Twenty-five sermons of twenty-five years

Contents

PAGE

Prefatory Letter v

I. Apostolic Succession i

I. Apostolic Succession

" Other men labored, and ye are entered into their labors." — John iv., 38.

" Therefore, seeing we have this ministry, as we have received mercy, we faint not." — II. Cor. iv., 1.

As I recall the succession of able men who with eloquent lips and earnest hearts have ministered to the spiritual wants of this Society, in the privacy of your homes and from this desk, and into whose labors among you, responsive to your call, I this day enter, my heart trembles with conflicting emotions of fear and hope : of fear, lest I shall wear but unworthily the pastoral mantle now fallen upon me from these past prophets and only demean offices hallowed to your hearts by so many memories ; of hope, when I think of the warm hands with which you have welcomed me here to begin my life's work, so near the scenes among which began my life. Ay, Lam tremulous with joyous pride, when I remember the nature of the work into whose long succession of laborers you have now admitted me, and see that this day the dream of my life is fulfilled. Confirmed by this realization of my childhood's hopes, inspired by a conviction of the worthiness of the office before me, and reading in the unanimity of your invitation and in the ready consent you have given to my requests for certain changes in some of your forms of service that you will freely and candidly listen to my thought, though it may not always agree with your own, and not be swift to censure deficiencies which must become apparent to you from a closer intercourse, I am emboldened to say with Paul, " Having therefore this ministry, as I have received mercy, I faint not."

Into the lengthening succession of the ministry, then, I now enter, and to its holy offices, under the blessing of God, here consecrate my powers. And the thoughts which the occasion presses upon me group themselves naturally around this topic, — the true doctrine of Apostolic Succession.

You know the old doctrine that goes by this name, which asserts that no ministry is valid unless it can be traced back, by the successive laying on of priestly hands, to the grace which Jesus himself communicated when he commissioned the first apostles. According to this view, the Holy Spirit can flow only through certain ecclesiastical channels, and spiritual validity is made dependent on physical manipulations. The minister does not go immediately and for himself to the fountain of grace which gives worth and spiritual life to his ministrations ; but — standing at the end of this long conduit, reaching back through all the ramifications and disturbances of ecclesiastical history for eighteen hundred years — he is dependent for such supplies as tradition may have saved for him from a past age through the hands of pope and prelate. The Scriptures, interpreted by the traditions and official voice of the Church, — this is the channel, and this only, through which his spirit may receive divine truth. And when we remember the worthless character of not a few of those who have stood in this priestly line of succession, and see through what gross and sordid hands this legacy of truth has sometimes had to pass ; and when we think with what rubbish and corruption the channel of ecclesiastical history has been clogged and befouled, — is it strange that those who trust to this resource for their supplies of grace should often find them both scanty and stale ? What wonder if they should sometimes discover that what they had taken for aqueducts of pure water should turn out to be offensive sewers, bringing down the filth and poison of effete centuries !

But this view, though its shadow linger yet in several of the Protestant sects, is distinctly declared and maintained as a dogma only by the Roman Catholics and the High Church party of the Episcopal denomination, and need not detain us longer. The fact of the Reformation and the consequent springing up of new sects, and often under the leadership of teachers on whom no priestly hands had been laid in consecration, necessitated the abandonment of the doctrine that ministerial grace is transmitted from the first apostles through an unbroken chain of physical communication, and gave rise to the second form of the doctrine of Apostolic Succession, which, for sake of distinction, though not held very strictly by all the Protestant sects, yet found to some extent in all or nearly all, I shall call the Protestant view of the doctrine.

According to this view, it is not necessary, in order to validate the ministerial office, that the laying on of priestly hands should have been maintained in unbroken succession from the first apostles. The impossibility of tracing such a genealogy through the confused history of the Middle Ages and the meagre annals of the first centuries of the Church, if there were no other objections, is deemed a sufficient argument against the claim. But the real succession and validity, it is maintained, are spiritual ; and the laying on of hands is only emblematic of grace already possessed, or, at best, is only a form of giving ecclesiastical validity, not substantial and spiritual qualifications. And this were all clear and rational, if it were only the real doctrine held ; that is, if the doctrine, as it is really held, were what the plain sense of these words indicates. But, in point of fact, there is hardly a Protestant sect that does not practically reproduce, with more or less strictness, in its own limits the Roman Catholic idea of validity. It is not necessary, indeed, for the Protestant preacher's validity that he should have received grace through the unbroken priestly order of the Church from the original apostles ; but it is deemed necessary that he should have received it from hands of his own faith. The Calvinist minister needs not, in order to^ prove his legitimacy, to show that the hands which were laid upon him received grace from some prelate's hands, which were made gracious by some previous prelate's hands, and so on back to the original grace in Galilee ; but he must show that the hands of Calvinists have been laid upon him.

