The Sacraments – Articles  XXV–XXVI

 

Article  XXV

Of the Sacraments

De Sacramentis

Sacraments ordained of Christ be not only badges or tokens of Christian men’s profession, but rather they be certain sure witnesses, and effectual signs of grace, and God’s good will towards us, by the which he doth work invisibly in us and doth not only quicken, but also strengthen and confirm our Faith in him.

Sacramenta, a Christo instituta, non tantum sunt notae professionis Christianorum, sed certa quaedam potius testimonia, et efficacia signa gratiae atque bonae in nos voluntatis Dei, per quae invisibiliter ipse in nos operatur, nostramque fidem in se non solum excitat, verum etiam confirmat.

There are two Sacraments ordained of Christ our Lord in the Gospel, that is to say, Baptism, and the Supper of the Lord.

Duo a Christo Domino nostro in Evangelio instituta sunt Sacramenta: scilicet, Baptismus, et Coena Domini.

Those five commonly called Sacraments, that is to say, Confirmation, Penance, Orders, Matrimony, and extreme Unction, are not to be counted for Sacraments of the Gospel, being such as have grown partly of the corrupt following of the apostles, partly are states of life allowed in the Scriptures; but yet have not like nature of Sacraments with Baptism, and the Lord’s Supper, for that they have not any visible sign or ceremony ordained of God.

Quinque illa vulgo nominata Sacramenta: scilicet, confirmatio, poenitentia, ordo, matrimonium, et extrema unctio, pro Sacramentis Evangelicis habenda non sunt, ut quae, partim a prava Apostolorum imitatione profluxerunt, partim vitae status sunt in Scripturis quidem probati: sed sacramentorum eandem cum Baptismo et Coena Domini rationem non habentes, ut quae signum aliquod visibile, seu caeremoniam, a Deo institutam non habeant.

The Sacraments were not ordained of Christ to be gazed upon, or to be carried about, but that we should duly use them.  And in such only as worthily receive the same they have a wholesome effect or operation: But they that receive them un worthily purchase to themselves damnation, as S. Paul saith.

Sacramenta non in hoc instituta sunt a Christo ut spectarentur, aut circumferrentur, sed ut rite illis uteremur, et in his duntaxat qui digne percipiunt salutarem habent effectum: Qui vero indigne percipiunt, damnationem (ut inquit Paulus) sibi ipsis acquirunt.

 

      This is one of those Articles in which large and important alterations were made in 1563.  The first paragraph, based largely on the Confession of Augsburg, formed the last paragraph of the original Article of 1553.  The second and third paragraphs were composed in 1563.  The last paragraph of our present Article formed the first of the earlier Article, but has undergone two important alterations, (i) An opening clause consisting of a quotation from S. Augustine has been omitted, (ii) the condemnation of the theory of grace ex opere operato has been withdrawn.

      Its object may be summed up thus:

      (i) To condemn as inadequate teaching about the sacraments held by Anabaptists, Zwinglians and others;

      (ii) To restore a sense of proportion in the view of sacraments by a reference to Scripture;

      (iii) To make clear that they require a moral effort in the recipient.

      N.B. – Allowed = probati, i.e. approved.

      Duly = rite, i.e. with right matter and form and a duly authorized minister.

      Worthily = digne, i.e. with right inward disposition.

 

Article  XXVI

Of the Unworthiness of the Ministers, which hinders not the Effect of the Sacrament

De vi institutionum divinarum, quod eamn non tollat malitia Ministrorum

Although in the visible Church the evil be ever mingled with the good, and sometimes the evil have chief authority in the Ministration of the Word and Sacraments, yet forasmuch as they do not the same in their own name, but in Christ’s, and do minister by His commission and authority, we may use their Ministry, both in hearing the Word of God, and in the receiving of the sacraments.  Neither is the effect of Christ’s ordinance taken away by their wickedness, nor the grace of God’s gifts diminished from such as by faith and rightly do receive the Sacraments ministered unto them; which be effectual, because of Christ’s institution and promise, although they be ministered by evil men.

Quamvis in Ecclesia visibili, bonis mali semper sunt admixti, atque interdum ministerio verbi et Sacramentorum administrationi praesint; tamen cum non suo, sed Christi nomine agant, ejusque mandato et auctoritate ministrent, illorum ministerio uti licet, cum in verbo Dei audiendo, tum in Sacramentis percipiendis.  Neque per illorum malitiam effectus institutorum Christi tollitur, aut gratia donorum Dei minuitur, quoad eos qui fide et rite sibi oblata percipiunt, quae propter institutionem Christi et promissionem efficacia sunt, licet per malos administrentur.

Nevertheless, it appertaineth to the discipline of the Church, that inquiry be made of evil Ministers, and that they be accused by those that have knowledge of their offences; and finally being found guilty by just judgment, be deposed.

Ad Ecclesiae tamen disciplinam pertinet, ut in malos ministros inquiratur, accusenturque ab his, qui eorum flagitia noverint, atque tandem justo convicti judicio deponantur.

 

      Practically unchanged since 1553.  Taken mainly from the Thirteen Articles and through them based in part on the Confession of Augsburg.

      Object. – To condemn the idea of Anabaptists that the personal holiness of the minister was a necessary condition for any valid preaching of the Word or ministration of the sacraments.

      § 1.  The word “Sacrament” has a long history. [Cp. Trench, Study of Words, pp. 138–139, and more recently E. Masure, The Christian Sacrifice (Burns Oates). pp. 79 ff., with the literature there referred to.]  In classical Latin “sacramentum” meant “a sacred pledge”.  It was used for a soldier’s oath or for caution money deposited to prevent frivolous suits.  The word is first used in reference to Christians by Pliny in a letter to the Emperor Trajan.  He writes that Christians bound themselves “sacramento”, not to commit some crime (as popular opinion supposed), but rather not to commit theft, robbery, adultery, etc.  The word here, in the writing of a heathen governor, must still have its meaning of “oath” or “solemn promise”.  Its appearance is almost accidental.  Its first employment in any technical Christian sense was in the earliest Latin-speaking Church, that of North Africa.  Here it was used to translate the Greek word μυστήριον.  μυστήριον originally meant a secret (not anything “mysterious” in our sense of the word).  It is used, e.g. of State secrets.  Hence it came to be applied to religious truths that were known only to the initiated or to acts “where more was meant than met the eye or ear”, and where the secret meaning was known only to those who had been taught it.  Thus it had quite a wide range of meaning, and its Latin translation, sacramentum, had at first an equally wide range.  Through the Latin versions of the New Testament it passed into the common vocabulary of the Latin-speaking Church.  In the Fathers it is used in its old sense of oath or of any Christian truth or ceremony or ordinance.*  But in quite early times we find a tendency to contrast the fewness of Christian with the multiplicity of Jewish ordinances.**  Accordingly, the term sacrament came to be limited to those rites which were commanded in the New Testament.  The number of sacraments varied with different writers.  The fixing of the number as Seven is assigned to Peter Lombard (d. 1164).  It is accepted in a decree of the Council of Florence (1439), and finally ratified by the Council of Trent in 1547.  Accordingly, at the time this Article was composed the idea of Seven Sacraments had long been familiar.

            [*E.g. Tertullian applies it to the baptismal vow.  “In Sacramenti verba respondimus.”  He even speaks of Christians being accused “de sacramento infanticidii”.  Cyprian speaks of the Lord’s Prayer as containing many great “sacraments”, of the three hours of prayer as “a sacrament of the Trinity”.  Pope Innocent can write of two sacraments in the Eucharist, the bread and the wine.]

            [**S. Augustine wrote how under the new dispensation Christ ‘has knit together His people in fellowship by sacraments which are very few in number, most easy in observance, and most excellent in significance, as baptism solemnized in the name of the Trinity, the Communion of His Body and Blood and also whatever else is commended to us in canonical Scripture, apart from those enactments which were a yoke of bondage to God’s ancient people, suited to their state of heart and to the times of the prophets and which are found in the books of Moses” (Ep. liv. 1 quoted in the earlier edition of the Article.  Cp. also Christian Doctrine, iii. 9).]

      § 2.  In all teaching about sacraments we have to face an initial objection.  Christianity, it is said, is a spiritual religion.  God is a Spirit.  We are spiritual beings.  What God asks for in us is a right inward disposition of the will, namely faith, not the performance of specified ceremonies.  We are told to worship the Father “in spirit and in truth”.  What place, then, can outward and material things have in the dealings of spirit with spirit?  How can the pouring of water on a man’s forehead or the tasting of bread and wine affect the soul’s relation to God?  History shows that the great danger of religion is that it should sink into substituting forms and ceremonies for spiritual obedience.  It would therefore be well for Christianity to shun the danger altogether.  Such objections are widespread.  They rest not on mere prejudice, but often on a desire for reality.  We must face them.

      (a) Such objections often rest upon a view of material things and the external world that is not Christian at all.  The Christian Church has always contended against the view that matter is intrinsically evil.  All material things have their origin in God.  The world as He made it is “very good”.  The statement that we are “spiritual beings” is a half-truth.  Man is not only spirit, but spirit linked to and realizing itself through a material body.

      Our very thoughts and prayers are conditioned by certain bodily functions.  Our whole spiritual activity is dependent upon the body.  An injury to the brain will wreck the finest intellect.  A bad headache will disintegrate the devotions of a saint.  We cannot explain the relation of the spiritual to the material, whether in human life or in the world at large.  It is an ultimate fact that we are compelled to admit, even though our finite understanding cannot grasp it.  As Christians we hold that the material is not necessarily opposed to the spiritual.  Rather matter fulfils its true purpose when it is subject to spirit and used as a means to the self-realization of spirit.  On the other hand, our whole life in this world is mediated by matter.  As Dr Moberly says, “If a man is not spiritual in and through the body, he cannot be spiritual at all.”  So the union of spiritual and material in the sacraments corresponds to and rests upon their union in man himself.  Just as in man the material may overcome and degrade the spiritual, the body may become master instead of servant, so in the sacraments the outward side may win an undue predominance.  It may become not a means but an end, not the expression of a spiritual state but a substitute for it.  But just as the misuse of the body does not render it possible or even desirable for us to attempt to discard it, so the misuse of sacraments is an argument not for their abolition but for their right use.  “Corruptio optimi pessima.”  The more that we insist upon the terrible results that follow from the misuse of the sacramental principle, the more we bear witness to its inherent power, and the more urgent becomes the call to claim and consecrate such a mighty possibility for the service of God.

      (b) Sacraments are as old and wide as religion itself.  We appeal quite rightly to the universal appearance of religion as a proof of its reality and importance.  We may extend the argument and claim that the prominence and universality of the sacramental principle is a proof that it satisfies a legitimate and universal human need.  In all parts of the world we find sacred ablutions.  Partly they symbolize the desire for inward purification, partly they create a sense of purity in preparation for drawing near to God.  Again, we find in most primitive worship sacred meals in connection with sacrifice holding a central place.  The original meaning of sacrifice is disputed, but beyond all doubt in historical times these sacrificial rites came to express the communion of the worshippers with their god and with one another.  The language in which this idea is expressed is often crude.  Sometimes the god was conceived in animal form, and the tribe who claimed kinship with him fed on the flesh of the sacred animal and thus were regarded as feeding on the life of the god.  In more civilized tribes the communion was rather sought by sharing a common meal with him.  Such rites, often crude, debased, and corrupt, must not be despised.  They may claim to be taken at their best, as the efforts of primitive man to realize communion with God.  They have their place in the preparation of the world for Christ.  If we believe that from the first the Word of God was “lightening every man that cometh into the world”, we find in them a divinely prompted feeling after God, an inspired education of needs and aspirations that awaited their full satisfaction in Christ.  Our Lord came to fulfill the highest ideals, not only of the Jews but of the heathen too.  Their sacrifices, like the Jewish, were in their degree a preparation for Christ.  By the deliberate institution of Christian sacraments our Lord drew men to find in Himself the satisfaction of those needs to which the persistence through long ages of such imperfect rites had borne witness.  Christ did not originate but consecrated afresh the sacramental principle.  Here, as elsewhere, He came not to destroy but to fulfill.

      (c) Sacraments are often called “an extension of the Incarnation”.  Just as Christ took on Him a human nature that through it He might draw near to us, so He still draws near to us in things that we can touch and see.  From His Birth to His Resurrection His earthly life was “broad-based” on matter.  The Atonement was wrought out on a Cross with material blood.  In His miracles He employed material means as an aid to faith.

[4] Again, in the Incarnation, God’s dealings with the world took the form of definite outward historical events.  The Atonement is not the less spiritual because it was achieved through certain acts in time to which we can give a date and place.  So, too, in His Sacraments Christ still deals with His Church through outward events.  While He moved on earth among men it needed faith to discern His authority.  Only the eye of faith could discern in the death on the Cross more than the murder of an innocent man.  So in the sacramental happenings of the Christian life faith is needed to discover and appropriate their inner meaning; but that does not make them the less real.  In the moral and spiritual life, as elsewhere, it is the concrete and particular rather than the abstract and general that counts.  The Devil has his sacraments.  We all condemn love of money in the abstract.  The test comes in the particular temptation to make money by means that our conscience condemns.  The further we get down the scale, the more important the concrete becomes.  A friend or a glass of beer, very definite and material facts, embody in themselves the spiritual conflict for many a human soul.  Christianity is a universal religion, not only for the intellectual but for the plain man, not only for the spiritually gifted but for the dull-witted and the savage.  For these spiritual truths need to be enshrined in concrete facts.  Through sacraments the meaning of unseen realities is brought home to simple minds.  Religion descends from the eternal and invisible to manifest itself in space and time, becoming not one bit the less spiritual in so doing.  Just as “the Word was made flesh”, so the living Christ still condescends to the needs of men and makes Himself known to them in the actual and the detailed.  Of themselves the water of Baptism or the bread and wine of the Eucharist can do neither harm nor good to the spirit of man – no more and no less than the sound-waves that underlie speech or the colours that form the raw material of the painter’s art.  But through the spoken word or the painter’s scene our spirit can communicate to another something of its own life, thoughts and suggestions, whether of beauty or of shame.  So through outward and visible signs Christ communicates Himself to us.

      (d) Sacraments are a necessary condition of the social side of religion.  If a man wishes to enter into any relations with his fellowmen he must employ material means.  The use of a physical medium is the condition of all human intercourse.  The glance of an eye, the utterance of the tongue, or whatever it be, all involve the use of matter.  A purely spiritual life, if it were conceivable for a man, would be a life of isolation.  The very nature of Christian sacraments emphasizes the social side of all true religion.  They are “a divine provision against spiritual individualism”.  Their form is that of ceremonies only possible among members of a society.  They remind us that religion includes not only our relation to God but our relation to our brethren.  While corporate religion cannot exist without sacraments of some kind, the Christian sacraments are peculiarly expressive of this common life, and, indeed, demand it.  A purely individual religion may be most spiritual, but it is not the religion of Jesus Christ.

      (e) While all human life is in some measure patient of being brought within the range of sacraments, certain elements in it stand out as primary and fundamental.  We can see why our Lord, as it were, focused the sacramental principle on two great ordinances.  He took the two most simple and universal needs, common to all mankind, the need of cleanliness and the need of food, and based on them the two sacraments of the Gospel.  As Dr Illingworth says, “He consecrates an ablution and a meal, the two necessities of our daily life, to be the witness through the ages of His spiritual presence among men.”  We cannot limit the sacramental principle to these two rites, of unique authority though they be.  They are but the supreme demonstration of the subjection of the material to the spiritual.  Even the more private and individual acts of human life may afford the material for sacraments.  But Christ ensured that no man should be outside the range of sacramental experience.  He shows that sacramental life is not for a few but for all.  Starting from the two great sacraments, men may learn to find in the whole of human life a parable of divine truth.  Every act and need may be consecrated to the service of God.  Human life will only become fully spiritual when it has become fully sacramental.†

      § 3.  The Article gives four objects for which Christian sacraments exist.

      (a) They are “badges or tokens of Christian men’s profession”.  This view is true as far as it goes, but by itself is inadequate.  It was specially emphasized by the Zwinglians.  They are the means by which we publicly confess our allegiance to Christ and our membership of the Christian society.  Such public confession is in Scripture demanded of Christians (Mt 10:32, Rom 10:9).  In heathen lands baptism is recognized by all parties as the decisive act that marks allegiance to Christ.  It often costs a man the loss of home and friends.  As Article XXVII says, “Baptism is ... a sign of profession and mark of difference whereby Christian men are discerned from other that be not Christened.”  At home the same is still true in the case of an adult.  To be baptized or confirmed is an open act of allegiance.  So, too, in many parts of England, to come to communion is to act differently from others.  The very act of coming is an act of witness to Christ.  It is felt that a man is compromised by it in a way that he is not by mere attendance at Church.  The Christian ought to be prepared to compromise himself publicly for Christ.

      (b) They be certain sure witnesses ... of grace and God’s goodwill towards us.  The fact that sacraments exist is an abiding proof that God in His love wishes to bestow grace on man.  Our personal call to use them is a proof that God wills to bestow grace on us personally.  They are witnesses of God’s goodwill both for the past and the future.  As the Catechism says: sacraments “are a means whereby we receive” grace “and a pledge to assure us thereof”.  In the Holy Communion we thank God “for that ... Thou dost assure us thereby of Thy favour and goodness towards us; and that we are very members incorporate in the mystical body of Thy Son.”  If we base our assurance of belonging to God only upon passing through certain religious feelings, then our sense of assurance shifts with our shifting feelings.  But God’s grace is wider and surer than man’s emotions.  Through a right use of the sacraments, as pledges of God’s love, our certainty is made to depend upon definite outward facts about which there can be no doubt.

      (c) They are effectual signs of grace and God’s goodwill towards us by the which He doth work invisibly in us.  An “effectual” sign is a sign that is no mere parable, but conveys the blessing that it symbolizes.  These words rule out the Zwinglian view of, e.g. the Eucharist as a bare memorial.  As the Catechism says: By “sacrament” “I mean an outward and visible sign of an inward and spiritual grace given unto us ... whereby we receive the same.”  This efficacy of sacraments depends upon the ordinance of Christ.  God is the efficient cause (n.b. Latin per quae ipse in nobis operatur), the sacraments are only instrumental causes.  “Christ is the chief and principal worker in all sacraments as a function of His everlasting Priesthood.”

      (d) By the which He ... doth not only quicken but also strengthen and confirm our faith in Him.  Sacraments are an aid to faith.  Just as in the Old Testament the Pillar of Fire and the Pillar of Cloud are represented as an aid to the faith of Israel, helping them to believe in a God whom they could not see, so Christian sacraments help our faith to lay hold on God.  The use of such simple means helps us to realize both our own needs and the power of God.  Our readiness to use them is a test of our belief in God’s promise and power (cp. 2 Kings 5:10–14).  Again, they offer definite opportunities for acts of faith.  They set before us definite promises of God for faith to claim.  Faith, like all our other faculties, needs exercise and grows stronger by use.  There is often a danger that a newly awakened faith may waste itself in vague emotion.  The sacraments afford definite objects on which to focus itself.  They provide definite efforts for our wills to make, and thus have an important place in the education of Christian faith.

      § 4.  The Article then goes on to deal with the number of sacraments.  It places on a level by themselves the two sacraments of the Gospel.  There are two Sacraments ordained of Christ our Lord in the Gospel, that is to say, Baptism and the Supper of the Lord.  These will be considered under the later Articles.  Then it proceeds Those five, commonly called Sacraments, that is to say, Confirmation, Penance, Orders, Matrimony, and Extreme Unction, are not to be counted for Sacraments of the Gospel.  We notice that the Article does not deny to them the name of sacraments.  “Commonly called” is not in the language of the Prayer-Book necessarily derogatory.  We find, e.g. “The Nativity of our Lord, or the Birthday of Christ, commonly called ‘Christmas Day’.”  All that the Article insists is that these rites are not to be counted equal to the other two.  It then goes on to give reasons for this position.  (i) On the positive side they are such as have grown partly of the corrupt following of the Apostles, partly are states of life allowed in the Scripture; (ii) on the negative side, They have not any visible sign or ceremony ordained of God.  These reasons need some consideration.  The sentences are not very exactly worded.  Only Extreme Unction can really be said to have grown from the corrupt following, i.e. the bad imitation (prava imitatione) of the Apostles.  The words can hardly apply to Penance with its mediaeval accretions, still less to the substitution of unction for laying on of hands in Confirmation.  Again, Matrimony and Orders may fairly be called “states of life allowed”, i.e. in the language of the time approved (probati) “in the Scriptures”, but neither of the positive reasons applies to either penance or confirmation.  The negative reason, however, covers all five.  Confirmation is really a part of Baptism, but we have no decisive evidence in Scripture that the laying on of hands was commanded by Christ (see, however, Heb 6:2).  Christ undoubtedly left with His Church the power to absolve sinners (Jn 20:23), but He did not command any visible sign or ceremony in which that absolution should be embodied.  The same is true of Orders (Jn 20:21–23).  We find laying on of hands employed in Scripture for ordination, but we possess no definite command of Christ.  So with Matrimony.  The most we can say is that Christ “adorned and beautified” it “with His Presence”, as the Marriage Service says, and S. Paul calls it a μυστήριον (Eph 5:32), but the word is not used in any technical sense.  The same applies to unction.  In neither case did Christ institute a sacrament.

      The difference between ourselves and the Church of Rome in the number of sacraments is mainly a matter of words.  The mediaeval number of Seven had certain practical conveniences.  It met the great crises of life with appropriate sacramental ordinances.  Moreover all of them could claim some authority from the New Testament.  On the other hand, the Church of England bases the distinction that it makes on Scripture, and had good reason for doing so.  It uses the word Sacrament in a narrower and in a wider sense.  In the Catechism it declares that Christ ordained two sacraments only “as generally” (i.e. universally) “necessary to salvation”.  Even the Church of Rome has never gone so far as to assert that the outward and visible sign of the other five was expressly given by Christ Himself, nor yet that all seven are on the same footing.  The Council of Trent anathematized any who should say “that these seven sacraments are equal to each other in such wise as that one is not more worthy than another”.

      § 5.  Two of these sacramental rites call for special treatment here.  (a) Penance: (b) Extreme Unction.

      (a) The whole conception of Penance rests upon two main truths: (i) Sin, while in its essence it is an offence against God, is also antisocial.  By our sins we injure not only ourselves but the society to which we belong.  (ii) The visible sign of union with Christ is life in the fellowship of the Christian Church.  No doubt this truth has become obscured by human sin, by the divisions of Christians and the failure of Church discipline.  But ideally and, as it were, sacramentally membership in the visible Body of Christ is the normal means of sharing in the divine life of Christ.

      When we turn to the Church as it is in Scripture we find that the duty is laid upon it of exercising judicial power over its members.  From its very nature it not only possesses the right inherent in all societies of exercising discipline upon members who neglect or disobey its own rules, but it possesses special authority, arising out of its relation to Christ, in dealing with the sins of men.  We find our Lord giving to S. Peter as the first member of His new Israel not only the power to “bind and to loose”, i.e. to declare forbidden or allowed, but also “The keys of the kingdom of heaven” (Mt 16:19).  Again, S. John represents the Risen Christ as breathing on the assembled Church and saying “Receive ye the Holy Ghost: whosesoever sins ye forgive, they are forgiven unto them; whosesoever sins ye retain, they are retained” (Jn 20:23).  We certainly find the Church acting upon this commission.  The Church tests men before admitting them into fellowship.  Faith and repentance were required of all candidates for Christian Baptism (Acts 2:37–41, etc.).  It was the Church that claimed to judge whether they truly possessed them.  And this claim to judge is not confined to the initial act of receiving into membership.  The Church no less claims to judge those who are its members as to their fitness to remain such.  “Do ye not judge them that are within. ... Put away the wicked man from among yourselves” (1 Cor 5:12–13).  Those who because of willful and notorious sin were put out of the Church were regarded as delivered over to Satan (1 Cor 5:5, cp. 2 Cor 2:5–11; 1 Tim 1:20).  That is to say, the Church was regarded as the scene of salvation.  To be cut off from the Church, as from Israel of old (cp. Exod 31:14) was to be cut off, not only from a visible society, but from covenanted union with God.  Outside God’s Church Satan was regarded as having power to inflict special sufferings.  Again, when the offender is penitent, the Church equally claims to be the judge of his penitence, and, if it thinks right, to readmit him to membership (2 Cor 2:10–11).  In all cases alike the Church’s judgment is dependent upon the guidance of the Holy Spirit, who in this as in all things is to guide men into all truth (Jn 20:22, cp. Jn 16:13).  A judgment of the Church which was not inspired by the Holy Spirit would not be ratified by God.

      Here, then, we find the origin of penance.  Just as at the beginning of the Christian life sins are remitted to the unbaptized by baptism (Acts 22:16), so to the already baptized sins are remitted by absolution.  Such absolution is primarily the Church’s judgment that a man may be rightly admitted to full fellowship and especially to the Holy Communion, which is the supreme expression of Christian fellowship.  The life of Christ is normally to be found within His Body, the Church.  The Church remits sins by restoring a man to membership in His Body, and retains sins by refusing such restoration.  Here, as elsewhere, the authority is that of the Church as a whole, but it is exercised by those who have been commissioned by Christ to act as ministers of the whole Church, e.g. the Apostles.

      In Scripture and in the earliest days there is no evidence of private confession.  Notorious offenders were required to make public confession before the whole congregation.  Only after long and grievous discipline were penitents restored to communion.  In James 5:16 we find the command “Confess therefore your sins one to another”.  The “therefore” connects it with the calling in of the elders of the Church to anoint the sick man with oil and to pray for him.  There is no mention of formal absolution.

      Auricular confession arose first as a preparation for public confession.  It was obvious that those who were publicly convicted of sin were not necessarily the only offenders.  A man might have fallen from Christ without the Church having become aware of his fall.  Hence those who felt themselves in danger of being in this state, consulted privately some spiritual adviser about their true condition, with the object of making public confession and doing penance if such were judged advisable.  Further, as primitive simplicity declined, public confession of sins began to be found undesirable.  The young were familiarized with gross sins.  It was a fruitful source of scandal and even made the basis of prosecution in the law-courts.  Hence, the historian Socrates tells us, after the Decian persecution (A.D. 250), bishops in the East appointed a regular officer or “penitentiary” to hear private confessions, impose suitable penance and grant absolution, where public confession was not judged necessary.  In the West Leo the Great sanctioned a similar arrangement (A.D. 440).  In this way private confession to a priest became the ordinary way of dealing with grave sins. [The origins of private penance present a complicated problem, which may be studied in K. E. Kirk, The Vision of God, Lect. v and R. C. Mortimer, The Origins of Private Penance.  Its development was considerably influenced by the practice of private confession in the monastic life.]  Where public scandal had been given, public penance was still enforced.  In 1215 the Lateran Council made confession to a priest obligatory once a year.  Disobedience rendered the offender excommunicate.  As the custom needed defence, the Schoolmen used their ingenuity to provide one.  Hence the elaborate mediaeval doctrine of the “sacrament of penance”.

      The mind of the Church of England on the subject of private confession is to be found in the Prayer-Book.  Here, as so often, the Church of England has returned to primitive practice.  Compulsory confession is abolished, voluntary confession is retained.  In the first exhortation in the Communion office the conditions necessary for making a good communion are laid down.  The duty is enforced of self-examination and repentance.  Stress is laid on the absolute need of a “full trust in God’s mercy” and “a quiet conscience”.  Then it proceeds: “therefore if there be any of you, who by this means cannot quiet his own conscience herein but requireth further comfort or counsel, let him come to me, or to some other discreet and learned Minister of God’s Word, and open his grief; that by the ministry of God’s holy Word he may receive the benefit of absolution, together with ghostly counsel and advice, to the quieting of his conscience and avoiding of all scruple and doubtfulness.”  Again, in the Visitation of the Sick the rubric runs: “Here shall the sick person be moved to make a special confession of his sins, if he feel his conscience troubled with any weighty matter.  After which Confession, the Priest shall absolve him (if he humbly and heartily desire it), after this sort.” Then follows the form of absolution.  “Our Lord Jesus Christ who hath left power to his Church, to absolve all sinners who truly repent and believe in him, of his great mercy forgive thee thine offences: And by his authority committed to me, I absolve thee from all thy sins.  In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost.  Amen.”  It is remarkable that the English Church retains the comparatively late form, “I absolve.”  If there could be any doubt that the Church of England intended to retain private confession, it is dispelled when we find the 113th Canon of 1603 warning clergy against revealing sins made known to them in confession.  Further, it was widely practiced in the reigns of Elizabeth, James I and Charles I, and again after the Restoration.  The Prayer-Book makes clear two great points about it.

      (1) There is no suggestion that we are not ordinarily able to prepare ourselves for Communion apart from auricular confession.  Neither Scripture nor the Prayer-Book nor the Primitive Church asserts that “mortal” sin cannot be forgiven on true repentance without private absolution.  Such a statement is often made but never proved.  Although there is no reason to credit the Lateran Council with any but the best motives in making confession obligatory, in actual practice it does not work.  It does not make sufficient allowance for human nature.  Forced confessions are often formal and not infrequently dishonest.  Unless they are inspired by real penitence they are apt to become an easy way of salving the conscience.  Sin is lightly regarded, as pardon for it can easily be obtained at the next confession.

      (2) On the other hand, confession is not an end in itself but is a means to an end, namely, peace with God.  A clear conscience is absolutely essential for a Christian life (cp. 1 Tim 1:5).  If a man cannot attain this by himself, confession is necessary for him.  It is notorious that many are unable to quiet their own consciences.  Some cannot feel that they are really sorry for their sin.  Confession in the presence of another is a real help, since it enables a man to see his sins as others see them, and so is a step to seeing them as God sees them.  Others cannot realize the fact of forgiveness.  Here the personal absolution comes home in a way that general absolutions fail to do.  There is no essential difference in quality between the two.  Either avails for the true penitent and neither for the impenitent.  There are not different brands of absolution.  But it is a simple fact of experience that private confession is a real means to many souls of bringing home the fact of God’s forgiveness through Christ.  Further, penitence like faith demands self-expression.  The self-humiliation of allowing another to overhear the penitent’s confession to God, the receiving of a penance which is regarded not as any attempt to make up for the sins but as an expression of willingness to bear whatever punishment God is pleased to send, are all practical outlets of sorrow for sin by which that sorrow is deepened and made more real.  However imperfect the penitence may still be, and true penitence is the work of a lifetime, the man still feels that he has tried his hardest.  Lastly, auricular confession is a great opportunity of obtaining an independent opinion about our life from one who has had all the facts laid before him, so far as we can do so.  Simple people need far more guidance in self-examination and dealing with temptations than is always realized.

