The gospel of the secular life : sermons preached at Oxford, with a prefatory essay

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I. Unity through a Moral Faith ... 33

II. Religion without a Temple 63

II. Religion toitftout a Cemple*

{Preached before the University of Oxford, February 2nd, 1879.)

"And I saw no temple therein : for the Lord God Almighty and the Lamb are the temple of it. And the city had no need of the sun, neither of the moon, to shine in it : for the glory of God did lighten it, and the Lamb is the light thereof. And the nations of them which are saved shall walk in the light of it ; and the kings of the earth do bring their glory and honour into it." — Revelations xxi. 22 — 24.

The secret which the Apocalypse, in common with all prophecy, has disclosed to this generation, shows us that the seer was representing-, for the comfort of his contemporaries, the times, not far off, but near at hand, the' things which he says must shortly come to pass — the hour that cometh, and now is. The principles which are enunciated apply to all times, but the vivid descriptions which are draw^n apply primarily to the events which are beginning to dawn on the spiritual insight of the prophet. The new Jerusalem is not the description solely, if chiefly, of the state to which Christians may look forward beyond the grave ; it is primarily the description of Christendom, the actual Christian society, idealised, no doubt, but intended in all its chief spiritual features to find its realisation now and here. It presents to us an ideal towards which we are to strive, as one capable of attainment ; and, while the spiritual and the critical faculty alike reject the piecing together of the ideal picture with its antitype, they alike teach us that here, as with all earnest poetry, reality lies at the base of the metaphor. John meant that the Church which he longed for should be what his imagery foreshadows.

The feature in this ideal to which the text gives prominence is, when we consider it, ndthing less than astounding ; namely, this — that the appliances of worship are completely absent. This seer of the primitive Church was, as the whole book shows, Jewish to the backbone. He wrote, as criticism tends to show, just at the time when the Roman eagles were about to swoop down upon Jerusalem, the Holy City. That city was identified with the temple which was its centre. The capital and the point of union of the Jewish nation was a place of worship. Yet in St. John's ideal of the new Jerusalem, which was in many things to be the counterpart of the old, these words stand forth in all their naked grandeur, " I saw no temple therein !" And if these words imply, as they unquestionably do, that the ideal of the primitive Church was one, not of worship, but of a life pervaded by the Spirit of God : if we accept^ as we are bound to do, this ideal as our own, then we must admit that the history of the Church presents something which is even more astounding — namely this, that the Church has looked upon

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public worship and its appliances as its main object and function. During the whole of the Middle Ages, that first great effort at the realisation of the Christian ideal, the building of places of worship, and the organising of hierarchies to serve them, was almost the sole thought of Christians; so that the Reformation had to set about the melancholy work of pulling down the splendid abbeys and chantries, the fruit of a misdirected zeal. Their doom was shadowed forth in the words of William Tyndale, the translator of the Scriptures, and one of the most far-seeing of our Reformers, in the answer he gave to the jest of Sir Thomas More about the building of Tenterden steeple. The great Chancellor's jest is widely known ; the Reformer's answer deserves to be known as widely : Neither intend I to prove to you that Paul's steeple is the cause why the Thames is broke in about Erith, or that Tenterden steeple is the cause of the decay of Sandwich Haven, as Master More jesteth. Nevertheless, this I would were persuaded unto you (as it is true), that the building of them and such like, through the false faith that we have in them, is the decay of all the havens in England, and of all the cities, towns, highways, and shortly of the whole commonwealth. For since these false monsters crope up into our conciences, and robbed us of the knowledge of our Saviour Jesus Christ, making us believe in such pope-holy works, and to think that there was none other way into Heaven, we have not wearied to build them E

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abbeys, cloisters, colleges, chauntries, and cathedral churches with high steeples, striving and envying one another who should do most. And as for the deeds which pertain to our neighbours and to the commonwealth, we have not regarded at all, as things which seem no holy works, or such as God would not once look upon. And, therefore, we left them unseen to, until they were past remedy, or past our power to remedy them ; inasmuch as our slow bellies, with their false blessings, had juggled away from us thatwherewith they might have been holpen in due season. So that the silly poor man (though he had haply no wisdom to express his mind, or that he durst not, or that Master More fashioneth his tale, as he doth other men's, to jest out the truth) saw that neither Goodwin Sands, nor any other cause alleged, was the decay of Sandwich Haven, so much as that the people had no heart to maintain the commonwealth, for blind devotion which they had to pope-holy works." {D emails' Life of Tyndale, p. 277.)

