The War and Unity Part 4

There is indeed every reason to believe that opinion outside the churches is more ripe for action than within them. On both sides there is need for something like an educational campaign on the subject of reunion and of the duty of Christians in regard to it. Difficulties have to be faced of a very serious kind. On the Nonconformist side there are still many who feel very keenly the burden of the disabilities from which they have suffered, and to some extent still suffer. They know that in some country districts Nonconformists are subjected to petty social persecutions, and that their boys or girls who wish to become elementary school teachers are handicapped from the outset. Many of them have been brought up on bitter memories, and their inherited hostility to the State establishment of religion does not incline them to any _rapprochement_ with its representatives. It is well that these facts should be faced, for they shew the need there is for the Free Churches to educate their own people.

To all this we have to add the _vis inertiae_ which operates in all the churches alike. Many of them are entirely satisfied with things as they are, and are only anxious that we should let well alone. There is too among certain of the denominations a self-satisfaction amounting almost to Pharisaism. They are very busy with their own work and devoted to their denominational interests, and, so long as these can be maintained, they do not see the use of agitations for reunion. They do not believe that they have anything to gain from it and therefore they let it alone.

The same spirit shews itself too on the Anglican side and there becomes a serious obstacle to any advance. There are those who regard the Church of England, as by law established, as the only possible Church for England, and they cannot imagine why any people should want to change its present position. Dissenters they say are outsiders and schismatics, and must be left to go their own way. They should be thankful for the toleration which has been extended to them and not abuse it by asking for more. For all this kind of thing there is only one remedy, and that is a wider vision, and for this all Christians of good will should strenuously work and pray. It should surely be obvious that we can no longer treat any church or denomination as an end in itself. All alike exist for the great end of the Kingdom of G.o.d and are to be judged by their efficiency in promoting that end among men. So no system of church order can be regarded as of divine right in itself but only so far as it becomes a channel of the Spirit of G.o.d and mediates His gifts to men. All the churches as we know them to-day have grown up in controversy and represent a long process of development and adaptation.

If we are to test them it should not be by the more or less artificial standards of any one age in their history, but rather by the spirit, and temper, and intentions of their Lord and Master Jesus Christ. When this is done, the differences between them fall into their proper proportions in view of the failure which is common to them all. On these terms too will the old antagonisms become a generous rivalry in good works and each church be ready to seek the welfare of others in the common interests of the Kingdom which they all serve.

So far we have dealt largely with the past and with the various movements in the direction of unity which have been set on foot. It now remains to say something of the motives which inspire and the principles which underlie them. First and foremost is the fact that it is the will of our Lord that His people should be one. This does not mean surely any mere uniformity of organization but unity of spirit, heart, and will. We seek this chiefly because it is a right thing. Anything short of it is evil. The Christian faith rests ultimately on the Fatherhood of G.o.d and the brotherhood of man, and these can only be made real when all Christians accept them and make them the ground and basis of their relations with one another. Here we need to appeal to the conscience of the churches and challenge them to put the first things first and learn in the love of the brethren the love and service of G.o.d and His Church.

Then we are bound to recognise in the next place that this unity is the prime condition of successful work and witness. The tasks awaiting the churches in the immediate future are gigantic and only as they stand together and learn to speak and act as one have they any chance of accomplishing them. They have to evangelize the world, and for this they will need above all things a common faith, a common witness, and a common sacrifice. They have to leaven society with the aims and principles of Jesus Christ, to bring His spirit to bear on all social, political, commercial, and industrial undertakings, and for this too they will need the united weight of all their influence and the pa.s.sion of a great common crusade. The devil is a great master of strategy and knows that if he can keep our forces divided there is nothing in them that need be feared. We must therefore close up our ranks and present a united front, not merely as a measure of self-preservation but in order to do well the work that has been committed to us. This will involve some real self-sacrifice on the part of us all, but it is the way the Master went and His followers must not shrink from it. If we but keep our eyes fixed on the great vision of the Kingdom which He opened before us, we shall not faint but go forward steadfastly and together until the kingdoms of this world have become the Kingdom of G.o.d and of His Christ.

UNITY BETWEEN CHRISTIAN DENOMINATIONS

IV. THE SCOTTISH PROBLEM

By the Very Rev. JAMES COOPER, D.D., Litt.D., D.C.L., V.D.