Should it be said that this form is only emblematic of approbation and fellowship on points of doctrine, I reply that the fancied explanation points to the very root of the error and, instead of refuting my statement, proves it ; for it shows that the substantial and spiritual qualifications — of the possession of which, it is said, the form of ordination is only symbolic — must have come through certain channels and have a certain church stamp upon them. Whatever may be said of individual societies, there is no sect — no, not even the most liberal — that dares to trust a minister freely with the Divine Spirit. He must have that Spirit, indeed ; but he cannot breathe it in like the free air of heaven by contact with his own lungs. He must have it measured out for him by prescription of some theological authority, and inhale it artificially through the sponge of a creed. It is not the Divine Spirit coming to him and showing him truth, but that Spirit as it once came to Luther or Calvin or Swedenborg or Wesley or Fox ; and if, perchance, it should come to him with some word not told to them, and he should use his freedom to utter it, most likely he will be disfellowshipped and excommunicated therefor. And so essentially there is no difference between the Catholic and the common Protestant doctrine of ministerial succession. The papal priest succeeds to apostolic grace and truth by hereditary descent from the first apostles. The Protestant minister succeeds to the apostolic inheritance by tradition from the founder, or founders, of his special sect.

The only difference is that the Protestant thinks that the line of hereditary descent from the first apostles has been broken, so that corruptions entered the Church, and that this failure has been mended by the truth having been reshown to the founders of his own sect. But both the Catholic and Protestant parties agree that of religious truth, at least for this world, there has been a final revelation ; and each of these two great bodies, as well as each of the numerous smaller Protestant sects, — with hardly a complete exception, — claims that its own interpretation of that revelation is a finality, so that a new minister only succeeds to the old office of expounding Scriptural truth according to the creed and commentaries of his own faith, travelling over the same road trodden by his predecessors for, it may be, hundreds of years ; while those who put themselves above the Scriptures, and claim the continuance and efficacy of the same revealing Spirit which manifested itself in them, are denounced as heretics and infidels. The sect that still claims the present guidance of the Holy Spirit as above Scripture — that of the Society of Friends, or Quakers — makes, at least in its largest section, no proper exception to this judgment; for it practically neutralizes the doctrine by making the authenticity of the living spoken Word of to-day depend upon agreement with the literal written words of eighteen centuries ago. And so there is succession, but no advancement. Churches are built, decay, and are succeeded by others, generation after generation of priests passes away, and yet there is no progress, no going beyond the creed of the fathers, no getting out of the catechism.

Notice that I am here stating the principle on which the sects stand rather than actual facts with regard to them. As a matter of fact, not even the strictest sect, I believe, is able to resist the general current of progress, which is shown, however, rather by a prudent silence on some of their most discreditable articles of faith than by boldly expunging them from the creed. In principle, however, no progress can be admitted. The Orthodox must hold to Calvin or Edwards, the Methodist must not depart from Wesley, the Quaker cannot go beyond Fox and Barclay ; and even in our own free denomination there are many who would draw lines each side of Channing, to pass over which in either direction should be deemed sufficient cause for nonfellowship. So that, with the partial exception of Liberal Christians, whatever advancement the sects make in religious truth is made not in consequence but in spite of their principles. And this advancement of particular sects, in spite of their creeds and their own efforts, is the result of a general movement in the knowledge of truth by which the whole civilized world is going forward : which brings us to the third mow under our topic, — the true and philosophic order of Apostolic Succession and ministerial validity. Let us distinguish the points carefully.