That Tyndale should have had to write this 1,500 years after the vision of Patmos is strange enough. But if it is strange that the Church of the darker ages should have needed so bitter a lesson, is it not ten times stranger still that the Church of the days of greater enlightenment should be found again making the chief part of its business the organising of the modes of worship, that the largest efforts which -are owned as the efforts of the Church are made for the establishment and maintenance of worship — that our chief controversies relate to the

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teaching and the ministry of a system designed primarily, if not exclusively, for worship — that even the fancies and the refinements of such a system divide us — that the breach between things secular and things religious grows wider instead of their being made to blend into one — and that the vast and fruitful spaces of the actual life of mankind lie still so largely without the gates ? The old Jerusalem was all temple. The mediaeval Church was all temple. But the ideal of the new Jerusalem was — no temple, but a God-inhabited society. Are we not reversing this ideal in an age when the Church still means in so many mouths the clergy, instead of meaning the Christian society, and when nine men are striving to get men to go to church for one who is striving to make men realise that they themselves are the Church }

There is no temple in the new Jerusalem. It is not a system of worship that Christianity came to bring to mankind ; it is not a religion, as religion has usually been understood — a system of worship abstracted from the common life of men. It came to bind men together in just and true relations, to infuse into their societies the Divine spirit, to transfigure the coarse vesture of humanity with that divinity which is love, till it shall become a temple in which He dwells. Its power is not that of a distant God who must be approached by special ceremonies, by special modes of life and thought, by shaping humanity into some peculiar attitude, but the power of a present God. The title of its Founder is Immanuel, E 2

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God with us, God in us, God making Himself a home in all the relations by which love and justice draw man to man, and class to class, and nation to nation ; a God who is known and realised in the tenderness of fatherly and motherly and filial affection, the rapture of married love, the steadiness of friendship, the honesty of trade relations, the loyalty of citizenship, the righteousness of political rule, the peace which is destined to bind together all mankind. Where these exist there is God ; where they are not He is absent. All worship which does not aim at these is hypocrisy; that worship alone is Christian worship which tends to their establishment.

It is not a quibble or a verbal criticism to observe that the vision of the Apocalypse represents the natio7is which are saved as walking in the light of the Holy City, as drinking of its w^aters, and being healed by the leaves of the Tree of Life. It is not in individuals that the fulness of the Gospel power is realised, but in great societies of men. The body of Christ is not the individual, but the company of believers. The God whom we worship is not the bare individual unity which some would assert, but the God whose name is Love, the Father of Jesus Christ, the Spirit who breathes through all things. And the image of God upon earth is not the individual soul, which cannot be made perfect by itself, but the society of men who dwell in faith and love. This is the body of Christ, the fulness of Him who filleth all in all.

And this society is no narrow one embracing but a part of human life, satisfying one only, however deep,

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of the functions of humanity, but that which embraces the whole range of human relations. It does not embrace only the gatherings of men for worship or for instruction or for beneficence, but comprehends that supreme corporate union which is termed the nation, which, by a Divine sanction, regulates all the relations of men, and from which there is no appeal. The nations, in which alone humanity can grow to completeness, must themselves become churches, provinces of the kingdom of God.

In the last sermon which it w^as my privilege to address to this audience I dwelt on faith as the great reuniter ; I pointed out how strange a spectacle was presented by the enmities arising among men in the name of Christianity, and showed that the reuniting power was faith, which in its simplicity, its versatility, its elevation, transcends or passes beyond those more limited views of religion which cause dissension, and holds fast as supreme the image of God presented to us in the character of Jesus Christ. But if this be granted, it may still be asked whether the outworking of faith must not make it pass into the phase in which it again becomes the subject of contention. I\Iust it not work itself out into propositions, into concrete facts, into institutions, into that which St. Paul calls the dogmas and ordinances of men And must not these again, as the Jewish law in his day, become the ground of dissension and of enmity, and so must not the old evil return upon us ]

