidence for in the Bible. The fact is that this notion of “necessity for salvation’ is dangerous, and the use made of it by Protestant tendency seems itself to be a new doctrine. There is a good lot of room between the idea of “necessary ” and that denoted by the word ‘unnecessary,’ and yet the very natural result of exalting certain doctrines or practices to a class necessary on the ground that they are by chance mentioned in the Bible has been to relegate other means of grace to the class unnecessary, as if any means of grace could be unnecessary! Nor is it in accord with the Christian spirit to fix doctrines and practices as necessary in this legal sense. The method of Christ and the very essence of the Spirit is expressed in the formula, “ This do, and thou shalt live.” Every opportunity of grace or life is necessary to the Christian, and it is the Church’s business to put him in the way of them THE HOLY SPIRIT IN THE CHURCH 49 and to warn him if he neglect them. The injunction of the Church to be baptized or to receive the Holy Communion, as well as to be confirmed, or to make a confession, is the setting of the way of life before a free spirit. “TI will keep Thy commandments when Thou hast set my heart at liberty.” As the “proving’’ by the Bible is onlyin relation — to this questionable notion of necessity, it is, to say the least, not a use of the Bible which is in the interests of the Spirit or of spiritual religion, and it is therefore objectionable to appeal to Bible proof as if it carried with it the authority of the Spirit of God. The Bible is not the Word of God. The Word of God was not committed to ink and parchment, but was made flesh and dwelt among us. This is no play on language. The unique revelation of God was through His Son. God has countless ways of revelation—in time past by the prophets—revealed to His Holy Apostles. Both prophets and apostles occupy the pages of the Bible, and as the Word of the Lord came to them, so it goes out from them through the canonical books, but to speak of the Bible as the Word has no point unless it is to convey the impression that it is the written authority of God inclusively perfect and exclusively com- plete. This is an unspiritual doctrine. The Scrip- tures are a record of revelation and a stimulus to continued life, but the record is not the revelation itself, for the writers were human and in language they had an imperfect instrument. | D 50 SPIRITUAL RELIGION The authority which a Christian can recognise is not something fixed behind him, for his religion is not one of law. Authority is something which draws him forward, to which he can sacrifice him- self, and in which he can find spiritual life, the love of the Blessed Trinity, the Person of Christ, the spiritual body of the Church. § 4. THE SPIRIT GIVING THE CHURCH'S DOCTRINE Our Lord promised that the Spirit would guide the Church into all truth. This truth is a truth of doing, expressing, living: it is a truth of the soul which is much deeper and more real than mere intellectual correctness. Our Lord said that He came to bear witness to the truth, and Pilate asked, “(What is truth ?”’ He was not answered in words ; the truth was being enacted before him. So Chris- tianity was from the first called “the Way” and regarded as in its essence a Life in the Spirit. The particular teaching of the Church at first charac- teristically took the form of active direction. Compare for instance S. Paul’s eucharistic teaching to the Corinthians. ‘Our Lord took bread, and blessed and gave, saying, This is My body”— “The bread which we break is the communion ’’— “Ye proclaim the Lord’s death till He come ;”’ it is all actively, dynamically explained. The most dog- matic of his epistles is to supplant an immobile religion of law by an active life in the Spirit. He THE HOLY SPIRIT IN THE CHURCH 51 resists attempts to “fix” the relations of this new life. ‘When sin abounded,” he said, “ grace abounded more.” The_ intellectual consequence would be to secure grace by sin. So it would, if Christianity were a balancing of dissensions ;_ but it is not, it is a dying to sin. Baptism is a rising again with Christ to a new life which goes forward, Similarly the earliest creeds do not take the form of a series or system of propositions, but of a single personal proposition. “I believe in...” The further explanations to which the Church committed itself during the following centuries mark a second stage of doctrine, but the stamp which it first received is not lost, That is why Christianity never becomes a philosophy, though it seems to involve a philosophy and to use it. The various contro- versies and heresies that led to the completion of the Nicene Creed may appear to have been meta- physical speculations, but it was the living truth of the Atonement, the reality of the Incarnation, and the spiritual life of the Church which were at stake. Pagan conceptions of the Godhead, a belief that the Passion was only apparent, separation of the humanity of Jesus from our humanity, a weakening of the apprehension of unity and the need of it, these heresies were blows struck at the Christian life. It is not that life depends on correct belief, but rather that false belief implies a misdirection or failure of life. The real truth then lies behind dogma. Not that dogma is itself untrue or necessarily symbolic, 52 SPIRITUAL RELIGION or that there is no such thing as intellectual truth. It may be valid and permanent, but it does not deal with the whole subject matter with which religion is vitally concerned. It may be absolutely true that the Real Presence is discerned by faith alone. But the truth which Christianity requires is the actual discernment of the Presence of Christ’s Body and Blood by faith. There is truth in life to which the doctrine is only asign-post. Unfortunately people are apt to mistake the value of the doctrine for the reality. One man “believes in” transubstantiation, and the other “believes in” faith. They stand by two different philosophical sign-posts and quarrel about their respective merits, but neglect the one step which will make either sign-post equally useful, namely the spiritual discovery of the Body and Blood of the Lord. *) Doctrine or dogma then is very far from being an unfortunate or cumbersome necessity. It is the use of the intellectual faculty in religion. It gives us tools with which to clear the wilderness and build the city ; it makes religion communicable, which is quite another thing to saying that it is religion in a communicable form, for religion has no form—it is movement. Sound doctrine is like well-adjusted machinery, it works true. Dogma cannot be left aside when life has been through its aid attained. Life never is attained in that sense; it is not a stationary goal, but a move- ment and activity constantly renewing itself. In- telligence is not such an ephemeral faculty of our THE HOLY SPIRIT IN THE CHURCH 53 nature that we can afford to drop the use of it when it seems to have done its work, Perhaps some of the mystics fell into that error. What is necessary is that we should recognise that intelligence which. provides dogma is only one of our faculties, or a partial faculty of our whole nature. It brings us into contact with the material of religion, or it brings us towards the presence but not into sight or touch of religion itself. Doctrinal truth then is the work of God’s Holy Spirit, for all that makes for spiritual life is His energy. So doctrine must be progressive in the sense that it has to express the development of life, This does not mean that old truths have to be dis- carded, as if life consisted of lumps of newly-dis- covered ore. Life is not lumps; it is a stream which takes new turnings as it flows, and broadens as it Sweeps towards the sea, The doctrine “perfect God and perfect man” is valid for all time, but the experience of the Church of the reality of Godhead and manhood may grow so that we need to speak more or differently about the personality of Jesus than was necessary when the council met at Nicza. That Christ suffered for our salvation is the kernel of Christianity, but the soul’s experience of life, of penitence, and forgiveness and communion will give changing forms to the doctrine of the Atonement. The resurrection of Christ is the very meaning of the Christian life, but living and growing experience of that life, of the body and matter and faith, will 54 SPIRITUAL RELIGION require new emphases in the intellectual form in which the truth is stated. Now it is clear to anybody that this movement of the Holy Spirit is not confined to the Church as a body, nor even to the individual members of the Church. It is a movement in the minds of men generally. Is there evidence that the Church itself is guided in any special way by the Holy Spirit to right doctrine? Once more we have to remember that the holiness of the Church does not mean that it is the exclusive sphere of the Spirit of God. It is not a sphere ; it is His instrument for salvation and life. In the matter of doctrine it gathers from men’s minds what is of use for the furthering and fostering of its life. It is not the Church’s province to pro- pound new doctrines which shall minister to life. Individual minds are infinitely varied and will intellectualise truths in various forms. Most of these will “have their day and cease to be’”’ without ever becoming part of the common stock of the Church. Other forms do pass into the common teaching of the Church whether formally decreed by conciliar authority or not. As a matter of fact a formal decree by which a doctrine is specifically approved or rejected is usually made to meet some special circumstance, as for instance when the given doctrine is impugned as subversive. The process of selection is always going on. The scholastics, the mystics, the modernists have left or will leave their mark upon the Church’s teaching. It is by this process that the Church, acting by THE HOLY SPIRIT IN THE CHURCH 55 the power of the Holy Spirit, built up its creeds and has developed its teaching on the Sacraments, on Church order and on the truths of redemption, on the scope of prayer and the ways of worship which form the heritage of the Catholic Church. § 5. THE SPIRIT GUIDING THE CHURCH’S ACTION The doctrine of the Church is a means to action, but it is not itself action. It fashions tools, but it does not use them. The Holy Spirit guides the doctrine of the Church, but His movement is further discerned in the Church’s action. The Church is chiefly to be understood as a body that lives and works, everything else is a means to that end. By the action of the Church is not meant the acts of the individual members of it. They indeed contribute to it, and in part express it. When we pray for the Spirit’s guidance, it is not always for the sanctification of our own efforts or life, but we pray for His guidance in the work of the Church, for God’s greater glory. The Church as such has a work which is in a sense apart from the individual. Though within the body he feels he can labour for this cause as a thing outside himself, he can sacrifice himself to it, in certain circumstances he acknowledges that his death may further it. The recognition of this fact is essential to Catholic Christianity ; it is a Church-consciousness which makes the doing 56 SPIRITUAL RELIGION of Christ’s work more important than the thought of personal salvation. Its absence makes a church a congregation, and turns Christianity into a mental system or a pious attitude of mind. The Church’s action is seen in its organisation of itself. This also, indeed, is a means to an end, but the preliminaries of action are themselves action ; the army must work as a unit before the rifleman is in place to pull his trigger. We speak of this too much as Church government, with the unnecessary implication that government means the policing of the mass or the control of the officials. This is one aspect of the case, but we need to consider it more from the point of view of the executive and strategic object of the Church. The true Church organisation is a divine ordinance quite as much or more than a devout thought is a divine inspiration. Church politics, as they might be called, are spiritual matters, requiring prayer and reverence in the handling. The effectiveness of the Church is a vital concern, it touches the Church’s life. It is easy, as it is common, to brush these questions aside with the remark, “Why don’t you get to work instead of bothering about these academic matters ?” The relation of dioceses or provinces abroad with the Church which established them may seem at first sight of little moment compared with the good work of saving souls and perfecting the faithful, but if the Church is an immortal body THE “HOLY: SPIRIT IN THE CHURCH. 57 whose life is more important than the sum of the individuals alive at any given time, the im- portance of the problem may be paramount. This leads up to the question between local autonomy and centralised government. The English Church stands for the former, as the Churches of America, South Africa, and elsewhere witness, yet in other parts, for a variety of reasons, of which ignorance is the chief, the papal theory is practically defended, though the vicar of Christ is found at Canter- bury or in the King of England’s Privy Council. The questions of Disestablishment, Church Finance, Church Reform are similar, and many of the problems which arise in connection with them cannot be solved even theoretically by recourse to ready-made doctrines. The Church has to move, and it must be by the guidance of the Holy Spirit. The mission field is another view of the Church in action, extensive as the last was intensive. Mission work has its own problems and its own methods, some of which may be temporary while the work is in beginning, while others may be- come new features of Church life. One thing which Church people at home can do for missions is to understand as far as possible the problems that occur and the new endeavours that are initiated, and in intercession to seek the Spirit’s guidance for those who have to deal with them. Yet the Church at home is at work in the same sense as the Church abroad. From the Church’s point of view there is no abroad or home in the 58 SPIRITUAL RELIGION world. It is home itself. The affairs of our parishes, the things which the people unite to do and the Church exists to carry out, this is the Church in action. Can we pierce a little deeper, and see the action of the Church not as issuing in this or that under- taking, but as the life itself, the movement of the soul ? Such a consciousness requires an effort to gain, It is not obtained by examining the Church's acts, nor by ignoring them, yet as we think of the Holy Spirit and again of the Church and what it is for and how it can do it, the two may be- come merged before the eye of faith, and one may know that there is a life of One who is amongst us, whose life we share, and yet that He will live and move onward unalterably whether we too press forward or slip away. CHAPTER III THE HOLY SPIRIT WORKING THROUGH THE SACRAMENTS Our belief in the Holy Spirit’s operation in the body of the Church depends on our belief in His work in the whole of nature. The Church is a divine institu- tion ; itis holy because it is set apart from the world by God for the carrying out of His purpose ; it is the appointed means or way of salvation ; and it is so just because the Spirit of God who moves upon the face of the waters, the divine impulsion through all nature and mankind, the Giver of all life and light, informs it and uses it and guides it. The result of holding that the Church alone is the sphere of the Holy Spirit would bea sort of modern polytheism ; it would reduce God to the dimensions of the early Israelite conception of Him, concerned only with an Israel. We have considered that such a conception of God and of the Holy Spirit’s influence cuts off the Church from relation with the world, because if Holy Spirit means anything at all it means bottom reality and source of unity, and therefore to segregate the Holy Spirit from the world is to establish in thought a dualism which cannot be unified and to deny the 39 60 SPIRITUAL RELIGION possibility of the kingdoms of this world being gathered into the spiritual body of Christ. On the other hand, to find that the universal Spirit is the life of the Church is to exalt the Church, for it teaches us to believe that it is God’s supreme method of carry- ing out the purpose of creation, it leads us to recog- nise in it the Word that giveth light to every man that cometh into the world and, recognising and receiving Him, to receive power to become the Sons of God. Just as we say that a man’s religion is not something to be kept apart from his daily life, but that his worship and Communions can only be real if his religion permeates and controls all his business and pleasure also, so that his worship is just the highest expression of a dedicated life, so the life and motion of the Holy Spirit, which is the only possible explana- tion of the reality of the world, finds its highest manifestation and effort in the body and activity of the Catholic Church. This consideration has been repeated at the beginning of this chapter because a similar line of thought is necessary for the understanding of the personal action of the Holy Spirit in the