The Church of the Living God

“The Church of the living God.” — I TIM. iii. 15.

I WANT to preach to you to-day about the Church. It has grown to be our habit on this Sunday morning, when we annually make our contribution for Domestic Missions, to speak especially and definitely about the Church; not, that is, directly of the personal Christian experience, but of the great corporate body of Christian life throughout the world, and especially of that particular organization in which we live and worship, and whose work in our own country we are to contribute to extend. If the Church is often thought about, and talked about, in a petty and mechanical and formal way, let us be very careful, if we can, to avoid formality and pettiness in our talk of her to-day. Let us try to make her seem what she really is, the Church of the living God, and Home of living men.

Let us begin then with one of the most pii-turesque and striking and perhaps perplexing incidents which occur in the Church’s life. A minister is called upon fco baptize a little dying child. It is an infant of a day. A ray of light has come from heaven, and just flashed for an instant into the great flood of sunlight, and now is being gathered back again into the darkness out of which it came. The minister goes and baptizes the unconscious child. He does an act which perhaps to those who stand around, seems like the blankest superstition. “What does it mean?” they say. “Have a little sprinkled water and a few whispered words any influence upon this flickering flame of life which in a moment is to go out? If the child is to live elsewhere after its brief life here on earth is over, will this ceremony do it any good? If it revives and lives its life out here on earth, will it live any better for this hurried incantation?” Meanwhile, to the minister, and to the Church of which he is a minister, that baptism of the dying child has a profound and beautiful significance. It is not thought of for a moment as the saving of the child’s soul. The child dying unbaptized goes to the same loving care and education which awaits the child baptized. But the baptism is the solemn, grateful, tender recognition, during the brief moments of that infant’s life on earth, of the deep meanings of his humanity. It is the human race in its profoundest selfconsciousness welcoming this new member to its multitude. Only for a few moments does he tarry in this condition of humanity; his life touches the earth only to leave it; but in those few moments of his tarrying, humanity lifts up its hand and claims him. She says, “You are part of me, and being part of me, you are part of mo forever. Your liftmay disappear from mortal siirlif almost we have seen it, but, wherever it may go, it is a human life forever. It belongs to God, as, and 1 a 1 1 humanity belongs to Him.” Humanity, recognizing itself as belonging to God, recognizes this infant portion of herself as belonging to Him, claims it i..r Him, takes it into her own most consecrated hopes, appropriates for it that redemption of Christ which led man’s belonging to God, declares it a member of that Church which is simply humanity as be longing to God, the divine conception of humanity, her own realization of herself as it belongs to God.

Can there be any act more full of significance, more free from superstition? And is there not in this act, just because of the feeble unconsciousness of the child to whom it is administered, the most distinct indication of the nature of the Church into which he is admitted? There is no fact developed yet about the child except his pure humanity. «- know nothing whatsoever about his talents, or his character. It makes no difference whether he is rich or poor. He may lie cradled in daintiest lace, or in most squalid rags. Beauty or ugliness, brightness or dullness, friendship or friendlessness, good blood or bad blood, are not taken into account; we baptize him, be he what he may, so that only he is ;i human creature, the child of human parents, the sharer of our human nature; we baptize him into the fellowship of consecrated humanity, into the Church of the living God.

Church of the Living God. 45

Have we not then presented to us in this simple ceremony, which to one bystander may seem so in significant and to another so superstitious, the deepest and broadest meaning of the Christian Church? It is the body of redeemed humanity. It is man in his deepest interests, iii his spiritual possibilities. It is the under-life, the sacred, the profounder life of man, his re-generation. Every human being in very virtue of birth into the redeemed world is a potential member of the Christian Church. His baptism claims and asserts his membership.

And now suppose that Baptism were universal, and suppose that instead of being, what it is so often, even among Christian people, a formal ceremony, everywhere it were a living act, instinct with meaning, what a world this would be! Every new-born immortal welcomed by the whole spiritual consciousness of his race! There is some true sense, we may well believe, in which the physical life of humanity grows richer through its whole substance by the added life of each new body. Just in proportion as the spiritual is more sensitive than the physical, may we not hold that the spirituality of the whole race is richer for the access of this new soul? Baptism is the utterance of the rejoicing welcome. The whole world of spiritual capacity thrills with delight and expectation. The Church accepts its new member and undertakes his education. For what time he is to be in her, a part of her, before he goes to his eternal place to be a member of the Church in heaven, whether it be for a few short hours or for a long eighty years, the Church belongs to him and he belongs to the Church. If he does good work it is the Church’s gain and glory. If he sins, and is profligate, it is as a member of the Church that he is w irked. The Church is spiritual humanity, and hr, a spiritual human being, is, by that very fact, a Churchman.