The very appearance of this subject on the programme of the CAMBRIDGE SUMMER MEETING, and still more the fact that it has been entrusted to ministers of different Christian denominations--one of them, too, from across the Border--are signs of a remarkable change that has come over--we may say--the _whole Christian people_ of Great Britain.

Our island was, till not so long ago, emphatically a land of different, and diverging "churches" and "denominations," unashamed of their separation; nay, boasting their exclusiveness, or their dissidence, commemorating with pride their secessions and disruptions. And even when they began to see something of the evils such tempers and such acts had brought in their train--the wastefulness of them, in regard alike to money, to men's toil, and gifts given by G.o.d for the use of the whole Church but confined in their exercise to some small section;--the injury to character, the multiform self-righteousness engendered by our schisms, the breaches of Christian justice and charity;--the treatment of that whole Mediaeval Period to which we owe so much, as if it had been one dark age of heathen blindness;--and, again, the hindrances to Christian work at home and especially abroad,--when uneasiness over these results began to shew itself, the recognition of the evil expressed itself at first in ways hardly indicative of any depth of penitence, or conducive to any practical measures for the healing of the wrong. We had in one quarter "Evangelical Alliances," which put a new stigma on huge portions of the Church of G.o.d, yet left those who took part in their meetings contented in their own divisions. In other quarters--probably in both the established Churches of our island--there was a tendency (and more) to look down on Dissenters as such, to ignore even their reasonable grievances, to ask more from them than either Holy Scripture or early tradition could warrant, and to disparage unions that were possible and urgent as likely to put new difficulties in the way of that further and perfect union of all who believe in Christ which alone He has promised, and for which alone He tells us that He prays.

I should be the very last to deprecate either prayer or effort to advance this perfect end. It ought to be the ultimate aim of all of us, since it is Christ's. We must do nothing to hinder it: we must do all that may be lawful for us to promote it. But it should be pointed out to such as look exclusively towards the East and Rome, first, that a juster view of those great Churches--great gain as it is--affords little excuse for ignoring the Churches of the Reformation, and for leaving the large numbers of devout Christians in the lesser sects without either the hope or the means of supplying defects which are now, for the most part, rather inherited than chosen; second, that the divisions and "variations" among all who in East or West, in England or in Scotland, in the 11th or the 16th century, felt themselves bound to repudiate the Papal Supremacy, have supplied, and still supply, the Papacy with a chief weapon against all of us alike, and in favour of those extreme pretensions which have been a chief cause of, and remain a chief obstacle to reunion; and third, that nothing is more likely to bring about that kinder att.i.tude toward the East and us which we desiderate on the part of Rome than a large and generous measure here and in America of "Home Reunion"--effected, of course (as it can only be effected), on the basis of the Catholic Creeds, a worship in the beauty of holiness, and the Apostolic Ministry.

Anyhow, this is what we are finding in Scotland. Scotland, I know, is but a little bit of the world: its largest churches small in comparison with those of England and the United States, not to speak of the vast communions of Rome and of the East. But the experience even of a small part may intimate what may be looked for in much larger sections of what after all is essentially the same body. For the Church, the Body of Christ, in all lands and in all ages is one in spite of its divisions.