Sacraments. The Sacraments cannot be understood as independ- ent means of grace. It is because the Holy Spirit is the indwelling presence and life of the Church that the Sacraments can be means of His special activity. This truth is tested by observing the result on sacramental belief of the conceptions of the Church which fail to emphasize its spiritual character. THROUGH THE SACRAMENTS 61 The Low Churchman, in the historical sense of the term, takes a low view of the Church’s nature. It is not to him a great spiritual reality, it is a purely human association, and he looks for the Spirit else- where—in the individual. In proportion to this low estimate of the spiritual reality of the Church we find that Sacraments become in such a system mere signs of helpful truths, or pleasant memories, or most strangely of all, formal acts of obedience to com- mands of Christ. In such a case the Sacraments are not really regarded as means of grace: they provide no contact with life, they are but stimulations of subjective emotions. The mechanical view of the Church at the other extreme makes the Sacraments into independent acts of magic, it is only a matter of turning on a different switch, they are not access to moving and undeter- mined life. The corrective to such errors is a living faith in the personal Spirit of God indwelling the whole Church, making its acts God’s acts, demanding the co-opera- tion of the will of the receiver, which is faith. Faith does not make the Sacrament valid, but it makes it effective in the individual soul, and it brings the soul into contact with it. The lack of faith and right disposition is itself sin, because it separates the individual from spiritual union with the Church. If the member is to live the Church’s life he must keep up with the motion. Faith is the energy of the soul that discerns and lays hold of spiritual life ; 62 SPIRITUAL RELIGION a sacrilegious Confession or Communion is a con- tempt of the Spirit of God. It is true that faith is an energy of Holy Spirit, but it is nonsense to talk of faith creating or constituting the inward and spiritual grace of the Sacraments. Faith discerns grace, co-operates with it. It is the human reverse as grace is the divine obverse, and they issue together (if the mix- ture of metaphor can be pardoned) into renewed life. Again, the inward and spiritual grace is the “ real thing” of the Sacrament; the outward sign is the effective means by which it is obtained or conveyed. Yet by a strange paradox a certain type of mind rejects or depreciates the sacramental system as being outward and unspiritual, but denies the reality of the inward grace and retains the form of the out- ward sign. The Sacraments are mere ceremonial (which may of course be quite useful and inspiring) if the reality which Catholicism ascribes to them is denied. The ceremonial of High Mass, the genu- flecting of worshippers, the accompaniments of incense and song, are justified by active faith in the spiritual reality of the Presence, that is the Presence of the Body and Blood of Christ. One must go further to justify the comparatively humble administration of the Lord’s Supper among a con- gregation which at any rate in word denies any meaning to the bread and wine which it handles, A certain bishop in England used to go out of his way to assure ordination candidates that they were not to think that he was giving them anything at THROUGH THE SACRAMENTS 63 ordination, but in so doing he left it doubtful why they were to assemble in the cathedral on the morrow for the laying on of hands. Spiritual religion will do all it can to emphasize the reality of the gift communicated in the Sacra- ments, and it will see through the outward sign which is present to the bodily senses to the gift or grace which is present to and received by the Spirit whose energy is faith. It sees through the outward sign as it sees through the child of Mary to the Word of God. As faith acknowledges “ He is not two but one Christ,” so likewise in the Sacrament it refuses to separate the spiritual gift from the outward sign. Receptionism or consubstantiation (if that word still means anything) is as destructive of the nature of a Sacrament as a doctrine of Our Lord doing some of His acts “as Man” and others “as God”’ is destructive of the truth of the Incarna- tion. To use a metaphor, necessarily inadequate, a Sacrament is not like a purse containing money, still less an empty one reminding us of it; a Sacrament is like the coin which conveys power. What we discern and receive in a Sacrament is spirit, but it is conveyed to us bodily. On our side, also, there is not a divorce between our spiritual faculties and life and the body which it controls. The outward acts of reverence, bodily and mental, are not necessarily evidences of superstition any more than they are proofs of real devotion, but one who does with his spirit discern the things of the Spirit will naturally express with his body the unseen energy of his soul. 64 SPIRITUAL RELIGION The gifts which we receive in the Sacraments are gifts of life. If metaphors are used it will only be misleading to liken the Spirit to anything with bulk. New Birth, Forgiveness, the offered Body and Blood of Christ, Holy Spirit, are not spatial quantities, they are gifts of power or life. They are gifts to be used as the gifts of music, or strength, or wisdom, are to be used. Absolution as a mere effacing of the past without a view to spiritual life in the present, Bap- tism as a process describable as “ being done,” are abuses of the Sacraments. This will be considered in detail in the following sections, but it is well to recognise at once that all Sacraments are dynamic in character, gifts of power and life. This at once disposes of the question whether they are necessary. If it were spiritually understood that all Sacra- ments by their nature are gifts of life, it is incon- ceivable that anyone should ask whether they are necessary. Spirit and life in their very nature are freedom. What meaning can be attached to the question whether freedom is necessary ? The very question about the necessity of Sacraments imphes either ignorance or denial of the Holy Spirit. It is true that the English Catechism emphasizes the necessity of two, which is generally taken to reflect adversely on any others, but it is highly doubtful whether the doctrine of the necessity or general necessity of the two or the implication of the unnecessity of others is of any use for spiritual religion or any other purpose except controversy. THROUGH THE SACRAMENTS 65 The notion of necessity simply does not come in for affirmation or denial to the sphere of spiritual life. He who lives in the Spirit is dead to the law. The expression “necessary to salvation,” unless qualified, spoils salvation of all vital meaning, for it involves a static conception of salvation; and it tends to-=* deprive the Sacraments of the spiritual movement which is life. The limiting of the number of Sacraments is another proceeding of very little value. It can be of no consequence to the spiritual life to know that there are two or seven means of grace rightly called Sacraments, No one need g0 out of his way to imperil his immortal soul by denying either doctrine, but the fact remains, when he finds a means of grace relative to his needs he will claim it as a spiritual child of God. Doctrines, we have seen, are directed to action ; they fashion tools, and tools sometimes are more ingenious than useful. The doctrine of the number of the Sacraments would seem to be of this character, 3 One more general consideration is the apparent failure of Sacraments, They are the offer and the gift of spiritual life and power, they are received by faith, the energy of the human spirit, yet it is a too common experience to feel their failure even when we are trying our best to receive them worthily, In the first place, it must be said that spiritual religion is not coincident or identical with emotional religion, and emotional results are not spiritual results, The very chief activity of spiritual life is E 66 SPIRITUAL RELIGION sacrifice, and an emotional result of a Sacrament is rather of the nature of a reward, which the truly spiritual will be prepared to sacrifice. Still, this does not quite cover the case. Ina well-balanced life, the emotions ought to reflect the spiritual energy. It is a trial of faith, it is also an oppor- tunity of perseverance when a devout use of the Sacraments is unrewarded, and apart from this the remedy is a renewal of faith in the Holy Spirit. It is not the Sacrament which is at fault, if fault there is, but our spiritual achievement, or our CO- operation in one way or another. The remedy cannot be the neglect of the Sacrament, but the renewed effort to rise to its demand. Every Sacra- ment makes a demand ; life is communicated, but it has to be unified in the Spirit—that is, lived. When this truth is grasped the work of the Holy Spirit in all the Sacraments of the Church becomes obvious. They are different manifestations of Him because there are different kinds of grace relative to the different needs of spiritual life and progress. The important point to bear in one’s consciousness is that the reality of every Sacrament lies in an in- ward and spiritual grace. To sum up, this reality is the work of God the Holy Spirit. They are the acts of the Church, which derives its life and power from the Spirit. He works them through it. “He shall take of Mine and shall show it unto you,” was the promise of Christ ; the Sacraments are the spiritual application of the power of the Cross, — THROUGH THE SACRAMENTS 67 They are spiritually received. Members of the Church are spiritual beings, they are consciously living a spiritual life. Born of the flesh, they are by the first Sacrament born again of the Spirit. Their life is activity, spiritual reception is the action of their spirit, a correspondence of life, § 1. THE SPIRIT IN BAPTISM A really strenuous campaign is needed to rescue the Church from the abuse to which this Sacrament is constantly subjected. At the threshold of the Church, the initial act of spiritual life, its use varies between that of a carnal ordinance, the neglect of which will arouse God’s vengeance, and mechanical magic, treatment by which the patient becomes entitled to favourable treatment hereafter. Both these ideas are contrary to spiritual religion. Charity indeed covers a multitude of sins, and the energetic young priest breathes a sigh of relief as he repeats the words “alloweth this charitable work of ours in bringing this infant to His holy Baptism,” though he knows quite well that neither by the letter or the spirit ought the infant to be baptized at all. Baptism is the washing of regeneration. The phrase combines two aspects of the reality, the doing away of sin and the entry into a new life These two aspects can temporarily be separated in thought and emphasized alone for convenience, but - in reality they are one thing, and cannot rightly be 68 SPIRITUAL RELIGION understood apart from one another. New birth means new life, and in a spiritual being remission or doing away of sin is meaningless apart from a new life lived, and new life is illusory apart from a death unto sin. | The Church is a spiritual body, living and nourishing in its members a spiritual life: by Baptism we are made partakers of that life, inheritors of the Kingdom of Heaven. The Church is the Body of Christ. In Baptism we are grafted into His body, made members of Christ. The Church is God’s family, involving duties and responsibilities, and in Baptism God sends forth the spirit of His son into our hearts, whereby we too cry “ Abba, Father,” we are made children of God. But birth has no meaning or existence apart from life, and life is activity, movement. We are placed in the sphere of a spiritual life which is only a potentiality unless we live it. It is a fellowship in the resurrection of Christ. In the activity of this spiritual life we are conscious of spiritual environ- ment, of means of grace, and first of grace itself. The life is an energy identified with the energy of the Holy Spirit, not so much toward a future goal of happiness, for it doth not yet appear what we shall be, but it finds freedom, that is itself, in the life of the Church, the impulse of God. This is the life begun in Baptism, though the consciousness of it is imperfect and intermittent and only growing. The spiritual fact that needs in- sistence is that Baptism is a beginning. The fact THROUGH THE SACRAMENTS 69 that it cannot be repeated does not mean that it is done with. Spiritually as well as physically a man cannot enter the second time into his mother’s womb and be born. Once born he has the life, but it remains to live it. The explanation of human life cannot be found in chromosomes or parturition, but only in the growing and active organism of the human body and its association in the life of society. So, too, the new life becomes explicable only in the spiritual energy of the individual and his member- ship in the Church. Spiritual life knows no past, present, and future as points on a line of march. Materially Our Lord may be said to have offered His sacrifice in the wilderness and on Calvary, but in the reality of spirit His whole life was the energy of sacrifice. It is the same with the baptized life of the Christian. The death unto sin and the new birth unto righteous- ness are not landmarks but energies summed up and moving forward in the new life. _. Apart even from actual sins the Christian life of the baptized is a continual dying unto sin, as Christ’s life was, through an Eternal Spirit. Other means of grace feed, repair, or continue this life, but the motion of Baptism is a continuous, pure motion, quenching, crucifying, mortifying the old man. “I believe in one Baptism for the remission of sins.” The faith and repentance required of those who come to be baptized are the spiritual disposition which co-operates with the divine life. or grace ; without it the life does not flow. It must not be 70 SPIRITUAL RELIGION said that the Sacrament is incomplete or void, any more than it could be said that the Cross of Christ was incomplete, though it was nothing to many who passed by. The Cross is the power of God, and | am baptized once and for all, though by my life I tread the one under foot and despise the other to live a life of spiritual death. It is clear that life at its highest involves conscious- ness, and the norm, therefore, of Baptism is that of a conscious person who with repentance and faith in the Lord Jesus accepts and lives the new life. But it is doubtful whether consciousness is a necessary feature of life. We seemed to discern a life of the spirit in the unconscious world, so there is nothing contradictory to a spiritual belief in Baptism in the admission of infants. But life certainly demands consciousness where it is possible, and the Church in admitting infants presumes that this consciousness will be directed to the life which they have received. Rules may vary, sponsors here and Christian parentage there, but the presumption is the same, and where the presumption cannot fairly be made, it would seem to be exceeding the authority and violating the spirit of the Church to use the Sacrament as a formal ordinance. Readers of the Importance of being Earnest will remember the fun made of Baptism in that play, and the case would not have been better if Canon Chasuble had been a model of devotion and faith. It is doubtful whether the baptism of an uncon- scious baby, whose parents only know God as a THROUGH THE SACRAMENTS 71 person who punishes bad language, and whose sponsor has been induced to stand by the promise of half a pint of ale, is a more suitable use of the promise of eternal life. One attitude, therefore, that ought to be attacked in the interests of a spiritual apprehension of the Sacraments, is the false sense of shame which civi- lised persons feel at not having been baptized. It has very little relation to the “Too late have I sought Thee” of S. Augustine ; it belongs rather to that conception of the Christian religion as a state of respectability. The shame should be concen- trated in penitence; the opportunity of receiving the Sacrament is all for joy. § 2. THE SPIRIT IN ABSOLUTION The Christian life entered in Baptism is a life of spiritual growth and union with God. “That which is born of the flesh is flesh, and that which is born of the Spirit is Spirit.” Every sin is apart from this new life, it is a decline from the spiritual move- ment, so it is a separation of the self from God. This is more than a metaphor. Language is neces- sarily symbolical, but this fact of sin and its results lies near the reality of human life. Spiritual life, which is the true human life finding itself in the movement of God, moves, as we know well by ex- perience, against contrary tendencies, or in a resisting medium. It is a man’s own life, not like a stream on which he tries to steer his boat, so that if he 72 SPIRITUAL RELIGION goes wrong he has but to turn his helm once more for the central course of the current. It is his own life, involving his consciousness. Sin is a stopping or a misdirection of the life itself ; the life must get free before it can go forward again. Stated morally, sin is a distrust of God, a refusal of love ; there is need of reconciliation and forgiveness. It is the