Read Ebook: A Wayfarer's Faith: Aspects of the common basis of religious life by Harvey T Edmund Thomas Edmund

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"And I am no more in the world, and these are in the world, and I come to Thee. Holy Father, keep them in Thy name which Thou hast given me, /that they may be one, even as we are/. . . . Neither for these only do I pray, but for them also that believe on Me through their word; /that they may all be one; even as thou, Father, art in Me, and I in Thee,/ that they also may be one in us: /that the/ /world may believe that Thou didst send Me/."

So lofty is the thought that one may wonder whether, if these words had not come down to us as they have done, and some later Christian mystic had dared to utter this as his ideal, he would not have been treated as a madman or a heretic. It is hard to think of what it means: a unity of Christians one with another, even as there is unity between the Divine Father and the unique Son.

In the bygone days of scholastic theology men might have gone on to unfold the meaning of this by showing how unity of substance did not remove the difference of person; But these thoughts do not live for us to-day as for our forefathers. We must seek to find the meaning of Christ's union with the Father, not by the road of medieval metaphysics, but by some method which may appeal to our moral consciousness.

Is it not a fact that Christ is most truly revealed to us as in unity with the Father in his identification of himself with suffering and degraded humanity, as most truly Divine when he eats with publicans and sinners, pours out his strength for the sick and suffering, and his life for those who have rejected him and at best have misunderstood him?

The Church, then, is most likely to attain to that inward unity for which her Founder prayed by following the guidance of his life. She will be most like him in laying upon herself and claiming as her own the sufferings and evils that befall or should befall, men in the world without; least like him and least likely to attain this Divine unity when she claims rights and privileges for herself, when she insists on her superiority, when she turns from her the publican and sinner, or leaves them to meet the punishment which is their due.

The union of Christians with each other is to be witness to the world of the Divine mission of Jesus. Men are to believe on him because they see how his life and spirit hold together communities with differing organisations and men of widely varying personality. The union is not to destroy personality or variety of character, but to underlie all difference. It is no external machinery to unite us in a single visible organisation by which individuality would be stamped out or fettered in growth. There is little trace of any such machinery in the earliest history of the Church, and the ages and places where it has been most perfect have not been those which we think of as nearest in spirit to Christ, nor those men most like Him whose lives have been spent merely in the development of such organisation.

First let us take our need of sincerity. Perhaps nothing so holds many men of to-day from Christ as the sense of the insincerity of those who call themselves Christians. Our worship, our hymns and prayers, are full of unreality; we persuade ourselves, perhaps, that we still believe in dogmas which have ceased to have any influence upon our lives. We shut our eyes to new truths because we are really afraid to be free, and what was the chalice of a new truth to our fathers becomes a poison-cup to us and our children. If the Church is to regain and to retain the respect of honest thinkers we must welcome fair-minded inquiry wherever it be directed, and not fear to open our eyes to the sun.

And it is not only intellectual sincerity in accepting new truths that is needed; if the old truths are to be made real to our day, we must be prepared to translate them into language which people can understand. It is worse than useless often to attempt to hand them on in the garments of old words by which they were clothed in former days, for as truth is a living thing, and words fade and lose their meaning, the form in which it is rightly expressed must change from age to age. It is not enough, then, to repeat some passage of Scripture, some familiar verse of religious poetry, or some words of a man of God of former days, to bring help to men to-day, even though the words are full of meaning to us because we have entered into the inward experience which they represent. Some have heard the words so often that they are now almost meaningless; others cannot be touched by a mode of thought which was the outcome of another time. They need the truths that lie behind the old words and the outworn methods of thinking, but they must be re-expressed if they are to reach them.

The eternal realities of which the New Testament writers had hold, which filled their souls and made them struggle with words and metaphors to express some glimpse of what they felt, could never be completely represented by any language. Yet we have taken the words of the Scripture and treated them as though they were so many phials of truth in solution. The exquisite flowers of love and faith have been crushed and bruised in the mortar of the theologians to produce the infallible dogmas of our orthodoxy. But the inward life does not live upon the abstractions of the theologian any more than our outward life upon the compressed drugs of the chemist, however perfect the process of their making may have been. Cannot we, then, honestly confess that our dogmas are but imperfect human attempts to fathom the deep things of God, symbols that stand for something which transcends them as much as the mother's face surpasses the poor drawing which her child may make of it? Such a drawing can only be understood by the eyes of love, and we need the same spirit to make our dogmas full of meaning.

