BX 5139 .H623 
 
 Hodges, George, 1856-1919. 
 The Episcopal church 
 
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 THE EPISCOPAL CHURCH 
 
THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 
 
 NEW YORK • BOSTON ■ CHICAGO • DALLAS 
 ATLANTA . SAN FRANCISCO 
 
 MACMILLAN & CO., Limited 
 
 LONDON • BOMBAY ■ CALCUTTA 
 MELBOURNE 
 
 THE MACMILLAN CO. OF CANADA, Ltd. 
 
 TORONTO 
 
THE EPISCOPAL CHURCH 
 
 ITS FAITH AND ORDER 
 
 BY 
 
 GEORGE "HODGES 
 
 DEAN OF THE EPISCOPAL THEOLOGICAL SCHOOL 
 CAMBRIDGE, MASSACHUSETTS 
 
 N*m lark 
 
 THE MACMHXAN COMPANY 
 1915 
 
 All rights reserved 
 
Copyright, 1915 
 By THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 
 Set up and electrotyped. Published February, 1915. 
 
PREFACE 
 
 These ten lectures are offered to the 
 younger clergy as a suggestion in their 
 preparation of persons for confirmation. 
 An outline is prefixed to each chapter as 
 a statement and sequence of the topics 
 which they will expound in their own way. 
 At the end of the series of instructions the 
 book may be given to those who are con- 
 firmed, as a reminder of what they have 
 been taught. 
 
 The necessary brevity of titles gives to 
 the book an apparent claim to authority 
 which is in no wise intended. Nobody may 
 speak for the Episcopal Church. One of its 
 characteristics is its hospitable inclusion 
 of very different people. Whoever uses this 
 book aright will bring to it his own person- 
 ality and experience, and the actual needs 
 of his own congregation, and will differ 
 from it, here in interpretation, and there in 
 emphasis. At the same time, these pages 
 have not been written — at least, in inten- 
 tion — from the point of view of any particu- 
 
 v 
 
PREFACE 
 
 lar kind of churchmanship. The constant 
 purpose has been to set forth, without 
 partisanship and without prejudice, "a 
 declaration of those things which are most 
 surely believed among us." 
 
 The annual visitation of the bishop gives 
 the pastor an opportunity for systematic 
 instruction. In the teaching of his cat- 
 echumens he will deal with many matters 
 which are not essential to their confirma- 
 tion, but for which this is a convenient 
 season. He will present in rapid survey a 
 field of truth whose details he is continually 
 considering at length in his sermons. He 
 will teach "the Creed, the Lord's Prayer, 
 and the Ten Commandments, and all 
 other things which a Christian ought to 
 know and believe to his soul's health." 
 These are the subjects which are considered 
 in this book. 
 
 In the presentation of these matters I 
 have had the benefit of the counsel and 
 criticism of my friend and colleague, Pro- 
 fessor Edward S. Drown. 
 
 George Hodges. 
 Cambridge, Massachusetts. 
 
 vi 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 PAGE 
 
 I. 
 
 The Bible . 
 
 3 
 
 II. 
 
 The Prayer Book 
 
 21 
 
 III. 
 
 Baptism 
 
 • 41 
 
 IV. 
 
 Confirmation 
 
 • 59 
 
 V. 
 
 Renunciation 
 
 • 77 
 
 VI. 
 
 Obedience . 
 
 • 95 
 
 VII. 
 
 The Creed .... 
 
 • 117 
 
 VIII. 
 
 The Church .... 
 
 . 141 
 
 IX. 
 
 Prayer . 
 
 . 165 
 
 X. 
 
 The Holy Communion. 
 
 . 183 
 
THE EPISCOPAL CHURCH 
 
THE BIBLE 
 
THE BIBLE 
 
 I. The Contents of the Bible 
 
 1. The Old Testament 
 
 (1) History: two series 
 
 (2) Poetry: five books 
 
 (3) Prophecy: major and minor 
 
 Eighth century — Assyrians 
 Seventh century — Chaldeans 
 Sixth century — exile and re- 
 turn 
 Later writings 
 
 2. The New Testament 
 
 (1) Historical books 
 
 (2) Twenty-one letters: Pauline and 
 
 Catholic 
 
 (3) The Revelation 
 II. The Nature of the Bible 
 
 1. A book of inspiration 
 
 Inspiration and genius 
 
 2. A book of revelation 
 
 Revelation and discovery 
 
 3 
 
I 
 
 THE BIBLE 
 
 The Episcopal Church stands on the 
 foundation of the Bible. Two chapters of 
 the Bible (or parts of chapters) are read 
 at every service of Morning or Evening 
 Prayer, four or five psalms are said or sung, 
 and the Communion Service adds a selec- 
 tion from one of the Gospels and another 
 from one of the Epistles. The calendars 
 of lessons at the beginning of the Book of 
 Common Prayer provide for the reading of 
 nearly all of the Bible in course during the 
 year. 
 
 In the services for the ordination of 
 ministers special emphasis is put upon the 
 supreme importance of the Bible. "Are 
 you persuaded that the Holy Scriptures 
 contain all Doctrine required as necessary 
 to eternal salvation through faith in Jesus 
 Christ? And are you determined, out of 
 the said Scriptures to instruct the people 
 committed to your charge, and to teach 
 
 4 
 
THE BIBLE 
 
 nothing as necessary to eternal salvation, 
 but that which you shall be persuaded may 
 be concluded and proved by the Scrip- 
 ture?" 
 
 I 
 
 The Bible is a library of sixty-six books, 
 bound together for convenience. These 
 books were written during the space of 
 about a thousand years. It is as if we were 
 to bring together between two covers sixty- 
 six writings, of which the earliest was com- 
 posed in the reign of King Alfred and the 
 latest in the reign of Queen Victoria. All 
 of the thirty-nine books of the Old Testa- 
 ment were written in Asia: some in Pales- 
 tine, some in Babylonia. Some of the New 
 Testament books were written in Asia 
 Minor, some in Greece, some in Italy. 
 
 The general theme of almost all of these 
 books is Religion. The book of Esther 
 does not contain the name of God, and the 
 book called the Song of Solomon is a collec- 
 tion of love poems; but these are excep- 
 tions. The Bible is concerned with the 
 dealings of God with man. God has always 
 dealt with all men, and there are other 
 records which contain the experience of 
 
 5 
 
THE BIBLE 
 
 China, of India, of Egypt, of Assyria. The 
 Old Testament is an account of the rela- 
 tion of God to the Hebrews; the New 
 Testament is an account of the relation of 
 God to the Christians — Hebrew, Greek and 
 Latin — and, through them, to the whole 
 human race. 
 
 i. The Old Testament is in three parts, 
 conveniently called history, poetry and 
 prophecy. 
 
 Old Testament history is contained in the 
 seventeen books from Genesis to Esther. 
 These books are in two series. The first 
 series, from Genesis to Second Kings, in- 
 clusive, begins with the creation of the 
 world and extends to the fall of Jerusalem 
 in 586 B. C. It is a history of the people. 
 The second series, from First Chronicles 
 to Esther, begins over again with Adam 
 and comes down to the restoration of the 
 Jews to their own land, after the exile 
 which followed the fall of Jerusalem; it 
 includes the rebuilding of the temple in 
 516, and the rebuilding of the city walls in 
 445. It is a history not so much of the 
 people as of the Church. Thus, after the 
 division of the kingdom, the history follows 
 the fortunes and misfortunes of the south- 
 6 
 
THE BIBLE 
 
 era tribes, centered about the temple in 
 Jerusalem, and has little to say about the 
 northern tribes who had their separate 
 sanctuaries. No record is made even of 
 such notable persons as Elijah and Elisha; 
 they are regarded as dissenting ministers. 
 
 The poetry of the Old Testament is 
 mostly contained in the five books which 
 are placed after Esther. One of these, the 
 Psalms, is a hymn book; another, the Song 
 of Solomon, is a song book. The other 
 three are called Wisdom Books. The 
 Proverbs is a collection of the words of 
 wise men regarding the conduct of life; 
 Job shows the wise man in the trials of 
 adversity; Ecclesiastes shows the wise man 
 in the trials of prosperity. 
 
 Prophecy, in the Bible, signifies preach- 
 ing rather than prediction. The prophet 
 sometimes speaks before the event, de- 
 claring what will happen in consequence 
 of the behavior and disposition of the 
 people; but he always speaks for God, as 
 the messenger of God, setting forth the 
 will of God. There are four long books 
 of prophecy, Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, 
 Daniel. These are called, on account of 
 their length, the Major Prophets. In the 
 
 7 
 
THE BIBLE 
 
 midst of this group is the book of Lam- 
 entations. There are twelve short books, 
 called for a like reason, the Minor Prophets. 
 Of these minor prophets, Amos, Hosea 
 and Micah preached in the eighth century, 
 when the land was invaded by the As- 
 syrians, and the northern kingdom was 
 destroyed; Zephaniah, Nahum and Hab- 
 akkuk preached in the seventh century, 
 when the land was invaded by the Chal- 
 deans, and the southern kingdom was about 
 to be destroyed; Obadiah, Haggai, Zech- 
 ariah and Malachi preached in the sixth 
 century, when the Jews returned from 
 their captivity; Joel and Jonah came later, 
 Joel taking his text from a plague of 
 locusts, and Jonah dealing with the nar- 
 rowness into which the people had been 
 led by their hatred of their foreign con- 
 querors. The four Major Prophets belong 
 to these four groups in order: Isaiah, the 
 prophet of the Assyrian invasion; Jeremiah, 
 the prophet of the Chaldean invasion and 
 the fall of Jerusalem; Ezekiel, the prophet 
 of the exile and of the return; Daniel, the 
 prophet of the Greek oppression, after the 
 conquest of Palestine by Alexander the 
 Great. 
 
 8 
 
THE BIBLE 
 
 2. The New Testament, like the Old, is 
 in three parts, history, letters, and "rev- 
 elation." 
 
 The historical books are the Gospels and 
 the Acts. Mark was the first gospel to 
 appear in its present form; it is a record of 
 the works of Christ. Matthew is made up 
 of Mark, plus records of the words of 
 Christ. Luke is made up of Mark, plus 
 records of other words of Christ. These 
 three are called the synoptic gospels be- 
 cause, taken together, they present a 
 synopsis or general view of the life of 
 Christ. They are narrative gospels. John 
 is an interpretive gospel, dealing mainly 
 with the ministry of Jesus in Judea rather 
 than in Galilee, and regarding Him in the 
 light of Christian reflection and devotion. 
 The Acts is a narrative of the ministry 
 first of St. Peter, then of St. Paul. It is an 
 account of the beginnings of the Christian 
 Church. 
 
 Of the twenty-one letters contained in the 
 New Testament, fourteen are conveniently 
 called Pauline, though this includes the 
 Epistle to the Hebrews, whose authorship 
 is unknown; seven are called Catholic, 
 most of them being addressed not to des- 
 
 9 
 
THE BIBLE 
 
 ignated Churches, but to the faithful in 
 general. Six of the Pauline epistles are 
 connected with St. Paul's Missionary 
 journeys: First and Second Thessalonians, 
 Galatians, First and Second Corinthians, 
 Romans. Seven of them are connected 
 with his imprisonment in Rome: Ephesians, 
 Philippians, Colossians, two to Timothy, 
 one to Titus, one to Philemon. The Epistle 
 to the Hebrews brings counsel and comfort 
 to Christians in peril of Roman persecu- 
 tion; they are reminded of the preciousness 
 of their religion and of the courage and 
 constancy of the brave men of old. The 
 Catholic epistles include one of James, two 
 of Peter, three of John, and one of Jude. 
 They are addressed, for the most part, to 
 churches in peril of persecution from with- 
 out or of heresy from within. 
 
 In the last book of the New Testament 
 persecution seems to be in force. The 
 Revelation belongs to a kind of writing 
 called apocalyptic, of which the book of 
 Daniel is another illustration. Such books 
 were addressed to the faithful in their 
 distress at the hands of victorious enemies; 
 they contain promises of the overthrow of 
 the persecuting power; and for the protec- 
 10 
 
THE BIBLE 
 
 tion of the writer they make use of symbols 
 rather than of plain statements, represent- 
 ing the oppressors under the form of 
 strange beasts. Thus Daniel was intended 
 to encourage the Jews oppressed by the 
 Greeks under Antiochus Epiphanes, and 
 Revelation was intended to encourage the 
 Christians oppressed by the Romans under 
 Nero and his imperial successors. 
 
 II 
 
 The Bible, thus consisting of the collec- 
 tion of these various writings, is an in- 
 spired book. 
 
 i. Inspiration, after all discussion of it, 
 remains a mystery, but the mystery is not 
 peculiar to religion. It is to be considered 
 in connection with other experiences. 
 Especially, it is to be understood in its rela- 
 tion to the mystery which we call genius. 
 Here is a man of unusual sensitiveness to 
 the conditions of the physical world: he 
 sees the meanings of things, and is thereby 
 made a man of science; or he sees the 
 splendor and the beauty of the landscape, 
 and is thereby made an artist or a poet. 
 Here is one who is similarly sensitive to 
 the world of humanity; he sees into the 
 
 ii 
 
THE BIBLE 
 
 hearts of men and understands their works; 
 it is a divine quality which makes artists 
 and poets and also novelists and dram- 
 atists, also leaders of thought and leaders 
 of action. These uncommonly sensitive 
 persons are thus temperamentally able to 
 see more than we can see, to understand 
 more, and to say more. When they possess 
 these qualities in a high degree we call 
 them men of genius. Out of the vast, in- 
 discriminate production of their day their 
 works survive when the works of their com- 
 monplace neighbors are forgotten. Plato 
 was a man of genius, Phidias was a man 
 of genius, Homer was a man of genius; 
 so was Shakespeare, so was Bacon, so were 
 Beethoven, Newton, Darwin, and several 
 hundred others. These men are mysteries. 
 We cannot explain them by the ordinary 
 rules of cause and effect. Somehow they 
 saw and heard and spoke. Somehow they 
 were different from others. 
 
 When this uncommon sensitiveness is 
 possessed by men in relation to the spir- 
 itual world it is called inspiration. Here 
 is one who has a singular consciousness 
 of the divine presence in the world; he hears 
 the voice of God speaking in his soul; he 
 
 12 
 
THE BIBLE 
 
 understands and is able to interpret to us 
 the will of God. In the course of history, 
 in the rise and fall of nations, in the face of 
 victory or defeat, and also in the events of 
 common life, he perceives God. He is like 
 the great statesman of whom it was said 
 that he saw stars where his neighbors saw 
 nothing but gray cloud. We do not know, 
 neither does he know, how or why he is so 
 different from us. But he is. When he 
 writes or speaks we come into conscious- 
 ness of truth such as we never knew be- 
 fore; he shows us the significance of our 
 own life. He lifts his hand and the horizon 
 widens before our eyes. He deals with us as 
 the prophet dealt with his servant for whom 
 he prayed when they two seemed to be 
 alone and defenceless in the face of ad- 
 vancing foes, and behold the mountain 
 side, which a moment before had showed 
 only the gray of the rocks and the green 
 of the trees, suddenly blazed with rank 
 upon rank of celestial soldiers, come to 
 their defence against the mighty. 
 
 These men are inspired. They are not 
 essentially different from other men of 
 genius, who like them are shining miracles 
 in the common world, but their genius is 
 
 13 
 
THE BIBLE 
 
 in the province of religion. There it is that 
 they are impressionable and sensitive. 
 Such a man was Moses, in whose sight the 
 bush was filled with flame. Such was 
 Isaiah, who saw the Lord high and lifted 
 up, and heard the angels chanting the 
 Thrice-Holy. Such were most of the men 
 who wrote the Bible. They were men of 
 genius in religion. We inquire in vain how 
 their inspiration should be distinguished 
 from the inspiration of other great men. 
 We inquire in vain where the lines of in- 
 spiration in religion should be drawn, 
 whether to include all of the authors of 
 the Bible books, or to include others beside 
 them. We are dealing with a mysterious 
 quality which defies all of our accurate 
 classifications. We are to understand, 
 however, that this mystery is not a thing 
 apart from human life, a monopoly of 
 religion, a divine procedure which has no 
 confirmation in human experience out- 
 side of the Bible. It is a valid part of 
 the universal way of God with man. The 
 mystery remains, but it takes its place in 
 the manifold mystery of human life. 
 
 2. Sometimes, in exceptional moments 
 of genius, and to exceptional persons, 
 
 14 
 
THE BIBLE 
 
 there comes that extraordinary achieve- 
 ment which we call discovery. The man 
 of genius, fitted for the pursuit of truth by 
 the sensitiveness of his soul, comes upon 
 a fact, or law, or truth, which nobody ever 
 knew before; or rather which everybody 
 knew without knowing it, which had been 
 in the dim consciousness of man from the 
 beginning, which when it is proclaimed is 
 recognized by all men, but which had never 
 been proclaimed. Copernicus discovers 
 the relation between the earth and the 
 stars, Newton discovers the law of gravita- 
 tion, Darwin discovers the law of evolu- 
 tion. Suddenly, into the minds of these 
 men, flashed a knowledge of the truth. 
 
 When this takes place in the realm of 
 religion it is called revelation. To the in- 
 spired man, with his soul open to the world 
 invisible, with his spiritual hearing acute 
 to distinguish amidst the confusion of 
 sounds the voice of God, comes a sudden, 
 profoundly mysterious, knowledge of God. 
 Thus, perhaps to Abraham, came a revela- 
 tion of the oneness of God. Thus to Moses 
 came a compelling sense of leadership. 
 Thus Hosea perceived, in the perplexities 
 of his own domestic experience, that God 
 
 15 
 
THE BIBLE 
 
 is love. These revelations are at the 
 heart of the Bible, as like revelations in 
 science, in philosophy, in art, are at the 
 heart of human progress. They rise to 
 heights supreme in the life and teaching 
 of Jesus Christ. These revelations the 
 inspired men understand, and gradually 
 by slow processes adapted to our dulness, 
 they make us understand. 
 
 The Bible is thus the Word of God. 
 Not the words of God — the words are 
 the inadequate expression, sometimes de- 
 fective, sometimes mistaken, of the truths 
 which inspired men received as they were 
 able to receive them, and wrote down 
 according to their ability in writing. The 
 Bible is the Word of God, — the message 
 of God, the supreme communication in all 
 history of the will of God. We know that, 
 because all the other Bibles of the other 
 religions have been translated into our 
 own language, and we can compare them. 
 We do not need to protect the Bible by 
 any artificial barriers of doctrine. It is 
 its own defence and commendation. 
 
 This book will inspire us if we bring 
 ourselves within the range of its influence. 
 It will make us wise unto salvation. It 
 16 
 
THE BIBLE 
 
 will give us guidance in our perplexities, 
 strength in our temptations, comfort in 
 our troubles. It has been doing that for 
 two thousand years. We are to read it. 
 We are to set ourselves assisting rules 
 which shall bring us to this spiritual exer- 
 cise at a certain time every day. Especially 
 the gospels, as the record of the ideal life, 
 and the epistles as the interpretation of it, 
 and the psalms as the expression of our 
 faith and adoration and penitence and 
 praise: these are to be read, and portions 
 of them learned by heart. The Old Testa- 
 ment teachers were insistent upon this: 
 "these words shall be in thine heart." 
 Our Lord, in His temptation and again 
 upon the cross, called to remembrance 
 great sentences from the great books. 
 
 17 
 
THE PRAYER BOOK 
 
THE PRAYER BOOK 
 
 I. The Contents of the Prayer Book 
 
 1. Lessons and days 
 
 2. Morning and Evening Prayer 
 
 preparation — praise — prayer 
 
 3. Holy Communion 
 
 (1) For the congregation in general 
 
 (2) For the communicants 
 
 4. Other services 
 
 EE. The History of the Prayer Book 
 
 1. In Hebrew 
 
 2. In Greek 
 
 A communion service of the fourth 
 century 
 
 3. In Latin 
 
 4. In English 
 
 III. The Value of the Prayer Book 
 
 1. It has the advantage of association 
 
 2. It serves the purposes 
 
 (1) of protection 
 
 (2) of proportion 
 
 (3) of participation 
 
 21 
 
II 
 
 THE PRAYER BOOK 
 I 
 
 Various tables and directions at the 
 beginning of the Book of Common Prayer 
 are concerned mainly with two matters : the 
 calendar of lessons and the calendar of days. 
 
 i. Prefixed to the tables of lessons is the 
 order for reading the book of Psalms, called 
 the Psalter. The Psalms, printed in the 
 latter part of the Prayer Book, are divided 
 into sixty parts, providing for the morning 
 and evening of every day in the month. 
 There is a table of "proper psalms" for 
 certain days, and a table of twenty selec- 
 tions from which psalms may be chosen 
 instead of those appointed for any day of 
 the month, and for the last day when there 
 are thirty-one. The Psalms (which were 
 first printed in full in the Prayer Book in 
 1604) are in the translation of Miles Cov- 
 erdale in the " Great Bible " of 1539. 
 
 The word "lesson," as here used, means 
 22 
 
THE PRAYER BOOK 
 
 a reading, and is applied to the two long 
 passages from the Bible which are read at 
 Morning and Evening Prayer: the "first 
 lesson" from the Old Testament, the "sec- 
 ond lesson" from the New. The tables of 
 lessons provide for Sundays, for Holy Days, 
 for Lent, and then, month by month, for 
 every day in the year. 
 
 The calendar of days gives a list of all the 
 feasts and fasts of the year. Some of these 
 are "immovable," occurring always on the 
 same day of the month. All of the saints' 
 days are in this list. Others are "movable," 
 depending on the date of the First Sunday 
 in Advent, or on the date of Easter. 
 
 The First Sunday in Advent is always 
 the Sunday nearest to St. Andrew's Day, 
 the thirtieth of November, whether before 
 or after. 'Easter Day is always the first 
 Sunday after the full moon which happens 
 upon or next after the twenty-first day of 
 March, the vernal equinox. The day of the 
 full moon after the vernal equinox is the 
 traditional date of the Passover; Sunday 
 is the day in the Passover week on which 
 our Lord rose from the dead. Since the 
 moon repeats its changes every nineteen 
 years, an arrangement of nineteen Golden 
 
 23 
 
THE PRAYER BOOK 
 
 Numbers indicates the days on which the 
 moon may be full between the twenty-first 
 of March and the eighteenth of April. An 
 arrangement of seven Sunday Letters, one 
 for each day of the week, indicates what 
 days of the month are Sundays. Con- 
 venient annual almanacs give the results 
 of these calculations. 
 
 2. "Finding the places" in the Prayer 
 Book is made easy by following the direc- 
 tions which are given in the rubrics. These 
 sentences in italics are intended to tell the 
 minister and the people what to do. 
 
 The Order for Morning Prayer and the 
 Order for Evening Prayer are each in three 
 parts. The first part begins with a sen- 
 tence from the Bible, includes an address 
 by the minister, the saying of a general 
 confession of sin, and the pronouncing of 
 an absolution or declaration of God's prom- 
 ise to pardon the penitent, and ends with 
 the Lord's Prayer. The second part begins 
 with versicles and responses, includes the 
 singing or saying of Psalms beginning (in 
 the morning) with the ninety-fifth (called 
 Venite from its first word in Latin), the 
 reading of an Old Testament lesson, fol- 
 lowed by the Te Deum or the Benedicite 
 24 
 
THE PRAYER BOOK 
 
 or in the evening by the Magnificat or 
 other Psalms; and of a New Testament 
 lesson, followed by the Benedictus or the 
 Jubilate or in the evening by the Nunc 
 Dimittis or other Psalms; and ends with the 
 Creed. The third part begins with versicles 
 and responses, includes a series of prayers, 
 and ends with what is called the Apostolic 
 Benediction. Thus the note of the first 
 part is Preparation, the note of the second 
 part is Praise, the note of the third part is 
 Prayer. 
 
