The Formation of Christendom, Volume II
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Title: The Formation of Christendom, Volume II
Author: T. W. Allies
Release date: May 31, 2012 [eBook #39873]
Most recently updated: June 17, 2020
Language: English
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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE FORMATION OF CHRISTENDOM, VOLUME II ***
The Formation of Christendom
Volume II
By
Thomas William Allies
London:
Longmans, Green, Reader, and Dyer.
1869
CONTENTS
Preface.
Chapter VII. The Gods Of The Nations When Christ Appeared.
Chapter VIII. The First And The Second Man.
Chapter IX. The Second Man Verified In History.
Chapter X. The First Age Of The Martyr Church.
Chapter XI. The Second Age Of The Martyr Church.
Chapter XII. The Third Age Of The Martyr Church.
Chapter XIII. The Christian Church And The Greek Philosophy. Part I.
Chapter XIV. The Christian Church And The Greek Philosophy. Part II.
Index.
Footnotes
PREFACE.
In the six chapters forming the first volume of this work I was engaged in
describing the operation of Christianity, as it took the individual human
soul for its unit, purified it, and wrought in it a supernatural life. I
began with the consummation of the old world in its state of the highest
civilisation united with the utmost moral degeneracy; I proceeded thence
to the new creation of individual man; compared heathen with Christian man
in the persons of Cicero and St. Augustine; drew out certain effects upon
the world around of Christian life, as seen in those professing it, and
viewed Christian marriage as restoring the primary relation between man
and woman, and thus remaking the basis of human society, while the
Virginal Life exhibited the crown and efflorescence of the most
distinctive Christian grace in the soul.
I had thus, beginning with the stones of which the building is formed,
reached the building itself; and the next thing was to consider the
Christian Church in its historical development as the Kingdom of Truth and
Grace: for while the soul of man is the unit with which it works, the word
“Christendom” betokens a society founded in Christ, made by Christ,
stamped with the image of Christ. It is the first great epoch of such a
Kingdom of Truth and Grace, proceeding from the Person of its Founder,
which I here attempt to delineate.
But not merely is the volume which I now publish a part only of a
projected design; even as a part it is incomplete. It was my wish to
finish this portion of my subject in one volume, which should reach to the
great Nicene Council. But the treatment of the Greek Philosophy was too
large for my limits, and so the last two chapters serve but as an
introduction to the actual contact of that Philosophy with the Christian
Church, which remains to be considered before I can complete my view of
the Formation of Christendom in the ante-Nicene period.
CHAPTER VII. THE GODS OF THE NATIONS WHEN CHRIST APPEARED.
“Emmanuel, Rex et Legifer noster, Expectatio gentium, et Salvator
earum, veni ad salvandum nos, Domine Deus noster.”
Under the sceptre of the imperial unity were brought together a hundred
different lands occupied by as many different races. That rule of Rome
which had grown for many centuries with out, as it seemed, any presiding
thought, by the casual accretions of conquest, may be said to assume under
the hands of Augustus, about the year of Rome 750, certain definite and
deliberately chosen limits, and to be governed by a fixed Idea, more and
more developed in the imperial policy. The limits which the most fortunate
of Roman emperors, nay the creator of the empire itself, put to it, were
the Rhine and Danube, with the Euxine Sea, on the north; the deserts of
Africa on the south; the Euphrates on the east; the ocean on the west. The
Idea, which may indeed have been conceived by Julius, but was certainly
first embodied by Augustus, was to change the constitution of a conquering
city, ruled by an aristocratic senate, into a commonwealth governed by one
man, the representative of the whole people; and the effect of this
change, an effect no doubt unforeseen, at least in its extent, by its
framer, was gradually to absorb the manifold races inhabiting these vast
regions into the majesty of the Roman law, order, and citizenship. The
three centuries which follow Augustus are occupied in working out the
drama of this unity. During this time the provinces appear to come out
more and more as parts of one whole. Some which at its commencement had
only just entered the circle of Roman power and thought, as Gaul, become
entirely interpenetrated with the law, language, customs, and civilisation
of the sovereign city. Spain was nearly as much, and northern Africa
perhaps even more Latinised: in all, local inequalities, and the
dissimilarity arising from conflicting races, customs, and languages, are
more and more softened down, though never entirely removed; and while
throughout this period the great city continues the head, yet the body
assumes an ever-increasing importance, until at length its members engage
the equal solicitude of that central potentate to whom all equally belong.
In the times of so-called Roman liberty, the plunder of lands which
received pro-consuls for their annual rulers, served to replenish the
fortunes of nobles exhausted by the corruption requisite to gain high
office; but if the dominion of one at Rome seemed an evil exchange to a
nobility which deemed itself born to enjoy a conquered world, at least it
served as a protection to those many millions for whom the equality of law
and order, the fair administration of justice, and the undisturbed
possession of property, constituted the chief goods of life. Cicero and
his peers might grieve over the extinction of what they termed liberty,
but Gaul, Spain, Africa, and Asia exulted in deliverance from the
oppression of a Verres, a Fonteius, a Gabinius, a Piso, or a Clodius, in
the communication of citizenship, and in the peace of a common
civilisation.
I. With a passing glance at the progress of this unity, which, great and
magnificent as it is, is yet external, let us turn to an object filling
the whole of this vast empire with its varied manifestations: for this
object leads us to the consideration of another unity, wholly internal,
without which that of government, law, and order must be apparent rather
than real, or at best, however seemingly imposing, be deprived of the
greater part of its efficacy.
1. It has been said that the empire contained in it many lands and many
races, but these likewise worshipped their own distinct gods, which were
acknowledged and sanctioned as national divinities for the several
countries wherein they were locally established. Had Augustus ordered an
enrolment not only of the numbers, the landed property, and the wealth of
his subjects, but of their gods, his public register, or Breviarium, would
have included at least ten distinct systems of idolatrous worship. First
of all, there would be the proper gods of Rome, then those of the Hellenic
race; and these, though the most similar to each other, yet refused a
complete amalgamation. But besides these there were on the west the
Etrurian, the Iberian, the Gallic, and the Germanic gods; on the east, the
Carian and Phrygian, the Syrian, the Assyrian, the Arabian; on the south,
the Phœnician, Libyan, and Egyptian. All these different races, inasmuch
as they were subjects of the empire, enjoyed undisturbed the right of
worshipping their ancestral gods,(1) who, so long as they did not overstep
their local boundaries, were recognised; they possessed priests, rites,
temples, estates, and self-government; they held the soil, and their
worship was legal. It was a matter of Roman policy not to interfere with
them. Nay, their several worshippers could carry their rites along with
them in their various sojourns and settlements, and even in Rome build
altars, and adore Egyptian, Asiatic, African, or Gallic gods. These
various systems agreed all in one point, that they were systems of
polytheistic idolatry: they all divided the attributes of the godhead,
assigning them to more or fewer objects, and worshipping all these by
visible symbols which the power worshipped was deemed to inhabit:(2) but
they did not make the same division with a mere difference of name; on the
contrary, they ran into and across each other with the most bewildering
multiplicity, variation, and contradiction. Even in the same system, if we
may give this name to any of the various mythologies, the several
divinities were perpetually interfering with each other’s province. When
the Roman made vows for the removal of his ailments, in his uncertainty to
which god the ailment belonged, or who was most proper to remove it, he
addressed his vow to several together; or in public supplications, being
often uncertain to whom exactly the prayer or offering should be made, he
cautiously expressed himself, “whether it be a god or a goddess.” And the
various Hellenic, Asiatic, or Egyptian cities often possessed local gods,
whose worship was supreme there, while they exercised far less influence,
or were even scarcely known elsewhere.(3)
Now merely as a specimen of what this worship was all over the Roman
empire, let us take the brilliant Athens, Greece’s eye, the world’s
university. First of all ruled in her the worship of Pallas-Athené: she
was the lady of the land, who had won it for her own after a hard contest
with Poseidon. Her chief sanctuaries were the temple of Athené, guardian
of the city, with its old statue fallen down from heaven on the Acropolis.
On the Acropolis likewise the Parthenon, built expressly for the gorgeous
Panathenaic festival; and in the lower city the Palladium with the statue
of the goddess supposed to have been brought from Troy. Yet the worship of
the “high goddesses,” Demeter and Persephoné, was also richly endowed with
shrines and festivals, and affected scarcely less the feelings of the
Athenians. Then Jupiter, as “supreme,” was honoured with unbloody offering
before the Erechtheium, dedicated to Athené: whilst as “Olympian” he had
the colossal temple begun by Peisistratus and finished after many hundred
years by Hadrian, and as “guardian of the city” distinct festivals. Yet
more manifold was the invocation of Apollo, as the Pythian, the Delphic,
the Lycian, as the ancestral god of the Ionians. The multiform Artemis had
her temples and worshippers as the Tauric, by the name Brauronia; as the
port-goddess, by the name Munychia; as the goddess of the hunt, by the
name Agrotera, who had the credit of the victory won at Marathon; as
presiding over birth, she was called Chitone, while Themistocles had built
a temple to her as the Counsellor. Heré had only a doorless and roofless
temple on the road to Phalerum; but the god of fire was worshipped in
Athens abundantly. Hermes had his peculiar statues in every street,
irreverence to which might be fatal even to an Alcibiades, the city’s
darling; while Aphrodité had a crowd of temples and shrines whose unchaste
worship found but too many frequenters. Poseidon had to content himself
with a single altar in his rival’s city, and with games in its harbour;
but Dionysos had three temples, with brilliant festivals; Mars was not
without one; Hestia was throned in the Prytaneum; the Earth, Kronos, and
Rhea had their temples and festivals, as also the Erinnyes, who were
worshipped only in two other places in Greece. Here alone in Greece was a
sanctuary and a rite to Prometheus; while the Asiatic mother of the gods
had a splendid temple where the archives of the state were kept. Besides,
there was the worship of the Hours and the Graces, of Eileithyia, goddess
of victory and of birth, of Æsculapius and Themis, of the Kabirian Anakes,
the Arcadian Pan, the Thracian Cotytto and Bendis, the Egyptian Serapis.
Mercy and Shame, Fame and Endeavour had their altars; and the hero-worship
numbered Theseus, Codrus, Academus, Solon, the tyrant-slayers Harmodius
and Aristogeiton; and Hercules, originally a hero, but here and elsewhere
widely honoured as a god.(4)
Athens, if the most superstitious as well as the most intellectual of
cities, may be taken as the type of a thousand others of Hellenic race
scattered over the Roman empire from Marseilles to Antioch. Say that she
had twice as many deities and festivals as her sister cities, enough will
remain for them wherewith to occupy the soil with their temples and to
fill the year’s cycle with their rites.
The lively Grecian imagination impregnated not with stern notions of duty,
nor with reverential devotion to those whom it worshipped, but regarding
them as objects of æsthetical satisfaction,(5) and yearning for a serene
and confidential exchange of relations with them, had in process of time
spun out a complete web of idolatrous worship which encompassed heaven and
earth, the whole domain of nature, every state and act of human life. Rain
and sunshine and the weather stood under the ordering of Zeus; the
fruitfulness of the soil was Demeter’s care; countless nymphs of field, of
fountain, and of river, offered to men their gifts; the vine and its juice
was under the protection of Dionysos, and Poseidon was lord of the sea.
The flocks had their defenders in Hermes and Pan; the Fates ruled the lot
of men. Kings and magistrates had in Zeus their prototype and guardian.
Athené held her shield over cities; the hearth of each private home and
the public hearth of the city were in Hestia’s charge. Marriage was secure
under Heré’s care. Demeter was entrusted with legislation; the pains of
childbirth were recommended to Eileithyia, or Artemis. Music, archery,
divination, were Apollo’s attributes; the art of healing claimed him and
his son Æsculapius as patrons. Athené and Ares swayed the issue of war;
the chase was the domain of Artemis; smiths and all workers in fire saw in
Hephæstus their patron; whilst Athené the Worker protected the gentler
trades, and Hecate watched over the roads.(6)
Yet Rome itself, whose own Capitoline Jupiter claimed a certain
superiority over all these gods, would scarcely have yielded to any
Grecian city, even were it Athens, in the number or variety of her
deities, the frequency and solemnity of her festivals; while in the
costliness of victims offered to her gods, and in the strictness of her
ceremonies, she probably far surpassed that and all other cities. Her
sterner worship of originally shapeless gods, presiding over the labours
of a simple agricultural life, had long yielded to the seductions of her
dangerous Grecian captive. The rude block Terminus, and Jupiter the Stone,
ceased to satisfy those who had beheld the majesty of the father of gods
and men embodied by the genius of a Phidias; and she had ended by going
farther in breaking up the conception of one god, and in the
personification of particular powers, operations, physical functions, and
qualities, than any nation of antiquity.(7) But though the beautiful forms
of the Hellenic gods, as expressed by the skill of unrivalled sculptors,
had carried her away, yet the nature of her worship was in strong contrast
with that of Greece. Her religion had rested originally on two ideas, the
might of the gods friendly to Rome, and the force of ceremonial over these
gods;(8) and still when she accepted the gods of conquered nations for her
own, it was to secure the possession of their might, and to have them for
friends instead of foes; while her own worship was a matter of routine and
habit jealously guarded by unchanging ceremonies, and prosecuted not out
of affection, but for the material security of daily life, which,
according to the deeply-rooted feeling of the people, could not go on
without it.
The individualised and humanised Latin and Hellenic gods, if they had much
in common, still could not be thoroughly amalgamated; but Rome, as the
mistress of Western Asia and Egypt, came upon Oriental religions of a very
different stamp. Instead of this wide Pantheon of gods, each of whom had
his occupation, these Asiatics generally regarded the deity in a sexual
relationship, as one male and one female god, representing the active and
passive forms of nature,(9) and worshipped with a mixture of fear and
voluptuousness. Such were Bel and Mylitta, Moloch and Astarte, and by
whatever different names the same idea was presented. The worship of the
great mother Cybele, so widely spread through Asia Minor, approached in
many respects in character to that of this female goddess. But it is
needless to go farther into the specific differences of these various
idolatries; only bear in mind that they in their several countries
occupied the domain of public and private life, as the worship of which I
have given the details did at Athens. So it was before the influence of
external conquerors reached them. After this a certain change ensues. The
Roman empire was accomplishing in the west as well as in the east what the
progress of Grecian rule and thought had commenced three hundred years
before(10) under Alexander and his successors, the bringing together and
in some sort fusing the multiform and often contradictory worship of the
nations surrounding the Mediterranean Sea. Not merely in Rome, but in all
the chief cities of the Empire, the Asiatic, the Egyptian, the Libyan
deities, and many others of subject nations under the Roman sway, were
worshipped side by side. Accordingly, in the time of Augustus, and at the
year of Rome 750, where we are taking our stand, there prevailed all over
the hundred millions of men ruled by him a polytheistic idolatry
bewildering by its multiplicity, internal contradictions, fluctuations,
and mixtures, yet imposing by its universal extent and prevalence. The
only exception seems to have been the Jewish worship of one God, whether
in its chief seat, the small province of Judæa, or as it was seen in the
lives of Jewish settlers scattered throughout the empire. It must be
remarked that this Jewish worship of the true God was sanctioned as that
of a national god belonging to the Jews, and sacrifice was perpetually
offered for Augustus in the Temple at Jerusalem. But the Jews did not, as
a rule, make efforts to convert the Gentiles to their religion, nor seek
to exhibit it as antagonistic to the prevailing idolatry, and as claiming
to subdue and cast it out. They were content to keep their own worship to
themselves, and with the toleration which the Roman law thus allowed them.
Yet even so in every place where they dwelt in any numbers some of the
better heathens were found to be attracted to their worship by the
intrinsic beauty of their belief in one God.
2. But such an exception as this hardly made a perceptible break in that
continuous mass of evil and falsehood which then surrounded young and old,
learned and ignorant, rich and poor, in its grasp. The sea stands in Holy
Writ as the well-known image of the world’s disobedience to the divine
promptings, of its impetuosity and lawlessness. What image is there in
nature so striking and awful as the long waves of the Atlantic bearing
down in storm upon a helpless ship, and sweeping it upon an iron-bound
coast! So broke that wild sea of human error over the individual mind of
man. The observer looked round upon all the nations, and it was everywhere
the same—a multiplicity of gods filling up the whole circle of human life,
many-named, many-natured, but all without truth, purity, and justice; full
of violent and sensual deeds, and still viler imaginations. What stay was
there for the spirit of man against that universal flood? Its vastness was
everywhere. Who was strong enough, who wise enough, to resist what all his
fellows accepted? And the struggle of a single soul against it might seem
like that of “some strong swimmer in his agony” alone at night amid the
waste of waters.
3. For this polytheism was no dormant, otiose power withdrawn into the
background and crouching apart from the actions and feelings of daily
life. Its presence was indicated in every home by the little images of the
Lares; homage was done to it at every table by libations; every house had
its consecrated emblems; every street its statues of Hermes and serpents;
in the forum there were feasts in honour of the gods; the shops, taverns,
and manufactories had little altars on which wine and incense were offered
to them; there were idolatrous emblems on the foreheads of the dead, on
their funeral pyre, on their tombs. The places of amusement were specially
dedicated to the gods; the theatres had representations in honour of them;
the circus had their images, chairs, carriages, robes borne in procession;
the amphitheatre was consecrated to them, and as being so Tertullian
called it “the temple of all demons.” So much for private and social life.
But not only so. All political acts were bound up with a crowd of
religious formalities, and outward signs of divine concurrence; and were
carried on with a ceremonial, every part of which was prescribed as having
an exact inward meaning. Then there were continually recurring vows to the
gods made for the great, made for private individuals, made for the
emperor and his family. Three special ceremonies were used to obtain
favours from them or to deprecate calamities, feasts, the solemnly bearing
their images on cushions, processions with naked feet.(11) To this we must
add the priestly colleges, pontifices, flamines, augurs, and magistrates,
whether distinct or co-ordinated. Then, besides, consider the magical
character of the prayers, and the strict use of formularies without
mistake, omission, or addition, which were supposed to insure success
apart from the intention of those offering them. Thus the whole life of
the Romans was filled with invocations, propitiations, purifications, and
even in any small matter a whole string of gods had prayer and service
offered to them, and no one of their names might be omitted. Consider
again the great frequency of the offerings, whether propitiative or
consultatory; and, further, how particular beasts belonged to particular
gods. The mere expense of victims was felt as a great burden. It was
reckoned that on the accession of Caligula 160,000 animals, chiefly oxen
and calves, were sacrificed in the Roman Empire in token of the general
joy; and Augustus and Marcus Aurelius devoted such a multitude of beasts
to their sacrifices that what had been said of the former was repeated as
to the latter, how the white oxen had written to him, saying, “If you
conquer, we are lost.” Indications of the will of the gods were to be
taken on all occasions; nothing was to be done in public or private
without consulting the auspices. Then there was the institution of the
Haruspices, in its two branches of examining the entrails of the victims,
and divining the meaning of all prodigies. One is still amazed at the
ever-untiring solicitude which the senate showed to have all these things
carefully watched—eclipses, rainbows of unusual colours, shooting stars,
misbirths human or bestial; showers of earth, stones, chalk, or ashes;
mice gnawing the golden vessels of a temple, bees swarming on a public
place, but especially a shrine touched by lightning. Such things struck
senate and people with consternation; special supplications were ordered
to appease the causers of them.(12)
These are the external manifestations of polytheism which struck every
eye, and affected the mind by their constant recurrence. But if we go
beneath the surface and examine the root, we shall find an universal sense
in the minds of all men in that day of unseen power over and above the
material operations of nature. It was too strong as well as too general
and invariable to be called an opinion, and it so acted on the nerves and
feelings of men that I term it not so much a logical conviction as a sense
of the close contact between man and nature, or rather an unseen power
behind the veil of nature and working through it. Various as the forms of
idolatry were—Egyptian, Asiatic, Libyan, Greek, or Roman; or, again,
Iberian, Gallic, German,—all teemed with this sense. To the adherents of
these religions, one and all, the world was very far from being a mere
system of nature governed by general laws;(13) it may rather be said that
this was precisely what it was not. They looked upon nature in all its
forms as an expression of the divine will, and therefore the unusual
productions of nature became to them intimations respecting that will. And
having lost the guidance of a fixed moral and religious teaching, they
were ruled by an ever-watchful anxiety to gain acquaintance with that
will. On this sense rested the universal belief that it was in man’s power
to hold intercourse by means of charms, spells, adjurations, with spirits
of greater might and knowledge than his own—that is, magic or witchcraft.