i. That is a narrow conception of revelation, and, as I believe, unsupported both by enlightened views of the nature of God and by the history of the religious development of man, which maintains that in religious truth there is no progress, — that the Christian of to-day has no better ideas of God and man and the relation between them than the Christian of eighteen centuries ago. It would indeed be strange if, while science and art and philosophy are progressive, religion — which embraces them all, the science, art, and philosophy of life — should stand still, and have no new word for eighteen hundred years. Nor does the history of Christianity bring us to any such singular result. So far as Christianity is a revelation of God, it is so, not because it laid down a platform of doctrines and put a finality to all religious thought and inquiry, but because it entered the world as a vitalizing, organizing power, bringing truth gradually to light and building up society according to its dictates. Truth, indeed, is one, absolute, eternal, infinite. But, for this very reason, the revelation of religious truth, as of all other truth, to a finite, progressive being must be always gradual, partial, and progressive. The case would not be altered by the supposition that the revelation of religious truth is through supernatural means and at special seasons. For even though the Creator, by methods above the ordinary laws of spiritual influence, should have so acted upon a few minds, the writers of the Bible, that they saw and uttered truths which otherwise they would not have seen, yet the minds of other persons — that is, of the world at large — could not see and comprehend these truths until elevated to the same condition of seeing, which must occur either suddenly by supernatural agency or gradually by natural growth and development ; and, as the former process is not claimed by the hypothesis except in the case of those to whom the truth was first shown, it follows that to the world at large the revelation must be gradual and progressive.

And, moreover, this must be so from the very nature of the mind itself. Our powers are not given us in full maturity, but as germs to be developed, we know not to what destined end. To this law of growth, the religious faculty, including religious perception as well as sentiment, is certainly no exception : else, why all this organizing of means, of preaching and prayer and missions, to make men more rationally religious ? The elevation of the soul, the enlargement and quickening of the truthseeing faculty within us, is, in fact, the test of the growth of character. And as not even Omnipotence can make the blind see without first opening their eyes, so he cannot reveal truth to the soul unless the soul be first opened to receive it ; and as the soul, in the natural order, opens by gradual development, so the revelation must be gradual and progressive. What is true of the individual is also true of the race, since the race advances only through the progress of individuals. Religious truth, then, in process of revelation to the world, must be progressive.

2. What are the agencies through which this revelation is effected ? First and foremost is the Divine Spirit, the source or vital atmosphere of the truth itself which is to be revealed. This is the primary and permanent agency acting through and above all others. It is Infinite Being revealing itself, Absolute and Infinite Truth making its way into finite, individual consciousness. The Divine

Spirit is only a form of conception for God. It is God going forth, as it were, from himself, — the Eternal Word issuing from Absolute, Unchangeable Being, and seeking incarnation and articulation in finite, personal form. This Eternal Word carries truth with it, by virtue of its very nature ; for truth is its life and substance. This is that " Wisdom" which "in all ages, entering into holy souls, maketh them friends of God and prophets." In every finite soul, then, in which this Word comes to consciousness, and just in proportion to the extent of that consciousness, is truth revealed.

And so the finite soul becomes a second and subagency in the revelation of truth. For though in every human being there is planted, as its vital organic principle, a germ of this eternal substance of the Divine Spirit, which will develop, as the faculties open, into religious principles and character, yet, as in science and art and every department of knowledge there have always been individuals who have seen farther than the mass of men, and have therefore been special instructors in their respective branches of knowledge, so in all ages have men appeared in whom the religious consciousness has been so elevated that they have seen farther than mankind in general into the secrets of religious truth, and become its special revealers to the world. These are the Spirit's witnesses, through whom the higher truths of religion are confirmed, if not announced, to humanity at large. They stand along the course of history as the guides of the race, as the prophets of human destiny. Their souls are

I I the reflectors of divine truth, so placed that they throw the rays upon the common human heart, and start into life and organic form the germs of truth before lying latent there. Through these prophetic souls, the common religious consciousness of the race is quickened to greater activity and elevated to a higher point of vision and a more extended spiritual horizon. And, then, as out of this elevated religious consciousness a new generation is born, so the prophets of this newer generation — even if, their feet standing on this higher plane, they do not see farther into the mysteries of truth than their predecessors — will at least have a better vantage-ground from which, with the truth they do see, they can act practically upon the world. And thus the common religious consciousness of the race is elevated to still higher reach ; and this elevation, in its turn, becomes a new stage by which succeeding prophets shall rise to yet larger vision, and make to the underlying world still broader revelations of Infinite Wisdom. As scientific men take up their respec tive sciences where they were left by the preceding generation, and so go on from these results to fresh discoveries and new generalizations, so each generation of religious teachers, standing on the ground won by the preceding age, should attain to broader views and help build to more perfect completion the temple of religious truth. And this is the true divine order of Apostolic Succession.