 The Litany, which follows, may be used 
 as a separate service or said after the third 
 collect of Morning or Evening Prayer. 
 Special prayers are provided to be used, 
 when desired, before the General Thanks- 
 giving, and special Thanksgivings to be 
 used after it. A Penitential Office for Ash 
 Wednesday, which may be used at any 
 time as a separate service, concludes that 
 part of the Prayer Book which contains the 
 Daily Services. 
 
 Then come the Sacramental Services. 
 First, the Holy Communion, then Baptism. 
 
 3. For use in the Holy Communion a col- 
 lect, epistle and gospel are provided for 
 every Sunday and Holy Day in the year. 
 
 25 
 
THE PRAYER BOOK 
 
 The Church Year, like the year of nature, 
 has its seasons : first, Advent, in December, 
 a preparation for Christmas; then Epiph- 
 any, meaning the manifestation or reveal- 
 ing of Christ to the world; then, after three 
 preparatory Sundays, Lent, a penitential 
 preparation for Easter, ending with Holy 
 Week and Good Friday, the anniversary 
 of the crucifixion of our Lord; then Easter, 
 commemorating His resurrection, followed 
 by Ascension Day, and Whitsunday the 
 anniversary of the coming of the Holy 
 Spirit upon the disciples as described at the 
 beginning of the Acts. With Trinity Sun- 
 day the second half of the year begins, a 
 long series of Sundays not named but num- 
 bered. 
 
 The Communion Service, into which the 
 proper collect, epistle and gospel are in- 
 serted week by week, is in two parts. 
 
 The first part is for the congregation in 
 general. After the Commandments, as a 
 penitential preparation, come the collect, 
 epistle and gospel; then the Creed, unless 
 it has been said already; then the Sermon; 
 and after that, the Offertory. At this 
 point, the service may end with a prayer 
 and blessing, but if the Communion is to 
 26 
 
THE PRAYER BOOK 
 
 follow, it ends with a prayer "for the whole 
 state of Christ's Church militant." After 
 this prayer, those who are not communi- 
 cants go out. 
 
 The second part is for communicants only. 
 It begins with Preparation: an address, a 
 general confession, an absolution, a read- 
 ing of certain "comfortable words"; then 
 the priest says "Lift up your hearts," and 
 the people answer, "We lift them up unto 
 the Lord"; the priest and people together 
 say or sing, "Holy, holy, holy, Lord God of 
 Hosts," and the preparation ends with the 
 "prayer of humble access." Then comes 
 the Prayer of Consecration: a recitation of 
 our Lord's words at the Last Supper, an 
 offering of the bread and wine as a memo- 
 rial of His precious death, an invocation 
 of the Holy Spirit to bless these gifts that 
 we may be partakers of the blessed Body 
 and Blood, and an intercession for the 
 whole Church and especially for those 
 present. After that the bread and wine 
 are given to the communicants who come 
 up and kneel at the Holy Table. The serv- 
 ice ends with Thanksgiving, concluding with 
 the Gloria in Excelsis and the benediction. 
 
 4. Baptismal services provide for the 
 
 27 
 
THE PRAYER BOOK 
 
 public baptism of infants, with an office for 
 baptism in private in cases of illness, and 
 the baptism of "such as are of riper years 
 and able to answer for themselves." 
 
 The next division of the book contains 
 Occasional Services: Confirmation, preceded 
 by a Catechism, Solemnization of Matri- 
 mony, Visitation of the Sick, Burial of 
 the Dead, Thanksgiving after Childbirth, 
 Prayers at Sea, Visitation of Prisoners, a 
 Service for Thanksgiving Day, and Forms 
 of Prayer to be Used in Families. 
 
 After the Psalter come the Episcopal 
 Services, i. e., those which are used by 
 bishops: the Ordering of Deacons, the Or- 
 dering of Priests, the Consecration of 
 Bishops, including the Litany and the 
 Communion Service which are here re- 
 peated because this part is a book by itself 
 bound for convenience with the Prayer 
 Book; then a Form of Consecration of a 
 Church, and an Office of Institution of 
 Ministers, used when a new rector takes 
 charge of a parish. 
 
 Finally, the Articles of Religion are added 
 to the book, being statements of faith 
 drawn up in the midst of the controversies 
 of the sixteenth century. 
 28 
 
THE PRAYER BOOK 
 
 II 
 
 The Book of Common Prayer, whose 
 contents we have thus considered, has 
 grown into its present form during a space 
 of nearly two thousand years. 
 
 i. It began as a Hebrew book, and in 
 that form was used by our Lord and His 
 apostles. 
 
 The synagogue service to which they 
 were accustomed began with the recitation 
 of sentences of Scripture, followed by a 
 series of prayers and praises called the 
 Eighteen Benedictions. Psalms were sung, 
 and two lessons were read, one from the 
 law, the other from the prophets. The ex- 
 planation of these lessons set the example 
 of the sermon. Thus appeared in Hebrew 
 the beginnings of the Daily Prayers. 
 
 The direct origin of the Holy Commun- 
 ion was in the Passover Supper, but it was 
 also related to the family prayers of every 
 Jewish household. On the eve of the Sab- 
 bath, the head of the family stood at the 
 table with a cup of wine in his right hand, 
 and his left hand on a loaf of bread, and 
 blessed and distributed the bread and wine. 
 The custom continues among the Jews to 
 
 29 
 
THE PRAYER BOOK 
 
 this day (Oesterley : " Religion and Worship 
 of the Synagogue," p. 346). 
 
 The Hebrew word A men remains to re- 
 mind us of the time when all the services 
 were in that language. 
 
 2. Then the church grew till a majority 
 of Christians were Greeks rather than 
 Hebrews, and the Prayer Book was trans- 
 lated into Greek. About the year 350, 
 St. Cyril of Jerusalem wrote out the in- 
 structions which he was accustomed to give 
 to his confirmation classes. Among other 
 teachings he explained the Communion 
 Service, point by point. We learn from 
 these instructions that the service pro- 
 ceeded according to this order: 
 
 1. Ablutions 
 
 2. Kiss of peace 
 
 3. Lift up your hearts 
 
 4. It is meet and right 
 
 5. Holy, holy, holy 
 
 6. Invocation of the Holy Spirit 
 
 7. Intercession for the living 
 
 8. Intercession for the dead 
 
 9. Lord's Prayer 
 
 10. Holy things to holy people 
 
 11. Communion 
 
 12. Thanksgiving 
 
 30 
 
THE PRAYER BOOK 
 
 The "Kiss of peace" has been disused, sur- 
 viving, in our service, only in the benedic- 
 tion of peace at the end; and the words of 
 the priest " Holy things to holy people " are 
 no longer said. Otherwise, the service was 
 much as we have it to-day. The "institu- 
 tion" is omitted by St. Cyril, — the words 
 of our Lord over the bread and wine; but 
 this was perhaps held back from the candi- 
 dates till they came actually to the service 
 itself. 
 
 About the same time, — the middle of 
 the fourth century — we have in a book 
 called The Apostolic Constitutions a com- 
 plete communion service, in this order: 
 
 I. For the Congregation in General 
 
 1. Lessons, from the Old Testament 
 
 2. Psalms 
 
 3. Epistle and Gospel 
 
 4. Sermon 
 
 5. Dismissal 
 
 II. For the Communicants only 
 
 1. Prayer for the faithful 
 
 2. Kiss of peace 
 
 3. Ablutions, and offering of bread and 
 
 wine 
 
 4. Lift up your hearts 
 
 5. It is meet and right 
 
 31 
 
THE PRAYER BOOK 
 
 6. Holy, holy, holy 
 
 7. Words of institution 
 
 8. Oblation and invocation of the Holy 
 
 Spirit 
 
 9. Intercession 
 
 10. Holy things to holy people 
 
 11. Communion 
 
 12. Thanksgiving and benediction 
 
 Such a service, following an order which 
 was for the most part invariable, but with 
 the prayers and praises largely in the 
 words of the minister, was general in the 
 church of that day. Nobody knows how 
 old it was at that time. 
 
 3. The church continued to grow till 
 side by side with the Christians who spoke 
 Greek were many other Christians who 
 spoke Latin. For their use the services 
 were translated. About that time the 
 spread of monasticism magnified the im- 
 portance of the daily prayers. Eight 
 times every day the monks had a little 
 sendee of psalm singing and Bible-reading 
 and prayer: "Vespers at Sunset, Compline 
 at bed-time, Nocturns or Matins at mid- 
 night or early dawn, Lauds at sunrise, 
 Prime at the beginning of work, Tierce at 
 the third hour or middle of the morning, 
 
 3 2 
 
THE PRAYER BOOK 
 
 Sexts at the sixth hour or midday, Nones 
 at the ninth hour or middle of the after- 
 noon." This Latin Prayer Book was not 
 a new composition. It was the Greek book 
 translated, improved, enriched and adapted 
 to the use of Westerners. We are reminded 
 of it by the Latin names for the Psalms 
 throughout our book. These were the first 
 words of the Latin psalms, as "Nearer my 
 God to Thee" begins an English hymn. 
 
 4. At last the time came when there was 
 a whole nation of Christians whose native 
 tongue was English. For their benefit the 
 Prayer Book which had been translated 
 with improvements, out of Hebrew into 
 Greek, and out of Greek into Latin, was 
 again translated with further improve- 
 ments. Not much change was made in the 
 Communion Service, except somewhat to 
 simplify it. But the daily prayers, which 
 in the form of eight services had been 
 adapted to the lives of monks but not to 
 the lives of ordinary people, were con- 
 densed into two. Vespers and Compline 
 were put together to make Evening Prayer. 
 Nocturns, Matins, Lauds and Prime were 
 put together to make Morning Prayer. 
 Thus in Morning Prayer the Venite, the 
 
 33 
 
THE PRAYER BOOK 
 
 Te Deum, the Benedicite, the Benedictus 
 stand in that order because they so stood 
 in the Latin book: so in Evening Prayer, 
 with the Magnificat and the Nunc Dim- 
 ittis. Errors which had crept into the 
 services during the Middle Ages were now 
 corrected, the Bible was read at greater 
 length, the musical parts were shortened, 
 but the new book was substantially the 
 old one, again as in the past translated and 
 improved. 
 
 Ill 
 
 i. A book with such a history has the 
 advantage of association. 
 
 It is like a venerable cathedral, built 
 centuries ago and many times enriched 
 and enlarged, having the handiwork of 
 Normans and Saxons and English, showing 
 the scars of old wars, representing the 
 annals of a people. Thus the Cathedral 
 of St. John the Divine in New York can 
 never, by any ability of architects, equal 
 Westminster Abbey. Into the Abbey is 
 built the life of the nation, from Edward 
 the Confessor to the Great German War. 
 In the same way these ancient prayers, and 
 the services in which they stand, have a 
 
 34 
 
THE PRAYER BOOK 
 
 quality which no new compositions possess. 
 Here is the Te Deum, written about the 
 year 400 by a missionary bishop in Servia, 
 and sung on a thousand occasions of na- 
 tional rejoicing which have marked the 
 progress of history. Here are versicles and 
 responses arranged about the year 500 by 
 St. Benedict. Here are collects for peace 
 which were first prayed when the bar- 
 barians were battering the walls of Rome. 
 
 The book associates itself also with our 
 individual life, with our own experiences 
 and joys and sorrows. People who are un- 
 accustomed to printed prayers sometimes 
 ask if we do not find them monotonous and 
 wearisome; and we are able to say in 
 answer that they grow more significant 
 and uplifting year by year. 
 
 2. The Prayer Book serves the purposes 
 of protection, of proportion, and of par- 
 ticipation. 
 
 It protects the clergy from the necessity 
 of literary composition in the progress of 
 their prayers, and from the subtle tempta- 
 tions which go along with it. And it pro- 
 tects the congregation, in great measure, 
 from the eccentricities of the parson. It 
 provides prayers which are not affected 
 
 35 
 
THE PRAYER BOOK 
 
 by the size of the congregation, by the 
 annoyances of the weather, by the health 
 of the minister, or by his inevitable limita- 
 tions. They insure the people a reverent 
 service, on a high spiritual plane. 
 
 The book has the quality of proportion. 
 The result of ages of ministration to human 
 needs, it voices all manner of petitions and 
 serves all temperaments. Its arrange- 
 ment of religious seasons brings all the 
 essential truths of religion one after an- 
 other into the prayers and into the ser- 
 mons. 
 
 And the book provides for the participa- 
 tion of the people. It is a Book of Common 
 Prayer, in which the people as well as the 
 priest have part. It belongs to both 
 priest and people, and to the one no more 
 than to the other. Also it takes into ac- 
 count the whole being of the worshipper — 
 soul and mind and body. It is constructed 
 on the psychological principle that the body 
 affects both mind and soul, as a lounging 
 attitude induces lounging thoughts. Thus 
 for better attention and devotion there 
 are changes of posture : We stand in praise, 
 and sit while we are being taught, and 
 kneel to pray. We kneel, as the English 
 
 36 
 
THE PRAYER BOOK 
 
 Prayer Book says with great plainness of 
 speech, On our knees. 
 
 One says, "But prayer is conversation 
 with God, and conversation has no use for 
 printed pages; when I talk with my friend 
 I don't read what I say out of a book." 
 The difficulty here is a confusion between 
 private and public prayers. If you were 
 to address your friend in a good, loud voice 
 in the hearing of several hundred people 
 and on their behalf, you would be wise to 
 write down with some care beforehand 
 what you intended to say. The Prayer 
 Book may be used in private, and is found 
 helpful for that purpose, but it was pre- 
 pared to be used in public. Even so, there 
 are some who can pray in public in their 
 own immediate words, in such a manner 
 as to make us realize the presence of God. 
 When this happens, we enter into a great 
 spiritual experience. But it does not 
 happen often, or with many. The Prayer 
 Book takes that into account. 
 
 37 
 
BAPTISM 
 
BAPTISM 
 
 I. The Nature of a Sacrament 
 II. The Outward Sign in Baptism 
 
 1. Water: immersion and affusion 
 
 2. Words: signature and seal 
 
 III. The Inward Grace in Baptism 
 
 1. Remission 
 
 2. Regeneration 
 
 3. Initiation 
 
 Members of Christ, children of God, 
 Inheritors of the kingdom of heaven 
 
 IV. The Recipients of Baptism 
 
 1. Originally adults 
 
 2. Then infants 
 
 The influence of "original sin" 
 The influence of parental affection 
 The provision of sponsors 
 
 41 
 
in 
 
 BAPTISM 
 I 
 
 Baptism is a sacrament; and a sacrament 
 is "an outward and visible sign of an in- 
 ward and spiritual grace." It sounds like 
 a difficult definition, but it is easily illumi- 
 nated by illustration. The clasp of a hand 
 may be the outward and visible sign of the 
 inward and spiritual grace of approval, or 
 congratulation, or sympathy, or affection. 
 The sound of a word may be the outward 
 and audible sign of any one of a thousand 
 kinds of inward and spiritual grace. It 
 may convey counsel, command, promise, 
 assent, pardon, inspiration, benediction. 
 Thus it used to be said by devout writers 
 that the world is filled with sacraments. 
 All nature is sacramental, all life is sacra- 
 mental. 
 
 Baptism and the Holy Communion dif- 
 fer from these other sacraments in the fact 
 that they were "ordained by Christ Him- 
 42 
 
BAPTISM 
 
 self." Confirmation, ordination, penance, 
 marriage are outward and visible signs of 
 inward and spiritual grace, but they do not 
 have their qrigin in our Lord's appoint- 
 ment. 
 
 The grace which is given in the sacra- 
 ments of the church is akin to the grace 
 which is given in the sacraments with 
 which the world is filled. Whatever helps 
 us spiritually, lifting up our hearts, rein- 
 forcing us against temptation, stirring us 
 to new resolution, giving us new patience 
 or courage or comfort or consciousness of 
 God is grace. Grace comes by the reading 
 of a good book whereby we are made better. 
 Grace comes by the influence of a good 
 friend. The grace which comes by the 
 sacraments of baptism and the holy com- 
 munion is a like spiritual benefit. It is not 
 peculiar to religion, but is a part of the 
 ministration of God to the soul of man in 
 universal human experience. 
 
 II 
 
 The outward sign in baptism is water 
 with the use of certain words. 
 
 i. In its original form baptism was prob- 
 ably administered by immersion. No spe- 
 
 43 
 
BAPTISM 
 
 cial importance, however, seems to have 
 been attached to the ritual of the sacra- 
 ment. It is true that in the early church 
 the baptistry was a building containing a 
 large tank, into which those who were to 
 be baptized descended. It is true also that 
 in the Prayer Book immersion is the pre- 
 ferred form; the minister is to dip the child 
 in the water discreetly or pour water upon 
 him. But the baptism "with fire" on the 
 Day of Pentecost was not an immersion: 
 the fire was on their heads. The saving of 
 Noah and his family in the flood is taken 
 as a type of baptism (I Peter 3:20, 21); 
 so is also the baptizing of the children of 
 Israel in the Red Sea (I Corinthians 10: 
 1, 2). In each of these cases the important 
 fact is that the people were not immersed: 
 that is what they escaped. Baptism is also 
 a symbol of burial; but the church's part in 
 burial is not the filling of the grave but the 
 pouring of earth on the coffin. Often, in 
 ancient Christian art, the minister and the 
 person to be baptized are represented as 
 standing in the water of a river and the 
 minister is pouring water on the person's 
 head. Thus they pictured the baptism of 
 our Lord. 
 
 44 
 
BAPTISM 
 
 Baptism is now commonly administered 
 by affusion, i. e., by pouring, because this 
 way is more convenient. The change ac- 
 companied the extension of the Christian 
 religion into colder countries. It was made 
 not by the formalities of canon law but by 
 the natural application of common sense. 
 The ritual of the other sacrament was 
 similarly changed to meet the change of 
 custom. It was originally given to persons 
 who, according to ancient manners, reclined 
 at the table. The particular form of ritual 
 is of no great importance. The amount of 
 water and the way in which it is used have 
 no essential sacredness. All that is nec- 
 essary is water. 
 
 2. Along with this are certain necessary 
 words. In several places in the New Testa- 
 ment the name of Christ seems to be consid- 
 ered sufficient (Acts 2:38, Acts 8:16). In 
 another place the direction is to baptize in 
 the Name of the Father and of the Son and 
 of the Holy Ghost (Matthew 28:19). The 
 longer form is set forth in the Prayer Book. 
 Baptism is represented as a covenant or 
 solemn agreement. The water is like the 
 seal which is affixed to solemn agreements 
 which are made in writing, and the two 
 
 45 
 
BAPTISM 
 
 names — the name of the person baptized 
 and the name of God — are like the sig- 
 natures of those thus solemnly agreeing. 
 On the human side the promise is to re- 
 nounce the devil, the world, and the flesh, 
 and obediently to keep God's holy will and 
 commandments. On the divine side the 
 promise is to receive the person making this 
 agreement, "to release him from sin, to 
 sanctify him with the Holy Ghost, to give 
 him the kingdom of heaven, and everlast- 
 ing life." 
 
 Ill 
 
 The inward grace in baptism is denned 
 by the words remission, regeneration and 
 initiation. 
 
 1. Baptism, as a "death unto sin," is the 
 sacrament of Remission. Thus water is 
 used as a natural symbol of spiritual 
 cleansing. The person to be baptized de- 
 clares his intention to put away evil out of 
 his life, and is washed with water in token 
 of that renunciation. His sins for which 
 he is truly penitent are forgiven, in ac- 
 cordance with many words of Holy Scrip- 
 ture (Acts 2:38, Romans 6:1-11). 
 
 2. Baptism, as a "new birth unto right- 
 
 46 
 
BAPTISM 
 
 eousness," is the sacrament of Regeneration. 
 The word is defined in the baptismal serv- 
 ice in the phrase, "regenerate and grafted 
 into the body of Christ's Church." The 
 Saxon phrase explains the Latin word. 
 Thus St. Paul taught that Christ is the 
 Second Adam from whom we derive spirit- 
 ual life as from the first Adam we derive 
 physical life. He illustrated this by the 
 simile of grafting (Romans 11:17). The 
 new branch grafted-in draws nourishment 
 from the tree. 
 
 St. Paul used also the simile of adoption 
 (Romans 8:15). Out of the "world" — 
 taking the word in the bad sense in which 
 it is used in the Bible — out of a life in 
 which passion is unrestrained by religion, 
 and God is forgotten, out of the region of 
 merely animal instincts and motives, he 
 who is baptized is adopted into the family 
 of religion, into a life of spiritual privileges, 
 into conditions where he will be taught the 
 truth and be surrounded by those who are 
 trying to do what is right. 
 
 These similes define regeneration not as 
 a "change of heart," but as a change of 
 circumstances. The grafting of a branch 
 into a tree and the adoption of a child into 
 
 47 
 
BAPTISM 
 
 a family do not effect any immediate 
 change. They are only potential. They 
 make great changes possible, but these de- 
 pend on the graft and on the child. The 
 graft may fail to lay hold on the new life 
 of the tree, and thus may wither. The 
 child may fail to avail himself of the new 
 life of the family, and may go wrong. 
 Nevertheless, the new opportunity is so 
 great that the act which makes it possible 
 may fitly be described as a new birth. In 
 baptism, they who thus enter into new 
 spiritual privileges, may properly be said 
 to be regenerate: they are born again. 
 
 3. As the Sacrament of Remission and 
 of Regeneration, Baptism is the Sacrament 
 of Initiation. Here the two previous def- 
 initions meet. He who is baptized is 
 thereby initiated into the divine society of 
 the Church. This is what baptism essen- 
 tially is, and is for. Water is poured upon 
 the head, and ancient and sacred words are 
 spoken, and this is what happens : the bap- 
 tized person is made a member of the 
 Christian Church. 
 
 Thus we say at the beginning of the 
 Catechism that in baptism we were each 
 made "a member of Christ, the child of 
 48 
 
BAPTISM 
 
 God, and an inheritor of the kingdom of 
 heaven." In the revision of the English 
 Prayer Book which was undertaken in 1785 
 by our First General Convention, the sec- 
 ond question in the Catechism, "Who gave 
 you this name? " was answered, " I received 
 it in baptism, whereby I was made a mem- 
 ber of the Christian Church." This was 
 considered an equivalent of the present 
 answer, and easier to understand. It is 
 what the answer means. To be made a 
 member of Christ, the child of God and an 
 inheritor of the kingdom of heaven is to be 
 admitted to the fellowship of the Church. 
 The three clauses are different statements 
 of the same thing. 
 
 The Church is described in the New 
 Testament under three names. It is the 
 body of Christ (Ephesians 1:23), it is the 
 household of God (Ephesians 2:19), and 
 it is the kingdom of heaven (Matthew 13). 
 
 When we were baptized we were made 
 members of Christ. It signifies the service 
 of God. A member of a body is a part of 
 the body, as a hand or an eye; and the 
 purpose of the members of the body is to 
 serve. We were made members of Christ 
 that we might serve Him: our hands are 
 
 49 
 
BAPTISM 
 
 to do His work, our feet are to go upon His 
 errands, our lips are to speak in His spirit. 
 