I cannot tell you, my dear friends, how strongly this view takes possession of me the longer that I live. I cannot think, I will not think about the Christian Church as if it were a selection out of humanity. In its idea it is humanity. The hard, iron-faced man whom I meet upon the street, the degraded, sad-faced man who goes to prison, the weak, silly-faced man who haunts society, the discouraged, sad-faced man who drags the chain of drudgery, they are all members of the Church, members of Christ, children of God, heirs of the kingdom of heaven. Their birth made them so. Their baptism declared the truth which their birth made true. It is impossible to estimate their lives aright, unless we give this truth concerning them the first impor tance.

Think too, what would be the meaning of the other sacrament, if this thought of the Church of the living God were real and universal. The Lord’s Supper, the right and need of every man to feed on God, the bread of divine sustenance, the wine of divine inspiration offered to every man, and turned by every man into what form of spiritual force the duty and the nature of each man required, how grand and glorious its mission might become! No longer the mystic source of unintelligible influence; no longer certainly the test of arbitrary othodoxy; no longer the initiation rite of a selected brotherhood; but the great sacrament of man! The seeker after truth, with all the world of truth freely open before him, would come to the Lord’s table, to refresh the freedom of his soul, to liberate himself from slavery and prejudice. The soldier going forth to battle, the student leaving college, the legislator setting out for Washington, the inventor just upon the brink of the last combination which would make his invention perfect, the merchant getting ready for a sharp financial crisis, all men full of the passion of their work, would come there to the Lord’s Supper to fill their passion with the divine fire of consecration. They would meet and know their unity in beautiful diversity — this Christian Church around the Christian feast. There is no other rallying place for all the good activity and worthy hopes of man. It is in the power of the great Christian Sacrament, the great human sacrament, to become that rallying-place. Think how it would be, if some morning all the men, women and children in this city who mean well, from the reformer meaning to meet some giant evil at the peril of his life to the school boy meaning to learn his day’s lesson with all his strength, were to meet in a great host at the table of the Lord, and own them selves His children, and claim the strength of His bread and wine, and then go out with calm, strong, earnest faces to their work. How the communion service would lift up its voice and It’ in

triumph, tin- ^-n-at anthem of dedicated human lil»-. Ah, my friends. 1hat. nothing ICSK than that, is tin; real Holy Communion of the Church of the living-God.

And then the ministry, the ministers, what a life theirs must be, whenever the Church thus comes to realize itself! We talk to-day, as if the ministers of the Church were consecrated for the people. The old sacerdotal idea of substitution has not died away. Sometimes it’ is distinctly proclaimed and taught. What is the release from such a false idea? Not to teach that the ministers are not consecrated, but to teach that all the people are; not to deny the priesthood of the Clergy, but to assert the priesthood of all men. We can have no hope, I believe, of the de struction of the spirit of hierarchy by direct attack. It may be smitten down a thousand times. A th nsand times it will rise again. Only when all men become full of the sense of the sacredness of their own life, will the assumption of supreme cleri< -al sacredness find itself overwhelmed with th” rising tide. The fault of all onslaughts upon the lofty claims of the ministry has been here. They have vociferously declared that ministers were no 1 than other men. They have not bravely and devi ptrdly claimed for all men, the right and power to be as good and holy and spiritual as any St. John been in his consecrated ministry. When that: claim is made and justified in life, then, not tili lordship over God’s heritage shall disappear and the true greatness of the minister, as the fellow-worker with and servant of the humblest and most struggling child of God, shall shine out on the world.