It is not only in intellectual matters that the Church has been insincere. Many who are no thinkers feel that she has not honestly attempted to carry out her own teachings. "Blessed are the gentle," "Blessed are the poor in spirit," are explained in many a commentary, but illustrated by too few lives. Yet the only adequate commentary on the beatitudes is the life of a real follower of Christ.

The fact is that many Christians think that by bowing down in worship before Christ they are His followers, forgetting His own test for such: "Why call ye Me, Lord, Lord, and do not the things which I say?" We write of Him, it may be, as Our Lord with capital letters, when He is not our lord at all, nor the master and controller of our lives. There is a great deal of false reverence about this lip-worship of phrase and form that actually keeps us from getting as near as we might to the true spirit of followers of Christ.

If we are lovers and followers of the truth as Jesus bids us be, we must recognise our kinship and comradeship with all others who sincerely seek the truth, even though they may attack us and fail for the moment to see all the light which may shine in our eyes so clearly: in the mere search after truth their souls are turned towards the light and unconsciously fed and aided by the Source of all truth! Nor must we think of them our blind brothers merely, for they may be fighting a far greater army of foes than we, placed as out-posts of the hosts of God, surrounded by the enemy and overborne themselves for a while, that afterwards the victorious ranks of their comrades may press on over their bodies to conquests of which we have not even dreamed.

And how far have we failed in unity with our Master and each other through our not having learnt His lesson of the way of service, of our true relationship to our fellows?

Yet here and there across the pages of history shines the light of a good life pointing us the true way, and how by losing ourselves we find ourselves.

The bearing of the Cross which Jesus enjoined upon His followers is far other than that asceticism which monk and nun and Puritan have wasted many a precious life to attain. We have not to give up the pleasant thing because it is pleasant, or because it gives only a mundane and transitory joy. Joy is good, and not to be avoided, but welcomed. We have to give up the pleasant thing ourselves, others may take it in our stead; or give up a large measure of it that they may share it with us. We do not lose the joy, or pretend that it is unreal and transitory as the monk may. It is very real, and we feel it in a sense we could not do before, because our fellows share it or have it in place of us, and our life is their life. Gladness which they feel we must feel too.

This is the difference between the monk of the desert and Francis of Assisi, the apostle of the joy of Christ . The monk battles with himself to maintain his vow of poverty; he is constantly giving up in not possessing things for himself, or in renouncing pleasures which attract him. St. Francis in possessing nothing has all things, for all are God's and his fellows', and he is theirs. The wide world is his cloister, and everything which he can do to gladden his brother gives joy to himself. True Christianity like his is full of an infectious sense of the joy of life. Whenever such men go there comes to others some touch of their spirit, as crumbs drop from a full table.

This faith that joy in itself is good does not mean that there may not be needful for us all some form of true asceticism, training in withholding from things good in themselves and from pleasures we desire, quite apart from the surrendering of them to others. But needful as this is, it is good only as training for an end beyond itself, and not for the mere sake of abstinence. We refrain that we may be masters of our wills, that we may keep control of habit, that our bodies may be the instrument of our spirits; such fasting as this only fits us more fully for the joy of service.

Deeper even than the sacrament of joy is that of sorrow, and we may learn something of it from John Woolman, the Quaker apostle of Christ's sufferings. Where men suffered he suffered too in spirit with them. When he came on his last journey to England he could not travel in the comfortable cabin because of the needless toil of the workmen that had gone to adorn it, but must share with the poor sailors the foul air and discomfort of the steerage. And when on the stormy passage across the Atlantic he lay there sick and in pain, his heart went up in thankfulness that he was permitted to share the experience which so many of his fellow-men had to go through, and be united thus to suffering humanity. "I was now desirous," he tells us, "to embrace every opportunity of being inwardly acquainted with the hardships and difficulties of my fellow-creatures, and to labour in His love for the spreading of pure righteousness on the earth." Then we shall remember, too, that beautiful passage near the close of his journal, where he recalls the vision that came to him in time of sickness of that mass of dull, gloomy colour, made up of human beings in as great misery as they could be and live, and how he was told that he was mixed with them and henceforth might not consider himself a separate being. The angel's song, "John Woolman is dead," sounded to him more pure and lovely than any he had ever heard before, for in truth his old will was dead, and in him the spirit of Christ was alive.