 When we were baptized we were made 
 the children of God. It signifies the love 
 of God. Sometimes in the Bible our Lord 
 is called the only Son of God, while in other 
 places we are all called children of God. 
 The word is used with different meanings. 
 So it is here. We are all God's children by 
 being born into His family, the race; we 
 are especially God's children by being bora 
 again into His spiritual family, the Church. 
 Baptism is here the symbol of the love of 
 God, of His fatherly care for us and His 
 desire that we should love Him in return. 
 
 When we were baptized we were made 
 inheritors of the kingdom of heaven. It 
 signifies the blessing of God. It means 
 God's blessing now and here: for being by 
 baptism brought into membership in the 
 Church we have the manifold help and 
 benediction which belong to that privilege. 
 And it means God's blessing hereafter: for 
 continuing in the love and service of God 
 we will enter into that ideal kingdom for 
 which all that is best in our present life 
 prepares us. 
 
 AH this is but a drawing out of the fact 
 
 5o 
 
BAPTISM 
 
 of church membership into its natural 
 inferences and applications. 
 
 IV 
 
 i. The recipients of baptism seem orig- 
 inally to have been persons of mature life. 
 The command, " Go, teach all nations, and 
 baptize them," and the two conditions, 
 "Repent and be baptized" and "He that 
 believe th and is baptized," indicate adults. 
 At the same time, the admission of children 
 into the Jewish Church might be taken by 
 the Christians as a precedent for their own 
 use. The baptizing of households by the 
 apostles seems to suggest the inclusion of 
 children. A few statements in very early 
 Christian writings (conveniently accessible 
 in the Schaff-Herzog, " Religious Ency- 
 clopedia," Vol. I, page 451) indicate that 
 children were baptized. "The rite of in- 
 fant baptism can be traced in Irenaeus, 
 was contested by Tertullian, and was for 
 Origen an apostolic usage." Irenaeus died 
 about the year 178, Tertullian in 222, 
 Origen in 254. Cyprian (died 258) said 
 that infants ought to be baptized. The 
 fact, however, that various eminent Chris- 
 tians of the fourth century were not bap- 
 
 5i 
 
BAPTISM 
 
 tized in infancy suggests that adult bap- 
 tism was the common rule. Baptism was 
 delayed until it was possible to fulfil the 
 conditions of repentance and faith. 
 
 This delay was confirmed in the case of 
 many in the early church by an under- 
 standing of its meaning as a Sacrament of 
 Remission. It was believed that the 
 baptismal water literally washed sins 
 away. Let us wait, then, said many pru- 
 dent Christians, till we have outlived the 
 days of strong temptation, and have sinned 
 most of our sins; then we may wash them 
 all away together. Sometimes they waited 
 till they were on their deathbeds. 
 
 2. The postponement of baptism ceased 
 to be a custom in the church by reason of 
 an understanding of its meaning as a 
 Sacrament of Regeneration. St. Augustine 
 taught that every infant is born under the 
 curse of original sin, and cannot, without 
 the new birth of baptism, enter into fulness 
 of life. This doctrine which populated 
 hell with infants "not a span long," was 
 easily applied by a childless clergy to 
 other people's children. It is an example 
 of what may be believed when the head 
 of the theologian takes no suggestion from 
 
 52 
 
BAPTISM 
 
 his heart. It frightened people into the 
 baptizing of their infant children. 
 
 But the baptizing of children, though 
 delayed by one superstition and hastened 
 by another, is a true deduction from the 
 meaning of the sacrament. The Christian 
 father was initiated into the Christian 
 Society, and the Christian mother was 
 initiated with him, and they were not 
 willing to leave the little boys and girls 
 outside; that is the heart of it. Some 
 theologians said this, and other theologians 
 said that. Tertullian said, You must not 
 have your children baptized lest they fall 
 into the awful condemnation of post- 
 baptismal sin. He had a text for it 
 (Hebrews 10:29). Augustine said, You 
 must have your children baptized lest 
 they fall into everlasting misery. He too 
 had texts for it. But the parents brought 
 their children, in happy ignorance of the 
 teachings of these relentless logicians, being 
 moved thereto by natural human affection. 
 It is the revelation of the will of God not 
 in a book, nor in a doctrine, but in the 
 heart, which maintains the baptism of 
 infants in the life of the Church. And the 
 custom is in accordance with His spirit 
 
 53 
 
BAPTISM 
 
 who said, "Suffer the little children to 
 come to me." 
 
 As for the scriptural requirements of 
 repentance and faith, these were met in 
 the baptism of infants by the promises of 
 Christian friends to take care that the 
 children should be brought to hear sermons, 
 that they should learn the Creed, the 
 Lord's Prayer and the Ten Command- 
 ments, and in general that they should 
 be virtuously brought up to lead a godly 
 and a Christian life. On arriving at years 
 of discretion the children were to be 
 brought to the bishop to be confirmed by 
 him. This provision of promisers, or 
 sponsors, which was universal till the time 
 of the Reformation, and is still general 
 among Christians, proceeds upon the prin- 
 ciple of Christian nurture. The idea is that 
 the spiritual life, without waiting for an 
 experience of conversion, should begin in 
 the earliest years of childhood. The child 
 increases in wisdom and stature, and, at 
 the same time, gradually and naturally, 
 in the knowledge and obedience and love 
 of God. 
 
 Baptism, whoever receives it, young or 
 old, is the same sacrament, with the same 
 
 54 
 
BAPTISM 
 
 meaning and the same blessing. There is 
 nothing magical about it. There is nothing 
 more mysterious than there is in any other 
 spiritual opportunity of our daily life. It 
 is the benediction with which one is re- 
 ceived into the membership of the Chris- 
 tian society on earth. It is the plain door 
 which opens, at the touch of the humblest 
 hand, into the Christian Church. 
 
 55 
 
CONFIRMATION 
 
CONFIRMATION 
 
 I. The Completion of Baptism 
 
 1. The third part of primitive baptism, 
 
 plus the first part 
 
 2. Thus required 
 
 II. The Confession of Christ: Question 
 and Answer 
 
 1. For His sake 
 
 2. For our neighbor's sake 
 
 3. For our own sake: a "decided ini- 
 
 tiative" 
 
 III. The Consecration of the Life: Laying 
 on of Hands 
 
 1. The prayer for the Holy Ghost 
 
 2. The ordination of the laity 
 
 IV. The Way of Admission to the Holy 
 Communion 
 
 1. The prohibitory rubric, the safeguard 
 
 of Confirmation 
 
 2. The privilege of the sacrament, the 
 
 chief blessing 
 
 59 
 
IV 
 
 CONFIRMATION 
 
 The meaning of Confirmation is con- 
 tained in four words: completion, con- 
 fession, consecration, communion. 
 
 I 
 
 Confirmation is the completion of bap- 
 tism. In several places in the New Testa- 
 ment (Acts 8:14-17, Acts 19:1-6, Hebrews 
 6:2) baptism is immediately followed by a 
 laying on of hands. 
 
 1. The baptismal service was originally 
 in three parts: a confession of Christ, an 
 immersion or affusion, and a laying on of 
 hands. "In the next place," says Ter- 
 tullian, in the end of the second century, 
 describing the act of baptism, "the hand 
 is laid upon us invoking and inviting the 
 Holy Spirit through benediction" (Ayer: 
 " Source Book for Ancient Church His- 
 tory," p. 233). 
 
 When it became the custom to baptize 
 60 
 
CONFIRMATION 
 
 infants rather than adults, the confession 
 of Christ, with the accompanying renuncia- 
 tion of the devil, was omitted. 
 
 When the church grew so large that the 
 bishop — originally the minister of bap- 
 tism — could not conveniently be present 
 at all baptisms, it was arranged that the 
 presbyter should baptize, but a share of 
 the service was still kept for the bishop: 
 the benediction at the end was postponed 
 until he came. Then when he arrived, on 
 the occasion of his visitation, those who 
 had been baptized in his absence were 
 gathered together, and he blessed them, 
 laying on his hands. It was like the order 
 of events in the Acts, when Philip baptized 
 in Samaria, and the apostles Peter and 
 John came down and laid their hands upon 
 the new disciples. 
 
 This concluding benediction was made 
 a service by itself, and became what we 
 call Confirmation. Thus it stood till the 
 end of the Middle Ages. Then at the 
 Reformation the Church of England pre- 
 fixed to it a recitation of the Catechism, 
 for which, in 1662, the single inclusive 
 question of the bishop was substituted. 
 Thus Confirmation, the benediction of the 
 
 61 
 
CONFIRMATION 
 
 ancient baptismal service, came to be also 
 the renunciation of evil and confession of 
 Christ with which that service anciently 
 began. Accordingly, in the Prayer Book, 
 the service of baptism has no benediction 
 at the end, and the confirmation service, 
 the proper benediction, begins with a con- 
 fession of Christ. 
 
 2. It is because of this ancient, and even 
 scriptural, character of confirmation that 
 we require it in the Episcopal Church. 
 Every Christian society which admits to 
 its membership those who enter in infancy 
 by baptism has a further service by which 
 it admits them to the Holy Communion. 
 But this is not only our prescribed manner 
 of approach to that sacrament; it has such 
 sanctions in the past that we say to those 
 who wish to be enrolled among us but who 
 have not been confirmed, "Here is an 
 experience into which you have not entered. 
 We cast no doubt upon your membership 
 in the Church: that was effected by your 
 baptism. But here is a service whereby, 
 according to immemorial tradition, the 
 rite of baptism is completed: not the sacra- 
 ment of baptism, — that requires only the 
 water and the words, — but the ancient 
 62 
 
CONFIRMATION 
 
 rite. We are not contented with a letter 
 of transfer only. We ask you to come to 
 receive the benediction of the bishop, as 
 your formal welcome and admission to our 
 branch of the church." 
 
 The head of our religious organization 
 is the bishop. He is the president of our 
 society. Nobody may be received into 
 full membership among us without being 
 formally presented to the bishop and 
 received by him. 
 
 II 
 
 Confirmation is also a confession of 
 Christ. The first part of the service con- 
 sists of the bishop's question: Do ye here, 
 in the presence of God and of this congrega- 
 tion, renew the solemn promise and vow 
 that ye made, or that was made in your 
 name, at your baptism ; ratifying and con- 
 firming the same; and acknowledging your- 
 selves bound to believe and to do all those 
 things which ye then undertook, or your 
 sponsors then undertook for you?" To 
 this the answer is, "I do." 
 
 The answering of this question presents 
 no alternative between taking responsibil- 
 ity and leaving it. There is indeed a 
 
 63 
 
CONFIRMATION 
 
 difference between the life which is ex- 
 pected of a communicant of the church 
 and the life which is commonly expected 
 of one who confesses no allegiance to reli- 
 gion. It is quite unlikely, however, that 
 any such difference is recognized by God. 
 In our Lord's parable of the Last Judgment 
 no distinctions are made between church 
 members and others, even between Chris- 
 tians and pagans; the only question is, 
 What sort of person are you, by reason of 
 the use which you made of your religious 
 opportunities? It will be of no avail to 
 say, "O, but I did not use my religious 
 opportunities; I never joined the church, 
 nor partook of its sacraments." That will 
 only make the situation worse. You might 
 have had all this help, if you would. You 
 cannot excuse yourself by saying that you 
 did not use it. It is like an examination, 
 wherein nobody may increase his marks by 
 affirming that he absented himself from 
 the classroom. The confirmation question 
 is concerned with that which all are 
 bound, — whether they acknowledge it or 
 not, — to believe and to obey: to believe 
 the truth of God, to obey the will of God. 
 i. The public acknowledgment of this 
 
 64 
 
CONFIRMATION 
 
 obligation is made in the first place for His 
 sake whom we thus confess before men. 
 He is not satisfied with concealed alle- 
 giance. He declared this plainly in such 
 words as are recorded in Matthew 10:32, 33. 
 
 2. It is made in the second place for the 
 sake of our neighbor who needs our ex- 
 ample and waits to see what we will do. 
 One may say, "I can get along without 
 the church: I am a philosopher and have 
 my books, or I am a mystic and have my 
 communion with God in my own soul." 
 But everybody affects somebody else. 
 The mystics and philosophers are few; 
 the plain people, tempted and troubled, 
 needing the church, are many. They are 
 seriously hindered by those who maintain 
 by their example that the church is not 
 worth while. They are served by every 
 strong man who declares that he himself 
 needs increase of strength, and here in the 
 church finds it. 
 
 3. The confession of Christ is made, in 
 the third place, for our own sake. It has 
 what is called in psychology the value of 
 a "decided initiative." Students of hu- 
 man nature tell us, — and, indeed, we know 
 by our own experience, — that if we hon- 
 
 65 
 
CONFIRMATION 
 
 estly desire to keep a good resolution we 
 may assist ourselves greatly by beginning 
 strong. Especially, we will do well to 
 enter into the practice of the resolution 
 in some pronounced and public way. Thus 
 is habit formed and strengthened. Thus 
 we bring to our aid the observation of 
 our neighbors. We surround ourselves 
 with an "atmosphere of expectation." We 
 know that we may break a resolve which 
 we have silently made in our own souls, 
 and nobody will be the wiser. But when 
 we are tempted to do that which is out of 
 keeping with our public declaration, then 
 we know that if we fail we will lose the 
 respect of our neighbors. They will look 
 curiously at us out of their open eyes. 
 In general it is easy to behave as those 
 who are about us expect us to behave. 
 A course of life openly adopted sets the 
 note of expectation. Thus a public con- 
 fession of Christ, an open declaration 
 that we are on His side, and that we in- 
 tend by His help to do His will, assists 
 us from that moment. The indefinite 
 people are in perpetual peril. They in- 
 tend in a vague way to be good, but they 
 are so far from clear about it that they are 
 66 
 
CONFIRMATION 
 
 naturally tempted to be bad. Temptation 
 comes because they seem to invite it. 
 The people who have decided convictions 
 and are perfectly frank about them, who 
 let their neighbors know precisely where 
 they stand, are shielded from much tempta- 
 tion by that fact. They are not only 
 definitely but aggressively good, trying 
 not only to be good but to do good. They 
 are thereby as immune from many solici- 
 tations to evil as a policeman is immune 
 from the proposal of a burglar to help 
 him rob a safe. The value of confirma- 
 tion, in this aspect of it, is in the position 
 of natural security which it offers. In a 
 world in which we all find it hard to be 
 good, here is a help. 
 
 Ill 
 
 Confirmation is a consecration of one's 
 self to the service of Christ. The second 
 part of the service consists of the bishop's 
 benediction. First he prays in general 
 for all who have come to be confirmed. 
 They have already been baptized: God 
 has vouchsafed to "regenerate them by 
 water and the Holy Ghost.'' May they 
 now be blessed with new spiritual strength: 
 
 67 
 
CONFIRMATION 
 
 "Strengthen them, we beseech thee, O 
 Lord, with the Holy Ghost the Comforter, 
 and daily increase in them thy manifold 
 gifts of grace." It is like the petition of 
 St. Peter and St. John, " who, when they 
 were come down, prayed for them that 
 they might receive the Holy Ghost." 
 
 i. One of the gifts given in answer to 
 the prayer of the apostles was a speaking 
 with tongues. At Ephesus, for example, 
 when St. Paul laid his hands on those whom 
 he had just baptized, "they spake with 
 tongues and prophesied." This has long 
 passed out of ordinary experience, though 
 it has occasionally recurred under peculiar 
 psychical conditions. It seems to have 
 been a crying-out to express a joy or an 
 excitement for which common, articulate 
 speech was inadequate. The gifts for 
 which the bishop prays to-day are very 
 different: wisdom, understanding, counsel, 
 ghostly ( = spiritual) strength, knowledge 
 and true godliness; to which is added 
 holy fear, i. e., the spirit of reverence, the 
 consciousness of the divine presence. The 
 words are taken from the beginning of 
 the eleventh chapter of Isaiah, and are a 
 description of an ideal king. The bishop 
 68 
 
CONFIRMATION 
 
 prays that these disciples may have the 
 qualities of leadership among their fellows, 
 especially a right judgment to know what 
 to do, and energy to do it, and that they 
 may undertake all their good works in 
 true piety and the fear of God. They 
 are to be active and useful persons, their 
 lives filled with social service, in the spirit 
 of religion. 
 
 2. Then prayer is made for each of them 
 in particular, the bishop laying his hands, 
 after the manner of the apostles, upon 
 the head of each, partly for indication, 
 showing by his gesture for whom he prays; 
 and partly for benediction, like the setting- 
 apart of a knight in the days of chivalry. 
 It is a kind of ordination of the laity, 
 blessing their consecration of themselves 
 to the active service of Christ. The bishop 
 prays for the grace of God that they may 
 be enabled to serve aright, with persever- 
 ance. "Defend, O Lord, this thy child 
 with thy heavenly grace; that he may 
 continue thine forever; and daily increase 
 in thy Holy Spirit more and more, until 
 he come unto thy everlasting kingdom." 
 
 69 
 
CONFIRMATION 
 
 IV 
 
 Confirmation is a rite of admission to 
 the Holy Communion. A rubric at the 
 end of the service directs that "the minis- 
 ter shall not omit earnestly to move the 
 persons confirmed to come, without delay, 
 to the Lord's Supper." And another 
 rubric says, "There shall none be ad- 
 mitted to the Holy Communion, until 
 such time as he be confirmed, or be ready 
 and desirous to be confirmed." 
 
 i. The original purpose of this prohibi- 
 tion was to prevent the disuse of Confir- 
 mation. It was thus set forth in 1281 
 by Archbishop Peckham of Canterbury. 
 "Many," he said, "neglect the sacrament 
 of confirmation for want of watchful ad- 
 visers; so that there are many, innumer- 
 able many, who want the grace of con- 
 firmation, though grown old in evil days. 
 To cure this damnable neglect, we ordain 
 that none be admitted to the sacrament of 
 the Lord's Body and Blood that is not 
 confirmed, except at the point of death, 
 unless he have a reasonable impediment." 
 
 The prohibition is not of the nature of 
 an excommunication. The lack of con- 
 70 
 
CONFIRMATION 
 
 firmation is not essentially a hindrance 
 to the right receiving of the Holy Com- 
 munion. There are such hindrances, but 
 they are stated in the Prayer Book in 
 their proper place, in the rubrics at the 
 beginning of the Communion Service. 
 Some kind of formal admission to that 
 sacrament is necessary in order that those 
 who come may have sufficient maturity of 
 mind and earnestness of purpose. This 
 must be secured by some sort of prohibi- 
 tion. Such a requirement is made in 
 every Christian society. Our rite of con- 
 firmation differs from similar rites among 
 our neighbors in its historical and scrip- 
 tural sanction, but not in its practical 
 efficiency. They provide in their own 
 way for devout and instructed approach 
 to the Lord's Table. Our rubric governs 
 our own practice, and those who would be 
 enrolled on our communicant lists must 
 conform to it. As regards others who may 
 desire upon occasion to come to our altar, 
 the rubric may be interpreted either liber- 
 ally or strictly. It is commonly inter- 
 preted liberally, in accordance with Chris- 
 tian hospitality. It is taken to apply to 
 our own people, not to those who have a 
 
 7i 
 
CONFIRMATION 
 
 different discipline.* Such a construction 
 of the rubric was officially given by Arch- 
 bishop Tait of Canterbury, in 1870, when 
 Dean Stanley invited to the Holy Com- 
 munion in Westminster Abbey the whole 
 company of the revisers of the translation 
 of the New Testament, representing vari- 
 ous denominations. 
 
 2. The highest values of Confirmation 
 are derived from the privileges into which 
 it gives admission. One may say, "I have 
 already the benefit of the Church; I attend 
 its sendees, and am entitled to its minis- 
 trations." But it is to be said in answer 
 that an obvious difference between those 
 who have been confirmed and those who 
 have not been confirmed appears when 
 the moment comes for the service of the 
 Holy Communion: those who have been 
 confirmed remain. They remain for the 
 spiritual strength which is imparted in 
 that sacrament. The distinction between 
 the two groups is not that those who re- 
 
 *See for example, the usage of Bp. Hobart, Bp. de 
 Lancey, and Bp. Whipple in Lights and Shadows of a Long 
 Episcopate, p. 10; and of Bp. Tuttle, dow (1914) Presid- 
 ing Bishop, in his Reminiscences of a Missionary Bishop, 
 p. 204; and the counsel of Bp. Lawrence in his Convention 
 Address (1913). 
 
 72 
 
CONFIRMATION 
 
 main say, "We are the good and religious 
 part of the congregation," while those who 
 go out say, "We make no profession of 
 particular goodness." All alike desire to 
 be good: that is taken for granted. But 
 those who stay to the Communion say, 
 "In order to be right and to do right we 
 need help, and we know that help is to be 
 had here." In a world in which we all 
 meet with trial and trouble, confirmation 
 admits us to a source of refreshment and 
 strength. Every devout communicant 
 knows that by experience. We come to 
 the Lord's Supper in our weakness, or 
 sorrow, or perplexity, beset by tempta- 
 tion, and we go away uplifted. 
 
 Herein is the answer to some who say, 
 "I am not good enough to be confirmed." 
 It may be a sufficient answer. It may 
 mean honest indifference to religion; or 
 it may mean a silent refusal to give up 
 some course of life which is known to be 
 wrong. Under such conditions, one ought 
 not to be confirmed. But sometimes it 
 means a confusion of aspiration with per- 
 fection. People may have a high ideal of 
 what it means to be a Christian, and may 
 feel that they must wait till they have 
 
 73 
 
CONFIRMATION 
 
 come nearer to it: then they will be con- 
 firmed. This is like saying, "I will wait 
 till I feel much better, then I will make 
 use of medicine." Medicine is for those 
 who need aid against disease; the Holy 
 Communion is for those who need aid 
 against sin, they ought to be confirmed 
 in order to be admitted to the ministra- 
 tions of this sacramental grace. The only 
 essential preliminary is aspiration, the 
 earnest desire to live, by God's help, a 
 better life. 
 
 74 
 
RENUNCIATION 
 
RENUNCIATION 
 
 I. The Essential Importance of Character 
 II. The Meaning of Renunciation 
 The keeping of Lent 
 III. The Renunciation of the Devil: Sins of 
 the Spirit 
 Committed in spirit 
 Beginning in spirit 
 
 IV. The Renunciation of the World: Sins 
 
 of Society 
 
 The Christian and the world 
 
 The Christian attitude towards amuse- 
 ment 
 
 V. The Renunciation of the Flesh: Sins of 
 
 the Body 
 Major sins: impurity, intemperance 
 Minor sins: indolence 
 
 77 
 
V 
 
 RENUNCIATION 
 I 
 
 Nothing in religion is so important as 
 character. The essential thing is to be 
 good. The Creed is of great value, the 
 Church is of great value, but their value 
 is in the assistance which they give to the 
 living of a right life. Unless our belief in 
 the Creed ministers to our conduct in ac- 
 cordance with it, that formula is no better 
 than any other true statement of philos- 
 ophy. Unless our membership in the 
 Church bears fruit in righteousness, that 
 organization is no better than any other 
 excellent society. 
 