Hence the evocation of the spirits of the dead to reveal secrets of their
prison-house, or necromancy. Hence the recurrence to oracles, running
through all pagan history, of which there were many scattered through the
Roman world, and which, after a temporary discredit, rose again into name
in the time of Hadrian. Not less general was the belief that men and women
might be possessed by spirits who ruled their words and actions according
to an overmastering will. Then divination existed in endlessly various
forms; and of its force we can gather a notion by Cicero’s remark that it
lay like an oppressive burden on the minds of men, so that even sleep,
which should be the refuge from anxieties, became through the meaning
attached to dreams the cause of a multitude of cares.(14) To this must be
added the use of sortileges, amulets, and talismans, in countless number
and variety; and the belief that the actions and fortune of men were
swayed by the course of the stars—that is, astrology. It was not the
vulgar and ignorant merely whose minds were filled with these things.
Scarcely a philosopher, scarcely a statesman, scarcely a ruler can be
found whose mind, even if proof against a genuine devotion to a divine
providence, was not open to one or more manifestations of the dark
mysterious power pressing upon the confines of human life, and every now
and then breaking through the veil of visible things with evidences of
malignant might. A more determined and unscrupulous conqueror than Sylla,
a more genuine philosopher than Marcus Aurelius, a more sagacious user of
religion than Augustus, we shall not easily find; yet each of these, like
their ordinary countrymen, had this sense of the supernatural and
intangible above, beneath, and around them. Sylla, on the eve of any
battle, would, in the sight of his soldiers, embrace a small statue of
Apollo, which he had taken from Delphi, and entreat it to give an early
fulfilment of its promises.(15) Marcus Aurelius, in his war with the
Marcomanni, collected priests from all quarters to Rome, and was so long
occupied in offering rites to their various foreign gods that he kept his
army waiting for him. And Augustus watched carefully the most trivial
signs, and was distressed if in the morning his left shoe was given to him
for his right. Even that Julius before whose genius all men quailed, and
whose disbelief of a future state stands recorded at a notable point of
Roman history, never mounted a chariot without uttering certain words for
good luck and preservation against calamity.(16) We shall therefore judge
most inadequately of the force which the innumerable rites, temples,
festivals, pomps, ceremonies, prayers, invocations, priesthoods,
sodalities, initiations, and mysteries of polytheism exercised upon the
minds of men, unless we take into full account that remarkable sense of
contact and sympathy between the external world and man—of invisible power
betraying itself through palpable agents, whether in reasoning or
unreasoning productions, whether in the animal or vegetable world—which
served as its basis. The line between religion and superstition in
paganism no eye can trace; but at least the foundation of true worship
plunged deep out of sight into the secret recesses of abject fear.
4. But what was the moral influence of this multiform, universal,
all-embracing, and all-penetrating worship?
Varro, whom Cicero calls the most acute and learned of writers, and whose
great work in forty-one books he praises as containing the names, classes,
offices, and causes of all divine and human things, divided theology into
the fabulous, the natural, and the civil. In the first, he said, are many
fictions unworthy of the nature and dignity of immortal beings: such as
that one god sprang from the head, another from the thigh, another from
drops of blood; such, again, as that gods were thieves or adulterers, or
became slaves to men. In fact, this fabulous theology attributed
everything to them which might happen not merely to a man, but to the most
contemptible of men.(17) Let us leave what he calls natural theology,
which is the discussion of philosophers concerning the physical nature of
the gods, and proceed to the third, which he calls civil, and which is
that which the citizens, and especially the priests of human communities,
are bound to know and administer. This treats of what gods are to be
worshipped, and with what rites and sacrifices. The first theology, he
says, belongs to the theatre, the second to the universe, the third to the
city. S. Augustine, commenting at length upon his division, proves that
the first and the third, the fabulous and the civil, are, in fact,
identical, since the universe is a divine work, but the theatre and the
city works of men. The theatre is indeed made for the city, and the very
same gods are ridiculed on the stage who are adored in the temple; the
same have games exhibited in their honour and victims sacrificed to them.
The images, features, ages, sexes, bearing of the gods in the one and in
the other are the same. Thus this fabulous, theatrical, and scenic
theology, full of everything vile and criminal, is actually a part of the
civil, cohering with it as limb with limb in the same body.(18)
Conceive, then, every revolting detail of adultery, prostitution, incest,
or of dishonesty, or of violence, which the perverted invention of modern
writers has ever dressed up for the theatres of great cities in this and
other countries. They will perhaps yield in turpitude to that which the
theatres of the Roman empire exhibited. But what these theatres
represented in mimic action was the exact image, as reflected in a mirror,
of what was transacted at the solemn service of the gods in unnumbered
temples.(19) The exact image so far as it went, yet stopping short in some
respects, for our eye-witness above cited declares that gratitude was due
to the actors, inasmuch as they spared the eyes of men, and did not lay
bare upon the theatre all that was hidden within the walls of temples. It
was not enough, then, that all the many games and spectacles in which such
things were represented were dedicated to the gods, acted under their
especial sanction, even enjoined by them as means of gaining their favour
or averting their wrath, which alone would have made them answerable for
the immorality so portrayed; not enough, even, that actions of this
quality were in the theatres ascribed to the gods who presided over them;
but these acts of immorality were not the fictions of poets or the acting
of players, but the very substance of the theology itself in which the
worship of all these nations was embodied. Priapus appeared to make a
laugh on the stage exactly in the costume in which he was worshipped in
the temples, or in which he entered into the rites of marriage; a costume
of indescribable turpitude, the shame of our human nature. The players on
the stage and the statues in the temples equally exhibited Jove bearded
and Mercury beardless, Saturn in decrepitude and Apollo in youthful
beauty. In the rites of Juno, of Ceres, of Venus, of the mother of the
gods, words were uttered and scenes acted such as no decent person would
suffer to be spoken or acted before his own mother; or rather they
contained, as a portion of themselves, the worst crimes which the theatres
represented; nay, crimes which they stopped short of acting, and persons
so infamous that they were not tolerated even on the stage, where yet to
take part was a civil dishonour. What, then, was the nature of those rites
wherein those were chosen to take part whom the utmost license of the
stage banished from its boards?(20) Let us conceive—if such a conception
can be adequately represented to the mind—that the vilest drama ever acted
upon a modern theatre was being daily carried on in all the churches of
Christendom by troops of priests and priestesses, with all the
paraphernalia of costliest worship, with prayers, invocation, and
sacrifices, as a service acceptable to the Ruler of man’s lot, and as an
account of what that ruler had Himself done, and of what He loved to be
imitated by others. That would be a picture of heathen worship in the time
of Augustus; that would be the moral food on which was nurtured that crowd
of nations which acknowledged Cæsar’s sway; that the conception of divine
things wrought into the minds of the hundred millions of men who formed
the Roman empire.
Was it surprising that all worshippers of the gods should look for their
example rather in Jupiter’s actions than in Plato’s teaching or the moral
judgments of Cato?(21) A nature subject in itself to the sway of passion
was stimulated by an authority supposed to be divine to the commission of
every criminal excess; and herein lay a strong proof of the malignant and
impure character of these gods.
On the other hand, the same eye-witness challenges the defenders of the
pagan gods to produce a single instance wherein moral precepts of living
were delivered to their worshippers upon divine authority. True, indeed,
there were here and there whispers of secret rites in which a pure and
chaste life was recommended, but where were the buildings dedicated to the
public preaching of such truths? Places there were in abundance
consecrated to the celebration of infamous games, rightly termed
“Fugalia,” since they put modesty and decency to flight, but none where
the people might listen to divine commands repressing avarice, ambition,
or unchaste desire. Thus with the positive inculcation of all evil, under
cover of their own example, was united the negative absence of all moral
teaching.(22)
For even the prayers which accompanied these sacrifices and this
ceremonial, and this lavish exhibition of every human wickedness under
divine names, were not addressed for moral goods, but for wealth, bodily
strength, temporal prosperity. Horace but expresses the general mind when
he says:
“Sed satis est orare Jovem quæ donat et anfert;
Det vitam, det opes, æquum mi animum ipse parabo.”
(_Epist._ i. 18, 111.)
They were moreover viewed as carrying with them a sort of physical force,
not as prevailing through purity of intention in those who offered them.
In fact, the gods to whom they were addressed were powers of nature, or
malignant and impure powers, but in neither case beings who looked for a
moral service from rational creatures.
One other turpitude the Asiatic idolatry added to the Greek and Roman
forms. By consecrating the sexual relations themselves in one male and one
female god, they effected this crowning connection of idolatry with
immorality that unchaste acts became themselves acts of sacrifice, and so
of worship.(23) This is the strange perversion borne witness to by
Herodotus, and corroborated by the prophet Jeremiah. A great seat of this
worship was the city of Hierapolis, in Syria, where was one of the most
magnificent temples of the ancient world, dedicated to Derketo, and rich
with the offerings of Arabians, Babylonians, Assyrians, Phœnicians,
Cilicians, Cappadocians, and all nations of the Semitic tongue. Nor was
this worship confined to the East, for hence, as from a centre, the
adherents of the Syrian goddess spread themselves in begging troops over
the provinces of the empire. And the worship of Venus at Eryx, and other
places in the West, with the thousands of female priestesses dedicated to
it, reproduced the same abomination.
As the great result of all that we have said, we find the notion of
sanctifying the human will absent from the religious rites of the
polytheistic idolatry in all its forms. To this corresponded the absence
of the notion of holiness in the gods. And this leads us finally to the
remarkable character which defines it as a whole. This worship was
throughout a corruption,(24) the spoiling, that is, of something good; a
turning away from the better to the worse. The worship itself had been
originally good. The corruption lay in the alteration of the quality and
the object of the worship. Worship had been implanted in man, and
prescribed to him. It was at once the need of his nature and the command
of Him who gave that nature. It had for it, first, positive institution,
and then tradition and custom, and throughout, the conscience, the reason,
and the heart of man. The reason of man ever bore powerful witness to the
unity of the Godhead; the breaking up of that unity, as exhibited by this
idolatrous polytheism, in contradiction to the original prompting and
continued witness of the reason, is a very strong proof of that moral
corruption in the will which first generated it, which continued its
existence, and which, while multiplying, degraded its forms from age to
age. But man was free to decline from the good in which he had been
placed. The corruption which was left in his power he exerted; he changed
the quality of the service, and the person served. The productive cause of
idolatry on the part of man was the soul of man turning away from the
notion of a good and holy Creator, the contemplation of whom was its
present support and future reward, to visible things. Of these things the
chief were bodily pleasures. Thus this corruption of the soul, in process
of time, and continually becoming worse, produced this whole pantheon of
gods, originally the creation of its own lusts, and subsisting as a
perpetual food and support of those lusts. For this cause it had broken up
the one perfect idea of God the Creator and Ruler of all persons and
things into a multitude of gods, whose functions became more and more
divided, until the ether, the air, the earth, and the water swarmed with
these supposed beings, which took possession even of wood and stone,
dwelling in the statues erected to them; and every desire which the soul
in its corruption could entertain had its corresponding patron, helper,
and exemplar. In this descending course cause and effect were perpetually
reacting on each other, and as the corruption of the human soul had
generated these gods, so their multiplication and degradation intensified
its corruption from age to age.(25)
5. But this was not all. If corrupt affection in man himself, if the charm
of representing the unseen objects of worship in visible characters of
wood or stone, if, finally, the ignorance of the true God, together with
the beauty of the creature substituted for Him,(26) were the disposing
causes within man to idolatry, there was a cause outside of him which must
not be forgotten. When we look upon this idolatry, occupying not one
country or race, but all; not merely bewildering savage or uncivilised
man, but throned in the chief seats of the world’s choicest civilisation;
when we look upon its endlessly divergent forms, its palpable
contradictions, its cherished or commanded immoralities, its crowd of
debasing, irrational, heterogeneous superstitions, its cruelty,
sensuality, and fearfulness, all these being no less an insult to man’s
reason than a derogation from God’s majesty, who is there that does not
feel this to be the strangest and most astonishing sight which history
presents to man? And yet there is a unity which runs through it all, and
stamps it with a double mark. Not only is it a service due from man to
God, which is paid by him to the creature rather than to the Creator,(27)
but more especially it is that service paid by man to God’s enemies, the
fallen angels. These it is who have assumed the mask of dead men; these it
is who within the sculptured forms of Jupiter, Juno, Mars, and Venus, of
Baal and Derketo and Mylitta, of Anubis and Serapis, of Thor and Woden,
and so many more, receive man’s adoration, and rejoice above all things in
possessing his heart. These it is who have seduced him by exhibitions of
visible beauty, have lain in wait for him by fountain, forest, and field,
and filled the groves and high places with the charms which best pleased
him under the name of worship; or have promised to disclose future things
to him; or, again, have harrowed his soul with phantasms and terrors of
the unseen world. These incoherent systems; these deities, whose functions
ran into and athwart each other; these investing of human passions, and
even unnatural and monstrous vices, with immortality and terrible power;
these rivals ever quarrelling with each other, and jealous for the
possession of man’s homage, all serve the purpose of those behind the
scenes, are puppets under their command, and have a common end and result
in the captivity of their victim. More even than this; while they seem
disunited and contradictory, they are really one, marshalled by the power,
directed by the mind, held in the hand of him who is called “the ruler of
this world,” “the power of darkness,” “the might of the enemy,” who “holds
the power of death,” “the ancient serpent, who leads into error the whole
world,” “that malignant one in whom the whole world is lying,” “the prince
of the power of the air, the spirit who now works in the children of
disobedience,” who musters “the principalities, the powers, the
world-rulers of this life’s darkness, the spirits of wickedness in
ethereal places,” to serve him in his conflict with man’s flesh and blood;
in fine, for S. Paul’s language goes one point even beyond that of his
Master, and terms him not merely the ruler, but “the God of this
world;”(28) that is to say, this manifold idolatry is the establishment of
his kingdom, the enthronement of his godhead over men, the mark of their
captivity and prostration before him.
The statements of our Lord and his apostles being so express and definite
as to the existence of this diabolic kingdom, and as to the personal sway
of a sovereign over it, let us look once more at this idolatry itself by
the light thus shed upon it.
And first, whether we regard men as made to be members of a well-ordered
society, enjoying temporal prosperity in this life, or as further intended
for happiness in a future life, resulting from their present actions,(29)
the condition in which the heathen nations are actually found at our
Lord’s coming is quite unintelligible unless we suppose the reality of a
diabolic power exercised upon them. The polytheism which we have witnessed
holding all human life in its grasp, while it did not teach and uphold the
great laws of morality, did, on the other hand, actively inculcate the
violation of those laws by continually representing to the minds and eyes
of men such a violation in the acts of the deities worshipped. It was a
perpetual incitement of men to crimes, as well against social order as
against all the sanctities of private life; it fostered the savageness of
slavery, and the utmost cruelty in carrying on war, because its deities,
being diverse for every nation, and belonging exclusively to the nation,
had obliterated the idea that all men were of one blood, and thus
delivered over the captive and the slave to the pitiless hatred or equally
pitiless luxury of their fellow-men. So much for its action on human
society as terminating with this life, while for a life to come it had no
doctrine and made no preparation, but had suffered the earlier teaching of
a future retribution to be considered as a fable fit for children and old
women. Looking at such a condition of human society from the moral point
of view, we may conclude with certainty that man would never, if left to
himself, have devised it.
Secondly, regarding this polytheism as an object presented to the human
intellect, nothing more unreasonable and monstrous than this crowd of
deities can even be conceived. The human reason demands imperatively the
unity of the godhead, since infinite power at least enters into the
conception of the godhead, and to divide or limit infinity is an unreason.
All the great works and order of the world bore witness likewise to this
unity of the godhead, and were sufficient to prove it;(30) and even in the
worst times of paganism we find this proof exhibited with a force and
lucidity to which even now little can be added. And in the worst times,
again, we find the natural witness of the human soul breaking out in
moments of sudden trial or great anguish, and calling upon the one God for
help.(31) Yet in spite of this we see whole nations renowned for their
intellectual productions, and men among them in whom the force of reason
has rarely or never been surpassed, bowing their necks to this yoke of
polytheism, and accepting this tissue of monstrous error, paying homage to
it in their life, and dying with it on their lips; as Socrates offering
the cock to Æsculapius, and Seneca the libation to Jove the liberator. We
know not how to account for this, were man’s reason left alone. We can see
an adequate ground for it only in “men having been made unreasonable, and
in the demoniacal error overshadowing the earth, and concealing the
knowledge of the true God.”(32)
Let us take a third view of it, neither the moral nor the logical, but the
view of it as an existing fact, as something which for many hundred years
occupied the earth, ruled nations, moulded the institutions and characters
of men. Here we do not speak merely of the multitude of temples, of
priests or priestesses serving in them, of sacrifices offered by these, of
prayers, vows, festivals in honour of the gods—because all these enter
into the notion of a service rendered by man to the power superior to him,
and in their utmost perversion there is nothing which may not be accounted
for by a simply human corruption stealing into and spoiling an originally
good institution; but all these in the actual condition of paganism were
mixed up with and penetrated by other elements, and accompanied by effects
not to be so accounted for. Let us take the universal persuasion that the
statues of the gods were inhabited by the deities which they represented,
as bodies by souls.(33) Here was the notion of a spiritual power taking
possession of material forms. But how was this notion introduced,
propagated, and maintained in men’s minds? By certain visible and palpable
effects,(34) of which those who were eye-witnesses give us many details.
Take again the oracles which existed throughout the heathen world, and, as
dealing with the same subject-matter, divination in all its forms. However
much of deceit there might be here, was there not also, in many instances,
an exhibition of power and knowledge beyond that of man, which no mere
deceit could produce? Take again magic, the invocation, adjuration, and
compacting with spirits, which ran through heathen society in numberless
shapes; and take lastly the fact of spirits seizing upon and possessing
the bodies of men, speaking by their voice, and controlling their minds.
The four classes which we have just given comprehend in themselves an
innumerable multitude of facts which are apparent in pagan history, in all
which the corruption of the human soul is an agent or patient, but for
which that corruption by itself supplies no adequate cause. A spiritual
power is behind, laying hold of and acting upon this corruption, and by
fault of the human will making an inroad into the visible world, and
partially mastering it, bending it to an evil purpose, and making it serve
as an agent to man’s captivity. Let us briefly cite as to the reality of
this spiritual power the witness of its victims and the witness of its
opponents.