The answer to this difficulty which I gave in my former sermon was that faith, the holding fast of the image of God presented in the character of Christ, is supreme, and that while we maintain it to be so, the special modes in which it is expressed, or the institutions in which men seek to realise it, are comparatively unimportant When we see the largeness and variety of faith, we are not induced to quarrel with one another by those things which are secondary to it ; we differ, but only as the various gifts of the Spirit may differ in those who confess that it is one Lord who worketh all in all. But I wish to-day to point out that the enmity and contention arises from the fact that the working out of faith so often takes a wrong direction. Faith is not best promoted when men try to realise it in a system of religious worship and teaching which is kept separate from the general aims of human life, instead of acknowledging as its chief sphere those plain human relations which form the life of mankind. Religion, as a separate thing, alien from human relations, becomes, through this very enmity which it produces, abhorrent to men, and the conscience of mankind is being led to find rest in the working out of those principles which bind men together in society. Christianity is destined, by the very law of its being, so to infuse itself into the societies and kingdoms of men that they may become the kingdoms of God and of Christ ; and while this is its aim, everything indicates that it will be welcomed more and more by the nations which are bent on living out their life in peace and justice and liberty. The

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secular life lived in the Spirit of our Lord is the great point of reconciliation for a world which is weary of theological and ecclesiastical strife.

I pointed out in my previous discourse how simple a thing faith is, how it may almost be said to be independent of dogma. Wherever there is an aspiration after goodness, wherever there is sympathy with it, there is faith in Christ. We need not change or deny any of the dogmas in which Christian thought has clothed itself, but we insist that they should be interpreted in connection with moral goodness ; for we may feel sure that what is most precious in God's sight, what is recognised by God as the truest faith, is the vital sentiment, the principle of a sacred lif^, which Christ came to build up, and which must underlie all that is said or done in His name. This faith, which is capable of universality, allies itself most readily with the secular life of man. We cannot expect the mass of men to take an interest in the technical parts of religion, in the details of the modes of worship, or the peculiar ways of expression on which most controversies turn. These are the professional business of a class — the ministers of public Vv'orship, the professed theologians. But every man, nay, every human being,'can learn to do his duty as in God's sight, and in the Spirit of our Lord Jesus Christ ; and the more each one is earnestly engaged in this effort, the more he will feel the need of the divine help, and the more he will lean with manly trust on the support of Christ and of the Holy Spirit. The contact of Christian faith with the secular life is good for both. The one is prevented from sinking into weak refinement, the other is raised from its grossnessto becomethe temple of God.

Can any one read the Gospels without preconceptions about the organisation of the Church, and fail to see that that on which our Saviour was intent was the raising and purifying of the common life of men? Whether we read the more directly practical accounts of the synoptics or enter into the deeper tone of St. John, the same truth appears. The spirituality of the Sermon on the Mount is not that of meditation and worship, and instruction about another world, but of reality and depth of motive in all we do : the direct teaching of our Lord is that of the Fatherhood of God, the assurance of forgiveness, the brotherhood of man, the relations of the family, our behaviour towards the weak and sinful. The teaching of the parables concerns the test of true discipleship, and the working out of great moral principles in the life of men and of societies. The deeper teaching of St. John proclaims that He who thus taught and pledged His life to His teaching was essentially divine. Nor need we make a theological mystery of the expression used as to His death, and the blessed consequences which have flowed from it.

The meaning of the sacrifice of the Cross is that self-devoting love, the surrender of the will to truth and to God, is the one thing acceptable to the Father, the one thing by which God and man are brought into harmony. There are in Christ's teaching no ordinances for public worship ; the intimations of another world are few and distant. Even the sacraments are federal acts, connected primarily with social life rather than with prayer. To gather from the gospels a system which is solely or chiefly a system of public worship, and of instruction concerning the life to come, would be a strange infatuation. All is directed to insure a present life of righteousness and of love, a life lived in the realisation of a present God, whose kingdom is here within us.