      Finally, Christianity is, above all, a social religion.  Sin injures the whole body.  Confession is a universal instinct of man, as a social being.  These principles underlay the confessions that we find in the Old Testament (Lev 5:5; Num 5:6–7; Josh 7:19; 1 Sam 14:43) and in the New (Mk 1:5 and 44; Acts 19:18.)  In the development of the Church they have come to find expression in the sacrament of Penance.  The priest’s absolution is no charm uttered by one who is supposed to possess in his own person some magic power, nor yet is it merely the publication of a forgiveness that God has already bestowed.  It is the receiving back by God’s family into the Father’s home of a brother who is conscious of having sinned not only against the Father’s love but also against the peace and unity of the whole household.†

      (b) Extreme Unction

      Anointing the sick as a means of healing is a widespread custom.  In Mk 6:13 we read that the Apostles “anointed with oil many that were sick and healed them”.  The same custom prevailed in the early Church, as is shown in James 5:14–15.  “Is any among you sick? let him call for the elders of the Church; and let them pray over him, anointing him with oil in the name of the Lord; and the prayer of faith shall save him that is sick, and the Lord shall raise him up; and if he have committed sins, it shall be forgiven him.”  Such anointing must be taken in connection with the gifts of healing spoken of in 1 Cor 12:9.  It was clearly for the healing of the body of the sick person, who, it was hoped, would recover.  Later, when the gifts of healing had declined, it became known as extrema unctio (i.e. the last anointing after those at baptism and confirmation) and reserved for administration to those at the point of death.  Thus extrema unctio came to be the equivalent of “unctio in extremis”, and, further, was viewed as bestowing primarily spiritual benefits.  Even so the English rite still contained prayers for the sick person’s recovery, and then, if the man recovered, it might be repeated.  The earliest evidence of its appearance as a religious rite is a letter of Pope Innocent I early in the fifth century.  He replied to a bishop who asked for information, that a bishop might certainly anoint the sick with oil, quoting S. James.  Further, he made it clear that if the bishop blessed the oil, priests or even laymen might use it in the hour of need.  Only those who were under exclusion from the sacraments might not receive it, since it is a kind of sacrament (quia genus est sacramenti).  The fact that a bishop needed to ask such a question is clear evidence that the custom was not universal.  The Pope’s vague language shows that “unction” was not yet an established “sacrament”.  Further, even a layman might administer it.  No other reference to unction as a sacramental rite can be found till the time of Pope Innocent III in the twelfth century. [But the considerable liturgical evidence may be studied in the article on the Visitation of the Sick in Liturgy and Worship, pp. 472 ff.]  The subject was discussed at the Council of Trent.  It was declared to be a sacrament, instituted by Christ, representing the grace of the Holy Spirit, cleansing away venial sins and comforting the infirm.  The one trace of its primitive use is the statement that the sick man “sometimes obtains bodily health when it is expedient for the welfare of his soul”.  Accordingly, though it is primarily a “sacrament of the dying” it may be repeated if the sick man recovered.  In the First Prayer-Book of Edward VI a service of anointing was still retained “if the sick person desire it”.  In the Second Prayer-Book it was wholly omitted and has never been restored.  The defence of the position of the Church of England is that there is no evidence either in Scripture or the practice of the primitive Church that the rite is of universal and lasting obligation.  Its use or disuse is merely a question of discipline.  In quite modern times a desire for its revival has arisen in connection with “faith healing”.  It is a well established fact that our minds and wills have greater influence over our bodies than at first sight appears.  “Suggestion” has great power for good in the case of nervous disorders and others that at first sight would not seem to come under that head.  At the same time there would seem to be no reliable evidence at present that “faith healing” is of the slightest value against organic diseases.  The use of unction, accompanied by prayer, would, it is claimed, afford a visible means of strengthening the willpower of the patient and give him the opportunity to exercise it.  It would regularize the employment of powers of suggestion that beyond all reasonable doubts are genuinely possessed by certain persons and within certain limits efficient.  The use of unction has been sanctioned for such purposes by certain bishops.  It is a return to its primitive use.  How far it is capable of such use depends upon the whole question of the scope of “mental healing” which is at present under investigation.* †

            [*Since the above paragraph was written the question of the use of unction and the laying-on of hands for the sick has been further discussed.  In 1924 there was published “The Report of the Committee appointed in accordance with Resolution 63 of the Lambeth Conference, 1920, on The Ministry of Healing”.  This Report was accepted by the Lambeth Conference of 1930 and in January 1932 the Convocation of Canterbury appointed a Joint Committee to draw up services (1) for Unction and Laying-on of Hands, (2) for Laying-on of Hands without Unction.  The services drawn up by the Joint Committee were approved on 6 June, 1935 by the Convocation of Canterbury for provisional use in the province.]

      § 6.  The final section of this Article deals with the right use of sacraments.  “The Sacraments were not ordained of Christ to be gazed upon, or to be carried about: but that we should duly use them.”  This sentence is not happily worded.  “The Sacraments” would naturally apply to Baptism and the Eucharist: but there is no evidence of any superstitious gazing on baptism, rather the reverse: superstitious ideas about baptism have been fostered by its being performed privately.  Unless it is a mere slip, the plural must refer to the two elements in the Eucharist and the allusion is to Corpus Christi ceremonies and the like, referred to more explicitly under Article XXVIII.  The remaining sentences follow from the nature of grace.  If all grace needs the cooperation of our human wills in seeking and using it, sacraments as means of grace demand a right disposition in the recipient.  They are not magical charms or mechanical devices that produce effects independently of our own faith and efforts.  Such could have no place in a moral life.  Hence “In such only as worthily receive the same they have a wholesome effect or operation.  But they that receive them unworthily, purchase to themselves damnation, as S. Paul saith.” The allusion is to 1 Cor 11:29, “He that eateth and drinketh (unworthily A.V.) eateth and drinketh judgment (damnation A.V.) unto himself, if he discern not the body.” The context makes it perfectly clear that S. Paul by judgment (κρίμα) means temporal chastisement sent by God in mercy to recall the careless to a sense of their sin (cp. v. 32, “that we may not be condemned with the world”).  “Damnation” in modern English means eternal punishment, and here, as in the Prayer-Book, conveys to our ears an entirely wrong idea.  In the sixteenth century its use was not necessarily so limited.  The practical effect on uneducated people has been and still is to drive them away from Holy Communion.  What the Prayer-Book means by “worthily” receiving is explained by the sixth and last answers in the Catechism and the exhortations in the Baptismal and Communion offices.

      The balance of this Article is further shown by the removal, in 1563, of a condemnation of the phrase “grace ex opere operato”.

      (i) Originally the phrase conveyed a true and valuable idea.  “Opus operatum” was contrasted with “opus operantis”, and implied that the efficacy of all sacraments depends upon the appointment of their author, God, and not on the merit of the officiant or recipient.  In this sense it is used by the Council of Trent.  It vindicates the important truth that grace is God’s free gift.  We do not earn or create it by our own faith or moral efforts.

      (ii) This became corrupted into the idea, condemned in this Article, that sacraments conferred grace automatically, quite apart from the faith or penitence of the recipient.  In this sense it was rightly condemned in the first edition of the Article.  As we saw, the blessing that we personally receive must depend on our individual capacity for receiving it, namely, our true repentance, our real belief in Christ and His promises, our desire to surrender ourselves to Him and to employ the grace that He bestows.  It has been said, “The grace of Sacraments does not depend on our faith, but for its effect in us all depends on our faith”; and again, “Grace without faith may come upon us, but it cannot make us holy.”  This second truth was secured by the language of the Article, and the condemnation of the phrase was wisely withdrawn, since it contained a true meaning as well as a false.

      The truth of Article XXVI follows from a right view of the nature of sacraments.  Here, as in similar cases, we must distinguish between a man’s personal character and his official capacity.  The evil life of a Christian minister, as of any Christian, brings reproach upon God and His Church.  Such, therefore, must be removed.  On the other hand, the validity of his official acts is not affected.  A bad judge, qua judge, must be obeyed, as the king’s representative, no less than a good one.  So in the sacraments the minister acts not as an individual but as the organ of the Church.  God’s promises are made not to him individually but to the Church as a whole.  Therefore their fulfillment is not affected by his personal lack of faith.  On any other supposition means of grace would always be precarious.  So our Lord distinguishes between the official commands of Scribes and Pharisees who “sit in Moses’ seat” and their private conduct.  He bids us obey the former, but not imitate the latter (Mt 23:2–3).  Scripture often gives instances of God sending blessings through bad men, e.g. Saul in the Old Testament and Judas in the New.  We have no reason to suppose that Judas’ ministry was any less productive of good results than that of the other Apostles.

 

Holy Baptism – Article  XXVII

 

Of Baptism

De Baptismo

Baptism is not only a sign of profession and mark of difference whereby Christian men are discerned from other that be not christened: but is also a sign of regeneration or new birth, whereby, as by an instrument, they that receive Baptism rightly are grafted into the Church; the promises of the forgiveness of sin, and of our adoption to be the sons of God by the Holy Ghost, are visibly signed and sealed: faith is confirmed: and grace increased by virtue of prayer unto God.  The Baptism of young children is in any wise to be retained in the Church, as most agreeable with the institution of Christ.

Baptismus non est tantum professionis signum, ac discriminis nota, qua Christiani a non Christianis discernantur, sed etiam est signum regenerationis, per quod, tanquam per instrumentum, recte baptismum suscipientes, Ecclesiae inseruntur, promissiones de remissione peccatorum, atque adoptione nostra in filios Dei per Spiritum Sanctum visibiliter obsignantur, fides confirmatur, et vi divinae invocationis gratia augetur.

Baptismus parvulorum omnino in Ecclesia retinendus est, ut qui cum Christi institutione optime congruat.

 

      The main body of the Article dates from 1553.  In 1563 the language on Infant Baptism was strengthened.  The earlier Article had only said that the custom was to be “commended” and “retained in the Church”.

      It is aimed at (i) the inadequate view of Baptism taken by Zwingli and the Anabaptists; (ii) the denial of Infant Baptism.

      § 1.  Christian Baptism has a long history behind it.

      (a) The use of ceremonial washings as preparatory to approaching God in prayer and worship is a common feature of many ancient religions.  It was a natural symbol for that purification, however inadequately conceived, which the worshipper desired before coming into the presence of God.  It corresponded to a universal human instinct.  We find such use of water among the Jews.  It is commanded in the Old Testament (e.g. Lev 8:6, 14:9, etc.).  Further, by the time of our Lord the custom had arisen for proselytes to the Jewish faith to be not only circumcised but baptized.  Proselytes so baptized were said by their entrance into Judaism to be “born again”.  A “new creature” (καινη κτίσις), the phrase applied by S. Paul in 2 Cor 5:17 to the Christian, as being in Christ by baptism, was a current Jewish term for a proselyte.  The plunge beneath the water in baptism represented a death to the old life and the rising from the water a birth to the new life within the sphere of God’s Covenant.  The baptism of John can only be understood in the light of such contemporary Jewish custom.  It differed from the ordinary ceremonial washings of the Jews because it was not repeated.  It was preparatory for the coming of the Messianic Kingdom.  In effect John treated the Jews as on a level with Gentiles: they needed to become, as it were, proselytes, in order to enter the Kingdom.  Mere descent from Abraham was not enough.  God required personal penitence, and such penitence must express itself in public submission to John’s baptism (Mt 3, etc.).  But John’s baptism was only preparatory.  It was only a “water baptism unto repentance”.  Those who received it were at best placed in the closest relation to God that was possible under the Old Covenant.  John himself looked forward to the coming of One who would “baptize with Holy Spirit and fire” (3:11).  Such baptism would bestow not only forgiveness for the past but new power for the future.  Those who received it would enter into the Messianic Kingdom and all its blessings.  We read, too, of baptism as practised by our Lord’s disciples during His life on earth (Jn 4:1–2).  This baptism would seem to be on a level with John’s.  It cannot have been full Christian baptism.  Such was only possible after the Ascension, when Christ was glorified and the Spirit was given (cp. Jn 7:39).  At its highest it was a mark of discipleship, not a means of membership of Christ.

      (b) This practice of baptism, already familiar to the Jews and easily intelligible to the heathen, Jesus Christ took and made to be the visible mark of acceptance of Himself as Saviour and of membership in the Christian society.  This is definitely asserted in Mt 28:19, “Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them into the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Ghost.”  But the belief that Christian baptism originated in the direct command of Christ does not depend on a single text.  His own baptism at John’s hands had consecrated the rite for Christians and given it a new Messianic significance.  From first to last the New Testament knows of no other means of entrance into the Church.  A Christian. and a baptized person are synonymous terms.  The universal practice of baptism in all churches, Jewish and Gentile alike, starting from the day of Pentecost (Acts 2:38 without any hint of questioning or debate, can only be explained by the fact that it was instituted by Christ Himself.  Many writers have held that the language of Acts shows that baptism was at first administered in the name of Jesus only (Acts 2:38 “in the name of Jesus Messiah”, 8”16 “into the name of the Lord Jesus”, 10:48, etc., cp. also Gal 3:27, Rom 6:3).  This is possible.  There were some who held the name of Jesus Christ by itself to be sufficient, even as late as the fourth century.  It was defended on the principle that baptism in the name of One Person of the Trinity implied baptism in the name of all.  On the other hand, it is equally possible that the phrases of the Acts and Epistles are not intended to represent the actual formula used, but rather to distinguish Christian baptism from Jewish baptism or John’s baptism.  S. Paul, for instance, speaks of being “baptized into Moses” (1 Cor 10:2), with an implied contrast to being “baptized into Christ”, but this does not mean that the formula “into Moses” was ever used. [The “name” in popular usage means much more than the “title”.  The name of a god or person was supposed to be, as it were, a real expression of himself.  In any case, when our Lord spoke of baptism “in the name” of the Trinity, He was not primarily giving a form of words to be used.  He was expressing the nature of the life bestowed.  Men were to be immersed into the full life of the Godhead, as He had revealed it.  The Greek word βαπτίζειν is not such an exclusively technical word as our “baptize”.  It means ‘immerse’ in a general sense, and this wider meaning is never quite lost sight of in the New Testament.]

      It is noticeable that the Didache both speaks of baptism “into the name of the Lord” [This may mean the Trinity, but the context favours Christ.] and also gives the Trinitarian formula showing that the two are not in any way inconsistent or mutually exclusive.  Attempts have also been made to show that the original text of Mt 28:19 ran simply “Baptizing them in the name of the Lord”, and was expanded later to correspond with ecclesiastical custom. [On the one side see E.R.E. ii. 380 a.  On the other side Chase, J.Th.S. 1905, pp. 481 ff.]  It is admitted that not one of our present MSS contains any hint of this alternative reading, but it is argued that Eusebius of Caesarea several times quotes the verse in its shorter form.  He had, access to many good and early MSS in the great library of Caesarea, and it is reasonable to suppose that he quotes it on their authority.  On the other hand, he quotes the verse in full when he needs it, and it is equally reasonable to suppose that he abbreviated it for his own convenience.  We are not greatly concerned to deny that baptism in the name of Christ may have once been common, but it certainly cannot be proved, and opponents of orthodoxy have no right to assume it as true.  The language of 2 Cor 13:14 shows that S. Paul expected all Corinthian Christians to be familiar with the type of teaching that is summed up in the Baptismal formula and is strong evidence of its primitiveness. [Cp. also Abrahams, Studies in Pharisaism and the Gospels, esp. pp. 45–46.  There is a Jewish phrase, “a proselyte to (or in) the name of heaven,” i.e. one who is baptized for God’s sake and for no personal motive.  In the Talmud there is another phrase, “baptism in (or to) the name of freedom,” applied to slaves, who, on rising to the rank of freemen, were rebaptized.  “A fine contrast and complement of baptism in the name of freedom is the proselyte’s baptism in the name of heaven, or in its Gospel form – baptism in the name of Christ.”]

      § 2.  What meaning is given to Baptism in Scripture?  Primarily it signified the public acknowledgement of Jesus as Lord or Messiah and entrance into the new Israel.  Today this meaning is seen most clearly in heathen countries, but it must never be lost sight of.  As the Article says, “Baptism is not only a sign of profession and mark of difference, whereby Christian men are discerned from other that be not Christian” (a non Christianis). [Cp. the Baptismal office: “Baptism doth represent unto us our profession: which is to follow the example of our Saviour Christ and to be made like unto Him, etc.”]  That, indeed, was the only meaning that the Zwinglians and Anabaptists would allow to baptism.  It was quite true as far as it went, but inadequate, as the Article goes on to point out.  Scripture makes it clear that baptism is not only a sign of profession but a means of grace.

      (a) We turn first to the teaching of our Lord as given in Jn 3:1–3.  The question may be raised how far we have here a literal record of His teaching.  But in any case when the passage was written Christian baptism had long been established and even if the words are an interpretation of Christ’s teaching rather than a record of it, the Church approved them as a true interpretation.  Nicodemus apparently regarded himself as fit to enter the Messianic Kingdom just as he was. He  had refused to submit to John’s baptism as a preparation.  He needed to be taught that a man must be “born again” (or from above) before he can even see the Kingdom of God (v. 3).  He must be born “of water and Spirit” before he can enter the Kingdom (v. 5).  In other words, the Kingdom of God is a spiritual kingdom and can only be shared by those who by receiving new life possess the capacity for sharing it.  The reference to baptism is unmistakable.  Nicodemus stands in the same relation to the new Israel as a Gentile to the old Israel.  He must become a “new creature”.  But whereas Jewish baptism and even John’s baptism was only with water, the baptism that admits into the Kingdom of God is “of water and Spirit” (εξ ύδατος και πνεύματος – the preposition not being repeated binds the two words into a single phrase).  This baptism not only symbolizes cleansing and new life, but bestows them.  The water is at once the symbol and the channel of the Spirit.  Some have seen an allusion to Gen 1:2.  The new man rises from the water of baptism at the creative touch of the Spirit of God, even as the world sprang to life as He moved on the face of the waters at the first creation.  The root idea is perfectly clear.  At our first birth we receive the initial capacity for life in this present world: at our new birth the initial capacity for life in the Kingdom of God and “the age to come”.

      This same thought underlies the whole of the New Testament teaching on Baptism.  S. Paul speaks of it as ‘the bath of regenera: tion’ (Tit 35). More often he expresses the same idea in a slightly different form.  By baptism we are incorporated into the body of Christ and become His members (1 Cor 12:13; Gal 3:27).  By our natural birth we are “in Adam”, i.e. we inherit a common human nature shared by our fellowmen: by our new birth in baptism we become in Christ (1 Cor 15:22).  Christ is the new Adam, the source of a new and regenerate humanity.  Henceforward the Christian is to live and do all things in Christ (Eph 1:3, 2:6, etc.).  As members of Christ His life is within us (1 Cor 6:15).  It is the same relation to Himself as that which our Lord describes in the allegory of the vine (Jn 15:1 ff.).  His life is to circulate in us, as the sap of the vine in the branches.  Further, S. Paul develops this thought so as to bring out that the birth to the new life must involve a death to the old.  In virtue of our union with Christ we share His death and burial, that we may rise with Him to newness of life (Rom 6:3–11; Col 2:12.  Note the aorists in each case, referring to the single definite event of baptism).  The symbolism of immersion admirably set forth this truth.  The plunge beneath the water represented the death and burial of the old man, the rising from the water the birth to new life in union with the Risen Lord.  Henceforth the baptized is to reckon himself “dead to sin but alive unto God in Christ Jesus” (Rom 6:10 ff.; Col 3:1–3).  Having been made a member of Christ, he is called to live as such (1 Cor 6:15; Eph 5:7–9, etc.).  In 1 Pet 3:20–21 stress is laid on present salvation begun here and now through baptism.  The Church is the ark in which safety may be found.

      (b) The blessings of baptism mentioned in the Article are not a number of detached blessings, but flow from the union with Christ thus gained.  Baptism is “a sign of regeneration or new birth”.  “Sign” is clearly used in the sense defined in the previous Article as “effectual sign”.  That is, baptism not only symbolizes new birth but conveys it, since by it we are made members of Christ. [Cp. the opening of the Catechism, “My baptism: wherein I was made a member of Christ, etc.”]

      Again by baptism “as by an instrument, they that receive baptism rightly are grafted into the Church.”  This simply expresses the same truth from another standpoint.  The Church is Christ’s body.  The metaphor of grafting comes from Rom 11:17; the Gentiles are like a wild olive grafted into the ancient stock of the true olive so as to be enriched by its life, the true olive being the Israel of God.  The promises of the forgiveness of sin ... by the Holy Ghost are visibly signed and sealed.  It is as being in Christ that we are forgiven.  We have entered into the new life and the stains of the old life have been washed away.  In the New Testament baptism is always “unto the remission of sins”, i.e. not only an expression of repentance, but a visible sign and seal of God’s forgiveness.  On the day of Pentecost S. Peter bids the multitude “Repent and be baptized each one of you in the name of Jesus the Messiah, unto remission of your sins and ye shall receive the gift of the Holy Spirit” (Acts 2:37–38).  Ananias called on S. Paul to “be baptized and wash away thy sins, calling on the name of the Lord” (Acts 22:16, cp. also 1 Cor 6:11; Eph 5:26).  As Article IX puts it, “There is no condemnation to them that believe and are baptized” (renatis et credentibus), not because God has favourites and arbitrarily passes over in one man what He condemns in another, but because those who repent and are baptized have faced their sin in penitence and done their best to remedy it by coming to Christ to receive from Him that new life which alone can restore them to spiritual health.  Their sins are forgiven them as being “in Christ”.  The actual cleansing of the body with the water is the “sign and seal” of the inward purification and acceptance by God.  A document is sealed when the donor who has promised a gift “actually makes the thing promised over to the receiver and thereby assures the possession of it to him”. [Sadler, Church Doctrine, Bible Truth, p. 120.]

      The promises ... of our adoption to be the sons of God by the Holy Ghost, [Dr Gibson, placing a comma before and after “by the Holy Ghost”, connects the words with both the forgiveness and the adoption.  This was the punctuation of the earliest English editions.  No question of doctrine is concerned.] are visibly signed and sealed.  Again, it is as being members of Christ that we share His sonship.  It is through Him we “receive the adoption of sons” (Gal 4:4–5).  So in Rom 8:15–17 S. Paul writes: “Ye received not the spirit of bondage again unto fear; but ye received (ελάβετε, aorist) the spirit of adoption, whereby we cry Abba, Father.  The Spirit Himself beareth witness with our spirit, that we are the children of God: and if children, then heirs; heirs of God and joint heirs with Christ” (cp. also Gal 3:26–27).  The objection may be raised “are not all men children of God?  They do not need to be made so by baptism.”  This objection confuses potential with actual sonship.  God made men to be His children, but sin has come in between God and men.  All men have by creation a capacity for sonship, but sin has blinded their eyes and warped their affections.  By ourselves we cannot be all that God meant us to be.  Can we say that a child is in any real sense a son to his father if he has never seen or known him or if he from the first has been alienated from him?  Only Jesus Christ has ever lived on earth a human life as a true Son of God, and by baptism He imparts to us the power of His own human sonship.  Only He can fully restore our capacity for filial love and obedience and take away the sin that has destroyed sonship.  So, too, it is as members of Christ that we share His election and are among “the elect people of God” (Rom 16:13 and Eph 1:4) and are inheritors of His Kingdom.  “I was made a member of Christ, the child of God and an inheritor of the Kingdom of Heaven” (The Catechism).  Baptism, therefore, like the Eucharist, has an eschatological reference; it is a pledge not only of the new life with and for God in this world but also of our final inheritance of eternal life at “the manifestation of the sons of God”, when we shall receive our “adoption, namely, the redemption of our bodies” (Rom 8:19, 23).

      Faith is confirmed: and grace increased by virtue of prayer to God.  The exact meaning of this sentence is most obscure.  The best interpretation seems to be that throughout this paragraph the Article has in view only adult baptism.  Infant baptism is not dealt with till the second paragraph.  In that case the “faith” that is confirmed is the faith of the baptized.  It is strengthened by exercising itself in the sacramental act.  So, too, the grace increased is that of the baptized, and it is increased in answer to the prayers either of himself or preferably of the Church.  The new life bestowed in baptism is God’s gift in response to the prayers of the Church.*

            [*If the first section has in mind infant as well as adult baptism, the simplest interpretation would be to interpret the words as denoting an increased blessing won for the baptized by the prayers of the bystanders.  Dr Gibson explains it in the light of the prayer in the Baptismal office, in which the minister in the name of all those present thanks God for their call to the knowledge of His grace and faith in Him, and then proceeds, “Increase this knowledge and confirm this faith in us evermore.”  On this view the words describe what takes place in the baptized subsequent to their own baptism, when they are reminded of their own baptism by witnessing another’s.  In any case the Latin “vi divinae invocationis” hardly corresponds to the English “by virtue of prayer unto God”, and might be translated “in virtue of the invocation of God”, i.e. of the name of the Trinity.]

      (c) If, then, baptism conveys all these blessings, how is it that many baptized persons are living openly in sin?  Our prisons, for instance, are full of baptized criminals.  These facts, it is often urged, disprove any doctrine of baptismal regeneration.  Such an objection misunderstands both the nature of grace and the true meaning of “regeneration”.  As we saw, God’s grace will do nothing for us without our own cooperation.  Baptism places us in a new relation to God: we, on our part, must respond to this and use it.  Baptism brings within our reach new possibilities for holiness: we must realize them by the use of our wills.  As baptized we have not only new claims upon God, but also new duties and responsibilities towards Him.  As members of Christ, we are in touch with new forces for good, but they will only make us holy in so far as we work with them.  The failure of many baptized persons does not show that baptism is valueless: it only shows that they have not responded to and used the benefits of baptism.  [We may compare the gifts of baptism to a store of money lying at the bank.  A man may possess such and yet be naked and starving because he has not claimed and used his money.  His plight does not prove the non-existence of the money.  So by faith and obedience we have to claim and use our baptismal grace.]

      Again, much confusion has arisen because the word “regeneration” has been used in different senses.  The Prayer-Book means by it simply incorporated into Christ.  All baptized persons are “regenerate” in this sense.  On the other hand, Nonconformists identify “regeneration” with “conversion”.  They mean by regeneration that spiritual renewal which membership of Christ results in, when it is rightly accepted and used.  It includes the conversion or turning of the will to God and the personal acceptance of Christ.  In this sense a baptized person who has made no effort to live up to his privileges is not “regenerate”.  If we use Prayer-Book language we say that regeneration needs to be supplemented by conversion.  The actual renewal of the soul requires both the gift of the grace of God in baptism and also the personal surrender of the will to that grace.  A man should be both regenerate and converted.  Regeneration is the work of God: it is accomplished in a moment: by it new powers are placed in our grasp.  Conversion is our work in conjunction with God: it calls for effort and self-surrender.  It may be either rapid or slow.  In the Bible we have instances of both kinds.  We may be able to point to a definite moment of conversion or not.  Many Christians pass through more than one conversion.  The important thing is that there shall be a thorough self-surrender to the divine will.  Conversion may precede regeneration or follow it.  In the case of children who are baptized as infants, it must necessarily follow it.  In the case of adults from whom faith and repentance are required, it must have begun before baptism.  But conversion is not a substitute for regeneration.  It is a call to seek baptism, not to do without it (cp. the case of S. Paul, Acts 9:18, Cornelius and his friends, 10:47, the disciples at Ephesus, 19:5).  One of the proofs of conversion is the willingness to obey the command of our Lord by submitting to baptism and to confess Him by joining openly the Christian society of which baptism is the visible entrance.  Whatever blessings God may bestow outside, by baptism we enter within the circle of God’s covenanted mercies.  No conversion, however complete, can of itself guarantee full and abiding union with Christ.  The normal means of that union, where it can be had is baptism, followed by a life lived in the fellowship of the Church.† [A difficulty is often felt about the words of 1 Jn 3:9 and 5:18, “Whosoever is born of God sinneth not” or “doth not commit sin”.  The difficulty is equally great whether “born of God” means “baptized” or “converted”.  No one could hold that a converted man never sins.  The only answer lies in drawing attention to the present tense (αμαρτάνει) which refers to a habit of sin.  S. John is assuming that the Christian is responding to the position given him as son of God (cp. Rom 8:14).  In so far as he does this and realizes the new life, he does not commit sin.]

      It is only fair to mention another view of baptism held by many reformers known as the “obsignatory” view.  This view has its origin in Calvinism.  Since God’s grace is irresistible and given only to the elect, it follows that sacraments cannot in any real sense be “means of grace”.  Rather they are pledges or seals of blessings already belonging to the recipient as a child of grace.  They assure him of the reality of the divine blessing.  On this view baptism does not make us children of God, it only assures us that we are such or can be such when we fulfill the necessary conditions of faith and repentance, just as the coronation does not give the king his sovereignty, but is the seal of an already possessed sovereignty.  This view is still held even by many who have abandoned the Calvinism that originally suggested it.  It can hardly be reconciled with the language of the Articles about sacraments as “effectual signs of grace”.  It renders almost meaningless much of the baptismal service, e.g. the words in which after the baptism of the infant we thank God “that it hath pleased thee to regenerate this infant with thy holy Spirit”, and of the Catechism, which declares that we were “made” members of Christ by baptism. In the case of adults it reduces baptism to little more than an aid to faith.  In the case of infants it is hard to see on this view that baptism has any value at all.  It might just as well be deferred to a later age, when its meaning would be understood by the recipient.

      § 3.  We can now turn to the question of infant baptism, always remembering that the Scripture language about baptism is coloured by the prevalent practice of adult baptism.  So too, much of the language both of our Prayer-Book and our Article, which is based on Scripture, is applicable in its full sense only to adults.  As applied to infants it requires a certain accommodation to new conditions.

      (a) Historically there seems no reason to doubt that the practice of infant baptism dates from apostolic times.  It is in the fullest accord with contemporary ideas on religion.  “The idea that a parent should enter a religion or covenant relation with God as an individual merely, i.e. by himself as distinct from his immediate family would never occur to the ancients, least of all to a Jew.” [E.R.E. ii. p. 379.]  Every Jewish boy was circumcised when he was eight days old and thus brought within the covenant.  In the case of proselytes to Judaism, the children were baptized and, if males, circumcised.  The practice was defended on the ground that “one may act for another to his advantage though not to his disadvantage apart from his knowledge and consent”.  We do not, indeed, find any positive mention of infant baptism in the New Testament, but we do not find the slightest hint of any age limit.  Looked at in the light not of modern thought but the thought and custom of the first century, silence on the point is most readily explained by the supposition that infants were baptized.  We have record of the baptism of the whole households (Acts 16:15; 1 Cor 1:16).  S. Peter can bid men repent and be baptized, “for to you is the promise and to your children” (Acts 2:39).  So, too, S. Paul sends a message to children based on their membership in Christ’s body (Col 3:20; Eph 6:1, n.b. “in the Lord”).  Infant baptism was certainly practised in the early Church. [It is implied, e.g. by Justin Martyr and Irenaeus.]  The first known objector to it is Tertullian.  His objection is based on the ground that infants may fall into sin later, and, since baptism cannot be repeated, such sin may fail to obtain forgiveness: hence it is wiser to delay.  These words are evidence for the existence of the practice, and he does not oppose it on doctrinal grounds.  Down to a much later date baptism was frequently postponed till the approach of death from a conviction of the unforgivableness of post-baptismal sin, and a desire to have a good time in the present world.  But such a practice did not express the mind of the Church.  On the other hand, the conditions of apostolic Church life were those of the mission field.  And in the mission field then, as today, adult baptism is the rule and infant baptism the exception.  Children are only baptized where both parents are Christian or where some very definite guarantee is given that the child both can and shall be brought up as a Christian.  Further, in times of persecution parents might be afraid to have their children baptized.

      (b) We cannot doubt that the Church was rightly guided and that “The Baptism of young children is in any wise to be retained in the Church, as most agreeable with the institution of Christ.”  The new covenant cannot be narrower than the old: the New Israel cannot put barriers where the Old Israel put none.  It is often objected that infants cannot have faith and repentance.  That is indeed obvious.  “Faith and repentance” are necessary conditions, when they can be had.  But spiritual life is the free gift of God, and where there is no active disbelief or impenitence to oppose a bar to God’s mercy, it does not need faith for its reception.  We need not be consulted about our second birth any more than about our first.  Children, when they come into the world, enter upon an inheritance tainted by sin.  They should equally possess from the first that union with Christ which is the antidote to sin.  After all few of us would refuse to pray to God to bless a child.  We read of our Lord blessing children who were so small that He could take them up in His arms, and therefore were presumably incapable of faith (Mk 10:13–16).  Our Lord always required faith for the reception of His blessings, where faith could rightly be expected, but in this case He expressly invited little children to come to Him.  We cannot possibly tell what precise effect either His blessing or our prayers have on the infant life, but we cannot suppose that they have no effect.  So, too, we may not be able to define the inward effect of bringing children to Christ in baptism: the infant cannot recount the story of its spiritual experience.  All we can say is that we believe that they receive from Him the best that they are capable of receiving.

      Further, infant baptism embodies a profound spiritual principle.  Religion starts not with what we do for God but with what God does for us. [Cp. the opening of the Church Catechism, which begins with what God has done for us and then goes on to point out what we are to do for Him.  So, too, our citizenship and our home come to us unearned and we have to live worthy of them.  We do not have firs to deserve them.]  We do not have to climb up to God first, to earn His goodwill by so much repentance or faith or so many good works.  God’s love and His free gifts come first, and we are bidden to live up to them.  Privilege comes before responsibility.  The reverse view seems at first sight to be common sense, but in practice it has always led to hard and gloomy views of God.  We can never be sure that our faith or works have come up to His standard.  The true view is an appeal to our trust and gratitude.  Above all, it gives us a sure ground of approach to God.  As baptized Christians we are God’s children, even though we may be His bad children, and we can always fall back on the sonship that He bestowed upon us.  The Prodigal Son had not earned his position as son.  He had received it, and used it unworthily.  But in the hour of distress he could fall back upon it as a ground of appeal.  Though a bad son, he could still cry “Father”.  So, when children are baptized their baptism always remains as a ground of appeal.  We do not bid them be good and say that then, if we judge them good enough, they will be baptized.  Rather we say they are Christians and therefore must live as Christians.  Nothing could be more Scriptural.