 In the Old Testament the emphasis is 
 on character. The Hebrew idea of God 
 differs in many respects from the ideas of 
 other nations, but chiefly in the belief that 
 He is a righteous God, who is best served 
 by putting away whatever is evil and doing 
 whatever is required by His holy command- 
 
 78 
 
RENUNCIATION 
 
 merits. In the Temple, the worshipper 
 passed through a series of sanctuaries of 
 increasing sacredness until he came to the 
 Most Holy Place; and in this Holy of 
 Holies, as the symbol and assurance of the 
 divine presence, were the tables of stone 
 on which were inscribed the chief require- 
 ments of the moral law. 
 
 In the New Testament the emphasis is 
 even more strongly placed on character. 
 Our Lord, by precept and by example, con- 
 tinually insisted upon it. He denned it as 
 consisting not only of words and deeds but 
 of the most secret thoughts of the heart. 
 St. Paul addressed the Christians not as 
 "orthodox," i. e., as distinguished by their 
 acceptance of a creed; and not as "cath- 
 olic," i. e., as distinguished by their al- 
 legiance to a church. These adjectives 
 came long after. He called them "saints," 
 i. e., holy people, good people. His letters 
 show by the counsels and warnings which 
 they contain that the Christians were very 
 imperfect saints; but they were trying to 
 do right. They were endeavoring to real- 
 ize an ideal of character. 
 
 Among the baptismal promises to which 
 the bishop refers at the beginning of the 
 
 79 
 
RENUNCIATION 
 
 confirmation service, the first and third 
 are concerned with character: "First, that 
 I should renounce the devil and all his 
 works, the pomps and vanity of this wicked 
 world, and all the sinful lusts of the flesh. 
 Thirdly, that I should keep God's holy will 
 and commandments, and walk in the same 
 all the days of my life." One of these is a 
 promise of Renunciation, the other is a 
 promise of Obedience. 
 
 II 
 
 Renunciation means giving up. In the 
 ancient ritual of baptism the new disciple 
 turning his face to the east to make his 
 confession of Christ, turned his back to the 
 west to renounce the devil, — the west, as 
 the place where the sun descends into 
 darkness, being at that time considered 
 the special residence of the infernal 
 powers. 
 
 Renunciation, which always implies, as 
 a matter of course, the giving up of that 
 which we know to be bad, also implies 
 sometimes the giving up of the good. The 
 right conduct of life is only in part a rejec- 
 tion of that which is plainly and definitely 
 evil; it is still more a choice, among supe- 
 80 
 
RENUNCIATION 
 
 rior and inferior goods, of that which is 
 better. This may be for the sake of disci- 
 pline, giving us practice in the difficult art 
 of saying "no," exercising us in matters 
 which are not of essential importance that 
 we may be ready to choose aright when 
 we are in the midst of serious temptation. 
 Or it may be for the sake of opportunity, 
 to get more time and have more strength 
 for that which is better; as every earnest 
 person gives up some measure of recreation 
 and of rest in order to devote himself to the 
 serious business of his life. 
 
 This is a great part of the meaning of 
 Lent. We abstain at such a time from cer- 
 tain articles of innocent food that we may 
 have the benefit of discipline, denying our- 
 selves that which is good that we may 
 strengthen the habit of denying ourselves 
 that which is bad. And we abstain from 
 certain innocent amusements, that we may 
 have opportunity for more frequent at- 
 tendance at church, and for more diligent 
 reading of improving books. The act is 
 negative, but the purpose is positive. The 
 whole value of the act is in its relation to 
 the positive purpose. Thus days of fasting 
 are defined in the Prayer Book as those 
 
 81 
 
RENUNCIATION 
 
 "on which the church requires such a 
 measure of abstinence as is more especially 
 suited to extraordinary acts and exercises 
 of devotion." 
 
 Ill 
 
 The renunciation of the devil is directed 
 against the sins of the spirit. 
 
 There are sins which are committed in 
 spirit, without necessarily making them- 
 selves either visible or audible. They are 
 consistent with the utmost respectability. 
 They who commit such sins may have an 
 appearance of great goodness. The Phar- 
 isees, for example, who were guilty of these 
 offences, were generally considered the most 
 excellent persons in the community. But 
 our Lord addressed them in terms of the 
 strongest condemnation. They themselves 
 honestly believed that they were pleasing 
 to God. One of them, in his prayers, 
 thanked God that he was so much better 
 than his neighbors. But all the time they 
 were under the divine displeasure. They 
 were so certain of their goodness, and so 
 unconscious of their actual condition, that 
 Jesus used the sternest words He could find 
 in order to awaken and undeceive them. 
 82 
 
RENUNCIATION 
 
 He told them that they were in danger of 
 the damnation of hell. 
 
 Among the sins of the spirit are pride, 
 self-conceit, contempt for others, arro- 
 gance, social indifference, selfishness, un- 
 brotherliness, covetousness. On the other 
 hand, St. Paul describes the fruit of the 
 spirit (Galatians 5:22) as "love, joy, peace, 
 long suffering, gentleness, goodness, faith- 
 fulness, meekness, self-control." 
 
 Indeed, all sins begin in the spirit. They 
 are first a thought of the heart before they 
 become a word or a deed. Sin, therefore, 
 is to be encountered at the outset, in the 
 spirit, before it has a chance to grow. We 
 are to attach great importance to the 
 thoughts which we think, realizing that in 
 them is the reality of our character. " As a 
 man thinketh in his heart, so is he " (Prov- 
 erbs 23:7). So is he in the sight of God, 
 who looks past all that we say and do to 
 what we are. "Keep thy heart with all 
 diligence, for out of it are the issues of 
 life" (Proverbs 4:23). We observe in the 
 account of our Lord's temptation that He 
 was defended against evil by the fact that 
 His heart was full of good thoughts. His 
 memory was stored with helpful words. 
 
 83 
 
RENUNCIATION 
 
 When He was tempted, He immediately 
 brought to His assistance a sentence from 
 the Bible. He was armed with " the sword 
 of the spirit, which is the word of God" 
 (Ephesians 6:17). 
 
 IV 
 
 The renunciation of the world is directed 
 against the sins of society. 
 
 Even though "the world" is commonly 
 regarded in the New Testament as a place 
 of evil, it was not the wish of our Lord that 
 His disciples should depart out of it — only 
 out of the sin of it. He Himself lived in it 
 so naturally, and in such a friendly spirit, 
 and found so much good in it, that the 
 Pharisees were scandalized. There was a 
 group in Jerusalem called "bleeding Phar- 
 isees" because they went about blind- 
 folded that they might not even see the 
 world, and were continually bumping them- 
 selves against corners. With that sort of 
 relation to the world, Jesus had no sym- 
 pathy. 
 
 The early Christians found it difficult to 
 follow the example of their Master, partly 
 because the world of their day was uncom- 
 monly bad, and partly because of a philo- 
 
 84 
 
RENUNCIATION 
 
 sophical doctrine current at that time to the 
 effect that matter is essentially evil. The 
 body, the philosophers said, is not only the 
 source and means of sin, but is totally and 
 hopelessly alien from good. All the ma- 
 terial concerns of man are bad. All busi- 
 ness and all pleasure, all social life and al- 
 most all of the natural occupations of 
 human beings, are of the devil. To carry 
 such a doctrine into its logical applications 
 was impossible. But many Christians 
 tried it. They abandoned the world and 
 sought in the seclusion of deserts and 
 mountains to save their souls. 
 
 The gospel records of the life of Christ 
 remained to correct this error, though the 
 endeavor was made again and again to live 
 in another world instead of this. It was 
 gradually understood that God made us 
 with bodies as well as souls, and placed us 
 in communities in this present world, be- 
 cause He wishes us to live in these condi- 
 tions. The world is a revelation of His 
 will. We are to live in the world, enjoying 
 to the full the pleasures which God has 
 provided in it; but we are not to be con- 
 formed to it. That is, we are not to follow 
 the world's opinion, nor to care very greatly 
 
 85 
 
RENUNCIATION 
 
 for the world's approval. We are not to 
 have the world's ideal, according to which 
 wealth and pleasure are chief goods. We 
 are not to live as if this visible world were 
 all the world there is. 
 
 These principles determine the Christian 
 attitude towards amusement. 
 
 Amusement is not only a universal and 
 necessary part of human life, but is a con- 
 tinuing fact of which we must take account. 
 People, young and old, have always amused 
 themselves, and will always amuse them- 
 selves. It is a divine instinct. Even the 
 methods of amusement have a permanent 
 quality, and defy all endeavors to change 
 them. Human beings are so made as to 
 enjoy music and dancing and the play 
 at the theatre. These amusements are 
 found in all lands and times. They 
 are often in need of reformation, but 
 to pronounce the thing itself wrong, be- 
 cause for the moment it is wrongly done, is 
 to make an artificial sin. There are real 
 sins enough, without confusing the dif- 
 ference between good and evil by manu- 
 facturing new ones. Indeed, considering 
 the inevitable continuance of these forms 
 of recreation, there is need not so much of 
 86 
 
RENUNCIATION 
 
 reprobation as of co-operation. Christians 
 ought to encourage every attempt to pro- 
 vide good music, good dancing, and good 
 plays. If the theatre, for example, should 
 be deserted by Christians, the drama would 
 naturally grow worse and worse, suiting 
 itself to the audience. That which might 
 be an influence to uplift society would be- 
 come an influence to degrade it. Every 
 good play which succeeds because good 
 people go to it, encourages every other ef- 
 fort to produce good plays. 
 
 As for the place of these matters in the 
 life of the individual, the Episcopal Church 
 lays down no rules. The principle to be 
 followed is that which holds in regard to 
 eating and drinking. We are to eat and 
 drink that which agrees with us, determin- 
 ing our food by its actual effect. And, in 
 like manner, we are to use amusements. If 
 any form of recreation disagrees with our 
 character, ministering to our baser selves, 
 spoiling the fineness of our thoughts, 
 smearing the fair surface of our souls, lower- 
 ing our ideals of conduct, or even taking 
 too much of our time, it is to be given up, 
 on that account. But amusements after 
 which we can say our prayers with a pure 
 
 87 
 
RENUNCIATION 
 
 heart, and which refresh us for the serious 
 work of life, are good because they do us 
 good. 
 
 V 
 
 The renunciation of the flesh is directed 
 against the sins of the body. 
 
 We perceive in ourselves two natures, 
 one akin to the animals, the other akin to 
 the angels. We hear two voices, one calling 
 us to take the broad and easy path which 
 leads to destruction, the other calling us to 
 take the straitened and difficult way which 
 leads to life. We have a body, and we 
 have a soul. Under these conditions, the 
 body, as St. Paul said, is to be kept under. 
 It is to be treated as a useful servant. It is 
 to be maintained in health and strength for 
 the sake of efficient service. Whatever in 
 the conduct or condition of the body in- 
 terferes with the best state of the mind or 
 of the soul is to be subdued or reformed. 
 
 The major sins of the body are indicated 
 by the phrase "the sinful lusts of the 
 flesh." They take the form of impurity 
 and of intemperance. They are revealed 
 as wicked by the fact that they are fol- 
 lowed by natural punishments, as burning 
 88 
 
RENUNCIATION 
 
 follows the handling of fire. They pro- 
 duce diseases — sometimes loathsome dis- 
 eases — of mind and body. They are 
 poisons, sometimes quick, but more often 
 slow, which result at first in pain and at 
 last in death. They are to be dreaded 
 and avoided like the plague. 
 
 These sins are followed by other punish- 
 ments also in their social consequences. 
 They harm not only the sinner, but all 
 who are connected with him. They not 
 only deprive him of usefulness by making 
 him sick, and by bringing him, in many 
 cases, to poverty, but they destroy the 
 happiness of families. They cause distress 
 and misery which are often far worse 
 than the tragedy of death. And they live 
 after him: they are visited, in the order of 
 nature, upon his children. Because of 
 the impurity or the intemperance of par- 
 ents children are bora subject to the same 
 temptations. They are weak because their 
 parents by their conduct weakened them 
 before their birth. The sinful lusts of the 
 flesh are responsible for the greater part 
 of all the unhappiness of human life. 
 
 There are also minor sins of the body, 
 which, while they do not destroy life, 
 
 89 
 
RENUNCIATION 
 
 dull it. They keep us from making the 
 best of ourselves. They hinder our effi- 
 ciency. They interfere with clear thought, 
 and alert action, and blur the difference 
 between right and wrong. Such are the 
 sins of indolence, and the indulgence of 
 appetite. Sometimes they take the form 
 of too much attention to the body, in 
 soft and luxurious and enervating living. 
 Sometimes they take the form of too little 
 attention to the body, in neglect of cleanli- 
 ness and exercise. They too have then- 
 natural and proper punishments, which 
 reveal the displeasure of God. The book 
 of Proverbs, for example, is full of warn- 
 ings against idleness and sloth. "I went 
 by the field of the slothful, and by the 
 vineyard of the man void of understand- 
 ing; and lo, it was all overgrown with 
 thorns, and nettles had covered the face 
 thereof, and the stone wall thereof was 
 broken down. Then I saw, and con- 
 sidered it well. I looked upon it, and re- 
 ceived instruction. Yet a little sleep, a 
 little slumber, a little folding of the hands 
 to sleep: so shall thy poverty come upon 
 thee as one that travelleth; and thy 
 want as an armed man " (Proverbs 24: 
 90 
 
RENUNCIATION 
 
 30-34). On the other hand, in the Bible 
 account of the victories of Joshua, there 
 occurs four times the significant sentence, 
 "Joshua rose up early in the morning." 
 It is one of the reasons of his success. 
 
 9i 
 
OBEDIENCE 
 
OBEDIENCE 
 
 I. The Commandments in General 
 II. Our Duty Towards God 
 
 1. First commandment: to have God 
 
 2. Second commandment: the idolatry of 
 
 covetousness 
 
 3. Third commandment: against irrev- 
 
 erence 
 
 4. Fourth commandment: rest and reli- 
 
 gion 
 
 III. Our Duty Towards our Neighbor 
 
 1. Fifth commandment: obedience and 
 
 courtesy 
 
 2. Sixth commandment: against murder 
 
 and hatred 
 
 3. Seventh commandment: in the letter, 
 
 in the spirit 
 
 4. Eighth commandment: against profit 
 
 by other's loss 
 
 5. Ninth commandment: against un- 
 
 brotherly speech 
 
 6. Tenth commandment: against love of 
 
 money 
 
 95 
 
VI 
 
 OBEDIENCE 
 
 Christian obedience consists in keeping 
 God's holy will and commandments and 
 walking in the same all the days of our life. 
 
 I 
 
 The commandments are stated in the 
 Old Testament in the twentieth chapter 
 of Exodus, and, with slight differences, 
 in the fifth chapter of Deuteronomy. The 
 differences, which appear chiefly in the 
 fourth commandment, suggest that all of 
 these ancient laws were originally as brief 
 as some of them are still. In that case, 
 the additions were written in afterwards 
 for purposes of explanation or application. 
 
 The commandments are interpreted in 
 the New Testament, in the Sermon on the 
 Mount. Our Lord there takes the sixth 
 commandment, and the seventh, and per- 
 haps the third and shows how they are 
 to be kept: not in the letter only, but in 
 96 
 
OBEDIENCE 
 
 the spirit; not in deed and in word only 
 but even in the heart. 
 
 The commandments are paraphrased 
 and applied in the Prayer Book in "My 
 Duty towards God," and "My Duty 
 towards my Neighbor." The distinction 
 is one which appears in our Lord's state- 
 ment of the two great commandments, 
 "Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with 
 all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and 
 with all thy mind. This is the first and 
 great commandment. And the second is 
 like unto it: Thou shalt love thy neighbor 
 as thyself." 
 
 This is what is meant by religion as dis- 
 tinguished from morality. Religion is 
 concerned with God; morality, with our 
 neighbor. Religion is exercised in faith 
 and prayer, in services and sacraments, 
 in a holy life. Morality is exercised in 
 being good and in doing good, in brother- 
 liness and helpfulness, in a righteous life. 
 It is possible to consider these duties 
 separately, in definitions and command- 
 ments, but they are combined in life as 
 oxygen and hydrogen are combined in 
 water. Each implies and needs the other. 
 Thus, at the transfiguration, some of the 
 
 97 
 
OBEDIENCE 
 
 apostles, on the mountain, were proposing 
 to live devoutly with God out of sight of 
 their neighbors: but Jesus forbade them. 
 Meanwhile, some of the apostles, on the 
 plain, were trying to live helpfully with 
 their neighbors without help from God: 
 but they failed, because they had not 
 strengthened themselves by prayer. Be- 
 cause God is our Father we serve Him in 
 all our service of our brethren. Because 
 the effectiveness of our service depends 
 greatly on what sort of persons we are, 
 we prepare ourselves for it by communion 
 with God. 
 
 II 
 
 Our duty towards God is set forth in the 
 first four commandments, our duty towards 
 our neighbor in the last six. 
 
 i. The first commandment forbids poly- 
 theism, the worship of many gods. Poly- 
 theism is the kind of religion which we 
 read of in the Iliad and the yEneid. It 
 exists still in distant lands, in India and 
 Africa. When this commandment was 
 given it was almost universal. The neigh- 
 bors of the people of Israel, and all the 
 nations with whom they dealt, had many 
 98 
 
OBEDIENCE 
 
 gods. It is likely that the purpose of the 
 commandment was less theological than 
 moral. Among the many gods of the 
 heathen were some who represented cruelty, 
 some who represented immorality. They 
 were believed by their worshippers to 
 encourage them in evil. The Hebrews 
 were to have one only God, not only be- 
 cause there is in truth only one God over 
 all the earth, but because God, as they 
 were taught to regard Him, is a righteous 
 God, concerned about the conduct of 
 men. 
 
 We are not in peril of this ancient error, 
 but there is something worse than having 
 many gods, and that is having no God at 
 all. The commandment means for us 
 that we are to have God. We are not to be 
 like those who are described as "without 
 God in the world." We are to realize that 
 at the beginning of our life, and in all our 
 life, the Maker of the universe of suns and 
 stars, and of ourselves in the midst of it 
 all, is God. Him we are to obey as His 
 will is revealed in the Bible. To Him we 
 are to pray. We are to worship Him, to 
 give Him thanks, to put our whole trust 
 in Him, to call upon Him, to honor His 
 
 99 
 
OBEDIENCE 
 
 holy name and His word, and to serve 
 Him truly all the days of our life. 
 
 2. The second commandment forbids 
 idolatry, the use of images to represent 
 God. Idolatry was as universal as poly- 
 theism, and was a natural accompaniment 
 of it: if there are many gods, it is con- 
 venient to have them distinguished one 
 from another by some manner of symbols. 
 The Hebrews lived in a world in which 
 idolatry was considered an essential part 
 of religion. They were tempted by it 
 through long centuries of their history. 
 Their ancestors had worshipped idols in 
 Mesopotamia. Rachel brought some of 
 the family idols with her when she came 
 to Palestine (Genesis 31:19). Aaron made 
 an idol on the plain of Sinai (Exodus 32 :8). 
 David had an idol in his house (I Samuel 
 19:13). The prophets again and again 
 reproved the people for idolatry (Isaiah 
 2:8, Ezekiel 30:13, Zechariah 13:2). 
 
 Idolatry comes from the natural desire to 
 realize God, somehow to see and touch Him. 
 This desire is met for us in the incarna- 
 tion. God is made man. In Jesus Christ 
 we find Him revealed in a form which 
 appeals to our minds and to our hearts. 
 100 
 
OBEDIENCE 
 
 The evil of idolatry is in its debasing 
 effect upon religion. People are led by 
 their idols into petty and magical and un- 
 worthy ideas of God, believing that He is 
 contained in a sacred image or other sym- 
 bol, and is thus resident upon an altar, and 
 may be used for our protection or advan- 
 tage. It was in this spirit that the Israel- 
 ites carried the Ark into the battle, think- 
 ing thereby to win a victory (I Samuel 
 4:4). 
 
 We are no more tempted now to break 
 the second commandment than the first. 
 But St. Paul gave a definition of idolatry 
 which brings it close to us. He said that 
 covetousness is idolatry (Colossians 3:5). 
 The effect of covetousness is to put some 
 material thing in the place of God. This 
 the man desires, this he considers and 
 obeys, this he serves, with this he is satis- 
 fied. It is only a little removed from the 
 idols of the heathen. 
 
 As for the "jealousy" of God to which 
 reference is made in the commandment, 
 we are to remember that the word has not 
 only a bad meaning but a good meaning. 
 On the bad side it means distrust of one's 
 friends; but on the good side to be jealous 
 
 101 
 
OBEDIENCE 
 
 is the same as to be zealous, — to be filled 
 with zeal, to be exceedingly in earnest for 
 the welfare of one's friends. God is a 
 jealous God in that He is greatly concerned 
 for the good of our souls. His jealousy is 
 like that of fathers and mothers who find 
 their children giving their confidence and 
 affection to bad companions. 
 
 3. The third commandment means that 
 religion is of such importance that it is 
 always to be taken seriously. The com- 
 mandment applies directly to our use of the 
 name of God. It forbids perjury, i. e., the 
 invoking of God's name in court in sup- 
 port of any statement which is not true. 
 It also forbids profanity, i. e., the naming 
 of God lightly as a help to emphasis in 
 conversation. The commandment applies 
 indirectly to our relation towards all holy 
 things and places. We are to remember 
 how our Lord drove the traders from the 
 temple because it was a house of prayer 
 (Matthew 21:12, 13), and how He would 
 not permit any man to carry a burden 
 therein (Mark 11:16). He knew that it 
 was for our spiritual good that holy places 
 should be set apart from all the ordinary 
 business of life, and kept quiet and sacred. 
 102 
 
OBEDIENCE 
 
 Thus we learn how to behave ourselves in 
 church, not only in service time, but at 
 all times. 
 
 A liturgical service, such as we have, 
 brings peril in connection with this com- 
 mandment. We are tempted into such 
 familiarity with sacred words and names 
 as to lead to our taking them upon our 
 lips without realizing them in our hearts. 
 We may well pray against this sin when 
 we kneel in silence at the beginning of the 
 service. 
 
 The breaking of this commandment 
 brings its natural punishment. God can- 
 not hold the offenders guiltless because 
 irreverence affects character. It dulls our 
 sensitiveness to the finer side of life, and 
 gradually renders us incapable of perceiv- 
 ing God. It is like the negligences and 
 ignorances which make people blind to the 
 best art, and deaf to the best music. 
 
 4. The fourth commandment means that 
 religion is of such importance that every 
 week a day is to be set apart for it. In the 
 Old Testament, the chief meaning of the 
 commandment is social (Deuteronomy 
 5:15) : the Sabbath is a day of rest. In the 
 New Testament the chief meaning is 
 
 103 
 
OBEDIENCE 
 
 spiritual: Sunday is the "Lord's Day," a 
 day of religion. 
 
 The day is to be observed according to 
 these definitions. As a day of rest, it is a 
 time of leisure from the stress and haste 
 of life, for ourselves and for others. It has 
 its psychological value in the increase of 
 efficiency. The welfare of the people far 
 exceeds in importance the business inter- 
 ests of the community. The contrast be- 
 tween a small number of prosperous and 
 privileged persons over against a great 
 number of dull and tired people whose 
 labor leaves them neither time nor strength 
 for true happiness, contradicts all the 
 commandments. Everybody is entitled to 
 one day of rest in seven. Whatever on 
 that day brings rest and refreshment to 
 mind and body is in accordance with the 
 commandment, which does indeed forbid 
 work, but does not in any syllable forbid 
 play: quiet and orderly recreation, the 
 open air of the country, books, pictures, 
 music. The day is happily marked in 
 households by special games and privileges 
 for children. What is needed is not so 
 much prohibition as affirmation. Religion 
 is in error when it gives a holiday with 
 104 
 
OBEDIENCE 
 
 one hand, and takes it back with the 
 other. 
 