First, as to its victims. Scarcely a writer, whether poet, historian,
philosopher, or biographer, can be found among the heathens of Greece and
Rome who does not attest facts belonging to one or more of these four
classes which surpass human power, and suggest an invisible spiritual
agency. The poet who writes expressly to deny such an agency speaks of the
whole world as bowed beneath the fear of it; another poet,(35) referring
tacitly to this very passage, felicitates the man not who has a pure
conscience, but who through knowledge of natural things has trampled these
fears under his feet. Nor is such a belief confined to the vulgar; but
scarcely a man of eminence, a soldier, or a statesman can be cited who
does not in his life and actions acknowledge it, shrink from it, or cower
beneath it. It is too powerful for Alexander or even Julius to escape; and
the philosophers who affect to deny it in their systems exhibit it in
their conduct. They have all the conviction of an evil power beyond and
above nature, but taking hold of natural forms, and ever lying in wait to
burst forth from them upon human life. The Greek name for superstition is
fear of the demons; and what S. Paul said of the Athenians, that he found
them in all things too fearful of the demons, might be applied to the
whole circle of nations surrounding the midland sea.
Secondly, as to the opponents of this power. Now they offer a triple
witness to its existence. The first of these is in the facts mentioned in
the New Testament. The strongest, most terrible, and most inexplicable
instance of this power lies in those diabolical possessions with which so
many of our Lord’s miracles are concerned. Again, as to the reality of
divining powers arising from the presence of a demon in a human form, we
have the evil spirit in the girl at Philippi acknowledging in S. Paul a
servant of the most high God, and, when cast out by the Apostle in the
name of Christ, leaving his victim destitute of those powers which had
brought gain to her masters, who forthwith try to avenge themselves for
their loss by exciting a persecution against the Apostle.(36)
A second witness is found in the rites and offices of the very power set
up to dethrone and abolish this other power. The Church called upon every
one who was received into her bosom to begin by renouncing the usurpation
of this great enemy, which was thus declared to be universal. She provided
forms for exorcising him. One of her Apostles warned those to whom he
wrote that men could not partake at once of the Christian sacrifice and
the heathen; for as truly as one was the chalice of the Lord, the other
was the chalice of devils; as one was the table of the Lord, the other was
the table of devils.(37)
A third witness is found in the unanimous testimony of all Christian
writers as to the reality of the demoniacal powers with which they were
waging war; as to their perpetual interference with human life; as to the
open and palpable effects which they produced; as to their unwilling
retirement in the face of that Stronger One who was come upon them. It was
not merely the fervid Tertullian who offered to rest the truth of
Christianity and the life of any ordinary Christian upon his power
publicly to expel a demon. Athanasius, who weighs every word he utters,
says also, “Let him who will, try the truth of what we have said, and in
the very presence of the spectral illusion of the demons, of the deceit of
oracles and the wonders of magic, let him use the sign of the cross
derided by them, only naming the name of Christ, and he shall see how by
him the demons fly, the oracles cease, and every sort of magic and
witchcraft is annulled.” No less express is S. Augustine in acknowledging
the reality of these dark powers, and the wonders worked by them.(38)
Resuming then for a moment our view of heathenism as a whole, with regard
to the exhibition of diabolic power in it, let us bear in mind, joined to
the absence of moral teaching, its flagrantly immoral disposition;
secondly, its illogical character, by which it is an insult to human
reason while yet accepted by the human will; and thirdly, the superhuman
effects noted in it and attached to its rites, ceremonies, and practices,
attested by many generations alike of its victims as of its opponents.
These proofs have each their own separate force, but they have likewise as
to our conclusion a cumulative force; and its result is, that the
existence of a diabolic kingdom and sovereign throned in heathenism,
pervading its rites and directing its operations, which is so expressly
declared in Holy Writ, is no less strongly proved by the facts of history.
6. Now, having sketched in four main points the substance of this
polytheism, its multiplicity, its universality, its hold upon daily life,
and its moral corruption, to all which a consummating force is added by
the indwelling of diabolic power, it remains to give a glance at certain
conditions and circumstances under which it was acting on the minds of
men. We have here taken it and examined it by itself, abstracting it from
those circumstances, but it never so appeared to those who lived under it.
The wonderful error which so enfolded these widespread nations never
exhibited itself to them bare and naked. On the contrary, it came to them
interwoven with the dearest claims of the family, the city, the country,
with the force of habit and tradition, with the dread of change, with the
past history and future hopes of their fatherland, coloured moreover with
the radiant dress of a rich and ever-advancing civilisation.
To judge of its power, vitality, and chance of permanence, we must look at
it under these conditions. And if, when we regard this idolatrous
polytheism in itself, one is lost in wonder at its ever having arisen, at
its existence, at its continuance, so, when one regards it as throned in
the customs, feelings, convictions, and interests of society, one wonders
how any moral force could ever overthrow it. At the present time not only
are there religions outside of Christianity, but there are also sects
within it, so irrational, so devoid of the witness given by internal truth
and harmony, so unable to render any account of themselves and their
claims which will satisfy a mind looking for consistency, that, regarding
them merely as facts, one cannot account for them, yet notwithstanding
they may have existed for several hundred years, and had a large share in
forming national habits of thought, or even national character; nay,
perhaps their secret strength lies in some fold of this character itself.
And because they are never seen by themselves, their intrinsic absurdity
does not come before their adherents, and the last thing which these think
of examining is the foundation of their sect, inasmuch as in fact it has
never approached them otherwise than as a condition of their daily life.
So we shall understand paganism better by considering it as interwoven
with civilisation, polity, and national feelings. We will treat of it
briefly under these three heads.
1. First, the whole eastern part of the Roman empire was made up of many
various nations having a long and sometimes renowned history, kingdoms,
and politics much anterior to Rome herself, of which the Romans had taken
violent possession, but wherein remained still the fruits of a rich and
undisturbed civilisation. And this word comprehends all the natural life
of man, all the discoveries gained by his invention or experience, and
accumulated by wealth descending from age to age, all the manifold ties of
social intercourse, all the pleasures of the intellect, united, moreover,
in their case with an art even now unrivalled in portraying the beauty of
the human figure, and in the elegance with which it adapted material forms
to the conveniences of life. So rich and varied an inheritance unfolded
itself in a thousand Hellenic cities studding the shores of the
Mediterranean. The culture itself since the time of Alexander might be
termed Hellenic, but it embraced Egypt, and Syria, and all Western Asia.
And so completely was idolatrous polytheism interwoven with culture, so
inextricably was it blended with the bulk, so gradually had it grown with
the growth, and wound its fibres about the tree and the branches, that the
worship might be absolutely identified with the civilisation. The gods of
Greece were the heads of the most illustrious Grecian families; their
hero-worship consecrated every city, every grove, every field. The gods of
Egypt were blended with the long renown of the Nile-land, with every
Egyptian custom, with the beginning and the end of life. Not less had the
gods of Syria and Western Asia occupied their respective lands. These
deities struck their root into the home of man, into the union of the
sexes, into the loves of parent and child, of brother and sister. They had
their mementos in every street of busy traffic; they watched over the
Acropolis; not a fountain but laid claim to their patronage, nor a field
which was fruitful but by their supposed influence. These countries had
lost their political independence, but the material ease of life under the
majesty of the Roman name they retained. There was a passionate love for
this world’s goods, comforts, and enjoyments in the Greek, Syrian,
Asiatic, Egyptian, and Libyan races, all of them more or less worn, and
effete, and deeply sensualised; but their glory was this great Hellenic
civilisation, with which polytheism might be termed one and the same
thing.
2. When we turn to the West, the seat of the sovereign city and of the
empire itself, we find that from the very beginning and through many
centuries the political constitution of the city had been indissolubly
blended with the worship of the Roman gods. The religion of Rome was much
more than national; her polity seemed only another name for her worship.
Her temples were as much a part of her political life as her forum. So far
at least she had embodied in her whole structure the legend of her
Etruscan teacher, wherein the dwarf Tages sprung from the soil to
communicate the worship claimed by the gods.(39) Her soil and her worship
were indivisible. And even after seven centuries, when the city was
embracing the world in its arms, this union practically existed. Rome
indeed admitted, as we have said, the gods of the conquered nations into
her pantheon, but it was on the same tenure as the nations themselves
shared her civic rights. Jupiter Capitolinus was a sort of suzerain not
only to the gods of the Grecian Olympus, but to the dark forms of the Nile
deities, to the Syrian, the Libyan, the Gallic, the Germanic, the
Sarmatian Valhalla. When the greatest of her poets would express unending
duration, he joins together the race of Æneas enthroned on the Capitol
with the god who dwelt there:
“Nulla dies unquam memori vos eximet ævo,
Dum domus Æneæ Capitoli immobile saxum
Accolet, imperiumque Pater Romanus habebit.”
The Roman father is the Capitoline Jupiter. I am not a king; the only king
of the Romans is Jupiter, said the most royal of the race, and the founder
of her empire, when, seeing all prostrate at his feet, he put away
reluctantly the diadem offered by his creature. Thus even he who had
seized the reality of power, who would have omens when he pleased, and
whose will was his law, left the crown on the head of Jupiter. In Rome,
all through her history “piety and patriotism were the same feeling.”(40)
When her empire became world-wide, this sort of devotion did not cease.
Rome had long been deified; and the double import of her name(41)
expressed strength against the foe without, and nourishment to the child
within. She was at once a warrior-goddess clothed in mail to meet the
enemy, and a mother offering her bosom to her citizens clustered around
her. And so in her new constitution, adapted for the world, her emperor
too was deified, as the first of her children, her living representative,
the embodiment of her force and love, the visible wielder of her unseen
power. All that is sacred in home and country to us the Roman signified
when he swore by the genius of the emperor. Nothing could be more tolerant
than this polytheism, if the innovation extended only to the borrowing or
creating a new divinity, to reforming a rite or a ceremony,(42) or to
suchlike modifications of worship which admitted that on which it rested;
but nothing more intolerant than the same polytheism when the worship
itself was attacked. A movement against the Capitoline Jupiter would be
not only sacrilege but high treason, and the refusal to call to witness
the emperor’s genius was in fact to deny his imperial authority. The
worship of the gods was as much identified with the empire of Rome in the
West as with the civilisation of Greece throughout the East.
3. But as if these two powers were not ties sufficiently strong to hold
polytheism together, there was another feeling distinct from both, which
formed its last bulwark. The iron hand which held in its grasp these vast
countries, many of them so large that by themselves they might have been
empires, was strong enough to prevent or crush insurrection, but provided
only the majesty of the Roman peace was accepted, did not seek to disturb
a large remnant of local feeling and interest still representing the
former life and polity of the several provinces. Now whatever of national,
tribe, or race feeling existed, was grouped everywhere about the worship
of the native gods.(43) The Nile-land had ceased to be a royal seat, and
was governed by a simple Roman knight as prefect of the emperor; but not
for this had the Nile gods abdicated their dark sway over their votaries.
In them the Egyptians still felt that they had something which was their
own. Thus, whatever force of patriotism still lurked in the several parts
of the empire was nurtured by its own form of polytheism, which it in turn
invested with the memories dearest and most ineradicable in man, of past
independence or renown. Not only the Egyptians, but the various Asiatic
and Libyan races, the Gauls and Germans under Roman sway, were thus
attached to their native gods with a feeling no doubt akin to that of the
English towards “Old England,” or the Russians towards “Holy Russia.”
4. Two more conditions of society throughout the whole empire we have yet
to consider in their bearing on the maintenance of polytheism: first, the
concentration of the vast power of the state—in itself an acknowledged
omnipotence, without the restriction or reservation of individual
rights—in one hand, the hand of the emperor, the sole representative of
the people. By this it would seem that all the upper classes of society,
the classes at ease as to their maintenance, the classes who have leisure
to think and will to act in political matters, were deprived of so much of
their freedom, and such deprivation would tend to support an existing
institution. Secondly, the despotism above was met by a corresponding
despotism below. The rights of the slaveholder over the human labourer
left as little margin of freedom to daily toil as the right of the
imperial autocrat to the freedom of conscience in the rich. The servants
throughout the world of Rome being slaves, were as much in the hand of
their masters as those masters were in the hand of the prince.
We can now take a prospect of human society in reference to the polytheism
of the empire from the standing-point of Augustus in the last twenty years
of his reign. The worship of her gods was so intertwined with the
political constitution of Rome from her birth through seven centuries and
a half, that it might be said to be one thing with it. Almost as close was
the identification of the several religious systems of the East with the
enjoyments of civilised life which they prized so highly, and which the
empire of Rome secured to them. Further in the background the national
gods of the many races included in the empire were the last inheritance of
their former independent life. Again, not only was the emperor as Pontifex
Maximus the official head of this polytheism, but as representing the
whole power of the state, he was its guardian, and whatever assailed it
was an insult to the majesty which he embodied; while the slavery in which
the masses were lying seemed to represent in human society the chances of
war which had all ended in the dominion of Rome and the subjection of the
whole pantheon of incongruous gods to the sovereignty of the Capitoline
Jupiter. These were general conditions to that multifarious whole of
nations and races. Then if Augustus sought to examine more narrowly the
society of Roman citizens spread through his empire, he would find it
divided very unequally as to numbers into two classes. The vast majority
were those who take things as they find them, and who belonged with more
or less fidelity and heartiness to the idolatrous polytheism. The worship
which came to them as part and parcel of the empire, of civilised and of
national life, they accepted without thought. To all these an indefinite
number of immoral gods was throned in possession of Olympus; to all these
the result of such worship was, as we have seen described by S. Augustine,
the utter perversion of morality, the consecration of fables equalling in
turpitude the utmost license of the theatres. But everywhere among the
educated classes were to be found a small number of sceptical minds:
philosophers they termed themselves: it was fashionable to follow some
philosophic system or sect, and these fell mainly into two. Now the
Epicureans and the Stoics, while they left the existing polytheism in
practical possession, as a matter of custom and state religion, and so
delivered themselves from any unpleasant consequences of denying the
prevailing worship, concurred entirely in this, that the one by the way of
atheism, the other by that of pantheism, destroyed all religion of the
heart and inner conduct; because they equally removed the notion of a
personal God, and its corresponding notion of a personal being in man
outliving the body and the world of sense, and meeting with a personal
retribution. Whether the power they acknowledge be nature, as in
Lucretius, or a hidden physical force running through all nature, which
might be called Jupiter, Juno, Hercules, or the name of any other god, as
in Marcus Aurelius, the notion of a personal Creator, provident and
rewarding, was equally destroyed. Nor before the preaching of the Gospel
does there appear a single individual who drew out of the existing
polytheism such a conclusion. On the contrary, in Augustus and his
successors the imperial idea of unity in religion was to make out that all
these systems of polytheism, running into and athwart each other, came
practically to the same thing, differing in name only. Their obedience to
Jupiter of the Capitol was the only bond of unity, and pledge of the
empire’s duration, conceived by the Roman rulers.
II. Thus in the time of Augustus no human eye, whether we look at the mass
of mankind or the thinking few, could see any sign either that the
dominant polytheism was about to fall, or that the lost doctrine of the
divine Unity and Personality could be extricated from the bewildering mass
of error and superstition which had grown over, disguised, and distorted
it. Darker still, if possible, became the prospect under his successor,
Tiberius, whose reign had reached the climax of moral debasement, when
Sejanus was all-powerful at Rome. Hope for the human race there appeared
none, when such an emperor devolved his omnipotence on such a prime
minister. Then in the judgment-hall of a procurator in a small and distant
eastern province, there passed the following dialogue between an accused
criminal and his judge:—“Pilate went into the prætorium again, and called
Jesus, and said to him, ‘Art thou the king of the Jews?’ Jesus answered
him, ‘Sayest thou this thing of thyself, or have others told it thee of
me?’ Pilate answered, ‘Am I a Jew? Thine own nation and the chief priests
have delivered thee up to me: what hast thou done?’ Jesus answered, ‘My
kingdom is not of this world. If my kingdom were of this world, my
servants would strive that I should not be delivered to the Jews; but now
my kingdom is not from hence.’ Pilate therefore said to him, ‘Art thou a
king, then?’ Jesus answered, ‘Thou sayest that I am a king. For this was I
born, and for this came I into the world, that I should bear witness to
the truth. Every one that is of the truth heareth my voice.’ Pilate saith
to him, ‘What is truth?’ ” He who thus declared himself to be a king, the
cause of whose birth and advent into the world, the function of whose
royalty, was to bear witness to the truth, received from the power which
then ruled the world the punishment allotted to the slave who was worthy
of death. For many ages a false worship had overshadowed the earth, hiding
the true God from men, and setting up instead a multitude of demons for
gods. And during this time the thinkers of Greek and Roman society had
been asking, What is truth? And now the officer who asked that question of
the Truth Himself, replied to it by crucifying Him. And when the body of
that Crucified One was the same day taken down from the cross and laid in
its sepulchre, the power which reigned in polytheism and spoke by the
mouth of the judge, seemed to have given the final answer of triumphant
force to its question, What is truth? and falsehood might be thought to
reign supreme and victorious in the world.
It was with the resurrection of that Body, in which Truth was enshrined,
that the resurrection of truth among men began. He had said to His
disciples a few hours before, not “I show the truth,” but “I am the
Truth.” His birth and His advent took place that His witness might be
given to it, the witness to it being that very birth and advent, His
appearance among men, and the reception He would meet with. The
crucifixion itself—the reply of triumphant force to its own unanswered
question—was the witness which, first in Him, and then in His followers,
should make itself heard over the earth, now held in captivity by
falsehood. And since Truth is His proper Name and His personal Being from
eternity, and by being the Truth He who spoke is the second Person in the
Godhead, the perfect Image of all Truth, let us consider the import of His
Name as the summing-up of the great antagonism which He then planted on
the earth.
For He named Himself the Truth because He is the Son and the Word of the
Father. “Thus the Father, as it were uttering Himself, begot His Word,
equal to Himself in all things. For He would not fully and perfectly have
uttered Himself, if there were anything less or anything more in His Word
than in Himself.... And therefore this Word is truly the Truth; inasmuch
as whatever is in that knowledge of which He is begotten, is also in
Himself; and whatsoever is not in it, is not in Himself.... The Father and
the Son know each other, the one by generating, the other by being
generated.”(44) Thus it is that He is the perfect Word, the absolute Image
of God; and being the Image of God He created man in the beginning a copy
of that Image, and according to its resemblance, in that He created him in
the indivisible unity of a soul intelligent and willing—a created copy of
the Trinity in Unity. But though by the original constitution of the soul
this copy could not be destroyed, being the very essence of the soul, yet
the resemblance might be marred, and the harmony which reigned in the
original man between the soul, its intellect, and will, through the
indwelling of God’s Spirit, was broken by the act of sin; whereupon that
Spirit withdrew from him, and left the copy of the divine Image defaced
and disordered. All the heathenism we have been considering is the
sequence of that disorder, part of which is the grievous obscuration of
truth, that is, of the whole relation between God and man, of which
idolatrous polytheism is the perversion. It was the exact representation
of the soul’s own disorder, being the distortion but not the extinction of
worship; the fear of many demons, instead of the fear of one God; slavish
instead of filial fear.
But as the Truth of the Father is beheld and expressed in generating His
Son, His Word, His perfect Image, so truth to man is the resemblance of
created things to the archetypal idea of them in God; the resemblance of
the works of the divine art to the Artificer’s intention. In this long act
of heathenism we see the work of the divine Artificer marred and obscured,
and the marring and obscuration seem to have gone as far as was possible
without touching the essence of the soul. Who, then, should restore, but
He who had first created? Who should give back to the copy the lost
harmony, and reimprint the defaced resemblance, save the perfect Image of
God? Thus, when the corruption had run its course, and the original
disobedience had reproduced itself all over the earth in a harvest of evil
and disorder, the time for the work of reparation was come, and the Divine
Word, the Image of the Father, took flesh.