Christ is not divided. It is "subjective unity" not "objective" which in the Church on earth is at present, through our sins, "suspended." Well, in Scotland; where, let me remind you, the confession of Christ alike as "King of the Nations" and "King in Zion," and of the visible Church as His Kingdom on earth, was never laid aside, either in the National Church or in the churches which separated from it (we laid aside much that we should have done well to keep, but we stuck manfully to this); we have had within recent times quite a number of incorporating unions; including two of considerable note--the union in 1847 which brought together in the "United Presbyterian Church" the two main sections of our 18th century "Seceders," and the union of 1900 of the United Presbyterians with the great ma.s.s of the "Free Church" of 1843--the union that has given us the "United Free Church." I doubt if to either of these unions the hope of a future Catholic Reunion contributed, at the time, much or anything. I know there were some in the Church of Scotland who fancied, and alleged, that the union of 1900 was "engineered" with no friendly purpose towards us. But what has been the outcome? Both of these unions:--partial in themselves--have tended, in the result, very materially to de-Calvinize (if I may coin the word) the general Presbyterianism of Scotland, and break down narrow prejudices, to widen the outlook and enlarge the sympathies of those who took part in them. The second, and greater of these unions, that of 1900 (suspected then, as I have said), proved, within eight short years, to be the very thing to pave the way for the opening, between the Church of Scotland and the United Free Church, of those official negotiations for an incorporating union which promise now to give us ere long a Church of Scotland, not complete, indeed--not embracing even all the Presbyterians of Scotland, and greatly needing the Scottish Episcopalians--but still a Church which will include an immense preponderance of the Scottish people; which will be able to cover the whole country with not inadequate organizations; which will be freer also than it is at present to enter into further unions; which will remain--what it has ever been--both national and orthodox; and will continue, I believe, to go on rapidly resuming many of those touching, reverent, and churchly usages which in the heats of the 16th and 17th centuries it unwisely threw away or, less excusably, gave up in the coldness of the 18th. We have still some beautiful old usages, as well as enviable liberties and powers. And even in the 18th century we kept the Faith against Arian and Socinian heresy: even then, our sacramental teaching could be high: even then, the doctrine and the practice alike of the Established Church and the Seceders were clear and strong on the derivation of the Ministry from Christ, and the Apostolical succession of our ministers, and yours, through presbyters.

For myself, I suggested in 1907, when it was proposed in our General a.s.sembly to open these negotiations, that we should attempt a larger duty, and approach all the reformed Churches in Scotland. I was over-ruled. It was held wiser "in the meantime" (they gave me this much) to "confine our invitation" to the United Free Church.

The Scottish Episcopal Church appeared to be of this mind also; and those in her and among us who have long looked wistfully towards our union with her and with the Church of England are already finding that our present effort (limited as it is) is proving not an obstacle, as some of us feared, but a powerful impetus towards the larger effort. The union seems likely to clear away hindrances to an extent we never dreamed of. It is opening up the wider prospect among an increasing number not in the Church of Scotland only, but emphatically also in the United Free Church. On all hands it is "recognised" in Scotland that the official "limitation of the Union horizon is only temporary":--I quote from the _Annual Report_ for this year of the Scottish Church Society:

No one is content to accept the contemplated union, should it be accomplished, as exhaustive. We all wait for a fuller manifestation of the Grace of G.o.d. At this season of Pentecost we dream our dreams and see our visions of that great and notable day when all who name the One Name shall be one.

The witness of the Scottish Church Society may seem to some one-sided: here is a witness from the other side, of a date more recent than last May; from a pamphlet just issued by the venerable Dr William Mair, the first and most persevering of the advocates of our present enterprise.

His words impress me as very touching in their transparent honesty:

It is thirteen years (he writes) since I first spoke out in the form of a pamphlet. No man stood with me. Hard things were said of me. I believed it to be the will of the HEAD of the Church, the LORD JESUS CHRIST, that there should be union of His Church in Scotland, and primarily that its two great Churches should be one.

I have never for a single moment doubted that His will would be fulfilled, or that it was the duty of these Churches to set themselves, under His guidance, with resolute purpose to work out its fulfilment.

Observe his "primarily": he quite recognises (I have his authority for saying so) the further obligation. And no wonder: he is clear as to the one great and supreme motive that should inspire all efforts for Church Reunion--faith in the Lord Jesus Christ, and the obedience of faith which the true confession of His Deity involves.

The will of the Lord in regard to the visible unity of His whole Church is plain: "Other sheep I have which are not of this fold: them also I must lead; and they shall hear My voice, and there shall be one flock, one Shepherd." No doubt there is a difference between a fold ([Greek: anle]) and a flock ([Greek: poimne]), between the racial unity of the Jewish Dispensation and the Catholic and international character impressed from the beginning on the Christian Church. But a flock is as visible as a fold is. We can see the one moving along the road under the shepherd's guidance just as distinctly as we see the other gleaming white on the hillside, or raising its turf-capped walls above the level of the moor. We can see, of course, if the walls of a fold are broken down; but we can see also whether a flock is united, whether it is moving forward as one ma.s.s, or is broken up and scattered. Such separations might be well enough if the different little companies were all going quietly on in one way; though even then their breaking up would argue on the one hand a portentous failure in that recognition of the shepherd's voice and the obedience to him which is due to his loving care, and on the other hand a strange lack of that gregariousness which is an instinct in the healthy sheep. But what if the sheep are seen running hither and thither in different directions: if they are found labouring to explain the inadvisability--nay, the impossibility--of their ever coming into line; if we see them instead crossing each other's path, starting from each other, jostling and b.u.t.ting one another, continually getting into situations provocative of fights and injuries?