 As a day of religion, it is to be made to 
 minister to our spiritual nature. We are 
 to attend to the quality of our life, to keep 
 the perspective right, to readjust our 
 standard of values, to deepen our sense of 
 the relation of our mortality to our im- 
 mortality. For these purposes, the serv- 
 ices and sacraments of the Church are 
 offered. We are to make use of them for 
 the sustaining of our souls : for our salvation 
 from our besetting temptations, for our 
 growth in grace. Children are to go to 
 Sunday school, and, when they are old 
 enough, to church. Remembering also the 
 social side of religion, Sunday is a day for 
 neighborly helpfulness and ministration. 
 
 In the change from Judaism to Chris- 
 tianity the holy day was changed from 
 the end of the week to the beginning. 
 The new day has often been called " The 
 Christian Sabbath " but the name " Sab- 
 bath " belongs more properly to Saturday. 
 The Christian day is " Sunday." 
 
 105 
 
OBEDIENCE 
 
 III 
 
 The other six commandments concern 
 our duty towards our neighbor. We are 
 to love him as ourself. That is, we are 
 not only to deal with him according to the 
 Golden Rule, "As ye would that men 
 should do to you, do ye also to them like- 
 wise" (Luke 6:3), but according to that 
 other word of our Lord when He said, 
 "This is my commandment, that ye love 
 one another as I have loved you " (John 
 15:12). When we remember how far His 
 love carried Him, even to the self-sacrifice 
 of the cross, we see what an ideal is there 
 set before us. As for the lesser standard 
 of loving our neighbor as ourself, we may 
 apply it profitably to the judgments which 
 we pass upon our neighbors, and consider 
 if we make as much allowance for them 
 as we do for ourselves. 
 
 1. The fifth commandment teaches us to 
 love, honor and succour (=help) our father 
 and mother, to honor and obey the civil 
 authority, to submit ourselves to all our 
 governors, teachers, spiritual pastors and 
 masters, to order ourselves lowly and 
 reverently to all our betters. There is 
 106 
 
OBEDIENCE 
 
 some inclination to-day to resent this an- 
 cient interpretation, especially on the part 
 of those who dislike the words "masters" 
 and "betters." They feel that it is an 
 endeavor of the "upper classes" to keep 
 the plain people in subjection. The truth 
 is, however, that obedience is a fundamen- 
 tal virtue, without which neither state, nor 
 church, nor school, nor family can go on. 
 So far from being a duty mainly of the 
 weak and ignorant and very young, it is 
 at the heart of all success in the most 
 strenuous of manly exercises: the training 
 of the athlete for the games which are a 
 kind of war in play, and the training of the 
 soldier for war in earnest. Without the 
 habit of instant and unquestioning obe- 
 dience all strength is turned to weakness. 
 What is needed is the "team-play" 
 whereby everybody subordinates himself 
 to a common purpose. It is a necessity in 
 households, where it is a form of "playing 
 the game." Children are to obey their 
 parents as they obey the leaders of their 
 sports. 
 
 The commandment has regard not only 
 to the duties but to the graces of life. It 
 enjoins courtesy, such as is easily lost in 
 
 107 
 
OBEDIENCE 
 
 the informality of our social ways, but 
 which, wherever it appears, smooths and 
 lightens and cheers and beautifies social 
 relations. It suggests the consideration 
 and deference of youth for age. 
 
 The long life which is promised is na- 
 tional rather than individual. The keeping 
 of the commandment makes a substantial 
 basis for all civil institutions, and gives a 
 people length of days. An illustration is 
 the reverence for ancestors which exists in 
 China. 
 
 2. The sixth commandment, in the 
 letter, forbids murder, i. e., the malicious 
 taking of human life. It is extended to 
 include suicide, on which the church puts a 
 certain ban by forbidding the use of the 
 burial service of the Prayer Book over 
 those who have laid violent hands upon 
 themselves. This, however, is not applied 
 to such as have thus made away with 
 themselves under conditions of insanity. 
 As for capital punishment, it is sanctioned 
 in the Bible; and the same is true of war. 
 We anticipate the time, however, when the 
 progress of civilization and religion shall 
 put an end to these tragic disciplines. The 
 true purpose of punishment is remedial. 
 108 
 
OBEDIENCE 
 
 The true settlement of disputes between 
 nations, as between individuals, is by reason 
 and just laws. The doctrine that might 
 makes right is a doctrine of the devil. 
 
 In the spirit, the commandment forbids 
 hatred, unforgiveness, unbrotherliness. It 
 is thus explained in the Sermon on the 
 Mount (Matthew 5:21, 22, 38-48). We 
 pray that we may keep it, when we ask to 
 be forgiven as we forgive those who hate 
 us. The Church forbids those to come to 
 the Holy Communion betwixt whom the 
 minister perceiveth malice and hatred to 
 reign, not suffering them to be partakers 
 of the Lord's Table until he know them to 
 be reconciled. This is a following of our 
 Lord's direction in the Sermon on the 
 Mount (Matthew 5:23, 24). This, how- 
 ever, is not applied to either one who is 
 willing to make amends of that wherein 
 he himself hath offended. 
 
 3. The seventh commandment, in the 
 letter, forbids adultery, i. e., that a man 
 should take another's wife, or that a 
 woman should have another's husband. 
 It does not forbid divorce, but it is inter- 
 preted in the Sermon on the Mount as 
 forbidding re-marriage (so long as a di- 
 
 109 
 
OBEDIENCE 
 
 vorced husband or wife is living) except in 
 the case of the innocent party in a divorce 
 for the cause of adultery (Matthew 5:32). 
 The canons of the Church forbid re- 
 marriage after divorce, even under this 
 condition, until a full year has elapsed. 
 Even then, the minister must refer the 
 case to the bishop for his decision. 
 
 In the spirit, the meaning of the com- 
 mandment is contained in two sayings of 
 St. Paul concerning our bodies. "Your 
 bodies," he says, "are the members of 
 Christ"; and again, "your body is the 
 temple of the Holy Ghost " (I Corinthians 
 6:15-20). It is the doctrine of the sacred- 
 ness of the body. Whatever degrades or 
 defiles the body is forbidden. And this, 
 our Lord extends even to the most secret 
 thoughts of our hearts (Matthew 5:28). 
 It includes the impurity of the eye. It 
 includes also all such reading or theatre- 
 going or talking as may soil the soul. A 
 good rule for young people is to test these 
 things by asking themselves regarding 
 them, "Would my father and mother like 
 me to do or say this?" 
 
 4. The eighth commandment, in the 
 letter, forbids stealing, i. e., the taking of 
 no 
 
OBEDIENCE 
 
 that which does not belong to us. The 
 catechism includes " picking," i. e., the 
 little dishonesties which seem insignificant 
 in themselves, but which lead to greater 
 offences. We are to keep absolutely clear 
 the distinction between that which is our 
 own, and that which is our neighbor's. 
 
 In the spirit, the commandment includes 
 all actions whereby we profit by our neigh- 
 bor's loss. We may not honestly profit 
 either by his ignorance or by his bad luck. 
 Gambling, betting and the chances of the 
 lottery are not only endeavors to get this 
 kind of profit, but they are harmful in that 
 they are attempts to get something for 
 nothing. Taken in single instances, these 
 may seem insignificant, but they are little 
 steps toward habits which are so destruc- 
 tive both of character and of happiness 
 that they are forbidden by law. They 
 have been considered innocent. Colleges 
 and churches have been assisted by lot- 
 teries. But experience has shown that 
 they are slow poisons. The good Christian 
 will take no part in any of them, for his 
 own sake and for the sake of his neighbor. 
 
 5. The ninth commandment, in the 
 letter, forbids false witness in a court of 
 
 in 
 
OBEDIENCE 
 
 law. In the spirit, it is against all lies 
 everywhere. A He is that whereby we 
 deceive our neighbor to his hurt. The 
 catechism includes evil speaking and slan- 
 dering. We are to keep our tongue from 
 all unkind words, even when that which 
 we are tempted to say is true. The un- 
 happiness of the world, of which there is 
 enough already, is needlessly increased 
 by such unbrotherly speech. The good 
 Christian tries to see good rather than ill 
 in others, and brings his religion into his 
 conversation by defending the absent, and 
 softening the hard judgments of his neigh- 
 bors. Thus he fulfils what St. James calls 
 the Royal Law: "Thou shalt love thy 
 neighbor as thyself " (James 2:8). In gen- 
 eral, a good rule is to speak as if our 
 neighbor were in the next room hearing 
 every word we say. 
 
 6. The tenth commandment, in the 
 letter, forbids that love of money which is 
 the root of all evil (I Timothy 6:10). For 
 the sake of gain, hideous offences are 
 every day committed. The sins of im- 
 purity and intemperance are deliberately 
 encouraged, rents are taken from in- 
 sanitary tenements, business is so con- 
 112 
 
OBEDIENCE 
 
 ducted as to neglect the welfare of men, 
 women and children, or to hinder it. The 
 cruelty of covetousness is almost beyond 
 belief. It is to be shunned, even in its 
 small beginnings, like a pestilence. 
 
 In the spirit, the commandment re- 
 minds us that all sins begin in the desire of 
 the heart. Every sin, long before it comes 
 to accomplishment, has its root in a 
 wrong thought. There it is to be en- 
 countered and overcome. We are to 
 guard our minds. "As a man thinketh in 
 himself, so is he" (Proverbs 23:7). "Keep 
 thy heart with all diligence, for out of it 
 are the issues of life" (Proverbs, 4:23). 
 
 "3 
 
THE CREED 
 
THE CREED 
 
 I. Faith and the Faith 
 
 Creeds: Articles 
 II. The Two Sides of Truth 
 
 1. Distinction in sight 
 
 2. Distinction in science 
 
 3. Distinction in heresy 
 
 III. The Three Great Doctrines 
 
 1. The Trinity 
 
 (1) Complexity in unity 
 
 (2) God in action 
 
 2. The Incarnation 
 
 (1) Human and divine desires 
 
 (2) Recognition of divinity 
 
 (3) God shining through 
 
 3. The Atonement 
 
 (1) To pay the devil: immoral 
 
 (2) To propitiate God: artificial 
 
 (3) To reconcile us to God 
 IV. Other Articles of the Creed 
 
 1. The virgin birth: natural and super- 
 
 natural 
 
 2. The descent into hell 
 
 3. Christ's resurrection: physical and 
 
 spiritual 
 
 4. The resurrection of the body 
 
VII 
 
 THE CREED 
 I 
 
 There is a difference between faith and 
 the faith. Faith is a matter of emotion, 
 the faith is a matter of understanding. 
 Faith is like appreciation of the splendor 
 of the stars, the faith is like the intricate 
 mathematics of astronomy. Faith is like 
 a child's trust and affection, the faith is 
 like a child's knowledge of the things which 
 interest his parents: the child's love is 
 perfect, the child's acquaintance with his 
 father's business is inevitably defective 
 and mistaken. 
 
 This is the distinction between religion 
 and theology: the Christian religion is the 
 loyal following of Jesus Christ, the Chris- 
 tian theology is an examination, and anal- 
 ysis, and statement of what is implied 
 in that allegiance. 
 
 Accordingly, faith is level with the 
 humblest mind, and is consistent with very 
 erroneous ideas. We may be absurdly 
 118 
 
THE CREED 
 
 mistaken concerning the faith, and yet 
 have saving faith. When Jesus said to the 
 woman of Canaan, "Great is thy faith," 
 He praised a pagan. She was of that reli- 
 gion whose gods are in the Iliad and the 
 Odyssey. She could not have recited even 
 the first article of the Apostles' Creed. 
 Her theology was all wrong, but great was 
 her faith. 
 
 The faith is stated in the Prayer Book, 
 in the first place for acceptance, in the 
 Creeds. The Apostles' Creed, written 
 originally in Latin, in the second century, 
 was directed against the doctrines of the 
 heretic Marcion, who taught that Jesus 
 was not truly man. Marcion said that He 
 only seemed to be man. Thus the Creed 
 speaks of His birth, suffering, death and 
 burial. The Nicene Creed, written orig- 
 inally in Greek, in the fourth century, was 
 directed against the doctrines of the heretic 
 Arms, who taught that Jesus was not truly 
 God. Arius said that He was an inferior 
 God, created by God the Father. Thus 
 the Creed declares that He is "God of 
 (= from) God, Light of Light, very God of 
 very God, begotten not made, being of one 
 substance with the Father." 
 
 119 
 
THE CREED 
 
 The faith is stated, in the second place, 
 for our instruction or information, in the 
 Articles. These were written in England 
 in the sixteenth century, at a time when 
 churches were making long theological 
 statements, and they are bound up with 
 the Prayer Book that we may know what 
 our Church said about the questions which 
 were then under discussion. Thus we re- 
 plied at that time to Roman Catholics and 
 to Calvinists. Nobody is now asked 
 whether he assents to these statements, 
 or not. If the old questions were again 
 debated, the theologians might still reply as 
 they did in the sixteenth century, or they 
 might have other and better answers based 
 on several hundred years of further study. 
 
 II 
 
 All profound truth has two sides: a 
 nearer side which we can touch and see, 
 and can in some measure understand, 
 which we can phrase with fair accuracy in 
 convenient formulas; and a farther side, 
 where we enter into the region of questions 
 without answers, the region of contradic- 
 tion and perplexity, and of everlasting 
 mystery. 
 1 20 
 
THE CREED 
 
 i. The boundary between the nearer 
 and the farther sides of truth is drawn along 
 the limits of our mental sight. For the 
 eyes of the mind are like the eyes of the 
 body, having a limited focus within which 
 our vision is clear, beyond which our vision 
 is obscure. We hold a printed page within 
 reading distance, and the page is plain; 
 we can read every word of it. But we 
 remove it beyond reading distance, and 
 the page is obscure, the letters are blurred, 
 and the lines run into each other. There is 
 no blur on the page; the blur is all in our 
 eye. 
 
 The mind works in the same way. When 
 our thinking is perplexed, and truths each 
 of which must be true contradict each 
 other, we have gone beyond the limits of 
 our mental sight. Thus the idea of the 
 personality of God and the idea of the 
 infinity of God are mutually exclusive. 
 Personality implies limitation, infinity has 
 no limitation. At the same time, we must 
 think of God as personal, because person- 
 ality is the highest form of being of which 
 we have any conception; and we cannot 
 think of God as less than infinite. The 
 difficulty is in our minds. So with many 
 
 121 
 
THE CREED 
 
 other insolvable equations in theology: 
 they are all solvable, if we could see far 
 enough to solve them. We find them dis- 
 couragingly difficult because they are 
 concerned with the farther side of truth. 
 
 2. This distinction between the nearer 
 and the farther side is not peculiar to 
 religion. It is quite as evident in science. 
 
 Here is a man of science working at the 
 problems of geology. He has his rocks 
 about him. He examines them, analyzes 
 them, names them, dates them — within 
 a million years. But he has only to take the 
 commonest pebble from the side of the 
 road, and ask it a few questions, to find 
 himself wandering in the uncharted coun- 
 try which lies on the farther side of truth. 
 He will be confronted with the impene- 
 trable mystery of matter. Nobody knows 
 what it is made of, or where it came from. 
 
 Here is a man of science working at the 
 problems of botany. He is classifying his 
 plants, observing their behavior, noting 
 their descriptive names. What he knows 
 may be written in large books. But he has 
 only to take the nearest blade of common 
 grass and question it, to find himself in the 
 perpetual fogs which lie forever on the 
 122 
 
THE CREED 
 
 farther side of truth. He will come to the 
 inscrutable mystery of life. There it is, 
 in every plant that grows, but it evades all 
 examination. Nobody knows anything 
 about it. 
 
 Thus science as well as religion has 
 its farther side. Neither has any monop- 
 oly of mystery. Whoever imagines that 
 science is occupied with definite realities, 
 while religion is concerned with the in- 
 visible, the intangible and the unprovable, 
 forgets that behind the definite realities 
 are forces whose nature is unknown. 
 Practical science deals with the nearer side 
 of the mysterious forces. It uses electricity 
 to turn our wheels and light our houses, 
 but it does not know what electricity is. 
 
 3. The difference between the nearer 
 and the farther sides of truth is sometimes 
 the difference between orthodoxy and 
 heresy. The heretic is commonly intent 
 on learning and teaching truth. He is 
 trying to understand the divine side of the 
 world, and to make it understood by plain 
 people. He would bring truth out of the 
 clouds into the daily service of man, as the 
 philosopher brought down the lightning. 
 In this endeavor he comes upon the nearer 
 
 123 
 
THE CREED 
 
 side of truth. He finds it clear, and reason- 
 able, and easy to understand. He accepts 
 it and proclaims it. He is satisfied with 
 it. It is a good enough theology for him. 
 But he overlooks the fact that his truth is 
 only a fragment of a great immeasurable 
 truth. He does not take into account that 
 beyond this nearer side which is so plain 
 is a farther side beyond his comprehension. 
 "Now," he cries, ;; I know it all!" and, 
 believing himself to know it all, he be- 
 comes a heretic. 
 
 For heresy is not necessarily an error; 
 it is what is happily called a ''short- 
 coming." It is the mistaking of a part for 
 the whole. It is a neglect or denial of 
 the farther side. The heretic stands by the 
 shore of the ocean, and cries, "I see hills 
 and the steeples of cities on the other 
 shore." But if he does see hills and cities 
 he is looking not across the ocean, but 
 across some narrow sound or inlet. 
 
 in 
 
 The Creeds contain the three chief char- 
 acteristic doctrines of the Christian reli- 
 gion: the Trinity, the Incarnation and the 
 Atonement. In our study of these doc- 
 
 124 
 
THE CREED 
 
 trines we should begin with the nearer 
 side. What we need is to get out of the 
 profound teaching of religion such definite 
 instruction as shall help us to live better. 
 We are to use the mysteries of theology as 
 we use the mysteries of nature, realizing 
 our ignorance but making the most of 
 such knowledge as we have. If, beginning 
 thus, we can go on some little way into 
 the farther side, very well: but the initial 
 thing is to begin. 
 
 i. The doctrine of the Trinity is that 
 the Father is God, the Son is God, and the 
 Holy Ghost is God; and yet they are not three 
 gods but one God. 
 
 Thus is asserted the unity of God, which 
 is essential to our rational understanding 
 of the universe. There is also asserted the 
 complexity of God. Simplicity is char- 
 acteristic of the lower orders of life, com- 
 plexity of the higher. Thus man, made in 
 the image of God, and in that sense a 
 revelation of God, is complexity in unity. 
 We distinguish in him various aspects, 
 actions, functions. For example, with his 
 hands he builds a house, with his mind he 
 composes a book, with his soul he loves 
 God and his neighbor: one man exerts 
 
 125 
 
THE CREED 
 
 himself, manifests himself, fulfills himself, 
 in these various ways. Beginning with 
 this premise, reason proceeds from the 
 known to the unknown, from man whom 
 we see to God whom we see not. God is 
 one, but He has various functions and 
 relates Himself to us in different ways. 
 According as we consider one or another 
 of these different divine activities, we call 
 God by different names. 
 
 When we think of God as the maker 
 and maintainer of the universe, of the race 
 of man, and of our own life in the midst of 
 all, we call Him Father. 
 
 When we think of Him as making His 
 love and His will known to us in this lan- 
 guage of a human life, in Jesus Christ, we 
 call Him son. 
 
 When we think of Him as living in all 
 life, thinking in all thought, century by 
 century urging mankind on, and hour by 
 hour speaking in our own conscience, we 
 call Him Spirit. 
 
 Throughout, we have in mind one only 
 God, thought of, and spoken of, in these 
 three ways. And this kind of theology 
 is expressed in the catechism, where we 
 say that in the Creed we chiefly learn to 
 126 
 
THE CREED 
 
 believe in God who made us, and is thus 
 called the Father, in God who redeemed 
 us and is called the Son, and in God who 
 sanctifies us and is called the Holy Ghost. 
 From the point of view of technical 
 theology this is so inadequate a statement 
 that it is easily consistent with an ancient 
 heresy called Sabellianism. But as re- 
 gards the needs of youth, for people who 
 are not scholars, as a statement to begin 
 with, it is sufficient. It is the doctrine of 
 the Trinity on the nearer side. God is 
 defined not in terms of being, but in terms 
 of doing. 
 
 Then we may go on, following the phi- 
 losophers and theologians as far as we can, 
 and declare that these manifestations 
 correspond to eternal distinctions in the 
 divine nature. But here we begin to 
 enter into the impenetrable mystery of 
 the farther side. 
 
 2. The doctrine of the Incarnation is 
 that Jesus Christ is at the same time God 
 and man. 
 
 He satisfies the human desire for an 
 embodiment of God. The Bible says that 
 God made man in His image, and the his- 
 tory of religion shows man in all ages 
 
 127 
 
THE CREED 
 
 trying to understand God by understand- 
 ing himself. "God is the superlative of 
 man the positive." Thus in the old time 
 men made gods of heroes, finding in ideal 
 men a revelation of the divine nature. 
 This human instinct finds fulfilment in 
 Jesus Christ, the supreme man, the mani- 
 festation of God. 
 
 He satisfies also the divine desire for 
 communication with man. Inferring the 
 mind of God from the mind of man, we 
 perceive that God must wish to make Him- 
 self known to us His children. For this 
 purpose He will speak to us in a universal 
 language. And this He will find not in 
 any book, not in the words of any tribal 
 dialect of the race, but in a human life. 
 Therein every man hears God speaking in 
 his own tongue. Truth is expressed in life, 
 independent of all grammars and dic- 
 tionaries. We understand it without 
 translation, as we understand laughing and 
 crying, in all lands. The omnipotence, the 
 omnipresence, the omniscience of God will 
 not be thus revealed, but He will declare 
 His relation to us, His care for us, His 
 will for our life. This He did when He 
 sent His Son. 
 128 
 
THE CREED 
 
 The humanity of Christ is a matter of 
 observation: it is evident in every page of 
 the gospels. The divinity of Christ is a 
 matter of recognition: like the perception 
 of excellence and truth and beauty in art, 
 in music, in letters and in life. It is apart 
 from argument, and cannot be proved by 
 citation of texts. It is like the splendor 
 of great music, which we either recognize 
 or fail to recognize; it thrills us, uplifts us, 
 gives us inexpressible joy, — or not. If 
 we delight in it, we cannot by any process 
 of reasoning communicate our delight to 
 our neighbor. His appreciation must grow 
 in his own soul. Something in him must 
 go out to the music, or the picture, or the 
 book, or the hero. The appreciation may 
 be cultivated: there are ways of living 
 which make it easy, as there are ways of 
 living which make it difficult. Thus the 
 divinity of Christ is recognized. Faith, 
 in this sense, is as independent of theology 
 as love is independent of psychology. 
 