3. If we would follow the line of this succession, we must get above denominational distinctions and take a broad philosophic view of religious development, not merely within the limits of sects, but in the production of sects. We shall then see that the true Apostolic Succession does not lie within denominational boundaries, but overleaps them, and that, in the race of true prophets, validity is proved rather by departure from than conformity to the established order of creeds and churches. Who does not see that Paul, though he had never seen Jesus in the flesh and was regarded with jealousy by the original apostles as an interloper and innovator of dangerous doctrines, was yet a truer apostle of Jesus than were they ? Paul, with his idea of the universality of the gospel, embracing the Gentile world, was the really Christian apostle; while the twelve were little more than partially reformed Jews. Again, Wiclif and Huss and Luther, Calvin and Zwingle, though trampling on the authority of the Church and introducing new doctrines and ecclesiastical usages, were yet, by spiritual descent, more legitimately priests of Christianity than were the popes and bishops who excommunicated them. So, in England to-day, it is not the High Church party, trying to stand so straight by ecclesiastical tradition and the Thirty-nine Articles that it leans backward toward Rome, — it is not this party that is carrying out, by true succession, the principles of the Reformation, but rather the heresy-suspected leaders of the Broad Church party, — Jowett, Whately, Stanley, and the lamented Arnold and Robertson, or even the open dissenters.

Fox and Wesley and Bunyan denounced Church and priest ; yet, by the laying on of spiritual hands, they were more legitimately successors in God's line of priesthood than the Archbishops of York or Canterbury. So, if we were to look for the true successors of Fox and Penn, we might not find them in the sect that, from the effort to stand upon their protest against forms and ceremonies in religion, has become the most severely formal of all religious denominations. The cause of the persecuted Independents, who fled from the tyranny of the English Church to find an asylum in New England, is better upheld now by the liberal sects than by those who still subscribe to the Puritan creed. And to come still nearer home, when I read the sublime pleas of Channing for the fullest liberty of religious inquiry and the formation of religious opinions untrammelled by the authority of great names or ecclesiastical organizations, and when I remember his earnest protestations against imposing upon the convictions of a single soul the bondage of a creed or making articles of faith the test of religion, I can but ask whether those who call themselves " Channing Unitarians," because, forsooth, they adopt his beliefs, are, in reality, so truly his followers as those who, entering into his labors and adopting his methods of fearless inquiry and criticism, have taken up the results of his thought and advanced to still greater victories over the degrading errors of the popular theology and to still clearer visions of religious truth.

It behooves us, at least, to inquire whether to stand where Channing stood is to be his follower. None, I am sure, quicker than he would rebuke the attempt to build a sect upon his creed by cutting off all inquiry beyond. To stop at his results, as though all truth were found, is not to honor, but to defame his memory. The only church that can be an honest monument to his name and truly claim him as its great apostle is that which, with the largest freedom of religious inquiry and indefinite progress in religious truth, combines the utmost charity to opponents in opinion and love to all men. Away, then, with that childishness that talks of there being " no more road in the direction we have been going" ! It is as ludicrously short-sighted as the opinion of the commissioners appointed, two hundred years ago, by the Colony of Massachusetts Bay, to lay out a public road into the wilderness ten miles west from Boston, who, in their final report, congratulated the General Court on the completion of the work, even at the great and unexpected cost, as there would never be need of a road any farther in that direction ! Nay, it is worse than short-sightedness, this talk of turning our forces, fatigued with the long march, to seek repose in the dreamy sanctity of venerable ecclesiastic rites and a "mystic church organization." It is infidelity to our Protestant inheritance, infidelity to the spirit of the age, infidelity to the great trusts we have assumed for humanity by virtue of our position, infidelity to the guiding Providence of God, and a cowardly distrust of the powers he has committed to man.*

We may see, then, from the foregoing illustra-

*The references in the above sentences are to the then much discussed sermon of Dr. Bellows, on "The Suspense of Faith," given at Cambridge in the preceding summer, 1859.

tions, how the lineage of the true apostolic succession runs ; that it is not identical nor parallel with ecclesiastical lineage, but crosses and denies its legitimacy ; that it is not to be found intact in any one church or sect, but breaks through churches and sects, and follows always the line of development in religious ideas ; that, finally, God's priesthood are not ordained by the laying on of ecclesiastic hands, but by the revelation of truth to the soul. And in this priestly succession stands many a one without mitre or surplice, unfrocked, and unconsecrated by ecclesiastic hand, — many a one who never stands in pulpit or speaks in the priestly name. So, too, there is many a surpliced or cassocked preacher, many a one whose ecclesiastic validity is amply authenticated by all the forms of the Church, and who may speak from the pulpit every Sunday with priestly authority to the people, who yet has no part in this apostolic succession of God's priesthood and (to adopt with a little variation Dr. Channing's phraseology) no validity of the Spirit's grace, though all the unctuous hands of Rome, Geneva, Princeton, or Cambridge, have been laid upon him. But to whomsoever and wheresoever the truth is shown, if it be but uttered again, in public or in private speech, by pen or spoken word, there is a prophet of God ; one who stands by true commission in the eternal order of the Spirit's priesthood. And all they to whom the truth is shown, by whomsoever or wheresoever shown, and who strive faithfully to live thereby, whether in the limits or out of the limits of ecclesiastic lines, constitute the true Broad Church, the real Catholic Church, which breaks over all the partition walls of sect, and joins in one spiritual fellowship the true and holy souls of all nations, ages, and religions.