Magnificent as had been the dower of the First Man, and wonderful the
grace which held his soul in harmony with itself, and his bodily
affections in obedience to his soul, incomparably more magnificent was the
dower of human nature in its reparation, inconceivably grander the grace
which ruled the Soul and Body of the Restorer. For whereas the First Man’s
person had been simply human, the Person of the Second Man was the Divine
Word Himself, the perfect Image of the Father; and whereas the grace of
the First Man was such that he was able not to sin, the grace which had
assumed the nature of the Second Man was a Person who could not sin, the
fountain of grace itself, measureless, absolute, and personal. The Image
of God Himself came to restore the copy of that Image in Man; his
appearance as man among men was the reconveying of the Truth to them,
because He was the Truth Himself. The Truth in all its extent; the Truth
in the whole moral order and every relation which belongs to it; the Truth
by which all the rational creation of God corresponds to the Idea of its
Creator, was the gift which He brought to man in His Incarnation.
But this truth is not merely external to man. In order to be received and
appropriated by him, he must become capable of it. The Restorer works his
restoration by an inward act upon the soul, its intellect and will. The
Image of God sets up His seat within His work, the copy. Man is sealed by
the Holy Spirit with the likeness and resemblance of the Father’s Face,
the Son; and having the Son within him, and giving a home within the soul
to the divine character, and making this his treasure, man is formed after
God.(45) The supreme likeness, which is beyond all others, is impressed on
human souls by the Spirit of the Father and the Son. As the defacing of
the likeness, the result of the original fall, caused the obscuring of the
Truth, so its restoration was itself the recovery of the Truth.
And this restoration is itself the witness to the Truth of which He spoke
before Pilate as the object of His birth and advent. But to make the
witness operative and fruitful, the greatest wonder in this list of
wonders is required, the suffering of the Truth Himself. He said of the
corn of wheat, which was to bear fruit in unnumbered hearts, that it would
remain alone unless it fell into the ground and died. And so His
crucifixion in the nature which He had assumed was the act from which the
renewal of truth went forth; and not only in His Person, but likewise in
His chosen witnesses this special mode of vivifying the truth, and making
it fruitful, should be repeated. Not only must the absolute Truth of God
appear in our nature itself in order to be accepted, but the nature in
which it appeared should offer the sacrifice of itself; and this
particular mode of propagating the truth should be observed in that chosen
band whom He termed specially His witnesses. Their witness should be their
suffering; in them too the Truth should be crucified, and so become
fruitful.
And as man in his original creation had been a copy, however faint, of the
eternal relations of the Godhead in itself, so his restoration springs
from those same eternal relations. In it the Father, the Son, and the Holy
Spirit are seen working.(46) It springs from the Father, in that He is the
Father of the only-begotten Son, the Original of the Image, and so the
Father of all those who are the copies of that Image. It springs from the
Son, in that He is the perfect Image of the Father, and by dwelling in a
created nature has raised it to the dignity of His Person, from which the
grace of Sonship comes. It springs from the Holy Spirit, whose work as the
Spirit of the Father and the Son is to imprint the copy of the Son on man.
He performs in every one of the redeemed by communicating to them a
participation of the divine nature, by dwelling in them, by contact and
coherence with them, a work infinitely less in degree, but yet of the same
order with that work of His whereby all the fulness of the Godhead dwelt
by personal unity in our Lord’s Manhood.(47)
But we left our Lord before Pilate, bearing witness to the truth. It
remains to see how that truth became impressed on the world.
CHAPTER VIII. THE FIRST AND THE SECOND MAN.
“Totus Christus caput et corpus est. Caput unigenitus Dei Filius,
et corpus ejus Ecclesia, Sponsus et Sponsa, duo in carne una.” S.
Aug. _de Unitate Ecc._ tom. ix. 341.
“Totus Christus, id est, caput et membra.” S. Thomas, Prolog. ad 1
Sentent. art. 4.
Let us look back on the space which we have traversed, and gather up in a
few words the sight which it presents to us. We have man before us as far
as history will carry us back, as far as reasoning, planting itself on the
scanty traces of history, will penetrate into the cloudland of prehistoric
times: and the result stands before us exhibited in the manifold records
still remaining of the most renowned ancient civilisation. Here, then, we
see nations whose genius, whether in history, poetry, and literature, or
in works of art, or in civil government, we still admire, comprising men
in many of whom the powers of reason reached their utmost limit; nations
inhabiting the most varied climates and countries, and amongst them the
fairest in the world, nations formed under the most different
circumstances and pursuing the most distinct employments, some
agricultural, some commercial, some inland, some nautical, but alike in
this, that they were enthralled by systems of a false worship, of which it
is hard to say whether it was the more revolting to the reason by its
absurdity, or to the conscience of man by its foulness. And this false
worship does not lie distinct and apart from the concerns of daily civil
and domestic life, but is intertwined with all the public and private
actions of men, forming their habits and ruling their affections.
Moreover, the polytheistic idolatry described above as existing at the
time of Augustus in every province of his empire except one, in almost(48)
every country which touched upon it, or was known to it, is the result,
the summing-up, the embodiment of man’s whole history up to that time, so
far as we know it: it is that into which this history had run out, its
palpable, it almost seemed its irresistible, form. And it amounts to a
complete corruption, first of the relation between man and his Creator,
secondly of the relation between man and his fellow, thirdly of the
relations of man in civil government, that is, of states and political
communities, to each other.
Now, looking at this polytheistic idolatry simply as a fact, without for
the moment any attempt to give a solution of it from authority, looking at
it just as modern science would regard the facts of geology or astronomy,
there is one thing, we may suppose, which it proves with a superabundance
of evidence not found to belong to any other fact of history; and that is,
the intrinsic corruption of man as a moral being. That which in
theological language is called the Fall of man is, apart from all revealed
doctrine on the subject, brought in upon the mind with irresistible force
by the mere enumeration of the gods which heathendom worshipped, and of
the worship paid by it to them; a force which is indefinitely increased by
every inquiry into the moral and religious state of man as he lived under
this worship.
Now, then, let us consider what solution the Christian faith does give of
this fact, which exists, be it remembered, independently of this solution,
and would exist with all its force undiminished, if this were rejected.
I. The Christian faith, as a solution of this wonderful maze of
polytheistic idolatry, with all its accompaniments and consequences,
carries us back to the first father of the race, whose development we have
been following in it. This, it says, is nothing else(49) but the body of
Adam carried out through thousands of years, the body of Adam fallen under
a terrible captivity. Not only does the Christian faith set before us man
as one race descended from one, but because he is this one race, descended
from one, it represents him as having come into such a state. To
understand this we must contemplate the original creation, the fall of
man, and its consequences, in their several bearings on each other, which
will then lead us on to the nature and mode of the restoration.
In speaking of the creation of man we may first consider the union of the
soul and body simply by themselves; that is, in order to obtain a clear
view of our subject, we may form to ourselves a purely ideal state of
simple nature. Such a state would include two things; one positive, the
other negative.(50) Positively, human nature in this condition would have
all natural faculties in their essential perfection, and the assistance
and providence of God naturally due to it: negatively, it would have
nothing superadded to nature, nothing not due to it, whether evil or good,
that is, neither sin on the one hand, and what follows sin, the guilt
which entails punishment, nor on the other hand any gifts of grace, or
perfections not due to nature.
Human nature, if created in such a state, would have no supernatural end;
its end would be to love God with a natural love, as the Author and Ruler
of the world.
Of such a state it is requisite for our present purpose to say only two
things further. The first, that it is not contrary to any attribute of God
to have created human nature in such a state. The gift of eternal
beatitude, arising from the vision of God, which such a creature would not
have had for its end, is simply and absolutely a gratuitous gift of the
divine bounty, which God is not bound to bestow on any creature as such.
Secondly, God did not in fact so create man.
Going on from this state of simple nature, we may consider another state
in man, in which, beyond all his natural faculties,(51) he would have a
certain special perfection, consisting in the absence of immoderate
concupiscence, or in the perfect subjection of the sensitive to the
rational appetite, so that the inferior appetite should not be allowed to
set itself in motion against the superior, or to anticipate reason. For
human nature, regarded in itself as the union of a spirit and a body, is
as it were divided in its natural affections, which tend in diverse
directions, and thus totters, so to say, in its gait; when, therefore, it
receives an inward peace in its own proper faculties, it is said to be
supplemented, or to receive its integrity.
Now it is much to be noted that this special gift of integrity would not
be connatural to man, that is, not given to him by force of his nature
itself. It is true indeed that as such a gift perfects nature in regard to
all natural acts, and supplies a sort of natural deficiency arising out of
the combination of a spiritual with a material substance, wherein a
conflict is engendered, in such a sense it may be called natural: but
strictly speaking it is a gift superadded to nature.
It must further be noted that this state of nature in its integrity,
however high and beautiful, is not only entirely distinct from but of an
inferior order to the state of human nature raised to the gift of Divine
Sonship. Between human nature in this condition and human nature raised to
the gift of sonship, there would be more than the difference(52) that with
us exists between the kindly-treated servant and the adopted son: for
human nature in this integrity would still not by virtue of it possess
sanctifying grace, or, in consequence, have God and His vision for its
supernatural end.
But, thirdly, it was not merely in this state that God created man, but in
a state which not only included this, but had grace for its basis,(53)
that is to say, every perfection which it had sprang out of this, that it
was united to God by grace. This is a state of far superior order,
absolutely gratuitous, and beyond anything which is due to nature. The
first man, Adam, then, was not only a union of soul and body, not only did
he possess this nature in its integrity, but he was created in grace, so
that there was a union of the Holy Spirit with him, whereby he was exalted
to the condition of a supernatural end and adopted Sonship, and in this
union was rooted the integrity of his nature, and the supernatural power
of so ruling all the lower faculties of his soul that the higher could
mount undisturbedly to God: and certain other gifts over and above, such
as immunity from error or deception, so long as he did not sin, immunity
from even venial fault, immunity from death, and from all pain or sorrow.
Such was the original condition which grace bestowed on human nature,
wherein man had not only a supernatural end, but the power to attain it
easily.(54)
Now it is evident that man, by being created in grace, was raised to an
astonishing height of dignity, to which not only his nature, but any
created nature whatsoever had no claim. All that the justice and goodness
of God required him to do in creating such a being as man of two
substances, soul and body, was to bestow on the compound being so united
such perfections as made the several substances complete in their own
order. Such would be the ideal state of simple nature as delineated above.
It was a gift beyond nature, such as nature in its first beginning could
not claim, to bestow on it the integrity which in the second place we
considered. But how far beyond this, passing it by an unmeasured chasm,
was that dower of sonship rooted in sanctifying grace which God actually
bestowed on His favoured child? It is obvious at first sight that the
divine gift here intended, being in Adam’s actual creation the root of all
which was over and above the natural faculties of body and soul in their
union, was bestowed absolutely by the pure goodness of God, and therefore
could be bestowed with such conditions attached to it as pleased the
Giver. In all that is beyond the mere faculties and needs of nature—in
forming which God’s own being is a sort of rule to Him—He is absolutely
free to give as pleases Himself, to what degree He pleases, on what terms
He pleases. What, then, were the conditions on which He invested Adam with
the gift of Sonship, and created Him in grace as its foundation? He
created him, not only as the individual Adam, but as the Head of his race,
so that his race was summed up in him, and a unity was founded in him
attaching his whole race as members to his body, in such manner that the
supernatural gift of sonship bestowed on him was to descend from him by
virtue of natural propagation to every member of that body, which thus
became a supernatural race from a supernatural father. So absolute was
this unity that the order maintained in the case of every other creature
put under the dominion of the man so formed was not followed in his case.
For whereas they were created with the difference of sex, each a male and
a female, he was created alone, as the Head, and then she, by whose
coöperation the race was to be continued, was formed out of him. It was
not a second man who was so formed from the first, but one made with
reference to him, in dependence on him, to be a help meet for him, not for
herself, with an independent being, but for him. This formation of Eve
from Adam, which has a meaning of unfathomable depth in the development of
the race, is an essential part of the original design. “Therefore,” says
Adam, speaking in an ecstasy sent upon him by God, the words of God, “this
is now bone of my bone and flesh of my flesh: she shall be called woman,
because she was taken out of man. Therefore shall a man leave his father
and his mother, and shall cleave unto his wife, and they shall be one
flesh.” First, the Eve so formed from him is one flesh with him; secondly,
the race springing from both is one flesh likewise with him. The
consequence intended by that one flesh was the transmission of that
magnificent inheritance in which Adam was standing when he so spoke. In
this he was Father and Head, for this created alone, then Eve built up
from him, from whom afterwards was to issue their joint race. On the
further condition of his personal obedience to God and fidelity to his
grace, he held the whole supernatural gift of grace conferring sonship,
both for himself and for his race: on these terms it was bestowed by the
charter of God, the original Giver. Thus, the greatness of his Headship
was visible in two things, the power of transmitting his quality of divine
sonship to his race by propagation, and the dependence of that quality, in
them as well as in himself, on his personal fidelity to God.
But the First Man, the Father and Head of the race, did not stand in his
inheritance. He broke the divine command, and lost the gift of sonship,
and with it all the prerogatives attendant on that gift, which were above
nature and rooted in grace, and which the eminent goodness of God had
bestowed upon him: and by the terms of the original charter lost the gift,
not only for himself, but for his race. But he did not, therefore, destroy
that relation between the Head and the Race, which was part of the
original foundation of God. This continued; but whereas it had been
intended to communicate the blessing of adoption, it now served to
communicate the demerit of adoption lost, the guilt, and with it the
punishment incurred by that loss. This is the original sin, the sin of the
nature, not of the person, inherited by the members of Adam’s body; and as
there can be no sin without free-will, the sin of the whole nature
included in Adam as its Root and Head, which sinned by Adam’s abuse of his
free-will.
Let us try to determine as accurately as we can the position into which
Adam and his race fell.
Did, then, Adam simply lose with the forfeiture of sanctifying grace the
gift of sonship, the supernatural inheritance, all which God had bestowed
on him beyond that ideal state of pure nature which we described in the
first instance? God, we said, might have created man originally in this
condition, and man so created, that is, in virtue of this creation, would
not have been under any sin, nor exposed to the anger of God. Did man, by
Adam’s sin, fall back into it? Not so. His state after his fall differed
from such a state of pure nature in that he had upon him the guilt of lost
adoption, of adoption lost by the first Adam’s fault, and in proportion to
the greatness of the loss, and the gratuitousness of the gift originally
bestowed, was the anger with which, on the donor’s part, the loss was
regarded. How would a king, a man like ourselves, regard one whom he had
raised out of the dust to be his adopted child, and who had been
unfaithful to the parent who had so chosen him with more than natural
affection? Such an anger we can indeed understand when felt against the
person sinning; but we fail to enter into it as resting on the race,
because the secret tie which binds the head and the race into one is not
discerned by us; because too the greatness of the divine majesty, the
awfulness of His sovereignty, and the wrath of that majesty slighted, are
feebly appreciated by us. But this image may at least give us some notion
of the nature of that divine anger which pressed upon Adam and his race
after the fall. Not only, therefore, was the gift of sonship and the
prerogatives attending it withdrawn, but this withdrawal was a punishment,
which their absence in the presumed case of an original state of simple
nature would not have been. Thus death was a punishment to Adam and his
race; the body’s weakness and disease, the soul’s sorrows and pains, the
disobedience of the inferior appetites to the reason, the resistance of
the reason to the law of God, were all punishments, and a remarkable point
of the punishment is to be seen in this. Adam, as the head of his race,
was in virtue of natural propagation to have bestowed on the children of
his flesh, the members of his body, his own supernatural inheritance. Thus
a singular honour was conferred on the fathership of Adam. But now when,
in virtue of this natural propagation, he, continuing to be the head of
his race, transmitted to it the guilt of adoption lost instead of the
blessing of adoption conferred, a peculiar shame was set by God upon this
fathership of Adam, and upon all the circumstances attending it: so that
henceforth in the disinherited race the bride veiled her head, and the act
of being a father became an act of shame.
The condition, therefore, of Adam and his posterity after his fall
differed from the condition which would have been that of simple nature by
the whole extent of the guilt incurred by the nature in its fall from
sonship.
And herein lies one peculiarity, and one strangely distressing condition
of his state, in that while he lost by the fall the grace in which, as an
indwelling gift, his whole supernatural state had been rooted, he yet did
not lose that condition of being formed and intended for a supernatural
end which grace alone could enable him to attain. For the supernatural
vision and love of God he had been created, and in his fall he did not
sink to be merely a natural man; but his original end was still held out
before him as that which he might reach supported by that grace the aids
of which were in a different measure promised to him in order to lead a
life of penance, and as the earnest of a future restoration.
This, however, is far from being a complete statement of his case, and we
must go back to the circumstances of his fall in order to add that further
still more peculiar and remarkable condition which, added to the one just
described, made up the whole of his fall.
Adam had not disobeyed the divine command, and so broken the covenant of
his sonship, by the simple promptings of his own will. Another had
intervened; had suggested to the woman doubts against her Maker and
Father. She had yielded to these doubts, and disobeyed; and then Adam had
suffered himself to be drawn with her in her disobedience. Who was this
other? He was the prince and leader of spirits created good, but fallen
into enmity with God. Thus, the favourite son of God had listened to the
persuasion of God’s chief enemy, and his fall from sonship had been, by
the judgment of the offended Parent, not a simple fall from his
supernatural estate, but a fall likewise into servitude to that enemy.
This servitude also, with the guilt of the nature in which he had sinned,
Adam transmitted to the members of his body in and by their nature. Adam
with his race was the captive taken in war by the enemy of God, and the
life which he was allowed to live had the condition of this servitude
impressed on it, with this alleviation only, that the assistance of the
divine grace offered to him by the mercy of God in his state of penance
could protect those who accepted it from the effects of this servitude,
and ultimately deliver them.
Here, then, is the condition of Adam’s posterity in consequence of his
fall; members of a Head who had broken his allegiance to his Creator and
Father, and so inheriting with their nature the disinherited state into
which he had cast himself; captives, moreover, of that powerful spirit,
God’s antagonist, who had tempted Adam, seduced him, and led him to his
fall.
Now the heathenism which we have been contemplating is the carrying out in
time and space of this body of Adam in those who, by their personal fault,
fell away from the aids of grace which were accorded to man after his
fall—aids given first to Adam for the whole race, and then renewed to Noah
for the whole race; and the false worship, so blent and mingled with
heathenism, which seemed as if it were the soul of its body, is the sign
and stamp of that captivity to the evil spirit which the first man’s sin
inaugurated.
How powerful was the bond between Adam and his race, how great and
influential the headship which the Divine choice had vested in him, we see
in that mysterious transmission of guilt which passed from him to his
children. And it must be expressly noted that it was not a transmission of
punishment alone. Rather, the divine justice cannot punish where there is
no guilt; and as in this case Adam’s fall, and that of his posterity with
him, was not merely a loss but a punishment, so it had the special nature
of guilt, not only in him but in his posterity, and was a sin both of the
person and of the nature in him, of the nature only in them. We see the
force and range of the divine endowment of Adam here, though it be in the
tenacity of the calamity which ensued to his race; but it must be
remembered that such in this respect as the punishment was, the blessing
would have been. Adam was created both an individual and a race. In him
were two things—the single man and the head; but of these two things the
headship was peculiar to himself, while such as the individual Adam was,
his race was to be. He had it in his power to break the covenant of his
sonship with God, but not the tie between himself and his race.