      Lastly, many objections to infant baptism depend for their force on a falsely isolated view of the sacrament.  As we have seen, the grace given in baptism does not transform us without our own effort.  It needs to be claimed and used.  Accordingly, the child must be taught that he is a member of Christ and all that such membership involves.  If he never learns his position as a child of God and makes no effort to avail himself of the powers placed within his reach, that does not show that infant baptism is of no value: it shows rather that the divine gift is being left unused. [We may compare the case of the insincere adult who is baptized, without real faith and penitence, e.g. Simon Magus (Acts 8:13 ff.).  When his insincerity is disclosed he is bidden to repent and amend his life: but there is no suggestion of rebaptism.  We might have supposed that his unbelief and sin would have hindered the reception of the gifts.  Rather the blessings of baptism have been given once for all and they await the will that will use them.  He is to obtain remission of sins in virtue of his relation to Christ founded in baptism, not by a new baptism.]  Further, life of all kinds can only be realized by development, and that development needs the right environment.  By baptism infants not only receive the power of a new life, but are placed in the Church in which this new life is to be progressively developed.  Our natural human life depends for its growth upon fellowship.  A child after birth needs to be fed and clothed if it is to be strong and healthy.  Later on it needs education and instruction.  So the baptized infant requires food and nursing for its soul if it is to grow up spiritually sound.  The Christian child is to come to self-consciousness within the Church.  He is to be taught all that his life means and the grand possibilities that it contains.  Hence the need of godparents, who in the name of the Church promise to train the child.  Accordingly, teaching on baptismal regeneration must never be separated from the thought of the Church as God’s family in which the new life is to be realized.  The gift of God in baptism implies as its background His gifts to the Church as a whole.  It is very doubtful whether it is right to baptize infants indiscriminately as is too often done today, when there is no real security that they will be brought up as the Prayer-Book directs.  Godparents are too often selected not for spiritual but for worldly reasons.  As a result, baptism comes to be regarded either as a mere form or else as having a vague magic efficacy.  The failure to mark any difference in later life between the baptized and the unbaptized is put down not to the failure of man’s cooperation but to the absence of divine efficiency.  Much as we deplore the refusal of the Baptists to administer baptism to infants, at least their position witnesses to the fact that Baptism means a great deal.  That is a truth that the Church of England needs to restore to its due prominence. [The importance of Baptism is also obscured by the custom, in defiance of all Prayer-Book rules, of administering it in a hole-and-corner fashion instead of in the presence of the congregation.  The whole idea of admission to Christian fellowship loses its natural expression.  We have substituted “Private Baptism” in Church for Public Baptism.]

      § 4.  What is the relation of Baptism to Confirmation?  In apostolic times it would seem that Baptism included a laying on of hands (Acts 19:6, cp. Heb 6:2) and possibly an anointing with oil (2 Cor 1:21–22; 1 Jn 2:20 and 27).  The language about anointing may be purely metaphorical, but washing and anointing commonly went together.  We find no explicit mention, however, of anything but baptizing with water in Acts 8:38 and 9:18.  In Acts 8:12–17 we find baptism distinctly separated from the laying on of hands and the gift of the Spirit connected with the latter.  Philip clearly possessed only authority to baptize.  The Apostles came to lay on hands.  Beyond all doubt in the custom of the early Church Baptism, unction, and the laying on of hands formed a single sacrament, like the bread and wine of the Eucharist.  Origen, for instance, can write, “Through the laying on of hands the Holy Spirit was given in Baptism.”  In the West the laying on of hands was restricted to bishops, and owing to the difficulty of obtaining a bishop became separated from Baptism.  The title “Confirmation” is late and purely Western.  In the Greek Church the laying on of hands has dropped out.  Infants are baptized and anointed with oil that has been specially blessed by the bishop for the purpose.  That is, Baptism and Confirmation are still one.  In the West, unction has been dropped by ourselves and the laying on of hands by the Roman Church.  It is usually held that the “form” of Confirmation is prayer for the gift of the Spirit.  It is doubtful whether either unction or the laying on of hands can claim any higher authority than that of the custom of the Church.  Many hold that the universal use of the laying on of hands by the Apostles from the first points back to a definite command of Christ, but that the command has not been preserved.  In Heb 6:2 the “laying on of hands” is included among the “first principles of Christ”.  Very possibly this implies that He Himself taught it.  The arguments are strong but not absolutely conclusive.

      In primitive times Confirmation, whatever the relative prominence of unction or laying on of hands in local practice, was part of a single sacrament of Christian initiation, by which the candidate was transferred from this world into the life of the Church, cleansed from sin, made a member of Christ, anointed with the Holy Spirit, and “sealed unto the day of redemption”.  Like baptism with water the Confirmation part of the rite had the once-for-all character proper to initiation, and the intervention of the bishop as the chief pastor and priest further emphasized its initiatory significance.  In the West the direct episcopal ministration of Confirmation has been fairly consistently maintained, but practical difficulties due largely in the first instance to the unprimitive size of dioceses led to the separation of the rite from baptism.  This in turn raised the theological question of the relation of the gift bestowed in Baptism to that bestowed in Confirmation.  The question was never a major issue in the patristic age, but where it is explicitly expounded or discussed, particularly in the third and fourth centuries, Confirmation is said to bestow the Holy Spirit.  Side by side with this evidence the Fathers, following the apparent emphasis of the scripture references to Baptism, sometimes speak as though baptism with water was of sole importance.  In the mediaeval West where the difficulty of administering Confirmation was acute the initiatory significance of the rite was largely lost and it became a separate and almost superfluous sacrament for “the increase of grace”, augmentum gratiae. [Thomas Aquinas, Sum. Theol. III, lxxii. 6, “ita se habet confirmatio ad baptismum sicut augmentum ad generationem.”]  At the Reformation the Church of England retained the Western practice of separating Confirmation from infant baptism but restored its initiatory character in two ways.  First, the close relation to baptism was brought into prominence by including in the rite the renewal of baptismal vows, and secondly it was reaffirmed that admission to Holy Communion was restricted to those who had been “confirmed or were ready and desirous to be confirmed”. [The rubric (based on the Sarum Manual) at the end of the Order of Confirmation dates from 1549, except for the qualifying clause which was added in 1662.  The modern Roman practice by which children are commonly admitted to Communion before they are confirmed continues to deprive the rite of its true initiatory character.]

      Modern discussions of the pastoral use and significance of Confirmation have revealed a general desire to retain traditional anglican practice.  There remains the theological question of the relation of the gift in Baptism to that in Confirmation.  Varying views are current in the Church of England.  One emphasizes the need that persons baptized in infancy should, on arriving at years of discretion, explicitly assume the responsibility for obedience to the vows already made in their name.  Through this personal act of faith and acceptance of responsibility the significance of Baptism comes to its fulfillment and in the Confirmation Service the whole act is supported and blessed by the prayers of the Church.  This view has a continuous history since the sixteenth century.  For another view, also widely held, the laying on of hands has a more sacramental character and is the means of a special gift of strengthening by the Holy Spirit, but no negative inferences about what is bestowed in Baptism are drawn.  This view can claim considerable support from the Prayer Book rites. [In the baptismal service we pray “Give thy Holy Spirit to this infant that he may be born again”.  The Bishop prays that the confirmed “may daily increase in the Holy Spirit”.]  Another view, while accepting the value of the renewal of vows, regards Confirmation as a sacramental rite which completes the sacramental act begun in baptism and bestows the gift of the Holy Spirit.*  Thus baptism as a sacrament is incomplete until Confirmation.  As a corollary of this view it is usually denied that the Holy Spirit is given in baptism.  This interpretation can appeal to evidence in Scripture and primitive tradition.  So long as practice continues to be uniform and the traditional order of Baptism, Confirmation, and admission to Communion is maintained it may not become urgent for the Church as a whole to decide the problem of the respective parts played by Baptism and Confirmation in the total act of Christian initiation.† [“The existence of some questions which defy definition is the price we have paid for the great advantages of administering Confirmation at an age of discretion” (The Theology of Christian Initiation, p. 23).  But plans for reunion which involve statements about the functions of bishops may make it difficult to avoid a decision on some issues concerning the theology of Confirmation.]

            [*The ancient prayer (from the Gelasian Sacramentary) which in our rite precedes the laying on of hands still (in spite of the change of “Send into them” to “Strengthen them”) appears to imply that the seven-fold gift is now to be given for the first time.  Moreover, persons baptized as adults are not dispensed from Confirmation though they have “answered for themselves” at baptism (see rubric following Baptism of Such as are of Riper Years).]

 

The Holy Communion – Articles  XXVIII–XXXI

 

Article  XXVIII

Of the Lord’s Supper

De Coena Domini

The Supper of the Lord is not only a sign of the love that Christians ought to have among themselves one to another: but rather it is a Sacrament of our Redemption by Christ’s death.  Insomuch that to such as rightly, worthily, and with faith, receive the same, the Bread which we break is a partaking of the Body of Christ; and likewise the cup of blessing is a partaking of the Blood of Christ.

Coena Domini non est tantum signum mutuae benevolentiae Christianorum inter sese, verum potius est Sacramentum nostrae per mortem Christi redemptionis.

     Atque adeo, rite, digne, et cum fide sumentibus, panis quem frangimus est communicatio corporis Christi: similiter poculum benedictionis est communicatio sanguinis Christi.

Transubstantiation (or the change of the substance of Bread and Wine) in the Supper of the Lord cannot be proved by Holy Writ; but is repugnant to the plain words of Scripture, overthroweth the nature of a Sacrament, and hath given occasion to many superstitions.

Panis et vini transubstantiatio in Eucharistia ex sacris literis probari non potest.  Sed apertis Scripturae verbis adversatur, Sacramenti naturam evertit, et multarum superstitionum dedit occasionem.

The Body of Christ is given, taken, and eaten, in the Supper, only after an heavenly and spiritual manner.  And the mean whereby the Body of Christ is received and eaten in the Supper is Faith.

Corpus Christi datur, accipitur, et manducatur in Coena, tantum coelesti et spirituali ratione.  Medium autem, quo corpus Christi accipitur et manducatur in Coena, fides est.

The Sacrament of the Lord’s Supper was not by Christ’s ordinance reserved, carried about, lifted up, or worshipped.

Sacramentum Eucharistiae ex institutione Christi non servabatur, circumferebatur, elevabatur, nec adorabatur.

 

      The original Article of 1553 on the Lord’s Supper coincided with the low-water mark of sacramental teaching in the Church of England.  It was contemporary with the Second Prayer-Book of Edward VI containing the “Black Rubric”, which in its original form denied any “Real and Essential Presence of Christ’s natural flesh and blood” in the sacrament.  In its present form, as restored in 1662, it only denies the “‘corporal’ presence of Christ’s natural flesh and blood”, a most important change.

      So the third paragraph of the Article denied “the real and bodily presence, as they term it, of Christ’s flesh and blood, in the sacrament of the Lord’s Supper”.  In 1563 this Article was altered to correspond with the changes made in the Prayer-Book of 1559.  The original third paragraph was struck out and the present one substituted.  The author of our present paragraph, Bishop Guest, expressly stated that it was drawn up not to “exclude the Presence of Christ’s Body from the Sacrament, but only the grossness and sensibleness in the receiving thereof.”  The rest of the Article remained unaltered, except that the second paragraph was strengthened by the addition of “overthroweth the nature of a sacrament”.

      The Article excludes: (i) Anabaptist views which made the Lord’s Supper a mere love feast; (ii) Zwinglian views which made it a bare memorial of Christ’s death; (iii) The Roman doctrine of transubstantiation.

 

Article  XXIX

Of the wicked which do not eat the Body of Christ in the use of the Lord’s Supper

De manducatione corporis Christi, et impios illud non manducare

The wicked, and such as be void of a lively faith, although they do carnally and visibly press with their teeth (as Saint Augustine saith) the Sacrament of the Body and Blood of Christ yet in nowise are they partakers of Christ, but rather to their condemnation do eat and drink the sign or Sacrament of so great a thing.

Impii, et fide viva destituti, licet carnaliter et visibiliter (ut Augustinus loquitur) corporis et sanguinis Christi Sacramentum dentibus premant, nullo tamen modo Christi participes efficiuntur.  Sed potius tantae rei Sacramentum, seu symbolum, ad judicium sibi manducant et bibunt.

 

      Composed in 1563, but omitted before publication probably by the personal intervention of Elizabeth in order not to hurt the feelings of the Papist party.  But it was passed by Convocation in 1571 and henceforward is found among the rest of the Articles.

      § 1.  All over the world men have expressed their fellowship with one another by a common meal.  Further, these common meals have often had a religious significance.  One of the earliest ideas underlying primitive sacrifice was that of communion between the god of the tribe and his people.  The god was regarded as present as an honoured guest at the feast made upon the sacrificial victim.  Among many tribes the god was also identified in some sense with the victim slain and it was supposed that by feeding upon the flesh of the god the divine life shared by him and the tribe was renewed and strengthened.  This idea of communion with God through a common sacrificial meal was not absent from the religion of Israel.  After the exile, with a fuller realization of the holiness of Jehovah and a deeper consciousness of sin, this aspect of sacrifice became less prominent.  Stress was laid more on the propitiation and atonement that was needed before communion with God could be restored than on the communion itself.  But the older idea survived.  So, too, among the Gentiles sacrificial meals were quite common.  Other ideas of sacrifice, such as that of a gift to the gods, are found, but the conception of fellowship was never lost.  In the world into which our Lord came the ideas of communion with God by a sacred meal, of the receiving of divine life through participation in the sacrificial victim, of the perfecting of human fellowship through such participation and the like were perfectly familiar.  Just as Jesus Christ summed up in Himself the fulfillment of the highest ideals alike of Jewish prophecy and Gentile morality, so in the Holy Communion He summed up the fulfillment of the highest ideals of worship, both Jewish and Gentile.

      (a) The institution of the Holy Communion is recorded by the three Synoptists and by S. Paul (1 Cor 11).  The title “Lord’s Supper” comes from 1 Cor 11:20.*  It is noticeable that the accounts of Mt and Mk contain no command for its repetition.  In Lk 22:19 the words “This do in remembrance of me” are absent in the Western text and may have been inserted from the account in 1 Cor.  So the only undisputed evidence in Scripture for our Lord’s command to celebrate it is that of S. Paul.  But behind his words there stands the universal and continuous practice and tradition of the Church.  Attempts have been made to assign the repetition of the Eucharist either to the Church or to S. Paul.  For such views there is no real positive evidence.**

            [*It is questionable whether the phrase “The Lord’s Supper” was used by S. Paul as a formal title.  On the one hand, the use of the adjective κυριακόν instead of του κυρίου suggests this (cp. κυριακή for Sunday in Rev 1:10).  On the other hand, the words in the context may only mean that where division and selfishness are, a supper may indeed be taken, but it will never be the Lord’s.]

            [**The words of 1 Cor 11:22 “For I (εγώ) received of the Lord (απο του κυρίου) that which I also delivered unto you” hardly warrant us in supposing that S. Paul claims to have received a special revelation on the subject.  If the emphatic εγώ might be taken to favour such a view, the use of απο (not παρά) and the use of the words “the Lord Jesus” no less forcibly suggest that he received his information mediately through the Apostles.  In any case, it is incredible that the Church should have received a new sacrament from S. Paul without any hint of enquiry or opposition.  He was not such a universally popular person, especially among Jewish Christians.  Further, Acts 2:42 and 44 imply that the Eucharist was being celebrated at Jerusalem long before S. Paul’s conversion.]

      (b) When we turn to the evidence of Scripture it is by no means easy to give any very certain account of the practice of the first Christians in reference to the Eucharist.  In 1 Cor 11:17–34 it is clear that at Corinth it was celebrated after and in close connection with a common meal.  The word δειπνον may include both.  There is no suggestion that this combination was wrong or an innovation on the part of the Corinthians.  S. Paul’s own words “This do as oft as ye drink” (the Greek contains no “it”) may mean “as often as ye hold a common meal together”.  When we turn to the Acts we find evidence of a similar custom.  The familiar title the “Last Supper” reminds us that eating together had all through His ministry been a bond of union between our Lord and His disciples.  At such common meals doubtless He was accustomed to break bread and give thanks even as He did at the feedings of the multitude (Mk 6:41 and 8:6).  His performance of these acts at the Last Supper was only in accordance with His regular habit.  It was by the manner in which He performed these same acts, that He made Himself known to His disciples at Emmaus after His Resurrection, even though they had probably not been present at the Last Supper (Lk 24:30–31 and 35, cp. Jn 21:13).  So, after the Ascension, it was only natural that the disciples should continue to meet for the breaking of bread, the outward sign of fellowship.  At first it would seem that the common meal of the Christian brotherhood was held daily.  In Acts 2:42 we read that the first Christians “continued stedfastly in the apostles’ teaching and fellowship (or “in fellowship” R.V. mg. και τη κοινωνία) and in the (τη) breaking of bread and the prayers” (the Bezan text has “the fellowship of the breaking of the bread”).  Again, in v. 46, “And day by day continuing stedfastly with one accord in the temple and breaking bread at home (κατ οίκον) they did take their food (τροφης) with gladness and singleness of heart, praising God and having favour with all the people.”  The probability is that by “the breaking of the bread” is meant a common meal held in conscious imitation of the Last Supper and concluding with the Eucharist.  The mention of food (τροφή) in v. 46 shows clearly that a meal is meant.  The use of the article (τη κλάσει) in v. 42 suggests that the phrase “the breaking of the bread”, in itself applicable to any meal, was beginning to acquire a technical meaning in the mouths of Christians.  In such early days of Church life all was inchoate and unformed.  The Church was feeling her way towards organized life and worship.

      Such a daily common meal and Eucharist was not possible everywhere.  It is doubtful whether it could have existed apart from the peculiar conditions of common life at Jerusalem.  Accordingly, as the Church spread abroad such daily reunion was found to be impossible.  The common meal became part of the distinctive worship of the first day of the week.  It was doubtless so at Corinth.  In Acts 20:7–13 this is expressly stated.  S. Luke gives a typical instance at Troas.  “Upon the first day of the week when we were gathered together to break bread, Paul discoursed with them.”  Then follows the incident of Eutychus.  Finally, when Paul “had broken the bread and eaten (γευσάμενος) and had talked with them a long while even till break of day, so he departed.”  The order would seem to be a common meal, after which S. Paul took the opportunity of all the Christians being assembled to deliver a lengthy discourse, then the Eucharist (γευσάμενος, meaning, as we should say, “having communicated”), followed by a final discourse. [Others, however, hold that the Eucharist preceded the meal.  On this view in v. 11 “breaking bread” refers to the Eucharist and γευσάμενος to the meal.  It is true that S. Luke uses γεύομαι in the sense of “taking food” but the reversal of the order of the Last Supper is most improbable so long as the meal and the Eucharist were still combined.]  The meal would thus be held on Saturday evening, since, according to the Jewish mode of reckoning, the first day of the week began at 6 P.M. on Saturday: the Eucharist would begin after midnight.  We have only to imagine an interval for sleep between the two parts to get to the later custom of observing Saturday night as a preparation for Sunday and holding the Eucharist early on Sunday.

      In Acts 27:33–36, just before the shipwreck, we find an account of a meal.  “When Paul ... had taken bread, he gave thanks to God in the presence of all: and he brake it and began to eat.  Then were they all of good cheer and began to eat.”  The language is strangely Eucharistic, but the meal clearly did not include the Eucharist. [“The similarity is due, not so much to the fact that the Holy Eucharist is a meal, as that every meal has a sacred character and food ‘is sanctified by the word of God and prayer’” (Rackham, Acts, p. 490).]  The company consisted almost entirely of unbelievers, and the confusion of a storm at sea is hardly the moment for such a celebration.  The important point is that the passage shows that “to break bread” could be used of an ordinary meal.  In Jude 12 and the parallel passage in 2 Pet 2:13 we find the title “Agape” or “love-feast” definitely given, according to the best reading, to the common meals of Christians.  These are in danger of being polluted by the presence of immoral members.  Probably the misbehaviour of such and drunkenness (1 Cor 11) brought these love-feasts into bad reputation among the heathen.  No light is thrown on their relation to the Eucharist.  We conclude, then, that in apostolic times as a general rule the Eucharist formed the conclusion of a common meal or agape and was not sharply distinguished from it.  The whole was considered sacred as being a representation of the Last Supper.  Whether an Agape was ever held without a Eucharist or vice versa we cannot be certain.  There is nothing improbable in such a separation.  The phrase “breaking bread” is in itself quite vague and might be applied either to a meal or to the Eucharist or to the combination of the two.

      Outside Scripture the earliest evidence has been very differently interpreted.  It is probable but not certain that in the Didache the Agape preceded the Eucharist, and indeed is included under the title ευχαριστία.  So, too, Dr. Lightfoot held that in the time of Ignatius the two had not yet been separated. [Lightfoot, Ignatius, vol. ii. p. 313, and vol. i. p. 386.]  In his letter to the Smyrnaeans he writes, “It is not permitted without the bishop either to baptize or hold a love-feast.”  The Eucharist is clearly included under the title Agape. It is inconceivable that it should be omitted, especially as it has been mentioned earlier in the letter.  The first clear evidence for the separation of the two is in Pliny’s letter to Trajan (Ep. 96). [Lightfoot, op. cit. vol. i. pp. 52–53.]  This makes it clear that in Bithynia by A.D. 112 Christians had come to hold two meetings on Sunday (stato die).  At the first they met “before day and sang a hymn to Christ antiphonally as to a God and bound themselves by an oath (sacramento)” not to commit certain crimes.  This seems to be a somewhat vague account of the Eucharist, possibly mixed up with a confused recollection of the baptismal vow.  At the second meeting later in the day they met “to take food” but that “ordinary and innocent food” (promiscuum tamen et innoxium – a refutation of pagan slanders); but in consequence of Trajan’s edict forbidding the existence of clubs or guilds, these last meetings had been abandoned.  This last statement would refer to the Agape.  Whether the separation of Eucharist and Agape had taken place before Trajan’s edict or in consequence of it is not certain, but it is clear that the Eucharist had been transferred to the morning.  Many authorities hold that the result of Trajan’s edict was a general separation of the Eucharist from the Agape and a giving up of the latter as being unessential. [S. Augustine held that the separation was one of the reforms introduced by S. Paul when he came to Corinth.  It is most probable that abuses connected with the Agape favoured the separation.]  This need not have taken place everywhere at the same time.  At any rate, Justin Martyr (150) describes the Eucharist without any mention of the Agape. [Irenaeus never mentions the Agape.  Tertullian speaks of the Eucharist as celebrated before daybreak (De Cor. c. 3) and treats the Agape as quite distinct.]  But the Agape still continued to exist.  It tended to assume the character of a charity supper contributed by the rich: possibly from the earliest days it had been a means of providing sustenance for the poorer members of the society.  It became increasingly distinct from the Eucharist and gradually lost its sacred character and became a common meal and nothing more.  Hence by the canons of various councils it was forbidden to hold it in churches.  It lingered on in Africa as late as the Trullan Council in 692. [This account in the main follows Lightfoot.  For a more recent discussion of the early Agape and Eucharist, see Dix, The Shape of the Liturgy.]

      § 2.  We may now turn to the inner meaning of the Eucharist.  This is determined by the position that Jesus Christ holds in the Church and by the closeness of union between Christians and Christ.

      (a) As we have seen, eating together is everywhere a sign of fellowship.  The Supper of the Lord is ... a sign of the love that Christians ought to have among themselves one to another.  This meaning is included in the title “Holy Communion”.  No one has ever attempted to deny it.  This unity is symbolized by the one bread [The Eastern Church still preserves the full symbolism of “one bread” by using one (leavened) loaf which is divided.] and the one cup.  “Seeing that there is one bread (or loaf), we who are many are one body: for we all partake of the one bread” (1 Cor 10:16, R.V. mg., cp. Jn 13:35 and 15:12).  The name “Agape” which could include the Eucharist, was probably derived from our Lord’s command “to love one another”, given on the same night as the institution of the Eucharist. [Cp. the beautiful prayer in the Didache (9): “As this broken bread was scattered upon the mountains and being gathered together became one, so may Thy Church be gathered together from the ends of the earth into Thy Kingdom” (Gwatkin’s Selections, p. 21).]  The many clubs existing under the Roman Empire showed their unity by common meals.  But just as the Church is more than a mere human society, so her common meal is more than a bare symbol of fellowship.  Hence this view by itself is inadequate.

      (b) Accordingly the Article proceeds: It is not only a sign of love; but rather it is a Sacrament of our redemption by Christ’s death.  As the Catechism says, it was ordained “For the continual remembrance of the sacrifice of the death of Christ and of the benefits which we receive thereby”.  It constitutes a proclamation before the world of the Lord’s death (1 Cor 11:26) and also a means of bringing it home to ourselves.  Whether the Last Supper was in detail a Passover meal or not is doubtful.  The evidence of S. John’s Gospel makes it clear that it took place the evening before the actual Passover. [But see J. Jeremias, The Eucharistic Words of Jesus.]  But it was in the closest connection with the Passover and was instituted to take its place in the new Israel.  The Passover was a means of keeping in mind and a public thanksgiving for Jehovah’s redemption of Israel from slavery in Egypt.  So the Eucharist was to be kept “in remembrance of Christ (1 Cor 11:25), and as a thanksgiving [The actual title, ευχαριστία, is not found in the New Testament, though it occurs in Ignatius and the Didache, but ευχαριστειν is used of our Lord’s own giving of thanks (1 Cor 11”24).  Possibly, too, in 14:14 ευχαριστία is used of thanksgiving at the Lord’s Supper.] for the redemption wrought by His death.  Further, the deliverance from Egypt was but the prelude to the renewing of the Covenant at Sinai.  At the Passover meal the individual Israelite claimed his share in the Covenant made by God with Israel.  Christ’s words “This is my blood of the covenant which is shed for you” (Mk 14:24) look back to Exodus 24:8 and suggest that a new covenant was about to be ratified by the blood of a better Sacrifice.  Every Eucharist is a memorial of this new Covenant made by God with a new and greater Israel, and each Christian who partakes of the Eucharist claims his share in the blessings won by Christ’s death.  The very term for the Passover liturgy, Haggadah, or “showing forth”, is that used by S. Paul (1 Cor 11:26).  So, too, the “cup of blessing” was the regular name for the third cup at the Paschal meal (cp. 1 Cor 10:16), at least in later times. [For an account of the Passover as now celebrated in a Jewish home, see Oesterley and Box, The Religion and Worship of the Synagogue.]  In short, the Eucharist is the Passover of the Christian Church.

      (c) Insomuch that to such as rightly, worthily and with faith receive the same, the bread which we break is a partaking of the body of Christ; and likewise the cup of blessing is a partaking of the blood of Christ.  This statement is based on 1 Cor 10:16, “The cup of blessing which we bless, is it not a communion (κοινωνία) of the blood of Christ?  The bread which we break, is it not a communion of the body of Christ?”  It asserts the reality of the gift bestowed on those who receive the sacrament rightly (rite), worthily (digne), and with faith.  The Holy Communion is an “effectual sign”, not only representing but conveying spiritual food.  “Rightly” here refers to the due observance of all that Christ commanded, the right matter and form.  “Worthily” refers to the right inward disposition of the recipient.  It would include “with faith”.

      What is meant by partaking of the Body and Blood of Christ?

      (i) We turn first to Jn 6.  This was spoken exactly a year before the institution of the Eucharist, at the previous Passover.  Moreover, by the time that the Gospel was composed, the Eucharist had been the centre of the life of more than one generation of Christians.  Hence we can hardly exclude all reference to the Eucharist.  The true relation between this discourse and the Eucharist would seem to be that in the former Christ speaks primarily of the gift of His own life which men needed and which was to be bestowed through the Eucharist: a year later He instituted the Eucharist to be the means of bestowing that life.  The gift is spoken of as future, not present (6:27 and 51).  Christ connects it with the time after His Ascension and the coming of the Spirit (vv. 62–63).  Throughout the discourse, step by step, greater stress is laid on the absolute need not only of Christ’s teaching but of Christ’s life.  Our Lord begins with a contrast between the “meat that perisheth”, the ordinary food of the body, and “the meat that abideth unto eternal life”, which He will give (v. 27).  The condition of receiving it is faith (v. 29).  Such bread can only come, like the manna, by the direct gift of God (v. 33), and He Himself is this bread (v. 33).  In v. 51 this bread is further defined as “my flesh”.  In v. 53 the objection of the Jews is met by an increased claim, “Except ye eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink His blood, ye have not life in yourselves. ... For my flesh is meat indeed and my blood is drink indeed.  He that eateth my flesh and drinketh my blood abideth in me and I in him.”  With such language we compare 1 Cor 10:16–17 and 11:27.  Throughout, the thought is of identity of life between the believer and Christ.  His “body and blood” primarily represent His perfect humanity.  The living Christ bestows upon His members the strength of a perfect human life, offered in sacrifice and triumphant over sin and death, in order to cleanse and refresh our weak and tainted lives.  In eating and drinking by a deliberate and voluntary act we take into ourselves something that is outside ourselves, in order that it may become part of ourselves and so our bodies may be strengthened.  So in the Holy Communion by a deliberate and voluntary act we receive the life of Christ into our souls that it may become our life.  The feeding of the 5000 which preceded the discourse was an acted parable of the spiritual truth laid down in the discourse.  So in the Holy Communion our Lord took bread and wine, the typical ordinary daily food of the Galilean peasant, to be the outward sign of the normal food of the Christian soul.  The visible reception is at once the parable and the means of the inward reception by faith.  In each case the goodness is there first in the food outside ourselves and by the appropriate act we take it into ourselves.  Again, all food corresponds to the nature of the life that it is to sustain.  Our bodies can be strengthened by bread and wine, because bread and wine contain just those elements out of which the body is composed.  In like manner the spiritual food of the Christian must correspond to the life of the Christian.  But the life of the Christian is, as we have seen, none other than the life of Christ: we are members of His body, branches in the vine.  So the food of the Christian must be Christ.  The Christ-life can only be fed by new supplies of Christ.  He alone can be the bread of life.  Accordingly, in the Holy Communion the Christian, as a member of Christ, receives by faith through the outward and visible sign of the bread and wine the inward and spiritual grace of the perfect humanity of Christ.  Partaking of the Body and Blood of Christ can mean no less than this.

      (ii) The further question may be asked: “Why are the body and blood spoken of in separation, and symbolized by the bread and the wine respectively?”  The answer is that our Lord’s language and that of S. Paul is borrowed from the picture of a sacrificial feast.  The reference to the body and blood in separation recalls the act of sacrifice in which the blood was poured out.  In the Holy Communion we feed on the life of the living and glorified Christ who has become all that He is through death. [We must resolutely put away the revolting idea that in any sense we feed on the body and blood of a dead Christ.]  He is eternally “the Lamb as it hath been slain”.  The life that He imparts to us is life that has passed through death.  Hence it is fitly mediated through bread and wine.

      (iii) As partaking of the perfect humanity of Christ, we also partake of all the blessings won by His sacrifice.  “What merit, force or virtue soever there is in His sacred Body and Blood, we freely, fully and wholly have it by this Sacrament.” [Hooker, v. 67, § 7.]  We enjoy the manifold privileges of the new Covenant ratified by His death (Mk 14:24).  So, by a right reception of the Holy Communion we are filled with all the fruits of His redemption.  These blessings are not something apart from Christ, but in so far as our life in Christ grows, we enter more fully into their meaning.

      § 3.  So far almost all Christians would agree.  The language used might vary, but all are at one in holding that through the Holy Communion our union with Christ is deepened and strengthened, by faith we receive new life from Him and enter into the fullness of the heritage won by His death.  Controversy has arisen on the question of the relation of the inward gift to the outward elements.  The first thing that we must grasp is that this further question is relatively less important.  In an age of bitter controversy Hooker could write: “Shall I wish that men would more give themselves to meditate with silence what we have by the Sacrament and less to dispute of the manner how?”  “What these elements are in themselves it skilleth not, it is enough that to me which take them they are the Body and Blood of Christ.”  “Let it therefore be sufficient for me presenting myself at the Lord’s table to know what there I receive from Him, without searching or inquiring of the manner how Christ performeth His promise.” [Cp. the whole passage, v. 67, §§ 5–7 and 12–13.]