Is this the kind of picture which the Lord Jesus has drawn of His Flock, His Church as He wishes, and intends, that it should be: is this what He promises that it shall be?

Christ made His Church one at the beginning: the rulers He set over it "were all with one accord in one place"; "the mult.i.tude of them that believed were of one heart and of one soul." And when the Gentiles had been brought in, what care did the Apostles take lest the new departure should cause a separation along a line made obsolete by the Cross of Christ; and with what adoring admiration does St Paul gaze at the delightful spectacle of Jew and Gentile made one new man in Christ Jesus--"where," he cries, "there cannot be Greek and Jew, circ.u.mcision and uncirc.u.mcision, barbarian, Scythian, bondman, freeman, but Christ is all, and in all."

In matters of rank and race and colour all our denominations retain this Apostolic Catholicity. How inconsistent to maintain it there, and repudiate it when we come to such differences as mostly separate us!

These are differences far more of temper than of creed, or even of worship or government. We say, sometimes, that we are "one in spirit": not so; it is just in spirit that we have been divided. In creed and organisation both, and in temper as well, the Church of Apostolic times was visibly one. "See how these Christians love one another" was the comment of the heathen onlooker. This state of things continued for a long time. Gibbon enumerates the Church's "unity and discipline," which go together, as among the "secondary causes" of that wonderful spread of the Gospel in the first three centuries.

The revived, broadened, and more candid study, alike of the New Testament and of Church History throughout its entire course, is one of the ways in which the Good Shepherd has been leading us to see alike the disobedience of our divisions, and the small foundation there is for many of the points over which we have been fighting.

Happily too, we do not now need to argue in favour of visible and organic unity. "The once popular apologies for separation which a.s.serted the sufficiency of 'spiritual' union, and the stimulating virtues of rivalry and compet.i.tion, have become obsolete."

More happily still, we have learned practically to appreciate the difference between our Saviour's gentle I must lead ([Greek: dei me agagein]) and our forefathers' various attempts to produce "uniformity"

by driving. The reproach of that sinful blunder is one that none of our greater Churches--Roman, Anglican, Presbyterian, or Puritan--can cast in another's teeth. Each of us committed it in our day of triumph. "What fruit had we then in those things whereof we are now ashamed?" The memory--one-sided, and carefully cultivated--of what each suffered in its turn of adversity has. .h.i.therto been a potent agency for keeping us apart. To-day those memories are fading. I was much struck by a remark I heard last spring from the Bishop of Southwark, that one reason why we are more ready nowadays to contemplate reunion is just that we belong to a generation to whom those miserable doings are far-off things outside alike our experience and our expectation.

In other ways also we discern leadings of Our Saviour to the same end.

Through Whitefield and the Wesleys, and the Evangelical Revival, He re-awakened the peoples of England and America to a keen sense of the need for personal religion. Where these powerful agencies had the defects of their qualities, in their failure to appreciate aright His gracious ordinances of Church and Ministry and Sacrament, He rectified the balance by giving us in due course the Oxford Movement, whose force is not "spent," but diffused through all our "denominations." Let us be just to the Oxford Movement: without it, humanly speaking, we should not have been here to-day. If it had its own narrownesses, it revived the very studies which, while they have revealed the inadequacy of certain of its postulates, have also brought clear into the view of all of us the Divine goal which now gleams glorious in front of us--the goal of the great Apostle--"the building up of the Body of Christ: till we all attain unto the unity of the Faith, and of the knowledge of the Son of G.o.d, unto a full-grown man, unto the measure of the stature of the fulness of Christ."