And this sheds a light upon the darkest part of that terrible picture
which collected heathenism presents to us. Man, as a social animal, is
incessant in his action on his fellow-man; the parent and the family form
the child; the companion and the neighbourhood lead forth the child into
manhood. This work is perpetually going on in all its parts, and society
is the joint result. When, therefore, we see this society once fallen into
the possession of a false worship, which perverts the very foundations of
morality, and instils deadly error into the child with the mother’s milk,
no thoughtful mind can gaze without horror upon beings involved in such a
maze,(55) yet intended for an eternal duration. Man’s nature, as a race,
seems turned against him; and in addition to the guilt under which each
individual of the race is born, and the nature which each inherits,
wherein the internal harmony of peace is broken, and neither the appetites
obey the reason nor the reason is obedient to God, comes the force of
habit, of education, of culture, of companionship, of man’s business and
leisure, his play and his earnest, the force of his language, the
expression of his thoughts upon himself and others, the whole force, in
fact, of man’s social being when it is put under possession of an evil
power, man’s adversary. But this social nature was to have been to him the
means of the greatest good. As by his natural descent from Adam unfallen
would have come the grace of sonship, so the whole brotherhood of those
who shared that gift would have helped and supported each in the
maintenance of it. The human family would have had a beauty and a unity of
its own as such; an order and a lustre would have rested on the whole
body, confirming each member in the possession of his own particular gift.
The concatenation of evil in the corrupt society is the most striking
contrast to the fellowship of good in the upright; and while it is
distinct from that guilt which descends to man as the sin of his nature,
yet springs like it from the original constitution of that nature as a
race. It is the invasion of evil upon good carried to its utmost point,
wherein we discern most plainly “the prince of this world” wielding that
“power of darkness” by which the Apostle described the whole state of the
world, out of which these nations, which made the empire of Augustus, were
a part.
We have thus contemplated four distinct pictures. The first of these was
human nature bare and naked by itself, a merely ideal view of man, as a
being compounded of soul and body, each possessing only the faculties
which belong to them as spiritual and corporeal natures, the result of
which is a substantial union, because the spiritual substance becomes the
form of the corporeal, not by making the body, when already animated by
another principle, to participate of spiritual life, but by becoming
itself the principle first animating it. And we set forth this condition
of human nature in order to throw light upon our second picture—the first
man as he was actually created, possessing, as a gift superadded by the
purest divine bounty to this his natural constitution, a divine sonship
founded in grace; which transcendant union of the Holy Spirit with his
soul kept the soul with all its faculties in a loving obedience to God,
and the body in obedience to the soul; and added even to this state the
further gratuitous prerogatives of immunity from error, fault, pain,
distress, and death. Our third picture was man in this same state, but
constituted besides by the divine will, whose good pleasure was the sole
source of all this state of sonship, to be father of a race like to
himself, receiving from him, with its natural generation, the transmitted
gift of sonship; that is, from our view of him as an individual person we
went on to consider him as the head of a body—the root of a tree.
Fourthly, we have looked on the same man stripped by a fault, personal to
himself but natural to his race, of this divine sonship—reduced to a state
like that which the first would have been, but altered from it by two
grave conditions, one of guilt lying on himself and his race on account of
this gratuitous gift of sonship lost, another of captivity to that enemy
of his Creator and Father who had seduced him to fall. And this picture
included in it the double effect of guilt transmitted through a whole race
from its head and father, and of the personal sins of each individual of
the race: which, moreover, had a tendency to be perpetually heightened by
the social nature of man—that part of his original condition which, as it
would have supported his highest good in the state of innocence, so came
to make his corruption intense and more complicated in the state of fall.
It has not been our purpose in this sketch to dwell upon those who, like
Adam himself after his fall, accepted the divine assistance offered to
them, and the promise of a future Restorer, and who, living a life of
penance, kept their faith in God. Such an assistance was offered not only
to Adam but to his whole race, and such a line of men there always was; of
whom Abel was the type in the world before the flood; Noah after the
flood, as the second father of the whole race; Abraham, the friend of God
and father of the faithful, in whose son Isaac a people was to be formed,
which, as the nations in their apostasy fell more and more away from the
faith and knowledge of the true God, should maintain still the seed of
promise out of which the Restorer should spring. But before that Restorer
came, the heathenism—of which we have been speaking in the former chapter,
and of which we have been giving the solution above—was in possession of
all but the whole earth, and the captivity of man to his spiritual foe, on
account of which that foe is called “the Ruler” and “the God” “of this
world,” which is said “to lie in the malignant one,”(56) was all but
universal. This universality denoted that the fulness of the time(57)
marked out in the providence of God was come.
For Adam, in his first creation, and in the splendour of that robe of
sonship(58) in which he was invested, had been the figure of One to come:
his figure as an individual person, his figure as father and head of a
race; his figure likewise, when the race itself is viewed as summed up in
one, as one body. Let us take each of these in their order.
What was the counterpart of Adam, as an individual person, in the new
creation? It was the Eternal Son Himself assuming a human soul and body,
and bearing our nature in His divine personality. Over against the
creature invested with sonship stood the uncreated Son, invested with a
created nature. For the grace of the Holy Spirit given by measure, and
depending for its continuance on the obedience of the creature, was the
Fountain of Grace Himself ruling the creature by a union indefeasible and
eternal; for grace communicated grace immanent in its source. For the son
gratuitously adopted was the Son by nature, making, by an inconceivable
grace, the created nature assumed to be that not of the adopted but of the
natural Son. In a word, the figure was man united to God; the counterpart,
the God-man.
What, again, is Adam’s counterpart as Father and Head of his race? It was
human nature itself, which the Word of God espoused in the bridal chamber
of the Virginal Womb, and so is become the Second Adam, the Father of a
new race, the Head of a mystical Body, which corresponds to Adam’s
original Headship, but as far transcends it as the grace of the Incarnate
Word transcends the grace bestowed on the first man. As Adam, had he stood
in his original state of son, would have transmitted the gift of a like
sonship to his whole race—as, falling, he did actually transmit to that
race the guilt of adoption lost, so the Second Adam, out of His own
uncreated Sonship, but through the nature which He had assumed, bestowed
the dower of adopted sons and the gift of justice on his race. From the
one there was punishment generating through the flesh;(59) from the other,
grace regenerating through the Spirit. From the one, nature stripped and
wounded, yet still bound to its head by an indissoluble tie; by the other,
the Spirit of the Head, the Spirit of Truth, Charity, Unity, and Sanctity,
ruling his Body and animating it, as the natural soul animates the natural
body. Precisely where the mystery was darkest and the misery greatest, the
divine grace is most conspicuous, and the divine power most triumphant.
The very point which brings out Adam’s connection with his race has an
exact counterpart in Christ’s Headship of His people, and an inscrutable
judgment serves to illustrate an unspeakable gift. In exact accordance
with the doctrine that the sin of Adam is man’s sin, and the guilt of Adam
man’s guilt, is that boundless and unimaginable grace that the Incarnate
Word did not merely assume an individual human nature, but espoused in
that assumption the whole nature; that on the cross He paid the debt of
the whole nature, whether for original or actual sin; that His
resurrection is our collective justification; that the gift of sonship is
bestowed on men not as individual persons, but as members of His Body,
before they have personally merited anything, just as the guilt came on
them, as members of Adam, before they demerited anything personally.
Exactly where the obscurity of the fall was the deepest, the light of the
restoration is brightest; and where the sentence was most severe, the
grace most wonderful. But to deny the first Adam would entail the loss of
the Second; and he who declines the inheritance of the father stripped and
wounded cannot enter into the Body of the Word made flesh.
But thirdly, as in that terrible corruption of heathenism, wherein
immorality was based on false worship, we saw the body of Adam run out
through time and space into the most afflicting form which evil can assume
in the individual and social life of man, so in that Body which is ruled
by the Divine Headship we see the counterpart, the triumph of grace,
individual man taken out of that state of fallen nature, and invested with
a membership answering to the dignity of the Head. The one great Christian
people, the Kingdom of Christ, stands over against that kingdom of
violence, disorder, impurity, and false worship. As there is a unity of
the fallen Adam, a force of evil which impact only gives, so much more is
there a unity of the Second Adam, which is not a collection of
individuals, but a Body with its Head. The first unity consists in the
reasonable soul, informing the flesh which was moulded once for all from
the clay and descended to the whole race; and the race so descending was
polluted by a common guilt, on which, as an ever-fertile root, grew the
whole trunk of man’s personal sins, of falsehood, enmity, corruption of
morals, division, having the common quality of egotism. The second unity
consists in the Holy Spirit of the Head communicated to the soul and body
of the faithful people, both being restored by that grace of which truth
and charity, unity and sanctity, are the tokens, the full virtue being
planted in the cross of the Head, and from the cross diffusing itself to
His Body.
II. And so we are brought again to Him who stood before Pilate to make the
good confession, and who declared that the cause of His coming into the
world was to bear witness to the truth. In what form was that witness to
be made, and how was it to be efficacious? This is that point which we
have now to illustrate. Adam’s disobedience was a single act, the power of
which, springing out of his headship, extended through the whole line of
his race; through the consequences of this act the truth was obscured to
them, and human life involved in manifold error. What was that action on
the part of Christ, the purpose, as He declares, of His Incarnation, which
had an equally enduring effect? If the guilt communicated was not
transitory, then should the corresponding grace be perpetual. And how was
it so? The Son of God, as the Head of His race, does not stand at
disadvantage with Adam, but rather, we are told His grace is superabundant
in its results over the other’s sin: and He Himself declared that He had
completely finished the work given Him to do.(60) But here He describes
this work to be the bearing witness to the truth. For, indeed, it was
worthy of the eternal wisdom to clothe Himself in flesh(61) in order that
truth, the good of the intellect, and the end of the whole universe, might
stand forth revealed to His rational creatures: and He who made all things
in truth would Himself restore truth, when it had been obscured by the
traducer.
1. Let us take the character which He acknowledged and claimed before
Pilate: His character of King, and the kingdom in which it is exercised.
The Person of Christ, as that of the eternal Word, is the Truth itself.
But He has assumed a body, and in that body He declares that He is a king,
and that the exercise of His royalty is the bearing witness to the
truth.(62) His words therefore indicate no less than the creation of a
kingdom to which the truth should be the principle of subsistence. But
what in the material or temporal kingdom is that by force of which it
subsists? Plainly power. A kingdom may be larger or smaller in population,
wealth, extent, stronger or weaker in the quality of its people; but as
long as it retains in itself that in which power culminates, sovereignty,
it will be a kingdom. If this power departs from it, if it falls into
subjection to a foreign authority, or if its own subjects successfully
rebel against its power, it ceases to be. In the kingdom, therefore, of
which Christ speaks, the maintenance of truth corresponds to what the
maintenance of power is in a material kingdom.
But power in the material kingdom moves men to the natural end of society;
it preserves order, administers justice, allows and assists all natural
forces to develop themselves, and it must be in its supreme exercise one
and indisputable: that is, it culminates in sovereignty. So in the
spiritual kingdom truth, the corresponding power, moves men to the
supernatural end, and truth culminates in infallibility. But where is this
power seated, and how does the King wield it?
The same who here calls Himself King and declares it to be the function of
His royalty to bear witness to the truth, in describing elsewhere the very
creation of His kingdom says to His apostles, “You shall receive power by
the Holy Ghost coming upon you,” bidding them also to remain in Jerusalem
“until they were endued with power from on high.”(63) But a few hours
before that scene in the hall of Pilate He had told them also that He
would send them the Spirit of Truth, who should abide with them for ever,
and should lead them into all truth. He creates therefore the kingdom of
the truth by sending down the Spirit of the Truth to dwell for ever with
those to whom He is sent; and this Spirit of the Truth is His own Spirit,
whom He Himself will send as the token of His ascension and session; the
Spirit who dwelt in the Body which He had assumed, and in which He spoke
before Pilate, should be sent by Him when that Body had taken its place at
the right hand of God, should invest with His own power those to whom He
was sent, and should never cease to be with them in His character of the
Spirit of Truth. Here, then, is that power in the kingdom of the Truth
which enables it to bear a true and a perpetual witness. It is the power
of the King, for it is His Spirit: it is the power of the kingdom, for it
remains in it, is throned in it, and makes it to be what it is.
But to create a kingdom of the truth, and to bear perpetual witness in
that kingdom to the truth, is not only to state what is true. These
expressions mark out an organisation in and by means of which truth is
perpetuated. And further, the spirit in man is both reason and will; and
that man may act, the intellect which has truth for its object must work
on the will which has good for its object. And so the witness which our
Lord speaks of is that action of the truth upon the will which produces a
life in accordance with it: it is truth not left to itself, but supported
by grace. This power of the Spirit of Truth is therefore double, as
intended to work on the two powers of the soul, the reason and the will:
it is the double gift of Truth and Grace; as He is the Spirit of Grace no
less than the Spirit of Truth, and all grace is His immediate gift.
Thus the Word made flesh being full of Truth and Grace from His own Person
communicated that Truth and Grace as the power which should form His
kingdom for ever, abide in it, and constitute its being a kingdom; the
gift of truth and grace being the very presence of His own Spirit, who
took possession of His kingdom on the day of Pentecost and holds it for
ever.
This whole possession of Truth and Grace dwelling in a visible body is the
work of the eternal Word, who assumed a body for that purpose. It is the
counter-creation to the kingdom of falsehood which commenced with the sin
of the first man believing a falsehood against his Maker, and which spread
itself with his lineage into all lands.(64) And as in the natural creation
He not only created but maintained—for He did not make His creatures and
then depart from them, but from that time they exist in Him—so in the
supernatural the act of maintaining is equivalent to the act of creating,
it is a continued creation. As the guilt had a force which was fruitful,
which continued and propagated itself, and produced a widespread reign of
falsehood, how much more should that mighty and astonishing grace of a
Divine Person assuming a created nature be fruitful, continue, and
propagate itself in the maintenance of a visible kingdom, whose
distinctive character and its very life should be the possession and
communication of the truth. Should the Creator of man in His greatest work
be less powerful than His seduced creature in his fall? and if the fall,
pregnant with falsehood, bore fruit through ages in a whole race, should
not the recovery likewise have its visible dominion, and stand over
against the ruin as the kingdom of truth?
It is as King ruling in the kingdom of truth that the Divine Word
incarnate redeems man from captivity, which began in a revolt from the
truth, and in becoming subject to falsehood. All who are outside His
kingdom lie in this captivity;(65) the life which He gave voluntarily is
the price paid for their liberation; and as age after age, so long as the
natural body of Adam lasts, the captivity endures, so age after age the
liberation takes effect by entering into His kingdom. And this is the most
general name, the name of predilection, which both in prophecy marked the
time of Messiah the King, and was announced by His precursor, and taken by
our Lord to indicate His having come. The eternal duration of this kingdom
may be said to be the substance of all prophecy, and it was precisely in
the interpretation of a vision describing under the image of a great
statue the four world-kingdoms, that is, the whole structure, course, and
issue of the heathenism which we have been contemplating, that Daniel
contrasts these kingdoms with another. “In the days of these kings shall
the God of heaven set up a kingdom which shall never be destroyed; and the
kingdom shall not be delivered to another people, but it shall break in
pieces and consume all these kingdoms, and shall stand itself for ever.”
As King in this kingdom through all the generations of men from the moment
that He stood in Pilate’s hall until He comes to judge the world, our Lord
bears witness to the truth, His witness and His royalty being
contemporaneous and conterminous to each other.
2. This perpetual possession and announcement of the truth is indicated by
another image which is of constant recurrence,(66) wherein Christ is the
Inhabitant, His people the Inhabited, while both are the House or Temple,
for that in which God dwells is at once His House and Temple. Thus Moses
is said to have been “faithful in all his house as a servant, but Christ
as a Son over His own house, whose house are we.” Here the King who bears
witness to the truth is the God who sanctifies the faithful people by
dwelling in them and building them in the truth. It is not merely the
individual believer, but the whole mass of the faithful which grows up to
be a holy temple; and the ever-abiding Spirit of truth, whose presence is
the guarantee of truth, is the equally abiding Spirit of sanctity, whose
presence imparts holiness. The Son dwells in His own house by His Spirit
for ever: as He ceases not to be incarnate, He ceases not to dwell in His
house, and could falsehood be worshipped in His temple, it would cease to
be His. That was the work of heathenism, when a false spirit had caused
error to be worshipped for truth; the specific victory of the Word
incarnate was to set up a temple in which the truth should be worshipped
for ever, “the inhabitation of God in the Spirit.” But living stones make
up this temple, that is, individual spirits, endued with their own reason
and will, yet no less fitted in and cemented together by His grace, and so
forming a structure which has an organic unity of its own, being the House
and Temple of One. It is in virtue of this inhabitation that the Church is
termed the House of God, the pillar and ground of the truth, inasmuch as
it contains, as between walls,(67) the faith and its announcement and
proclamation, that is, the law of the King of Truth declared by His
heralds. “We speculate,” says S. Augustine, “that we may attain to vision;
yet even the most studious speculation would fall into error unless the
Lord inhabited the Church herself that now is.”(68) And again: “In earthly
possessions a benefit is given to the proprietor when he is given
possession; not so is the possession which is the Church. The benefit here
lies in being possessed by such a one.”—“Christ’s Body is both Temple and
House and City, and He who is Head of the Body is Inhabiter of the House,
and Sanctifier of the Temple, and King of the City.—What can we say more
acceptable to Him than this, Possess us?”(69)
3. Again, to take another image, which is the greatest of realities. What
a wonderful production of divine skill is the structure of the human body!
Even its outward beauty is such as to sway our feelings with a force which
reason has at times a hard combat to overcome, so keen is the delight
which it conveys. But the inward distribution of its parts is so
marvellous that those who have spent their lives in the study of its
anatomy can find in a single member, for instance, in the hand, enough out
of which to fill a volume with the wise adaptation of means to ends which
it reveals. There are parts of it the structure of which is so minute and
subtle that the most persevering science has not yet attained fully to
unravel their use. In all this arrangement of nerves and muscles, machines
of every sort, meeting all manner of difficulties, and supplying all kinds
of uses, what an endless storehouse of wisdom and forethought! And all
these are permeated by a common life, which binds every part, whatever its
several importance, into one whole, and all these, in the state of health,
work together with so perfect an ease that the living actor, the bearer of
so marvellous a structure, is unconscious of an effort, and exults in the
life so simple and yet so manifold poured out on such a multitude of
members, a life so tender that the smallest prick is felt over the whole
body, and yet so strong that a wound may transfix the whole structure
leaving the life untouched. And, in addition to this physical marvel, the
incorporeal mind, which has its seat in this material structure, and whose
presence is itself its life, rules like an absolute monarch with
undisputed sway over his whole dominion, so that the least movement of
volition carries with it a willing obedience in the whole frame, and for
it instantaneously the eye gazes, the ear listens, the tongue speaks, the
feet walk, the hands work, and the brain feels with an incomparable unity.
The marvel of the body is that things so many and various by the rule of
the artificer impressed upon them are yet one, concur to one end, and
produce one whole, from which no part can be taken, and to which none can
be added without injury, the least and the greatest replete with one life,
which so entirely belongs to the whole body that what is severed from the
body at once dies. “Now as the body is one, and has many members, but all
the members of this one body, being many, are one body, so also,” says S.
Paul, “is Christ,” giving the name of the Head to the whole Body. What the
human head is to its own body, that our Lord is to His Church. Perhaps no
other image in the whole realm of nature would convey with such force the
three relations(70) which constitute spiritual headship, an inseparable
union, by which the head and the body form one whole, an unceasing
government, including every sort of provision and care, and a perpetual
influx of grace. This is on the part of the head, while as to the body
perhaps no other image but this could equally convey the conjunction of
many different members with various functions, whose union makes the
structure, and whose unity is something entirely distinct from that which
all the parts in their several state, or even in their collocation and
arrangement, make up, for it is the life which makes them one. Thus it is
an unfathomed depth of doctrine, which is conveyed in the words, “God gave
Him to be Head over all things to the Church, who is His Body, the fulness
of Him who fills all things in all.” For though no language could exhaust
or duly exhibit the meaning of the kingdom or the temple in which the
abiding work of our Lord is indicated, we have in this title yet more
strikingly portrayed the intimate union and common life of His people with
Christ, and His tender affection for them, since the King of Truth who
redeems and the God of Truth who sanctifies is at the same time the Head
who by His own Spirit of the truth rules and vivifies His own Body. If it
be possible to dissociate the idea of the King from his kingdom, or that
of God from the temple of living souls in whom He is worshipped, and whose
worship of Him makes them one, yet in the human frame to dissever the head
from the body is to destroy the propriety of both terms, and it is as a
whole human body that the apostle represents Christ and His people to us.