fact of consciousness which makes sin what it is. We have seen that there appears to be evil apart from sin. Such evil might be called a lower good, though that is merely an intellectual judgment without relation to reality, but by no mental gymnastic, only by moral perversion, can sin be described as a lower good. Sin is a fall, an act of consciousness, and by all spiritual experience it is not annulled or put away by the simple effort of not doing it again. . The metaphors which we use to describe the effect of sin—stained, burdened, tied and bound— all witness to the experience that sin is a positive obstruction to the spiritual life which must be re- moved if the spirit is again to be free. It is necessary to distinguish two meanings of the term consciousness. Sin means the evil act of a conscious being. If a person was absolutely un- conscious in respect of the matter, it would not be sin. But consciousness is sometimes restricted to the emotional quality which feels. Sin, and the feeling that one has sinned, are not at all the same thing. In this sense, consciousness of sin is part of the activity toward reconciliation, a step to peni- THROUGH THE SACRAMENTS 73 tence. Thus those who feel their conscience bur- dened by any weighty matter need Absolution, but those who also have sinned and do not feel their conscience burdened need it more, and are further from it. To take a concrete example, Saul of Tarsus was much nearer to the life in the Spirit when he be- — came conscious of sin, than when he was only kicking against the good; and he was nearer then than when the young men, who stoned S. Stephen, laid down their clothes at his feet. Much more is this the case with those who, un- like Saul, have consciously entered the Christian life. If an action has been sin at all, it does not cease to be so because it is forgotten : the life which has been turned aside from the movement of the Spirit is not restored by thinking no more about it. As it is in consciousness that sin occurred, in consciousness also the sin must be put away. This is repentance and forgiveness. As always with grace, there is the twofold activity, the divine and the human, the grace which God gives, which the Holy Spirit works, and the disposition which receives or energises towards. Of the Holy Spirit’s work in the human soul, moving to penitence and convincing of sin, we shall think later. We have now to consider rather the gift of Absolution. Absolution is the release of the soul from the sin which separates into union once more with the spiritual life. It is the energy of the Holy % 74 SPIRITUAL RELIGION Spirit. It is the act of the Church, which as the vehicle of the Spirit's power receives back the penitent into its peace. As the Church is the organ of the spiritual life in which the person lives, sin separates him from the Church, from its life. Absolution is a judg- ment pronounced by the Church in the name of God, and by the authority of Our Lord committed to it. So as the action of the Holy Spirit we may trace three features in the reconciliation of the penitent. First, the work in the sinner, convincing him of sin, of his fall, and his refusal of Christ. Secondly, the energy of the Christ life from which the sinner has departed, and to which he strives to return—the truly Christ life which he sees as his life. Thirdly, the judgment by which sin is con- demned and life restored. Absolution is not, any more than Baptism, con- cerned only with the past. Penitence is occupied with the past as a fact of the present. Absolution is the renewal of spiritual life, of a life to be lived. A sacrilegious confession, besides being in itself an act of contempt, does not so much invalidate the Church’s or the Spirit's act of Absolution as, ipso facto, renew the sin in the soul. The question has been asked whether Absolution is a positive grace, by which is meant a help for the future. This is little more than an in- tellectual subtlety. Absolution is spiritual life, life THROUGH THE SACRAMENTS 75 in union with the Spirit of God. It has no quanti- tative measurement. It is enough to be alive in the Spirit, to be free. We have spoken of sin and Absolution as the cessation and renewal of spiritual life, but after all we have only drawn a diagram of the matter. It is the power of Christ crucified which actually — brings the sinner to repentance, the attraction of divine love manifested in suffering which makes the sinner see himself as he is. The Holy Spirit within him gives him the power to see the Cross thus. It is the Atonement of Christ that constitutes reconciliation ; true contrition is to be crucified with Christ, and to know perhaps something of the desolation of being separated from God. Con- fession is indeed to lay the body in the sepulchre, the grave and gate of death, to pass by Absolution to a joyful resurrection. The amended life is in truth a union with the resurrection or spiritual body of Christ. Christ through an Eternal Spirit makes the way of forgiveness to life. It is through the same Spirit that we are made and restored as partakers of that life. Pardon is through the precious blood, but it does not act behind the curtain; it avails in the Spirit to the freedom of our souls. § 3. THE SPIRIT IN CONFIRMATION Confirmation is par excellence the Sacrament of the Holy Spirit. He Himself or His indwelling is 76 SPIRITUAL RELIGION described as the inward and spiritual grace of the Sacrament. It is the communication by the Church to its individual member of that force which in- spires and impels the whole body. We have considered that the Church is the continued manifestation in the world of the Holy Spirit, the Lord and Giver of life, proceeding from the Father and the Son. There is no implication that the Spirit of Life is confined to the body of the Church, but on the contrary the secret of the Church’s mission is that in its reality, that is its life force, it is akin to that which moves and vitalises the whole of creation. The Church ex- presses the Spirit’s purpose, the life comes into consciousness, a consciousness of purpose and method. “ One holy Church, one army strong, One steadfast high intent ; One working band, one harvest-song, One King omnipotent.” The individual members are to share the life of the body. The life which makes it what it is will animate them, They can be microcosms of the whole. As God willed the Church to be the Body of His Son and endued it with power by the Holy Spirit, so the baptized member of the Church is to receive the same outpouring of power for the mission which he is to accomplish, a grace which the Church bestows in the Sacrament of Confirmation. Confirmation is distinct from Baptism, as Whitsun THROUGH THE SACRAMENTS vJep from the Commission of the Apostles and the Resurrection and Ascension of Our Lord. The Apostles waited for the power from on high though they were already joined together as one body in the faith of Christ. As Whitsun could not be under- stood apart from the Resurrection and Ascension, so it is that Confirmation cannot be understood apart from Baptism. It is the giving of power and mission to one who is already living the life. Life would be sterile without the mission and the sense of it, as the mission would be meaningless without the life. So S. Peter is reported in the Acts to have apprehended it. “Can any man forbid the water, that these should not be baptized, which have received the Holy Ghost as well as we ?”’ Perhaps we ought to emphasize more the idea of Mission in our thoughts and teachings on Confirma- tion. The “laying on of hands,” “ out-pouring”’ of the Spirit, have one significance, which is the con- ferring of power to do. There are many difficulties and scruples which arise in connection with Confirmation—doubts of being any the better for it on the part of baptized members of the Church, scruples about “ keeping it up,” the Confirmation of communicants who have avoided the Sacrament, not to mention the case of Dissenters who have come over or desire to come over to the Church. Most of these difficulties would in great part disappear if it were recognised more fully that the Sacrament is an endowing with amission, Itsreception does not by implication con- 78 SPIRITUAL RELIGION demn the status of the past life, it is the grace to work for God in the Spirit. Confirmation is not directly intended to make one better ; Penance is the Sacra- ment that deals directly with sin and recovery. Confirmation is the gift of power to use, and it so far makes us better as a high calling and the answer to it is better than refusing the grace of God. There can be little doubt that the rigidity which makes Confirmation into a sort of preface to Communion, with very likely a First Confession as a preliminary to the Confirmation, tend to obscure the freedom of the spiritual life. A First Confession at the time is no doubt much better than none at all, but normally children should be in the practice of penitence before the age when they are generally confirmed. For the same reason there is much to be said in favour of First Communion in childhood before Confirmation, and this would probably be in the interests of both Sacraments, for First Com- munion is as much overshadowed by the episcopal impressiveness of Confirmation, as the latter is de- preciated by becoming a mere qualification for the communicant life. It need not be denied that there may be advan- tages in the sort of dramatic catastrophe caused by twelve weeks’ preparation ending in First Confession, Confirmation, and First Communion crammed into_ the space of about a fortnight and at the dawn of adolescence, nevertheless experience leaves some doubt whether dramatic catastrophe is what is wanted to ensure an harmonious spiritual life and a propor- THROUGH THE SACRAMENTS —§ 79 tioned apprehension of the means of grace by which itis supplied. To return to the connection between Baptism and Confirmation, the endowment with the Spirit is a corollary of the reception of spiritual life. S. John and S. Paul speak of both in one breath. The conversation with Nicodemus would certainly have been interpreted by the Evangelist as referring to both Sacraments, and S. Paul, writing to S. Titus, joins washing of regeneration and renew- ing of the Holy Ghost. The Epistle to the Hebrews places “the teaching of baptisms, and of laying on of hands” together, and the book of the Acts, in the accounts of Cornelius, of the conversion of the Samaritans, and of S. Paul at Ephesus, speaks clearly of the practice of the Apostolic Church. The directions of the English Prayer Book could hardly be more clear to the same effect. It is one of the results of the abuse of Baptism already re- ferred to, that the spiritual connection of the two Sacraments is very largely lost on the English people. It is partly the fact that the nature of Confirmation is not understood, but it is much more to the point that the meaning of Baptism, a Sacrament which they have actually received, is not grasped. Spiritual life is not so much a thing to be enjoyed, still less is it a qualification for respectability here or glory hereafter: it is a life to be lived. Life without Confirmation must be presented to us as the energy of waiting till we be endued with power. Practically the Sunday School, or whatever corre- sponds with it, must be a Confirmation Class. By all 80 SPIRITUAL RELIGION means let us teach the parables and the life of Christ, but the object of it all must be to educate and direct the baptized Christian to pray, and know God in prayer and worship, to love Our Lord that his faith may be quickened to realise in himself the incarnate life, to learn the doctrine of the Church that it may mould his life, so that he may be fitted to be an instrument of God the Holy Spirit. The practice, also, of baptizing adults, as it were to make up a defect in their early treatment, without at the same time presenting them for the laying on of hands, is altogether out of tune with spiritual religion. They cannot possibly be in a fit state for Baptism if they are unwilling to incur the responsibility (as they put it) of Confirmation. The responsibility rests on their Baptism. Every confirmed person is himself a body through which the Spirit works. The fact is patent to those outside. They show it by the different estimation they make of one who is confirmed; they expect different things of him. The fact is clear, too, in the consciousness of the confirmed ; he knows that much is required of him, not only by his fellows, but by God, and by God in them. Both the re- sponsibility and the opportunity are greater to the confirmed, though it is a responsibility which cannot be shirked if the life of Baptism is to go on. It is indeed a higher life which is received from God in this Sacrament. Itis a more perfect union of our spirit with the divine movement, a nearer accord- ance of our consciousness with the purpose of God, THROUGH THE SACRAMENTS 81 Once more, we need to remember that grace is the obverse of faith, which is activity. It is no passive obstruction to temptation, no power outside ourselves, to resist, that this or any Sacrament bestows, The grace of the Holy Spirit is a power which we may make our own, to the greater glory . of God. Not by works done in righteousness, which we did ourselves, nor by works which we did not ourselves, but according to His mercy He saved us, through the washing of regeneration, and renewing of the Holy Ghost. § 4. THE SPIRIT IN HOLY CoMMUNION All thoughts on the Blessed Sacrament spring from one central thought, namely that of the Sacri- fice of Christ. The Holy Eucharist sums up in itself all the truths, the blessings, the aspirations of the religion of Christians, It does so because the Cross of Christ is the life-giving fount of the Christian life. It is the power of conversion and the secret of wisdom, for it is the perfect manifesta- tion of divine love, and the finding of spiritual life through sacrifice unto death. This Sacrament can be regarded and used with different intentions, though all are implicitly present in every celebration—for praise, for intercession, for pardon, for blessing, for thanksgiving ; all these and other purposes are included in the Sacrifice of Christ, and all are spiritual efforts of the human soul as it makes for communion with God through F 82 SPIRITUAL RELIGION the life of Christ imparted to it in the Body and Blood. Through an Eternal Spirit Christ offered Himself without spot to God. The words seem almost acci- dental as they occur in the Epistle to the Hebrews, but they exactly express the reality of Our Lord's life and death and resurrection. We must explain the Christian’s life by Christ’s, not vice versa, yet as God in Him was incarnate, and it was by man that there came the resurrection of the dead, human experience alone can teach us the meaning of the redemption wrought by Christ. His was a death unto sin which He died in the body, a saving of human nature first of all in the body which was prepared for Him, and it was a Sacrifice to the uttermost offered by Love. It was the final victory in a human life of the Spirit over the flesh. In the contemplation of the Sacrifice of Christ we discover the reality of life, the spirit set free in the perfect co-activity of man with God. It may be, according to the attitude of our mind, as the image of the ideal, though philosophy may deny such a possibility. But there in the Sacrifice of Christ a Christian finds in outward fact an absolute in which all Christian life inheres. It is not only Christ’s life, but His and every Christian life, potentially because He is, as it were, making it His, dynamically because ~ itself supplies the power for making it. Or it is as ° the blank darkness of mystic penetration, for from the human standing-point life is found in death, success in failure, gain in loss; but the death of THROUGH THE SACRAMENTS 83 Christ, complete as it was, is not a giving up of that for which the life was lived, but an energy accomplishing its purpose and finding its freedom. The Sacrifice of Christ is spiritual life at its highest achievement lived in and through the body. Such is the Christian’s life. Present as an ex- ternal object to faith and worked in us by the Same Spirit who worked in Christ, Our Lord’s life becomes actually the Christian’s, It is given to him by the Sacrament of the Body and Blood. To understand the spiritual truth of the Sacra- ment, we shall begin by grasping the spiritual fact of the Sacrifice of the death of Christ and of the benefits which we receive thereby. If we have any intuition of spiritual reality, the old distinction of subjective and objective presence will cease to have much value for us. Spirit itself means reality, the real presence is the presence of the res, that is of the Body and Blood of Christ, the spiritual grace of the Sacrament. If it is necessary to use these forms of thought, spiritual religion would insist on the objective presence because to deny it would mean reducing the outward sign to mere ceremonial through which the spiritual gift is not conveyed. The idea of a subjective presence apart from an objective is mean- ingless apart from a metaphysical theory which would cover too much ground for those who take’ refuge in a “subjective presence.” If it means presence to consciousness, unless consciousness is deluded, it must be there that the person may be 84 