A Scotsman may be excused for referring to the debt which the leaders of the Oxford Movement--Dr Pusey in particular was always ready to admit it--owed to Sir Walter Scott, particularly in re-awakening a more sympathetic interest in the Mediaeval Church. If Sir Walter's countrymen were slower to follow him in this matter, they are doing so now in unexpected quarters. We are full to-day of the American alliance: may I remind you that Sir Walter Scott was the first British man of letters to hail the early promise of American literature by his cordial welcome to its representative, Washington Irving? Scott was a devoted subject of the British Monarchy; but he saw, and he insisted on, the duty of Great Britain to cultivate a warm friendship with the United States.

In the same direction we have been led in days more recent by the large development, in all our denominations, of two main branches of Christian work. I refer to Missionary enterprise abroad and Social service at home. Our ecclesiastical divisions are a serious handicap to both. In a matter more vital still, that of the Religious--the Christian--Education in our Schools and Colleges, our divisions have sometimes proved well-nigh fatal. The one remedy is that we make up our differences and come together.

And now this War, so dreadful in itself, is helping powerfully, and in many ways, to the same end. It is bringing us together at home, and making us acquainted with, and appreciative of, each other in a thousand forms of united service. It has spread before our eyes the magnificent and inspiring spectacles of Colonial loyalty, of one military command over the Allied Forces, of the cordial and enthusiastic support of a fully-reconciled America. Shall "the children of this world be wiser than the children of light"? Shall the Church neglect the lesson read to her by the statesmen and the warriors? Then, again, the cause for which we are in arms is--most happily--not denominational. The present War is not in the least like those hateful, if necessary, struggles which historians have ent.i.tled "The Wars of Religion": but it is, on the part of the Entente, essentially and fundamentally Christian--more profoundly so than the Crusades themselves. That is why it is bringing us so markedly together. And, if this is its effect at home and in America, much more is it producing the same result among our chaplains and our Christian workers at the Front. They are finding, on the one hand, the limitations, or faults, of every one of our stereotyped methods of work and forms of worship; they are seeing on the other hand among each other excellencies where they only saw defects. They are brought together in admiring comradeship, which resents the shackles restrictive of its play. Let me read to you a pa.s.sage from a letter I received a fortnight since from an eminent Anglican chaplain now serving with our troops in France:

I see (he says) in this great war all the excrescences--the non-essentials which up till now have masqueraded and misled so many religious and non-religious men--drop off in the light of great realities; and I have seen in the eyes of all true lovers of our LORD, chaplains and laity, a wistful longing to unite, and mobilize our spiritual forces now dissipated and ineffective through disunion. What we look for more and more is a man, so filled with the SPIRIT of G.o.d--so free from ambition, covetousness, denominationalism, with a big heart and deep love, to make a plunge and start. We may be able to start out here, if we have the good-will of our leaders at home.

I think I may safely a.s.sure my correspondent that he has the good-will of all the living leaders of all our denominations? May I write and tell him so from this present meeting? [Yes....] I think I shall remind him further of those words of the Angel of the Lord to Gideon when he threshed his wheat in the wine-press with a vigour suggestive of his wish to have the Midianites beneath his flail--"Go in this thy might, and thou shalt save Israel" from their marauding hands.

At home, then, as well as at the Front, the will is present with us; and where there is "the will" there is pretty sure to be "the way."

"The way" (I believe for my part) is substantially that laid down by the Pan-Anglican Conference of 1866, in the "Lambeth Quadrilateral." Its four points were:

I. The Holy Scriptures.

II. The Nicene Creed.

III. The Sacraments of Baptism and the Lord's Supper ministered with the unfailing use of the Words of Inst.i.tution.

IV. The Historic Episcopate.

It is fifty-two years since these terms were put forth. Have they ever been formally brought before the "denominations" for whom presumably they were intended? Were they even once commended to the nearest of these Churches by a deputation urging their consideration? I doubt it.

Yet the first three of these four conditions are already accepted by nearly all the English Nonconformists; and certainly by all the Presbyterian Churches, as fully as they are in the Church of England.

The Presbyterian Church of England has set the Nicene Creed on the fore-front of its new Confession. Every word of the Nicene Creed (as the late Princ.i.p.al Denney pointed out) is in the Confession of Faith of all the Scottish Presbyterians. The Church of Scotland repeats it at its solemn "a.s.sembly Communion" in St Giles'. Its crucial term, the h.o.m.oousion, is in the Articles now sent down to Presbyteries with the view of their transmission next May to the United Free Church.