4. Yet, as if this was not enough, S. Paul goes on to delineate Him as the
Bridegroom, whose love after redeeming sanctifies one who shall be His
bride for ever, one who obeys Him with the fidelity of conjugal love, one
whose preservation of His faith unstained is not the dry fulfilment of a
command, but the prompting of wedded affection. The image seems chosen to
convey intensity of love, first on the part of the Bridegroom as
originating it, and then on the part of the Bride as responding to it. But
no less does the unity of person in the Bride, given by S. John as well as
by S. Paul, indicate in the Church something quite distinct from the
individuals who compose her. For she is the pattern of the faithful wife
in that she is subject to Christ; and in these words a fact is stated,(71)
a fact without limit of place or time, which therefore marks that she who
is so described can never at any time be separated from the fidelity and
love due from her to her Head and Husband. And this is not true of the
individual souls belonging to her, for they, having been once faithful
members of the body, may fall away and be finally lost. The Bride alone is
subject to Christ with a never-failing subjection. And He on His part
loves her as His own flesh, a union of the two loves of the Head for the
Body, and of the Bridegroom for the Bride, which is true with regard to
Him of the Church alone, since individuals within her He may cast off, but
her alone He cherishes and fosters for ever. It is indefectible union and
unbroken charity with Him which her quality of Bride conveys.
5. And out of this wedded union by that great sacrament concerning Christ
and the Church, of which in the same passage S. Paul speaks, that they two
shall be one flesh, springs the whole race, in the generation of whom is
most completely verified his title of the Second Adam. From the womb of
the Church, become from a Bride the Mother of all living, the Father of
the age to come bears that chosen race, and royal priesthood, and holy
nation, and purchased people. And here we see expressed with great force
the truth that all who belong to the Father’s supernatural race must come
by the Mother. Her office of parent is here set forth; as her fidelity and
intense affection shine in the title of the Bride, as her union,
submission, and unfailing reception of life in her title of Body, so in
the title of Mother all the saved are borne to Christ by her, as S.
Cyprian(72) drew the conclusion, “he cannot have God for his father who
has not the Church for his mother.”
In all this we see the five(73) great loves first shown by God to man,
then returned by man to God; the love of the Saviour, redeeming captives,
and out of these forming His kingdom; the love of the friend, who is God,
sanctifying those whom He redeems into one temple; the love which He has
implanted in man for self-preservation, since that which He so redeems and
sanctifies He has made His own body; the love which He has given to the
bridegroom for the bride, since it is the Bride of the Lamb who is so
adorned; and the love of the Father for his race, since it is his wife who
bears every child to him. Why is the whole force of human language
exhausted, and the whole strength of the several human affections
accumulated, in this manner? It is to express the super-eminent work of
God made flesh, who, when He took a human body, created in correspondence
to it that among men and out of men in which the virtue of His Incarnation
is stored up, the mystical Kingdom, Temple, Body, Bride, and Mother. No
one of these titles could convey the full riches of His work, or the
variously wrought splendour of His wisdom, which the angels desire to look
into; therefore He searched through human nature and society in all its
depth and height for images whose union might express a work so unexampled
and unique. Rather, it is truer to say that these natural affections
themselves, the gift of that most bountiful giver, were created by Him
originally to be types, foreshadowings, and partial copies of that more
excellent supernatural love which He had decreed to show to man, since
first of all things in the order of the divine design must the Incarnation
have been. The whole structure of the family, and the affections which it
contains, must spring out of this root, for nature was anticipated by
grace in man’s creation, and must ever have been subordinate to it. And
now, when the full time of grace is come, these titles of things which by
His mercy have lasted through the fall, serve to illustrate the greatness
of the restoration. For this, which has many names, all precious and dear,
is but one creation, having the manifold qualities of redemption and
sanctification, of organic unity in one body, wherein many members
conspire to a corporate life, which life itself is charity, and in which
is the production of the holy race. As we gaze on the Kingdom, Temple,
Body, Spouse, and Family, one seems to melt and change into the other. The
Kingdom is deepened and enlarged by the thought that the King is the
eternal Truth who is worshipped therein; and the worship passes on into
the love of the Incarnate God for the members of His own Body, whom He
first saves, then fosters and cherishes as His own flesh: and here again
is blended that tenderest love of the Bridegroom for the bride, which
further issues into the crowning love of the Father for His race. The mode
of the salvation seems to spring from the nature of God Himself, since all
paternity in heaven and earth springs from that whereby He is Father of
the only-begotten Son, who, descending from heaven with the love of the
Bridegroom for the bride, binds together in sonship derived from his own
the members of His body, the bride of His heart, the subjects of His
kingdom, who are built up as living stones into that unimaginable temple
raised in the unity of worshipping hearts to the ever-blessed Trinity. To
this grows out, as the fulness of Him who fills all in all, that body of
the Second Adam, of which in the body of the first Adam He had Himself
deposited the germ.
When the angel described to the Blessed Virgin herself that miracle of
miracles which was to take place in her, the assumption of human flesh by
the Son of God, he used these terms: “The Holy Ghost shall come upon thee,
and the power of the Most High shall overshadow thee.” When the Son of
God, at the moment of His Ascension, declared to His Apostles the creation
of His mystical body, by using similar words He referred them back to His
own conception: “You shall receive power, the Holy Ghost coming upon you:”
having already on the day of His Resurrection told them, “I send the
promise of my Father upon you; but wait you in the city until you be
indued with power from on high.”(74) Our Lord Himself thus suggests to us
the remarkable parallel between the formation of His natural and His
mystical body. He who framed the one and the other is the same, the Holy
Ghost: the Head precedes, the Body follows; because of the first descent,
that Holy Thing which was to be born should be called the Son of God;
because of the second, “you shall be my witnesses in Jerusalem, and in all
Judea, and Samaria, and to the farthest part of the earth;” and this is
said in answer to their question whether He would then restore the kingdom
to Israel: that is, the second descent of the Holy Ghost forms the kingdom
whose witness to Christ is perpetual; forms the body with which and in
which He will be for ever by this power of His Spirit dwelling in it to
the end of the world. We have therefore here all the various functions and
qualities which, under the five great titles of Kingdom, Temple, Body,
Spouse, and Mother, delineate His Church, gathered up into that unity
which comprehends them all, and from which, as a source, they all flow,
“The Power of the Holy Ghost coming upon men.”(75) This creation is as
absolutely His, and His alone, as the forming of our Lord’s own Body in
the Virginal Womb; it is the sequel of it; the fulfilment among men of
those divine purposes for which God became Incarnate; in one word, the
Body of the Head perpetually quickened by His Spirit. And here we may
remark those striking resemblances between the natural and mystical Body
which this “power of the Holy Ghost,” the former of them both, indicates.
For in the first the manhood(76) cannot be severed from the Person of the
Word, nor in the second can the body of the Church be severed from Christ
the Head and His Spirit. Secondly, in the first the Person of the Word and
His manhood make one Christ, and in the second Christ the Head and the
Church the Body make one complete Body. Thirdly, in the first the manhood
has its own will, but through union with the Godhead is impeccable and
indefeasible; and in the second the Body of the Church, though possessing
its own liberty, is so ruled by Christ and guided by His Spirit, that it
cannot fail in truth or in charity. Fourthly, in the first there is an
influx of celestial gifts from the Person of the Word into the manhood,
and in the second there is a like influx from Christ the Head into His
Body the Church, so that he who hears the Church hears Christ, and he who
persecutes the Church, as Saul before the gate of Damascus, persecutes
Christ. Fifthly, in the first the Head, through the manhood as His
instrument, fulfilled all the economy of redemption, dwelt among men,
taught them, redeemed them, bestowed on them the gifts of holiness and the
friendship of God; and in the second, what He began in His manhood He
continues through the Church as His own Body,(77) and bestows on men what
He merited in His flesh, showing in and by the Church His presence among
men, teaching them holiness, preserving them from error, and leading them
to the eternal inheritance.
It is also by this one “power of the Holy Ghost coming upon men” that we
learn how the Head and the Body make one Christ. As in the human frame the
presence of the soul gives it life and unity, binding together every
member by that secret indivisible force, from the least to the greatest,
from the heart and brain to the minutest portion of the outward skin, so
in this divine Body, which makes the whole Christ, it is the presence of
the Holy Ghost, as of the soul, which gives it unity and life. The
conclusion was drawn by a great Saint, and no less great a genius,
fourteen hundred years ago, and I prefer S. Augustine’s words to any which
I can use myself: “Our spirit by which the whole race of man lives is
called the soul; our spirit, too, by which each man in particular lives is
called the soul; and you see what the soul does in the body. It quickens
all the limbs: through the eyes it sees, through the ears it hears,
through the nostrils smells, through the tongue speaks, through the hands
works, through the feet walks; it is present at once in all the limbs that
they may live; life it gives to all, their functions to each. The eye does
not hear, nor the ear nor the tongue see, nor the ear nor the eye speak,
but both live; the functions are diverse, the life common. So is the
Church of God. In some saints it works miracles; in others gives voice to
the truth; in others, again, maintains the virginal life; in others keeps
conjugal fidelity; in these one thing, in those another; each have their
proper work, but all alike live. Now, what the soul is to the human body,
that is the Holy Spirit to the body of Christ, which is the Church: what
the soul does in all the limbs of an individual body, that does the Holy
Spirit in the whole Church. But see what you have to avoid, what to
observe, and what to fear. It happens that, in the human body, or in any
other body, some member may be cut off, hand, finger, or foot. Does the
soul follow it when cut off? As long as it was in the body it lived: when
cut off, it loses life. So too the Christian man is a Catholic while he
lives in the body; when cut off, he becomes a heretic; the Spirit does not
follow the amputated limb.”(78)
But what is this “power of the Holy Ghost coming upon men”? It is the
whole treasure of truth and grace, which dwelt first in the natural body
of Christ, which He came to bestow on men, which He withdrew not when He
ascended, but of which He promised the continuance in the Person of the
Holy Ghost, and fulfils by that Person indwelling in the Church. It was
the imparting the whole treasure of truth and grace by such an indwelling
which made it expedient for Him to go, which made His bodily departure not
a loss, but a gain, which was “the promise” of which He spoke on that last
night, and which was expressly declared to be a perpetual presence,
leading, as it were, by the hand(79) into all truth—an all-powerful,
all-completing, all-compensating presence, such as that alone is or can be
which maintains the intellect of man in truth, because it maintains his
will in grace: and, instead of the two wild horses of which the great
heathen(80) spoke, guides the soul in her course as borne aloft on those
twin divine yoke-fellows,(81) faith and charity.
Correlative, therefore, to the Person of Him who is at once King, and God,
and Head, and Bridegroom, and Father, is that singular creation of His
Spirit, by which, in the Kingdom, Temple, Body, Spouse, and Mother, He
deposited the treasure of the truth and grace which He became man to
communicate. It was not as individual men, living a life apart, but as
common children of one race, joint members of one body, that the guilt of
the first father fell upon them; it is only on them as children of a
higher race and members of a far greater body, that the grace of the
Deliverer is bestowed. The distinctions of race and the divisions of
condition drop away as they are baptised into one body, and made to drink
of one spirit. The new and supernatural life cannot be communicated save
by this act of engrafting into a new body. As Eve from the side of Adam
sleeping, so the Church from the side of Christ suffering; as Eve bears
still to Adam the children of men, so the Church to Christ the children of
Christ. These are not two mysteries, but one, unfathomable in both its
parts, of justice and of mercy; but the whole history of the human race
bears witness to the first, and the whole history of the Christian people
to the second. It would be amply sufficient to prove what we have been
saying, that the first communication of the supernatural life is conferred
by being baptised into one body and made to drink into one spirit. But
this is not all. There is a yet dearer and more precious gift, which
maintains and increases the life so given. Our Lord stands in the midst of
His Church visibly forming from day to day and from age to age that Body
of His which reaches through the ages; He takes from Himself and gives to
us. He incorporates Himself in His children. He grows up in us, and by
visible streams from His heart maintains the life first given. Here, above
all, is the one Christ, the Head and the Body. This is but an elemental
truth of Christian faith, though it is the highest joy of the Christian
heart. It was in an instruction to catechumens that S. Augustine said,
“Would you understand the Body of Christ? Hear the Apostle saying to the
faithful, ‘But you are the Body and the members of Christ.’ If, then, you
are Christ’s Body and His members, it is your own mystery which is placed
on the Lord’s table; it is your own mystery which you receive. It is to
what you are that you reply amen, and by replying subscribe. For you are
told, ‘the Body of Christ,’ and you reply, amen. Be a member of the Body
of Christ, and let your amen be true. Why, then, in bread? Let us bring
here nothing of our own, but listen to the Apostle himself again and
again, for in speaking of that sacrament he says, ‘We that are many are
one bread, one body.’ Understand and rejoice. Here is unity, verity,
piety, charity. One bread. Who is that one bread? We being many are one
bread. Remember that the bread is not made of one, but of many grains.
When you were exorcised, it was as if you were ground; when baptised, as
if you were kneaded together with water; when you received the fire of the
Holy Ghost, it was your baking. Be what you see, and receive what you are.
This the Apostle said of the bread. Of the chalice what we should
understand is clear enough even unsaid. For as to make the visible species
of bread many grains are kneaded with water into one, as if that were
taking place which Holy Scripture records of the faithful, ‘they had one
mind and one heart in God,’ so also in the case of the wine. Many grapes
hang on the bunch, but their juice is poured together into one. So too
Christ the Lord signified us; willed us to belong to Himself; consecrated
on His own table the mystery of our peace and unity. He who receives the
mystery of unity and holds not the bond of peace receives not a mystery
for himself, but a witness against himself.”(82)
Thus the coherence of the natural and mystical Body of Christ was at once
exhibited and effected in the great central act of Christian worship, and
the whole fruit of the Incarnation was seen springing from the Person of
Christ, and bestowed on men as His members in the unity of one Body. Thus
were they taken out of the isolation, distraction, and enmity—that state
of mutual strife and disorder which heathendom expresses—and made into the
one divine commonwealth; and thus the Body of Christ grows to its full
stature and perfect form through all the ages of Christendom.
And if there be one conviction which, together with the belief in the
Incarnation itself of the Word, is common to all the Fathers, Doctors,
Saints, and Martyrs of the Church—which together with that belief and as
part of it is the ground of their confidence in trouble, of their
perseverance in enduring, of their undoubting faith in times of
persecution, of their assurance of final victory, it is the sense which
encompassed their whole life, that they were members of one Body, which,
in virtue of an organic unity in itself and with its Head, was to last for
ever. The notion that this Body, as such, could fail, that it could cease
to be the treasure-house of the divine truth and grace, would have struck
them with as much horror as the notion that Christ had not become
incarnate, and was not their Redeemer. The Body which the Holy Ghost
animated on the day of Pentecost never ceased to be conscious of its
existence—conscious that the power of its Head, the Eternal Truth, was in
it, and would be in it for ever. Confidence in himself as an individual
member of the Body, the Christian had not, for he knew that through his
personal sinfulness grace might be withdrawn from him, and that he might
fall away; confidence he did not place either in his own learning,
knowledge, and sanctity, or in these gifts as belonging to any individual
Christian; his confidence lay in the King who reigned in an everlasting
Kingdom, in the Head who animated an incorruptible Body. To sever these
two would have been to decapitate Christ.(83) The thought that the Bride
of Christ could herself become an adulteress, and teach her children the
very falsehoods of that idol-worship which she was created to overthrow,
would have appeared to him the denial of all Christian belief. And such a
denial indeed it is to any mind which, receiving the Christian truth as a
divine gift, looks for it also to have a logical cohesion with itself, to
be consistent and complete, to be a body of truth, not a bundle of
opinions. Let us take once more S. Augustine as expressing, not a private
feeling, but the universal Christian sense, when he thus reprehended the
Donatist pretension, that truth had deserted the Body of the Church to
dwell in the province of Africa. “But, they say, that Church which was the
Church of all nations exists no longer. She has perished. This they say
who are not in her. O shameless word! The Church is not because thou art
not in her. See, lest therefore thou be not, for though thou be not, she
will be. This word, abominable, detestable, full of presumption and
falsehood, supported by no truth, illuminated by no wisdom, seasoned with
no sense, vain, rash, precipitate, and pernicious—this it was which the
Spirit of God foresaw, and as against these very men, when He foretold
unity in that saying, ‘To announce the name of the Lord in Zion, and his
worship in Jerusalem, when the peoples and kingdoms join together in one
that they may serve the Lord.’ ”(84)
Now, to suppose that anything which is false has been, or is, or can be
taught by the Church of God, is to overthrow the one idea which runs
through the titles of the Kingdom, Temple, Body, and Spouse of Christ, it
is to make the Mother of His children an adulteress, to deny that power of
the Holy Ghost coming down on the day of Pentecost, and abiding for ever,
with His special function of leading into all truth, that presence of the
Comforter in virtue of which the Apostles said for themselves and for the
Church through all time, “It has seemed good to the Holy Ghost and to us.”
With all men who reason, such a supposition is equivalent to the statement
that Christ has failed in what He came on earth to do, for “the Word was
made flesh that He might become the Head of the Church.”(85) Next,
therefore, in atrocity to that blasphemy which assaults the blessed
Trinity in Unity upon His throne is the miserable and heartless blasphemy
which, by imputing corruption of the truth to the very Kingdom and Temple,
the very Body and Spouse of the Truth Himself, the Incarnate God, would
declare the frustration of that purpose which He became man to execute,
the falsifying of that witness of which He spoke in the hall of Pilate,
and would so annihilate that glory to God in the highest, and on earth
peace to men of good-will, which was the angelic song on the morning of
His birth, and is daily(86) in the mouth of His Bride. The truth can as
little cease out of the House and Temple of God as the Father and Son can
cease sending the Spirit to dwell in it: the truth can as little cease to
be proclaimed and taught in its own kingdom as the King can cease to reign
in it. The conjugal faith of the Bride of Christ cannot fail, because He
remains her Bridegroom. The power of the Head, the double power of truth
and grace, cannot cease to rule and vivify His Body, because He is its
Head for ever. The Mother cannot deceive her children, because she is of
one flesh with the Son of Man, in the union of an unbroken wedlock.
