Read Ebook: The Church: Her Books and Her Sacraments by Holmes E E Ernest Edward

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Dear Saviour! make our hearts to burn, And make our lives to shine, Oh! make us ever true to Thee, And true to all that's Thine-- Thy Church, Thy Saints, Thy Sacraments, Thy Scriptures; may we own No other Lord, no other rule, But Thee, and Thine alone.

A. G.

THE CHURCH.

THE CHURCH ON EARTH.

But three questions meet us:--

What is this Church which Christ loved?

When and where was it established?

What was it established for?

As such, let us think of the Church on earth under six Prayer-Book names:--

The Catholic Church. The National Church. The Established Church. The Church of England. The Reformed Church. The Primitive Church.

THE CATHOLIC CHURCH.

Thus, wherever there are souls and bodies to be saved and sanctified, there, sooner or later, will be the Catholic Church. And, as a matter of history, this is just what we find. Are there souls to be saved and sanctified in Italy?--there is the Church, with its local headquarters at Rome. Are there souls to be saved and sanctified in Russia?--there is the Church, once with its local headquarters at Moscow. Are there souls to be saved and sanctified in England?--there is the Church, with its local headquarters at Canterbury. It is, and ever has been, one and the same Church, "all one man's sons," and that man, the Man Christ Jesus. The Catholic Church is like the ocean. There is the Atlantic Ocean, the Indian Ocean, the Pacific Ocean: and yet there are not three oceans, but one ocean. The Atlantic Ocean is not the Indian Ocean, nor is the Indian Ocean the Pacific Ocean: they are all together the one universal ocean--"the ocean".

But, after all, is not this a somewhat vague and nebulous conception of "The Church". If it is to go into all the world, how, from a business point of view, is this world-wide mission, in all its grandeur, to be accomplished? The answer is seen in our second name:--

THE NATIONAL CHURCH.

All this is, or should be, going on in England, and we have now to ask when and by whom the Catholic Church, established in the Upper Chamber on the Day of Pentecost, was established in our country.

THE ESTABLISHED CHURCH.

THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND.

But, being national , it is, obviously, subject to the dangers, as well as the privileges, of national character, national temperament--and, in our case, national insularity. The national presentment of the Catholic Church may err, and may err without losing its Catholicity. The Church of England, "as also the Church of Rome, hath erred"; it has needed, it needs, it will need, reforming. Hence we come to our fifth name:--

THE REFORMED CHURCH.

The name is very suggestive. It suggests two things--life and continuity.

A Reformed Church, then, is not the formation of a new Church, but the re-formation of the old Church.

How did the old Church of England reform itself? Roughly speaking, the English Reformation did two things. It affirmed something, and it denied something.

First, it affirmed something. For instance, the Church of England affirmed that the Church in this country in the sixteenth century was one with the Church of the sixth century. It affirmed that it was the very same Church that had been established in Palestine on the Day of Pentecost, and in this realm by Augustine in 597. It reaffirmed its old national independence in things local just as it had affirmed it in the days of Pope Gregory, It re-affirmed its adherence to every doctrine held by the undivided Church, without adding thereto, or taking therefrom.

Then, it denied something. It denied the right of foreigners to interfere in purely English affairs; it denied the right of the Bishop of one National Church to exercise his power in another National Church; it denied the claim of the Bishop of Rome to exercise jurisdiction over the Archbishop of Canterbury; it denied the power of any one part of the Church to impose local decisions, or local dogmas, upon any other part of the Church.

Thus, the Reformation both affirmed and denied. It affirmed the constitutional rights of the Church as against the unconstitutional claims of the Pope, and it denied the unconstitutional claims of the State as against the constitutional rights of the Church.

Much more, very much more, "for weal or for woe," it did. It had to buy its experience. The Reformation was not born grown up. It made its mistakes, as every growing movement will do. It is still growing, still making mistakes, still purging and pruning itself as it grows; and it is still asserting its right to reform itself where it has gone wrong, and to return to the old ideal where it has departed from it. And this old ideal is wrapped up in the sixth name:--

THE PRIMITIVE CHURCH.

Re-formation must be based upon its original formation if it would aim at real reform. It is not necessarily a mechanical imitation of the past, but a genuine portrait of the permanent. It is, then, to the Primitive Church that we must look for the principles of reformation. If the meaning of a will is contested years after the testator's death, reference will be made, as far as possible, to the testator's contemporaries, or to writings which might best interpret his intentions. This is what the English Reformers of the sixteenth century tell us that they did. They refer perpetually to the past; over and over again they send us to the "ancient fathers," as to those living and writing nearest to the days when the Church was established, and as most likely to know her mind. They go back to what the "Commination Service" calls "The Primitive Church". This "Primitive Church" is the Reformed Church now established in England. The Reformers themselves never meant it to be anything else, and would have been the first to protest against the unhistoric, low, and modern use of the word "established". In this sense, they would have been the sturdiest of sturdy "Protestants".

And this word Protestant reminds us that there is one more name frequently given to the Church of England, but not included in our scheme, because found nowhere in the Prayer Book.

THE PROTESTANT CHURCH.