      For 800 years there was no formal dispute on the subject.  The earliest controversial treatise was by a certain Paschasius Radbert in 831, which was the beginning of a long and unedifying wrangle, leading up to the formal statement of the doctrine of transubstantiation at the Lateran Council in 1215.  The attempts made to state the relation of gift in Holy Communion to the outward elements may be summed up as follows:

      (a) The “Receptionist” view.  On this theory the bread and wine in the Holy Communion are merely tokens not channels of the inward grace that is given.  They are like the water in baptism, outward signs ordained in order to assist faith, but brought into no vital relation to the divine realities that they represent.  The devout communicant does indeed by an act of faith receive the body and blood of Christ at the moment that he receives the bread and wine, but in no real sense by means of them.  Thus Christ is present only in the hearts of the faithful recipients.  His coming is connected not with the consecration of the elements but with the reception.  This view was taught by Calvin: it was the necessary corollary of his doctrine of grace.  If grace is given only to the few elect, it clearly cannot be possible for all to receive it who receive the bread and wine.  So its reception must be essentially independent of the reception of the visible elements.  The theory has been largely held in the Church of England* and was expounded at length by Waterland.  It represents one side of the teaching of S. Augustine and can be supported by isolated sentences of other Fathers.  It is perfectly tenable by loyal members of the Church of England.  There is nothing in the Prayer-Book that definitely contradicts it.  Quite rightly the Church of England excludes only a Zwinglian view of the Sacrament – a view, that is, which is not only inadequate, but positively denies a part of the truth.†

            [*Hooker is usually claimed as a receptionist.  He certainly writes, “The real presence of Christ’s most blessed Body and Blood is not therefore to be sought for in the Sacrament, but in the worthy receiver of the sacrament” (c. 67 § 5).  But other passages qualify this statement.  He also writes, “This bread hath in it more than the substance which our eyes behold” (c. 67 § 12), and “The power of the ministry of God ... by blessing visible elements, ... maketh them invisible grace” (c. 77 § 1).  Further, Hooker’s great object was to allay contention by fixing the minds of all Christians on those great truths concerning the Eucharist about which they were all agreed.  He refused to join in a bitter and barren controversy about the mystery of the Eucharist.  Accordingly, as Bishop Paget wrote, “He should have the credit of having really meant what he said.  On the ground of some passages in his argument he is claimed as supporting one side in the very controversy from which he urged men to refrain. ... Those who know Hooker’s ways and do him justice will not easily think him so careless or so disingenuous as to break the bounds which he was strenuously appealing to other men to keep” (see Paget, Introduction to Hooker, bk. v. p. 176).]

      (b) The Real Presence.  On this view we hold that we receive through the bread and wine the Body and Blood of Christ, because in answer to the prayers of His Church and in fulfillment of His own promise, He has brought the elements into a mysterious union with Himself.  He has, as it were, taken them up into the fullness of His ascended life and made them the vehicle of imparting that life to His members.  Thus He is in a real sense present not only in the devout communicant but in the consecrated elements.  Of the manner of this union we affirm nothing.  The Presence is spiritual, not material.

      This, in some form, is the teaching of the Roman and Eastern Churches, of Luther, of the Fathers and early liturgies, and has always been held by many within the Church of England.  It would appear to be the most consistent with Scripture and the tradition of the Church, and also to be a safeguard of certain great Christian principles.

      (i) Let us turn first to Scripture.  An enormous amount of labour has been wasted in attempting to get back to the actual words spoken by Christ and to interpret the meaning of “is” in “This is my body” and “This is my blood”.  In Aramaic the word “is” might, or might not be definitely expressed.  The important point is that S. Paul understood these words to contain a promise of a divine gift.  He bases on them the solemn warning “Wherefore (ώστε) whosoever shall eat the bread or drink the cup of the Lord unworthily, shall be guilty of the body and blood of the Lord” (1 Cor 11:27).  If the existence of the gift is made conditional upon the faith of the individual communicant, as receptionists teach, the unworthy recipient can hardly be said to be “guilty of the body and blood of the Lord”.  If the presence of Christ is to be sought only in the heart of the faithful recipient, there can have been no presence for him to profane.  As being unworthy he has drawn near only to bread and wine.  Further, if the words mean only “This represents my body”, we have only a parable, not a promise: they contain no pledge of any sacramental gift.  The words are not really parallel to such allegorical statements as “I am the bread” or “the door”.  These last couple together an idea and a concrete reality.  But the words of institution couple together two concrete realities of the external world.  Again, in 1 Cor 10:16 S. Paul connects the “communion of the body” and “the blood” not with reception but with consecration.  He speaks of “The cup which we bless” and “the bread which we break”, “we” being the minister as the organ of the assembled Church.

      (ii) Again, if we turn to the Church as the interpreter of Scripture, the main stream of Christian teaching is quite clear.  We find a singular absence of theological controversy about the Eucharist, but the general line of thought may be exemplified by these words of Irenaeus, “The bread which is of the earth receiving the invocation of God is no longer common bread but Eucharist, made up of two things, an earthly and a heavenly?” [Irenaeus, Adv. Haer. iv. 18, § 5.]  No doubt certain individuals or schools of thought exhibit a tendency to lay a one-sided emphasis on particular aspects of the truth, as, for instance, to dwell on the Eucharist as imparting the gift of bodily immortality, but such teaching did not express the mind of the Church as a whole and was corrected by the corporate consciousness.  The early liturgies all attest a belief in the Real Presence.  There is a marked difference between the treatment that was accorded to the water in Baptism and the elements in the Eucharist.  No special care was taken of the water.  Indeed, baptism was often administered in streams.  But the consecrated elements were by a natural instinct always treated with the utmost reverence. [Cp. Gore, Body of Christ, p. 76 and note 5.]  In Baptism there are no words that in any way are the counterpart of the words of institution.*

            [*It is worth noting that when the Fathers speak of the bread and wine as “signs” or “symbols” of the body and blood of Christ, they do not in any way imply a merely receptionist view.  To us a “symbol” at once suggests that the reality symbolized is absent.  To them a “symbol” was rather “the evidence to the senses of a divine reality actually present”.  “The really heavenly element lay either in or behind the visible form without investing itself with it” (Gore, p. 89, quoting Harnack).  The Fathers do indeed avoid any such language as would speak of Christ as present in or under the bread and wine.  They rather speak of the bread and wine as “types” or “symbols” of spiritual realities invisible to the eye of sense, but most truly present.  S. Cyril of Jerusalem, for instance, writes: “Under the sign (εν τύπω) of bread is given thee the body, under the sign of wine is given thee the blood.” (Cat. xxii. 3.)]

      (iii) The Sacraments are an extension of the Incarnation, in so far as through them the Incarnate Lord still offers His own saving grace to men.  But the Incarnation was an event discerned by faith but in no way produced by faith.  When Christ walked on this earth, those who discerned the divine in Him, discerned what was really there.  Their faith enabled them to see and grasp the truth.  It was quite possible for men to be blind to His divinity and to miss the blessings that He brought within their reach through lack of faith, but that does not prove their unreality.  In other words, faith is a capacity for intuition or apprehension.  It can recognize and respond, but not create.  It can rest upon and surrender itself to what already exists, but it calls nothing into being.  So with the gift promised in the Holy Eucharist.  It is contrary to all analogy to make the existence of the gift in any sense dependent on faith.  Rather the gift is there, objectively: those who approach with faith discern and appropriate it, those who have not faith are, as it were, blind to the gift, and fail to claim it. [Cp. the words of Thorndyke, “The eating and drinking of it” (i.e. the Lord’s Body and Blood) “in the sacrament, presupposes the being of it in the sacrament ... unless a man can spiritually eat the flesh and blood of Christ in and by the sacrament, which is not in the sacrament when he eats and drinks it, but by his eating and drinking of it comes to be there.”]

      Again, the Incarnation was God’s gift to His people as a whole.  Some availed themselves of it, others did not.  So the Holy Eucharist, like all the blessings bestowed through Christ, is primarily a gift not to the individual Christian but to the whole body of Christ.  The individual as a member of the body is bidden to claim and appropriate his share of it.  This truth is of the highest value as emphasizing the corporate nature of all true Christianity.  We may compare the coming of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost.  The fire first appeared as one and then as “tongues parting asunder” [Not “cloven” as A.V., an impossible sense for the present participle.] (Acts 2:3).  The receptionist view weakens the social aspect of the Eucharist by making it a number of separate donations to individuals.  The doctrine of the Real Presence vindicates the unity of life which is to be realized in brotherhood.

      The opposition to any such phrase as “real presence” is due in the main to the fear that it means presence in space and involves materialistic ideas.  Let us admit that the primary idea of the Eucharist is that of Christ active rather than of Christ present, of Christ as bestowing a gift rather than of the gift bestowed.  But it still remains true that our imaginations are unable to conceive of Christ as active unless He is in some sense present and of the gift as bestowed unless it is there to be bestowed.  No doubt Christ is present always and everywhere, behind all the processes of nature and human life.  But that was not inconsistent with a presence in a new way and for a new act of divine grace in the Incarnation.  Again, Christ promised to be with His Church “all the days” (Mt 28:20), yet He could say, “Where two or three are gathered together in my name, there am I in the midst of them” (Mt 18:20).  That promise does not imply a previous absence, but rather a presence in a special way and for a special purpose.  So, too, in the Holy Communion Christ acts in fulfillment of a special promise and vouchsafes to His Church a special presence of Himself.  Christ is still Man.  He did not lay aside His human nature at the Ascension.  Nor yet was His body then removed to an infinitely distant part of the universe, rather it was raised above the limitations of space altogether.  It became the perfect self-expression of spirit.  Heaven is a manner of life, not a place.  So in His Heavenly life Christ still possesses all the capacities of perfect manhood.  He can still render His humanity active at will and act through it in our world of space and time.  Only the Lutherans have ever pictured Christ’s manhood as, so to say, automatically and unconditionally omnipresent.  It is nearer to truth to assert that Christ can act through it at will, and make it a present power in the world wheresoever He is pleased to do so.

      Now in the Holy Communion He gives us His Body and Blood.  Here, if anywhere, He acts through His glorified humanity.  We must try therefore to conceive of Him as present not only as God but as Man, present by an act of will to bestow upon us the gift of His own Manhood.  This act, or this presence – in whichever way we view it, is no fresh humiliation.  It is in no way on a level with the submission to the limitations of our present world made at the Incarnation.  Rather it is on a level with the ascended life: it is Christ’s very heavenly presence itself. [The early liturgies use language both about the Body and Blood of Christ as being present at our earthly altars and of our oblations of bread and wine as being carried up to the heavenly altar and there united with His Body and Blood.  (Cp. Gore, op. cit. pp. 84–85, and Fr. Benson, Letters, vol. i. p. 273.)]  There is no opposition between a “real” and a “spiritual” presence.  The most “real” things are not those that belong to the material world.  A “spiritual” presence is presence in the manner of a Spirit, a manner outside our earthly experience, but not therefore imaginary or unreal, any more than Heaven is unreal.

      The manner of this Presence and its relation to the outward elements we cannot define, except in so far as we reject certain attempts of our imagination to picture it.  Thus, it involves in no sense a movement in space.*  Nor is it in any sense comparable to the chemical changes to be viewed in our laboratories.  It is rather analogous to the spiritual changes that take place in ourselves.  If we say that Christ is present “in” the sacrament, we use “in” metaphorically, as when we say that Christ abides in the Christian and the Christian in Christ.  Wherever we study the relation between spirit and matter, whether between God and the world, or our souls and our bodies or here, our reason and our imagination are always baffled.  We can only speak in symbolical language borrowed from space.  It is a real source of strength to the Church of England that she refuses to speculate on the question or to make the acceptance of human speculations a condition of membership.**†

            [*Cp. the words of Cardinal Newman (Via Media, vol. ii. p. 220): “If place is excluded from the idea of the Sacramental Presence, therefore division or distance from heaven is excluded also, for distance implies a measurable interval and such there cannot be except between places.  Moreover, if the idea of distance is excluded, therefore is the idea of motion.  Our Lord then neither descends from heaven upon our altars, nor moves when carried in procession.  The visible species change their position, but He does not move.  He is in the Holy Eucharist after the manner of a spirit.  We do not know how; we have no parallel to the ‘how’ in our experience.  We can only say that He is present, not according to the natural manner of bodies, but sacramentally.  His Presence is substantial, spirit-wise, sacramental; an absolute mystery, not against reason, however, but against imagination, and must be received by faith.”]

            [**Cp. the lines attributed to Queen Elizabeth:

His was the Word that spake it:

He took the bread and brake it:

And what that Word did make it,

I do believe and take it.

            Indifferent poetry, but admirable theology.]

      (c) The Roman doctrine of “Transubstantiation”, condemned in our Article, is an attempt to define the relation of the gift to the elements in the Eucharist.  As a formal definition it has its roots far back in Church history.  Just as Monophysitism was the culmination of a tendency to exalt our Lord’s divinity at the expense of His humanity and to reduce the latter to a mere semblance, so we find a tendency among certain early writers to exalt the divine gift in the Eucharist in such a way as to minimize or even explain away the reality of the bread and wine after consecration.  This appears first in the East: in the West it was kept in check by the influence of S. Augustine, who unmistakably believed in the permanence and reality of the elements. [In the East it became common from the fourth century onwards to speak of the bread and wine as being “changed into” the Body and Blood.  This “conversion” language appears in S. Ambrose, but did not come into general use in the West until much later.]  A new stage began with the treatise of Paschasius Radbert composed in 831.  He taught beyond all doubt a doctrine of “transubstantiation”.  By consecration the natural substance of the elements is annihilated: there is on the altar “nihil aliud quam corpus et sanguis Domini”.  Only the appearance of bread and wine remains to test faith and afford a screen to the awful realities.  This teaching was opposed at the time, especially by Ratramnus, a monk of Corbey, but the controversy died down for some two centuries.  Then it was rekindled by the teaching of Berengar, Archdeacon of Angers, who attacked the crude popular language about the Eucharistic presence.  He himself held the doctrine of an objective but spiritual presence in the elements.  In 1059 Berengar was forced to recant, and the decree which was forced upon him at Rome in the presence of the Pope is sufficient evidence of the dangerously materialistic view taken by the Church as a whole at that time.  He was made to assert that “The bread and wine after consecration are not only a sacrament but also the true body and blood of our Lord Jesus Christ and are sensibly not only in sacrament but in truth touched and broken by the hands of the priests and bruised by the teeth of the faithful.”  Berengar’s opponents asserted even that the body and blood of Christ were physically eaten with the mouth.

      But his protest had not been in vain.  The gross and superstitious teaching was at once defended and refined by the teaching of the Schoolmen.  They took advantage of the current philosophical distinction between substance and accidents [Berengar had known of this distinction and had combated in advance any use of it for this purpose.  He held that “accidents” could not exist apart from the “substance” in which they inhered.  That was also Wycliffe’s argument.] to formulate a theological statement of transubstantiation.  The philosophy of the day held that our senses can only perceive the qualities or “accidents” of things.  Beneath these qualities or “accidents” there is an underlying reality, the thing itself, to which was given the technical name of “substance”.  For instance, bread possesses certain “accidents” of which our senses inform us, hardness, colour, taste, smell, etc.  But these are not the bread itself.  Behind them is the “substance” of bread in which they cohere.  This “substance” is beyond the range of all our senses, touch included.  So the Schoolmen laid down that through consecration the “substance” of the bread and wine was by the almighty power of God changed into the “substance” of the body and blood of Christ.  No change can be detected by the senses.  The “accidents” of the bread and wine remain in order to veil the divine gift.

      No doubt this philosophical speculation does not necessarily involve a materialistic view of the sacrament.  “Substance”, as so used, is intangible.  But it could do nothing to correct the debasing influence of popular superstition, and there can be no denying that the ordinary view of transubstantiation in the Middle Ages was absolutely carnal and materialistic, as, indeed, it is in popular Romanism today.  The actual word “transubstantiation” is first found in use in the eleventh century.  It received official sanction at the Lateran Council in 1215.  It is employed however in a less definite sense than in Tridentine theology.  Despite the obvious misunderstandings and abuses that attached to it, it was retained and reasserted at the Council of Trent,* and has remained as an article of faith in the Roman Church.

            [*E.g. “If anyone shall say that in the Holy Sacrament of the Eucharist the substance of the bread and wine remains together with the Body and Blood of our Lord Jesus Christ and shall deny that wonderful and singular conversion of the whole substance of the bread into the Body and of the whole substance of the wine into the Blood, the appearance only of the bread and wine remaining, which conversion indeed the Catholic Church most fittingly calls Transubstantiation, let him be anathema” (Council of Trent, Session xiii. Canon 2).]

      Our Article rejects the doctrine on four grounds:

      (1) Transubstantiation (or the change of the substance of bread and wine) in the Supper of the Lord cannot be proved by Holy Writ: Scripture knows nothing of any philosophical distinction between “substance” and “accidents”.  The words of institution may reasonably be interpreted as the promise of a divine gift, but they throw no light whatever on the manner in which that gift is related to the outward sign.  Roman controversialists have indeed admitted that transubstantiation cannot be proved from Scripture.  It is at best one explanation of Scripture.

      (2) It is repugnant to the plain words of Scripture.  That is to say, Scripture speaks of the Bread after consecration as still bread (1 Cor 11:26 and 28).  We may add that the Canon of the Roman Mass does the same, since it goes back to an age that knew nothing of transubstantiation.

      (3) It overthroweth the nature of a Sacrament.  In the words of the Catechism a sacrament has two parts: “the outward visible sign,” here bread and wine, and the “inward spiritual grace”, the body and blood of Christ.  But if, as on the Roman view, the substance of the bread and wine is annihilated, the reality of the outward sign is destroyed, i.e. the nature of the sacrament is overthrown as lacking one of its two parts.

      (4) It hath given occasion to many superstitions.  As Dr. Gore has truly said, “The atmosphere in which the doctrine of transubstantiation grows into a dogma is calculated to send a shiver through one’s intellectual and moral being.”  Paschasius Radbert drives home his teaching by recounting a series of miracles in which drops of blood flowed from the consecrated Host as the form of the infant Christ appeared.  A similar miracle was opportunely registered in order to forward the institution of the Festival of Corpus Christi in 1264.  The gross imagination of mediaeval theologians did not shrink from discussing the precise relation of the reception of the Lord’s Body to the processes of physical digestion.  In answer to the objections of opponents, miracles were lavishly postulated.  It was supposed that the more contradictions that were offered to reason, the greater was the opportunity given for the meritorious exercise of faith.

      As against the popular idea of transubstantiation as held and taught in the Roman Church both in the Middle Ages and today, these objections are conclusive.  Attempts, however, are made by educated Romanists to escape them.  They point to the fact that the Canon of the Mass calls the Host after the recital of the words of institution “bread”, as S. Paul does, and therefore claim that the Roman Church still in some sense recognizes it as bread.  Again, they argue that the “accidents” that remain are real and therefore constitute a true outward visible sign.  Further, as we all should admit, the fact that anything has given rise to superstition is not conclusive against it.  The Bible itself has given rise to many superstitions, but that is no reason for abolishing it or denying its value.

      In this way it is possible to get a refined doctrine that is not open to the charge of materialism.  But although it may be held in this form by subtle and educated minds, we must repeat it is not the ordinary teaching of popular Romanism.  Further, it practically explains away the mediaeval doctrine altogether.  “Thus the modern Roman theologians allow to the consecrated bread and wine all the reality which anyone believes any bread and wine to possess, or, in other words, explain away transubstantiation, till it remains a verbal incumbrance due to an inopportune intrusion into Church doctrine of a temporary phase of metaphysics.” [Gore. op. cit. p. 120.]  Further, in however refined a form it is held it is open to very grave objections.

      (1) It not only attempts to define what Scripture leaves mysterious, but binds men down to one particular form of philosophy.  At best it is a pious opinion.  We should not wish to condemn those who choose to hold it or to expel them from the unity of the Church.  But the Church has no authority to add to the divine revelation a mere philosophical opinion.

      (2) It “detracts from the kingdom of nature in order to magnify the kingdom of grace”.  On the Roman view the natural is destroyed to make room for the supernatural: the bread and wine are not really consecrated to be the vehicle of divine blessings, they are annihilated.  Such a view as this is at bottom akin to Gnosticism, not Christianity.  Christianity has always taught that the material attains to its highest end in becoming the means and expression of the spiritual.  The supernatural completes and perfects the natural.  In the Incarnation our Lord’s manhood was not absorbed or destroyed by His divinity.  Rather He alone was perfect man. In the controversies about the Incarnation the Fathers use the analogy of the Eucharist in order to prove this.  According to the Roman doctrine the analogy of the Eucharist would prove just the opposite.  “Transubstantiation” is in its whole conception essentially unspiritual.  It treats our Lord’s ascended and glorified Humanity as on a level with the things of earth which must needs make room for its coming.*†

            [*Some mention must be made of the unhappy doctrine maintained by Roman theologians of repute that the presence of Christ bestowed in the Eucharist is withdrawn as soon as the elements begin to be digested.  By a second miracle transubstantiation is reversed.  The “substance” of Christ’s Body is withdrawn.  The “substance” of the bread is replaced.  So the coming of Christ is only a temporary visit, for about a quarter of an hour, not a permanent deepening of that union with Christ that only sin can weaken or destroy.  This flatly contradicts the true Christian teaching as given by S. Augustine, “What you see in the Sacrament passes away, but the invisible thing signified does not pass away but remains.”  Christ abides in us and we in Him.]

      § 4.  The third paragraph affirms the great truth that safeguards and is the complement of the doctrine of the “Real Presence”.  “The body of Christ is given, taken and eaten in the Supper only after an heavenly and spiritual manner.  And the mean whereby the body of Christ is received and eaten in the Supper is faith.”

      Just as Christ’s body and blood are present without being made subject to space and movement, so when we eat and drink them they are not made subject to any physical process.  We can no more eat and drink them physically than we can eat bread and butter by faith.  Each food, the natural nourishment and the spiritual nourishment, has its own means of reception.  If, by faithful reception of the body and blood of the Lord, “the body and soul” of the communicant are “preserved unto everlasting life” such reception can be “only after an heavenly and spiritual manner”. [For the meaning attached to this Article by its author, Bishop Guest of Rochester, see above.  His statements are quoted in full in Stone, vol. ii., pp. 210 ff.]

      (a) This truth is further explained by Article XXIX, “Of the wicked which do not eat the body of Christ in the use of the Lord’s Supper.”  The phrase “eat the body” clearly refers to the spiritual eating spoken of in Article XXVIII.  “The wicked and such as be void of a lively faith, although they do carnally and visibly press with their teeth (as S. Augustine saith) the Sacrament of the body and blood of Christ; yet in nowise are they partakers of Christ, but rather to their condemnation do eat and drink the sign or Sacrament of so great a thing.”  The wicked and the faithful alike receive the elements that have been brought into union with the body and blood of Christ.  Neither wicked nor faithful carnally and visibly press with their teeth more than the bread and wine.  But only the faithful receive the body and blood of Christ, since only they possess that faith which is the indispensable means of receiving them.  This Article does not in any way deny the “real presence”, it only rules out any carnal view of it.  To give an illustration: when our Lord was on earth He possessed healing power quite independently of the faith of men: but only those who possessed faith could get into touch with it.  Many touched His garments, but only the woman who had faith was healed (Mk 5:30 ff.).  The healing power was there: the touch of faith did not create it, but faith, as it were, opened the channel to appropriate the blessing.  So in the Eucharist, Christ in all His saving power is present.  The wicked are only capable of receiving the visible and material signs of His presence.  But those who approach with faith can receive the inward grace and become partakers of Christ by feeding on His Body and Blood.  Attempts have, indeed, been made to distinguish between “eating the body of Christ” and “partaking of Christ”.  It has been claimed that the wicked do the former to their soul’s peril, but cannot do the latter.  No such distinction, however, can be drawn, and Scripture seems to know of no feeding upon Christ that is not unto life (cp. Jn 6:53 ff.).  The wicked only receive the outward “sign or sacrament” that has entered into the closest relation with the divine gift.  The gift itself is withheld or withdrawn, we know not how. [It is universally agreed that the unworthy communicant does not enter into that union with Christ which is the ultimate end of receiving the sacrament.  It might, however, be held that S. Paul’s reference to those who are “guilty of the body and blood of the Lord” and “eat and drink judgment” to themselves (1 Cor 11:27, 29) suggests that the unworthy receive a divine gift, but for judgment and not salvation.]

      (b) The Sacrament of the Lord’s Supper was not by Christ’s ordinance reserved, carried about, lifted up or worshipped.  This last section of the Article is carefully worded.  It is based on a sound and intelligible principle.  The Holy Communion was given to us by Christ for a definite purpose.  We can only be secure of its blessings so long as we respect the limits of that purpose.  The faithful Christian is assured that in receiving the Holy Eucharist he is brought face to face with Christ.  The Lord’s presence is guaranteed by the Lord’s promise.  But it is a spiritual presence: and a spiritual presence, however real, is not necessarily controlled by the same laws as an earthly presence.  The appearances of our Lord after His Resurrection during the great forty days did not obey the same laws as those that limit and govern our present earthly humanity.  Though He condescended to use material means, He was not subject to them.  So we must not presume to argue about our Lord’s presence in the Eucharist as if it were in any way an earthly presence.  We are sure that He is present to bestow His body and blood.  We cannot be certain that that Presence abides when we use the consecrated bread and wine for a new and entirely different purpose, a purpose not ordained by Christ, but prompted by the fallible logic of human devotion.  If our Lord could at will enter or withdraw Himself from the Upper Room, so at will He comes to fulfill His promise in the Eucharist and at will He can depart when that promise has been fulfilled.  We cannot, as it were, bind Him to earth by our treatment of the elements.  Such thoughts lie behind the very cautious statements of the Article.  The practices mentioned are not condemned as sinful.  No anathema is levelled at those who retain them.  All that is asserted is that they are precarious, as going outside the ordinance of Christ. [Cp. the similar statement of Article XXV: “The Sacraments were not ordained of Christ to be gazed upon or to be carried about.”]  The Church of England, therefore, was perfectly justified in abolishing them.  At best they are practices enjoined by a part of the Catholic Church.

      (i) Reservation purely for the communion of the sick or absent is thoroughly primitive and natural.  It is in full accord with the spirit of Scripture and the revealed purpose of Christ and was the custom of the primitive Church.  Justin Martyr tells us that a portion “is sent to them that are absent, by the deacons”.  In an age of persecution, and when perhaps the majority of Christians were slaves, members were often unavoidably prevented from being present.  So, too, the Communion was sent to Christians in prison.  Again, we read of Christians taking away the consecrated elements in order to communicate themselves at home during the week or carrying them with them when on a journey.  Tertullian speaks of a Christian woman at home “secretly, before all food” tasting the Lord’s Body. [“Ante omnem cibum” must surely mean “before all food”, not “before every meal”, though great names can be cited to support the latter translation.  There is no evidence for communicating ordinarily more than once a day.]  So, too, as late as the time of S. Basil the monks in the desert, where there was no priest, communicated themselves with the reserved sacrament.  In times of persecution such a practice of private communion was necessary.  But it was liable to abuse, and from the fourth century onward the Church took steps to suppress it. [Was the sacrament always or ever reserved in both kinds?  Probably, as a rule, only the Bread was reserved, but at the time of receiving a fragment was placed in a cup of wine, which was thus regarded as consecrated.  This certainly was the usage in some places.  (See Wordsworth, Holy Communion, p. 266 and the references to reservation in Dix, The Shape of the Liturgy.)]  We hear also of the Eucharist being sent as a sign of fellowship to distant churches.  This custom was familiar to Irenaeus.  In the East it was forbidden by the Council of Laodicea in 365, but lasted on longer in the West.  Such practices did not commend themselves to the mature judgment of the Church.  The practice of reservation continued, but under due restrictions in church.  The canon law required that it should be kept under lock and key.  According to the first Prayer-Book of Edward VI the sick might be communicated with the reserved sacrament on the same day as a celebration in church.  In the second Prayer-Book this permission was withdrawn: there was a very real danger of conveying the sacrament away and using it for superstitious purposes. [Cp. the last rubric at the end of the Communion Office of 1549.]  In 1662 the present rubric was added enjoining the consumption in church of all the consecrated elements at the close of the service.  The primary object of this was to forbid not reservation but the irreverent carrying of the elements out of church for ordinary consumption, which the Puritans were quite capable of doing.  But indirectly the rubric forbids all reservation, and even the primitive custom of taking away their portion to the sick.  This is a real loss, since every communion of the sick involves a separate private celebration.  Happily many bishops have allowed reservation for this purpose under proper conditions – a great relief in crowded parishes, especially as all sickrooms are not adapted for private celebrations.

      The Article is aimed at reservation when practised not only for purposes of communion, but in order to provide a localized object of worship.  This is a comparatively modern and entirely distinct practice.  It is a use of the sacrament that diverges widely from the declared intention of Christ.  It arose in the dark ages and received a great impulse through the assertion of Transubstantiation.  The Pyx, or receptacle, at or above the altar containing the reserved sacrament, came increasingly to take a prominent place in the eyes of worshippers.  In 1264 the festival of Corpus Christi was instituted and the Blessed Sacrament was exposed for worship.  So the central act of the modern Roman service of Benediction is the blessing of the congregation by the priest with the consecrated Host.

      (ii) Carrying about the Host in procession is only an extension of the same practice.  Such a procession came soon to be one of the chief ceremonies of Corpus Christi, though it appealed too largely to the popular taste to be confined to that day.

      (iii) The lifting up or elevation of the Host after consecration in order to be adored by the people was first introduced about A.D. 1100 and is on a level with the previous practices.  This elevation must not be confused with the manual acts during the prayer of consecration, when the priest solemnly reproduces the action of Christ at the Last Supper and take’s up the bread and the cup.  Nor yet again has this elevation any connection with that usually found in oriental liturgies, where, after the Lord’s Prayer and before the Fraction, the priest lifts up the elements with the words “holy things for holy men”, as a preliminary to communion.  Elevation for adoration was supposed to signalize the actual moment of consecration.  It was expressly forbidden in the first Prayer-Book of Edward VI. [In the silent Canon of the mediaeval Mass the Elevation did at least direct the attention of the people to what was being done at the altar.  But it gave rise to the unfortunate consequence that for the people the main motive of eucharistic worship became the desire to see the Host.  The Reformers rightly regarded this as a perverted piety.]

      (iv) If Christ is present in the Eucharist, most certainly He is then as always to be adored.  But this, as we have seen, is quite different from adoration of the Blessed Sacrament divorced from Eucharistic worship.  We have no ground for believing that He gave us the Eucharist in order to dwell among us today by an abiding external presence as during His earthly life or to afford a visible object of adoration.  Nor, again, are we justified in that absolute identification of our Lord with the outward sign that is implied in modern Roman devotions.

      Finally, let us gladly admit that in these practices as allowed by the Church of Rome today we do find the expression of very deep and real devotion to our Lord.  But we maintain that that devotion is purchased at a great cost.

      Since there is a vigorous movement to introduce not only individual, but corporate devotions before the reserved Sacrament, including Benediction, into the Church of England, we will develop more fully the objections to such practices felt by many who believe wholeheartedly in the Real Presence in the Sacrament and are in full sympathy with the general Catholic position.  These innovations are defended on two main grounds, first that they are a natural development of Reservation for the sick and have behind them the authority of the Western Church, and secondly that experience both on the Continent and in England shows that they promote devotion and win many to Christ.

      In reply we protest that these practices are not so much practices of the Catholic Church as of the Counter-Reformation.  They have no authority in Scripture or primitive custom.  Even the learned Roman Catholic, Father Thurston admits that “In all the Christian literature of the first thousand years, no one has apparently yet found a single clear and definite statement that any person visited a church in order to pray before the Body of Christ which was kept upon the altar.” [Note in Bridgett, A History of the Holy Eucharist in Great Britain, p. 170.  On the case of Gorgonia (Gregory of Nazianzum, Orat. viii. 18), which Father Thurston regards as irrelevant, see C.Q.R., April, 1918, p. 119 ff.]  So, too, the Orthodox Churches of the East reserve the Sacrament, usually on the Altar, with a lamp burning before it.  Not only does the intervention of the Screen and the Holy Doors shut it out from any possibility of adoration by the people, but even those who enter the Sanctuary make no sign of reverence as they pass before it.  No one can deny the belief of the Eastern Churches in the Real Presence, but here, as so often, they preserve ancient tradition.  Only in the West has the cult of the reserved Sacrament been developed.  The beginnings of this are to be found in the Middle Ages, but the full growth was accelerated by reaction against the minimizing views of Protestant reformers in lands which did not accept the Reformation.  Thus these practices are relatively a late development, at least in the form in which we are asked to accept them today, and the authority behind them is not that of the Catholic Church but of the Roman Church since the Reformation.