SPIRITUAL RELIGION conscious of it; if it means a presence formed by the thinking mind, it becomes an intellectual con- cept, and it is extremely difficult to see in what sense it is a gift or a grace at all, or in what sense there is any Sacrament. There is no presence at all, there is only a presentation in memory of a past event. This is a long way from the needs or the experience of spiritual religion. Receptionism has more to be said for it because it does find reality in action, but it is not adequate to find reality in our devout acceptance of it. Both receptionism and the subjective theory imply that whatever of reality there is comes from us or at any rate through us, the outward sign never being more than suggestive, and the Church as distinct from the individual being left out of account altogether : but spiritual religion insists that reality comes to us or that we go to it. The Church is a spiritual body, and in its works the individual finds his life. The fact is these more or less in- tellectual ideas of the Sacrament express aspects of the truth, and when they are understood to negate one another, they involve falsehood and incidentally destroy themselves. By the working of the Holy Spirit the Church does offer on earth the Sacrifice of Christ, and Christ’s Body and Blood are actually present by the means of bread and wine. We offer Christ, as He ever offers Himself, by the power of the Holy Spirit within us, and enlightened by Him we are both conscious what we are doing and THROUGH THE SACRAMENTS 85 what Christ is doing. Communion is perfected by our reception, for therein we discern Christ’s Body and surrender our lives in union with His sacrifice and thereby do share His life, Certainly memory of the past, our apprehension, our act are involved, but we apprehend something which — is present and continuing, our act is a union with energising life. The spiritual reality is there for our worship, for our reception. We see and know no bread or wine, for faith working within us gains the ascendancy over our senses, and even our bodily senses become the instruments of faith, In us, too, in the occupation of worship and communion the Spirit controls the body, and in faith we live and act with Christ. A fact to be remembered is that the Eucharist is an action of the Church, and each particular celebration of it an act of the worshippers present in union with the whole Church. It is a taking up of the activity of Our Lord. We do not go to it primarily for edification, but to renew our life of praise and intercession and sacrifice in the power of Christ’s. The appeal of sensuous things—music and incense and lights and raiment—is of course to man rather than to God, but they may be the expression of our nature as well as an appeal to it, and it is in this spirit that they fill so prominent a place in Eucharistic worship. To an outsider a solo by a young lady at a men’s afternoon service and an Agnus Dei by the choir may seem much the same thing. There is a risk indeed that they may be so, 86 SPIRITUAL RELIGION but the beauty of whatever sort in the worship of the altar is meant to be the ordered expression of love and aspiration, not an incentive to cold hearts. All fulfil their part in the whole, as well as bring their individual needs and desires. 3 The Eucharist expresses one of the most pro- found truths of the spiritual life of man in its conjunction of glory and beauty with the awful truth of suffering and death. It is not only because the Sacrifice of Christ, being the conquest over sin, makes possible such joy and exaltation. That is true, yet for us the battle with sin is still proceed- ing, and the sufferings of Christ and His death must be our life here. The Eucharistic joy recalls the truth spoken of Our Lord when it was said that He “for the joy that was set before Him endured the cross, despising the shame,” and it reflects the gladness of the martyr’s “ birthdays.” Mystic exaltation and sacrifice are never far apart. Isaiah, seeing and hearing the vision and song of ‘heaven, fell on his face in abject penitence, and the painful emptying and surrender of self are the means that many a saint has found to the loveliness and satisfaction of a life found in God. We can certainly express the truth by saying that it is the Glorified Christ who is present and given and worshipped in the Blessed Sacrament, but it is well to remember always that He is glorified by suffer- ing and sacrifice, and that we are partakers of His resurrection by becoming partakers of His death, and we can only rejoice in the Eucharist round the Lamb THROUGH THE SACRAMENTS 87 as it had been slain, if all the time we are preparing to wash our robes and make them white in His blood by coming through great tribulation. It is the spiritual life which is lived and nourished by Communion, one and the same with, though on a higher level than, the life which we go on to live outside the sight of the altar. In the power of the Holy Spirit every communicant can so devote him- self, and shake off the engrossing attractions of the world, its cares and pleasures, that the life which is communicated to him will become actually his life, and he be able to say, “I live, yet not I but Christ liveth in me.” § 5. THE SPIRIT IN ORDINATION All the Sacraments are exercises of the Church’s life. Where there is no Church there cannot be ina true sense any Sacrament. This does not rest merely on a technical arrangement, or on an arbitrary assumption that only one particular organisation is entrusted by God with the power of handing down His grace. It rests on the fact that the principle of Catholic unity and the principle of sacramental grace are one and the same. If the purpose of God is fulfilled through an organic body, grace will be organised ; if the Church is visible, grace will be given visibly ; if Christianity in its true form is corporate, grace will be given and received as from a common life. The converse is equally true; if Christianity were purely individualist, and 88 SPIRITUAL RELIGION the Church an abstraction, outward signs could be nothing more than outward, there could be no means of grace, a Sacrament could be nothing more than formal ceremonial however frigid or emotional ; it would probably in the progress of enlightenment become an incubus, kept up, if at all, in obedience to a supposed command, which as a matter of fact belonged to an altogether different order and purpose of spiritual life. As a matter of experience our spiritual life is found in the losing of ourselves in something greater. Our life is the life of the Church, which is Christ’s, which is God. Our death unto sin is new birth into the Body of Christ, the Church : our reconcili- ation is the renewal of our life in the common life: | our unctlion is our commission to share the common energy : our Communion is a united act, and par- taking together of life given to the whole body. Now these Sacraments are means of life, and grace is life. It comes to us as well as we to it. It is ministered to us. If we draw our life from the Church, it is but the same thing to say that the Church supplies life to us. It was to the Church as a whole that we understand that Our Lord gave the commissions mentioned in the Gospel: “Do this in remembrance of Me,” “Go into all the world and baptize,” ‘Whose sins ye forgive they are forgiven,” “As My Father hath sent Me, even so send I you.” To the Church power was given and as a Church it exercises it. The Church is the organ of the Holy Spirit. THROUGH THE SACRAMENTS 89 The priesthood of the Church is ordained with the Holy Spirit in order that the Church may fulfil its functions. It has been disputed whether min- isters of the Church derive their authority from above or below, from God or the people. Surely from the middle, where the Church is and the Spiri of God. | Where there is no Incarnation and no Church, the priesthood is a superior caste imposed on the people from above. As for the representative theory, it just depends how the body which the minister represents is conceived. If the body is merely a congregation of people who desire to organise them- selves for the purposes of worship and edification, the minister chosen is a valuable but not quite necessary functionary. But if the body is the spiri- tual organism of the divine purpose, a body which has received power and is continuing the life of Christ in the world, then the minister or the priest represents the body to the individual, and is the ordered instrument by whom the Church supplies its members with the life they need. There can be no doubt which of these two alternatives is spiri- tual religion. It is no use trying to persuade one who does not believe in the Church of the importance of Apostolic Succession. Unless he first can be brought to see what the Church is—and this is no intellectual con- ception, it can only be explained or grasped in terms of life—Apostolic Succession can only. have a false meaning to him. Apostolic Succession may easily go SPIRITUAL RELIGION be misrepresented. It is regarded sometimes as a stream of divine authority trickling down through the episcopal order from the Apostles and Our Lord. If this were so, the clergy would be the Church, the organ of the Spirit of God, and the laity would be a subsidiary body at the best. In other words the Church, as we understand it, is unnecessary and ceases to exist, Every ordination is the conferring of the Holy Spirit for the authority to minister by the Church in the way that the Church by its own divine authority has determined. Ordination is the exer- cise of life, not the handing down ofa privilege. On clearness in the handling of this truth depends the possibility of reunion so far as the question of the ministry is concerned. As churchmen we can afford to speak of the grace being handed on “ from bishop to bishop,” but when it becomes a question of reclaiming to the Catholic Church the other bodies of Christians it must be made quite clear that the real “succession” is “from Church to bishop,’”’ from a Church which possesses in the present the living power of the Spirit of God. The same truth is the solvent of many Protestant objec- tions to practices of the spiritual life. The priest’s part in Absolution is condemned as an intrusion by one who does not understand that the Church is something from which sin separates and something which has power to restore. A distinction is often drawn between the autho- rity or the call to minister and the grace to fulfil THROUGH THE SACRAMENTS gI the ministry, but it is doubtful whether there is room for such a distinction in spiritual reality. It might be said that Baptism confers new life and also grace to live it, but in truth the grace is the life. Strength or vitality are only qualities of bodily life, they are not something different from life which contribute to its maintenance. So in matters of spiritual life, grace always is itself the life of the Spirit, and in the special matter of Holy Order it is the life of priesthood which is conferred by the gift of the Holy Spirit. The authority of _ priesthood and the grace to be a priest are not dis- tinguishable, they are the same thing. The inward and spiritual grace of the Sacrament is the divine authority of the Spirit to minister. In a sense all the Sacraments of the Church, except in special cir- cumstances Holy Baptism, depend for their validity on this Sacrament of Holy Order. Validity in this case means theChurch’s sanction. Without the priest or bishop the Sacraments would not be the act of an organic Church, which is their essential character. That is why the ministry of any Christian body is generally made the test of that body’s Catholicity, because by its origin a ministry points to the char- acter of the body which it serves, and by its acts to the quality of the spiritual life which that body fosters. There are two other purposes of the ministry that must be considered, those of teaching and ruling. So far the office has been considered as the ministry of grace, and this is the distinctive character of the Catholic priesthood. Q2 SPIRITUAL RELIGION The Church ordains men to teach. To be ac- credited does not mean infallible, but neither does authoritative mean infallible. The purpose of the teaching of the faith, of doctrine, is the quickening of the spiritual life of the Church’s members and the awakening to the possibility of life of those who are outside the life of faith. The work of the Christian teacher is first of all to communicate what may be called the material of faith which the life of the Spirit has deposited on its way ; he has to handle it in such a way that by means of it the learner may catch up the common life of the Church. The teacher of Christians has besides a still more sacred office. All his teaching must be directed to quicken and instil life, but it is not only the common experience that he is to put before those whom he teaches—he should have experience himself, an inner mystical life in the Spirit, which will make the symbols which he teaches quick with life. He must be able, like S. Paul, to tell others of things which he has seen and heard, whether in the body or out of the body he knows not, and to lead them by spiritual sympathy to the same knowledge. He must know, too, the reality of sacrifice, for this above all he has to teach, and it cannot really be taught in intellectual terms. He is called by the Spirit, in taking up the office of the priesthood, to resign the world in some measure or altogether—marriage and capital and independence. There are no doubt diversities of gifts even within the sacred ministry, but in no case can the ministry of life be just one of the professions ; THROUGH THE SACRAMENTS 93 it must be a spiritual life at high pressure if it is to bring others to the knowledge and energy of it. The office of ruling the Church is associated with the highest order, the episcopate. We have nothing to do here with the details of Church government. Ultimately it is the whole Church which is the source of authority. Order and rule are character- istic of life. The Church makes bishops its exe- cutive, responsible for discipline, and priests similarly in their sphere, but responsible to their bishop. This is the anatomy of the Church’s life, but the condition of the members’ health, for it is in discipline that sacrifice may be learnt, and in order that selfishness may be crushed, and so life gained to the increase of the body. CHAPTER IV THE HOLY SPIRIT IN THE INDIVIDUAL CHRISTIAN No energy or manifestation of the Holy Spirit is more normal than another. It is confusing to say that the Spirit normally works in the Church or through the Sacraments, but that He also works in the individual. It is confusing because it suggests that the one is exclusive of the other. We have already seen that the fact that there is one Catholic Church, embodying the purpose of God, the organ of the Holy Spirit, does not involve the exclusion of the Spirit from religious sects, or philosophies, or non-Christian systems. All such manifestations may be regarded as leading up to the meaning and work of the Church, So, too, in the other direction, the Holy Spirit’s operation in the Church does not preclude His operation in the individual soul, but on the contrary the former implies the other. The analogy of the body holds good. The body may be said to supply lite to the members, or the members to contribute life to the body, and all the time the life is some- thing more than either, 94 IN THE INDIVIDUAL CHRISTIAN | 95 What we mean by the work of the Spirit is the rushing life of God which ** Fills the Church of God and fills The sinful world around.” The Church is what it is in virtue of the life and | purpose which it embodies: the Christian is what he is in virtue of the spiritual life which he lives. If his spiritual life does not, so to speak, include the Church, it is so far the less partaking in the life of the Spirit. For the life of the Spirit is the life of God, and man’s just in so far as man lives it. The life of the Church is the life of God, and man’s in so far as he lets the Spirit draw him into it. The point to be made clear is that the meaning of man’s spiritual life is to be found in God, and not in the degree of perfection or the depths of intuition that a man seems to attain. Therefore it is not true to speak of the Spirit working in man nor- mally through the Church and bya sort of exception directly in a man’s soul; but rather the spiritual life which fails to co-operate with and express the lite of the Church is so far defective. It is necessary to state the same truth from yet another point of view. One man seems to draw the strength of his devotion and energy from the Church, i.e. from fellow- ship, from Absolution, from Communion ; another from the direct energy of the Spirit within him. But this is a mis-statement. The Spirit is not less directly active in the first man, but he has found a fuller life and a wider activity. Supposing that the 96 SPIRITUAL RELIGION self-surrender and the zeal in both cases are equal, the one finds life in real union not only with God but with the people of God, and on the Spirit’s plan which he thereby furthers ; the other, through igno- rance or blindness which may not be fault, energises with a life which he cannot contribute to the body of which he is not a member. We are to think, then, of