Yet once more, here must be seen the true place and dignity of truth and doctrine. It is not knowledge anywhere that is the end and purpose of man’s labor or of God’s government. It is life. It is the full activity of powers. Knowledge is a means to that. Why is it that the Church has magnified doc trine overmuch arid throned it where it does not be long? It is because the Church has not cared enough for life. She has not overvalued doctrine; she has undervalued life. When the Church learns that she is in her idea simply identical with all nobly active humanity, when she thinks of herself as the true insj piror and purifier of all the life of man, then she will — what? Not cast her doctrines away, as many of her impetuous advisers bid her do; she will see their value, their precious value, as she never has seen it yet; but she will hold them always as the means of life, and she will insist that out of their depths they shall send forth manifest strength for life which shall justify her holding them.

The decrying of dogma in the interest of life, of creed in the interest of conduct, is very natural, but very superficial. It is superficial because, if it succeeded, it would make life and conduct blind and weak. But it is natural because it is the crude healthy outburst of human protest against the value of dogma for its own sake, of which the Church has always been too full. Let us not join in it.

50 The Church of the Living (n-d,

Let us insist that it is good for man to know 61 tiling In- can know, and believe everything hbelieve of the truth of God. But while we will not pull down dogma, let us do all we can to build up life about dogma, and demand of dogma that service which it is the real joy of her heart to render t<» life. I will not hoar men claim that the doctrine of tho Trinity has no help or inspiration to give to the merchant or the statesman. It has great help, great inspiration. I will not hear men claim that it menus nothing to the scholar or the bricklayer whether ho believes or disbelieves in tin; Atonement. It means very much to either. Out of the heart of those doctrines 1 must demand the help and inspiration which they have to give. Then I must do all that I can to make the life which needs that help and inspiration hungry for them. 1 must do all that I can to make the world’s ordinary operations know their sacredness and crave the sacred impulse which the dogmas have to give. I must summon all life to look up to tho hills. I must teach the world that it is the Church, and needs and has a right to all the Church’s privileges, and so make it cry out to the truths of tin; Trinity and Atonement to open the depths of their helpfulness, as they never have heard the call to open them when only theologians were calling on them to complete their ihcologir systems, or only a

few special souls were asking them for special comforts or assistance. Here, in the assertion of tin; 1 human Church, IS the true adjustment of the relations of Doctrine and Life! Doctrine kept active by life. Life kept deep by doctrine.

Ah, but you say, this does not sound like the New Testament. There certainly the Church and the world are not the same. They are not merely different; they are hostile to each other. There is a perpetual conflict between the two. Indeed there is; But what Church and what world are fighting together there? The Church is a little handful of half-believers. The world is a great ocean of sensuality and secularity and sin. Of course between those two there is an everlasting conflict, so long as each is what it is. The world distrusts the Church, in part at least, because it feels coming out from it no spiritual power. The Church dreads the world, which is always dragging it down from its imperfect loyalty and consecration. But he has listened very carelessly to the New Testament who has not heard in it the muffled, buried voices of another Church and another world, crying out for life! A Church completely strong in faith, not standing guard over herself, but boldly claiming all the world in all of its activities for Christ, and a world conscious of its belonging to divinity, counting its sin and intrusion an anomaly, a world ashamed and hungry, the world of which St. Paul dreamed, the groaning and travailing creation. How often as we read the New Testament, this deeper Church and this deeper world are dimly seen and faintly heard beneath this present faithlessness and sin. How, whenever they are seen and heard, we recognize, be-

52 The Church of the Lrcing God.

yond a doubt, that they arc tin- true ( ‘hurch. and the true world, ami that every departure from or falling short of then j iii’ the Church’s or the world’s

reality. And how, when the true Church and the true world stand before us, we sec and know that they are not in conflict; that they are in perfect harmony; nay, far more than that, that they are identical with one another.

There is no fight so fierce and vehement as that which rages between two beings which ought to be perfectly one. but which, because each i’alls short of what it was designed to be. are now in conflict with each other. So long as the ( ‘hurch and the world are what they are there must be discord. Yc who are in the Church must keep watchful guard over her, and must dread and oppose the evil influence s of the, world. But at the same time w-e never must let ourselves forget that all this is unnatural. Ve must never lose out of our sight the vision, never lose out of our ears the music of the real Church and the real world struggling each into perfection for itself, and so both into unity and identity with one another.