Is it not here that the Church will find the way to reconcile the world of toilers and sufferers estranged from her to-day? -- in that unity between her members which goes deeper even than membership, in a love to Christ which shows itself, as He calls for it, towards all who have need of Him, which identifies the Christian with his brothers, the doers and bearers of wrong?

As we look out upon a Christendom divided by sects and creeds into a score of different bodies, we may be saddened by the lament which many a devout lip has uttered over the schisms which rend the mystic robe of the Master. But it was only His outer garments which the soldiers rent asunder: the seamless robe is unsevered still. External separation does not touch the spirit of love and true communion which beneath countless outer differences unites together the lives of all who follow Him in deed and in truth. And as we each draw nearer to Him, and His life flows into our lives, we must draw nearer to each other and to all our fellow-men.

FOR the individual and the community alike the deepest influences are expressed in life rather than words, yet it remains true that through the symbols of spoken thought life must again and again come to expression. In former days this was realised in the value set upon prophecy, if we may use the word in its broadest and highest sense, as the forth-telling, in the language of human thought, of the Divine will present behind our lives and at work amid the world.

One of the changes that strike one most in organized Christianity to-day, compared with the Church of earlier times, is the general absence of prophecy in this sense, in all but very occasional crises. The prophetic instinct is not dead indeed, but men find its highest manifestations rather outside the Church of earlier times. The leaders of the Church have been too often content to repeat the messages of the prophets of a former day rather than to seek for a living voice within their midst. Yet those who know anything of the life of the Church from within, judged not merely by this incomplete expression, but seen as it affects the daily lives of countless men and women, must surely agree that in spite of all the trammels of convention and tradition the Church has still a life to pass on and a message to deliver for the needs of to-day. Those who would have it become once more the school of the prophets will surely be willing to look for a few moments at the picture which has come down to us of what place prophecy filled in the Church life of the earliest days, and how the prophet was supplanted, not killed, as some have thought, by the priest, but rather silenced by the iron grip of organization.

In the fourteenth chapter of the first epistle to the Corinthians is preserved for us a picture the meetings of an early Christian Church, full of interest to the historian.

It is clear from this description that an important part was usually taken in these gatherings by men who gave to their fellow worshippers what they believed to be God's message or revelation to them. This was something quite distinct from the recitation of a hymn or a passage of Scripture, or from the interpretation of scripture, or again from the teaching of doctrine. It is regarded by the Apostle Paul as the highest spiritual gift, one earnestly to be desired, although it was not given to all, but only to some. Of the nature of this ministry we get a glimpse in his description of the way in which an unbeliever who enters the assembly is convinced by it. The ministry goes to his inmost self, reading the needs of his heart.

The message of prophecy is one, as it seems, which reaches the subconscious self of the incomer, who suddenly beholds the realities of his own inner life in this flood of light that flows in upon him, piercing through the veil that custom and convention had wrought about him. But the prophetic word does not merely give this fuller knowledge of his own nature to the stranger; it puts him also into touch with a higher self. He sees in a flash of revelation not only the evil in his own life, but the source of power to set it right, here in the midst of this assembly, and bowing himself before it he confesses the Divine Presence.

If we ask how this prophetic ministry is conceived as coming to those who exercise it, it would seem from the words of the Apostle that it is not by exercise of the intellect that prophecy comes, though the understanding is to be cultivated in connection with another highly prized gift, that of teaching. But the Corinthians are urged to long after the gift of prophecy most of all; they are to prepare themselves for it, then, by prayer, the door through which our life opens out into the Divine life and is fed from it. The teacher thinks over what he knows of the needs and difficulties of his fellows, ponders over the truths that have been made clear to him in the past, searches amongst the sayings of the Lord, the teachings of the Apostles, the words of the Law or the prophets of old, for help for the present. Not so the prophet. He may, indeed, go through all this preparation of thought, but the essential preparation for his work is prayer; prayer in which he must be willing to lay aside, if need be, all these thoughts of this. The prophetic spirit reaches out to realize the condition of those to whom it is to minister, and upward in search of light and strength from its only source.