the Spirit of God working in those who are baptized and confirmed, fully allowing that there is no human being in whom God is altogether without the witness of His Spirit. The untaught savage and the civilised anti-Christian have a conscience, rudimentary in the one case, suppressed in the other, yet in each something of divine, the unrecognised whisper of God’s Holy Spirit. But to study for devotional purposes the operation of the Spirit, it is right to look for it in the life which is consciously guided by Him and co-oper- ating with Him by the effort to live His life—that is, in the baptized ; and still more in the life which is conscious of His presence, awake to the responsi- bilities of such a power, and aiming at seizing the opportunities which He affords—that is, in the con- firmed. The spiritual life of a man is God’s life, yet it is truly and altogether his own. It is easy to explain the antinomy in words. Life is reality, whether we go on to say that reality is God, or that the impulse of it is from God. A man’s life is what is real of him, but in his spiritual life he is in contact with IN THE INDIVIDUAL CHRISTIAN 97 the Life which is the life of the All of God Himself, So it is God’s life which a man lives. But it is his own too, for without God his life is nothing, or it is a resistance to the motion of reality. In the spiritual life, the life which a man seems to find outside himself, though he must seek it from within, _ is all that gives meaning to his very existence, his creation, his powers, his purpose; and that which gives meaning is the thing itself—the life which he thus finds is his own truest life. Yet he has the treasure in an earthen vessel, so that in him the spiritual life appears as a conflict first of all. The mystic life of union is always there, in the bottom of his being, but the intuition of it is at the best intermittent, and only the perceived can be consciously lived. Life may be unconscious, and consciousness may not be a necessary feature of personality, but a man’s personality is incomplete without consciousness, and as a creative living being himself he must come to consciousness, and he is what he is conscious of. In the intuition of God and the life of God, a man lives altogether the spiritual life, but as his intuition is so obstructed his life is an effort towards God, a striving of the Spirit towards its own expression. This striving towards life, which we speak of and apprehend as actual life, works itself out in a man’s ethical and mental and spiritual nature. We find the Holy Spirit working and manifested in con- science, and understanding, and action, and prayer, before, so to speak, we can discuss His G 98 SPIRITUAL RELIGION perfect energy in purity, and faith, and love, and worship. The spiritual life is all a progress, and an effort, and a movement, but first it is a movement through that which hinders, and afterwards a movement to rise ever above and beyond itself. Not that these are actually successive stages in spatial time or separated in years or decades of a man’s life. They are always in some sense concurrent ; they are rather different energies or actions of life which the mind separates that it may take account of them. The real spiritual life is one, and empty of all conditions; like water poured out which rushes down, and seeks ever a deeper depth even though nothing obstructs, and all the more violently because nothing stops it. But the actual life of a man isa contest with hindrances, bursting throughand dashing aside, and turning, it may be, a wheel in its progress. This life has to gather force, and subdue its con- ditions till they become part of it or modes of its expression. The Church of Christ, in fighting with the world, claims the world to itself, till the world shall become the Church. So in the man the Spirit lusteth against the flesh, only to subdue it till all the conditions of a man’s nature and work become the organ of the Spirit within him. To put it in con- crete form, a man’s religion by the force of the Spirit will so claim his energies, that it will find its perfect expression in his business and his leisure, which in the sight of God and in his own intention will be ruled by love and offered in worship. IN THE INDIVIDUAL CHRISTIAN 99 The Christian must understand the real bearings of his life if it is to bea spiritual life. It is inspired by the Spirit and directed toward the full embodi- ment of Him. The Beatific Vision may be the final - attainment and prize in the distance, but it will never be brought nearer unless religion is all the | time moving towards it. The intuition of the mystic may seem beyond our ken, as we read of his flights in the super-essential darkness, but all religion is Only true religion in so far as it is moving and making towards that very knowledge and being. It is by the grace of God, not our invention and initiative, and the Spirit inspires us only because of what He knows we are capable of becoming. So though we have not yet obtained that perfect self- sacrifice of Christ which is a resurrection from the dead, and are not already made perfect, at least we will press on if so be that we may apprehend that for which also we were apprehended by Christ Jesus. The level of the spiritual life which is the subject of the following sections is the claiming of all that makes up a man’s life for Christ by the Spirit of God, the setting free of his powers and the sanctifi- cation of his energies. § 1. THE SPIRIT PROMPTING AND WARNING IN CONSCIENCE This is the simplest of all the manifestations of the Spirit. It is shared by all human ‘beings, and all are more or less conscious of it. The character- 100 SPIRITUAL RELIGION istics of conscience are patent ; it is only when men come to reason about it, to track it down to causes— in a word, to deal artificially with it—that questions as to its validity arise. The elementary experience that God warns us and prompts us in conscience is not really shaken as to its validity by any consideration as to its source in our nature. It does not matter whether conscience is a faculty sui generis, or a deposit of past calculations, or habit; the fact remains that in it, or by it, a man is warned against some actions and prompted towards others. Conscience bears on the face of it the twofold aspect which has been in every case noticed as characteristic of the Spirit's work and of spiritual life. It presents itself to a man as something apart from himself, it appears to act upon him as something which he can obey or refuse, while he remains himself in either alter- native. At the same time he conceives his con- science as really himself, and the temptations or the negligences which it combats are the extraneous force. At-the lower level of moral life the former is the predominant aspect. As morality advances the latter seems to represent the true case, and at a higher level still the conscience and the self seem altogether united, and the moral combat of life is the effort not only to climb free but to climb higher to a fuller realisation of self in divine character. The universality of conscience testifies to the divine element in all men and therefore in human nature itself. It is the divine spark in moral nature IN THE INDIVIDUAL CHRISTIAN tor that may be fed until it becomes a fire enveloping the whole personality of a man. Indeed it is his personality, for it directs and creates and purposes and is itself conscious. Conscience shows to us the personal character of the Holy Spirit. Con- science is not a faculty in man which can be co- ordinated with others, as reason, or the emotional or zsthetic faculties. Reason and passion may be in conflict, but if so we know why, and could explain in terms of mind and sense ; but conscience is as immediate as sense, and can employ reason, for it is not an activity of any part of our frame but of the whole of our being. It is a familiar truth that conscience may be trained and quickened by use and attention, as it may be deadened and silenced by neglect. The Spirit is life and must be lived, and spiritual life must be continuous and progressing. A live con- science is one which is in touch with Christ, for the Christian’s real life is Christ in him. This is true in matters of morals as in the more definitely super- sensual or spiritual life, for after all the Christian’s life is one ; subdivisions are only forms of thought, and do not occur in reality. It is said of the Spirit in a Litany that He ‘makes Jesus present still.” Conscience is the demand of the Christ life by which the Spirit of Him who raised Jesus from the dead quickens our mortal bodies. So it is indeed true that neglect of its dictates silences the voice. Even our own faculties are atrophied by disease, much more the power of a life which we refuse to live, 102 SPIRITUAL RELIGION Here comes in the importance of explaining a thing not by its rudimentary appearance, but by its highest development. The conscience of a church- man, consciously living or trying to live the life of Christ by the perceived power of the same Spirit by whom Christ was conceived and in whom He lived, is a very different thing from the conscience of the untaught savage or the unconverted millionaire. Conscience, as we will understand it, is thinking with Christ, it is the will of God. This being so, we can very well understand in what sense con- science is not authoritative. It is the sense in which we know that our life is not yet the perfect expression of Christ. We have no ready-made register of right and wrong, but in perfect self- sacrifice of will, by earnest prayer with faith, by effort of intuition, the voice of conscience becomes convincing. When actually we are dead unto sin, we cannot live any longer therein. Conscience is not only deterrent from wrong, as Socrates knew it, it is also positive, directing the next step or the new effort. For a Christian this is the primary action of conscience, for it is the voice of life, and life is not a state but an energy. Temptation seems rather the danger of falling from a state, but virtue is the activity of moving life. Both these energies of conscience, the negative and positive, should be in our minds in our self- examination. | The power of self-examination lies in invocation of the Holy Spirit. He will enlighten, for He will IN THE INDIVIDUAL CHRISTIAN 103 quicken conscience, and prayer is the energy of our spirit to accord with Him. By His help a quickened conscience will uncover from memory the definite commissions of sin and the omissions of obvious duties into which we have fallen. But a deeper purpose of self-examination is to reveal the soul from God’s point of view. This is the quickening of conscience in its positive aspect, the revelation of things not so much forgotten as confused and un- recognised in their true character, of lapses not from a fixed but from a rising standard, failures to rise— that is, to enter more deeply into life. This is what the Christian needs if he is to press forward to the goal, to live with Christ. The rule of God’s commandments is not sufficient for the Christian whose soul is set at liberty. It is into the standard of his purity, of his devotion, of his truthfulness, and of his honesty that he must probe. The exposure is the realisation of the Spirit within conscience. He is what he beholds. To see with penitence the lowness of his endeavour is to rise to a new height ; to recognise the life of the Spirit, since it is not with the sensual eye but with the risen will, is to make it his own in faith. § 2. THE SPIRIT GUIDING THE MIND The sevenfold gift of the Holy Spirit includes wisdom, understanding, counsel, knowledge. The classification is not to be pressed. The passage in Isaiah is a poetic description of the personality of 104 SPIRITUAL RELIGION the promised king—his spiritual power and force. In the usage of the Christian Church the number seven expresses the completeness of the gift, the union of human and divine nature, but attempts to define or fix the meaning of each separate gift are artificial, It is one of those cases where mystical. expression loses its force by being treated as an exact system. Interpretations by different expositors never agree with one another. As an analysis it is useful for meditation, but the gift of the Spirit cannot per- manently be stated with mathematical precision, and an atmosphere of unreality is introduced when these seven gifts are presented as a formula of theology or psychology. But the illumination of the mind is part of the Holy Spirit’s gift and work. We need to pray with understanding, and to grasp the truth intellectually up to the measure of our intellectual powers. Faith is not intellectual, for it is the energy of our whole nature. If we are inclined to connect faith with the will, or at any rate with the volitional element in our nature, which is the same thing, yet the intellectual and the institutional element cannot be outside the sphere of faith, they must at least subserve it. To speak of intellect as something opposed to faith is to introduce a dualism into reality, and ultimately to deny the unity of God. The mind or intellect cannot explain God or perceive life itself because intellect is constituted to compare things which only express life, and to fit men for IN THE INDIVIDUAL CHRISTIAN 10s action. To drop into metaphor, intellect walks about the decks of the ship, whose motion is life. It takes note of currents and winds, it may add fuel or stretch sails; but its movement is relative to the movement of the ship, and though it may commit suicide by losing that relationship, the one thing it cannot do is to exceed the pace at which — the: ship is travelling. So long as the crew is aboard none of its movements is really contrary to the ship’s. It is so with the intellect. Just because faith or religion is the motion of our whole nature, intellect must not be outside our faith. In so far as it formulates truth at all it is a manifestation of the Holy Spirit, and He en- lightens the understanding and guides the mind for the enrichment of life and the increase of its activities. It would be most trite to insist on the import- ance of intellectual truth for expressing the results of faith and communicating them to others. In individual experience we generally learn the faith before we actually live it. It is one of the chief truths of spiritual religion that our holding of the faith must be a truth of our life and not a mere intellectual assent. The truths of the In- carnation, the Atonement, the Resurrection must be necessities of our spiritual life, though certainly we first learn of them as intellectual doctrines. It is quite clear that the difference between intellectual assent and faith is almost infinite, yet one could seldom say at what point one became the other. 106 SPIRITUAL RELIGION There must be a spiritual guidance and a spiritual quality in intellect to make the transition possible. We accept intellectually the Incarnation and the Atonement on grounds of authority or reason ; then by effort of the will they become part of experience, faith apprehends them as perceived facts ; we know them by intuition, and this know- ledge lifts the weight off authority and reason. So the mind serves the interests of spiritual religion as a preliminary stage, and again by reflecting upon the material of faith. Its function is to equip the person and to fashion truth so that it may be of use and brought within reach. These are but metaphors, but we know in our own experience and observe it in others’, how the same truth becomes in one case a way of life and in others remains a lifeless proposition. It is by the guidance of the Holy Spirit that truth is formulated so as to tend to the apprehension of life, and by His inspiration that in study and learning the intellec- tual passes into the spiritual effort. It may be that after reading a given book, one reader might be able to give the better précis of its contents, but the other might have absorbed the real truth contained in it into his life. The first reader would make the better critic of the book’s shortcomings or inconsistencies, but the second would have caught up its positive value. | Therefore it is that we need a spiritual attitude, and'the aid of the Spirit in reading and studying. The critical faculty also may be used in the in- IN THE INDIVIDUAL CHRISTIAN 107 terests of spiritual life. It sets free vital truth from the dressings which no longer express, but rather obstruct it. Myth, which once embodied truth, in course of time obscures it, unless criticism reveals ‘its proper character. It is criticism which has made the Old Testament a living record of the Spirit’s progress, instead of a burdensome heritage, which’ . only desperate subtleties and trivial scientific agree- ments could explain away. Criticism, too, reveals the person of Our Lord and the purpose of the Church, for it brings the Redeemer of mankind out of the rigid sphere of a written record into living actuality. Criticism may be perverse or it may be honestly mistaken, but its true object is the dis- covery of truth. Any person is more than his biography can permanently produce. Circum- stances and aspects of his life assume propor- tions which to new generations fail to express his presence, It is this tendency that the mental faculty of criticism counteracts. The mind itself is progressive and changing in its action, and what is at one time a sufficient formula, in course of time, when the prevailing philosophies and forms of thought have given way to others, needs to be criticised and restated. It is not that the truth can become untrue, but its ex- pression can only be truly understood in relation to the forms which it presupposes. The memories attaching to such words as substance, person, ob- ject, exemplify this fact. So the mind can never rest in ree of religion, 108 SPIRITUAL RELIGION for religion is a living, active force, and the mind must keep pace with it to supply its needs, § 3. THE SPIRIT MOVING TO PRAYER Prayer is the language and the intercourse of the spiritual life. It is as much God speaking to us and God speaking in us as our speaking to God, for it is the voice of our spiritual nature, in which the dis- tinction between the human and the Divine Spirit are not clearly marked. Life without prayer is a deaf and dumb spirit, and, on the contrary, prayer is almost co-extensive in its activity with life in the Spirit, for it is the link that attaches ourselves, as we are, to that purpose or life which is potentially ours. Our actions and speech become God’s work if they are inspired by the power of prayer. “I speak not from Myself: but the Father abiding in Me doeth His works.’’ The communion of saints is realised in intercession, in the consciousness of corporate prayer, and in the power of appealing to those whom the Church recognises as saints in glory, and the spiritual sense of their prayers with and for us. Confession and penitence has its language of prayer, by which we strive from a fallen nature back to the communion of spiritual life. In meditation, prayer begins to be rather the hearing than the speaking of the soul, but it is the hearing of the disciple who is asking questions of his master, and his hearing is rather an active energy than a passive reception. In contemplation, the IN THE INDIVIDUAL CHRISTIAN 109 need for utterance has passed, and prayer is become the soul’s attitude of communion and aspiration. Perhaps one of the greatest needs of Christian life is that prayer should be understood and used more as the way of obtaining the knowledge of God—a way, that is, of access to spiritual life. Prayer is 3 itself the Christian’s lesson, from the simplest ele- mentary teaching, which the child gains by repeating the Lord’s Prayer, to the most profound spiritual enlightenment that the greatest mystics have ob- tained in the long hours of agony and devotion. For this reason nothing is to be despised that assists prayer. When it is considered that all our nature and the needs we do not feel, all the full- ness of Church life and spiritual life which we have not yet made our own, and only shall in prayer, have to find their place in the prayer of the Christian, it is foolish to suppose that anybody can pray at any time. It is foolish to suppose it a priori, and it is not in accordance with experience that it is so. Forms of prayer are useful, even to make our morning and evening prayers approach toward completeness. A hurried petition to be kept safe till morning light is not all the orison that is expected of a powerful male to whom God has given talents of health, and brains, and wealth, and vigour. Forms of prayer for daily use, for penitence, for preparation and thanksgiving for the .Sacraments, for intercession, and even for meditation, bring to our IIo SPIRITUAL RELIGION aid the experience of the Church or of those who have obtained special mastery of prayer. They are to be used as lessons to enlarge our scope and direct our aspiration and kindle our devotion, with humility as of men who are willing to learn, certainly not with the pride of men who make long prayers. It is the spirit in which we pray that is the prayer : the goodness or badness of the use of forms depends entirely on the spirit in which they are used. The same is true of repetitions, which are vain if they are used for the sake of the merit acquired by such performance, but Christians have always found that the repetition of simple forms of prayer like the Kyrie, the Paternoster, the Ave, may be a vehicle for prayer continually changing in intention, or in- creasing in fervour. This is really a form of mental prayer as it is called, the words used being quite subordinate to and hardly even expressive of the actual meaning and intention, It is a stupid term, because all prayer which can rightly be called prayer at all is mental, or rather spiritual. What is meant is prayer which is inarticulate. After all, words and forms may help, but they can be discarded when their work is done. It is in unuttered prayer that the spirit achieves its real growth and closest communion. Spiritual life does not necessarily mean contemplative life, it means a life consciously acting under the influence of the Holy Spirit and conformed to Christ by the Spirit’s power, and apprehending Christ by faith, which is the IN THE INDIVIDUAL CHRISTIAN 111 Spirit’s gift. Such a life finds its spring in meditation. In meditation we invoke the Holy Spirit, and by His aid or action within us absorb spiritually the lesson from scripture or the fact of faith on which we meditate. Christ’s actions are made to live in our will, His commands awake the response of our intentions, His passion and resurrection are made ours in faith and so able in love to be actualised in our human life. There is a point where praying and studying run into one another in the Spirit’s work. That effort in studying which passes from intellectual understanding to spiritual appropriation is of the nature of prayer: and that attitude of prayer which seeks, by living again some fact, to get to the bottom of its truth is spiritual learning. In prayer of this sort the Holy Spirit does make it possible for us to re-enact those truths which Christ through Him showed forth in His life, to realise (for once the word may be used literally) the doctrines of redemption and sanctification in faith. The rosary is not more exempt from the danger of formality than other sorts of prayer, but to meditate on the incarnate life of Our Lord from the point of view of His blessed Mother, and on her character and glory as the crowning example of human salva- tion, learning over again the lessons of that story and apprehending it in our souls by continuous prayer, is an exercise most calculated to give oppor- tunity to the Spirit of God within us. When all forms tend to distract one’s energies from prayer to its expression, it is often found that 112 SPIRITUAL RELIGION the more mechanical and artificial framework of prayers is compatible with free devotion where absence of method would leave the spirit confused and preoccupied. It has already been mentioned that the Com- munion of Saints is partially realised in intercession. In such prayer man remembers that spiritual life is much wider than his individual sanctification. In intercession man takes his place in the vast and abundant purpose of the Church. The Spirit of God is the impulse in creation which the Church embodies, and if the Church, then in microcosm the individual churchman, In prayer for the Church, gathering into the effort the knowledge or the thought of its special difficulties, the problems of disagreement, the ob- stacles to be overcome, apathy and worldliness and ignorance, the dangers bodily and spiritual of missionaries, and of converts and hearers, the call to sacrifice and the glory of victory, the churchman through the Spirit that is active with him is doing the Spirit’s work, promoting the Kingdom. Prayer is always an energy of faith which must issue to action. Orare est laborare not only in itself but it is the spring of labour. The dark night of the soul, when the soul seems in conflict with itself, issues into the clear day, when the soul can work un- hindered. It was so with S. Catherine of Siena, with S, Theresa, with S. Augustine, with S. Paul, and with Jesus Christ Himself, who was led by the Spirit into the wilderness and returned by the Spirit lie vs ts ~, oe ee ee ee - a 7 YS ah IN THE INDIVIDUAL CHRISTIAN 113 to Galilee, who passed through the passion and the agony of the Cross, the desolation and the death, to the resurrection of endless life, 4. THE SPIRIT INSPIRING TO ACTION Every Christian is necessarily a missionary. “No man liveth unto himself,” and the Christian life most of all is one of activity which tells on the whole body. Our actions, even more than our words, are sermons. When a boy or girl at work or at play with companions: takes an opportunity of standing up against some form of evil, as dishonesty, or deceit, or impurity of language or action, it is the Spirit of God working in him or her. When a priest or other worker of the Church strikes at the moment when the iron is hot and wins a soul it is the Spirit of God doing His work. Our courage when we are naturally timid, and not less our tact where otherwise we should repel by professionalism, are the effect of the Holy Spirit who uses us. We should think of this in reference to the circum- stances of our life and work, and the calls which perhaps God is making upon us without response on our part. The Spirit's call to work is made in many dif- ferent ways. Sometimes when it comes through the body of the Church itis a clear call, and involves no hesitancy except the shrinking to do what is clearly demanded. When the demand is duly made on one who is under obedience, or otherwise by the H 114 SPIRITUAL RELIGION authority in the Church at whose disposal we ought to place ourselves, it is none the less the vocation of the Holy Spirit. It may be that it is not seldom distrust of one’s readiness to obey the Spirit's call, in other words unwillingness to sacrifice oneself, that prevents the initial step of entering a life of obedi- ence—the religious life. Nevertheless it is perhaps necessary to insist that the call of the Spirit is an inward call as well as an outward. The abuse and the neglect of such calls has led some to emphasize the reality of the out- ward call of the Church to the individual, eg. in respect of the call to the sacred ministry, at the expense of the inward motion. As in all spiritual life, there is the double energy ; the soul must go out to meet the Sacrament, it cannot be merely receptive, i.e. passive. The discernment of a call is one of the hardest problems of life, yet it is an undoubted spiritual experience. It is only in the spirit of prayer and self-sacrifice, that is in the Spirit, that the Spirit’s call can really be discerned, otherwise in- clination’ can easily masquerade as the divine force. Those who are truly sacrificing their wills are probably spiritual enough to make the call upon themselves without any sense of divine impulsion, that is they are so in accordance with the Divine Spirit that they cannot be conscious of any out- wardness in the call, they freely determine in the Spirit to devote themselves to such and such a work. But we cannot expect to hear God’s calls IN THE INDIVIDUAL CHRISTIAN 115 or the Spirit’s judgments in our difficulties, if we have not attuned ourselves to hear Him in prayer. The Christian’s actions are the expression of his spiritual life. “Tf ye love Me ye will keep My commandments.” “If we live by the Spirit,” says S. Paul, “by the Spirit let us also walk.” This will not be living in conformity to any law, but acting on the impulse of the divine nature of which we are conscious. The law provokes a conflict with every lust of the flesh, but the whole law is fulfilled in love. In the power of love they that are of Christ Jesus have crucified the flesh with the passions and lusts thereof. The spiritual life is the continual cruci- fixion of the flesh, setting free the spirit to bear its fruits. § 5. THE SPIRIT CONVICTING OF SIN In the conviction of sin we come to the root of our own lives, That which separates us from God, and from life in God, is sin; that which makes our lives not life in the ae is the sin which finds place there. The first step to the death unto sin and the new birth is penitence, the vital fact of penitence is the sense of sin. The sense of sin is the Spirit lusting against the flesh, asserting its claim and re-establishing itself, the energy of the Holy Spirit. The illumination of conscience is only a small 116 SPIRITUAL RELIGION part of the soul’s sense of sin. The sense of sin can hardly be brought into a system of ethics, as conscience can, for it is part of the motor force of Christian life, it is an element in the movement which is reality. The sense of sin is one of those facts which make Christianity not a philosophic system but a way and a life. It does not tell us what we ought or ought not to do, but it is the effort or part of the activity by which we struggle from the negation of spiritual death to positive spiritual life. The sense of sin cannot be described; we only can tell a little of how it comes about. It is in some way connected with the Cross of Christ ; it happens in the power of love. The love of Christ crucified moves to repentance when the sinner is able to open his spirit to the beams of the Cross. “Is it nothing to you, all ye who pass by ?” The completeness of the sacrifice, the very deso- lation of the Cross, by the power of the Spirit makes an appeal to the sinner’s heart, and he comes to the knowledge that it is to him that the appeal is made. The sense of sin is not mental awareness, but the wounding of that with which we love. The absence and the failure of our love has torn the love of God. The Holy Spirit is the Spirit of the love of God. The sense of sin, which is in one way the consciousness of death, is the quickening in our life of the Eternal Love. IN THE INDIVIDUAL CHRISTIAN 117 But the conviction of sin is not only the effect in us of the Cross of Christ, it is itself a passion and crucifixion in ourselves. Christian rhetoric, - in dwelling upon the passion of the Saviour who bore the iniquities of us all, has pointed to the several sufferings of Our Lord—the crown of thorns, the scourging, the bearing of the cross—as the bearing of the guilt of man’s several sins, pride, and lust, and sloth, With the sight of the Cross before him, the converse is true of the sinner who has come to the sense of his sins; his conscious- ness is his passion, This is the process of the death unto sin ; through the power of the same Eternal Spirit man knows the fellowship of Christ’s sufferings, he is con- formed unto His death, he is crucified with Christ, and in virtue of this he comes to know also the power of His resurrection. Now all this experience of the soul (and it is not only S. Paul’s but that of every true penitent) is the work of the Spirit. In Christ Jesus it was worked out in the physical order, yet it was as truly a spiritual truth of His life. It was a real dying in the flesh to the body of sin, a winning of the spirit through the opposition of sin to eternal life. Tauler says of Our Lady that “she first conceived and bare God in her spirit,” and it was because she bore God in her soul and her spirit that she was able to bear the Word of God in her body. The spiritual is more real than the bodily, or rather the bodily is the expression of the spiritual, the outward of the 118 SPIRITUAL RELIGION inward and real. So it is with the Passion and death, and in true penitence the reality of the Passion is ours to the measure of our life. So both sin and penitence are described as death, but in very different applications of the word. Sin is moral death, the failure to live of our true nature, the cutting off of our being from the spring of divine life, the absence of spiritual life. Penitence also is a death, a dying unto sin, a death of sin, the surrender of all in will, perhaps in physical fact, to the uncreated Life and Love which quickens the mortal body to new and spiritual life. Sin speaks of death and only of death ; penitence of death leading to life, as the Cross also is the emblem of death but the symbol of eternal life. It is the Spirit that quickeneth. The penitent prays to the Holy Spirit for light in his self-exami- nation, and as the sense of his sin deepens the Spirit groans within him in voiceless speech. By the power of the Spirit he crucifies his sins and his whole body of sin by such a repentance that it is truly a death. Through the Eternal Spirit he offers himself, if not without spot of sin, at least washed in the blood of Jesus, to God, that henceforth he may live not after the flesh but after the Spirit. The sense of sin is the process by which the soul of man identifies itself with real life. In the activity of life it becomes possible to be conscious of death. Sin appears as it is; self-will and fleshly lust, which have become parts of our life, are manifested as true life’s negation. In the Spirit we know then what IN THE INDIVIDUAL CHRISTIAN 119 we are, and face to face with reality in our own soul, the meaning of the sacrifice of Christ is re- vealed to us as the love which sacrifices and the ~ power which raises again to life. It is not alone the conviction of our own state which the Spirit of God quickens within us, but the knowledge of what sin is in the life which we share as members of the human family. If the pulse of our spirit can throb with the life that the Spirit lives in the heart of mankind, we become conscious of the burden of human sin, the call to