      This is not in itself a ground of condemnation.  They may be healthy and legitimate developments, a fresh adaptation of old forms of worship to meet new demands and circumstances.  We must examine them in the light of reason and of the fruits that they produce.

      Theologically it is hard to find a satisfactory defence.  We hold that the Christian religion has a twofold foundation, Christian experience and historic fact.  Both are necessary.  Each reinforces the other.  In order that experience may be kept Christian, it needs constantly to be tested by the New Testament.  In support of the doctrine of the Eucharist, we can appeal not only to Christian experience throughout the ages and to the intrinsic moral and spiritual value of its symbolism, but also to the mind and promise of Christ as revealed in the historical facts of its institution.  The sense of His presence and of the new life that He imparts is no mere product of collective imagination.  It is guaranteed by His actual word and act.  But there is nothing in His institution or in the outward signs to suggest in any way that He gave us the Eucharist in order that through the consecrated elements He might dwell among us today by an abiding external presence comparable to His presence during His life on earth.  “The Presence is given under a form which indicates that it is to be received.”  Any other use is not only unauthorized and goes beyond the declared purpose of Christ, but is in danger of obscuring that purpose by suggesting that “the value of the Sacrament is intended to reside in itself”. [W. Temple, Christus Veritas, p. 241.]  No doubt certain critics hold that the Eucharist was not instituted by Christ Himself, but by the Christian Church, in imitation of mystery cults, though under the guidance of the Holy Spirit.  On this view it is quite possible to argue that the Church may be equally inspired to adapt it to new uses, and the appeal to historic fact falls to the ground.  Benediction may be defended, as it is by certain Modernists, as a piece of edifying symbolism, but no more.  This is perfectly consistent Modernism, but will hardly commend itself to most advocates of these practices.  It is precisely because we uphold both the importance of historic facts and also the objective nature of the Eucharistic Presence, that we hesitate to support these developments.  In the Church of Rome they are defended by an appeal to the infallible authority of the Church.  This is a dangerous argument for Anglicans, since the same authority pronounces that their orders are no orders and their sacraments are no sacraments.  Judged by the principles for which the Church of England stands, the theology of these practices is precarious.

      Attention must be called to another theological danger.  While it is plain that they do not necessarily presuppose transubstantiation, yet as a matter of history their development was largely due to the promulgation of that doctrine, and the arguments commonly used by Roman Catholics to urge their value are bound up with transubstantiation.  The practice of visits to the Tabernacle is advocated on the ground that the Presence granted to the recipient in communion is withdrawn at a certain stage of the digestion of the elements.  Thus a writer in the Month can say, “Of course to have Him in our hearts in Holy Communion is more in itself than to have Him near to us in the tabernacle.  But we have Him in Holy Communion only for a few minutes at a time, and in proportion as we believe this and take it to heart is our desire to seek His Presence in the tabernacle again and again.”  Such theology is a denial of the truth that the sacred Humanity of Christ dwells in all true believers.  It is a practical contradiction of the teaching of S. John’s Gospel that union with the ascended Christ through the Holy Spirit maintained and deepened through the Sacraments is a better substitute for the relationship that the disciples enjoyed during His earthly ministry.

      Again the Eucharist has many aspects.  It embraces in one glorious complexity the many-sided richness of Christian grace and truth.  It is the meal of God’s family, the means of fellowship both with Christ and with one another through Him, the Christian sacrifice, the commemoration of His redeeming victory on the Cross and so on.  It includes both the feeding of our souls and our self-oblation to the Father through Him.  The extra-liturgical use of the Sacrament tends to abstract and isolate one element, the Presence of Christ, and to destroy the proportion of truth so as to suggest a local and material Presence.  The whole conditions suggest a Presence on a level with the visible and material order.  “The Prisoner of the Tabernacle” is a phrase that sums up this tendency and is hard to reconcile with S. Paul’s vision of a Christ who fills all things.  The inevitable result of this emphasis is that a church where the Sacrament is not reserved is regarded as an “empty” church, a place where prayer is less effective and God further off.  All services, not only Mattins, but Evensong, which do not bear on the use of the Sacrament are to be depreciated.  The divine omnipresence is in danger of being forgotten.  It is one thing to regard the sacraments as the means by which One who is always present, becomes present in a unique and supremely characteristic manner for a special purpose.  It is quite another thing to limit His effective presence to the Sacramental presence.  There is a danger of encouraging a view of God which is less than Christian, and of ignoring His active presence in the universe.  We must always remember that the most fundamental question of all religion is our idea of God.

      When we pass on to the fruits of these practices in life and devotion, from the nature of the case the evidence is less clear.  It cannot be denied that many find these forms of worship attractive, though their attraction seems to be limited to certain temperaments, and they repel many, where they are not enforced and where all criticism is not forbidden by the iron discipline of the Church of Rome.  Even though piety is stirred and the love of Christ deepened, as indeed we should expect from any forms of devotion that led men to contemplate Him, this does not prove that they are the best way.  History shows that the degradation of religion has often been the fruit of the surrender to the popular desire for forms of worship that roused the maximum of emotion with the minimum of moral and spiritual, not to say intellectual effort.  When we turn to the wider results of Counter-Reformation piety, while we gladly find much to admire, we do not believe that the very limited type of Christianity that is produced represents the highest Christian ideal.  One important and objective piece of evidence is the quality of the devotional literature that the cult has inspired.  If we take away those forms that are in origin Eucharistic, it is strangely sentimental and childish.  The worship of God demands all our faculties, reason included, and where reason is ignored poverty of worship must in the long run result.  The whole devotional atmosphere of modern Romanism is too often alien from that of the New Testament.  Not only do these innovations in worship tend as it were to swallow up and depreciate the recitation of the divine office until the whole of Christianity seems to centre round the Blessed Sacrament, but reason and conscience are starved.  Just as theology, if it is to remain alive and human, must keep in the closest touch with devotion and practical Christian effort, so devotion if it is not to become one-sided and relaxed, must not be divorced from the activity of the mind and the moral sense.*

            [*The following considerations, among others, would probably now be urged by those who take a different view of extra-liturgical devotions from that maintained in the text.  (1) In the later Middle Ages the desire to see the Host at the elevation and the extra-liturgical use of the sacrament became dominating elements in popular eucharistic piety and tended to displace completely the participation of the people in the whole eucharistic action, especially since the reception of Holy Communion was very infrequent.  This represented a fundamental perversion of eucharistic doctrine and practice, and fully explains the strictures of the Reformers on any use of the sacrament outside the liturgy and their positive desire to insist on the participation of the people in the whole rite, to emphasize the reception of communion as integral to it, and to encourage more frequent reception.  In the situation then existing these measures were salutary and necessary.  (2) At the present day in the Church of England the question of extra-liturgical devotions arises in a context very different from that of mediaeval times.  In quarters where the desire for such devotions exists, frequent communion is usual and is not, according to the evidence available, endangered where these devotions are practised.  (3) If reservation be conceded, the devotional use of the reserved sacrament is not mainly, and certainly not exclusively, a doctrinal issue.  “The real question is, is the devotional use of the reserved sacrament a good and desirable kind of prayer?”  Can it be so ordered as to promote a right total eucharistic practice and not to disturb its true balance?  Much will depend not only on the whole context of teaching and practice in a particular parish in which the sacrament is used devotionally outside the liturgy, but also on the character of the prayers and hymns used in the special service.  If these are restricted to what is sound and healthy, it is unlikely that this form of devotion to our Lord can produce undesirable effects or lead to distorted views.]

      A distinct question is that of church discipline.  Even if we grant that the extra-liturgical use of the Sacrament is desirable, it cannot be said that it is essential.  It falls within the power of the local church to regulate it.  All who by their own free choice are admitted to minister in the Church of England promise on oath to use only the services of the Book of Common Prayer or such as are ordained by lawful authority.  By Catholic custom the use of the reserved Sacrament falls under the control of the Bishop.  To hold Exposition or Benediction in defiance of the Bishop of the Diocese is an Anglican peculiarity for which there is nothing to be said from the standpoint of Catholic order.  It is indeed often argued that the parish priest has the inherent right to reserve for the sick in virtue of ancient canon law which has never been repealed.  Even this however is disputable in face not only of the long desuetude of the custom, but of the independent legislation in another sense, through the deliberate provision in the Prayer-Book of the office for private communion.  Even here if we are to have reservation, it should be by the authority of the episcopate.† [Provision for reservation under severe restrictions was made in Proposed Prayer-Book of 1928 (cp. the Book as proposed in 1927).  A parish priest who wishes to reserve continuously for the purpose of communion does not now in general find that episcopal assent is withheld.]

 

Article  XXX

Of both Kinds

De utraque specie

The Cup of the Lord is not to be denied to the lay-people.  For both the parts of the Lord’s Sacrament, by Christ’s ordinance and commandment, ought to be ministered to all Christian men alike.

Calix Domini laicis non est denegandus, utraque enim pars Dominici Sacramenti, ex Christi institutione et praecepto, omnibus Christianis ex aequo administrari debet.

 

      Composed by Archbishop Parker in 1563.

      § 5.  There is no evidence whatever to support the present Roman custom of denying the cup to the laity either in Scripture or in the use of the primitive Church.  At the Last Supper those present all drank of the cup (Mk 14:23).  At Corinth all alike received in both kinds.  S. Paul could write, “Let a man prove himself and so let him eat of the bread and drink of the cup” (1 Cor 11:28).  The account of Justin Martyr is conclusive for the custom of the Church in the second century.  Indeed, it is admitted by Roman theologians that till the twelfth century communion in Church was always given in both kinds. [E.g. Cardinal Bona, quoted by Wordsworth, Holy Communion, p. 268.]  The only possible exception was when the sacrament was reserved for the absent or the sick.  But even here it is doubtful whether there is any decisive evidence for communion in one kind only.  Justin Martyr makes it quite clear that in his day the deacons carried both elements to those who were not present.  Jerome at the end of the fourth century speaks of a certain bishop who carried about “The Lord’s body in a wicker basket and His blood in a vessel of glass”. [Ep. 125, § 20.] Whether this refers to his practice when visiting the sick or when on a journey, we cannot tell.  The more common custom was to consecrate wine afresh for the communion of the sick by adding to it a particle of the consecrated bread.  Sometimes the consecrated bread that was reserved for this purpose had been moistened before reservation with consecrated wine from the chalice.  More often it was reserved by itself. [See Freestone, The Sacrament Reserved, and the comments on his conclusions by Harris in Liturgy and Worship, p. 548.]  But in either case the fresh wine was deemed to be consecrated by the intinction of the consecrated bread.  Usually the sick man’s communion was made in a single act.  We find words of administration for this purpose, such as “The Body and Blood of the Lord be unto thee remission of all thy sins”.  It is going too far to say that we can prove that in early days communion was always given in both kinds.  But the prevalence of such customs as these proves that such was the desire of the Church where possible.  They have been retained in the Eastern Church. [For evidence see Wordsworth, Holy Communion, p. 263 ff.]

      Further, communion in one kind, so soon as it appeared, was vigorously denounced by the highest authorities of the Church.  In the middle of the fifth century certain Manichaeans refused to drink of the cup and Pope Leo commanded that they should be excommunicated.  At the close of the same century Pope Gelasius, hearing that some after receiving the Body, from some motive not explained, “abstained from the cup,” ordered that they should “either receive the Sacraments entire or be repelled from them altogether because the division of the one and the same Mystery cannot take place without a huge sacrilege”.  This utterance was inserted in Gratian’s collection of canon law and at a later date had to be explained away.  The Schoolmen were equal to the task, and Aquinas boldly refers it to the consecrating priest alone.

      At the close of the eleventh century the custom of communicating in one kind only began to be adopted unofficially.  The motive was probably convenience, the avoidance of any danger of spilling the wine.  It was condemned by the Council of Clermont in 1095, and again by Pope Paschal II in 1118.  But the practice spread during the next two centuries and was defended by ecclesiastical writers.  The change was made gradually.  Aquinas, who died in 1274, only speaks of it as the custom of many churches.  Evidence of the survival of primitive practice is found as late as the middle of the fourteenth century.  When the Council of Constance met in 1415 it was widely hoped that the abuse would be checked.  Unhappily communion in one kind was formally adopted as the official practice of the Church.  The Council claimed for the Church the power of ordering that the sacrament should be given to the laity in one kind only.  “Though in the primitive Church this Sacrament was received under both kinds, yet has this custom been introduced ... that it should be taken by the celebrants under both kinds and by the laity under the kind of Bread only. ... Wherefore since this custom has been introduced by the Church and the holy Fathers on reasonable grounds and has been very long observed, it is to be accounted for a law.”

      The reason alleged for the denial of the cup to the laity was commonly the risk of irreverence.  Another reason was the danger of giving the simple occasion to “think that Jesus is not entire under each species”.  When the practice had become general, this last was the theological defence attempted for it.  It was held that “as much is contained under either kind as under both”, for the whole Christ, both body and blood, is received under both.  This doctrine, known as “Concomitance”, is, to say the least, the purest speculation.  It makes assertion about matters that are clearly outside our knowledge.  It can claim no support from Scripture or early teaching.

      At the Reformation the restoration of the cup to the laity was demanded in the Lutheran Confession of Augsburg.  In England it was restored immediately after the death of Henry VIII.  But the Roman Church refused to abolish the existing custom.  At the Council of Trent the doctrine of “Concomitance” was distinctly affirmed.  It was asserted that communion in one kind was sufficient and that the Church had power to ordain it.  All who denied these assertions were anathematized.  It is true that a section was added to the canons on this subject promising that at the earliest opportunity the Council would consider whether some relaxation of the rule might be allowed.  But the opportunity has never arrived.  At this day the Church of Rome is fettered by the decrees of Trent.

      The practice is utterly indefensible.  Not only does it rest on a precarious theological speculation, but it is in open disobedience to the express command of Christ.  It is defended as a useful ecclesiastical regulation.  The Church has, indeed, authority to decree rites and ceremonies, but not in contradiction to Scripture and to our Lord’s own words.  It cannot be denied that the practice has a certain practical convenience.  But we cannot set that against the plain direction of Christ.  The danger of irreverence can be reduced to a minimum.  The Church of England in company with the Churches of the East is content to hold fast to the primitive and Scriptural practice. [To attempt to suggest what loss of grace the Church of Rome inflicts upon its laity would be to indulge in speculation as unprofitable and unprovable as that on which the doctrine of concomitance is based.]  Both parts of the Lord’s Sacrament by Christ’s ordinance and commandment ought to be ministered to all Christian men alike.

 

Article  XXXI

Of the one Oblation of Christ finished upon the Cross

De unica Christi oblatione in cruce perfecta

The offering of Christ once made is the perfect redemption, propitiation, and satisfaction, for all the sins of the whole world, both original and actual, and there is none other satisfaction for sin but that alone.  Wherefore the sacrifices of Masses, in the which it was commonly said, that the Priests did offer Christ for the quick and the dead, to have remission of pain or guilt, were blasphemous fables, and dangerous deceits.

Oblatio Christi semel facta, perfecta est redemptio, propitiatio, et satisfactio pro omnibus peccatis totius mundi, tam originalibus quam actualibus.  Neque praeter illam unicam est ulla alia pro peccatis expiatio.  Unde missarum sacrificia, quibus vulgo dicebatur, sacerdotem offerre Christum in remissionem poenae, aut culpae, pro vivis et defunctis, blasphema figmenta sunt, et perniciosae imposturae.

 

      In substance dates from 1553.  Only slightly altered later.  The decrees of Trent on this subject were not issued till 1562, hence the doctrine attacked is not official Roman teaching but popular mediaeval ideas.  It asserts (i) The uniqueness and all-sufficiency of the sacrifice of the Cross; (ii) The falsity of any view that made each Mass a sacrifice independent of or additional to the sacrifice of the Cross.

      § 6.  The Eucharistic Sacrifice

      (a) The New Testament says very little in detail about the Eucharist as a sacrifice, but it leaves no doubt, wherever it is mentioned, that the Church regarded it as such.  In 1 Cor 10:14–21 S. Paul’s argument rests upon an identity of principle between the Christian Eucharist and the sacrificial meals of the Jews and heathen.  He speaks of the “table of the Lord”, which in Old Testament language is simply a synonym for “altar” (Mal 1:7 and 12; Ezek 41:22, 44:16).  In the Eucharist no less than in these sacrifices, those who eat, have communion with the altar, that is with God, who is represented by the altar.  Hence the inconsistency of attendance at the Christian Eucharist and at idolatrous sacrifices.  “Ye cannot partake of the table of the Lord and of the table of devils.”  So, again, in the Epistle to the Hebrews we read, “We have an altar whereof they have no right to eat, who serve the tabernacle” (13:10).  A sound scholarship forbids us to limit “altar” here to the actual table.  But the reference to the Eucharist is unmistakable, and the words imply a sacrifice present comparable to those of the old covenant, of which the members of the new Israel partake as Israel after the flesh did of theirs.  So, too, when we turn to the accounts of the institution the whole tone and structure are sacrificial.  It is true, indeed, that the words “Do this” (τουτο ποιειτε) in themselves mean no more than “perform this act”.  Attempts have been made to press the translation “sacrifice this”.  In the Septuagint ποιειν is undoubtedly used in the sense of “sacrifice” or “offer”; but only when the context demands it.  In itself it is as vague as the English verb “do”.  None of the early Fathers, with the single exception of Justin Martyr, understand the words here as meaning in themselves more than “do this”.  Again, the word “remembrance” (ανάμνησις) is employed in the Septuagint in a sacrificial sense (cp. Heb 10:3).  But in this case also the word in itself is quite indeterminate.  Who is reminded and of what he is reminded, depend solely upon the context.  The fact, however, still remains that both the manner and circumstances of the institution leave no doubt of the sacrificial nature of the Eucharist.  The “Body” and “Blood” mentioned in separation recall the pouring out of the blood in sacrifice.  They are given not simply “to” you, but “for you” (ύπερ υμων), i.e. on your behalf.  It is clear that our Lord’s Body and Blood are not only our spiritual food: they are that because they are first the sacrifice that prevails for us. [The phrase the “bread of God” (Jn 6:33) may in itself be sacrificial (cp. Lev 21:6, etc., where it refers to the sacrifice as a whole, originally perhaps regarded as the actual food of Jehovah).]  The words “This is my blood of the covenant” (Mt 26:28) or “This is the new covenant in my blood” (1 Cor 11:25) are an echo of the words of the covenant sacrifice of Exodus 24 (quoted Heb 9:20).  The whole service is the Passover of the new Israel.

      In the early Church the Eucharist is from the first spoken of in sacrificial language. [See, for instance, Gore, Body of Christ, p. 157.]  It is called the “spiritual” and “unbloody” sacrifice.  It is viewed by Irenaeus and the Fathers generally as the “pure offering” foretold by Malachi (1:11).  The heathen world was full of sacrifices.  The Church could hardly have avoided explaining her worship in terms of sacrifice.  The question still remains in what sense she employed them.  Gradually the Church made clear to herself all that was implicit in the Eucharist from the first.  She found in it at once the fulfillment and the correction of those imperfect ideas and aspirations that were embodied in Jewish and heathen sacrifices.

      (b) As we have already seen, several distinct ideas underlay the sacrificial worship of the Jews and heathen, and these ideas were not sharply defined.  Sacrifice was a gift or tribute, an expression of homage.  It was also a means of propitiation and a means of communion.  Through the common sacrificial meal the union between the worshippers and their God was strengthened.  All these ideas run into one another and find their expression in the Christian Eucharist.

      (i) What the Church offers to God in the first instance is simply bread and wine, as a token of homage and dependence upon Him, and an act of thanksgiving for His mercies of creation and redemption.  In Old Testament sacrifices thoughtful Jews had come to discern that the worth of a sacrifice in the eyes of God lay not in its intrinsic value, as if God needed man’s gifts, but in the spirit of the man who offered it (e.g. Ps 50:5–17, 51:16–17, 69:30–31).  In early days the people brought their offerings to God in kind as an expression of thanksgiving.  The bread and wine actually used in the Eucharist were taken from these offerings of the faithful.  So today the oblations of bread and wine and the collection of money which takes place at the same point in the service are in origin and significance one and the, same act.  The connection between them is preserved in so far as the bread and wine are the gifts of the whole congregation as being bought out of the alms.

      (ii) Then in the prayer of consecration the Church in obedience to our Lord’s command performs in remembrance of Him those acts that He Himself performed at the Last Supper.  We pray that our earthly oblations of bread and wine may, by the power of the Holy Spirit, be united with the heavenly oblation of our Lord.  God, so to say, shows His acceptance of our offerings by giving them back to us charged with the fruits of our Lord’s passion, to be the spiritual food of His body and blood.  In the early liturgies the effect of consecration is expressed indifferently either as the descent to earth of the Heavenly Presence of our Lord or as the lifting up to Heaven of our gifts, there on the heavenly altar to be united with Him.  The truth that they strive to express is that heaven and earth are made one. [Cp. the language of the Leonine Sacramentary: “On Thy altars, O Lord, we thankfully offer earthly gifts that we may win heavenly: we give earthly things that we may receive eternal.”]  So in the Holy Eucharist our Lord is present in His Heavenly glory, to be the food of our souls, and since He is present, His sacrifice is present too.  Our Lord presides at the Board not only as Host but as Priest.  “He pleads by what He is.”  His presence in Heaven eternally intercedes for us, and His presence in the Eucharist is no less a presence of intercession.  We, as His members, join with Him in presenting His sacrifice before the Father.

“Having with us Him that pleads above,

We here present, we here spread forth to Thee,

That only offering perfect in Thine eyes,

The one true pure immortal sacrifice.”

      Thus, what the Church does in the Eucharist is on a level, not with what our Lord did once for all on Calvary, but with what He is now doing in Heaven.  That death can never be repeated.  Through it He has become all that He now is.  Our Lord’s historical acts “had value only as expressing and perfecting His will, and they live eternally in the will expressed and ‘perfected’ through them: so that He offers Himself for ever.  Through the commemorative thanksgiving the Church cooperates with the eternal act of His will and offers Him to the Father.” [Article “Sacrifice in N.T.” by F. E. Brightman, p. 768b, Murray’s Bible Dictionary, The whole article should be studied.]  Our Lord, as the “Lamb that hath been slain”, is an eternal and abiding sacrifice, interceding for us by His presence in Heaven.  In the Eucharist we on earth join with Him in pleading His sacrifice, even as He pleads it above.*

            [*It is important to notice two ambiguities that lurk under the expression “the finished sacrifice of Christ”.  The word “sacrifice” may mean either “the act of sacrificing” or “the victim sacrificed”.  If it is used in the first sense our Lord’s sacrifice is an act that lies in the past.  If it is used in the second sense, “our Lord is our sacrifice”, He is the “Lamb as it had been slain”.  Again, the word “finished” may mean no more than “past”, “no longer going on,” as, e.g. a day is “finished” when it comes to an end.  But it may also mean “completed”, “able to do its work,” as, e.g. a house is finished when we can live in it.  More than half the controversies about the Eucharistic sacrifice have turned on a confusion in the use of these two words.  In one sense we rightly speak of the finished sacrifice of Christ, meaning that He has died and risen and ascended and will never die again.  In another sense, no less rightly, we regard our Lord Himself as an abiding sacrifice.  Through all that He has accomplished, He has become the perfect instrument of our redemption.  He is for all eternity “the Lamb that hath been slain” (ως εσφαγμένον, Rev 5:6), i.e. alive through death.  “He is” (not was) “the propitiation for our sins” (1 Jn 2:2).  It is through the living and glorified Christ, not simply through what He once did, but through what He now is, that we have access unto the Father (Eph 2:16–18).  In other words, His sacrifice is finished in that we can now enjoy all its benefits.  The one view that contradicts all Scripture teaching is to maintain that our Lord’s death is in any sense repeated.

            Certain teachers of very different schools of thought have used language that implies that in the Eucharist we feed on the Body and Blood of the dead Christ: that we go, in the words of Bishop Andrewes, “ad cadaver,” or in the words of a leading Evangelical teacher, that “The res sacramenti is not Christ as He now is, but Christ’s Body and Blood as separated in Sacrificial Death for our sins.”  In other words, at each communion “by the omnipotency of Christ’s word the actual moment of His redemptive death upon the Cross is made to be present again to faith”.  Such a view would seem to demand a new miracle at each Eucharist no less than the doctrine of Transubstantiation demands it.  Further, it rests on an unreal distinction between the sacrificed and the glorified Body.  There is but one Body of Christ, that which has passed through death to glory.  His Body is not νεκυόν but εσφαγμένον.  The view in question is anxious to safeguard the immediate connection between the Eucharist and Calvary.  But it rests on a false antithesis.  The Crucifixion and the Ascended Life of our Lord are in the most intimate connection.  The latter derives its saving potency solely from the former.  It is as He that “became dead and liveth” (Rev 1:18) that Christ is our Saviour.  Just as the saving efficacy of the Cross lives on in the living Christ, so in the Eucharist our faith rests not on a single act of past time but on an eternal present.  (For a full discussion see Moberly, Problems and Principles, No. 5.)]

“His manhood pleads where now it lives

            On Heaven’s eternal throne,

And where in mystic rite (i.e. the Eucharist) He gives

            Its presence (i.e. the presence of His manhood) to His own.”

      As His members we identify ourselves with our Head.  As “in Christ”, we hold up before the Father His Cross and Passion, as being the realization of that antagonism to sin and filial obedience to the Father’s will, which we would fain attain, but from which we know ourselves to fall short.  We claim the forgiveness won for us.  We thank God for the great act of redemption.  We ask God, as it were, to look upon Christ as being that which by His grace we hope one day to become.  Thus, through Christ we dare to enter into communion with the Father.  He is our at-one-ment.  Through Him we can enjoy that fellowship with God which ancient sacrifices aspired to achieve.  And through Christ we offer our prayers and thanksgivings for our fellow members in His Body and plead His death for all the faithful living and departed.

      (iii) Not only do we commemorate all that our Lord has done for us, but in and through Him we offer ourselves to the Father.  Our Lord in Heaven presents to the Father not only Himself but His Body, the Church.  We, as parts or “members” of Christ, filled anew by the act of communion with His life, join with Him in offering ourselves, “our souls and bodies.”  We in and with Him intercede for the whole Church, and offer to God the whole body of the faithful living and departed and ourselves as part of it.  This is the culmination of the Eucharistic sacrifice.  Not the mere presentation of Christ’s sacrifice as something done for us or outside us, but rather our own self-identification with that sacrifice.  In the language of S. Augustine, “The whole redeemed city ... is offered as a universal sacrifice to God by the high priest, who offered nothing less than Himself in suffering for us, that we might become the body of so glorious a head.”  The priest who celebrates the Eucharist does not act simply as an individual, but as the minister and representative of the whole Body of Christ – not only the particular congregation gathered within the walls of a building, but the whole body of the faithful living and departed.  Without our own self-oblation the Eucharistic sacrifice is incomplete.  “This is the Christian sacrifice, the many become one body in Christ.  And it is this that the Church celebrates by means of the Sacrament of the Altar ... when it is shown to her that in what she offers she herself is offered.”

      (c) In such thoughts as these we find the Church making explicit to herself the wealth of meaning contained in her chief act of worship.  It was her supreme act of homage, the commemoration of the atoning sacrifice of Calvary, the means of Communion.  All that the old sacrifices prefigured found its fulfillment here.  There is little or no attempt to construct any formal theological statement of the Eucharistic sacrifice till quite a late date.  Even the earlier Schoolmen refrained from precise definitions on the subject.  The corruption of doctrine attacked in our Article may be said to start from certain informal statements of Thomas Aquinas.  These combined with current tendencies of popular religion to produce a debased and disproportionate teaching of the Eucharistic sacrifice.  Not only did he define sacrifice as “something done for the honour properly due to God in order to appease Him”, [Summa, III. 48. 3.] but he asserted that it involved a change of some kind in the object offered, as “that animals were killed, that bread is broken and eaten and blessed.” [Summa, IIa, IIae. 85. 3. ad. 3.]  This a priori view is quite out of touch with history.  It isolates the act of sacrifice and attempts to treat it independently of the results attained by sacrifice.  We can hardly wonder if the fruit of such treatment is an abstract and one-sided theology.  The study of the Eucharistic sacrifice got, as it were, shunted on to a very barren sidetrack.  The absorbing question came to be, if Christ is the victim in every Eucharist, what change does He undergo in each offering, so that it may rightly be termed a sacrifice?  Thomas Aquinas was far too good a theologian to suppose that the sacrifice of Calvary was in any sense repeated or added to in the Eucharist, but his definition of sacrifice was the parent of theories that came dangerously near such teaching.

      Again, current practice lent itself to a distorted theology.  By every analogy communion is an essential part of sharing fully in the Eucharistic sacrifice.  In the first days of the Church every Christian attended the Eucharist as a matter of duty at least every Sunday and communicated.  We hear first of non-communicating attendance at the close of the second century.  Tertullian mentions those who on days other than Sunday did not wish to break their fast, and so were present at the service and took away the Lord’s Body for private communion at home.  Again, Clement of Alexandria contemplates its being left to the conscience of persons present to receive or not: but he states that such permission was only the practice of some.  The habit of non-communicating attendance only became general when Christianity had become popular and the world had invaded the Church.  Many Christians no longer desired to make the effort of frequent communion, nor indeed were spiritually capable of it.  S. Chrysostom found it necessary to condemn the habit of substituting mere attendance at the Eucharist for communion, and allowed it only to those in the final stage of ecclesiastical penance.  Otherwise he insisted that those who felt themselves unworthy to communicate ought to go out with the penitents.  The same condemnation is found elsewhere, as, for instance, in the “Apostolical Canons”.  It is clear that the Church was being faced with a real problem, how to deal with the lowered standard of personal holiness in ordinary Christians.  The problem was solved by allowing non-communicating attendance.  This, at least, preserved the Lord’s service as the chief service on the Lord’s Day.  Even so, those present were said to “assist at the prayers” rather than “assist at the Sacrifice”.  As time went on infrequency of communion on the part of the lay-folk tended to increase.  The well-meant attempt of the Lateran Council to enforce a minimum of once a year was perverted into a restriction of communion to once a year.  This inevitably tended to thrust into the background the great truth that the Eucharistic sacrifice culminates in the self-oblation of the whole Church.  Stress was laid rather on the priest’s part, and the priest was no longer regarded as the representative of the whole priestly body, but only as the representative of Christ.  This tendency was furthered by the withdrawal of the cup from the laity.

      Again, the Eucharist was at the first the common sacrificial meal of the united Christian brotherhood.  Not till the fifth century do we hear of the possibility of more than one Eucharist in the same Church on the same day with rare exceptions.  About 445 Pope Leo wrote to Bishop Dioscorus of Alexandria, pointing out that this rule might prevent some from offering the sacrifice, and urging him to bring Alexandria into line with Rome, where there was more than one celebration in a day in the same Church – “as often as there was a congregation to fill the Church.”  The condition is worth notice.  Gradually in the West there developed the ordinary method of the Middle Ages.  Many priests celebrated daily.  In many churches Masses were multiplied. [In the East every church has still only one altar.  The Eucharist is celebrated on Sunday and festivals.]  This development was partly due to a desire to suit the convenience of the congregation, more largely to the growing custom of saying Masses for special purposes.  It received a great impetus by the growth of the doctrine of Purgatory.  The whole system of chantries and the traffic in “solitary Masses” were the result of this doctrine.  The Mass came to be viewed chiefly as a means of delivering souls from Purgatory.  Once again this increase in the number of Masses led to a diminution in the number of persons required to take part, until in “Low Mass” all that remained was concentrated in the hands of the priest. [Here again the East shows its conservatism.  Low Mass is unknown.  The East preferred to maintain the full dignity of the Eucharist and to be content with fewer celebrations.]

      So the idea of the Eucharist was externalized.  The neglect of communion fixed attention on the moment of Consecration.  Excessive attention was paid to the question of the relation of the elements to the presence of Christ.  The consecration itself became regarded as the sacrificial act performed by Christ through the priest.  The words of consecration were in danger of being viewed as a magical charm in obedience to which the miracle of transubstantiation took place.  The priest came to be regarded, not as the organ of the whole priestly body, but as an individual possessed of certain wonderful powers.  So the corporate aspect of the Eucharist was obscured.  Again, as a result of the mechanical view of sacrifice, each Eucharist was regarded as having, so to say, a special value of its own and as purchasing an installment of salvation.  The more Masses that were offered, the greater amount of benefit was secured.  Here again the influence of Thomas Aquinas was unfortunate.  He asserted that the Sacrifice of the Mass was efficacious in winning blessings for all who had a right disposition.  This is capable of a perfectly right interpretation, but it was perverted into the teaching that the sacrifice of the Mass apart from Communion could automatically obtain blessings for those on whose behalf the priest intended to offer it, whatever their moral state.  So attainment of salvation became little more than a question of getting sufficient Masses offered for oneself either in one’s lifetime or after death.  To meet the demand a worthless class of priests sprang up who earned their living simply by saying Masses.