And this fact becomes clearer to us when we consider our Lord as the founder of a society. The calling of the twelve was not for public worship and for instruction in the mysteries of futurity, but for the foundation of a society which was to embrace the whole life of its members. That their first business was to teach and persuade men was a matter of necessity, though with it, even in their first trial mission, healing and beneficence were conjoined, if they had not even the first place. And as soon as the society was formed, on the Day of Pentecost, its adherents threw into it their all. The community of goods was a witness that they joined the Church not for worship and for instruction in relation to a future world, but for the whole course of the life now present. All their relations to their fellow-men were to be Church relations, the arrangements for the serving of tables, with all the mechanism which this involved (the germ of the life of a perfect society) was in the hands of the Apostles. The distinction which has been so constantly and so fatally maintained between things sacred and things secular was unknown to the early Church. The life of the Church was, as St. Paul says, in God the Father and His Son Jesus Christ.

The Church, then, was to be a society which tends to embrace the whole life of mankind, to bind all their relations together by a Divine sanction. As such it blends naturally with the institutions of common life — those institutions which because they are natural and necessary are therefore Divine. It asserts aqd realises itself not so much as a separate society^ but rather in the institutions into which it infuses itself. It joins itself with the family, and the family itself becomes, for the time, the Church. It may take at another time the form of a sect of the Jews, or of one of the Hetaeriae of the Roman Empire. But wherever it is true to its primary object it presses on to embrace the larger society, in which the relations of human life have the fullest play ; it becomes the soul of the already-existing fabric, and transforms it into a Church. The Divine system of human government, of which St. Paul says that its ministers are ministers of God, can never be outside of its range. The Church may for a time be a separate society, aloof from the national life or government ; but this is an abnormal state of things, and the effort of the Church which is true to its Master must be not to maintain its separation, but to merge itself in the society which God has made, and to find itself again in making that society truly and freely Christian.

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What it aims at is not the recognition by the nation of a worshipping body, governed by the ministers of pubHc worship, which calls itself the Church, but that the nation and all classes in it should act upon Christian principle, that laws should be made in Christ's spirit of justice, that the relations of the powers of the state should be maintained on a basis of Christian equity, that all public acts should be done in Christ's spirit and with mutual forbearance, that the spirit of Christian charity should be spread through all ranks and orders of the people. The Church will maintain public worship as one of the greatest supports of a Christian public life ; but it will always remember that the true service, the \oyiKr] Xarpeia of Christians, is a life of devotion to God and man far more than the common utterance of prayer.

That this is not generally felt, even in our own Christian commonwealth, although ev^ery page of our public liturgy bears witness to the sacredness of public life, must be attributed to the insufficient scope which men accord to the belief in God and in Redemption. When we believe that God is the common Father, and that all men and all things which he has made are dear to Him, when we think that he is near to every one of us, and that in Him we live and move and have our being, then we cannot count any man or any thing common or unclean. We believe that there is a Divine element in each man and each object, and our constant effort must be to draw out this Divine element. And when we realise the full scope of Redemption this truth becomes more clear and more dear to the believing heart. Christ is the Saviour of all men ; Christ came to redeem the world in all its wide expanse. There is nothing under the broad vault of heaven which is not included in the all-embracing purpose which is expressed by St. Paul in these words, " That He might gather together in one all things in Christ, both which . are in heaven and which are in earth." All societies of men, all occupations of men, all knowledge, all art, all the intercourse of men in society or in trades, all the relations of nations one to the other, are not merely to be influenced from without by a body established for the purpose of public worship, but to become functions of that great body which only in the fulness of its entire life is to be the home and the temple of God.

Towards this end then we must strive. And it is an end which is not so distant or impossible as some may think it. There never was a time or a country in which it so needed to be kept in view, and in which the possibilities of its incoming were so great, as the present time and our own country. If the object were confessed by the leaders of opinion, and set distinctly before the nation, the very fact of its recognition would bring us half way to its accomplishment. It may, no doubt, be said and felt that it is far too good to be true; men will say that it is impossible to attribute to ordinary men such faith as will thus transform society. And this, no doubt, is true, if we mean by faith a well-considered adherence to every article main-

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tained in Christian confessions. But if faith be a moral conviction, a sympathy, an aspiration towards better things, it is not untrue to assert that the general conviction is on the Christian side,and it is not untrue to speak of a nation as Christian. The nucleus by which its deeper life is led is thoroughly imbued with the Christian spirit even now. The spirit of faith is alive and operative, though it does not find full expression in words.