Sometimes it is not given to the prophet to reach conscious hold of Him by whom we are all upheld, and then all his ministry may be but a cry for help, with a deep sense of need. Sometimes he feels the presence very near, and as he keeps close to the Father's hand, those about him are given to feel it too.

Or, perhaps, some word of the Lord, or some thought of other days is suddenly illumined by a fresh light, and his message is to hand on the fire from the altar, that those about him may light their torches too.

The prophet is God's spokesman. He must lose thought of himself in his message. He is translating for others and to others in the presence of the Giver of the message. He must keep in touch with those to whom he is speaking. He must remember too how easy it is for interpreters to expand and embroider upon the original, and thus to mar it. And, therefore, the prophet should keep very close to the Giver of the message, who may have given to others its fuller exposition.

One danger of the prophets of Corinth was very present to St. Paul's mind.

Some of them seem to have got so wrapt up in a sense of the Divine communion that they did not keep that control of their whole nature, which would lead them to find expression in the language of intelligence. Carried away by their feelings they gave utterance to the experience of their spirit in words broken and unintelligible, the channels of word and thought over which their brains had control seemed too small for the flood of emotion which swept out in overmastering power, so that their tongues moved and they spoke without knowing what they said. Paul knew better than any of them the hidden things of the Spirit, the groanings that cannot be uttered, the thoughts that flash upon us and cannot be caught up by our halting reason, following slowly after, the striving of the soul that no words can compass, the God-given intuitions which cannot be imprisoned in words.

But he knew too that language was given us not for the joy of expressing what we feel but as a means of sharing our experience with others. To speak with an unknown tongue, to abandon oneself to the ecstasy of the moment, may be right for our own life, he writes, but it is useless for our fellows. We must not be content to soar up ourselves into the world of life and light, we must try to bring back into our world of sense some symbols of the truths of the world beyond, imprisoning in words which men may understand fragments of the truths which can never wholly be expressed in words.

At times the message burns so within the prophet's breast that he feels he must speak, no matter what is happening about him. Thus it seems that sometimes at Corinth two or three prophets would speak at once, and mar each other's messages. But this was to lose sight of their true place, to forget that the message was given them that others might receive it.

The prophet, he writes, is still master of his own spirit: he is not to allow his reason to lose its right control. He has to use his intelligence in deciding when he is to speak and when he must hold silence. He has not to let his conscious self be submerged in the sub-conscious, like an island beneath the waves of the surrounding sea; rather is he to gather on to its dry land the goods the waves have brought him, before he sends them forth again to other shores. In this way may the Divine message not only bring help to him but comfort to all to whom it is sent. Thus the picture of the Church of Corinth and St. Paul's advice for its needs is one to which men may look who are seeking to-day for that true prophetic ministry which seemed to the Apostle the most important of the gifts of the Spirit to the Christian Church.

It may help us too to consider how far that gift has been present throughout the succeeding ages, and how far it has been hindered by the Church from finding its true exercise.

When next we get a glimpse of the Church at Corinth, more than a generation has passed away, and probably few of those who were members when St. Paul wrote are still alive. The majority of the church is in disagreement with its Elders or Bishops, and has deposed them from their positions; and the Bishop of Rome, Clement writes in the name of his church, in reply to some letter from the Corinthians, to urge them to be reconciled, and give once more the honour that is their due to these worthy presbyters. The first epistle of Clement is a long and beautiful letter, and enters with tact and deep concern into a discussion of the dissension that is troubling the peace of the Corinthians, but it makes no mention whatever of the place of prophecy in the Church. The word prophet does occur twice in the epistle, but only in reference to the Old Testament.

It was not right, he urges, that men who had been appointed by the apostles and afterwards by other men of renown, with the consent and approval of the whole Church, who had fulfilled their duties without blame, should now be cast out of their offices.

If we turn to another group of letters, written some twelve years later by Ignatius of Antioch, on his way to martyrdom at Rome, we find, again, that the only references to prophets and prophecy deal with old Testament days, but that the greatest importance is set by Ignatius upon the relations of the Church to its Bishop: "Do all of you," he bids the Church of Smyrna, "follow the Bishop, as Jesus Christ the Father, and follow the College of Presbyters as the Apostles, and give heed to the deacons as God's commandment. Let no man do anything of those things that appertain to the Church apart from the Bishop. Let that Eucharist be accounted valid that is under the authority of the Bishop or of him to whomsoever he himself entrusts it. Wheresoever the Bishop appeareth there let the multitude be, even as wheresoever Christ Jesus is there is the Catholic Church. It is not lawful apart from the Bishop either to baptise or to hold an Agape, but whatsoever he approves that is also well pleasing to God; that all that is done may be safe and valid."