      Again, in later mediaeval teaching we find an idea that, while the sacrifice of the Cross availed only for the forgiveness of original sin, that of the Mass was instituted to make satisfaction for actual sins.  This opinion was condemned in the Confession of Augsburg, which had influence on our Article XXXI.  The Roman party repudiated any such teaching, and certainly after attention had been drawn to it the doctrine was not repeated.  But the idea in question is found in sermons ascribed wrongly to Thomas Aquinas and was probably held by Catharinus, a bishop who was present at Trent.  The existence of the sermons, whoever composed them, is proof that such a doctrine was taught.

      The Church of England at the Reformation endeavoured to get back to a truer view of the Eucharist, one that preserved the due proportion of things, and was in complete accord with Scripture and primitive teaching.  Hence the emphasis on communion as an integral part of Eucharistic worship, and the attempt, not altogether successful, to restore frequent communion.  So this Article has its eye throughout on mediaeval abuses and on the attempt of the Council of Trent to shelter them as far as possible.

      The offering of Christ, once made, is the perfect redemption, propitiation and satisfaction for all the sins of the whole world, both original and actual: and there is none other satisfaction for sin but that alone.  This assertion of the atonement, similar in language to the opening words of the Prayer of Consecration, is only made here, as the structure of the Article shows, to be ground of the subsequent condemnation.  It is based on Heb 7:27, 9:14, 26–28, 10:10, where the death of Christ once for all (εφάπαξ) is contrasted with the repeated sacrifices of the Jewish system (cp. Rom 6:9–10).  Wherefore the sacrifices of Masses in the which it was commonly (vulgo) said that the priests did offer Christ for the quick and the dead, to have remission of pain or guilt, were blasphemous fables and dangerous deceits.  The language is most carefully chosen.  There is no denial of the Eucharistic sacrifice, but of current popular perversions of it, as embodied in the practical system of worship during the Middle Ages.  The plural “sacrifices” condemns any idea that each Eucharist is in any sense a repetition of the sacrifice once offered on Calvary or an addition to it, or that by multiplying Eucharists blessings could automatically be multiplied.  So, too, the plural “Masses” makes plain that the idea condemned is that each Mass possesses a supplementary value of its own.  Again, the plural “priests” emphasizes the condemnation of this idea.  So it is not “the sacrifice of the Mass” but the “sacrifices of masses” that is condemned not any formal theological statement of doctrine, – for such did not exist, – but popular errors (quod vulgo dicebatur).

      The decrees of the Council of Trent bear evidence of a double purpose.  As theologians they wished to preserve themselves from making the sacrifice of the Mass a repetition of that of Calvary.  As ecclesiastical statesmen they did not wish to upset established ideas and practice.  Hence on the one hand they distinguished between the bloody oblation of Calvary and the unbloody oblation of the Eucharist.  The latter was instituted to be the representation of the sacrifice on the Cross, till Christ should come.  Through this unbloody offering the fruits of the bloody offering are received.  On the other hand, they spoke of the sacrifice of the Mass as “truly propitiatory”, a phrase capable of an innocent but also of a perverted meaning,* especially as it is elsewhere called “a true and proper sacrifice” (verum et proprium sacrificium).  From this dubious teaching of the Council of Trent have arisen two types of Roman teaching, the one minimizing, the other exalting, the Sacrifice of the Mass.  Both, however, are hampered by the unsound tradition based on the teaching of Aquinas, which regards the destruction or physical modification of the victim as the essential part of sacrifice and connects the Eucharistic sacrifice, not with our Lord’s Heavenly priesthood, but with His death on the Cross placed in an unreal isolation.  The dominant school in the Church of Rome hold that in some sense Christ suffers change or destruction in each Mass and that the Eucharist is in virtue of this act a distinct sacrifice in itself.  Christ is regarded as in each Mass undergoing a new humiliation, a new self-emptying.**  As we saw, the latest Roman denial of our orders is based on our rejection of any such view which makes the sacrifice of the Eucharist additional to that of Calvary.  As long as it is taught, in however refined a form, the protest of our Article will not be out of date.

            [*“Now undoubtedly there are two senses in which an act may be said to be propitiatory.  The act of Christ’s sacrifice on the Cross had an original propitiatory power ... all the power that any action of man can have for this end is a derived power, derived from Christ’s sacrifice, from which any other sacrifice, the Eucharistic one included, borrows its virtue and without which it would be wholly null and void.  There is then an original propitiation and a borrowed propitiation, a first propitiation and a secondary one.  Why did the Fathers of Trent, when they had all human language at their command, deliberately choose to call the sacrifice of the Mass vere propitiatorium?  They may have said that it was vere propitiatorium in the secondary sense; but no man can fail to see the misleading effect of such language and that nothing could have been easier to the divines of Trent, had they chosen, than to draw a far more clear distinction than they did between the sacrifice of the Mass and the sacrifice on the Cross” (Mozley, Lectures and Theological Papers, p. 216).]

            [**Cp. Gore, R.C. Claims, p. 175, and Dom Chapman’s reply.  The statements of the Council of Trent appear to be the only definitions of the eucharistic sacrifice officially binding on Roman Catholics.  Some modern Roman writers (e.g. de la Taille, Masure, Vonier) expressly reject the view that the eucharistic sacrifice involves any kind of “immolation” of Christ other than that once made on the Cross.]

      We need to get back to broader and truer notions of sacrifice.  As we have seen, the culminating point of animal sacrifice was not the death of the victim but the presentation of the “blood which is the life” before God.  The death was not the climax, but rather the means through which the life was set free.  So, too, a sacrifice does not necessarily involve a change or destruction of anything.  The “meal offering” and the shewbread were both sacrifices, and they are typical of a multitude of similar sacrifices found all over the world.  The root idea of sacrifice is found to be communion rather than propitiation.  The Roman interpretation of the sacrifice of the Eucharist rests on the later and debased mediaeval theology.  Against it we appeal to a nobler and wider conception of sacrifice, more faithful alike to history and to Scripture.†

 

Church And State – Articles  XXXVII – XXXIX

 

Article  XXXVII

Of the Civil Magistrates

De civilibus Magistratibus

The Queen’s Majesty hath the chief power in this Realm of England, and over her dominions, unto whom the chief government of all estates of this Realm, whether they be Ecclesiastical or Civil, in all causes doth appertain, and is not, nor ought to be, subject to any foreign jurisdiction.

Regia Majestas in hoc Angliae regno, ac caeteris ejus dominiis, summam habet potestatem, ad quam omnium statuum hujus regni, sive illi ecclesiastici sint, sive civiles, in omnibus causis, suprema gubernatio pertinet, et nulli extemae jurisdictioni est subjecta, nec esse debet.

Where we attribute to the Queen’s Majesty the chief government, by which titles we understand the minds of some slanderous folk to be offended; we give not to our princes the ministering either of God’s Word, or of Sacraments, the which thing the Injunctions also lately set forth by Elizabeth our Queen doth most plainly testify: But that only prerogative, which we see to have been given always to all godly princes in holy Scriptures by God himself; that is, that they should rule all estates and degrees committed to their charge by God, whether they be Ecclesiastical or Temporal, and restrain with the civil sword the stubborn and evildoers.

Cum Regiae Majestati summam gubernationem tribuimus, quibus titulis intelligimus animos quorundam calumniatorum offendi, non damus Regibus nostris, aut verbi Dei, aut Sacramentorum administrationem, quod etiam Injunctiones ab Elizabetha Regina nostra, nuper editae, apertissime testantur: sed eam tantum praerogativam, quam in sacris Scripturis a Deo ipso, omnibus piis Principibus, videmus semper fuisse attributam: hoc est, ut omnes status atque ordines fidei suae a Deo commissos, sive illi ecclesiastici sint, sive civiles, in officio contineant et contumaces ac delinquentes gladio civili coerceant.

The Bishop of Rome hath no jurisdiction in this Realm of England.

Romanus pontifex nullam habet jurisdictionem in hoc regno Angliae.

The laws of the Realm may punish Christian men with death, for heinous and grievous offences.

Leges regni possunt Christianos propter capitalia, et gravia crimina, morte punire.

It is lawful for Christian men, at the commandment of the Magistrate, to wear weapons, and serve in the wars.

Christianis licet, ex mandato magistratus, arma portare, et justa bella administrare.

 

      The history is important.  In 1563 the whole of the opening paragraph was rewritten and the second paragraph added for the first time.  Its objects were:

      (i) To explain and defend “The Royal supremacy”;

      (ii) To repudiate all papal jurisdiction;

      (iii) To condemn Anabaptist attacks on the authority of the State.

      § 1.  The relations between Church and State

      (a) We find in Scripture no formal discussion of the relations between Church and State.  As we have seen, the Church is there pictured as a society with a life of its own, drawing a sharp distinction between those within and those without, exercising over its own members judicial authority in its own courts according to its own laws.  Nothing is clearer than that the rules of the Church in no way depended upon the authority of the State.  For instance, the Roman Empire had its own laws of marriage binding upon all its subjects alike.  But the Church had her own far stricter laws of marriage based upon the teaching of Christ.  These S. Paul claimed to enforce upon Christians.  At the Council of Jerusalem definite rules were made on subjects about which the laws of the Empire had no concern, e.g. fornication and eating certain kinds of meat.  On all questions of discipline and order the Church claimed to interpret the will of Christ under the guidance of the Spirit and demanded from her members obedience to her interpretation.  She acted upon her own authority.

      But since the Church existed within the Roman Empire she could not escape all relationship with it.  In the very early days Christians would be regarded simply as a new Jewish sect.  They shared the toleration accorded to Judaism.  But it soon became apparent that Christianity was more than a reformed Judaism.  As the Church developed an independent existence and a vigorous life of her own, conflict with the State became inevitable.  The Roman Empire had a great suspicion of all smaller societies within itself.  Christianity was a religion not sanctioned by law.  The Church’s very existence might at any time lay her open to the hostility of the State.  Further, the State required of all who were not Jews a willingness to participate in idolatrous worship, especially the worship of the Emperor.  Such commands Christians, out of loyalty to Christ, could not obey.  Their refusal appeared an act of disloyalty to the Emperor.  Again, civil and social life were so bound up with idolatry that it was almost impossible for Christians to take part in it.  They were made to appear unsocial and unpatriotic.  Hence arose persecution and the attempts to compel Christians to do sacrifice.  Even the most reluctant witness must confess that under such circumstances obedience to Christ was inconsistent with obedience to the State. [Cp. Hobhouse, The Church and the World, p. 41, “Christians were ... persecuted not so much for individual beliefs, as for being members of a Church and of a Church which acknowledged no divided allegiance.”]

      At the same time, the Church had no hostility to the State as such.  By His example and teaching Christ Himself had inculcated loyalty to the civil power in its own sphere.  He showed that Caesar’s head on the coinage implied the duty of paying taxes to Caesar.  There was no necessary conflict between the claims of Caesar and the claims of God (Mk 12:13 ff.).  He submitted Himself to the authority of Pilate as being given to him from above (Jn 19:11), so long as he acted within the limits of his office (Jn 18:33 ff.).  S. Paul commands wholehearted obedience to the civil authority.  “The powers that be are ordained of God” (Rom 13:1–7).  S. Peter ends a long exhortation on the respect due to the State with the injunction (1 Pet 2:13–17), “Honour the king” – a hard duty when Nero was on the throne.  It is true that in the Apocalypse we find denunciation of Rome as the persecutor of Christians (Rev 13 and 17).  Pergamum, the centre of the cult of the Emperor in Asia Minor, is “where Satan’s throne is” (2:13).  But this was hostility not towards the Empire as such, but towards the Empire as persecuting Christians.  In early Christian writers we find side by side professions of loyalty to Emperor and bitter denunciation of persecutors. [E.g.Tertullian, ad Scap. 2.]

      (b) The accession of Constantine ushered in a new era.  The State had failed to suppress the Church.  Constantine saw that the only course was to make an alliance with the Church.  Relations became openly friendly.  By the Edict of Milan universal toleration of all religions was proclaimed.  The laws of Constantine were tinged by Christian morality, but they were not specifically Christian.  The clergy were given equal privileges with pagan priests.  The Church was allowed to receive gifts.  During the lifetime of Constantine paganism was discouraged and immoral worship put down, but it was left for his successor to issue definite edicts against heathenism as heathenism.  But very soon we find evidence of a tendency to be content no longer with a mere alliance of Church and State, but to aim at something like identification.  The State was ready to purchase the support of the Church by lending the support of the secular arm for the suppression of heretics or heathen.  Before the close of the fourth century heresy and paganism had become offences against the civil law.  Further, the State began to find in bishops valuable civil servants and to assign to them a share in the civil administration.  The Church had in time to pay the price.  If the Church’s laws were enforced by the power of the State upon those who defied them, the State might not unreasonably claim a voice in the making and amending of such laws.  If a bishop was an important government official, the State might not unreasonably expect to be consulted in his selection and appointment.  Above all the Emperor assumed a position of supreme importance in the Church.  If a heathen Emperor was a minister of God, a Christian Emperor was “the Lord’s anointed”, endowed with an almost priestly office.  Even Constantine could say “You are bishops of matters within the Church: I also am the bishop ordained by God of matters without the Church.”  The line of distinction between the Church and the State became more and more obliterated.  A new ideal grew up of a great Christian commonwealth, at once State and Church, like Israel of old.  Heresy was regarded not only as disloyalty to the Church but as treason to the State.  Old Testament notions were freely applied.  The State and the Church were regarded as two aspects of one visible Christian society, “the City of God.”  So far as the old conflict between State and Church survived, it passed into a conflict between the civil authorities and the spiritual authorities, regarded as different classes of officials in one and the same society.  Since we are still suffering from the effects of this fusion of Church and State, it may be well to pause and consider some of the features of the change.

      (i) The first result was a confusion between the principles of civil and the principles of ecclesiastical authority.  The State has not only the right but the duty of compelling obedience to its laws, if need be, by methods of force.  Such laws are binding upon all its subjects alike.  On the other hand the Church, if she is loyal to the teaching of Christ, can only enforce obedience to her laws by spiritual penalties, in the last resort by expulsion from her fellowship.  Further, she can only claim such obedience from her own children.  Persecution and the employment of force to compel men to come into the Church or to submit to her laws is wrong and contrary to the spirit of the Gospel. [For certain qualifications, see W. Temple, Church and Nation, pp. 16–19.]  The source of all the Church’s life and order is loyalty to Christ, and personal adhesion to Christ cannot be brought about by compulsion. If by persecution the Church could make men Christians, the Church would be right to persecute. But methods of force can only make nominal Christians : they cannot create a lively faith. The immediate result of the identification of Church and State was to flood the Church with nominal Christians. It cost less to profess to be a Christian than to make no profession.

      (ii) Further, the authority of the Church should go deeper than that of the State. Civil legislation can never go very far in advance of public opinion. The State should indeed enforce the principles of universal morality. It has been well called ‘the armed conscience of the community’ : but just because the community contains many who are not prepared to accept the full Christian standard of living, the State cannot go beyond the public conscience of the day.  The Church, on the other hand, is bound to enforce upon her members the full moral teaching of Christ: she asserts not only those laws of morality that the State asserts, but others which it would not be reasonable to expect any who are not Christians to accept.  The confusion between the laws of the Church and the laws of the State inevitably resulted in a lowering of the Christian standard.  The attempt to enforce full Christian morality could only end in failure.  In popular practice the moral demands of Christ were identified with the average morality of the day – the morality of a world that had become Christian only in name.  A double standard of Christian practice was set up.  Full Christian morality was expected at most from the clergy.  The laity were to be content with something less exacting.

      (c) In mediaeval times the relations between Church and State were dominated by ideas that were inherited from earlier days.  In theory the Emperor and the Pope were the two heads of one “Holy Roman Empire”.  In England the same ideal was reproduced in miniature.  In Saxon times there was very considerable confusion between Church and State.  There were no separate Church courts and no clear distinction between national and ecclesiastical assemblies.  The fellowship between Church and State was so intimate and their mutual understanding so complete that there arose no necessity for any exact definition of their relationship.  With the coming of the Normans England was brought into closer connection with the Continent and the papacy.  A separation was effected between civil and ecclesiastical courts.  A distinction was recognized between the canon law which was administered in the Church courts and the common law which was administered in the civil courts.  But Church and State were none the less identified.  Every Englishman was regarded as ipso facto a member of the national Church.  Whatever laws existed were enforced upon all Englishmen alike.  Breaches of the Church’s law were punished by civil penalties and breaches of civil law by ecclesiastical penalties.  Excommunication involved not only loss of Church privileges but loss of civil rights.*  When the Church claimed to withdraw her officers from the jurisdiction of the civil courts and to try them in her own courts, there was no idea of any rebellion against the State.  The claim is rather to be viewed as a dispute between two sets of officials of one single Church-State as to the limits of their respective jurisdiction.  Church and State were not even regarded as two distinct societies composed of the same people, but as one great all-embracing divine society.  The quarrels between kings and bishops were quarrels between heads of two departments in one community.**

            [*It is from this point of view that we must consider persecution, namely, as the lending to the Church by the State of the force of secular authority in order to compel obedience to the Church’s authority on questions of doctrine or practice.  So in 1400 Parliament supported the Church by passing a statute for the burning of heretics, and fourteen years later by a supplementary Act put at the disposal of the Church the organization of the State for hunting out the Lollards.  Heresy was regarded not only as disloyalty to the Church but as disloyalty to the State.]

            [**“The word Churchman means to-day one who belongs to the Church as against others.  In the Middle Ages there were no others, or if there were they were occupied in being burnt.  A Churchman meant one who belonged to the Church in the narrower sense of its governing body – an ecclesiastic, as the word implies; just as statesman today means not a member but an officer actual or potential of the State” (Figgis, Churches in the Modern State, p. 189).  There were, of course, the Jews, who carried on a precarious existence without any assured rights, dependent upon the caprice or the poverty of the ruling classes.  But no mediaeval Christian would have taken much account of the Jews.]

      This mediaeval point of view was destined to be shattered by the Reformation, but it explains many of the features of that troubled time.  All parties persecuted because all parties could have no conception of a state of society in which more than one religion was tolerated.  Catholics and Protestants agreed that Church and State must remain coextensive.  They differed as to the nature of the Church that they desired.  Even the Puritans for a long time did not wish to separate from the Church of England: they wished to change the Church of England into the kind of Church that they preferred and to make all Englishmen submit to it.  Hooker can still write: “There is not any man of the Church of England but the same man is also a member of the commonwealth; nor any man a member of the commonwealth, who is not also of the Church of England.” [Eccl. Pol. viii.]  Hooker did not suppose that the Church’s spiritual authority was derived from the State or that the Church was simply a Government department for dealing with religion.  But his eyes were blinded by the traditional thought and customs of centuries.  He could not conceive of a day when Church and State should no longer be coextensive.  Moreover, in Elizabeth’s day it was easy to confuse the desire for national unity against external foes with the desire for the religious unity of the English nation.  But even while Hooker wrote, his theory was breaking down.  Elizabeth was, in practice, compelled to tolerate nonconformists even though they had to endure severe restrictions.  Since her day the idea that the Church of England is simply the “nation on its religious side” has become more and more contrary to the facts.  The spread of toleration has wrecked any identification of Church and State.  Quite rightly we enjoy the fullest toleration of all religious beliefs.  With a very few exceptions the fullest rights of citizenship are granted to men of every creed or none.  Accordingly a new situation has arisen, demanding a fresh consideration of the relations between Church and State.

      § 2.  We may now turn to the changes in the relations between Church and State made at the Reformation.

      (a) As we saw, the Church assigned to the Christian Emperor a unique position.  He was regarded as the Lord’s anointed, the successor of the sacred kings of Judah.  In mediaeval theory the Emperor was the coequal head with the Pope of the City of God.  So, too, in England there has been from the first a very real Royal Supremacy.  It was in no sense created at the Reformation.  Our Article asserts no new doctrine when it claims for Elizabeth “that ... prerogative which we see to have been given to all godly princes in Holy Scriptures by God Himself, that they should rule all estates and degrees committed to their charge by God, whether they be Ecclesiastical or Temporal, and restrain with the civil sword the stubborn and evildoers.”  In practice the Royal supremacy was exercised in the following directions:

      (i) The King regarded himself as the guardian of justice within his realm.  It was his duty to see to the safety of the bodies and property of his subjects.  Their souls were in the care of the Church.  As such he claimed to prevent any external power, such as the Pope, from exercising authority over persons or property within his kingdom, except by permission. [In theory, at least, no appeal might be made from the Church courts to Rome without the royal permission.  Papal legates needed the King’s consent before landing in England.  English bishops could only act as papal legates with the King’s sanction.]  Further, he saw that the Church obeyed her own laws and did not encroach upon the authority of the State.  New canons could only be made subject to the King’s approval.  The Supremacy “was essentially, therefore, a regulating force, the function of which was to decide in what spheres and under what conditions the spiritual power which it recognized as independent in origin and authority should act. [Wakeman, History of the Church of England, note D.]  The King did not claim any spiritual authority. Rather he supervised the administration of the Church from outside.

      (ii) But the King was no less the first layman of the Church and her champion.  As such it was his duty to protect the Church and see that she had free scope for her work.

      (b) We must consider the changes made by Henry VIII in the light of such ideas as these.  What changes were actually made?

      (i) The authority of the Pope was disallowed.  In theory the jurisdiction claimed by the Pope was purely spiritual.  The term “papal supremacy” came to be used only after his power in England had come to an end.  “From the point of view of the King it was simply a part of the Church system which he allowed or disallowed so far as it seemed harmless or harmful to the realm at large.” [Collins, C.H.S. Lectures, III .p. 34.]  No doubt there were times, especially between the eleventh and fourteenth centuries, when the Pope claimed temporal authority in England.  A weak King was not above purchasing the support of the Pope by allowing his claim to bestow the crown of England on whom he would.  But any such recognition of papal authority was vigorously repudiated, e.g. in the statute of Praemunire, and was never generally allowed.  So the relation of the Pope towards the English Church was a spiritual relation.  There is no denying that, especially at certain times, he exercised very considerable authority over the English Church.  It became customary for archbishops to receive from him the gift of the Pallium and to take an oath of obedience to him on receiving it.  He often filled vacant sees.  Appeals of all kinds were made to him.  The theory came to be held that canon law derived its authority from the Pope, and hence the Pope and the Pope alone could dispense from it.  Accordingly, we find an exceedingly strict and logical system of Church law which was in practice never observed, because it could be evaded by dispensations.  Its strictness was only a source of profit to the papal officials.  When we consider the very wide field that this system covered, we can see that the power of dispensation gave to the Pope immense political importance, e.g. in the matter of marriages.  The immediate cause of Henry’s breach with Rome was the refusal of the Pope to declare his marriage with Catherine null and void, and that refusal was based on purely political calculations.  But England was tired of papal exactions.  The loyalty of the Church to the Holy Father had expired under the burdens that he had laid upon her.  In 1534 Convocation declared that “The Pope of Rome hath no greater jurisdiction conferred on him by God in Holy Scripture, in this kingdom of England, than any other foreign Bishop.”  The Church of England claimed that such jurisdiction over her as he had enjoyed had only been by her free consent.  He had proved himself unworthy to exercise it, and therefore, since she was in no way bound to bestow it, it was taken away.  This repudiation of papal authority was accepted by the whole Church under pressure from the Crown.  “The civil power forbade, under penalties, any recourse to the authority which, as a matter of fact, the Church of England had just repudiated.”

      (ii) In 1531 Henry, in order to ensure the submission of the clergy, demanded the consent of Convocation to a new form of title.  He claimed to be “Supreme Head of the English Church and Clergy”.  The title was accepted by Convocation, with the important qualification, “so far as the law of Christ allows.”  In a letter addressed to the Northern Convocation, Henry expressly disclaimed any new authority in spiritual matters.  In 1534 he was recognized by Parliament as “only supreme head on earth of the Church of England”.  Further, in the same year the act for the submission of the clergy gave the authority of Parliament to arrangements already agreed to by Convocation in 1532.  Convocation had consented that it should only meet by the King’s writ and that new canons might only be promulgated by the King’s license.  On the other hand, the King’s assent to the meeting and the promulgation of canons was not to be withheld arbitrarily.  So far nothing revolutionary had been done.  The novel title “Supreme head” was capable of a good interpretation. [Cranmer, indeed, in his examination shortly before his death gave a very mild interpretation of the title: “Every king in his own realm is supreme head. ... Nero was head of the Church, that is in worldly respect of the temporal bodies of men, of whom the Church consisteth: for so he beheaded Peter and the Apostles.  And the Turk, too, is head of the Church of Turkey.... The king is head and governor of his people which are the visible Church ... wherein he was named supreme head of the Church, there was never other thing meant?]  The control claimed by the Crown over ecclesiastical legislation was no greater than had been claimed by earlier kings: it was only made more positive and definite.  On the other hand, “Although it is true that nothing had been done except to define and formulate rights of the Crown in relation to the Church which had been frequently insisted upon and exercised in past ages, still it was equally true that their revival and exercise by a King of the character of Henry VIII at a time in the history of England when kingly authority was exceptionally strong, practically introduced a new state of things.  There was no new principle involved in the relations of Church and State, but the mutual influence of the two bodies upon each other was altered.” [Wakeman, History of the Church of England, p. 215.]

      (iii) But the use by Henry VIII of his supremacy did not stay here.  The Supremacy Act in 1534 included among his powers “full power and authority ... to visit, repress, redress, reform, order, correct, restrain and amend all such errors, heresies, abuses, offences, contempts and enormities, whatsoever they be, which by any manner spiritual authority or jurisdiction ought or may lawfully be reformed ... or amended.”  This implied a claim not only to supervise the fulfillment of their proper duties by spiritual authorities but also himself to exercise spiritual jurisdiction.  This new claim was exercised without any hesitation or scruple.  After being dropped by Mary, it was revived by Elizabeth in the form of the Court of High Commission, which was only finally abolished in 1641.  Further, in 1535 Henry delegated his powers to Cromwell, who carried out a visitation in the King’s name.  This was only one act that showed that the Crown claimed to govern the Church just in the same manner as it governed the State.  There is no need to enter into details.  It was a period of constitutional anarchy in Church and State alike.  The Church was powerless in Henry’s hands.  He was restrained by no scruples from carrying out his will.  No precedents for the use of the Royal Supremacy can fairly be quoted from such a time.

      (c) The use of the title “Supreme Head” was continued by Edward VI and by Mary up to the time of her marriage with Philip in 1554.  It was then dropped and has never since been revived.  When Elizabeth came to the throne in 1558 she only claimed the title “Supreme Governor”.  The “Supreme Head” statute was never re-enacted.  She was unwilling to be addressed as the head of the Church of England, maintaining “that this honour is due to Christ alone, and cannot belong to any human being soever.”  Accordingly the old Article was very largely rewritten, and our present Article simply explains the title “Supreme Governor” – “We attribute to the Queen’s Majesty the chief government.”  Elizabeth took the greatest pains to define and limit the constitutional meaning of her supremacy.  In 1559 she appended the Injunctions, “An admonition to simple men deceived by the malicious,” referred to in our Article.  This, in very similar language to the Article, insisted that she only claimed the authority “of ancient time due to the Imperial Crown of this realm, that is, under God to have the sovereignty and rule over all manner of persons born within these, her realms, dominions and countries, of what estate, either ecclesiastical or temporal they be, so as no other foreign power shall, or ought to have, any superiority over them.”  Further, the Queen wrote with her own hand the addition to Article XX stating that “The Church” (not the Crown) “hath power to decree rites and ceremonies and authority in controversies of faith.”  In the Royal Supremacy, as defined in our present Article, there is nothing to which the Church can reasonably object.  In practice it includes the following claims:

      (i) No Englishman can claim to be withdrawn from the jurisdiction of the Crown in virtue of any office that he may hold in the Church.  The Crown is to rule “all estates and degrees committed to their charge by God, whether they be Ecclesiastical or Temporal.”

      (ii) The King is to be the guardian of all forms of justice.  In the civil courts judges act in the King’s name.  They receive authority not to make but to interpret and administer laws.  So in the enforcement of the Church’s laws, the King, in virtue of his sacred office as first layman, is to dispense justice.  That does not mean that he makes the laws of the Church or can alter them, but that he undertakes to see that the Church observes her own laws and that justice is meted out in accordance with them.

      (iii) It is his duty to keep the balance between Church and State and to see that each side faithfully observes its side of the compact.  Thus Queen Elizabeth in 1572 forbade Parliament to discuss bills concerning religion “unless the same should be first considered and liked by the clergy”.  Again, in 1593 she wrote to the Speaker: “If you perceive any idle heads ... which will meddle with reforming the Church or transforming the commonwealth and do exhibit any Bills to such purpose, that you receive them not, until they be viewed and considered of those who it is fitter should consider of such things and can better judge of them.”

      § 3.  The relation of the Church of England to the State today can only be understood in the light of previous history.  It is not the result of the consistent working out of any theory, but of gradual growth and development.  Much that appears at first sight illogical and absurd is a survival from past days when conditions were very different from the present.

      (a) We find the Crown in possession of considerable authority in Church matters.  We saw how from the time of Constantine such a position was given to the Christian King.  This position was a personal one.  It was given to him as a loyal son of the Church, “a godly prince,” at a time when princes governed in person.  Further, it was no arbitrary or unlimited power that was bestowed, but it was assumed that the King would exercise it subject to certain limitations and with due respect to the Church’s own rights and laws, according to precedent and custom.*  Today the personal position of the King has completely changed.  The real power has been transferred to the Prime Minister, the Cabinet and Parliament.  The King no longer governs in person.  As Churchmen we maintain that this has made all the difference.  The King has no moral right to delegate the authority given by the Church to him personally, as the “eldest son of the Church”, to some secular official or body, whose relation to the Church in no way resembles his own.  The Prime Minister is not bound to be a Christian.  The Cabinet or Parliament may contain at any time a majority of Jews or agnostics.  Further, there is a tendency to regard the authority of Parliament as absolutely unlimited, even in dealing with the Church.  The respect for the Church’s independence which was tacitly implied and acted on in the original relationship to the Crown is in danger of being ignored.**

            [*“No one would probably deny that, as a matter of fact, when the Church admitted the Crown to a share in her concerns, whether it was in Constantine’s day or Charlemagne’s, or at the Reformation or under Louis XIV, it was to a real King understood to be both a Christian and a Churchman that she consented to yield this power” (Dean Church, On the Relations between Church and State, p. 17).]

            [**“Legally the position of the Crown in the civil government is not much changed from the days of Edward the Confessor: politically and constitutionally it is altogether changed.  As a power it is a ministry or a Parliament: as a person, the Crown stands at the head of a nation, like all other nations broken up into recognized and tolerated parties, and is bound to neutrality....  Statesmen cling with inconsistent tenacity to a notion of ecclesiastical supremacy entirely different from that which they entertain of temporal: and are taken aback at the idea of limitations in the one, which they have all their lives assumed as first principles in the other” (op. cit. p. 51).]

      (b) A clear instance of the fruits of this change is seen in the appointment of bishops and the exercise of Crown patronage.  It was one thing for the King as first layman of the Church to nominate bishops.  It is quite another thing for a Prime Minister who may not be a churchman to do so.  No doubt this implies no claim on the part of the Crown to bestow spiritual authority.  The man nominated receives his spiritual authority solely through consecration.*  But logically the system is quite indefensible.  It can only be urged that on the whole it works very well.  Prime Ministers of all parties have of late years conscientiously tried to find the best men.  It avoids the creation of anything like parties in a diocese supporting rival candidates.  But we must remember it may cause trouble at any time.  An unscrupulous Prime Minister might force a conflict upon the Church by a series of political choices or the deliberate selection of an unorthodox candidate.

            [*The actual process is this. The Crown nominates a man and issues a writ commanding the chapter of the diocese to elect him and the archbishop to confirm the election.   Disobedience would legally incur severe penalties. But resistance has more than once been threatened, and the possibility of it is a certain safeguard.  In 1733 the appointment of Rundle to the bishopric of Gloucester was successfully opposed on the ground of Deism.  He was consoled with a bishopric in Ireland!]