 The idea of the Incarnation was some- 
 what hindered by an exclusive emphasis 
 on the doctrine of the divine transcend- 
 ence, according to which God dwells 
 apart and remote, and must "come down" 
 
 129 
 
THE CREED 
 
 to unite Himself with man. It is helped 
 by the doctrine of the divine imma- 
 nence, according to which it is God in 
 whom we live, and move, and have our 
 being; for God, thus conceived of, "shines 
 through." It is like the shining of the sun 
 through clouded glass. Here the pane is 
 thickly frosted, and the light is dim: thus 
 God manifests Himself in nature. Here the 
 pane is thinly frosted, and the light is 
 clearer: thus God manifests Himself in 
 humanity, especially in the heroes and the 
 saints. But here is a single place where 
 there is no clouding at all; we look through 
 and see the sun. Even so, we do not really 
 see the sun; even with the best telescope 
 we do not adequately see the sun; but we 
 get the best sight of which our eyes are 
 capable. Thus we look through Jesus 
 Christ and see God. In His life, His char- 
 acter, His person, we make our utmost 
 possible approach to God. 
 
 The formula of this nearer side of the 
 Incarnation is in St. Paul's words, "God 
 was in Christ" (II Corinthians 5:19). 
 God, who is in nature, and in man, and in 
 us, was in Christ: in Him uniquely and 
 supremely. 
 
 130 
 
THE CREED 
 
 The formula of the farther side is in 
 St John's phrase, "the Word was God" 
 (John 1:1). The divine and the human 
 meet in Him as the spiritual and the 
 material meet in us, in a union which 
 eludes all analysis. 
 
 3. The doctrine of the Atonement is that 
 Jesus Christ died for our sins. 
 
 The explanation of the death of Christ 
 has varied much. At first, for a thousand 
 years, it was thought that He died to pay 
 to the devil a ransom for our souls. By 
 reason of sin the devil was in possession of 
 our souls. He agreed to give us up, if in 
 our place he might have the Son of God. 
 Thus Christ died. But having died, the 
 devil lost the advantage of the bargain by 
 His resurrection; he released us, but he 
 could not retain Him. 
 
 This doctrine of divine deceit contented 
 a world which was mainly occupied with 
 other matters. Then St. Anselm, seeing 
 that our moral sense was affronted by the 
 idea that God would cheat even the devil, 
 proposed the theory that the death of 
 Christ was a recompense offered to God for 
 the insult of our sins. Sin being against 
 an infinite Being must be punished either 
 
 131 
 
THE CREED 
 
 by the infinite (= eternal) suffering of us 
 men, or by the finite ( = temporary) suffer- 
 ing of an infinite Savior. This infinite 
 Savior was Jesus Christ. 
 
 Each of these doctrines was in its time a 
 part of orthodox belief. Even to question 
 it was accounted disloyalty to the truth. 
 Gradually, however, it became plain that 
 both of the doctrines made such a dis- 
 tinction between God the Father and God 
 the Son as to suggest to the unreflecting 
 mind the idea of two Gods: it was prac- 
 tically a kind of polytheism. It was per- 
 ceived, also, that the theories agreed in 
 considering salvation not so much in re- 
 lation to sin as in relation to hell. They 
 both missed the Bible emphasis, which 
 is laid not on escape from punishment 
 but on freedom from the sins which if 
 persisted in will lead to punishment. A 
 third defect in the doctrines was found in 
 the small account which they took of the 
 will. Sin was regarded as a burden, from 
 which we might be freed if some friend 
 would cut the cords which bind it to our 
 back. But in reality sin is a disease: it is 
 something the matter with us. We can- 
 not be rid of it by any consultation of 
 132 
 
THE CREED 
 
 doctors, but by the co-operation of our 
 desire. Somehow, we must be appealed to, 
 awakened, and stirred to co-operative 
 action. 
 
 Moreover, the first explanation was seen 
 to be immoral, God being represented as 
 defrauding Satan. And the second ex- 
 planation was seen to be artificial, an in- 
 vention of theologians, a theory made of 
 school logic, without regard to the nature 
 of either God or man. 
 
 Thus we still seek a satisfying statement 
 of the doctrine of the Atonement, under- 
 standing that it must take account both 
 of the will of man and of the love of God. 
 Meanwhile, the nearer side is in the words 
 with which St. Paul continued his state- 
 ment of the Incarnation. "God was in 
 Christ, reconciling the world unto him- 
 self." The death of Christ is here rep- 
 resented as concerned not so much with 
 Satan or with God as with us. God is al- 
 ways waiting to be gracious. He is in no 
 more need of reconciliation on His side 
 than was the father of the Prodigal Son. 
 It is we who have lost our relation with 
 Him, and must be brought back. We must 
 be reconciled. 
 
 133 
 
THE CREED 
 
 This reconciliation is effected by the 
 death of Jesus Christ, which is a revelation 
 of the dreadfulness of sin and of the love 
 of God. In the sight of the cross we begin 
 to realize what sin is and how it hurts not 
 only ourselves and our neighbors but God 
 Himself. This He did, the Son of God, to 
 save us from our sins. 
 
 The farther side is presented dimly in the 
 fifty- third chapter of Isaiah and in the 
 description of the agony of Jesus in the 
 Garden of Gethsemane. "By His stripes 
 we are healed;" "the Lord hath laid on 
 Him the iniquity of us all." It appears 
 again in the words, "This is my blood 
 which is shed for you and for many for the 
 remission of sins." The "moral" theory 
 of the Atonement is not sufficient for these 
 great and mysterious sayings. But as far 
 as it goes it is clear and understandable. 
 In this respect at least it is true that 
 Christ died for us: that by His death we 
 might be reconciled to God. 
 
 rv 
 
 Other teachings of the Creed require less 
 explanation. 
 
 i. The statement that Jesus was barn 
 
 134 
 
THE CREED 
 
 of the Virgin Mary appears in the Apostles' 
 Creed but did not originally appear in the 
 Nicene Creed; that is, its natural place is 
 in the Creed which is concerned with His 
 humanity rather than in the Creed which 
 is concerned with His divinity. The 
 Nicene fathers made no use of it in their 
 great argument. In this, the Creeds follow 
 the gospels. The fact of the Virgin Birth 
 is in the gospels of St. Matthew and St. 
 Luke, the gospels of the humanity of 
 Christ, but not in St. John, the gospel of 
 His divinity. The intention of the state- 
 ment is to assert the true manhood of our 
 Lord, against those who were declaring 
 that He was human only in appearance. 
 The phrase, "the Virgin Mary," is not a 
 proposition but a title. The question of the 
 virgin birth was not under discussion. 
 
 It is at present under discussion. As a 
 matter of fact, it is incapable either of 
 proof or of disproof : it can never be settled 
 to the satisfaction of historians. As a 
 matter of scripture, the natural birth seems 
 to some commentators to be asserted in 
 the genealogies which conduct us to Joseph; 
 the supernatural birth is plainly asserted 
 in the narratives which accompany them. 
 
 135 
 
THE CREED 
 
 As a matter of religion, it is one of the 
 least profitable of all themes. It is not 
 useful in theology: no doctrine depends 
 upon it; the fact of the Incarnation is 
 independent of the method of the Incar- 
 nation. And it is not useful in life. It 
 cannot well be preached about. Historic- 
 ally the stressing of it has led to an un- 
 wholesome depreciation of the sacrament 
 of marriage, and to a practice of Mariolatry 
 which the gospels make absurd. 
 
 Between two interpretations, natural 
 and supernatural, the church affirms 
 the second. It expresses that estima- 
 tion of the person of Christ which or- 
 dinary birth seems inadequate to ex- 
 press. It fitly begins the story of the life 
 of Christ with glory as the Ascension ends 
 it with glory. 
 
 2. The statement that Jesus descended 
 into hell is explained in the Prayer Book in 
 the margin of the Creed. It is a part of 
 the declaration that He truly died: His 
 body was buried, and His soul descended 
 into the place of departed spirits. The 
 word is Jiades, the other world of life, as 
 distinguished from gehenna, the other 
 world of death. 
 136 
 
THE CREED 
 
 3. The statement that He rose again 
 from the dead is made difficult by the two 
 accounts which are given in the gospels. 
 In part, the records show a physical con- 
 dition: He eats, is touched, and exhibits 
 the marks of crucifixion. In part, the 
 records show a spiritual condition: He is 
 unrecognized till He chooses to be known, 
 He vanishes away. St. Paul seems to per- 
 ceive no difference between the Lord as 
 the apostles saw Him on the earth and the 
 Lord as he saw Him in the sky. All the 
 accounts agree that He was seen alive after 
 His death; and that is the one essential 
 fact. Very likely, the reality was incap- 
 able of translation into terms of our ex- 
 perience. The details do not greatly 
 matter. They are sought by curiosity 
 rather than by faith. The heart of it all 
 is the truth that He conquered death and 
 brought fife and immortality to light. 
 
 4. As for the resurrection of the body, it 
 is interpreted in the fifteenth chapter of 
 St. Paul's First Epistle to the Corinthians: 
 "Thou sowest not that body which shall 
 be, but God giveth it a body as it hath 
 pleased him." The difference between 
 the natural and the spiritual body is that 
 
 137 
 
THE CREED 
 
 one is adapted to the conditions of this 
 natural world, while the other will be 
 adapted to the conditions of the other, 
 spiritual world. What those conditions 
 will be, nobody knows, nor can know. 
 The idea of the article in the Creed is to 
 assert the continuance of personal identity. 
 Of that, the body is a symbol. On we go 
 after death, not as in the Buddhist belief, 
 to be absorbed in the soul of the universe, 
 "as the drop falls into the crystal sea," 
 but with our own individuality preserved, 
 to be recognized, and to reap whatever we 
 have sown. 
 
 138 
 
THE CHURCH 
 
THE CHURCH 
 
 I. The Description of the Church 
 
 1. "Holy" 
 
 2. "Catholic" 
 
 (1) A missionary church 
 
 (2) An inclusive church 
 
 3. "One": unity of the spirit 
 
 4. "Apostolic": unity of organization 
 II. The History of the Church 
 
 1. The period of construction 
 
 (1) Primitive officers 
 
 (2) Two theories: direction, in- 
 
 spiration 
 
 2. The period of addition 
 
 (1) Church extension 
 
 (2) Two invasions: barbarians 
 
 (West) Moslems (East) 
 
 3. The period of subtraction 
 
 (1) In Germany: pope and bishops 
 
 (2) In England: pope only 
 
 III. The Position of the Episcopal Church 
 
 1. Between Catholics and Protestants 
 
 2. The apostolic succession 
 
 3. The argument of efficiency 
 
 (1) for direction 
 
 (2) for inclusion 
 
 141 
 
VIII 
 
 THE CHURCH 
 I 
 
 The Church is described in the creeds by- 
 four adjectives. It is called one, holy, 
 Catholic and apostolic. 
 
 1 . Two of these refer to the purpose and 
 work of the Church. The Church is holy, 
 i. e., the purpose for which it exists is to 
 make people better. This is the intention 
 of the services and the sacraments. By 
 this the value of every detail is to be 
 measured. The test of the Church is the 
 conduct of the people. 
 
 2. And the Church is Catholic (= univer- 
 sal). It is meant to spread to all lands, and 
 to include all kinds of good people. 
 
 It is thus a missionary church. We are 
 not content to keep the privileges and 
 blessings of religion to ourselves. We 
 have a truth about God which is essential 
 to happiness, the doctrine of the father- 
 hood of God. It is essential to happiness 
 
 142 
 
THE CHURCH 
 
 not only or chiefly in a future state, but 
 now and here, for it changes for those who 
 accept it the whole complexion of the 
 world. It puts divine love in the place of 
 divine wrath, and faith in the place of 
 fear. We can no more keep it to ourselves 
 than a good physician can keep for his 
 own patients a medicine which all people 
 need. This gospel of Christ we would 
 contribute to all lands and religions, not 
 by way of destruction so much as by way 
 of addition. 
 
 It is also an inclusive church, having 
 hospitable room for all religious tempera- 
 ments. It includes those whose religion 
 is objective, who look up towards God, 
 whose characteristic word is adoration; 
 they care greatly for the service, especially 
 in its sacramental forms, and attach such 
 a high value to the institution — i. e., to 
 the orderly arrangements of the Christian 
 society — that they are called "high" 
 churchmen. 
 
 It includes those whose religion is sub- 
 jective, who look in towards their own 
 souls, whose characteristic word is salva- 
 tion; they care greatly for the sermon, they 
 desire to approach God immediately and 
 
 143 
 
THE CHURCH 
 
 individually, and attach so much less value 
 to the institution that they are called 
 "low" churchmen. 
 
 It includes those, high or low, whose 
 characteristic word is ministration, who 
 are intent upon bringing the truth of reli- 
 gion into accord with all truth, and the 
 life of religion into contact with all life. 
 They look up towards God, or in towards 
 their own souls, but chiefly out towards 
 their neighbors. They are called "broad" 
 churchmen. 
 
 It sometimes happens that these dif- 
 ferent temperaments have difficulty in 
 understanding one another. To the high 
 churchman or the low churchman or the 
 broad churchman, it may seem that his 
 kind of religion is the only valid kind; he 
 may even desire in his zeal to put his 
 neighbor out. He may wish that the high 
 churchmen would become Roman Cath- 
 olics; or the low churchmen, Methodists; 
 or the broad churchmen, Unitarians. But 
 any such expulsion would rob the Church 
 not only of its catholicity, but of a part of 
 its appeal. The peculiar strength of the 
 Episcopal Church is in its frank recogni- 
 tion of the fact of difference, and in the 
 144 
 
THE CHURCH 
 
 resulting inclusiveness which brings to- 
 gether in the Church people who differ 
 more among themselves than they differ 
 with their neighbors. It is according to 
 the genius of the church that churchmen 
 may be high or low or broad as they will. 
 It is against the genius of the Church that 
 any of them should be sectarian or narrow. 
 
 Two of the distinctive adjectives refer 
 to the nature and history of the church. 
 
 3. The church is one, in the unity of the 
 spirit. It includes all baptized persons, 
 for all such have been made members of 
 it. Nobody is made by baptism a Pres- 
 byterian or a Lutheran or a Roman Cath- 
 olic or an Episcopalian. By baptism we 
 are admitted to membership in the univer- 
 sal church. The "blessed company of 
 all faithful people " includes all the de- 
 nominational differences. We have one 
 Father, one Saviour, one ideal of life, one 
 hope of heaven. 
 
 4. But the church is also apostolic, i. e., 
 there is not only a unity of the spirit but a 
 unity of the body. The church is not only 
 an influence but an institution. Its sym- 
 bols are the leaven and the seed, but also 
 the field with tares among the wheat, and 
 
 145 
 
THE CHURCH 
 
 the net with fishes good and bad. The net 
 and the field indicate a bond of union 
 which is more tangible than character 
 or faith. They point to a visible church, 
 to an organized Christian society. 
 
 As a matter of fact, the Church is such a 
 society, held together not only by spiritual 
 agreement but by a settled administration 
 and having a significant history. 
 
 II 
 
 The history of the Church began with a 
 period of construction. 
 
 i. Our Lord appointed various persons 
 to serve as officers or ministers. Some 
 were for a temporary work, as the Seventy; 
 some, like the Twelve, were for a continu- 
 ous service. The men of longer tenure, 
 who were to serve not for a campaign but 
 for a lifetime, appointed their successors, 
 and others. At the same time, there were 
 apostles, like St. Paul, who derived their 
 appointment not from the Twelve but by 
 direct summons from heaven, God speak- 
 ing in their souls. 
 
 Thus appeared, at the very beginning, 
 some such distinction of ministers as 
 exists at present: some ministers whose 
 146 
 
THE CHURCH 
 
 ordination was canonically "regular," 
 others whose ordination was canonically 
 " irregular." They represent, in a way, the 
 Old Testament difference between the 
 priest and the prophet: the priest, accord- 
 ing to the order of Aaron, in the "succes- 
 sion"; and the prophet, according to the 
 order of Melchizedek, out of the prescribed 
 succession. 
 
 These officers appointed others for nec- 
 essary duties. First, the Seven, often 
 called deacons, to do social service. Then 
 the Presidents (using the name which 
 Justin Martyr was using about A. D. 150). 
 Sometimes these presiding officers were 
 called presbyters, /. e., elders. Sometimes 
 they were called bishops; the Greek word 
 is episcopoi, meaning overseers. Beside 
 these, others appear in lists given by 
 St. Paul: prophets, evangelists, pastors, 
 teachers (Ephesians 4:11). 
 
 There was as yet no clear vision of a long 
 future. The common expectation was 
 that the world would speedily come to an 
 end. The Christians met the daily need 
 as best they could, providing for the groups 
 of believers such organization as seemed 
 likely to be effective. As time went on, 
 
 147 
 
THE CHURCH 
 
 and difficulties arose — some in the form 
 of persecution, some in the form of her- 
 esy — it was necessary to hold the faithful 
 together, and for this purpose the position 
 of the local minister was magnified. St. 
 Ignatius was very emphatic about it. 
 "Do nothing," he said, "without the 
 bishop." Even so, the conditions were 
 not such as to suggest a permanent 
 policy. 
 
 There are two tJieories concerning the 
 growth of the Church, as there are two 
 theories concerning the making of the 
 world. As to the world, some think that 
 it was built like a house, according to 
 detailed divine specifications; others think 
 that it grew like a tree, beginning with the 
 divine provision of matter and of life and 
 proceeding according to the action and 
 reaction of the one upon the other. 
 
 One theory about the Church is that 
 our Lord arranged it all, perhaps in those 
 forty days after the resurrection when He 
 spoke with His disciples concerning the 
 kingdom of heaven: He told them what 
 to do, put in form the orders of the min- 
 istry, instructed them in the administra- 
 tion of the sacraments; He Himself in- 
 148 
 
THE CHURCH 
 
 stituted and organized the Church. To 
 this theory, the early chapters of the Acts 
 present serious difficulties. The apostles 
 seem to have no idea that they are to 
 start a church. They found a fraternity, 
 as St. Francis of Assisi did, but it is within 
 the Jewish Church as his was within the 
 Mediaeval Church. They have no idea of 
 departing from that church in which they 
 had been brought up, whose ministry was 
 in succession from Aaron, and whose 
 foundation was in the Bible. They did 
 eventually depart from it but only when 
 they were stoned out, in company with 
 St. Stephen. 
 
 Their behavior suggests the other theory, 
 which is that our Lord gave the apostles 
 not direction but inspiration. He imparted 
 to them His spirit. He gave the Church 
 not form but life. The Church grew. The 
 apostles administered the increasing society 
 by meeting successive emergencies and 
 opportunities, the Lord working with 
 them. Instead of looking back to consult 
 a prescribed order given to them, they 
 believed in a continuing divine presence, 
 and in an unfailing leadership of the Holy 
 Spirit. They did what seemed good, as 
 
 149 
 
THE CHURCH 
 
 they said in a significant phrase, "to the 
 Holy Ghost and us." 
 
 Whichever of these theories may seem 
 the more reasonable to us, it is plain that 
 by the middle of the third century, at the 
 latest, the Christian society had decided 
 that the best form of organization was that 
 which we call episcopal. There is no 
 reasonable doubt but that in St. Cyprian's 
 day (about A. D. 250), whatever presbyte- 
 rian or congregational or papal experi- 
 ments may have been tried, the Church 
 was governed, as the Episcopal Church is 
 still governed, by bishops, priests and 
 deacons. The period of construction had 
 brought the Church to that result. 
 
 2. Then came a period of addition. 
 
 When Constantine, having been con- 
 verted to the Christian religion, became 
 the sole ruler of the Roman Empire, the 
 Church increased greatly. The bishop who 
 had sometimes been the pastor of a little 
 flock, among whom he lived as the min- 
 isters of colonial New England dwelt 
 among their people, now had under him 
 many presbyters and deacons. The parish, 
 which had grown into the diocese, widened 
 out into the archdiocese. To the bishop, 
 
 150 
 
THE CHURCH 
 
 who had been the highest officer of the 
 church, with other bishops his equals but 
 none his superior, was added the arch- 
 bishop, also called patriarch, also called 
 pope. The establishment of Christianity 
 as the religion of the empire magnified the 
 importance of this new method of eccle- 
 siastical administration. 
 
 The method had been suggested by the 
 situation. The archbishop, patriarch, 
 pope, had been appointed as naturally as 
 the deacons were appointed at the begin- 
 ning, to meet a need. The missionary 
 policy of the early church selected the 
 larger cities as centres of activity. Out of 
 them, the Christians went to preach the 
 gospel in the country. They planted lesser 
 churches which were missions of the greater 
 church. The same process resulted in 
 lesser dioceses around the diocese which 
 contained a city of more than ordinary 
 importance. The bishop of the central 
 diocese exercised a natural authority over 
 the bishops of the dependent dioceses. In 
 the new situation, with its new problems 
 demanding solution, he was needed as a 
 leader. Thus it came about that certain 
 bishops — of Alexandria, of Carthage, of 
 
 151 
 
THE CHURCH 
 
 Rome, of Milan, of Antioch, of Constan- 
 tinople, — stood head and shoulders above 
 their brethren. Most of these popes were 
 in the East, where the Church was strong; 
 a smaller number in the West, which had 
 been missionary ground. 
 
 Then came two catastrophes, one in the 
 East, the other in the West. 
 
 Early in the fifth century the barbarians 
 descended in force upon the civilization of 
 the West. They destroyed the Western 
 Empire. In 476 they deposed the last of 
 the emperors. So many of them, however, 
 had been converted to Christianity before 
 this final invasion, that they respected the 
 Church. Their coming strengthened the 
 position of the Archbishop of Rome. He 
 established missions among them, in Gaul, 
 in Germany, in Britain (A. D. 597). He 
 so succeeded in allying himself with them 
 that on Christmas Day, A. D. 800, he 
 crowned Charlemagne. It is a conve- 
 nient date to remember as the time of the 
 appearance of the papacy as we know it. 
 
 In the middle of the seventh century 
 the Mohammedans out of Arabia invaded 
 the East. They destroyed the Eastern 
 Empire. They took into their possession 
 
 152 
 
THE CHURCH 
 
 the lands in which our Lord and the 
 apostles had lived and the cities in which 
 the great councils had been held. Jeru- 
 salem, Antioch, Alexandria fell under their 
 rule, and so continue to this day. The 
 archbishops of these places lost their 
 ancient importance. Christianity con- 
 tinued, but under such disadvantages that 
 the Russian Church to-day, while properly 
 under the patriarch of Constantinople, is 
 actually governed by the Holy Synod, be- 
 cause the patriarch is under the power of 
 the Sultan. 
 
 Thus in all the Christian world there was 
 only one strong pope, the pope of Rome. 
 His position had been emphasized by the 
 removal of the throne of the empire from 
 Rome to Constantinople. His influence 
 and rule were so extended by the politi- 
 cal situation that he became the head 
 of Western Christianity. Theologians 
 found texts for him in the New Testa- 
 ment: they said that he was the successor 
 of St. Peter to whom Christ had said "On 
 this rock will I found my church." But 
 his power came first, and the application of 
 the texts afterwards. By historical proc- 
 esses, in the natural course of events, he 
 
 iS3 
 
THE CHURCH 
 
 took a place which made him archbishop of 
 archbishops. Thus the period of addition, 
 which had already set certain bishops over 
 their brother bishops, set the pope of Rome 
 over all the bishops of the West. He was 
 a new officer, of whom the early Church had 
 known nothing. 
 
 3. There followed a period of subtraction. 
 
 The power of the pope was at first be- 
 neficent. He centralized the life of the 
 Church, and made it strong to endure the 
 storms of the Middle Ages. Over against 
 the material reign of emperors and kings 
 he upheld the kingdom of God. He stood 
 for righteousness. 
 