We see at once that it would not be easy to fit into such an ordered Church as this prophets like those of the earliest Church in Corinth.

But while in most of the larger towns the churches had been developing along lines like these it would seem that at the same time there were out of the way places in which a much more primitive tradition was preserved.

We can get some idea of this from the passages in the Didache which refer to prophets and travelling apostles.

Two whole chapters of this ancient book of teaching are devoted to this subject, whereas only the briefest mention is made of bishops and deacons, and in these words, "Elect then for yourselves bishops and deacons, worthy of the Lord, men gentle and not money loving, true and tested, for they too themselves offer to you the service of the prophets and teachers; "Despise them not then, for these are they who are honoured of you along with the prophets and teachers."

Thus it would seem that the bishops and deacons are chosen by the Church for its work, perhaps in default of sufficiency of prophets and teachers, to do the work which these would do, and they seem at least to need, in the writer's eyes, to be supported by an appeal which he would not think of making on behalf of the prophet and teacher whose messages carry within themselves their authority. That the true prophet stands, in his eyes, above the human ordering of the church, seems clear too, from the section which gives instructions as to the words of the eucharistic prayer . At the conclusion of this model prayer the writer adds: "but allow the prophets to offer thanks as much as they choose."

Warning of almost naive simplicity is given against dangers from false prophets. Apparently the temptation to emotional enthusiasm is not before the writer's mind, as it was before Paul's in writing to Corinth. The travelling evangelist, or apostle, as he is called, is to be received "as the Lord," but if he stay for as long as three days he is to be recognised as a false prophet. The readers are warned not to judge the prophet who speaks in the spirit, this being treated as the sin against the Holy Ghost.

"But not every man who speaks in the spirit is a prophet," the writer goes on," but only if he have the ways of the Lord," thus making the character of Christ the objective standard by which prophets are judged.

"From their ways then shall the false prophet and the prophet be known, and every prophet who appoints a feast in the spirit does not eat of it, unless, indeed, he be a false prophet, and every prophet who teaches the truth, if he does not do that which he teaches, is a false prophet." The readers are warned against judging the prophet who does some strange symbolic act for the edification of the Church without bidding others to do as he does," for even thus also did the ancient prophets." "But whoso saith in the spirit Give me money, or any other things, to him ye shall not hearken; but if he speak concerning others who are in need, and bids men give, let no man judge him" . The true prophet who is willing to settle amongst them is worthy of his keep, they are told, and so is the true teacher; "and so," the writer continues, "ye shall take every first- fruit of the produce of your wine-press and threshing floor, of your oxen and of your flocks, and shall give to the prophets, for they are your high priests.

"But if ye have not a prophet give to the poor; and so likewise with bread, oil and wine, with

money, clothes and all other things" .

Here we have, perhaps, the hint of a transitional stage between the early church of Corinth and the churches of Clement and Ignatius. The prophet has the first place of honour and next to him the teacher but all churches have not their prophet, and in these bishops and deacons must act in the place of prophets and teachers, and be honoured as such, while in other churches the prophets and teachers were treated as a sort of Christian priest, and one may see how their work came to be regarded as a regular church office and gradually assimilated, in church after church to the offices customary in the larger congregations like Rome and Antioch. As time passes the place of the prophet is more and more taken by the bishop, and by the end of the second century it would seem, that, for such a bishop of the Church Catholic as Apollinaris of Hierapolis, the prophet was a memory of the distant past.

The Montanist movement in Phrygia had owed its strength to the appeal which it made to the prophetic tradition and the prophetic spirit. In the reign of Marcus Aurelius, the Phrygian convert Montanus had gone into prophetic ecstasies which shocked the more orderly members of the church, and a separation ensued, in which Montanus was joined by two prophetesses, Prisca and Maximilla; they continued for some time, it would seem, to appeal to those within the greater church to recognise them, for a fragment of Maximilla which is preserved to us, runs thus:

"I am chased like a wolf from the flock; I am wolf, I am utterance, spirit and power." .

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