      (c) A more serious grievance increasingly felt in the early years of this century is the inability of the Church to legislate for herself.  All new legislation requires the consent of the Crown, of Convocation representing the clergy, and of Parliament.  In old days Parliament was in a real sense a “House of Laymen”.  All members were churchmen and were elected by churchmen.  As representing the laity they could rightly claim a voice in Church legislation.  Today, as the result of toleration, there are quite rightly no religious tests either for members of Parliament or for electors.  Under present conditions there is nothing to prevent the majority of members from being Roman Catholics, Nonconformists, Jews or atheists.  Yet all fresh Church legislation, on however sacred or domestic a subject, requires their consent before it can be enforced. [“The understanding never was that the ecclesiastical power should be transferred to a body of men, neither representing the Church nor identified with her in feeling, in purpose, in belief, into whose hands by the effect of political changes, had passed in reality the old civil and temporal functions of the Crown” (op. cit. p. 52).]  We may fairly claim that men who do not profess the Christian religion or who belong to bodies that have deliberately separated themselves from the Church and organized themselves in opposition to her, have no moral right to interfere in matters that belong to her own internal life and organization.  The whole situation is a relic of the days when every citizen was a member of the Church.

      This grievance has been alleviated by the passing of the Enabling Act in 1919.  By this Act a National Assembly of the Church of England has been set up with the power of initiating legislation under conditions that give it a reasonable chance of receiving the sanction of Parliament.  The Assembly consists of three Houses.  The House of Bishops is composed of the members of the Upper Houses of Convocation, the House of Clergy of the members of the Lower House of Convocation, and the House of Laity of representatives elected by the representative electors in the several Diocesan Conferences.  The method of procedure is as follows.  The Assembly resolves that legislation on some matter relating to the Church is desirable.  In order to give practical effect to the resolution, it is embodied in a “measure”.  The measure in the form that it is passed after discussion by the Assembly is passed on to a Legislative Committee of the Assembly, which forwards the measure to a special Ecclesiastical Committee of both Houses of Parliament, with any comments or explanations that it thinks desirable.  The Ecclesiastical Committee then drafts a report on the measure containing its views on its expediency and its relation to the constitutional rights of all His Majesty’s subjects.  This report before being presented to Parliament must be shown to the Legislative Committee of the Assembly and the two committees may if they desire confer together.  The next step lies with the Legislative Committee.  If it so desires, the measure and report together are presented to Parliament, but it has the power of withdrawing the measure at this stage, so as to avoid a direct conflict between the Assembly and Parliament in the case of an unfavourable report.  After the report has once been presented, any member of either House of Parliament may propose a resolution that the measure be submitted to the King for his assent.  A resolution of both Houses is necessary, and, after receiving the Royal Assent, the measure has all the force of an Act of Parliament.  It is to be noticed that Parliament may approve or reject but cannot alter the measure.

      By this Act the possibility of new legislation receiving the consent of Parliament has been considerably increased.  Under the old conditions time was grudged for Church measures and as they were in no way a source of party profit, the Government was unwilling to grant special facilities.  This gave opportunity for an individual member who was hostile to the Church to block the motion.  The enemies of the Church deliberately opposed all proposals which would increase her efficiency.  Since the Enabling Act came into operation, many useful measures of the Assembly have passed through Parliament and received the Royal Assent.  With the pressure on the time of Parliament arising from the troubled events of the period since 1919 the legislation demanded by the changing circumstances of the Church could hardly have received proper attention in any other way.  The rejection of the proposed Revised Prayer-Book by Parliament in 1927 and again in 1928 brought disappointment and dismay to many church people.  A serious point of principle was no doubt involved in Parliament’s decision to reject a Book officially proposed by the Convocations and the Assembly, but since 1928 general opinion in the Church has become much less disposed to regard the decision as a disaster. [There was a strong minority opinion in the Church against some features of the new Book; Parliament probably rightly judged that if sanctioned it would not have brought about a real settlement.]  A fresh and more promising approach to the revision of the ordering of the Church’s life and worship is now being made by the discussion of a new body of Canons.  If in this way the ecclesiastical law is clarified and adapted to present conditions and the system of Church Courts is revised so as to command general confidence, the Church will be in a better position to undertake the work of liturgical revision with an orderly and united purpose.†

      Until new Canons are made it remains by no means easy to determine what the law of the Church is on many points.  During the Middle Ages the Church of England accepted the canon law of the Western Church with a certain amount of local canon law.  In origin this canon law was partly the customary law of the Church, partly the decisions of councils, partly the decrees of Popes either genuine or forged.  At first it simply represented the mind of the Church as declared in her decisions on particular cases with references to particular circumstances and was observed only in so far as it was enforced by the bishops, and thus continued to represent the mind of the Church.  In time this was systematized and came to be viewed as resting not on the mind of the Church but on the authority of the Pope and was administered as a legal system.  When the authority of the Pope was repudiated, the system was shattered. A return was made to earlier principles.  Much of the old canon law no longer represented the mind of the Church and was therefore rightly abolished.  A revision was needed, and a committee was appointed to make such a revision with a view to giving it the authority of statute law.  Till then the old canon law was declared still binding on the clergy “so far as it be not contrary to the statutes of the realm”.  An attempt at revision was made, the “Reformatio Legum Ecclesiasticarum”, but it never received authority, so that we are theoretically bound to what was left of the old canon law.  This position is, however, modified by three considerations: (i) Much of the old law was deliberately abrogated by the Church’s own acts during the Reformation and the laying down of new rules of worship, e.g. the restoration of communion in both kinds and the abolition of compulsory confession.  (ii) It is a principle of canon law that it is abrogated by “desuetude”, i.e. by the deliberate giving up of a practice or by the adoption of a definite practice to the contrary.  This is evidence that the law abrogated no longer represents the mind of the Church.  Much of the old law has in this way ceased to be authoritative.  In other words, the present canon law of the English Church is that which the English Church today as a matter of fact uses.  (iii) From time to time the Church of England has made new canons, e.g. those of 1603, and changes have been made in the Prayer-Book.

      The Report of the Archbishop’s Commission on Canon Law, issued in 1947, under the title “The Canon Law of the Church of England”, contains a draft of a complete body of new Canons to take the place of the Canons of 1603.  Such a new body of Canons, together with the Book of Common Prayer and Statutory Provisions, will, it is hoped, “give the Church a body of law, simple, up-to-date, and sufficient for its needs, without either being too detailed or revolutionizing the characteristics of our law, and will, at the same time, leave the ancient Canon Law as the source of the principles of our ecclesiastical jurisprudence”.† [See Report, p. 86.]

      (d) Yet another disturbing result of the transference of authority from the King to a secular body is seen when we turn to the disciplinary system of the Church.  In the Middle Ages the Church had her own system of courts, the archdeacon’s, the bishop’s, the archbishop’s. [We must remember that Church courts dealt with a very wide range of cases.  They included not only questions of Church discipline and property, but e.g. marriages and wills.]  Appeals could be made from a lower to a higher court.  In practice appeals were carried from the archbishop’s court to the Pope, in spite of many efforts to check this by legislation.  In fact, in order to save time and trouble appeals were often made to the Pope in the first instance.  The result of this custom and of the centralization of authority in the Pope was to weaken the Church courts.  They naturally tended to fall into disuse, being superseded by papal jurisdiction.  At the Reformation appeals to Rome were forbidden.  It was laid down in the statute of the Submission of the Clergy that they should be made to the Crown instead, and that the King should on each occasion appoint a court of commissioners to try the particular case.  This was only intended as a temporary measure, until the reformation of canon law was completed and the system of Church courts reconstituted.  As we have seen, this reform was never carried through, and the Crown by repeated use of its powers acquired the right of appointing the members of a final court of appeal for ecclesiastical cases known as the Court of Delegates.  The position of such a court, so long as ecclesiastics were appointed, might be perfectly satisfactory, though there was no guarantee that it would be so.  But in 1833 by Act of Parliament, without the consent of the Church, as the result not of any deliberate policy, but of a series of accidents, muddles and misadventures, the jurisdiction of the Court of Delegates was transferred to the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council.  This committee is a purely civil body, originally called into being for purely civil purposes.  It may consist entirely of lawyers who are not even Christians and may possess no sympathy with the life of the Church and no qualifications for deciding on questions of doctrine, which call for more than a merely legal knowledge.  So by an Act of very doubtful authority the judicial supremacy granted to the King personally as a churchman has been transferred to a purely secular court.  Its unspiritual nature is sufficiently shown by the fact that it cannot inflict those spiritual punishments which are the only fitting penalty for grave cases of spiritual disobedience, such as excommunication or deprivation of orders.  The appointment of two bishops to act as assessors since 1876 cannot turn a civil court into a spiritual court.  Hence churchmen have as a matter of conscience widely refused to recognize the authority of this court.  They hold that, “The Crown being supreme over all causes has the right to appoint such a court” (i.e. a court of final appeal).  “But this right must be exercised in accordance with the Church constitution, otherwise the court will lack spiritual authority, which can only be derived from the Church, and therefore its decision cannot be accepted as valid.” [Crosse, Church and State, p. 100.]  The Church of England is placed in the unhappy position of having no final court of appeal for questions of Church order and discipline whose decisions are binding on the conscience of all her members.  The result is disciplinary chaos tempered by episcopal good advice and a practical disuse of ecclesiastical courts.  Much is said about “clerical lawlessness”.  Such lawlessness can only be remedied by a revival of a proper system of Church courts.*  It is well also to remember that lay members should equally be subject to Church discipline.  Our present unhappy condition is partly a legacy from days when civil and ecclesiastical courts were looked on as parts of the judicial system of one single Church-State, partly the result of the transference to the Crown of powers that had been seized by the Pope, partly the result of sheer dullness of imagination.  But the Church of England can never do her work satisfactorily until it is remedied.† [The proposed new Canons include a revised system of Church Courts.]

            [*Cp. The Report of the Royal Commission on Ecclesiastical Discipline, c. x., esp. the following sentences: “A court dealing with matters of conscience and religion must, above all others, rest on moral authority if its judgments are to be effective.  As thousands of clergy, with strong lay support, refuse to recognize the jurisdiction of the Judicial Committee, its judgments cannot practically be enforced.  Those who most desire to repress irregularities are those who have most to gain by the substitution of an effective tribunal for a court which, because it is powerless, encourages rather than represses disorder.  The establishment of a court, the authority of which could not be disputed, would destroy any foundation for the claim now in fact made by a section of the clergy to decide for themselves the limits of canonical obedience” (p. 67).]

      (e) It may be perhaps urged that these conditions are the inevitable result of Establishment.  The reply is that they are not the result of Establishment as such, but of the unfortunate terms on which the Church of England is established.  We have only to turn to Scotland to see a Church there established on very different terms.  The Established Church of Scotland appoints its own chief ministers: it is free to legislate for itself, and such legislation is recognized as valid by the civil courts: it possesses a complete system of Church courts, with a final court of appeal possessed of due spiritual authority.  It combines establishment with spiritual autonomy.  Further, there has been much confusion about the meaning of “established”.  The Church of England “as by law established” in the original use of the phrase, e.g. in the canons of 1604, means “not as by law founded, but as by law settled: it refers not to the origin of the Church but to its control.” [Figgis, Churches in the Modern State, p. 9.]  There was no idea of drawing any contrast between Churches that are established and Churches that are not; the reference rather was to the actual terms of the relationship to the State.  Nor does the word imply that the State claims to have founded the Church.  In itself there need be nothing in State recognition to limit the liberty of the Church.

      The State might bestow privileges upon the ministers of the Church, give special facilities for Church worship and teaching and even make grants of land or money because it considered Christianity a desirable religion for its subjects, without affecting the discipline of the Church at all.  Whether the State decides to give to the Church any such privileged position, the State alone can determine.  “Establishment is in its nature a political fact: the adoption or maintenance of a national relation towards the Church.” [Moberly, Problems and Principles, p. 160.]  The Church cannot either establish or disestablish herself.

      Further, from the nature of things the Church cannot at any time be entirely free from all relation to the State.  The Church is called to work in the world.  She avails herself of all the resources of civilized society.  The safety of her gatherings depends upon the strong arm of the civil law.  Again, the tenure of all property depends upon the State for its security.  If it is given for a certain purpose it is the duty of the State to see that it is used for that purpose.  As early as A.D. 269 we find the Church appealing to the heathen Emperor Aurelian in order to recover Church property which Paul of Samosata refused to give up after his deposition by the Council of Antioch.  So the Free Churches are in varying degrees bound down by the possession of property.  If, say, a minister preached doctrine not in accordance with the trust-deed of his chapel and an action were brought to eject him, that action, involving questions of doctrine, would be tried by a civil court.  Some years ago the majority of the Wesleyan Methodist body desired to extend the number of years during which a minister could remain at one chapel.  To effect this they were compelled to apply to Parliament for leave to alter the terms of the trust on which their property was held.  A minority within the body threatened opposition, so that there was no chance of Parliamentary support.  Accordingly the reform was dropped.  Again, the same principle can be seen in the famous case of the Free Church of Scotland.  This body by a very large majority decided to amalgamate with a smaller Presbyterian body, the United Presbyterians.  The union was effected in face of the resistance of a small minority.  But this minority brought an action in the civil courts claiming the whole of the property on the ground that this union involved a change of doctrine, since the formularies of the United Presbyterians were looser than those of the Free Church.  Before the House of Lords the action was finally decided in favour of the minority, and it needed a special Act of Parliament to make possible an equitable apportionment of the property.  These examples are enough to show that the present limitations of self-government in the Church of England are not due simply to the Royal Supremacy or to Establishment.  If the Church were disestablished tomorrow the amount of liberty she possessed would depend upon the terms of disestablishment, that is, on the conditions on which she held whatever property she retained.

      Accordingly, behind any question of establishment, and in reality distinct from it, there lies the further and greater question: how far is the State ready to recognize the independent life of smaller societies within itself, to regard them as containing within themselves powers of development and growth, and to allow them to adapt their rules and constitutions to fresh circumstances?  That is one of the big problems of the future.  It affects not only the Church, but many other societies, such as trade unions.  We can only consider it here so far as it affects the Church.  Let us take one divergence which has already arisen between Church and State.  The State has by Act of Parliament seriously relaxed its laws of marriage.  It allows, for instance, the remarriage of divorced persons, innocent and guilty alike.  The man in the street cannot understand that the Church has not changed her law too.  Hence he cannot see why, when two persons are married according to the law of the land, they may be repelled from communion in church, on the ground that they are not married according to the Church’s law.  In other words, he cannot imagine that the Church can have a law of her own resting on other authority than that of the State.  The question may be obscured by establishment, but is at bottom independent of it.  Again, the case of the Free Church of Scotland suggests that the State is unwilling to allow a religious body the right to make new rules for itself.  It is quite possible that if we were disestablished we might be bound down, with very little power, say, to alter our Prayer-Book or make new canons.

      (f) In the face of present difficulties we are being thrown back upon first principles.  There exists today in Europe a greater variety of belief and practice than can be found at any time probably since the Empire became Christian.  We must face facts.  It is both useless and impertinent to pretend that a Theosophist or a Buddhist, or a votary of the “New Thought” or an agnostic is a Christian or a churchman because he is an English citizen.  It is not that such men interpret the will of Christ in one way and the Church in another way.  They do not recognize the authority of Christ at all, and do not even wish to discover what His will is, still less to submit to it.  More and more men are rejecting not simply Christian doctrine, but the whole Christian standard of morality.  It is becoming clear that the two in the long run stand or fall together.  The present age is impatient of mere convention.  Open disbelief is taking the place of secret indifference.  A bored acquiescence in Christianity, as the correct thing, is changing into a calculated rejection of Christ.  It is doubtful how long the current relations between Church and State will bear the strain.  Pressure of fact compels us to look for guidance to Scripture and the early Church.  We may find help, too, in a study of the mission field, where the essential principles of Church life stand out more clearly than at home.  The following lines of thought may be suggested as an outline of practical policy.

      (i) Perhaps the greatest danger that besets the English Church in its relation to the State is Erastianism.  On this view the supreme authority over religion rests with the State.  The Church is simply the Government department for dealing with religion and the clergy are a class of civil servants.  Hence it rests with the State to decide questions of doctrine, worship and discipline.  There is a good deal of Erastian thought current, all the more dangerous because it has not been put into words.  It is shown in the idea that all Englishmen have a right to be admitted to communion or that the law of the State concerning marriage binds the Church.  Against this we must insist that the authority of the Church, her rule of life and her ministry, depend not on the State but on Christ. [The taunt that we wish to reduce the Church to the level of a sect loses its force when we remember that the word “sect” comes from “sequor” , not “seco”.  The Church as a whole must be in the strict sense of the term a “sect” since it consists of those who follow Christ and are thereby distinguished from all others.  It is more important that the Church should consist of true Christians than that it should include all Englishmen.]  Were the Church disestablished tomorrow she would still be the Body of Christ: she would still preach God’s word and minister His sacraments.  Christ Himself gave authority to His Church to “bind and loose”: to submit to the commands of the State when they conflict with the law of Christ would be disloyalty to Him.  It would be to give to Caesar what belongs to God.  It is always possible that the Church may be faced with the alternative of consenting to the usurpation of authority by the State in deciding matters of doctrine and ordaining rites and ceremonies or else of going out into the wilderness naked and bleeding and stripped of all her possessions.

      (ii) Positively, we must work for Church reform, not necessarily disestablishment at all.  We believe as English citizens that we have a duty to the nation and that every opportunity should be given to the Church to influence the national life.  We must be prepared to sacrifice our own preferences on matters that are not vital in order to meet the needs and desires and even the prejudices of the nation (cp. 1 Cor 9:22).  On the other hand, in order that the Church may be her best self she needs greater power of action.  What is required is some means by which the Church may express her mind and alter or amend her rules.  It may be claimed that some improvement in this respect has taken place since the end of the first great war.  Certain reforms in the representation of the clergy in the Convocations were carried through by new Canons which received the Royal Assent in 1921.  The preponderance of the official element is now diminished, and more adequate representation is given to the parochial clergy, including the unbeneficed.  The setting up of the Church Assembly with a House of Laity has provided a statutory central organ for the expression of lay opinion, and, more locally, Diocesan Conferences and Parochial Church Councils have helped to bring the laity into active participation in the affairs of the Church.  But it cannot be said that the problem of forming, expressing, and giving effect to a corporate mind in the Church on important matters concerning her life and witness has yet been completely solved.  Again, we must strive for the restoration of an efficient system of Church courts leading up to a final court of appeal, such as will bind the consciences of all Church people.  Only when this has been attained can we hope for any efficient exercise of Church discipline over all who claim to be her members.  In short, the Church of England must demand from the State a fuller recognition of the independence of her own life, even if a price has to be paid for such recognition.

      (iii) On the other hand, the Church must fairly recognize the independence of the State.  Just as she no longer expects the State to compel all citizens to attend her services, so she must not expect the State to enforce on all its citizens the full Christian standard of morality.  Probably there never was a time when all the members of any State were at heart Christian.  Today it is unreasonable to expect men who reject the authority of Christ to accept, say, a strict law of marriage that is based on His authority.  The Church must be content to be able to enforce the Christian standard of life upon those who voluntarily are her members.  Those without we must leave to God’s judgment.  To attempt to enforce upon the world at large the full Christian standard can only end in degrading that standard.  What will in practice be enforced will be something lower than Christian which will at the same time be supposed to be Christian.

      Let us in conclusion recall the true work of the Church.  The Church exists to forward the Kingdom of God on earth, to lead all men to Christ, that in Him they may find their truest life.  She is to be “in the world but not of the world”.  She recognizes to the full the authority of the State as coming from God.  If she desires to preserve her own life from worldliness and from the intrusion of secular authority, it is not from any selfish motive, but because only so can she preserve within herself that salt of Christian living which is to be her gift to the world.  What is best for the Church will be best for the State in the long run.

      § 4.  As we saw, the discipline of the State differs from that of the Church, in that the State has the right of employing force to compel obedience.  The Church has always recognized the divinely given authority of the State (cp. Rom 13; 1 Pet 2:13–17).  The State exists because men as social beings can only realize themselves through a common life.  The existence of the State may be threatened in either of two ways, by lawlessness within or by enemies without.  In either case the State is bound to use force to maintain its own existence.  Public order is something that a right and wise use of force can ensure.  The State is concerned primarily with acts and not motives, and hence its discipline can differ from that of the Church.  The strong arm of the law is able to effect that outward obedience in those matters that are the concern of the State.

      (a) This is justification of that police action which is defended in the Article against the anarchial theories of Anabaptism.  The rulers have authority “to restrain with the sword the stubborn and evildoers”.  Our whole social order is backed in the last resort by force.  Under normal circumstances this is disguised.  Even so, unpleasant duties, such as paying taxes, are enforced by the aid of the policeman.  Men do them because they are obliged to.  So, too, in primitive communities disputes are settled by open violence.  The stronger party carries the day.  Among ourselves we have political conflicts.  At bottom the effective principle is the same.  “We count heads instead of breaking them.”  Modern events have shown that a powerful minority, smarting under a sense of injustice, may even now tear down the disguise and appeal to the sword.  Thus from its very constitution the State has the inherent right of using force for self-preservation.  This is not to say that the authority of the State is simply the will of the stronger or that the only motive to obedience is fear of punishment.  As civilization advances the use of force is abated.  Conduct becomes moralized.  Higher motives for obedience tend to supplant the lower.  But at bottom there must always be the appeal to force to put down disorder.

      (b) So, too, when the State’s existence is threatened by an external enemy, force may rightly be used to repel him.  That is, the State can call upon its citizens to take up arms in its defence.  Hence “It is lawful for Christian men, at the command of the Magistrate, to wear weapons and serve in the wars” (Latin, iusta bella).  This position was contested by the Anabaptists.  So today the Quakers and many other individual Christians argue that all war is evil, and the Christian, as such, is bound not to take part in it and even to endure suffering or death rather than fight.  The ordinary man finds it difficult to understand how the same persons can avail themselves of the protection of the State for their lives and property, which protection against internal disorder, as we have seen, depends in the last resort on force, and yet refuse to support the State in defending itself by war against destruction and pillage by external foes.  But their position raises in an acute form the problem of the Christian’s attitude to war.

      When we turn to the New Testament we find that our Lord accepted social conditions as He found them.  He did not directly attack abuses, such as war or slavery, rather He laid down principles through the acceptance of which such abuses would be abolished.  In the case of slavery there is no explicit condemnation in the New Testament.  S. Paul does not even bid Philemon set free Onesimus (Philemon v. 16).  Rather he exhorts slaves to do their work faithfully.  Yet in due time the conscience of Christendom came to see with increasing clearness that slavery was inconsistent with the principles of the Gospel, such as the unique value of the individual and the brotherhood of humanity.  Accordingly, slavery was mitigated and in time abolished.  So in the case of war, soldiers are not bidden to abandon their profession (e.g. Lk 3:14; Acts 10:48) and metaphors from the soldier’s life are freely employed.  War is recognized as a training ground of manly virtues.  Our Lord seems to approve of the use of armed force by the “kingdoms of this world” (εκ του κόσμου τούτου, i.e. having their origin from this world, Jn 18:36). [So, too, our Lord seems to teach that force is not intrinsically evil, but can be consecrated to the service of God, when He pictures the Good Shepherd as employing it to defend the sheep. in 101:11–12.]  On the other hand, we are coming increasingly to see that if men and nations were really Christian, war would be impossible.  War is simply the result of human sin and self-seeking.  It is a symptom of the depravity of the human heart.  Christianity sets itself not to abolish the symptom only but to root out the cause of the evil.  After all, war is simply the exhibition on the largest and most destructive scale of those fierce and antisocial passions which lie equally behind all acts of cruelty and injustice and are in utter antagonism to the Christian spirit of love.  The more Christian we become the more we are shocked at the horrors of war.  Only when the whole world is Christian can we hope for war to cease.  It cannot be put down by any external legislation.

      It may be asked, however, ought not the Christian to carry out literally the precepts of the Sermon on the Mount and refuse to offer resistance to any enemy?  One line of answer would be to point out that we have obligations not only to self but to society.  What our Lord forbids is the spirit of personal revenge.  If we ourselves alone are injured, we may be called on not to resist our enemy and even to suffer death.  Such non-resistance may be truly Christian.  But when the injury affects others, then we may be called on to resist.  The evildoer is to be resisted not that we may gratify our own spite, but that he may himself learn from his punishment and be reformed, and that society may be protected.  All war is sinful, and arises from unchristian ambitions and jealousies.  Yet the Christian fights not from personal animosity but to save his country.

      Further, as we have seen, the State is not as yet fully Christian.  It contains many citizens who are not even Christian in name.  It is arguable that a perfectly Christian State might be called on to render a literal obedience to the Sermon on the Mount by a policy of nonresistance, and to witness for Christ by suffering wrong patiently as our Lord did.  But a semi-Christian State cannot be under any such obligation.  The difficulty for the individual Christian is that he is compelled to live, as it were, on two levels.  As a member of the State he must assist the State to live up to its highest standard, and that standard includes resistance to evil by force.  As a Christian he believes that evil can never be conquered by force.  If he accepts State protection for his own personal safety, he can hardly refuse to help the State to defend itself against external enemies.  In a sinful world this dual standard is unavoidable. Human sin has made the best impossible.  We must choose the second best.

      Political and scientific developments in the first half of the twentieth century have, however, made the problem of war both more urgent and more difficult.  The total character of modern warfare, involving the mobilization of whole populations and their exposure to mass destruction by weapons of ever-increasing power, has made the idea of engaging in war repugnant to the conscience of the majority of mankind.  But this fact does not in itself preclude the possibility of a new war.  On the other hand the rise of totalitarian forms of government has increased the seriousness of the issues at stake in any conflict.  A desire to extend the range of their power and the domination of their ideas is characteristic of these governments, and their claim to control men’s minds as well as their actions makes the threat of their ultimate victory much more serious than a threat of conquest would have been in earlier ages.  A nation and society united in Christian conviction might renounce war and face the probable consequences, spiritual and material, with confidence.  But such a society does not anywhere yet exist.  Meanwhile the Church has a clear duty to work for the promotion of international justice and cooperation and for the elimination of poverty and discontent which in different parts of the world invite a resort to tyrannical forms of government.†

      (c) Again, the supreme penalty that the State can inflict is death.  Without doubt in earlier stages of society the death penalty was absolutely necessary as a deterrent.  It is approved by the conscience of the writers of the Old Testament and of the New (Gen 9:6; Exod 21:12; Acts 25:11, etc.).  Hence the cautious wording of the Article can hardly be criticized.  “The laws of the realm may punish Christian men with death, for heinous and grievous offences.”  Whether at any given time it is desirable to inflict the death penalty is left open.  That is a question that can only be decided by the reason and conscience of the particular community.†

 

Article  XXXVIII

Of Christian men’s Goods, which are not common

De illicita bonorum communicatione

The riches and goods of Christians are not common as touching the right, title, and possession of the same, as certain Anabaptists do falsely boast.  Notwithstanding, every man ought, of such things as he possesseth, liberally to give alms to the poor, according to his ability.

Facultates et bona Christianorum non sunt communia, quoad jus et possessionem (ut quidam Anabaptistae falso jactant); debet tamen quisque de his quae possidet, pro facultatum ratione, pauperibus eleemosynas benigne distribuere.

 

      Composed in 1553.

      § 5.  At the time of the Reformation certain Anabaptists advocated communism as an essential part of Christianity.  They based their claim on a literal imitation of the life of the earliest Christian community as described in the opening chapters of Acts.  There Christians are described as having “all things in common” (see esp. 2:44–45 and 4:32).  Such a claim, however, fails to take account of all the facts.  It is quite clear that such communism was the spontaneous product of the new spirit of brotherhood.  It was based not on any formal legislation but the sharing of a common temper and outlook.  It was neither compulsory nor universal.  S. Peter clearly asserts that Ananias had the right, if he so wished, to retain either his property or the money for which he sold it (54).  Mary the mother of S. Mark clearly possessed her own house, though she put it at the disposal of the community (Acts 12:12).  It is a certain inference from the facts of S. Paul’s life that he was able at times of crisis to draw upon considerable resources.  Both our Lord and the teaching of the New Testament generally inculcate the duty of almsgiving, which presupposes the retention of at least some private property (Mt 6:1 ff., etc., Rom 12:13; 1 Cor 16:2; 2 Cor 9:7; Heb 13:16; 1 Jn 3:17, etc.).  Outside Jerusalem no trace of communism is found.  Before many years had passed the Church of Jerusalem was in urgent need of financial assistance (Rom 15:25–28, etc.).  How far this was due to the conduct described above is an interesting question.

      Today a very similar demand is often made that the Church should definitely commit herself to that economic theory known as “socialism”. [It is much to be wished that the term “socialism” would only be employed in its proper sense.  As so used it signifies the view that the community as a whole should own all the means of production.  It is too often employed in a vague sense as meaning little more than “social reform”.  Socialism is not the same as communism, since it leaves room for a limited possession of private property.]  Our Lord is claimed as a socialist.  This demand rests upon unsound arguments.  Our Lord laid down general principles.  He did not formulate any system.  He left it to His disciples to work out those principles to meet the needs of successive ages.  If we believe that socialism is economically sound and will minister to the highest welfare of mankind, then we are bound to propagate it.  But we must allow that our views are not an essential part of the Christian faith.  Socialism has no place in the revelation of God.  Christians must be prepared to differ on such a subject.  All that loyalty to Christ demands is that whatever views they hold, they adopt them from Christian motives as the result of prayer, thought and study, not simply because they will fill their own pockets and keep them full.  Our Lord’s teaching about wealth may be summed up in two leading thoughts.  First, it is a great responsibility, to be used for the good not only of its owner but of others.  Secondly, it is a great temptation, leading its possessor to rely on self rather than God.  This teaching, we must note, applies not only to money but to all conspicuous gifts whether of mind or body.

      The Church is not tied down to any one economic theory, but it is bound to assert Christian principles.  That is where the Church has often failed.  It has made little or no protest against the exploitation of the poor and weak. [See the excellent statement, W. Temple, Church and Nation, p. 80 ff.]  Men have been allowed to suppose that Christian morality applies only to private life and not to business relationships.  Prominent members of the Church have been known to be getting money by means that involved the suffering and loss of their fellow men and women and the Church has never rebuked them.  Men have salved their conscience by gifts to the Church taken from money gained at the cost of the lives of their employees.  The Christian conscience has acquiesced in the existence of slums and the employment of sweated labour.  In all attempts at reform the Church has too often taken the side of wealth rather than righteousness.  These ugly facts underlie the demand that the Church should adopt socialism.  The Church is bound to face, in the light of the Gospel, the evils for which socialism claims to supply a remedy.  But she is not bound to accept any particular political or economic remedy without investigation.  She must always insist that external conditions by themselves cannot secure righteousness, though they may do much to hinder it.  The real root of all social problems lies in the perverted will and heart of man, in other words, in human sin.  No economic reconstruction apart from love can bring true and lasting satisfaction.

      The social measures which since the second world war have set up in this country, with the general support of public opinion, what is called “the Welfare State” must be welcomed by the Christian conscience as supplying remedies for many social evils.  Some credit for these measures must go to the diffusion of Christian ideals among our people, but circumstances arising from the war probably hastened what might otherwise have taken a long time to accomplish.  In this new situation the emphasis and direction of the duty of the Church to society will need some rethinking.  The Welfare State may go far towards giving “social security” at the cost of the sense of personal responsibility for self and others, a danger which can be counteracted only by an intelligent propagation of Christian teaching on family and social relations.  If the opportunities are wisely discerned and used, a wide sphere of voluntary service and influence remains open to effective Christian effort, and the official services themselves will not fulfill their possibilities unless individual Christians are ready to find a vocation in them.  The problem of the relation of the Church to contemporary society has thus changed in character.  The relief of economic need is no longer a primary concern.  The Church now has to discover how to make Christian standards effective in a society in which education is mainly under the direct control of the State, and the large-scale influence of rapid transport, the cinema, radio and television is a constant factor.†

 

Article  XXXIX

Of a Christian man’s oath

De jurejurando

As we confess that vain and rash Swearing is forbidden Christian men by our Lord Jesus Christ, and James his Apostle: So we judge, that Christian Religion doth not prohibit, but that a man may swear when the Magistrate requireth, in a cause of faith and charity, so it be done according to the Prophet’s teaching, in justice, judgment, truth.