 Then he encountered the temptations 
 which accompany power and wealth and 
 dominion, and fell into the sins of ambition 
 and avarice. He made the Church a king- 
 dom of this world, existing not for the gen- 
 eral welfare but for its own gain. He be- 
 came a tyrant. He stood in the way of 
 national, and intellectual, and spiritual 
 progress. 
 
 Accordingly, there began in Germany a 
 process of subtraction. Luther, for the 
 good of religion, subtracted from Christian- 
 ity both the pope and the bishops. For on 
 
 154 
 
THE CHURCH 
 
 the continent of Europe the bishops sup- 
 ported the pope against the reformation of 
 the Church. This radical subtraction, thus 
 including officers who had been a part of 
 the ecclesiastical administration from the 
 beginning, involved the formation of new 
 societies. Luther, Calvin, Knox, and their 
 followers went out of the historic organiza- 
 tion. Compelled by their consciences to 
 make a choice between the Church and the 
 truth, they chose the truth. They followed 
 the example of the apostles who went out 
 of the Jewish Church, saying, Thus it seems 
 good to the Holy Ghost and us. In this 
 manner Protestantism began. 
 
 In England, the situation was somewhat 
 different. The reformation in that coun- 
 try was at the same time embarrassed and 
 facilitated by a quarrel between the pope 
 and the king. It was embarrassed by the 
 nature of the quarrel, which had its rise 
 in the desire of Henry VIII to divorce his 
 wife that he might marry one of the maids 
 of honor of his court. But it was facili- 
 tated by the co-operation of the king with 
 the Church in the expulsion of the pope. 
 Henry was never a Protestant, beyond the 
 limits of his personal quarrel. The true 
 
 155 
 
THE CHURCH 
 
 reformation of the Church in England be- 
 gan under King Edward and was carried 
 forward under Queen Elizabeth. Henry, 
 however, did effect the subtraction of the 
 pope. He made it easy for the Church to 
 proceed to do regularly and under the rule 
 of the bishops what Luther had been 
 obliged to do irregularly against the opposi- 
 tion of the bishops. In England, accord- 
 ingly, the subtraction stopped with the 
 pope. The bishops continued. The result 
 was that while the German reformers, ex- 
 pelling the bishops, went out of the historic 
 organization, the English reformers, retain- 
 ing the bishops, stayed in. 
 
 The Church had had a long life in Eng- 
 land before the pope was ever heard of. 
 Christianity was probably planted in that 
 island by soldiers of the Roman legions. A 
 council summoned by Constantine to meet 
 at Aries, at the mouth of the river Rhone, 
 in 314, was attended by three British 
 bishops who signed their names to the de- 
 cisions. Their dioceses were London, York 
 and (probably) Lincoln. It was in the 
 course of that century that the Roman 
 troops were withdrawn from Britain and 
 the barbarians came in, — the English 
 
 156 
 
THE CHURCH 
 
 (Angles), the Saxons and other pagan tribes. 
 The civilization and Christianity of Britain 
 were driven into the mountains of Wales. 
 Thus the Church in the island was separated 
 from the Church on the mainland. In 563, 
 St. Columba began the conversion of the 
 pagans in the north; in 597, St. Augustine 
 (called "of Canterbury") began their con- 
 version in the south. Columba represented 
 the British Church; Augustine was sent on 
 his mission by the pope. In 664, at the 
 Council of Whitby, representatives of the 
 two missions, British and Roman, agreed 
 to follow the church customs of the conti- 
 nent rather than the local customs of the 
 island. The points under debate con- 
 cerned the date of Easter, and other mat- 
 ters of slight importance, but the decision 
 brought the Church in England under the 
 rule of Rome. Thus it continued, the 
 papacy gradually changing from an in- 
 fluence to an institution, until the definite 
 break with Rome by the act of Henry in 
 i53i- 
 
 When, therefore, the organized Chris- 
 tianity of England subtracted the pope, the 
 church returned to its primitive condition. It 
 had lived six hundred years without the 
 
 157 
 
THE CHURCH 
 
 pope; it had then lived nine hundred years 
 with the pope; it has since lived nearly five 
 hundred years without him, as before. 
 Here, for illustration, is a church wall ; after 
 a good while, ivy is planted beside it, and 
 grows so thickly over it that not a stone is 
 visible; but this is found to be bad for the 
 wall, and the ivy is cut off. Thus over the 
 Church of England grew the ivy of the 
 papal domination. In the sixteenth cen- 
 tury it was removed. People used to say, 
 when such things were matters of contro- 
 versy, Where was your church before 
 Henry VIII? It was like asking, Where 
 was the wall before the gardener cut the 
 ivy? It was just where it has always been. 
 
 Ill 
 
 i. Thus stands the Episcopal Church, 
 daughter of the Church of England, be- 
 tween the Roman Catholics and the Prot- 
 estants. The Roman Catholic Church con- 
 tinues (like the Russian and other eastern 
 churches) in the ancient Christian society, 
 to whose order it has added the pope and 
 various objectionable doctrines. The Prot- 
 estant Churches are modern Christian 
 societies, separated from the ancient order 
 
 158 
 
THE CHURCH 
 
 by their subtraction of the bishop. The 
 Episcopal Church is Catholic in organi- 
 zation, continuing in the ancient order; it is 
 Protestant in spirit, believing in the inde- 
 pendence of the individual, as well as in 
 the value of the institution, and exalting 
 the freedom of the truth over submission 
 to authority. 
 
 2. The continuance of the Church in the 
 historic society is called the apostolic suc- 
 cession. It is held by some that outside of 
 this succession a ministry is not a valid 
 ministry, and the sacraments thus admin- 
 istered are not valid sacraments. It is held 
 by others that the difference in ministry 
 and sacraments is properly stated not in 
 terms of validity but in terms of regularity. 
 The evidence of validity is the blessing of 
 God ; and this, it is plain, is altogether inde- 
 pendent of ecclesiastical boundaries. The 
 test of regularity is the canon law; accord- 
 ing to this test a ministry which is not 
 episcopally ordained is irregular. 
 
 3. The convincing argument for any par- 
 ticular form of organization is not its an- 
 tiquity but its efficiency. The modern man 
 is indifferent to the claim that an order of 
 procedure is very old. His determining 
 
 159 
 
THE CHURCH 
 
 question is, How does it work? A family 
 may take pride in its splendid past; a 
 church may find satisfaction in its long 
 descent, its ancestral lines of saints and 
 heroes extending back to the apostles. But 
 the family and the church alike are es- 
 teemed to-day according to their contribu- 
 tion to our present life. 
 
 The value of the episcopal administra- 
 tion is in its working qualities of direction 
 and inclusion. 
 
 The function of the bishop is that of 
 general direction. The ministers are oc- 
 cupied, each with the affairs of his own 
 parish; a chief minister is needed to at- 
 tend to the large common interests, to co- 
 ordinate the parishes and bring to religion 
 the reinforcement of their united action, 
 to make long plans and carry them into 
 effect. He is like a general manager in 
 business. 
 
 The bishop makes possible that character 
 of inclusion which is so marked in the 
 Episcopal Church. It is largely by loyalty 
 to him that the very different people who 
 compose the church live happily together. 
 He unites them as the parents unite the 
 children in the household. The sons and 
 1 60 
 
THE CHURCH 
 
 daughters go their several ways, having 
 their individual tastes, preferences and 
 interests, and sometimes having little in 
 common except their family life. The high 
 churchmen, the low churchmen, the broad 
 churchmen, are held together in their diver- 
 sity by a similar relation of which the 
 bishop is the symbol. Their union con- 
 sists not in assent to all the details of a 
 theological agreement, and not in obedience 
 to a uniform manner of worship, but in 
 their membership in the family of the 
 church. 
 
 In this respect, the Episcopal Church re- 
 veals the possibility of a united Christen- 
 dom; presenting itself as an example of a 
 realization of the ideal of unity in diversity. 
 Placed midway between the two great 
 Christian companies, Roman Catholic and 
 Protestant, akin to each and sympathetic 
 with each, it is a meeting ground wherein the 
 reconciliation of differences may be brought 
 about. In the meantime, for the sake of 
 such a service, it avoids identifying itself 
 exclusively with either side. For this rea- 
 son it is indisposed toward such superficial 
 unity as is represented by "exchange of 
 pulpits." Without questioning the validity 
 
 161 
 
THE CHURCH 
 
 of other ministries, it maintains the im- 
 portance of the difference between the an- 
 cient society and the modern societies, and 
 between regular and irregular ordination. 
 
 162 
 
PRAYER 
 
PRAYER 
 
 I. The Problem of Prayer: Intellectual 
 Difficulties 
 
 1. Can God answer prayer? 
 
 (1) The apparent hindrance of law 
 
 (2) The interpretive evidence of will 
 
 2. Will God answer prayer? 
 
 (1) On account of our indolence 
 
 (2) On account of our ignorance 
 
 3. Prayer as a means of grace, and as an 
 
 expression of faith 
 II. The Problem of Prayer: Moral Diffi- 
 culties 
 
 1. Familiarity 
 
 2. Secularity 
 
 3. Infirmity 
 
 III. The Practice of Prayer 
 
 1. In private 
 
 2. In public 
 
 IV. The Lord's Prayer 
 
 1. Invocation 
 
 2. Petition 
 
 3. Ascription 
 
 4. The Lord's Prayer in translation and 
 
 in explanation 
 
IX 
 
 PRAYER 
 
 The need of prayer appears in the 
 example of our Lord. He felt it to be 
 necessary in His own spiritual life — He 
 who lived always in the consciousness of 
 the divine presence. It is plain that it 
 must be far more necessary for us. 
 
 The importance of prayer appears in 
 His teaching. He often spoke of it, as in 
 the Sermon on the Mount. He related 
 it not to piety only but to performance, 
 giving it an essential place not only in 
 sanctification but in service. When the 
 apostles failed in one of their endeavors to 
 do good, He told them that it was for 
 lack of prayer (Matthew 17:21). 
 
 Thus He gave His divine sanction to 
 a universal human instinct. Man is a 
 praying animal. There is that within us 
 by nature which makes us hold up our 
 hands to the sky and ask aid from the 
 invisible world. 
 
 166 
 
PRAYER 
 
 Prayer may be considered as petition or 
 as communion. Under either aspect it 
 has its difficulties. In the way of petition 
 the difficulties are mainly intellectual; in 
 the way of communion, they are mainly 
 spiritual. 
 
 I 
 
 The intellectual difficulties which hinder 
 prayer as petition gather about two ques- 
 tions, Can God answer prayer? and Will 
 God answer prayer? 
 
 i. Can God answer prayer, because we 
 live in a world of law. We are aware, 
 much more than our ancestors were aware, 
 of a constant sequence of cause and effect. 
 Every effect proceeds from a cause, which 
 in its turn is the effect of an antecedent 
 cause, and so on back. Growth, which 
 men of science call evolution, is the order 
 of the universe. 
 
 In the first enthusiasm of the theory of 
 evolution, there were those who said that 
 all effects are so enfolded in their causes 
 that a sufficiently intelligent mind study- 
 ing the original molecules which were the 
 seeds of the world could have foreseen 
 what figure would be touched by the 
 
 167 
 
PRAYER 
 
 mercury of the thermometer at any given 
 hour, of any given day, in any given place, 
 even to this present moment. All was 
 fixed, determined, foreordained, predes- 
 tinated. They said, accordingly, that to 
 pray for that which was not already 
 written, as Mohammedans say, "on the 
 iron leaf," was to pray for a whole new 
 universe. In order to grant a prayer for 
 rain when the succession of cause and 
 effect did not inevitably lead to rain it 
 would be necessary to reconstruct the 
 order of events from the beginning. 
 
 This rigor of logic has been somewhat 
 abated. To-day, the evolutionary theory of 
 Darwin is modified by the evolutionary 
 theory of Bergson. "Creative evolution," 
 in Bergson's phrase, sees the world still in 
 process, with new and unexpected combina- 
 tions working out new and unexpected re- 
 sults. But even without this mitigation it 
 became clear that they who insisted so 
 sternly on the reign of law were overlooking 
 one of the essential forces of the world. 
 In addition to such elements as oxygen and 
 hydrogen, and such forces as attraction 
 and repulsion, and such facts as life and 
 matter, is the human will. In the midst of 
 1 68 
 
PRAYER 
 
 the sequence of cause and effect appears a 
 force invisible and inscrutable, independent 
 of laboratory tests, defiant of prediction 
 and calculation. The everlasting laws 
 forbid rain, but man wills that it shall rain, 
 and it does rain, the water coming from the 
 hose which his will has brought into action. 
 The everlasting laws pronounce upon a 
 patient the sentence of death, but the will 
 brings a physician and his will gives the 
 patient a new lease of life. 
 
 Such a response and action of the human 
 will is an answer to prayer. The only 
 important difference between these prayers 
 and those which are made in religion is 
 that in religion we pray to God, while in 
 these and like cases we pray to the physi- 
 cian or to the gardener. In essence the 
 action is the same, and bears the same rela- 
 tion to the world of law. In prayer we ask 
 God to bring His divine will into the se- 
 quence of cause and effect as, in lesser 
 matters, we bring our human will. We 
 know that God can answer prayer be- 
 cause we can. 
 
 2. But will God answer prayer? Will He 
 do it in consideration of our indolence? 
 Will He do for us that which we might do 
 
 169 
 
PRAYER 
 
 for ourselves? Would not such an easy 
 accomplishment of results be bad for us? 
 We recognize the wisdom of the philos- 
 opher who said, "Every man is as lazy as 
 he dares to be." We perceive in our ob- 
 servation and experience how considerable 
 is this audacity. We know very well that 
 if students could pass examinations by 
 prayer, some of them would not study; if 
 business men could make a fortune, or 
 even a decent living, by prayer, some of 
 them would not work. We know also that 
 study and work and other like exercises 
 are good for us. They strengthen us and 
 make us grow. They are conditions of 
 human progress. We believe that God 
 is interested not so much in what we have 
 as in what we are. His ideal is a world 
 whose note is set in the beatitudes, wherein 
 life is governed not by compulsion but by 
 aspiration, and men master themselves 
 first and then master the conditions which 
 surround them. 
 
 So when the plague made its annual 
 visitation to the mediaeval city, and the 
 people crowded the churches and besought 
 God to remove it, He would not do ac- 
 cording to their prayer. It was a prayer 
 170 
 
PRAYER 
 
 which they could answer for themselves. 
 At last, they saw that, and cleaned the 
 town. They learned the lesson, which an 
 easy answer to their prayers would have 
 hidden from their minds, that one of the 
 conditions of health is cleanliness. It re- 
 veals God's way with man. For the sake 
 of human welfare, for our good, God will 
 not answer the prayers which we indolently 
 pray. 
 
 Will God answer prayer in consideration 
 of our ignorance? We know not what is 
 best for us. Sometimes we pray des- 
 perately to be delivered from conditions 
 which in reality are blessings. Or we pray 
 for that which we ought not to have. St. 
 Paul prayed again and again, he says, for 
 the removal of some form of sickness which 
 he called a thorn in the flesh. The prayer 
 was not granted. It seemed a reasonable 
 request, but St. Paul saw afterwards that 
 his weakness was a help rather than a 
 hindrance. Indeed, we pray, as our Lord 
 prayed, bringing our desires into conformity 
 with the great plans of God, saying "not my 
 will but thine be done." We do not wish 
 a reply to any prayer which we ignorantly 
 pray, misunderstanding what is best. 
 
 171 
 
PRAYER 
 
 These limitations of the divine answer 
 to prayer are such as exist in the common 
 experience of domestic life. Children pray 
 (to use St. Paul's phrase) "without ceas- 
 ing." They are all the time asking for 
 things. The little child cries "Mother" a 
 thousand times a day, praying his prayers. 
 All of these prayers are heard, but a great 
 many of them are not answered. The 
 indolent prayers and the ignorant prayers 
 are not answered. God deals in like man- 
 ner with us His children. 
 
 3. Is it, then, necessary to pray? Will 
 not God, who knows our necessities before 
 we ask, and our ignorance in asking, give 
 us what we need without our petition. It 
 is plain that He does so give us the univer- 
 sal blessings. The sun rises and the rain 
 falls on those who pray and on those who 
 do not pray, without distinction. This 
 belongs to what St. Francis called "the 
 great courtesy of God." But as regards 
 particular blessings, we are instructed by 
 the ministry of Jesus. He never distrib- 
 uted His blessings at wholesale. He never 
 healed the patients in a hospital, ward by 
 ward. He usually healed one by one. And 
 commonly those whom He healed were 
 172 
 
PRAYER 
 
 distinguished from those whom He did not 
 heal by the act of prayer. He cured those 
 who asked for cure. Thus in Jericho, 
 where there were many blind men, He gave 
 sight to one, in answer to his persistent 
 prayer. 
 
 Prayer is an expression of faith in the 
 being of God : we kneel and speak to Him. 
 It is also an expression of faith in the prov- 
 idence of God; it is a way of saying that we 
 commit our lives to Him, and all our in- 
 terests and desires, in perfect confidence. 
 Thus we explain the curious petition in the 
 Litany: "That it may please thee to rule 
 and govern thy holy church universal in 
 the right way." It is not intended to 
 imply that unless we pray diligently, 
 keeping God reminded of His duty, He 
 will govern the church in some wrong way. 
 It is a statement of faith, in terms of 
 prayer. But especially prayer is an en- 
 deavor to obtain that which we might 
 otherwise miss. Thereby we open our 
 souls and make ourselves receptive to 
 divine blessing. We make it possible for 
 God to bless us. 
 
 i73 
 
PRAYER 
 
 II 
 
 The difficulties which hinder prayer as 
 communion are not so much intellectual 
 as spiritual. 
 
 1. One of them is familiarity. We be- 
 come so accustomed both to the act and 
 to the words of prayer that we pray 
 automatically without thinking, without 
 really praying. This hindrance may be 
 removed by beginning our prayers with a 
 moment of preliminary silence, while we 
 consider with ourselves where we are and 
 what we are about to do. We are in the 
 divine presence, and are about to address 
 God. A further help against familiarity 
 is the making of a change in the order or 
 in the words of our prayers; getting away 
 from the letter, the formula, of our peti- 
 tions. 
 
 2. Andther difficulty is secular ity. We 
 find ourselves lacking in sensitiveness of 
 spirit, in consciousness of God, because we 
 have dulled our souls by conformity to 
 the world, and are not conscious of God 
 in our ordinary thoughts. Our minds are 
 rilled with other things. Our honest inter- 
 est is elsewhere. There are courses of 
 
 174 
 
PRAYER 
 
 living which unfit people for religion. A 
 devoting of one's energies wholly to busi- 
 ness, or to recreation, affects every other 
 part of our life. The unused faculty be- 
 comes after a time unusable. Especially, 
 any willing and satisfied continuance in 
 sin affects prayer. What we need, under 
 such circumstances, is reformation; we 
 need repentance and amendment. We 
 need such a desire for the betterment of 
 our souls as shall express itself in earnest 
 prayer. 
 
 3. A third difficulty in communion with 
 God is infirmity, especially infirmity of 
 body. It affects both mind and soul. We 
 are not well, and that ill condition affects 
 all that we do. The early monks, who 
 lived in defiance of the laws of health, 
 found themselves afflicted with a spiritual 
 disease which they called Indifference 
 (acedie = the condition of not caring). 
 There were times when God seemed to be 
 remote or non-existent, and religion seemed 
 to have no meaning or value, and nothing 
 was worth while. This malady may some- 
 times be overcome by taking exercise, 
 breathing pure air, and getting into a 
 better physical condition. Sometimes it 
 
 175 
 
PRAYER 
 
 may be met by effort, by resolutely sum- 
 moning our attention. In any case, God 
 has not withdrawn Himself from us; it is 
 we ourselves who have set our bodies as a 
 barrier between Him and us, by our mis- 
 fortune or by our neglect. 
 
 Ill 
 
 Considering now the practice of prayer, 
 we find ourselves praying both in private 
 and in public. 
 
 i. It is highly important that for our 
 private prayers we have definitely settled 
 times. We are, indeed, to pray "with- 
 out ceasing," i. e., we are to be habitually 
 prayerful as some are habitually musical, 
 or artistic, or literary in the inclination of 
 their interests. But to such a frame of 
 mind we are to add a regulation of time. 
 Every day on rising, or on retiring, or on 
 both occasions, we are to address ourselves 
 to God. 
 
 It is also desirable that we have def- 
 initely settled themes. First, conscious- 
 ness of the divine presence, before we be- 
 gin; then thanksgiving for God's blessings, 
 of preservation, of health, of happiness, of 
 special gifts; then anticipation, looking 
 176 
 
PRAYER 
 
 forward to the difficulties and opportunities 
 of the day, asking for guidance and 
 strength; then intercession, for other per- 
 sons, for the advance of the kingdom of 
 heaven in general and in particular. The 
 evening prayers may be like the morning, 
 changing anticipation to retrospection. 
 
 2. The public prayers should be prefaced 
 like the private prayers with a space of 
 silence. We kneel as we enter the church, 
 and pray that in this service we may con- 
 duct ourselves to the praise of God and the 
 good of our souls: "Let the words of my 
 mouth, and the meditation of my heart, 
 be alway acceptable in thy sight, O Lord, 
 my strength and my redeemer." 
 
 The prayers and praises of the service 
 constitute our offering to God. They are 
 the true reason for church attendance. 
 The sermon is what we get; and the honest 
 truth is that often we can get something 
 better by staying at home and reading a 
 good book. But the service is what we 
 give. It is our sacrifice of adoration. And 
 as we offer it, He is among us who prom- 
 ised His especial presence wherever any 
 two or three are met together in His 
 name. 
 
 177 
 
PRAYER 
 
 IV 
 
 When the disciples asked the Master 
 to teach them to pray, He taught them 
 the Lord's Prayer. 
 
 1. It begins with invocation. We pray 
 to "Our Father," remembering His near- 
 ness to us and His love for us, and add 
 "who art in heaven," remembering His 
 might and majesty, bringing to our affec- 
 tion reverence. The plurals of the prayer 
 express our sense of brotherhood: not for 
 our own selves but for our neighbors also 
 do we pray. 
 
 2. Invocation is followed by petition: for 
 the spirit of worship — "Hallowed be thy 
 name"; for the spirit of service — "Thy 
 kingdom come, thy will be done," express- 
 ing our ideal of the world and our part in 
 attaining it; for help for the present — 
 "Give us this day our daily bread," — for 
 the past — "Forgive us our trespasses" — 
 and for the future — "Lead us not into, 
 temptation." Temptation is a trial of our 
 souls; it is a test of our strength. And we 
 shrink from it. It is true that St. James 
 said, "Count it all joy when ye fall into 
 divers temptations"; but he was a saint. 
 
 178 
 
PRAYER 
 
 Our Lord takes our weakness into account, 
 and permits us to pray this natural and 
 instinctive prayer. If temptation befalls 
 us, "deliver us from evil"; if there must 
 be a battle, grant that we may quit our- 
 selves like men; but out of the power of 
 temptation, out of the mastery of evil, 
 good Lord, deliver us. 
 
 3. The prayer ends with an ascription, 
 taken not from the Bible but from the 
 service of the early church. 
 
 4. The Lord's Prayer is somewhat dif- 
 ferently worded in the two places in which 
 it occurs in the gospels, and the Prayer 
 Book wording is not quite like either of 
 them. This is because the Lord's Prayer, 
 like the Psalms, is retained in the Prayer 
 Book from a translation of the Bible older 
 than the King James version. When that 
 version appeared, in 1611, every English- 
 speaking Christian knew by heart the 
 Lord's Prayer of the earlier time and con- 
 tinued, as most people continue to this day, 
 to say it in those words. 
 