It has been said above that the power of that bond which from the origin
of man united the race to its head was shown not only in the guilt which
the act of that head was able to inflict on the body, not only in the
exact transmission of the same nature, thus stained, from age to age, but
likewise in that social character of the race in virtue of which such a
thing as a man entirely independent of his fellow men, neither acting upon
them, nor acted upon by them, never has existed nor can exist. It was in
that connected mass which this social nature creates, that corporate unity
of human society, that heathenism appeared most terrible, because
corruption seemed to propagate itself, and evil by this force of cohesion
to become almost impregnable. But it was especially in creating a
corporate unity which should show the force of our social nature for good,
as the corruption had shown it for evil, that the power of the Restorer
shines forth. The true Head of our race came to redeem and sanctify not so
many individuals but His Body. Surely there is no distinction more
important to bear in mind.(87) “No single member by itself can make a
body; each of them fails in this; coöperation is required, for when many
become one, there is one body. The being or not being a body depends on
being united or not united into one.” And, again, beautiful as the
individual member, the hand or the eye, may be in itself, far higher is
the beauty which belongs to the body as the whole in which these members
coalesce and are one. Each member too has a double energy, its own proper
work, and that which it contributes to the body’s unity, for this is a
higher work which the coöperation of all produces; each a double beauty,
its beauty as a part, and that which it adds to the whole: and these two,
which seem to be separate, have the closest connection, for a maimed limb
impairs the whole body’s force, and as to its beauty, as it is
incomparably finer than the beauty of any part, so is it marred by a
slight defect in one part, as the fairest face would be spoilt by the
absence of eyebrows, the fairest eyes lose their lustre, and the
countenance its light, by the want of eyelashes. It is, then, in the
beauty of the Body of Christ that the Christian mind would exult, not
merely in the several graces of those who are its members, but in that
corporate unity which they present. We see in the course of the world that
great image of the prophet, lofty in stature and terrible to behold, whose
head is of gold, whose breast and arms of silver, the thighs of brass, the
legs of iron, the toes mixed of iron and clay. This is the form of the
first Adam, seen in his race; and over against it likewise is the one man
Christ, forming through the ages, gathering His members in a mightier
unity. This is the Word made flesh, the Second Adam, “so that the whole
human race is, as it were, two men, the First and the Second.”(88)
So much, then, is the creation of the Church superior to the creation of a
single Christian as the creation of a body is superior to that of a single
bone or muscle. This superiority belongs to the nature of a body as such.
It is another thought, which we only suggest here, _whose_ body it is. And
here it appears in two very different conditions, the one as it is seen by
us now, the other as it will be seen hereafter. There is, I conceive, no
subject in all human history comparable in interest to that which the
divine commonwealth as such, when traced through the eighteen centuries
which it has hitherto run, presents. What nation can be compared to this
nation? what people to this people? what labours to its labours? what
sufferings to its sufferings? what conflicts to those which it has
endured? what triumphs to those which it has gained? what duration to that
portion only of its years which is as yet run out? what promise to its
future? what performance to its past? What is the courage and self-denial,
what is the patience and generosity, what the genius, the learning, the
sustained devotion to any work, shown by any human race, compared to those
which are to be found in this race of the Divine Mother? How do those who
are enamoured of nationalities fail to see the glories of this nation,
before which all others pale their ineffectual fires? How do those with
whom industry is a chief virtue, and stubborn perseverance the crowning
praise, not acknowledge her whose work is undying and whose endurance
never fails? These men admire greatness and worship success. Let them look
back fourteen hundred years, when that great world-statue seemed to be
breaking up into the iron and clay which ran through its feet. Then this
kingdom was already great and glorious, and crowned with victory, and
filled the earth. The toes of that statue have meanwhile run out into ten
kingdoms, and the islands which were forest and swamp when this kingdom
commenced have become the head of a dominion which can be mentioned beside
that of old Rome; but still in undiminished grandeur the great divine
republic stands over against all these kingdoms, penetrates through them,
stretches beyond them, and while they grow, mature, and decay, and power
passes from one to the other, her power ceases not, declines not, changes
not, but shows the beauty of youth upon the brow of age, and amid the
confusion of Babel her pentecostal unity. If success be worshipful,
worship it here; if power be venerable, bow before its holiest shrine.
But if this be the Body of Christ here in its state of humiliation, during
which it repeats the passion of its Head, if these be the grains of wheat
now scattered among the chaff,(89) what is that one mass to be which these
shall make when the threshing-floor is winnowed out? We see the Body in
its preliminary state of suffering, where it has a grandeur, a duration,
and a beauty like nothing else on earth. What it shall be in its future
state S. John saw when he called it the great City invested with the glory
of God, the Bride adorned for her husband; and S. Paul hints, when he
speaks of the perfect man compacted and fitly framed together by what
every joint supplies, and grown up to full stature in the Head. There is
in the redeemed, not only the exceeding greatness of the quality of their
salvation, that is, the gift of divine sonship; nor, again, that this gift
is heightened by its being the purchase of the Son of God, so that He is
not ashamed to call those brethren whom He has first washed in His own
blood: but over and above all this, one thing more, that the whole mass of
the redeemed and adopted are not so many souls, but the Body of Christ.
Faint shadows, indeed, to our earthly senses are House and Temple, Kingdom
and City paved with precious stones of that mighty unity of all rational
natures, powers, and virtues, each with the perfection of his individual
being, each with the superadded lustre of membership in a marvellous
whole, under the Headship of Christ. The exceeding glory of this creation,
which will be the wonder of all creation through eternity, is that God the
Word made flesh, the Head and His Body, make one thing, not an inorganic,
but an organised unity, the glorified Body of a glorified Head.
Once more let us note the consistency and unbroken evolution of the divine
plan.
In the first creation of the human race the Body of Christ is not only
foretold but prefigured, not only prefigured but expressed in the very
words uttered by Adam in his ecstasy, the words of God delineating that
act of God, the greatest of all His acts of power, wisdom, and goodness,
whereby becoming man, and leaving His Father and His Mother,(90) He would
cleave to the wife He so took, the human nature which in redeeming He
espoused. This, and no other, was the reason why Eve was formed out of
Adam. It is the beginning of the divine plan, which is coherent
throughout, which was designed in the state of innocency, which remains
intended through the state of guilt, which is unfolded in the state of
grace, which is completed in the state of glory, when what that forming of
Eve from the side of Adam, and of the Church from the side of her Lord,
what that growth through thousands of years, through multitudinous
conflicts, through unspeakable sorrows, through immeasurable triumphs,
shall finally issue in, shall be seen by those whom the Second Adam has
made worthy of that vision, and by whom it is seen enjoyed.
CHAPTER IX. THE SECOND MAN VERIFIED IN HISTORY.
“Magnum principium, et regni ejus non erit finis. Deus fortis,
dominator, princeps pacis.”
In order to complete the view taken in the preceding chapter of the work
of Christ as the second Adam over against the work of the first Adam, it
is necessary to dwell at greater length upon a point of which only cursory
mention was made therein. It was our object there to bring out the
relation of Christ to the Church, but this cannot be done without fully
exhibiting the relation to the same Church of the Holy Spirit. To the
Incarnation the Fathers in general give the title of the Dispensation of
the Son, and as the equivalent, the result, the complement and crown of
this Dispensation, they put the Giving of the Spirit.(91) This Giving of
the Spirit occupies the whole region of grace, and is coextensive with the
whole action of the Incarnate God upon men whom He has taken to be His
brethren. The Holy Spirit in this Giving is He who represents the
Redeemer, and executes His will, not as an instrument, not as one
subordinate, but as the very mind of Christ between whom and Christ there
can far less enter any notion of division or separation than between a man
and his own spirit. He is that other Paraclete, abiding for ever, who
replaces to the disciples the visible absence of the first Paraclete, the
Redeemer Himself: He is the Power constituting the Kingdom of Christ; the
Godhead inhabiting His Temple; the Soul animating His mystical Body; the
Charity, kindling into a living flame the heart of His Bride; the Creator
and Father of His Race.
This connection between the Dispensation of the Son and the Giving of the
Spirit was delineated by our Lord himself when He first appeared to His
assembled disciples after His resurrection. As they were gazing in wonder
and trembling joy on that Body which had undergone His awful passion, as
He showed them the wounds in His hands and His feet, He told them how His
sufferings were the fulfilment of all that in the Law, the Prophets, and
the Psalms had been written concerning Him. And thereupon it is said, He
opened their mind to the understanding of these Scriptures. It was thus
that the Christ was to suffer, it was thus that He was to rise again on
the third day. Hitherto He has dwelt upon His own dispensation, as the
fulfilment of all prophecy, now He proceeds to its fruit: that in the name
of this Christ repentance and remission of sins should be proclaimed to
all nations, beginning at Jerusalem. “And you,” He says, “are the
witnesses of these things. And, behold, I send the promise of my Father
upon you: but stay you in the city of Jerusalem until you be endued with
power from on high.” Again, at another occasion of equal solemnity, when
He was with His assembled disciples in visible form for the last time, at
the moment preceding His ascension, He uses the same emphatic words,
charging them not to depart from the city, but to await there that promise
of the Father, the baptism in the Holy Ghost, which they were to receive
in common together, which was to be the power in virtue of which they
should be His witnesses for all time unto the ends of the earth: the power
which instead of restoring a local kingdom to Israel, as was in their
thoughts when they questioned Him, was to create an universal kingdom to
Him in the hearts of men. It is then as the result of His passion, and the
token of His resurrection, that the Son sends down upon His disciples the
promise of the Father, that is, the perpetual presence of the Spirit of
the Father and the Son, the Spirit of Truth and Grace, that permanent and
immanent power from on high, who, dwelling for ever in the disciples,
makes the Church.
But these words, so singular and so forcible, which He uses on these two
occasions, at His resurrection and His ascension, are themselves a
reference to the long discourse which He had held with His apostles on the
night of His passion. It is in this discourse, from the moment that Judas
left them to the conclusion of the divine prayer—and if we can make any
distinction in His words, surely these are the most solemn which were ever
put together in human language, since they are the prayer not of a
creature to the Creator, but the prayer of One divine Person to Another—it
is in this discourse that He describes the power from on high with which,
as the promise of the Father, He, the Son, would invest His disciples. It
is here He says that He would ask the Father, who should give them another
Paraclete, the Spirit of truth, to abide with them for ever: whom the
world would not receive, nor see, nor know, but whom they should know,
because He should abide with them and be in them. This other Paraclete,
coequal therefore with Himself, whom the Father should send in His name,
and whom He should send from the Father, the Spirit of holiness as well as
the Spirit of truth, should teach them all things and remind them of all
His teaching. And His coming, though invisible, should profit them more
than His own visible presence. For while He declared Himself to be the
Way, the Truth, and the Life,(92) He revealed to them here that it was by
that very way that the Spirit of truth should lead them by the hand into
all truth. It was in this Truth, that is, in Himself, that they should be
sanctified, and that they should be one, the glory of the Incarnation,
which had been given to Him, passing on to them as the members of His
Body, by the joint possession of the spirit of truth and holiness, whose
presence was the gage that the Father loved them, as He loved Christ, the
Body being identified with the Head. In all this He was describing to them
the work of that other Paraclete, His own Spirit, “who was to sanctify
what He had redeemed, and to guard and maintain possession of what He had
acquired.”(93) This is but a small portion of that abundant revelation,
which our Lord then communicated to His apostles, concerning the Power
from on high with which they were to be invested.
The words of our Lord to His apostles at the three great points of His
passion, His resurrection, and His ascension, stand out beyond the rest in
their appeal to our affections. The last words of a friend are the
dearest, and these are the last words of the Bridegroom, and they are
concerning His Bride. When He was Himself quitting His disciples He dwells
upon the Power which was to create and maintain His Church, upon the gift
of His Spirit, His other self, in which gift lay the formation of His
kingdom. It is thus He expresses to us the point with which we started,
that the Giving of His Spirit is the fulfilment of all that Dispensation
wherein the eternal Word took human flesh.
It is not only then the unanimous voice of the Fathers which sets the
Giving of the Spirit over against the Incarnation of the Son. They are but
carrying on that which our Lord so markedly taught; their tradition was
but the echo of His voice, as their life was the fulfilment of it.
But it was a double malady in man which God the Word became man to cure.
It was the whole nature which was affected with a taint, and the soul
through the whole race touched in both its powers of the intellect(94) and
the will. That false worship which we have seen spreading through the
earth, and that deep corruption of manners which was interlaced with it,
were the symptoms of this malady. The perversion of the truth concerning
the being of God, and all the duties of man which grow out of this being,
was inextricably blended with the disregard of these duties in the actual
conduct of man. It was in vain to set the truth before man’s intellect
without a corresponding power to act upon his will. Therefore the apostle
described the glory of the only-begotten Son, when He dwelt as man among
us, by the double expression that He was “full of grace and truth.” Viewed
as the Head of human nature, its Father and new beginning, He is the
perpetual fountain to it of these two, which no law, not even one divinely
given, could bestow. For the law could make nothing perfect, because it
could not touch the will; and the law gave the shadow, but not the very
truth of things. But when that unspeakable union of the divine nature with
the human had taken effect in the unity of one Person, Truth and Grace had
an everlasting human fountain in the created nature of the Incarnate Word.
Now was the fountain to pour forth a perpetual stream upon the race
assumed. And this it does by the descent of the Spirit. In this descent
upon the assembled Church the Grace and Truth of the divine Head, with
which His Flesh, carried by the Godhead, overstreams, find themselves a
human dwelling in the race. Such an operation belongs only to the Divine
Spirit, for God alone can so act upon the intellect and will of creatures
as to penetrate them with His gifts of Truth and Grace, while He leaves
them their free will, their full individuality, as creatures. This, then,
was the range of that power with which our Lord foretold to His apostles
that they should be invested, and for which He bade them wait. The whole
field of truth as it respects the relation of God to His creatures as
moral beings, and the whole extent of grace, as it touches the human will,
for the performance of every act which a reasonable creature can execute,
made up the extent of that divine indwelling in men which the Spirit of
Christ assumed upon the day of Pentecost. This was the power of the Holy
Ghost which then came down upon men. Through the whole divine discourse
which preceded His passion, our Lord dwells upon this double power,
referring to Himself as the Truth, to His Spirit as the Spirit of the
Truth, to Himself as the Vine, and so that root of grace which should
communicate its sap to the branches, and to His Spirit, who should take of
His and give it to them; uniting both ideas of Truth and Grace in that one
word, “Sanctify them in thy Truth,” that is by incorporation with me, who
am the Truth, in my Spirit, who is the Truth. And so the eternal Word,
having assumed a human Body, when He withdraws His corporal presence,
proceeds to form that other human Body, the dwelling-place of His Spirit,
in which His Truth and Grace are to become visible.
Thus the transfusion of Truth and Grace from the Incarnate Word to His
mystical Body is the generic character of the Giving of the Spirit.
Two differential marks distinguish this giving from any which preceded the
coming of our Lord.
First, the Spirit should come upon them, but should never depart from
them. “He shall give you another Comforter, to abide with you for ever,
the Spirit of Truth.” This giving was not an intermittent operation,
whether extraordinary, such as had shown itself in Moses and the Prophets,
for their inspiration in writing, or their guidance in particular trials,
nor that ordinary one whereby from the beginning He had enabled all the
good and just to lead a life acceptable to Him. It was a far higher
gift,(95) wherein, as S. Augustine says, by the very presence of His
majesty no longer the mere odour of the balsam, but the substance itself
of the sacred unguent was poured into those vessels, making them His
temple, and conveying that adoption in virtue of which they should not be
left orphans, but have their Father invisibly with them for ever. No
intermittent operation, and no presence less than that of His substance,
would reach the force of the words used by our Lord, “I will ask the
Father, and He shall send you another Paraclete, the Spirit of Truth, to
abide with you for ever;” for that word “other” conveys a comparison with
Himself, from whom they had never been separated since He had called them,
in whose continuance with them alone was their strength, their unity,
their joint existence and mission, without whom they could do nothing. All
this to them that “other” Paraclete was to be, in order that the departure
of the Former Paraclete should be expedient for them. For in this
continuity of His presence was involved the further gift that the
Paraclete was to come to them as a Body, and because of this manner of
coming He replaced the Former. Had He come to them only as individuals,
they would have suffered a grievous loss, the loss of the Head who made
them one. But He came to them as the Body of Christ, and by coming made
them that Body, being the Spirit of the Head. That rushing mighty wind
filled the whole house in which they were sitting, and they all were
filled together with the presence; and as a sign that the old confusion
and separation of mankind were in them to be done away, speaking in one
tongue the one truth which was evermore to dwell with them, they were
heard in all the various languages of the nations present at the feast.
“The society by which men are made the one Body of the only Son of God
belongs to the Spirit,”(96) and He came upon all together in one House to
indicate, as He made, that one Body. “The mode of giving,” says S.
Augustine, “was such as never before appeared. Nowhere do we read before
that men congregated together had by receiving the Holy Ghost spoken with
the tongues of all nations.”(97) “Therefore He came upon Pentecost as upon
His birthday.”(98)
It is His presence alone which confers four gifts upon the body which He
vivifies.
It was the will, says S. Augustine,(99) of the Father and the Son that we
should have communion with each other and with Them by means of that which
is common to Them, and by that gift to collect us into one, which, being
one, They both have; that is to say, by the Holy Ghost, who is God, and
the gift of God. For, says S. Thomas,(100) the unity of the Holy Spirit
makes unity in the Church. It is not by similarity, or by juxtaposition,
or by agreement, how much less by concessions and compromises, that unity
exists in the body of Christ, but because the Spirit is one, because all
gifts, however various, all functions, however distinct, are distributed
by this One.
For the same reason truth dwells in this Body, because He is the Spirit of
Truth. Our Lord Himself has defined His great function in this particular,
to lead His disciples by the hand(101) into all truth, to teach all
things, and remind of all things which made up His own teaching. This
function began on the day of Pentecost, and lasts to the day of judgment,
and belongs to the Body of Christ, and to it alone, and belongs to it
because it is animated by the Spirit of Truth. And this animation is like
the Head, the same yesterday, to-day, and for ever. It is not of any past
time more or less than of the present or the future. It is the
illumination which belongs to that whole last day, through which the Body
of Christ grows, teaches, labours, and suffers, until the mortal day break
into the light of eternity.
His third gift to the Body is that of charity, and for the same reason,
because He is this Himself. He who is not only the Unity of the Father and
the Son, but their mutual Love, coming as the gift of that Divine love
which redeemed the world by the sacrifice of its Maker, and as the Spirit
of that Love, who invested Himself with human flesh, creates in this human
dwelling-place that one charity which bears His name, and is of His
nature, and which in that one body joins the wills of men together as His
Truth joins their intellects. If the Body of Christ has one prevailing
charity, which reaches to all its members, and encompasses the least as
well as the greatest, it is because the heart is divine.
The fourth gift which He bestows upon the Body is sanctification, and it
may be said to be the result of the other three. This, again, is His own
name and nature, and many have thought and said, His personal attribute,
to make holy; and that, as Fathership indicates the First Person, and
Sonship the Second, so the making holy names the Third, the bond of the
most blessed Trinity. But this, at least, may be said to be the final
cause of the body which He animates, the imparting of holiness. In virtue
of this gift, all the means and aids and rules of holiness are stored up
in the Body. And this does not mean that there is not a continual falling
away from the rule and practice of holiness in particular members, but it
means that while these, in spite of the Body’s nurture and solicitude,
fall away from it and perish, the Body lasts for ever, the rules and aids
and means of holiness lasting for ever within it, because it is the Body
of the Spirit of holiness.
Now these four gifts, Unity, Verity, Charity, and Sanctity, can none of
them exist in the Body without the other, and all of them exist together
there, because they have one divine root, that indwelling of the Holy
Spirit which is the fruit of the Incarnation, and whereby the mystical
Body of Christ corresponds to His natural Body. Of this Body the beginning
is Unity, the substance Truth, the bond Charity, the end Sanctity.
Countless heresies and schisms have sought to break up the coinherence of
these gifts, but in vain. The only success which the indwelling Spirit
allows them is to detach from the Body those who are unworthy to remain in
it, and to prolong for a time their maimed existence by some portion of
some of His gifts. Truth, for instance, has such a vitality that many a
heresy will live for ages on that fragment which it has detached from the
mass; unity and charity have such force that even their shadow, that is,
the joint possession of a fragmentary truth, and the good-will thence
proceeding, will prolong for a time a sort of corporate existence.
Holiness has so attractive a power, that zeal and self-denial, which
present the seeming of it, will make the fortune of a sect for a time. But
in the union and the completeness of these four gifts, the great Body of
Christ stands out through all the ages inimitable and unapproachable.