Very interesting have been in history the pulsations, the brightening and fading, the coming and going of this great truth of the Church and the world ideally identical. That truth is always present in the words of rlcsus. He told his disciples how they were to fight with the actual world, to be persecuted by it, even to be murdered by it. Uut he!, i ls pointing abroad ami saying, “The field is the world.” The ideal Church, which was the real Church in his eyes, knew no limit but humanity.

By-aiid-by came the persecutions of the early Church, and they drove the Church in upon itself, and made the few believers think of themselves as outcasts and exceptions. The intensity of their personal experiences dulled and dimmed the thought of their being simply representatives of all humanity. The Church lived like a sect of souls with special privileges and illuminations.

The mediaeval Church in its own way caught sight again of the idea of universality, but it was formal and selfish. It did not think of itself as ful filling the life of the world, but of the world as existing for it, and to be practically swallowed up in its dominion. Still it had some notion of it and the world coming to identity with one another, though it was almost the identity of the wolf with the sheep which he has devoured.

With the Protestant Reformation came another intense assertion of the personal nature of religion, und the larger aspects, the world-meaning of the Church, was lost or lay in silence. Calvinism was too busy with the intense problem of the individual soul to think much of the great Redemption of the world, of all humanity.

But now, when in these latter days, there are so many signs that we are passing into a new region, beyond the strong immediate power of the Reformation which has prevailed from the sixteenth century till now, it is the relation of the Church to the active world, tin- conflict ;m<l the possible harmony !>«•-

i wcci i t hci 1 1. 1 IK- i: of the Church to the world,

the turning of the world into the Church,: tin- problems and the visions which aiv more and more occupying the minds of thoughtful visim. ing men.

Such alternations and pulsations cannot go on for ever. The hostility of the Church to the world, and the conformity of the Church to the world, neither of them is the final condition, nor shall the Church vacillate between them always. (Iradually. slowly, but at last surely, this must come forth which we saw testified even in tin- hurried baptism of the little child who made this earth his home but lor a single day, that the earth is the Lord’s, and so that to be living in this earth is to belong to Cod; and that all human life is by the very fact of its humanity a portion of His Church.

I think that we can d the best work in the Christian Church only in the light of that truth cordially acknowledged. Because that truth is coming lo more and more cordial acknowledgment, I believe, that the Christian Church is becoming a better and a better place to work in every year. If I ask where in the Christian Church one can best live and work, I answer myself that it will be where that truth is most vital, where it makes most strongly thpower of the ( ‘huivh’s life.

And this brings me to what little I want t” about our own ( ‘hurch, on this morning when we are to make our annual contribution for the extension of her work. We value and love our Communion very deeply. To many of us she has been the nurse, almost the mother of our spiritual life. To all of us she is endeared by long companionship, and by familiar sympathy in the profoundest experiences through which our souls have passed. When we deliberately turn our backs for a moment upon all these rich and sweet associations, and ask ourselves in colder and more deliberate consideration, why it is that we be lieve in our Episcopal Church and rejoice to commend her to our fellow-countrymen and fellow-men; the answer which I find myself giving, is that our Church seems to me to be truly trying to realize this relation to the whole world, this sacredness of all life, this ideal belonging of all men to the Church of Christ, which, as I have been saying, is the great truth of active Christianity. I find the signs of such an effort, in the very things for which some people fear or blame our Church. I find it in the impor tance which she gives to Baptism and in the breadth of her conception of that rite; for Baptism is the strongest visible assertion of this truth. I find it in her simplicity of doctrine. I find it in the value which she sets on worship; her constant summons to all men not merely to be preached to, but to pray; her firm belief in the ability and right of all men to offer prayer to God. I find it in her strong historic spirit, her sense of union with the ages which have past out of sight and of whose men we know only their absolute humanity. In all these things I recognize the true, strong ten-

56 The Church of tlic Living C/W.

dency wliicli our Church lias In draw m-ar to the life, of the world, an. I to draw the world’s lit’.- near to her. In this tendency all true ( ‘hiirchineii must r. joiee. Her l»n adth of doctrine, her .l.-voiit ness, and her clear hold upon the long history of human life, all these qualify her tor a great work in bringing up humanity, and making it know itself for what it is. the trm; universal ( ‘hurch of the Living (iod, toward which all ecclesiastical establishments which have thus far existed in the world, have been attempts, of which they have been preparatory studies.