sacrifice for the life of the whole body, the glory of the evidences of the divine mercy. CHAPTER V THE HOLY SPIRIT IN HUMAN CHARACTER OvuR final thoughts about the work of the Holy Spirit are still concerned with His energy in the souls of individual persons, yet it is not merely a con- tinuation of the catalogue of His works from the last chapter. Then it was to His action upon human faculties that we turned attention—upon our judgment by His prompting of conscience, upon our minds in giving understanding, on our desires in moving to prayer, on our deeds by inspiring us to action, on our human souls by stirring within them the sense of sin. We come now to consider what He is Himself within our souls when He is present and given the co-operation of our nature—that is, what human character is when positively it manifests the Spirit of God. For the Spirit of God in the elect is not an outside influence but an indwelling life, and His life is their life, and only then are they truly alive when Christ dwelleth in them by the power of the Holy Spirit. The character of the redeemed life, sanctification in the narrower sense, is now our subject. In one 120 THE HOLY SPIRIT IN CHARACTER 121 sense all Christians are sanctified, in another sancti- fication has yet to be attained. S. Paul is bold to write to imperfect Christians as “them who are ~ sanctified in Christ Jesus.” Sanctification can mean nothing less than holiness unhampered by any sin, a Character redeemed, a spiritual life of resurrection. This is the life which we see perfectly in the risen life of Our Lord after He had through an Eternal Spirit offered Himself without spot to God. That is not only the life of the Christ, it is the ideal life of every Christian, it is the life at which we aim. More than that, it must be the life which we recognise as ours by faith, and by faith we must make it ours until it be realised in actual fact. In Christ, that is as we see ourselves in Him and claim His fellowship, that sanctification is ours. In us it shall be ours by the working of the Holy Spirit, who makes Christ present in those who are His, actually andreally. “Christin us” is the end of our religion, and the truth is held forth to us in the promise of the Paraclete. ‘In that day ye shall know that I am in My Father, and ye in Me, and I in you.” So then we know what the life of sanctification is : we see it in Christ as it is revealed by the Spirit. We do not find it explicitly in the scrappy accounts of Our Lord’s resurrection appearances in the written Gospels. There is something here which cannot be conveyed to the intelligence by written description. The world cannot receive it, for it beholdeth not the Spirit, neither knoweth Him. The glory of Christ is a knowledge which the Christian can catch with 122 SPIRITUAL RELIGION spiritual insight and spiritually interpret to others, but not with the words which man’s wisdom teaches. There is this knowledge of Christ not after the flesh but after the Spirit; and the Spirit works within us and is found within us—a knowledge which has lost touch with records, for it is not a formulation but an energy of spiritual being. The Christian’s knowledge and his being are no longer distinct. He spiritually is what he spiritually beholds. Those who would help us to gain this insight tell us that we must turn our gaze inwards, and though this is a metaphor it corresponds with the. truth. Spirit can only be found within. Yet it is through the within to the beyond that we must really pierce. Introspection marks the means, not the end. We are not yet actually made perfect, we but seek to attain, and have the earnest of the Spirit. There is a reality in which we do inhere, and by self-sacrifice we commit ourselves to it, but it flows irresistibly whether we find it or not. It is the divine life with which we would be clothed, and it becomes ours through our apprehension of it. The life is one and invisible. Strictly it suffers no analysis, it has no psychology ; reached in many ways and through every faculty, it is a simple con- sciousness. Joy and desire and certainty seem fused into one energy. Itis compared to bright light and to black darkness, to heavenly harmony and divine stillness. Yet with the glory of this knowledge it is not in THE HOLY SPIRIT IN CHARACTER 123 the Christian life necessary, like Moses, to put a veil between the glory and the common life.- S, Paul says that we reflect as a mirror the glory of the Lord, and so are transformed into the same image from glory to glory. So the spiritual life is reflected in common life, and this we may mark, watching its — manifestation and observing its action. In the following pages there is no pretence of exact psychology. It is not really possible to divide up human character into mind and will and heart, and if it were, faith and hope and love could not neatly be fitted into such compartments. Nevertheless it is roughly in these aspects that the human spirit is: energised by the divine impulse, and the possession of them does correspond predominately with those manifestations of the Spirit which we describe as virtues. § 1. THE SPIRIT IN THE BODY—PURITY When, in this sketch of the Spirit’s working in mankind, we passed from the consideration of His work in the wider world of creation to His operation in the Incarnation and the Church, the first view that met us was of a maiden who for her purity and humility was chosen to become the Mother of God and of the Church of Christ. So now the first thought of the Spirit’s free activity in the Christian soul is of the body pure and useful, in which the Christian is inspired to live in the Spirit. Purity of body includes or rather is purity of mind 124 SPIRITUAL RELIGION and soul and of all that is human. The body for good or ill is the expression of a character and life within. Its purity is less a physical fact than a spiritual reality, for the body is but a corpse apart from the life which animates it. By the purity or otherwise of desires and intentions and mind and will the body is clean and free or stained and bound. In experience the life of a man is a conflict between the Spirit and the flesh. The former is life and movement, the impulse of the constant flow of reality, the divinity which makes alive and raises from the dead. The flesh is the symbol of the stationary and the dead, the drag against free movement, the resist- ance to life, the denial of the divine, the refusal to be raised, the false realisation of self apart from the — real. The Spirit lusteth against the flesh and the flesh against the Spirit, and these are contrary the one to the other. Yet this is not an eternal conflict. It is a conflict in our fallen nature and in so far as it is fallen; and as the Spirit of Him who raised Jesus from the dead raises also that which is fallen and quickens our mortal bodies, so the conflict ceases or ap- proaches cessation. The body too is good. It is in the divine purpose and becomes in the divine victory the temple of the Holy Ghost. The body of sin may die, or rather must die, that it may live unto God in the Spirit. | Those sins which are specially associated with the body or the flesh have already been seen in THE HOLY SPIRIT IN CHARACTER 125 penitence to be sins against the body. The pure Spirit of God convicts us of sin unto repentance and to renewal of life. We think now not of impurity but of positive purity, the quality of the Spirit as He reigns in the human body. The power which animates and quickens the body for the perfect expression of the Spirit, it can be seen in sacrifice and the life attained by sacrifice. It may be put before us in Jesus standing naked and wounded on Calvary, a body perfect in awful beauty to the eyes of Christian love and penitence, or standing in the sunlight of early . morning once more by the Lake of Galilee, when the Apostles whispered, “It is the Lord.” Or purity may be seen and valued in some of Christ’s saints, and chiefly in the Mother, where it availed to make her not only the bearer of the Christ but the mirror of all purity, and to our hearts and in our love for ever “‘ Blessed amongst women.” Purity is the character or energy of a body so freed by sacrifice that it is a means of power and an expression of beauty. It lends itself to the Spirit and shows Him forth. It is free to live. Our spiritual faculties are much influenced by our bodies. Faith, perseverance, devotion are strangely affected by bodily condition, whether pulled down or strengthened and purified. We think of them chiefly as dragged away from their purpose and intensity, or as hampered in the struggle. But there is also the other side of the truth. There is purification through conflict, there is 126 SPIRITUAL RELIGION value in sacrifice, and the victory has often been won. A body perfect in purity, which is the Spirit, by its vigour and wholesome activity, by its beauty and joy, uplifts the mind and strengthens the will, Cleanness and power over the sinful lusts present a body which in its freedom and health and strength is strong for the work of God and itself an acceptable sacrifice. This is the presence of the Holy Spirit in the loveliest of God’s visible creation. The way to such an activity is for most of us through the path of sorrow and mortification, for all of us, even for Jesus Christ, through the suffering and sacrifice that makes perfect. The realisation of the Spirit in the body is an object for prayer after such penitence ; and all the time the Christian © has before him the Risen Body of Jesus and the sacramental Presence, and seeing it by faith, in faith he makes it his own through the Spirit which is his and dwelleth in him. § 2. THE SPIRIT IN THE WILL—FAITH Faith, like every other spiritual virtue, is the activity of the whole of man’s nature, but it seems to be gathered up and directed forth in the will. The institutional element in man’s nature requires faith, and intellectual activity is to some extent based upon faith. A man may believe on authority ; it may be the authority of the Church, or of teachers inspiring confidence, or of reason. Such an attitude — implies a preliminary faith in the elementary form THE HOLY SPIRIT IN CHARACTER 127 of trust in the society, or persons, or intellectual process which he makes the ground of his faith. At the same time it is well to notice that this form of faith or trust, which is described as elementary, is by no means necessarily the unthinking or arbitrary affection of a simple soul. It may be not only the ~ beginning but the result of intense and active experi- ence, not merely the simplicity of the child who accepts what he finds or is told, but the mature confidence of one who by humility and sacrifice is actually living the life which now guides him and holds his obedience. But the acceptance of any authority is not really what is meant by faith. It is rather a condition of faith or a way in which men are led to faith. Faith is not a state of mind but an activity. Take the case of a Sacrament—Penance. A man might believe in that Sacrament because the Church teaches it, or on the strength of Our Lord’s words recorded in the Scriptures, or the inherent reasonableness of it, or through his respect for the spiritual know- ledge of the Tractarians. Now it would require some energy of faith, greater or less in degree, to come to such a condition of mind, but the con- dition itself is not faith. Faith is the further con- tinuous energy which assumes the truth of that Sacrament into the man’s own life. It is the will at work, not at rest. If that is so in the case of a Sacrament the same fact is still more clear in the case of the principles of Christian redemption and religious faith. What- 128 SPIRITUAL RELIGION ever power any authority may have in leading this man or that to the acceptance of the Being of God and the Holy Trinity, of the Incarnation and Atonement, it cannot possibly constitute faith itself. The mental acceptance of Theism and Christianity is not faith. Faith may go before in the construction, but acceptance is like machinery fitted and ready. Faith is the energy produced when the power is turned on. In fact, faith is Holy Spirit in our will, a power of life, and full of life, apart from any conditions which make the life possible in human nature. By faith the truths of redemption are made alive in man, the life of Christ becomes man’s life. By faith the Spirit makes Christ present in the soul, not acting from without but by the energy which is its own. The Incarnation, the Atonement, the Resurrection, the ascended life and perpetual sacrifice of Christ, are in the first place facts of the life of Jesus Christ. They are truths of redemption of human nature in His person. We see Him made perfect in human nature and glorified. This indeed requires our action of faith, the instruction of the Spirit of Truth. But the whole process by which that redemption first is viewed as our redemption and finally be- comes actually ours is the real process of faith. Faith grasps redemptive truth not as a fact but rather as a power. Redemption is a living process which is not apprehended otherwise than by being lived. Life can only be apprehended by life. If THE HOLY SPIRIT IN CHARACTER 129 this doctrine seems obscure when propounded as a philosophy, it is a necessity, almost a common- place, to religion. The truth of the Atonement is known in being reconciled, and the truth of God in sacrifice to His will and response to His love. Christian truth is finally life, and faith is the energy in which man seeks to live. In Christ a man sees the salvation of human nature accomplished, Faith, which is the very affinity or even identity of the Spirit in us with the Spirit that was in Jesus, makes him view and claim that salvation as his own. He knows that that is his nature, he knows that what Christ accom- plished in Himself He will accomplish in him also. He knows so certainly that that is his true destiny, and trusts so fully in Christ’s power to work it in him, that even at the present he can claim salvation as his, and believes that God looks on him as found in Christ. That is the account of a man’s will when the Holy Spirit is supreme in it. Though actually this salvation is in Christ, faith is the very substance of the thing so hoped for. In faith he is saved. God cannot impute righteousness where it is not, and actually a man is not redeemed—his redemption is not accomplished—so long as sin at all reigns in his mortal body: but the Spirit of God assures him that what is already his in faith, by His working will infallibly be so in fact. So faith is spiritual sight, a power of viewing spiritual truth in its action; and as in spiritual i# 130 SPIRITUAL RELIGION matters beholding is being, the energy of the will which uses this knowledge is faith also. Faith works upon what it sees. By faith we mortify sin and die a death in repentance, killing with effort of surrender our pride in self-examination and contrition; by faith we bury ourselves in Baptism and in Absolution, and by faith the new life is worth living. ‘By faith” does not mean “in a figure”; faith is the most real thing in experience, for it is the energy of the Spirit, which alone is in touch with life. Faith, then, is the activity by which the Spirit in man appropriates truth. Appropriation better describes the fact than receptivity. The Spirit is never passive ; God works and man responds by co-operation. Grace indeed is received, man opens his soul to God, man submits to the divine will, but such phrases only cover the energy of the Spirit which conforms man to the divine or spiritual life. So faith is the means by which the grace is received in the Sacraments. There are three stages : first, the act of Christ ; second, the Spirit working in the Church ; third, the appropriation by the Chris- tian; yet these three stages are unified by the fact that each are manifestations of one and the self- same Holy Spirit of God. § 3. THE SPIRIT IN THE MIND—HOPE It is not an intellectual faculty, but a power of the Spirit. Yet it is a parallel to the mental act ee ae ais ee on ‘ fe a ee ee THE HOLY SPIRIT IN CHARACTER 131 in that it equips, sustains, and fashions for use the medium of the spiritual life rather than creates. S. Paul speaks of hope and of the mind of the Spirit together in the great chapter on spiritual religion in the Epistle to the Romans (Rom. vill.). “The mind of the Spirit is life and peace,” he says, and again he says that sufferings are necessary in the coming to birth of the new life, but hope, in those who have the first-fruits of the Spirit, is confident through all, and sustains in the conflict. Once more in the difficulties that beset the Christian life and obscure its way the Spirit helps our weakness by the uplifting of the power of prayer, and in secret prayer one gains access to the mind of the Spirit, and there survives the confidence that to them who love God all things work together for good. Faith and hope run into one another, and also support one another. Hope in the Christian char- acter sees with the eyes of the Spirit the far-off divine event, and faith starts out to attain it. And again faith is discouraged because of the way, and hope restores the will to the effort. How hope is the manifestation of the Holy Spirit can be seen when it is considered what hope has to contend against. Despondency is just the failure of that which is spiritual within us to realise itself. Hope is the self-assertion of the Spirit. To give up trying is the victory of that which is born of the flesh, to keep on trying is simply the vitality of that which is born of the Spirit. 