Quemadmodum juramentum vanum et temerarium a Domino nostro Jesu Christo, et Apostolo ejus Jacobo, Christianis hominibus interdictum esse fatemur; ita Christianorum Religionem minime prohibere censemus, quin jubente magistratu in causa fidei et charitatis jurare liceat, modo id fiat juxta Prophetae doctrinam, in justitia, in judicio, et and veritate.

 

      Composed in 1553.

      § 6.  The objection of the Anabaptists, like that of the Quakers in later days, to the use of oaths rests upon a misunderstanding of Scripture of the same kind as those that we have already considered.  In Mt 5:33 ff. our Lord says, “Ye have heard that it was said to them of old time, Thou shalt not forswear thyself but shalt perform unto the Lord thine oaths: but I say unto you, Swear not at all. ... But let your speech be, Yea, yea; Nay, nay; and whatsoever is more than these is of the evil one.”  His words are re-echoed by S. James 5:12, “Above all things, my brethren, swear not, neither by the heaven, nor by the earth, nor by any other oath; but let your yea be yea, and your nay, nay (let yours be the yea, yea and the nay, nay, R.V. mg.), that ye fall not under judgment.”  These are the passages alluded to in the Article.

      To grasp the spirit of our Lord’s command, we must consider the meaning of an oath.  The idea of any obligation to speak the truth at all times and to all men is quite a late idea.  Primitive man only felt himself bound to speak the truth to particular men, e.g. his own kinsfolk, or under particular circumstances.  As the narratives of the Old Testament show, no moral blame whatever was felt to attach to untruthfulness to a stranger or an enemy.  Gradually the circle of men to whom truthfulness was felt to be a duty widened.  Christian morality proclaims that all men have a right to expect the truth (Eph 4:25).  Lying is anti-social.  The Christian, if he is faithful to Christ, is bound to speak the truth.  This is the real thought that underlies the exhortations of our Lord and S. James.  The oath is in origin a device to obtain truthfulness on a particular occasion, when truthfulness was not necessarily to be expected.  It is the solemn calling upon God to bear witness that a statement is true.  The use of oaths has always tended to produce a double standard of truthfulness.  Men come to feel that they are bound to speak the truth when they are on oath, but not otherwise.  Further, men try to evade the sanctity of oaths by quibbles and subterfuges.  Some oaths are held to be binding and others not (cp. Mt 23:16-22).  In short, the whole system of oaths, though necessary, is at best a makeshift.  What is wanted is not a code of oaths but a spirit of truthfulness.  Human selfishness and ingenuity will always endeavour to evade an oath, unless there is the right inward disposition.  Our Lord commands His disciples to speak the truth always, as being always in the presence of God.  Hence the need of oaths is removed.  The Christian will not have two standards of truth, one when he is on oath and one when he is not.  His simple “yea” or “nay” will be sufficient.  His whole speech will be on that high moral level to which the speech of the non-Christian is raised only temporarily and partially by the taking of an oath.

      If, then, the world was a Christian world and all men were disciples, our Lord’s command would be obeyed literally.  Oaths would rightly be abolished as contrary to the spirit of Christ.  But, as we saw, the State is not as yet a Christian society.  Its members are not all Christians.  Its action, therefore, cannot be guided by the full principles of Christian morality.  Hence it is compelled to retain and enforce oaths.  And the Christian, as a member of the State, will conform to the State’s rule in matters that concern the State.  To him, indeed, the oath will be superfluous, as he is equally bound to speak the truth at all times.  He will, however, be content to follow the example of His Master, who, though He gave the command “swear not at all”, yet was willing to be put on oath by Caiaphas and recognized the authority of the State (Mt 26:63). [The solemn asseverations used from time to time by S. Paul (e.g. 2 Cor 1”22; Gal 1:20, etc.) may be considered a form of oath.  They were needed because his converts had hardly yet reached the full Christian standard of morality.  They do not violate any Christian principle, since they in no way imply a double standard of truthfulness.]

 

List Of Books For Further Study

 

INTRODUCTION

See N. Micklem, Religion (Home University Library); E. O. James in The Study of Theology, c. ii (with bibliography).

On faith and conduct, see L. S. Thornton, Conduct and the Supernatural; V. A. Demant, The Religious Prospect (for Christian dogma in relation to social and political theories).

On the nature of Theology, see Lux Mundi, Essay ii, § 6, and Essay vi, § 1; Webb, A Century of Anglican Theology, Lect. iii; W. R. Matthews (editor), Dogma in History and Thought; essays by N. P. Williams and N. Micklem in The Study of Theology; Taylor, The Faith of a Moralist, esp. Vol. ii, c. ii; K. Barth, The Doctrine of the Word of God; E. Brunner, The Christian Doctrine of God, Dogmatics, Vol. i ; E. L. Mascall, Christ, the Christian and the Church, c. xiii.

 

THE THIRTY-NINE ARTICLES.  THEIR HISTORY AND PLACE IN THEOLOGY

For the background of English Church History, see J. R. H. Moorman, A History of the Church in England and the volumes in Stephens and Hunt’s History of the English Church, and for an excellent brief account, T. M. Parker, The English Reformation to 1558 (Home University Library).  For the Continental Reformation, see Kidd, The Continental Reformation, and Documents of the Continental Reformation, and for the Council of Trent his The Counter-Reformation.  See also Pullan, Religion Since the Reformation, Lects. i–iii.  The Protestant standpoint can be studied in Lindsay, History of the Reformation (two Vols.).  For a full history of the Articles, see Hardwick, A History of the Articles of Religion.

 

THE BEING OF GOD

For a defence of theism see Taylor’s essay in Essays Catholic and Critical and his article, “Theism,” in E.R.E.  For a clear statement of the Scholastic proofs of the existence of God, Joyce, Principles of Natural Theology.  Among larger works are A. M. Farrer, Finite and Infinite (a brilliant critical and constructive discussion of rational theology); E. L. Mascall, He Who Is (a discussion along modern Thomistic lines); Temple, Nature, Man and God; H. H. Farmer, The World and God and Towards Belief in God (the last three works containing a more idealistic and experiential approach).

On Israel’s faith in God see Hamilton, The People of God, Vol. i; Wheeler Robinson, Religious Ideas of the Old Testament; G. E. Wright, The Old Testament against its Environment (S.C.M. Press).

On divine personality, see Webb, God and Personality; Illingworth, Personality, Human and Divine, Lects. i–v.  Among more recent discussions, Quick, Doctrines of the Creed, c. iv; and on the use of the principle of analogy, A. M. Farrer, Finite and Infinite, esp. Part I; E. L. Mascall, Existence and Analogy (Longman).

See for a discussion of reserve in ascribing “possibility” to God, Mozley, The Impassibility of God; von Hugel, Essays, Vol. ii, pp. 165 ff.; Taylor, The Faith of a Moralist, Vol. ii, Lect. viii.

On divine providence, see H. H. Farmer, The World and God, cc. vi, xiii and xvi.

On the being and attributes of God see the books referred to above and Headlam, Christian Theology, The Doctrine of God; W. R. Matthews, God in Christian Thought and Experience; E. Brunner, The Christian Doctrine of God, Dogmatics, Vol. i.  For a discussion of divine transcendence and immanence see Temple, Nature, Man and God, esp. Lectures x and xi.

 

THE HOLY TRINITY

For a discussion of our Lord’s miracles, see A. Richardson, The Miracle Stories of the Gospels (S.C.M. Press).

For a study of the New Testament evidence, see A. E. J. Rawlinson, The New Testament Doctrine of the Christ.

See Glover, Conflict of Religions in the Early Roman Empire; Bevan, Stoics and Sceptics and Hellenism and Christianity; Halliday, The Pagan Background of Early Christianity; A. D. Nock’s essay in Essays on the Trinity and the Incarnation, ed. Rawlinson, on “Early Gentile Christianity and its Hellenistic Background”.

On the preparation for the doctrine of the Trinity in Judaism, see K. E. Kirk, “The Evolution of the Doctrine of the Trinity” in Essays on the Trinity and the Incarnation; J. Lebreton, Les Origines du Dogme de la Trinité.

For ebionism, see Bethune Baker, Christian Doctrine, pp. 62–68; Du Bose, Ecumenical Councils, c. iii; Tixeront, History of Dogmas, Vol. i, c. iv.

For docetism, see art. “Docetism” in E.R.E.; Du Bose, Ecumenical Councils, c. iii.

On dynamic and modalist monarchianism, see Mackintosh, Person of Christ, pp. 147 ff.; Tixeront, History of Dogmas, Vol. i, c. viii.

For Arianism, besides the histories of dogma, see Mackintosh, Person of Christ, c iv; Du Bose, Ecumenical Councils, cc. v and vi; Gwatkin, Studies of Arianism.

On the meaning of ousia, hypostasis and homoousios, see G. L. Prestige, God in Patristic Thought.

The early history of the doctrine of the Trinity may be studied in the standard histories of doctrine, of which Tixeront is the best for general use.  For more detailed treatment of the history see G. L. Prestige, God in Patristic Thought; Essays on the Trinity and the Incarnation, esp. iv, v, and vi; and for more systematic treatment, L. Hodgson, The Doctrine of the Trinity; K. Barth, The Doctrine of the Word of God; R. S. Franks, The Doctrine of the Trinity (Duckworth).

On the subject of this note see Temple, Nature, Man and God, esp. Lects. i, xii and xx, and Quick, Doctrines of the Creed, c. ii (for criticism of the traditional distinction between natural and revealed theology); for the neo-Reformed view, see E. Brunner, Revelation and Reason; K. Barth, The Doctrine of the Word of God; differences between Barth and Brunner on natural theology are set out in their discussion in E. Brunner and K. Barth, Natural Theology (Centenary Press); for a defence and exposition of the distinction between natural reason and supernatural revelation, see A. M. Farrer, The Glass of Vision, cc. i and ii. Cp. E. Gilson, Reason and Revelation in the Middle Ages.

 

THE INCARNATION

On the figure of Christ in the Gospels and on questions concerning faith and history in relation to the Gospels, see Hoskyns in Essays Catholic and Critical; Mysterium Christi (ed. Bell), Essays ii, iii and iv; A. E. J. Rawlinson, Christ in the Gospels; T. W. Manson, The Servant-Messiah; E. Brunner, The Mediator, cc. vi, xiii and xiv; D. M. Baillie, God Was in Christ, Sections i and ii.  On the moral perfection of Jesus, Quick, Doctrines of the Creed, c. xvii.

The best brief account of Apollinarius and his teaching is G. L. Prestige, Fathers and Heretics, c. v.  C. E. Raven, Apollinarianism, gives a fuller historical discussion.  See also Mackintosh, Person of Christ, pp. 196 ff.; R. V. Sellers, Two Ancient Christologies (for the place of Apollinarius in “Alexandrine” Christology).

For recent brief and sympathetic accounts, see G. L. Prestige, Fathers and Heretics, c. vi, and R. V. Sellers, Two Ancient Christologies, c. ii (on Antiochene Christology).  L. Hodgson in Appendix iv to Nestorius, The Bazaar of Heracleides (ed. Driver and Hodgson) raises some valuable points about the metaphysics of Nestorius.  Bethune Baker, Nestorius and his Teaching, defends Nestorius’ orthodoxy.

On the Council of Chalcedon and the merits of its Definition, see Mackintosh, Person of Christ, cc. x and xi; Temple, Christus Veritas, c. viii; Mozley’s essay in Essays Catholic and Critical; L. Hodgson’s essay in Essays on the Trinity and the Incarnation, esp. pp. 387 ff.; R. V. Sellers, The Council of Chalcedon (S.P.C.K.).  See also Bindley, The Oecumenical Documents of the Faith (ed. Green, 1950)

On the theology of the Incarnation, see, among older works, Gore, The Incarnation of the Son of God (Bampton Lectures) and Dissertations; Mackintosh, The Person of Christ; among more recent works, H. M. Relton, A Study in Christology; L. Hodgson, And Was Made Man and his essay in Essays on the Trinity and the Incarnation; L. S. Thornton, The Incarnate Lord; E. Brunner, The Mediator; D. M. Baillie, God Was in Christ.  On the relation between Christology and soteriology, Mozley’s essay in Mysterium Christi is most valuable.  For discussion of the kenotic theory see Temple, Christus Veritas, c. viii; Quick, Doctrines of the Creed, c. xiii; Baillie, op. cit., c. iv.  For a survey of the history of the doctrine, see Ottley, The Doctrine of the Incarnation (two Vols.).

On our Lord’s human knowledge, see Gore, Dissertations; Quick, Doctrines of the Creed, c. xvi; E. L. Mascall, Christ, the Christian and the Church, c. iii.

On our Lord’s temptations and moral perfection, see L. Hodgson, And Was Made Man, c. iii; Quick, Doctrines of the Creed, c. xvii.

On the Virgin-birth, see Box, The Virgin Birth of Jesus; Gore, Dissertations; Headlam, Miracles of the New Testament, Lect. vii; Quick, Doctrines of the Creed, c. xv.

 

THE ATONEMENT

Only a few of the numerous books on the Atonement are here mentioned.  Among older works, see Dale, The Atonement; Denney, The Death of Christ; Forsyth, The Work of Christ; Moberly, Atonement and Personality.  Among more recent works, Mozley, The Doctrine of the Atonement (an excellent historical and systematic survey); E. Brunner, The Mediator; Quick, The Gospel of the New World and Doctrines of the Creed, cc.xix–xxi; G. Aulen, Christus Victor; Mackintosh, The Christian Experience of Forgiveness; L. Hodgson, The Doctrine of the Atonement; and for a valuable brief discussion, K. E. Kirk’s essay in Essays Catholic and Critical.  See also, esp. for New Testament teaching, the three works by Vincent Taylor, Jesus and His Sacrifice, The Atonement in New Testament Teaching, and Forgiveness and Reconciliation.  For a sustained and learned exposition of the “subjective” theory, see Rashdall, The Idea of Atonement in Christian Theology, and more briefly R. S. Franks, The Atonement (Oxford University Press).

 

THE RESURRECTION AND ASCENSION

Among older books, Swete, The Appearances of our Lord after the Passion; Westcott, The Revelation of the Risen Lord and The Gospel of the Resurrection are very valuable.  The best recent survey of the evidence and the theology is A. M. Ramsey, The Resurrection of Christ.  See also the essays by E. G. Selwyn in Essays Catholic and Critical and H. Sasse in Mysterium Christi.

On the eschatological elements in our Lord’s teaching, see Schweitzer, The Quest of the Historical Jesus (the last two chapters); von Hügel, Essays and Addresses (First Series) v and vii; and more recently, C. H. Dodd, The Parables of the Kingdom (“realized eschatology”); Hoskyns’ essay in Essays Catholic and Critical (on the “Liberal” view of the Gospels); H. E. W. Turner, Jesus, Master and Lord, esp. c. ix.  On the doctrine of the Last Things (Judgment, Resurrection) see Darragh, The Resurrection of the Flesh; Quick, Doctrines of the Creed, cc. xxii–xxiv and The Gospel of the New World, c. viii.

 

THE HOLY SPIRIT

On the development of the doctrine of the Holy Spirit, see Swete, art. “Holy Spirit” in H.D.B. and The Holy Spirit in the New Testament and The Holy Spirit in the Ancient Church.  See also Wheeler Robinson, The Christian Experience of the Holy Spirit.  For the relation of the Holy Spirit to the Person and Work of Christ, see L. S. Thornton, The Incarnate Lord, c. xii.

On the question of the “double procession”, see Swete, The Holy Spirit in the Ancient Church, c. ix.  On Filioque in the Creed, see J. N. D. Kelly, Early Christian Creeds, pp. 358 ff.

 

THE SCRIPTURES

On the inspiration and interpretation of the Bible, see Gore, Lux Mundi, Essay viii; Sanday, Inspiration, Lect. viii; and, among more recent books, A. Richardson, A Preface to Bible Study; C. W. Dugmore (editor), The Interpretation of the Bible (S.P.C.K.); McNeile (ed. C. S. C. Williams, 1953), Introduction to the New Testament; Wheeler Robinson, Ancient and Modern Versions of the Bible, Essay ix; Mozley’s essay in The Christian Faith (ed. Matthews); A. M. Farrer, The Glass of Vision.

For the history of the Canon, see Westcott, The Bible in the Church and The Canon of the New Testament; Sanday, Inspiration; McNeile (1953 edn.), Introduction to the New Testament.

On the importance of the Old Testament, see G. E. Phillips, The Old Testament in the World Church; Wheeler Robinson (editor), Record and Revelation, Essay x; A. Richardson, A Preface to Bible Study, esp. cc. vi and vii; C. H. Dodd, According to the Scriptures.

 

THE CREEDS

Earlier works on the Creeds have been largely superseded by J. N. D. Kelly, Early Christian Creeds, which contains a full discussion of the history and interpretation of the Apostles’ and Nicene Creeds.  Swete, The Apostles’ Creed and Turner, The History and Use of Creeds and Anathemas are still valuable.

For a convenient exposition of Brewer’s theory of the origin of the Quicunque, see Badcock, The History of the Creeds.  Cp. Burn’s article in J.Th.S., Vol. xxvii (1926), pp. 19 ff., and for a criticism of Brewer, see F. Homes Dudden, The Life and Times of S. Ambrose, pp. 676 ff.  For Burn’s earlier views, see his books An Introduction to the Creeds (1899) and The Athanasian Creed (1912).

 

THE NATURE OF MAN, AND GRACE

For an account of primitive man, see E. O. James, The Origin of Man.

On the Christian doctrine of man, see R. Niebuhr, The Nature and Destiny of Man; E. Brunner, Man in Revolt; Quick, The Gospel of the New World; E. L. Mascall, Christ, the Christian, and the Church; D. Cairns, The Image of God in Man.

On sin, see Strong, Christian Ethics, Lect. v; Taylor, The Faith of a Moralist, Vol. i, Lect. v; Mackintosh, The Christian Experience of Forgiveness; K. E. Kirk, Some Principles of Moral Theology, c. x.

On original sin, see Williams, The Doctrines of the Fall and of Original Sin (for the history); Bicknell, The Christian Idea of Sin and of Original Sin, and his essay in Essays Catholic and Critical; C. E. Barbour, Sin and the New Psychology; Tennant’s works referred to in the text; Quick, op. cit., esp. c. ii.  Doctrine in the Church of England (S.P.C.K.) gives a concise review of questions relating to sin and original sin.

On mortal and venial sins, see K. E. Kirk, Some Principles of Moral Theology, cc. x and xi, and on questions of penance, discipline and their relation to the Christian summum bonum, see his book The Vision of God.

On grace, see Taylor, The Faith of a Moralist, Vol. i, Lect. vi; Williams, The Grace of God; L. Hodgson, The Grace of God in Faith and Philosophy; The Doctrine of Grace, ed. W. T. Whitley, (S.C.M. Press, 1932), a symposium expounding the doctrine and its history in different parts of the Church.  On grace and freedom see esp. Mosley’s essay in Essays Catholic and Critical.  On the Pelagian controversy and S. Augustine, see Tixeront, History of Dogmas, Vol. ii, c. xi.

 

SALVATION

On justification, see the commentaries on Romans by Sanday and Headlam, C. H. Dodd (Moffatt) and K. E. Kirk (Clarendon Bible); Vincent Taylor, Forgiveness and Reconciliation; E. L. Mascall, Christ, the Christian and the Church, esp. c. v (on imputation and impartation).  See also C. H. Dodd, Gospel and Law.

On predestination, see Mozley, The Augustinian Doctrine of Predestination (a classical exposition); F. H. Brabant, Time and Eternity in Christian Thought, Lect. vii; and for a modern Thomist exposition, R. Garrigou-Lagrange (trans. Rose), Predestination (E. Herder).

 

THE CHURCH

On the doctrine of the Church, see for particular aspects the books mentioned lower down on the Authority and Ministry of the Church.  On the doctrine of the Church in general, see among older books, F. D. Maurice, The Kingdom of Christ; Swete, The Holy Catholic Church; Stone, The Christian Church; Gore, The Reconstruction of Belief, Part iii; among more recent books, A. M. Ramsey, The Gospel and the Catholic Church; A. G. Hebert, The Form of the Church; K. E. Kirk (editor), The Apostolic Ministry; E. L. Mascall, Christ, the Christian and the Church; S. Neill, The Christian Society.  See also The Parish Communion (S.P.C.K.), esp. Essays iv, v and vi; The Church of God (S.P.C.K.), an Anglo-Russian symposium; W. A. Visser’t Hooft and J. H. Oldham, The Church and its Function in Society (Allen and Unwin, 1937); E. Mersch, The Whole Christ (an English translation of Le Corps Mystique du Christ, on the historical development of the doctrine of the mystical body).

On the New Testament doctrine (in addition to most of the above), see R. Newton Flew, Jesus and His Church; L. S. Thornton, The Common Life in the Body of Christ; K. L. Schmidt, The Church (Bible Key Words – A. & C. Black).

On the nature of “catholicity”, see Catholicity (Dacre Press, 1947), The Fulness of Christ (S.P.C.K. 1950), and The Catholicity of Protestantism (Lutterworth Press, 1950), three reports presented to the Archbishop of Canterbury.  See also D. T. Jenkins, The Nature of Catholicity (Faber), for a modern Congregationalist point of view.  A more radical Protestant view is given in E. Brunner, The Misunderstanding of the Church (Lutterworth Press, 1952).

Questions concerning reunion may be studied in G. K. A. Bell, Documents on Christian Unity (Oxford University Press), three volumes; Reports of the Lambeth Conferences of 1920, 1930 and 1948; The Church (S.C.M. Press, 1951), a report of the Faith and Order Commission of the World Council of Churches; A. M. Ramsey, K. E. Kirk, op. cit.; A. E. J. Rawlinson, The Church of England and the Church of Christ and Problems of Re-union; W. Nicholls, Ecumenism and Catholicity; M. J. Congar, O.P., Divided Christendom (throws light on some currents of thought in the Roman Church, the French original Chrétiens Désunis should be used if possible).  For a full bibliography of books and periodicals on the subject, see H. R. T. Brandreth, Unity and Reunion (second edition, 1948).

On the question of the papacy, see list of books below.

 

THE CHURCH’S AUTHORITY IN DOCTRINE

On the authority of the Church, see Salmon, Infallibility of the Church (1952 edn.); Gore, Reconstruction of Belief, Book III, cc. v–x ; essays in Essays Catholic and Critical by A. E. J. Rawlinson and Knox; essay by N. P. Williams in Northern Catholicism esp. pp. 154 ff.

On development in doctrine, see Mozley, Theory of Development; Darwell Stone, The Christian Church, c. xiv; Turner, Catholic and Apostolic, cc. ii and iii; R. Hanson and R. Fuller, The Church of Rome (S.C.M. Press), c. iv.

On modernism, see A. R. Vidler, The Modernist Movement in the Roman Church.  English Modernism may be studied in H. D. A. Major, English Modernism, and E. W. Barnes, The Rise of Christianity. Harnack, What is Christianity? remains a classical exposition of the older type of Liberal Protestantism.  For a review of the whole subject, see Quick, Liberalism, Modernism and Tradition and the Report entitled Catholicity (Dacre Press, 1947).

On general councils, see Darwell Stone, The Christian Church, c. xiii.

On purgatory, see Mason, Purgatory, and the brief treatment in Doctrine in the Church of England.

Modern Roman teaching on indulgences is set out conveniently in H. Davis, S.J., Moral and Pastoral Theology, Vol. iii.

On the invocation of saints, see Doctrine in the Church of England, pp. 213–216; Darwell Stone, The Invocation of Saints; Williams’ essay in Northern Catholicism, pp. 221 ff.

 

THE CHURCH’S AUTHORITY IN DISCIPLINE

The Report on The Canon Law of the Church of England (S.P.C.K., 1947) should be consulted.  See also Hooker, Eccl. Pol., V, cc. v–x, for the classical defence of Prayer-Book ceremonies and customs.

On celibacy and the monastic ideal, see K. E. Kirk, The Vision of God.  On clerical celibacy, see Wordsworth, Ministry of Grace, iv; Lea, History of Sacerdotal Celibacy; the article “Célibat Ecclésiastique” in Dictionnaire de Théol. Catholique.

On the early history of excommunication, see K. E. Kirk, op. cit.

 

THE MINISTRY OF THE CHURCH

On the early history of the ministry, see Lightfoot’s Excursus in his Commentary on Philippians, with Moberly’s criticism in his Ministerial Priesthood; Gore and Turner, The Church and the Ministry; Swete (editor), The Early History of the Church and the Ministry; C. Jenkins and K. D. Mackenzie (editors), Episcopacy, Ancient and Modern; K. E. Kirk (editor), The Apostolic Ministry, with the criticism in The Ministry of the Church, by S. Neill and others (Canterbury Press).

For the doctrine of the apostolic succession, see the books cited above, esp. essay iii (Turner) in The Early History of the Church and the Ministry; A. M. Ramsey, The Gospel and the Catholic Church.  For another view, see Headlam, The Doctrine of the Church and Christian Reunion; A. Ehrhardt, The Apostolic Succession.  For Free Church expositions, see Lindsay, The Church and the Ministry in the Early Centuries; and more recently D. Jenkins, The Nature of Catholicity and The Gift of Ministry; T. W. Manson, The Church’s Ministry.

On the validity of Anglican orders, see Puller, The Bull “Apostolicae Curae” and the Edwardine Ordinal; Moberly, op. cit., c. vii and Appendix; the essay on the Ordinal in Liturgy and Worship; Dix, The Question of Anglican Orders (Dacre Press).  For a formal statement on priesthood and sacrifice in the Church of England, see Responsio Archiepiscoporum Angliae ad Litteras Apostolicas Leonis Papae XIII, issued by the Archbishops of Canterbury and York (Temple and Maclagan) in 1897 (now published by the Church Historical Society, S.P.C.K., under the title “Anglican Orders”).

On the question of the papacy, see Puller, The Primitive Saints and the See of Rome; Salmon, Infallibility of the Church, 1952 edition, cc. xi–xv; Stone, The Christian Church, cc. vi, viii, ix; Kidd, The Roman Primacy to 461; T. E. Jalland, The Church and the Papacy.

 

THE SACRAMENTS

On the general theology of the sacraments, see Lux Mundi, essay x; Quick, The Christian Sacraments and The Gospel of Divine Action; A. E. Taylor, The Faith of a Moralist, Vol. ii, Lect. vii; H. J. Wotherspoon, Religious Values in the Sacraments; the section in Doctrine in the Church of England.  On the origin of the Christian sacraments, see Williams’ essay in Essays Catholic and Critical; A. D. Nock’s essay in Essays on the Trinity and the Incarnation (the “mystery religions” question); Dix, The Shape of the Liturgy.

On the history of penance, see O. D. Watkins, A History of Penance (fully documented); K. E. Kirk, The Vision of God; R. C. Mortimer, The Origins of Private Penance.  On the practice of sacramental confession, see O. Hardman (editor), The Christian Life, Vol. ii.  Roman Catholic theory and practice may be studied in H. Davis, Moral and Pastoral Theology, Vol. iii, cc. v–ix.

On the anointing of the sick, see Liturgy and Worship, pp. 472 ff.; The Report on the Ministry of Healing, (S.P.C.K., 1924); and the forms of service approved by the Convocation of Canterbury, June 1935.

 

HOLY BAPTISM

On baptism, see Darwell Stone, Holy Baptism; G. W. H. Lampe, The Seal of the Spirit; W. F. Flemington, The New Testament Doctrine of Baptism; O. Cullman, Baptism in the New Testament (S.C.M. Press).

For the view that confirmation for the first time bestows the Holy Spirit, see Mason, Relation of Baptism to Confirmation; Hall, Confirmation; and the lecture by Dix, The Theology of Confirmation in Relation to Baptism (Dacre Press).  For a different view, see Stone, Holy Baptism; Quick, The Christian Sacraments, p. 181; and the extensive review of New Testament and patristic evidence in G. W. H. Lampe, The Seal of the Spirit.  Recent discussions of theory and practice may be studied in the following Reports: Confirmation Today (1944) and Baptism Today (1949, Press and Publications Board); The Theology of Christian Initiation (1948, S.P.C.K., the report of a Theological Commission).  See also the two volumes Confirmation (S.P.C.K.) and the essays by evangelical authors in Baptism and Confirmation (Church Book Room Press).

 

THE HOLY COMMUNION

For a review of the history of teaching on the Holy Communion in the Church of England, see Waterland, A Review of the Doctrine of the Eucharist (1736); A. J. Macdonald (editor), The Evangelical Doctrine of the Holy Communion; C. W. Dugmore, Eucharistic Doctrine in England from Hooker to Waterland; Darwell Stone, A History of the Doctrine of the Holy Eucharist, Vol. ii (with full quotations).  Cp. Y. Brilioth, Eucharistic Faith and Practice (a review of the various traditions by a Swedish scholar).

On the doctrine of the real presence, see Strong, The Real Presence; Gore, The Body of Christ; Quick, The Christian Sacraments, c. ix; E. L. Mascall, Christ, the Christian and the Church, cc. ix–xi, and Corpus Christi; Stone, The Holy Communion.

For the history of the doctrine of transubstantiation see Gore, Dissertations, iii; Stone, op. cit. (both volumes).

For a history of reservation, see Freestone, The Sacrament Reserved (Alcuin Club).  The Article by Harris on “The Communion of the Sick” in Liturgy and Worship contains much important material.  Reservation (S.P.C.K., 1926), the Report of a representative conference, provides a full discussion of the questions at issue, and the paper by E. G. Selwyn and the Chairman’s summary at the end ably state the case respectively for and against extra-liturgical devotions.

On the sacrificial aspect of the eucharist, see the works by Stone, Gore, Quick and E. L. Mascall already cited; Kidd, The Later Medieval Doctrine of the Eucharistic Sacrifice; Hicks, The Fulness of Sacrifice. Essays iii, iv and v in The Parish Communion (S.P.C.K.) contain valuable discussions of the corporate character and significance of the eucharistic action.  See also A. G. Hebert, Liturgy and Society.  On the history of the liturgy, see J. H. Srawley, The Early History of the Liturgy; Dix, The Shape of the Liturgy.

 

CHURCH AND STATE

Recent discussions will be found in Report of the Archbishops’ Committee on Church and State, 1916; Report of the Archbishops’ Commission on the Relations between Church and State, 1935; Church and State, being the Report of a Commission appointed by the Church Assembly, 1952.  See also Dibdin, Establishment in England (essays by a distinguished authority on ecclesiastical law, 1932); C. Garbett, Church and State in England (1950).

For a more general treatment of the subject, see Hobhouse, The Church and the World; Figgis, Churches in the Modern State.

For an account of the Enabling Act, the Constitution of the Church Assembly and a list of the Measures passed since its inception, see the annual Official Year-Book of the Church of England.

See The Canon Law of the Church of England, being the Report of the Archbishops’ Commission on Canon Law (S.P.C.K., 1947), which contains essays on the history of Canon Law, proposals for a Revised Body of Canons, and a Memorandum “Lawful Authority” by Mr Justice Vaisey.  See also R. C. Mortimer, Western Canon Law.

See the Report of the Ecclesiastical Courts Commission, 1926, which is reprinted as Appendix IV in the 1935 Report on Church and State, Vol. i, mentioned above.  See also the Report on Canon Law mentioned above.

For a brief review of the problems connected with war, see the Report of the Lambeth Conference 1948 (Report of Committee No. ii on The Church and the Modern World).  For a fuller discussion, see “The Church and the Atom”, a study of the moral and theological aspects of peace and war being the Report of a Commission appointed by the Archbishops at the request of the Church Assembly to consider the Report of the British Council of Churches’ Commission entitled “The Era of Atomic Power”.  See W. Temple, The Ethics of Penal Action (Clarke Hall Fellowship Lecture, 1934).

For a general review of the relation of the Church to modern society, see the Report of the Lambeth Conference 1948 (Report of Committee No. ii on The Church and the Modern World).

The following books deal with various aspects of this problem more fully: E. Brunner, Christianity and Civilization and Justice and the Social Order; H. Butterfield, Christianity, Diplomacy and War; V. A. Demant, Theology of Society and Religion and the Decline of Capitalism; T. S. Eliot, The Idea of a Christian Society; D. M. Mackinnon (editor), Christian Faith and Communist Faith; J. Maritain, Man and the State; Richard Niebuhr, Christ and Culture; M. B. Reckitt, Maurice to Temple; W. Temple, Christianity and Social Order.

 

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