CHAPTER II OUTWARD AND INWARD THE Christian religion is so broad and so complete, it is able to embrace such opposite poles of the truth and to show that the contradictories of the partizan are really complementaries, for this reason -that it is itself a reconciliation. It has drawn opposites together; and has shown that the truth. lies, not in the one side or the other, not in the dull middle-way between them, but in the combination of them all. This is the reason why there are so many sects and parties in Christendom: men are not large enough to appreciate the whole, and they bind themselves together to press certain sides of the truth which appeal to them. So Christendom seems to be sectarian, though its Master's prayer is that we may be one. But we are one already in the communion of saints, and we shall be visibly one some day, for the Church is essentially Catholic that is to say, "over the whole," a federation of all local excellencies. The natural man is a fighter and a partizan. The spiritual man is a reconciler. Thus is the Truth won. Men are generally right when they affirm, and wrong when they deny. By seeking to understand the positive truth which underlies the convictions of other men, we become partakers in the great reconciliation; and we find that as we are more bound in unity we are increased in freedom. The truth shall make us free. "The Word was made flesh." That is the central doctrine of the earliest Christian theology. The Son of God came into humanity, and was made man; the Divine was revealed in a human life, lived in a human body; and in Jesus Christ there was perfect reconciliation of God and Man. And St. John will have no evading of this unity: the first heretics he had to meet were the Gnostics, who boggled at the material side of the Incarnation, and could not endure the thought that God's Son should have anything to do with so gross a thing as the human body. Against them St. John warned his disciples in the strongest words "Hereby know ye the Spirit of God: every spirit which confesseth that Jesus Christ is come in the flesh is of God: and every spirit which annulleth Jesus is not of God: and this is the spirit of the antichrist." 1 For those who made that denial just missed the point of Christianity - they left the material and the spiritual unreconciled. They were heretics, that is to say, they were choosers," 2 because the Whole was too much for them. 66 Christianity is the Catholic religion, that is, the religion of the Whole. It unites the spiritual with the material. That is why our Lord, the Prophet of the spiritual, was also the Healer of men's 1 John 42-3. "Annulleth" is R. V. marginal for confesseth not." 2 Heresy (hairesis) originally meant choice," and in the New Testament it still has the sense of party-spirit or selfwilled choosing rather than of heterodoxy. bodies, and could say in one breath, “Thy sins be forgiven thee," and "Arise and walk." That is also why Christendom — while it has produced the most wonderful army of saints, and the highest forms of worship, and an unceasing stream of noble literature and inspired poems has also been the home of science, and freedom, and material progress. The white man has still many faults; but he has moved, while other races have stood still even the cleverest nations of the East can only advance by learning from him, for with all its spirituality their religion has been a thing apart. To him religion has been concerned with this world as well as the world beyond: in his conception of life the Word does not lie in the chill distance, but "is made flesh" his religion is as large aslife. Thus the white man, the product of Christianity, has made his way upward - with many falls and failures, of course and is to-day bringing the whole world into conformity with himself. Though he is himself as yet but half-Christianised, how much has been won already in honour, mercy, and justice the emancipation of woman, for instance, the destruction of slavery, the abolition of tyrannies, and the freedom for all to think and act. Black as are the social evils which still disgrace us, who can doubt that great forces are gathering among all good men to sweep even these away? Christendom resounds with great ideals which are being surely fulfilled as the years go by, and those ideals are becoming the ideals also of the whole world. And this because we have in our blood a religion in which heaven and earth are met together; righteousness and truth have kissed each other, and the Messengers who cry "Glory to God in the highest," cry also, "Peace on earth." It is the special and peculiar glory of the Christian Faith that it neither despises material things, as do some religions, nor worships them, as do others, but reconciles the material with the spiritual by that revelation wherein God is in man made manifest. Theologians call this the sacramental principle, and I do not know of any other word that expresses the idea. Sacramentalism is, indeed, the characteristic which distinguishes Christianity sharply from other religions. The Incarnation, as has been often said, is itself a sacrament—the revealing of Godhead in visible humanity. Christ in his life upon the earth was himself the visible embodiment of the Divine; and he worked also sacramentally, touching the inward through the outward, and renewing men's outward bodies by that which is within. And he founded a Church itself the visible dwelling-place of the invisible Spirit a Church which is entered by a sacrament, and of which the life has always centred round that holy mystery, which in common language is called the Sacrament because it is the focus of Christian worship. What then is a sacrament? It is, in the admirable definition of the Church Catechism, "an outward and visible sign of an inward and spiritual grace." Regarded technically as a Christian ordinance, it may be confined to those vehicles of grace expressly ordained by Christ. Regarded universally, sacramentalism is the answer to the riddle of the Universe. For in this general sense the Universe itself is a sacrament, the outward sign of the power and care and the beauty of God,— Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns, All thinking things, all objects of all thought, Thus poets, musicians, and all other artists, have always seen it. The "magic," indeed, as we call it, of art is precisely its sacramentalism—that it reveals the eternal and invisible which always lies within the outward. And art does this by methods which are themselves sacramental, using audible or visible things as the vehicles of ideas that baffle the common ways of speech: a musician by the vibrations which he scrapes from the sinews of a sheep can lift us into a world of emotion and of knowledge which lies about the feet of God; a poet, often by the simplest use of everyday words, can stir thoughts that lie too deep for tears; and the gift of understanding is just that we can see the infinite in common things- the gross nature is just that which is unsacramental, the material being all that it can see A primrose by a river's brim A yellow primrose was to him, |