The term is a foreign one--not English. It comes from Germany and was given to the Lutherans in 1529, because they protested against an edict forbidding them to regulate their own local ecclesiastical affairs, pending the decision of a General Council.

It had nothing whatever to do with "protesting" against ceremonial. The ceremonial of the Church in Lutheran Germany is at least as carefully elaborated as that seen in the majority of English churches.

In these Prayer-Book names, then, we see that the Church on earth is a society, established in the Upper Chamber on the Day of Pentecost; that it was established to be the ordained and ordinary channel through which God saves and sanctifies fallen man; that, in order to accomplish this, and for business and administrative purposes, the Church Catholic establishes itself in national centres; that one such national centre is England; and that this Pentecostal Church established in England is the Church which "Christ loved," the Sponsa Christi, the "Bride of Christ":--

Eph. v. 25.

The primary meaning of the word Catholic seems to refer to world-wide extension. St. Augustine teaches that it means "Universal" as opposed to particular, and says that "The Church is called Catholic because it is spread throughout the whole world". St. Cyril of Jerusalem says: "The Church is called Catholic because it extends throughout the whole world, from one end of the Earth to the other," and he adds, "because it teaches universally all the doctrines which men ought to know" .

Service for "The Ordering of Priests".

i.e. the English, as distinct from the British Church.

"The word Establishment," writes Bishop Stubbs, "means, of course, the national recognition of our Church as a Christian Church, as the representment of the religious life of the nation as historically worked out and by means of property and discipline enabled to discharge, so far as outward discharge can insure it, the effectual performance of the duties that membership of a Christian Church involves. It means the national recognition of a system by which every inch of land in England, and every living soul in the population is assigned to a ministration of help, teaching, advice, and comfort of religion, a system in which every English man woman and child has a right to the service of a clergyman and to a home of spiritual life in the service of the Church" .

It is sometimes asked, Does not the presence of the Bishops in the House of Lords constitute an Established Church? No. Representatives from all the sects might, and some probably will, sit there without either making their sect the established Church of the country, or unmaking the Catholic Church the Church of the country. Bishops have sat in the House of Lords ever since there has been a House of Lords to sit in, but neither their exclusion, nor the inclusion of non-Bishops, would disestablish the Church of England.

Augustine is worried, as we are worried, by the variety of customs in different Churches, and asks Pope Gregory "why one custom of masses is observed in the Holy Roman Church and another in the Church of the Gallic Provinces". "My brother knows," replied Gregory, "the custom of the Roman Church in which he was brought up. But my pleasure is that you should, with great care, select whatever you think will best please Almighty God wherever you find it, whether in the Church of Rome, or in the Church of Gaul, or in any other Church, and then plant firmly in the Church of the English that which you have selected from many Churches.... Choose, then, from each individual Church things pious, religious, righteous, and having, as it were, collected them into a volume, deposit them with the minds of the English as their custom, their Use."

"I protest," wrote Archbishop Cranmer, "and openly confess that, in all my doctrine, whatsoever it be, not only I mean and judge those things as the Catholic Church, and the most holy Fathers of old, with one accord, have meant and judged, but also I would gladly use the same words which they used, and not use any other words, but to set my hand to all and singular their speeches, phrases, ways, and forms of speech, which they did use in their treatise upon the Sacraments, and to keep still their interpretation."

See Preface to the Prayer Book.

The Edict of the Diet of Spires.

THE CHURCH'S BOOKS.

For the purpose of these lectures, we will select two:--

THE BIBLE.

This is the Divine Order. Preaching, not writing, was the Apostolic method. Oral teaching preceded the written word. Then, later on, lest this oral teaching should be lost, forgotten, or misquoted, it was gradually committed to manuscript, and its "good tidings" published in writing for the Church's children.

It is very important to remember this order , because thousands of souls lived and died long before the New Testament was written. The earliest books of the New Testament were not written for twenty years after the Day of Pentecost; the earliest Gospel was not committed to writing before A.D. 65. And, even if the Bible had been written earlier, few could have read it; and even then few could have possessed it. It was a rare book, wholly out of reach of "the people". The first Bible was not printed until 1445.

But, thank God, the Church, which wrote the book, could teach without the book; and we may be sure that no single soul was lost for the want of what it could not possess. "Without a Bible," says St. Irenaeus, writing in the second century, "they received, from the Church, teaching sufficient for the salvation of their souls."

Then, again, the Church alone could decide which books were, and which books were not, "the Scriptures". How else could we know? The society authorizes its publications. It affixes its seal only to the books it has issued. So with the Divine Society, the Church. It affixes its seal to the books we now know as the Bible. How do we know, for instance, that St. Paul's Epistles to the Corinthians are part of the Bible, and that St. Clement's Epistle to the Corinthians is not part of the Bible? Because, and only because, the Church has so decided. If we had lived in the days of persecution it would have made a considerable difference to us whether this or that sacred book was included in the Christian Scriptures. Thus, when the early Christians were ordered by Diocletian to "bring out their books," and either burn them or die for them, it became a matter of vital importance to know which these books were. Who could tell them this? Only the society which published them, only the Church.

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