 The Lord's Prayer is explained in the 
 Catechism. "I desire my Lord God, our 
 heavenly Father, who is the giver of all 
 goodness, to send his grace unto me and 
 
 179 
 
PRAYER 
 
 to all people; that we may worship him, 
 serve him, and obey him, as we ought to 
 do. And I pray unto God that he will 
 send us all things that are needful both for 
 our souls and bodies, and that he will be 
 merciful unto us, and forgive us our sins; 
 and that it will please him to save and 
 defend us in all dangers both of soul and 
 body; and that he will keep us from all 
 sin and wickedness, and from our spiritual 
 enemy, and from everlasting death. And 
 this I trust he will do of his mercy and 
 goodness, through our Lord Jesus Christ. 
 And therefore I say, Amen, So be it." 
 
 1 80 
 
THE HOLY COMMUNION 
 
THE HOLY COMMUNION 
 
 I. The "Lord's Supper" 
 
 1. Remembering: the death of Christ, the 
 
 mercy of God 
 
 2. Receiving: for spiritual strength 
 II. The "Holy Communion" 
 
 1. Fellowship with Christ: the "real 
 
 presence" 
 
 2. Fellowship with one another: the 
 
 kingdom of heaven 
 
 III. The "Holy Eucharist" 
 
 1. The ancient sacrifices 
 
 2. Their fulfilment in Christ 
 
 3. Our sacrifice of praise, and of self 
 
 IV. Difficulties 
 
 1. Intellectual: "This is my body" 
 
 (1) Roman solution: transubstan- 
 
 tiation 
 
 (2) Protestant solution: commem- 
 
 oration 
 
 (3) These solutions modified and 
 
 combined in the Episcopal 
 Church 
 
 2. Moral: the peril of "unworthiness" 
 
 Understood by definition 
 
 i83 
 
THE HOLY COMMUNION 
 
 Requirements 
 
 z. Repentance and amendment, faith and 
 
 thanksgiving, brotherly love 
 2. Comfort and counsel 
 
 184 
 
X 
 
 THE HOLY COMMUNION 
 
 This sacrament is called by three signif- 
 icant names: it is the Lord's Supper, it is 
 the Communion, and it is the Eucharist. 
 
 I 
 
 As the Lord's Supper it is a memorial 
 of the words and acts of Christ, on the 
 night in which He was betrayed. He took 
 bread and blessed it and gave it to His 
 disciples, saying, " This is my Body which 
 is given for you; do this in remembrance 
 of me." Likewise, He took the cup, and 
 when He had given thanks He gave it to 
 them, saying, "Drink ye all of this, for 
 this is my Blood of the New Testament, 
 which is shed for you and for many, for 
 the remission of sins; do this, as oft as ye 
 shall drink it, in remembrance of me." 
 
 i. The first meaning is that of remem- 
 brance. He was no longer to be with them 
 in the old way; they would meet together 
 
 i85 
 
THE HOLY COMMUNION 
 
 and His place would be empty. He had 
 been their guide and inspirer, teaching 
 them continually by His word and ex- 
 ample, by the spirit of His life, the truth 
 which should transform the world. They 
 were not only to be like Him, but their 
 mission, henceforth, was to be the extension 
 of that likeness among men. They were to 
 be witnesses unto Him. To that end, they 
 must keep Him in their thoughts and in 
 their hearts. If in any way they forgot 
 Him, and substituted any other teaching 
 for His teaching, and any other ideal for 
 His ideal, they would so far fail in their 
 great purpose. Accordingly, He provided 
 a definite act whereby their memory of Him 
 might be assisted. And He associated this 
 act with a necessary, and universal, and 
 daily part of life; He connected it with 
 eating and drinking. 
 
 The breaking of the bread was to remind 
 them of His broken body, the pouring of 
 the wine was to remind them of His shed 
 blood, because in His death He summed 
 up the significance of His life. The cross 
 is the symbol of the love which He had 
 for them and for all men, and of the self- 
 sacrifice in which that love was manifested 
 1 86 
 
THE HOLY COMMUNION 
 
 even to the laying down of His life. The 
 remembrance of Him, such as would be 
 renewed by the bread and wine, would 
 help them to fulfil the commandment 
 which shall change the kingdoms of the 
 world into the kingdom of God: "That ye 
 love one another even as I have loved you." 
 
 But the love and self-sacrifice of Jesus 
 Christ mean far more than the affection 
 and devotion of a friend. The Last Supper 
 appealed immediately to their friendship; 
 the words came to their hearts as the words 
 of one whom they devoutly loved, who for 
 mysterious reasons beyond their under- 
 standing was to die. They were filled 
 with sorrow. But as time passed, and the 
 crucifixion was interpreted by the resurrec- 
 tion, and they began dimly to perceive 
 who He was, and is, who had lived so 
 familiarly among them, the meaning of the 
 sacrament rose from friendship to faith. 
 They saw that in Him was not only human- 
 ity but divinity; in Him was God man- 
 ifested. Thus the sacrament became not 
 only a reminder of His affection, and a 
 remembrance of His self-sacrifice, but a 
 revelation of God. It showed how God 
 cares for man. 
 
 187 
 
THE HOLY COMMUNION 
 
 Two kinds of remembrance, then, meet 
 in this sacrament: we remember, for the 
 deepening of our love, the self-sacrifice 
 of Christ; and for the increase of our faith, 
 the mercy of God. We are to have "a 
 lively faith in God's mercy through Christ, 
 with a thankful remembrance of His 
 death." "To the end that we should 
 always remember the exceeding great love 
 of our Master, and only Savior, Jesus 
 Christ, thus dying for us, and the innu- 
 merable benefits which by his precious 
 blood-shedding he hath obtained for us, 
 he hath instituted and ordained holy 
 mysteries, as pledges of his love and for 
 a continual remembrance of his death, to 
 our great and endless comfort." 
 
 2. These meanings of the sacrament 
 would have been satisfied by a breaking 
 of the bread, and a pouring of the wine 
 into a cup. When He said, "Take and eat 
 this," "Drink this," He went beyond, and 
 made the supper a symbol, as He made 
 baptism a symbol, of a divine blessing. 
 As the water of baptism is the outward 
 sign of a spiritual cleansing, so the bread 
 and wine, partaken of, are the outward 
 signs of a spiritual feeding. Thus the 
 188 
 
THE HOLY COMMUNION 
 
 Lord's Supper is a sacrament not only of 
 remembrance but of strength. 
 
 We bring to the interpretation of the 
 sacrament the mystical sentences of the 
 sixth chapter of St. John. " I am the living 
 bread which came down from heaven; if 
 any man eat of this bread, he shall live 
 forever: and the bread that I will give is 
 my flesh, which I will give for the life of 
 the world." "Whoso eateth my flesh and 
 drinketh my blood hath eternal life, and 
 I will raise him up at the last day." "He 
 that eateth my flesh and drinketh my blood, 
 dwelleth in me, and I in him." The words 
 have no immediate reference to the Holy 
 Communion, being spoken long before 
 the institution of the sacrament. The 
 blessing which they promise is associated 
 in other places with other conditions. 
 Thus to one who asked how he might 
 attain eternal life, our Lord replied, "If 
 thou wilt enter into life, keep the Com- 
 mandments." And St. John said, "If we 
 love one another, God dwelleth in us." 
 The grace of the sacrament may be had 
 without the sacrament. There is nothing 
 magical about the consecrated bread and 
 wine, as if grace were somehow enclosed 
 
 189 
 
THE HOLY COMMUNION 
 
 in them, given to us by the hand of the 
 priest, and made ours by eating and 
 drinking. 
 
 At the same time, the words remain, and 
 the command to eat and drink remains. 
 In many ways God nourishes our souls; 
 and, here particularly, in this way. Among 
 the innumerable sacraments with which 
 the world is filled — every one of them an 
 outward and visible sign of an inward and 
 spiritual grace — is this of the bread and 
 wine, ordained by Christ Himself. Thus 
 there are many foods, but here is the 
 table spread in our house: this is our im- 
 mediate concern. There are many means 
 of grace, but here is this, offered definitely 
 to us. 
 
 We come, therefore, to the Lord's 
 Supper not only remembering but re- 
 ceiving. We come for strength. We are 
 perplexed in the confusion of life, hard 
 beset by temptation, needing increase of 
 faith, and a closer approach to God, and 
 comfort in sorrow. And this we find in 
 this sacrament. It is not a theory, derived 
 from an interpretation of texts. It is an 
 experience into which Christian people 
 are entering every day. 
 190 
 
THE HOLY COMMUNION 
 
 II 
 
 i. As the Holy Communion, the Lord's 
 Supper is primarily a fellowship of the soul 
 with Christ. The doctrine of the "real 
 presence," maintaining that Christ is 
 present on the altar under the form of 
 bread and wine, easily descends into su- 
 perstition and thus degraded becomes a 
 Christian equivalent to pagan idolatry. 
 It is capable, however, of a spiritual 
 interpretation which commends it to the 
 mystics. He who promised His presence 
 with us always is present with us now and 
 here. We may say, indeed, with truth — 
 especially with the kind of truth which is 
 better expressed in prose than in poetry — 
 that Christ is present as actually outside 
 the church as in, and that the notion that 
 He is particularly present on the altar is 
 absurd. But Christ is present for us only 
 so far as we ourselves recognize Him, and 
 it is the virtue of the sacrament that it 
 awakens that recognition. The conditions 
 combine to produce that emotion: the 
 still church, the dim light, the steady 
 voice, the sacred associations, the rise of 
 prayer and praise to a supreme height in the 
 
 191 
 
THE HOLY COMMUNION 
 
 union of our worship with that of angels and 
 archangels, all preparing us for the recital 
 of Christ's mysterious consecration of the 
 bread and wine to be His body and blood. 
 It is easier, with these assistances, to real- 
 ize Him than it is in the common course 
 of busy life. In that sense there is a real 
 presence of Him who is forever really pres- 
 ent. He dwells in us and we in Him. 
 
 2. There is also in the Holy Communion 
 not only a spiritual but a social fellowship. 
 The meaning of the phrase in the creed, 
 "the communion of saints," is unknown. 
 The history of its addition to the creed is 
 obscure, and the form of the Latin is such 
 that nobody can tell whether the reference 
 {sanctorum communionem) is to holy things 
 or to holy persons. The phrase looks like 
 an explanation of "the holy Catholic 
 Church"; but it may mean either that the 
 church is the society in which we partake of 
 sacred privileges, such as the sacraments, 
 or that the church is the society in which 
 we are all joined together in the unity of the 
 faith and in love one for another. The 
 two interpretations meet in the sacrament, 
 but the second is more distinctly referred 
 to in the Prayer Book. 
 192 
 
THE HOLY COMMUNION 
 
 This is the sacrament of brotherly love. 
 It is required of those who come to it that 
 they be "in charity with all men." "If ye 
 shall perceive your offences to be such as 
 are not only against God, but also against 
 your neighbors, then ye shall reconcile 
 yourselves unto them; being ready to 
 make restitution and satisfaction according 
 to the uttermost of your powers for all 
 injuries and wrongs done by you to any 
 others; and being likewise ready to forgive 
 others who have offended you, as ye would 
 have forgiveness of your offences at God's 
 hands." These words follow the spirit of 
 our Lord's direction in the Sermon on the 
 Mount (Matthew 5:23, 24). The congrega- 
 tion at the sacrament is thus a little section 
 of that kingdom of heaven which our 
 Lord sought to realize on earth, the ideal 
 of universal fraternity for which He gave 
 His life. We are to come putting out of our 
 hearts all hatred and variance, all jealousy 
 and prejudice, and whatever else may 
 hinder us from godly union and concord. 
 
 193 
 
THE HOLY COMMUNION 
 
 III 
 
 In the last service in the Prayer Book, at 
 the end of the last page, before the Ar- 
 ticles, the Lord's Supper is called the 
 Eucharist, or "praise-service." The word 
 is denned in the phrase, "our sacrifice of 
 praise and thanksgiving." 
 
 1. Primitive religion is filled with sacri- 
 fice. Men come with the produce of their 
 fields, or of their flocks, — sometimes 
 with the bodies of their enemies or even 
 of their own children, — to make an 
 offering to God. A fire burns on the altar 
 and the sacrifice ascends to heaven in the 
 flame and smoke. The idea is commonly 
 to propitiate God, i. e., to turn away His 
 wrath, and persuade Him to spare sinners. 
 This method of approach to God is con- 
 tradicted by the doctrine of the divine 
 fatherhood. Not in that manner do chil- 
 dren, even in deepest penitence or fear, 
 approach their father. 
 
 2. All that was true in the ancient 
 sacrifices finds fulfilment in the cross of 
 Christ. He suffered death for our redemp- 
 tion. He "made there (by his one oblation 
 of liimself once offered) a full, perfect, and 
 
 194 
 
THE HOLY COMMUNION 
 
 sufficient sacrifice, oblation and satisfac- 
 tion for the sins of the whole world." On 
 the nearer side, His death was a proclama- 
 tion of the infinite importance of the spir- 
 itual religion which He preached, and of the 
 ideal life which He taught and lived. He 
 was put to death because He insisted on 
 these things, and He considered them 
 worth dying for. He died to redeem us 
 from the sin and error against which He 
 protested. By His sacrifice, as we come 
 to recognize it, we are reconciled to God. 
 
 3. Thenceforth all the old sacrifices, 
 even of the Temple, are fulfilled and cease. 
 In the place of the old altars is a Holy 
 Table, spread with the symbols of His 
 death in perpetual memory of His precious 
 sacrifice, and made beautiful by the signs 
 of our devotion. This is the meaning of 
 the adornment of the table with fair linen, 
 and silver vessels, and lights and flowers. 
 This is the basis of the tradition which 
 summons all Christians to be present at 
 the sacrament on certain days — Christ- 
 mas, Easter, Whitsunday — because these 
 are the anniversaries of divine blessings 
 which give us reason for special gratitude. 
 
 One side of the eucharistic meaning of the 
 
 195 
 
THE HOLY COMMUNION 
 
 sacrament is set forth in the words, "Above 
 all things ye must give most humble and 
 hearty thanks to God, the Father, the Son 
 and the Holy Ghost, for the redemption 
 of the world by the death and passion of 
 our Saviour Christ, both God and man." 
 
 Another side is in the words, "And here 
 we offer and present unto thee, O Lord, 
 ourselves, our souls and bodies, to be a 
 reasonable, holy, and living sacrifice unto 
 thee." 
 
 Thus while the title the "Lord's Supper," 
 suggests the good of our souls, and the 
 title, the "Holy Communion," suggests in 
 part the love of our neighbor, the title, the 
 "Eucharist" suggests that aspect of the 
 sacrament in which we address ourselves 
 to God, kneeling before Him, praising Him, 
 worshipping Him, adoring Him, and offer- 
 ing Him the sacrifice of our Thanksgiving, 
 and the service not only of our lips but 
 of our lives. 
 
 rv 
 
 Two difficulties arise in the way of this 
 sacrament, the one intellectual, the other 
 moral. 
 
 i . The intellectual difficulty is connected 
 iq6 
 
THE HOLY COMMUNION 
 
 with the words "This is my body." We 
 perceive with our senses that this is bread. 
 How can it be at the same time bread and 
 His body? To this question two kinds of 
 answers have been given, literal and 
 spiritual. 
 
 One of the literal explanations is called 
 Transubstantiation. It is founded on a 
 proposition of mediaeval metaphysics 
 which affirmed that every object consists 
 of substance and accidents. The substance 
 is the thing in its essential being; the 
 accidents are the manifestations of it to 
 our senses, as for example its form and 
 color. In the sacrament, they said, the 
 accidents of bread and wine remain, but 
 the substance is changed by the word of 
 the priest into the Body and Blood of 
 Christ. The saying, "This is my body" 
 is taken literally. This which is on the 
 altar is now bread and wine only in appear- 
 ance; it is really the body and blood which 
 our Lord derived from the Virgin Mary 
 His Mother. 
 
 One of the spiritual explanations is 
 called Commemoration. Our Lord's words 
 are understood in the sense of metaphor: 
 This represents my body and blood. The 
 
 197 
 
THE HOLY COMMUNION 
 
 sacrament is a memorial. Whatever bless- 
 ing it imparts is by the quickening of our 
 remembrance. Transubstantiation is ob- 
 jective, making grace to reside in the 
 consecrated elements; Commemoration is 
 subjective, making grace to consist in the 
 emotions of our hearts. This which is on 
 the Holy Table is body and blood only in a 
 figure of speech; it is really and solely plain 
 bread and wine. 
 
 Each of these interpretations, more or 
 less modified in statement, has found 
 acceptance in the Episcopal Church. In 
 the Prayer Book of 1549, when the ruling 
 men of the church were of what is called 
 the Old Learning, the priest as he admin- 
 istered the bread was instructed to say, 
 I "The body of our Lord Jesus Christ which 
 was given for thee, preserve thy body and 
 soul unto everlasting life.". This was con- 
 sistent with the theory of Transubstan- 
 tiation. In the Prayer Book of 1552, when 
 the ruling men were of the New Learning, 
 the words were changed to read: "Take 
 and eat this in remembrance that Christ 
 died for thee, and feed on him in thy heart 
 by faith with thanksgiving." This ex- 
 pressed the theory of Commemoration. 
 198 
 
THE HOLY COMMUNION 
 
 In the Prayer Book of 1559, in the reign 
 of Elizabeth, when the desire was to hold 
 within the church both of these kinds of 
 men, the two sentences were put together, 
 and so remain to this day. The combina- 
 tion fairly represents the mind of the 
 church. There are still "extreme" men 
 on one side, whose devotions run along a 
 line which is at least parallel with Tran- 
 substantiation; and there are "extreme" 
 men on the other side whose position is in 
 large measure expressed by Commemora- 
 tion. But most churchmen effect a working 
 combination of the two. 
 
 The sacrament of the bread and wine is 
 at the same time the sacrament of the 
 body and blood. The word of scripture 
 is true, and true also is the witness of our 
 senses. The Holy Communion is like a 
 letter which by means of ink and paper 
 brings to us the will, the counsel and the 
 affection of our friend. It actually brings 
 them. The words are not our friend; the 
 value of them is not in their outward form ; 
 neither do the words merely remind us of 
 our friend. In them he comes, and speaks, 
 and helps us. In some such way, Christ 
 comes in the bread and wine. With our 
 
 199 
 
THE HOLY COMMUNION 
 
 lips we receive these outward things, and 
 into our hearts there enters thereby, if 
 we are receptive, the blessing which Jesus 
 associated with the eating of His flesh and 
 the drinking of His blood. 
 
 2. The moral difficulty is connected with 
 St. Paul's words, "He that eateth and 
 drinketh unworthily eateth and drinketh 
 damnation to himself, not discerning the 
 Lord's body." 
 
 The difficulty is diminished by defini- 
 tion. "Damnation," as the Revised Ver- 
 sion shows, means condemnation. Words 
 change their values in the course of 
 time. "Prevent" once meant to go be- 
 fore in order to help, and in the English 
 Prayer Book where we say "Direct us, O 
 Lord, in all our doings," they still say 
 "Prevent us." But now in our common 
 speech, the word means to go before in 
 order to hinder. So with "plausible," 
 which used to mean worthy of applause. 
 So with "damnation." We connect the 
 word with everlasting punishment, but 
 that was not the meaning when the King 
 James' translation was made, early in the 
 seventeenth century. It meant condemna- 
 tion. They who come unworthily will be 
 200 
 
THE HOLY COMMUNION 
 
 condemned of God, like those who do any 
 other wrong. 
 
 And "unworthily" means indifferently, 
 without thought of religion. It is made 
 plain in the Communion Service that in 
 order to partake aright we must have a 
 sincere feeling that we are unworthy so 
 much as to gather up the crumbs under 
 the Lord's Table. The minister confesses 
 that, for himself and for us. We must be 
 conscious of our sins, and aware of our 
 distance from our ideals. We may not 
 approach in the disposition of the Pharisee, 
 saying, "God, I thank thee that I am not 
 as other men are." We acknowledge that 
 we have grievously offended in thought, 
 word and deed. We are heartily sorry 
 for these our misdoings. The remem- 
 brance of them is grievous unto us: the 
 burden of them is intolerable. Such a 
 sense of unworthiness as this is essential. 
 It is on account of our weakness that we 
 come to this sacrament of strength. 
 
 We learn what St. Paul meant when we 
 see what they were doing whose unworth- 
 iness he reproved. They were in the habit 
 of assembling for a social meal. At these 
 festivities some were wholly interested in 
 
 201 
 
THE HOLY COMMUNION 
 
 eating and drinking: they were hungry, 
 St. Paul says, and even drunken. At the 
 end of this rather disorderly meeting they 
 had the Lord's Supper. Therein they 
 did not "discern" the Lord's body, i. e., 
 they made no difference between the 
 consecrated bread and common bread 
 (I Corinthians 11:20-34). Unworthiness, 
 then, in the sense in which St. Paul used 
 the word, is the offence of those who come 
 to the sacrament as those Corinthians 
 came, lightly, carelessly, without thought 
 of sin, and without thought of God. Often, 
 those who hold back and are afraid to 
 come are in the very spirit which the 
 sacrament requires. 
 
 V 
 
 1. The requirements are stated in the cat- 
 echism: "To examine themselves whether 
 they repent them truly of their former 
 sins, stedfastly purposing to lead a new 
 life; have a lively faith in God's mercy 
 through Christ, with a thankful remem- 
 brance of his death; and be in perfect 
 charity with all men." It is like the silent 
 meditation which precedes the act of 
 prayer. The three points of preparation 
 202 
 
THE HOLY COMMUNION 
 
 are repentance, remembrance and rec- 
 onciliation. Am I honestly aware of my 
 sins and shortcomings? What are they, in 
 actual detail? Am I trying to overcome 
 them, trying definitely to be better, and 
 seeking now for that purpose the help of 
 God? Am I thinking with faith and grati- 
 tude and affection of the death of Christ, 
 who gave His life that we might be re- 
 deemed from such sins? Do I hear Him 
 saying, "This have I done for thee, what 
 doest thou for me?" Am I living neigh- 
 borly and fraternally with others? Am I 
 increasing or diminishing the pleasantness 
 of life where I live? Am I harming any- 
 body in thought, word or deed? Am I so 
 far as lieth in me living peaceably with all 
 men? 
 
 The answers to these questions cannot be 
 in terms of perfection, but they must be 
 in terms of aspiration. We must earnestly 
 desire and definitely resolve to be better. 
 
 2. If such reflection raises difficulty in 
 our minds, and we are in doubt whether 
 we ought to come to the Lord's Supper or 
 not, we are told in the Prayer Book not 
 to continue in our anxiety but to consult 
 a minister. "Because it is requisite that 
 
 203 
 
THE HOLY COMMUNION 
 
 no man should come to the Holy Com- 
 munion, but with a full trust in God's 
 mercy, and with a quiet conscience: 
 therefore if there be any of you, who by 
 this means [i. e., by his own thought and 
 prayer] cannot quiet his own conscience 
 herein, but require th further comfort or 
 counsel, let him come to me, or to some 
 other Minister of God's Word, and open 
 his grief, that he may receive such godly 
 counsel and advice, as may tend to the 
 quieting of his conscience, and the re- 
 moving of all scruple and doubtfulness." 
 
 204 
 
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