It might almost fill us with despair, when we recognise this as the true vocation of the Christian Church, to find those who teach in our Christian assemblies so often occupied with the inculcation merely of an individual piety, which hardly takes account of the social and political Ufe even of individuals, and shrinks from public affairs as from some unhallow^ed thing. Religion is often praised for producing an unearthly experience," its effect is often to break up men's common life, and to send them, like Arthur's knights, in ecstatic pursuit of the Holy Grail, instead of staying like valiant men to bring the world under the dominion of right ; and the ministers of public worship are often more anxious to bind themselves together as a class and assert their separate life, than to serve the community well ; their effort is often to make public worship a function withdrawn from the life of mankind, rather than the means of refreshing and elevating that life ; they are often more anxious to keep matters like education in their own hands, than to strive that, in whosoever's hands, it should be conducted so as to diffuse knowledge and

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righteousness among the people ; the Church constantly means the clergy (as indeed it must until it identifies itself with the nation), and this misconception makes the Church appear as the enemy of human progress and the source instead of the assuager of strife. These things might fill us with despair, but for the certainty that the true kingdom of Christ must come, and for the evidence of its coming which we see both in history and in present society.

It was a noble effort that was made in the Middle Ages by men like Hildebrand to bring all Christendom into harmony. It was a brave attempt and a true foreshadowing of that which the Church is designed to do. But though the attempt was a noble one, and was motived by the belief that the clergy were capable of regenerating the world if the world were placed under their dominion, it was based on a false calculation. It still kept life divided into two distinct spheres, which were only harmonised by the one being absolutely subject to the other. The clergy and the so-called spiritual power was everything. The laity and the so-called temporal power was nothing. Moreover, an order separated by celibacy from the general life were altogether incompetent to rule. The monastic ideal was quite inadequate to the task of influencing and regenerating the general life. And had it been possible to subject all the powers of Christendom to the clergy, and had the clergy been as pure as they were corrupt, the result of separating off one power, one function, in the Church,

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and making it supreme over all the rest^ would merely have been to emasculate the other powers, to deprive them of their sense of responsibility, and to substitute the false notions of clerical law for the demand for just rule which was slowly beginning to dawn. The clergy, who rejoiced to see the head of the secular power humbled before the Pope at Canossa, had done nothing, when the education of the young sovereign had been entrusted to them, to fortify him with kingly virtues ; they presented to him the spectacle of worldly men, who used the privileges which they claimed to ensure their own wealth and power. In the strife of the clergy and the kingly power, there was indeed but little to make impartial men take either side; but the secular and equal justice of which the kings of England and of Germany were the guardians should be quite as dear to Christian hearts as the public worship and monastic virtues maintained by a Hildebrand or a Becket. To call the one temporal and the other spiritual, the one Christian, the other worldly, is a mistake, and the parent of a whole family of mistakes. For that which is Christian is simply that which is just.

In the conflicts of the clergy against the secular power in the present day, we find those who have the conduct of the government waking up gradually to the fact that they have a religious responsibility ; that they, 'and not only the clergy, are ministers of religion. The religion of justice in human relations is taking its place side by side with the religion of

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dogma and prayer ; and the task of our age is to harmonise them. Take such a country as Italy, the centre of the clerical system. The regeneration of Italy has been accomplished by the devotion of men like D'Azeglio and Cavour, Mazzini, Garibaldi, and Cadorna, in the teeth of the vehement opposition of the clergy. Some of these men had the deepest respect even for the Roman Catholic system, the excesses of which they combated ; some of them were antagonistic to that system. The writings of some of them, like Mazzini, cannot be read without seeing that the fear of God was paramount with them. They were supported in their conflict with the representatives of the clergy by a religion as strong as theirs, the religion of human justice. Liberty of worship, constitutional government, equality before the law, the abolition of shackles upon the press and public meetings, universal education, the sanction of civil marriages, all these form a body of doctrine quite as clear to men's minds, quite as Christian, and far more operative on the consciences of the mass of men, than any which they heard taught in the churches. These formed a real religion to them, which has stood the test of every conflict, and has presented an instructive contrast to the religion of the clergy. Read side by side the Syllabus and the Italian Constitution, or compare the utterances of Pius IX. with those of Italian statesmen, and you cannot doubt that the true religion lies on the side of the latter. There is a strange