132 SPIRITUAL RELIGION The fight in which the Christian is engaged—not only the fight against definite temptations, but the struggle to attain towards the knowledge and nature of God—is a fight which rages round hope. Sins are transgressions and weaknesses in a nature disposed to evil, and they have to be made to die that the true self may rise within us. But as surely as we believe that good is greater than evil, God than the devil, the soul than the body—wmore than that, as we believe that ultimately God is, and everything else is less than being, that the soul is eternal and flesh mortal, so surely we know that sin can and will be exterminated and good prevail, and if we in our spirits hold to the good our self will be saved from the bondage of sin, and live unto God. Hope thus holds on to eternity, and assures us in the desperateness or weariness of our transient conflicts. But by despair we resign ourselves to the perishing of spiritual negation and make straight for death, since we have lost the prospect of life. We ask no for- giveness and seek no renewal, and withdraw our- selves out of the sphere of grace. It is truly written : “ God will forgive you all but your despair.” So we hope in the Spirit and “faint not, but though our outward man is decaying, yet our in- ward man is renewed day by day. For our light affliction, which is for the moment, worketh for us more and more exceedingly an eternal weight THE HOLY SPIRIT IN CHARACTER 133 of glory, while we look not at the things which are seen, but at the things which are not seen. For the things which are seen are temporal, but — the things which are not seen are eternal.” , §4. THE SPIRIT IN THE HEART—LOVE Than all other spiritual gifts “behold,” says S. Paul, “I show you a more excellent way.’ And he goes on in his famous hymn to show not only how love is the highest and most enduring of all gifts but how all others are useless without it. What is the place of love in the spiritual life and in spiritual religion ? The motive of the work of Jesus was love, and love is therefore the essence of Christ’s redemption. Love is the creative power of the life of redemp- tion. “God so loved the world that He gave His only-begotten Son.” Love was not only the originating cause of the Incarnation, it was the form of the incarnate life. The life which the Gospels record was determined by love, the miracles and the teaching were inspired by love, the passion and death were the sacrifice that love offered, the very disposition of the Sacraments and the Kingdom and the Spirit were the pledge and promise which love made. Now the life of Christ is the life of the Christian, but it would be useless and vain to imitate the actions without sharing the Spirit which prompted and informed them. Mystical union with Christ, the appropriation of the Atonement and 134 SPIRITUAL RELIGION ' Resurrection, the continual incarnation of the Word of God in the Christian, is faith working through love. The power of the Cross to convert is love, so conversion and the converted life is the response of love. Thus with the Christian as with Christ, love is the spring and the determining factor of his life. The whole experience of penitence and trust, the efforts of faith and the confidence of hope, is the energy within him of the spirit of love. The hatred of sin is a demand the love of God makes upon him: God is all, the object of his intense desire, the ruling passion, controlling and stimulating every other faculty. Love is willing to be spent, so itis the strength of sacrifice. Hope cannot fail or faith fall short of attainment so long as love is strong ; indeed love is itself the object and fulfilment of hope and faith. Love reminds us, too, of one another ; spiritual religion is not a solitary communion or an indi- vidual attainment of desire. Love also unites Christians together. The Church is represented as the bride, and the beloved adorned for the Bride- groom, who is Christ. The Church as the body of Christ or as the fellowship of Christians is a relation- ship of love. On this truth the disciple of love dwells constantly in his Gospel. Faith and trust in the Church and humility and obedience and mis- sionary zeal cannot be strong unless ordered and enforced by mastering desire and love. , THE: ‘HOLY SPIRIT -IN GHARACTER 135 This is all the kindling in man’s heart of the spirit of love. ‘The love of God is shed abroad in our hearts by the Holy Ghost which is given unto us.” The Spirit working in all nature, physical and moral, is the spirit of love ; the eternal good to which all things move, their consummation. So in the ~ deep of human nature the Spirit is love moulding ~ and guiding it towards its consummation in God, which God is love. § 5. THE SPIRIT IN THE SOUL—WORSHIP The intuition of Spirit or life is one, in the sense that the self or personality which makes the intuition is one. Body, will, mind, and heart are not the parts of the person. They are abstractions, in no relation as such to reality, but mental forms con- venient in the task of reflecting on what happens, or rather what has happened. Purity, faith, hope, and love are just activity of Spirit itself. Again, intuition is not in the narrow sense an intellectual faculty, not a power, put forth from the Spirit, but rather in the Spirit or of the Spirit. ‘We are what we behold,” not because we behold. We behold because we are, that is in the act of being. The apprehension of Spirit is the work of Spirit; and if faith, hope, love, and purity can be for a moment regarded as the effect of Spirit, that which gathers them all up in the one activity of Spirit is worship. Spiritual life can only be spoken of in terms of eternal becoming. The spirit of man 136 SPIRITUAL RELIGION projects itself into the divine activity of holiness and truth. Worship is at once the consciousness of union with God and the effort towards union. God is not a fixed point of light at which we aim, nor a point receding as we approach; that is to use a — spatial imagery which baffles because it is false to truth. In fact any imagery will probably be mis- leading. God is Spirit, and they who worship Him must worship in Spirit and truth. Worship is the seeking after God, not the groping in the dark towards the light of faith, but the seeking in the light towards what some mystics in the dazzling nearness of their approach have been con- strained to call the Divine Dark. They have found it within because it is with the inward reality of their being that they have apprehended the Eternal Spirit. Worship is indeed the energy of the inner life ; it is the Holy Spirit of God realised in man, the awakening or the wakefulness of the divine in him, man on his true march, in his right direction. It is for this very reason that in worship we recog- nise God’s transcendence. In the sphere of will, worship is sacrifice, the giving up of all desire which in the “now” of duration we cannot but call our own, and the more perfect the union with God's will, the more utter is the fact of self-abandonment. It is away from self that God is found. In the sphere of the heart, God is the object of love, and though it is only in love that God, who is Love, can be known, yet the more ardent the love, the more exalted is the object. We love Him because THE HOLY SPIRIT IN, CHARACTER 137 He first loved us. The experience of worship is self-suppression and humility. It is not that God is distant, but that He is different. The union of which worship is consciousness is not a union of state, which certainly would be a pantheistic con- ception, and moreover, if our view of life and ~ reality is right, would mean nothing at all; it is a_ union of activity, and this is just what worship is in the experience of prayer and praise, of faith and love. Worship, then, is the supreme work of the Holy Spirit of God in the soul of man ; it includes every other activity. The soul goes out to God freed from the encumbrance that would check its true activity because every thought and desire, whatever it has come through in the past of time, is now trained upon truth, and every trespass and burden of sin has been or is being undone in penitence and love. The highest expression or achievement of worship is the pure consciousness of union with the Eternal God, even as the ideal climax is the Beatific Vision. This is the unity when God is All, the perfect freedom which is perpetual service, the rest when nevertheless they rest not day or night, the stillness which is perfect praise. In the unitive way there is no discord between the world of the Spirit. and the things of matter and forms of thought, for nothing is secular, and reaction is swallowed up in movement. | This is the nature of worship not only in the saints of the contemplative life, but in every soul 12 138 SPIRITUAL RELIGION redeemed by Christ, and if we are only too conscious that it is mixed with much else in actual living, we must still assert that it is much more vital than an unrealised ideal. It is the living truth of human life, and everything else is something less or mis- direction. But Christian worship must gather into itself all the means by which life is gained. The power of the sacrifice and resurrection of Jesus Christ in the life of the incarnation is the means of life and therefore the way of worship. We find ourselves at once at the Holy Eucharist. Nothing is common or insignificant now, except our individual weakness in entering into the mystery. In the humility of worship and in divine illumination, we see the foolish things of the world chosen to put to shame the wise. The stumbling-block of the Cross, the simple faith of disciples, the machinery of a visible Church, the elements of bread and wine, they minister to us the will to sacrifice, and the power to live with Christ through the Spirit. And the worship of the Christian is necessarily a common life: it is in its nature life in the Body of Christ, and so it will be in its means. The Eucharist and all worship is the action of the com- munity, and the measure of individual attainment is but a partaking in the union of the Bride of Christ, if it is also his answer when the Spirit and the Bride say “Come.” | Worship must mean a consecration of all faculties, viewed both as a corporate and an individual action, THE HOLY SPIRIT IN CHARACTER 139 We have seen that spirituality does not mean the abstraction of a spiritual element from the total life of man, but the spiritual activity of body and mind and soul, Not only is this necessary if common or © public worship is to be an actual thing, but without the use of all the forms of life, it is obvious that — the neglected forms will be left to act for them- selves, and that the offering of worship will propor- tionately fall short of reality. Of the actions of the body, acts of reverence and gestures which symbolise the communication of grace, the use of the bodily senses, of sound and sight, of the taking of parts, as in a drama, in com- bined worship, we may speak sometimes as helps to the spiritual energy of worship, at other times as ex- pressions of it. They are both, for in the broadest sense of the word they are Sacraments, efficacious signs by which we receive, rites by which we cele- brate the communicated eternal life. In this respect it is certainly true that allowance must be made for what is called temperament, both individual and racial. There is prima facie something artificial in helps to worship which, as a matter of fact, are said not to help, and expressions of devotion which are alleged to distract rather than to express. But temperament, after all, is very pliable when deprived of the element of self-will. We must examine the case a little deeper. The inquiry may seem trivial, but it is engaging a great number of minds at the present day. 140 SPIRITUAL RELIGION If soul, mind, body represents the ideal order of dignity, in actual life, in the immediate facts of ex- perience, perhaps even the reverse order may claim | to represent the valuation which governs men’s lives, If we consider not so much the individual but the community, not over an artificial period, but in successive time, it does appear that the claim of pure spirit (allowing the term for the sake of argu- ment only) tends to become feeble, if not discon- tinuous, when unsupported by the other interests of human life. In fact, it becomes individualist ; and individualism means, in effect, the exclusion of “other individuals.” The effect appears in the life of the community, where the spiritual life has be- come dissipated, and its place is taken by an ethical standard or a law of good works. Then, when spiritual consciousness and aspiration have become faint, undue importance is ascribed both to the absence of outward signs and to the presence of those which mere custom has retained. There is such a phenomenon indeed as religion without worship. It is an abstraction, and not the reality of life nor the energy of the Holy Spirit. The outward expression of the soul’s worship, the ingenious uses of mind and art and bodily action which men devise, may be but flowers and leaves on the tree of life, but leaves are necessary for the nourishment of the root, and in the flower the seeds of new life are formed. + This analogy is borrowed from an essay on ‘‘ Worship” in a volume entitled Zhe Holy Eucharist, by Fr. Waggett. PQA > a THE HOLY SPIRIT IN CHARACTER 141 The peculiarities indeed of individual tempera- ment are things to be sacrificed, to be treated by oneself with little consideration, for the spirit of worship is before all things humility and self- suppression. In the fruitful service of the whole of life, in the common action of the organised society, is to be found the real effort which is worship in the Spirit. The individual brings to that common life of the faithful the genuineness of his spiritual experience : even if he is beside himself it is for the Church’s sake. The highest transport of the Lord’s worship is not for the exaltation of the self but that God’s name may be hallowed, His kingdom come, and His will be done in earth as it is in heaven. Thus worship is the work in man of God the Holy Spirit. In worship, man with all his life that » has so far been created is offered to God. Quick- ened by the Spirit of God Himself, man’s life goes forward into union with the activity of God. In the short succession of a mortal life the individual soul finds in worship the reality which he will be- hold face to face in the hereafter; but in the im- mortal life of the Holy Church the Creator Spirit is bringing mankind according to His purpose by Cross and Passion to the glory of resurrection, into the presence of God, to know whom is eternal life. APPENDIX A METHOD OF MENTAL PRAYER AND INTER- CESSION SUGGESTED BY THE CONTENTS PREPARATION— Zhe Creed. Vent Creator Spiritus. Gloria. THe Ho.ry SPIRIT IN ALL NATURE 1st Mystery. Lord's Prayer 1. Present in unconscious creation. Pray for the accomplishment of God’s will—for health, fruitful seasons, safety from disasters of plague, pestilence, and famine. 2. Present in mankind. Pray for true civilisation, political movements, peace among nations, social justice, organisation of human relations. 3. Present in human mind. Pray for unfolding of truth, co-ordination of science, settling of doubts, freedom from obscurantism. 4. Present in human conscience. Pray for advance in morality, progress in legislation, supremacy of high ideals, influence of Christianity on public thought, conformity of wills. 142 APPENDIX 143 5. Present in universal religious sense. Pray for spread of Christian faith, solution of error and superstition, all missionary needs. Whitsun Collect. Gloria. and Mystery —TueE Hoty SPIRIT IN THE CHURCH Lord’s Prayer 1. Working in the preparation of the world. Pray for the spirit of faith in one God, of hope, of salvation, of love in sacrifice, out of which the Christ may be born, that the Church of Christ may be true to its origin and its purpose. 2. Working in the unity of the Church. Pray that the Church may be one, for the healing of outward divisions, for recognition of the necessity of unity. 3. Working in Sacred Scripture. Pray for inspiration of Church and all members in understanding the Bible, for the illumination of critics and expositors, for the emergence of the spirit from the letter. 4. Working in Church’s doctrine. Pray that Christian thought and teaching may conduce to Christian life, that intellectual un- derstanding may become spiritual experience. Pray for those who teach, for Church Councils and Synods. s. Working in Church’s action. Pray for the right management of Church affairs, r44 SPIRITUAL RELIGION toward reunion. Whitsun Collect. Gloria. 3rd Mystery —TuHE HOLY SPIRIT IN THE SACRAMENTS Re Lord's Prayer . In Baptism. Pray for rescue of Sacrament from abuse by formal — administration, for realisation of privilege and vs responsibility of baptized life. x 2. In Penance. Be Pray for general acceptance of this Sacrament, rar oS penitents and confessors, for apprehension of need ty of restored life. F 3. In Confirmation. Rae Pray that all baptized may desire Confirmation, for i removal of formal restrictions of age, for lively