Can our Church do any such great otlice as this for the America in which she is set? There are some of her children who love to call her in exclusive phrase The American Church. She is not that; and to call her that would be to give her a name to which she has no right. The American Church is the great total body of Christianity in America, in many divisions, under many names, broken, discordant, disjointed, often quarrelsome and disgracefully j -alous, part of part, yet as a whole bearing perpetual testimony to the people of America of the authority and love of God, of the redemption of Christ, and of th cred possibilities of man. If our ( ‘hurch does especial work in our country, it must be by the especial and peculiar way in which she is able to bear that witness; not by any fiction of an apostolical succession in her ministry, which gives to them alone a right to such witness. There is no such pendiar privi- <>f commission belonging to her or any other body. The only ri-ht of any body lies in I!K- earnest will and in the manifest power. The right to preach the Gospel to America lies in the earnest faith that the Gospel is the only salvation of the people, first as men, and then as Americans; whoever brings that faith has the right to preach; whoever does not bring it has no right, be the fancied regularity of his commission what it may!

In some sense there has been reason to fear, and there is still reason to fear, that what makes part of the strength of our Church, may also make part of its weakness. Its historic sense binds it, in a very live way, to the sources from which it immediately sprang, and tempts it to treasure overmuch its association with the great Church of another land, the Church of England. So long as it does that it can never truly be the Church of America. So long as ifc prefers to import customs and costumes, names and ways, instead of creating them here out of the soil on which she lives, she will be what she has been in very much of her history, what she is in many parts of the land to-day, an exotic and not a true part of the nation’s life. The Episcopal Church’s only real chance of powerful life, is in the more and more complete identification of herself with the genius and national life of America.

To do that, she must become a great moral power. No careful preservation of the purity of doctrine, no strictness of ecclesiastical propriety, can take the place of moral strength. It is by the conscience, that the Church must take hold of this people. It is in the conscience, that the nation is uneasy. In its

5’S The Church of the Living God.

uneasy conscience, it sees the vision and hears the voices of the li!<- it might be living. To the conacience of the nation then, the (‘Imn-h that is must

sjpeak to tell the nation of the Church that it might The Church which forty years ago had bravely cried out at the sin of ulavi TV, would he more powerful than we can imagine in America to-day. TIic Church which to-day effectively denounces intemperance, and the licentiousness of pocial life, the cruelty or indifference of the rich to the poor, and the prostitution of public office, will become the real Church of America. Our Church has done some good service here. She ought to do much more. Largely the Church of the rich, she ought to rebuke rich men’s vices and to stir rich men’s torpidity. She ought to blow her trumpet in the ears of the young men of fortune, summoning them from their clubs and their frivolities to do the chivalrous work, which their nobility obliges them to do for I’d lowman. She ought to speak to Culture, and teach it its responsibility. She ought to make real contributions to the creation of that atmosphere of brotherhood and hope and reverence for man, in which alone there is any chance that the hard social and economical problems of the present and the future can find solution. If she can do such things as these, she will be following in the steps of all the la. minded, deepest-hearted Fathers of the church, all the way from St. Paul down. That, is the true apostolical succession. That she must not that she lias, but she must struggle more and more earnestly to win.

My friends, it is not possible for the true man to think of his Church without thinking of his country. I cannot be the Churchman that I ought without being a patriot. On this Sunday morning, when we plead for our Church, let the image of our country stand before us, with her chances, with her dangers, with her glories, with her sins! We are glad indeed that our Church is not the only church which is laboring for the land’s salvation. We rejoice in all that our brother Christians of other names are doing; but we believe in the work which our Church has to do. We pray to God, 0 keep her simple, brave and earnest, free from fantasticalness and cowardice and selfishness, that she may do it. We look on, and far, far away we see the Nation-church, the land all full of Christ, the Nation-church, a true part of the World-church, issuing into glorious life, and swallowing up our small ecclesiasticisms, as the sun grandly climbing up the heavens swallows up the scattered rays which he sent out at his rising. And full of that vision, we are ready to do what we can to make our Church strong for the work which it must do in preparation for that day!