Alone it dares to claim them thus united and complete, for alone it can
present their realisation.
These four gifts, then, dwell in the Body in a higher degree than that in
which they adorn the members of the Body, as in it, by force of the
Spirit’s indwelling, they ever exist together. Let us now see the
qualities which the Spirit imparts to the members of the Body, by virtue
of their incorporation into it.
First of all is the forgiveness of sins. The Spirit takes them out of that
state of alienation in which they are born, and unites them to His Body;
and in so doing He effaces both the birth-sin and every actual sin which
they may have committed. This is that plenary forgiveness of sins, the
pure gift of God unpreceded by any merit on man’s part, which greets the
new-comer out of Adam’s body of sin into the Body of Christ. It is
imparted by and from the Body, and to its members alone.
The second quality is that illumination of the mind, irradiated by the
truth, the whole compass of which exists in the Body. This illumination is
the root of the virtue of faith, by means of which the individual mind
appropriates the divine truth presented to it. The force of the virtue
differs in the individual as the keenness of sight in the natural man, but
the visual power is the same in quality in all. By it the mind of the
believer lays hold in ever varying degree, one more and one less, of that
great harmony of truth which is held in its completeness, its manifold
applications, and all but infinite relations, only by the Body. For the
truth with which we deal is not unlocalised and scattered, the prey, as it
were, of the individual mind, which can hunt it down and take it as a
spoil, but it is a divine gift, orbed in the sphere which was created for
it, the Body of that Word who is the Truth. Hence the first question to
the applicant for baptism: What askest thou of the Church of God? and the
answer is, Faith.
The third quality is the adoption of Sonship, which flows directly from
incorporation into the Body of Christ, and to which man has no sort of
title in himself or from his own nature, but which comes to him only by
kindred with Him who, on the morning of His resurrection, greeted that
great penitent who bore the figure of the Church with that paschal
salutation of the Second Adam, “Go to my brethren, and say, I ascend to my
Father and to your Father, to my God and to your God.” And the divine
virtue of hope well corresponds to this quality, the effects of which in a
state of trial and conflict are to so great a degree future and unseen. It
seems, moreover, to be as a special link and tie between the virtue which
purifies the intellect, and that which corrects the will and makes it
obedient. Thus through it we pass on to the fourth quality of
Sanctification, which is the completion of the other three and their end,
the harmony of each individual will with the divine will, the work of
charity. That divine virtue is the special fruit of the passion of Christ,
which was to gather up into one what sin had disunited and torn away,
first from its Author, and then from the order by Him created, which was
to heal the animosities thus introduced, and to change the world from a
conflict wherein each sought to better himself at the expense of his
neighbour, into a community cemented together with mutual affection. It
was with reason, therefore, that S. Augustine would not allow the
possession of charity, save in the unity of that one Body which Christ had
created,(102) and without charity there is no sanctification.
The four qualities thus slightly sketched, forgiveness of sins,
illumination of faith, adoption to sonship, and sanctification by charity,
which come to the individual by and with incorporation into the Body, are
not given to him irrevocably, but are conditional upon his perseverance.
They are portions and derivations of that vast treasure of Truth and Grace
which the Body holds in their entireness and for ever, because of the
perpetual indwelling of the Spirit who makes its life, but which He
dispenses as it pleases Him to the members, and which He may withdraw from
them in default of their coöperation. Vast are the losses thereby
incurred, not to the treasure-house which remains inexhaustible, but to
those who fall out of it back into the world, or rather that body of Adam
from which they were taken. But these losses touch not the beauty and the
glory of that Body of Christ, which goes on through the ages, and takes up
its own, fulfils its appointed work, and reaches its intended end.
Thus on the day of Pentecost a new Power, the Spirit of the Incarnate God,
descended not upon single men, but upon an assembly of men, binding it in
a unity, conveying to it a truth, kindling in it a charity, and working
through these a sanctification never before known; which Power,
thenceforth dwelling in that Body, was to collect and draw into itself out
of all nations and ranks of men those who should form the Church, that is,
the Kingdom and Temple, and House, and Body, and Family of Christ. In it
was to work and from it to go forth henceforward to all time the virtue of
Him who had assumed our flesh, not transiently, but for ever; in the Head
and the Body, through the life of His Spirit, Christ should teach and bear
for ever that witness to the truth of which He spoke in the hall of
Pilate, and concerning which He said that “this gospel of the kingdom
should be proclaimed through the whole world, for a witness to all
nations, and then that the end should come.”(103) To the continuance, the
indissolubility, the purity of this power He has pledged His word in such
a way that they who deny it must in doing so deny Him. He has even made
the unity of this Body the special mark to men of the truth of His
mission, beseeching His Father in that last prayer, “Neither pray I for
these alone, but for those also who through their word shall believe in
Me, that they all may be one, as Thou, Father, art in Me, and I in Thee,
that they also may be one in Us, that the world may believe that Thou hast
sent Me.”
There are three analogies(104) which illustrate this creation of our
Lord—a creation in itself as singular as His assumption of man’s nature.
First, that of the relation between the soul and body. The soul is the
life of the body; the body, as it were, the mansion and home of the soul,
its bearer. Through the body the qualities of the soul become visible and
known; its powers exercise themselves, and personal unity so binds the two
together that we love or hate, admire or despise, the one for the sake of
the other; the grief of the soul acts upon the body, the sickness of the
body depresses the soul. Through the acts of the body we learn the very
existence of the soul, and in these acts it portrays itself. Human nature
has been so made by its Creator that the qualities of soul and body, of
spirit and matter, are imputed in the individual man to each other. Now to
the Body we have been considering the Spirit of Christ is, as it were, the
soul. It is nothing strange, then, if it was His will to create such a
Body, if it be the result of His Incarnation, that the like effects which
exist in the case of every human soul and body should take place here. To
this Body also the power and virtue of its soul are communicated; and,
since Christ by His Spirit animates it, in honouring it He is honoured; in
despising it, He is despised. There is an imparting to it of the qualities
which He has; and thus it is that unity and sanctity, truth and charity
dwell in it as the operation of His mind. Thus every man contains in
himself, in the union of soul and body, an image of that tie by which
Christ and His Church are one.
Secondly, because God has created man for society, He has implanted in him
an irrepressible instinct of communion with his brother men. This instinct
it is which, under circumstances of every possible variety, results in one
end, the State. The human commonwealth, whatever external shape it wear,
whatever division of its powers it make, springs from this. In virtue of
this original formation of man, that he is made to live together, and
gregariously, not separately, the supreme power of government, the power
of life and death, dwells in the community, and obedience to it has a
divine sanction. Thus, the commonwealth has a variety of powers which the
individual has not, and not only so, but it also has powers which do not
arise from the mere aggregation of individuals, rather which belong to it
as a community, as a whole, for instance, sovereignty in all the details
of its exercise. But now the very object for which Christ became Incarnate
was to constitute a divine commonwealth. He is the King: it is the
tenderness of a God Incarnate that He calls and makes His Kingdom His
Body. The powers, then, which belong to the earthly commonwealth belong,
with the changes which the change of subject carries, to the Divine. They
who have so great a reverence for human government, who respect in the
nation an ultimate irresponsible power, ought, if they were consistent,
when they acknowledge Christ as having come in the flesh, to acknowledge
His government in the kingdom which He has set up. All that his country is
to the patriot, the Church is to the Christian, but in so much higher a
degree, as the object for which Christ came is above the needs and cares
of this present life. Has the City of God, then, less claim upon
Christians than the City of Romulus had upon Romans? Thus, in the natural
duty of the citizen, as well as in the compound nature of man, is
contained a reminder of the Christian’s relation to the Church, and a
picture and ensample of the Church’s authority.
Thirdly, there is the analogy presented by the transmission of natural
life(105) through the one flesh of Adam to all his race. As the breath of
natural life, once given to Adam, is continued on to all those sprung from
his body, the power of the Creator never starting anew, but working in and
through the trunk of human nature; so the supernatural life springing from
our Lord, as the gift of His Incarnation, is breathed on the day of
Pentecost into the whole Body of the Church to be communicated from that
Body for ever. Christ is to the one exactly what Adam is to the other. As
the Word of God, creating, joined to the inheritance of the flesh of Adam
from generation to generation the communication of a spirit such as
Adam’s, by which double action we have the unity of race, so the Word of
God, redeeming, when He had taken our flesh as the first-fruits of human
nature, breathed forth from that flesh the communication of His Spirit to
the Body of the Church, by which we belong to the race of the Incarnate
God, and are become His family, and make His house. Thus that which the
body of Adam is naturally, the Body of Christ is spiritually, and the
descent of human nature in its unity a picture of the Holy Spirit’s unity
working through the Body which He has chosen. And this analogy is made the
more striking by the statement so often repeated in the Greek Fathers,
that with the natural life, as first given to Adam, was conjoined the gift
of the Holy Ghost, forfeited afterwards by his sin, and withdrawn from him
and his race, and now restored as the special gift of the Incarnate
God.(106) Thus the descent of the Spirit at Pentecost is a true and real
counterpart of the creation of man in Eden; but they who share it are
become kindred of God through His flesh, and by so sharing it together,
they form that society which failed through Adam’s sin. In the first
creation, the Omnipotent Creator, in His bounty towards His favourite
child, as foreseeing the assumption of that nature by Himself, attached to
the gift of natural life the Spirit of sanctification; in the second,
having assumed that nature, He gave through His own Body, first taken out
of us, then crucified, now risen and exalted, the gift of the Spirit, Who,
with all the endowments springing from Him, as the Inspirer of truth and
charity, of unity and holiness, dwells in that Body for ever.
Thus in the union of the soul and body, in the constitution and authority
of the human commonwealth, and in the race’s natural unity, God holds
before us three analogies, which each in some respect, and altogether very
largely, illustrate His finished work, to which all natural productions of
His providence are subordinate, His work of predilection, His work of
unbounded love and sovereign magnificence, the creation of that which is
at once the Body, the Kingdom, and the Family of the Incarnate Word.
From all that has gone before we gather this conclusion, that to become a
Christian was to enter into a spiritual and physical(107) unity with
Christ by incorporation into that Body which He had created as the result
of His becoming man. This it was for the individual to become a Christian.
But Christianity itself was neither a mere system of belief, nor an
outward order representing that belief; but “the great and glorious Body
of Christ,”(108) possessing and exhibiting the whole truth of doctrine,
possessing and distributing all the means of grace, and presenting
together to God those whom it had reconciled with Him, and made one, as
the members of the Son by the indwelling of the Spirit.
Let us now trace the exact correspondence of the historical fact with the
dogmatic statement just given.
The Acts of the Apostles exhibit to us the creation of the divine society
by the descent of the Holy Ghost on the day of Pentecost. When they were
all together, the sound as of a rushing mighty wind was heard, which
filled the whole house wherein they were sitting, and tongues as of fire
were seen, the tongues apportioned severally, but the fire one,(109) which
rested upon each, to kindle in all that eternal flame of charity which was
to draw into one the hearts of men, the fire of which our Lord had spoken
as being that which He was come to light upon the earth. Fire, whose
inward nature it is at once to illuminate and warm, to purify and unite,
was thus appropriately selected as the outward sign, both expressing and
conveying the fourfold office of the Comforter, who came to be “no longer
an occasional visitant, but a perpetual Consoler and eternal
Inhabitant”(110) of this His chosen home. As each in that assembly spoke
in the one tongue of the country, he was heard by those present in the
several tongues of all the nations of the earth represented at that great
feast by the Jews who dwelt in them. And this was the mark, says S.
Augustine,(111) of the Church which was to be through all nations, and
that no one should receive the Holy Spirit, save he who should be jointed
into the framework of its unity; the mark which signified that the
confusion of Babel, dividing the race into nationalities jealous of each
other and perpetual enemies, was to be reversed and overcome by the one
Power whose force to unite should be greater than the force of sin to
sever; who should gather out of all nations the City of God, fed by the
exulting and abounding river of His Spirit, the fountain proper and
peculiar to the Church of Christ: the mark of that one truth,(112) which
conveys and harmonises and works out into all its details the whole
revelation of God, and so is the utterance of one voice, the voice of
Christ; speaking to all nations, not in the broken languages of their
division, but in the Unity of His Person, carried by His Body. We have
then in the one Fire the one inward power; in the one language its outward
expression, in the assembly its receptacle, the House of God. This Body
appears at once as formed and complete. In it sits and prays in her silent
tenderness and unapproachable grandeur, as the Mother of the risen Lord
and Head, and the Mother too of His race, the most beloved, the most
lovable, and the most loving of creatures,(113) whose great function in
the Church for ever is to pray for the members of her Son, and to solicit
the graces of His Spirit, which as the Mother of the sacred race she gains
and distributes to all and each that belong to it, a Second Eve who
corresponds to the Second Adam, as the First Eve in the divine plan
corresponded to the First Adam. In it the Apostles, so long before chosen
and designated by their Lord, and having already received from Him
portions of their supernatural power on the day of His resurrection and
during the forty days of His secret instruction, teach and govern; in it
Peter at their head exercises that primacy, which, imaged out by a new
name imposed at his first calling, promised at his great confession, and
confirmed and conveyed on the sea-shore of the lake of Galilee, is
exhibited with such grandeur, as he stood with the eleven and lifted up
his voice, to describe to the men of Judea and the inhabitants of
Jerusalem the nature of the event which they were witnessing, and the
fulfilment of all the promises made through their prophets concerning that
presence of God in the pouring out of His Spirit among men in the last
days. That first discourse of his at the head of his brethren is the
summary as it were of his perpetual office of teaching and promulgating
the dispensation of the Christ in the midst of the Church. Its immediate
effect was the aggregation of three thousand persons to the Body, who were
told that this was the way in which they should receive remission of sins
and the gift of the Holy Ghost.(114) The subsequent teaching of Peter and
the Apostles, accompanied with miraculous cures, produced further
aggregations among all ranks of the people. And the mode of salvation for
all time is pointedly marked out by the words, “the Lord was adding to the
Church day by day such as should be saved.”
We have only to repeat the process which is thus described as having taken
place at Jerusalem in the first months after the day of Pentecost, by
carrying it through the various cities of the Roman empire, Damascus,
Antioch, Rome, Alexandria, and between these all round the shores of the
Mediterranean, to have a just picture of the mode in which the Divine
Society grew and gathered into itself more and more of those who listened
to the truth which it announced. What is important to dwell upon is that
men uniformly became Christians in one way, by being received into the
Divine Body, through which reception forgiveness of sins and the gift of
the Holy Ghost were conveyed to them. From the whole account contained in
the sacred Scriptures, and from all that remains to us of history, the
great fact is established for us that Christianity came into the world at
its first beginning a society created by the Holy Ghost, and held together
and informed by Him as its soul, who is sent down upon it as the Promise
of the Father from the Incarnate Son.
Further, it was in and by their reception into this society that men
received all the fruits of the Incarnation; it was in it that all the
gifts of the Holy Ghost dwelt, and through it that they were dispensed. By
hearing the truth announced by its ministry penitence was engendered in
the listeners, itself a preventing grace of the Holy Ghost, which gave
inward effect to the outward word. As a working of this penitence they
came, according to the instruction of the teachers, to be baptised. By and
in the act of baptism they were received into the divine society, and made
partakers of the full operation of the Spirit who dwelt in it. They had
the supernatural virtues of faith, hope, and charity infused into them,
each according to the measure of the grace accorded to him, and to help
the exercise of these virtues, that they might be borne as it were with
the wings of a Spirit, the seven-fold gifts of wisdom, understanding,
counsel, fortitude, knowledge, piety, and fear, were added to the soul.
None of these virtues and gifts were possessed by believers as
individuals; all of them came to men as members of her who was dowered
with the blood of Christ,(115) and whose bridal quality imparted to her
children all which that blood had purchased. In her was stored up that
great, inexhaustible source of abiding life, the Body and Blood of her
Lord and Husband: in her the redeeming Word gave direct from His heart the
vivifying stream. In her was the gift of teaching which illumined the
understanding, and not only drew from without, as we have seen, those who
should be saved from the ignorance of the pagan or the carnalism of the
Jew, but which erected in the world the Chair of Truth,(116) that is, the
rule and standard of right belief, which was the continuance of the
pentecostal gift, the illuminating and kindling fire, and the speaking
tongue of unity, which the Body of Christ possesses for ever. It was by
enjoying these endowments together in her bosom, by the actions of a life
pervaded with these principles, by the joint possession and exercise of
these supernatural powers which at once opened to the intellect a new
field of knowledge and strengthened the will to acts above its inborn
force, that men were Christians. And those who remembered what they had
been as Jews, and what they had been as heathens, had no difficulty in
recognising such a life as the effect of a divine grace, and no temptation
to refer it to anything which belonged to them as individuals, since its
commencement coincided with their entrance into a divine society, its
growth depended on their membership in that Body. Their union with Christ
in this Body was something direct and palpable; to them the several
degrees of that one ministry constituted by Christ were the joints and
articulations of the structure; the teaching thence proceeding as it were
the current of life; by their being parts of the structure they were saved
from the confusion of errors which swept freely round them without,
through the craft of men and the seduction of deceit.(117) “Possessing the
truth in charity,” or “sanctified in the truth,” was the expression of
that divine life in common whereby they were to grow up into one, and be
called by the name of their Lord,(118) because inseparably united to Him
by the nerves and ligaments of one Body.
And this makes manifest to us how Christians, while scattered through
every city of the great Roman empire, formed one Body. It was by virtue of
the unity of spiritual jurisdiction which directed the whole ministry of
that Body. The command of our Lord was, “Go, and make disciples all
nations,” “proclaim the gospel to every creature;” the Body assembled and
empowered at Pentecost was to carry out this command. How did it do so?
The teaching and ruling power was distributed through a ministry wherein
those of a particular order were equal as holding that order: bishops as
bishops were equal, priests as priests. But not the less by the
distribution of the places where the ministry was to be fulfilled,
subordination was maintained through the whole Body. Had it been
otherwise, as each Bishop had the completeness of the priesthood in
himself, his sphere of action, that is, his diocese, would have
constituted a distinct body. But no such thing was ever imagined in the
Church of those first centuries. The Bishops were, on the contrary, joint
possessors of one power, only to be exercised in unity.(119) The unity was
provided for in the Apostolic body by the creation of the Primacy, without
which the Body never acted, the Primate being designated before the Body
was made; the Primate invested with his functions on the sea-shore of the
lake of Galilee before the Ascension, the Body on which he was to exercise
them animated on the day of Pentecost. Spiritual jurisdiction being
nothing else but the grant to exercise all spiritual powers, two
jurisdictions would make two bodies; a thousand would make a thousand; so
that the more the Church grew, the more it would be divided, were it not
that the root of all its powers in their exercise is one. A spiritual
kingdom is absolutely impossible without this unity of jurisdiction; and
in virtue of it the whole Church, from north to south and from east to
west, was and is one Body in its teaching and its rule; that is, in the
administration of all those gifts which were bestowed at the day of
Pentecost, and which have never ceased to be exercised from that day to
this, and which shall never cease to the end of the world. Thus as it is
through the Body that men are made and kept Christians, so the Primacy is
that principle of cohesion and subordination without which the Body cannot
exist.
Let us carry on the history of the divine Body to another point. How was
the Truth transmitted in it?
Peter and his brethren having received through the great forty days from
our Lord the complement of His teaching concerning His kingdom, were
empowered by the descent of the Holy Ghost to commence its propagation.
And for this work they use the same instrument which their Lord had
used—the living spoken word. They labour together for some time; after
several years they divide the world between them; but in both these
periods they found communities and supply them with everything needful for
complete organisation and future increase and progress by their spoken
teachi
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