My friends, I pray that it be into no merely ecclesiastical order of ministerial succession that I now enter among you. If I felt that I had no validitysave what came to me through the churchly ceremonies of last week, severely simple though they were, I should not stand here to-day. I do not come among you to help build up a sect, or to fill your pews, or to perform merely the priestly office in your homes. I come to speak to you whatever of truth may by God's grace be shown to me. I ask only that you may listen by the same grace. I believe that the mission of Unitarian Christianity is higher and larger than simply to make a new religious sect or to open new places for Sunday worship or to fill old ones, — namely : to liberalize and spiritualize all sects, to make all society religious and all life worship ; and all ecclesiastical organizations, forms, rituals, ministers, missions, houses of worship, the very Church itself, are nothing, and worse than nothing, if they do not effect this.

This morning's sun brought the birth of the eighteen hundred and sixtieth year of the Christian era. Eighteen hundred and sixty years since that Life appeared in Galilee, which seemed so divine a thing that it became the measure of time and named the civilized world ! In these years, what successions of priests have come forth in the name of Christ, and passed away ; how numberless the churches dedicated to his memory ; what countless crowds of worshippers have knelt at his altars ; how various the sects claiming his authority for their doctrines and practices ; what conflicting systems of theology have been built upon his words ; what imposing pageantries of ritual and ceremony, what costly and complicated organizations, what a vast array of ecclesiastical machinery, what wealth and enginery of material and political forces, have gathered around that humbly born life in Nazareth ! But what more ? Has that life been lived ? Do we dare to live it yet ? Does it appear in society, in government ? Do we yet trust the principles of peace that this Prince of Peace proclaimed ? Count our armies. See our bristling forts. Look at Christian Europe in arms to-day. No : we have no faith in Christ. We dare not trust the principles he uttered, till the whole world shall adopt them. Do we yet enact his precepts in our laws ? A slave woman comes to you, flying for freedom, for purity, for life. You must violate your laws, if you will give her humane shelter. You must hang the men who go down to the tyrant's house, with chivalrous hearts, to set her free. Look into the world of business. Does Christ's life appear there ? Does the merchant always dare to follow the laws of justice and strict honesty, when they interfere with what he calls the laws of trade ? No : the Christian sects do not dare to live Christ's life yet. For centuries, now, the civilized world has borne his name. It has prayed to him and through him ; it has called him Son of God, nay, God himself ; it has invented

:8 ingenious devices of theology by which he may save mankind ; men have preached him, read him, admired him, worshipped him ; but who yet dares to live as he lived, with no authority but Truth, no law but Right, no master but God ? With all its massive and wide-spread organizations, with all this ecclesiastical machinery and power, — nay, with all its victories, for it has them, — how little, when we consider its resources, has Christianity done toward Christianizing society !

And, if we were to look for the cause of these small results, we should find it, I believe, to be chiefly that there has been too much organization, too much mechanism, too much Church. The power has been nearly spent in moving the machinery. It is an historical fact that, so far as Christian truth or the moral essence of Christianity has made progress in society and appeared in the reform of laws and social institutions, it has done so, not through the organic action of the Church, but against it. And, at this very day, it is the most powerful and strongly organized Christian sects that most stand in the way of the progress of religious truth and social reforms. It is not the "organic, instituted, ritualized," imperial Church, with its mystic sanctity and symbols, with its sacred days and usages made venerable by centuries of repetition, that is to bring the kingdom of God ; nor yet is that kingdom to come through the priests of this Church, made such only by ecclesiastic grace. But wherever a single soul bows with more passionate devotion to truth, and resolves to follow the truth wheresoever it may lead, through whatsoever road, and though losing all things else, even life itself, there is a member of God's Church and a true minister in the line of his priesthood.