CHAPTER VI

THE COMMUNION OF SAINTS

Except by the will of God, it is not in man that walketh to direct his steps amid life's measureless possibilities or to have any confidence in dealing with them which is not vanity. Yet even God's will gives insight and courage only as it is our own law of liberty. As a rule from without, even a perfect standard of it would leave our souls oppressed, our lives routine, our world bounded by prison-walls, our moral horizon confined to the duties commanded. Being followed from a regard to God, it might deliver us from the worldly prudences for worldly success, which above all other causes deny us the noble uses of the world, but it would still leave our world a place of straight ruled highways, dusty with many anxieties, with the burden of routine worship added to routine duty. Not till we find the will of God to be the perfect law of liberty, and are free in it by seeing it to be wholly personal, wholly concerned with our own insight and reverence and purpose of good, does it give life more and more abundantly.

Yet it is never merely individual. We are not free as we are Ishmaelites. In isolation from the inspiration of human achievement and the influence of our fellows we have no scope in any sphere, and least of all in the highest. A conscience judging God's will by 259 tradition or common opinion is corrupt, but a conscience repudiating all guidance except its own constitution is barren. In the sense of a rule plain to each individual in every age and social condition, and independent of all the ideas which are the measure of human progress, there is no more a natural morality than, in independence of the increasing insight of prophetic souls, there is a natural religion.

We have no width of moral outlook except from the summit of mankind's highest ideals, and every ideal has a history, and without the influence of those who have before us seen life's opportunities, few duties would intrude upon our privacy. Except as we live in sympathy with the thoughts, are inspired by the lives, are strengthened by the fellowship of those who, by willing to do God's will in the actual tasks of life, have discerned by its guidance life's increasing purpose, and, with whatsoever outward defeat, have won its victories in their own souls, conscience may forbid, but cannot enlighten.

This heritage from those who have been open to receive and do the will of God and this fellowship with their spirit of victory and peace create the true Communion of Saints: and it is a first essential task of our true liberty to take our right place in the midst of it.

Being then heirs of its promise, we shall not need to trouble ourselves about its precise frontiers. Many societies professing to represent exclusively this august body have not been conspicuously either communions or saints, and the immense zeal spent 260 in discussing their claims is worse than wasted, but when we ourselves belong to the Communion of Saints so as to find our freedom in it, we shall not fail to discover our kindred, or be doubtful of their fellowship, because we shall be in the true apostolic succession.

This situation involves another antagonism which, being mechanically opposed, must be for ever in conflict, but which a truly personal relation, not working directly on us, but indirectly through us, turns into perfect harmony. The result may once again be expressed in summary form. God's will of love cannot be known apart from those who have discerned its guidance and cherished its fellowship, yet we cannot know it either by copying their example or by being absorbed into their company, but only by realising our own freedom in the midst of them.

The first wrong way of belonging to the Communion of Saints which makes it impossible to know the will of God as our own will, is by so accepting tradition that the past makes void God's living word.

The prevalence of the misconception that the use of the heritage from the past is by accepting it as authoritative antiquity explains the contempt with which all dependence upon the Communion of Saints has been repudiated, for it seems to mean the imposition of an external authority of standards of belief and action in a way to repress all true moral 261 independence. Naturally this resentment is not diminished when superior persons insist on subjection to external authority as the only state for which the bulk of mankind is fitted. In particular when, as its head, Jesus is set up as a standard to which we ought so directly to conform as to make it a sin to go round by the way of our own discernment of duty, He is vehemently rejected as the heaviest of all impositions on our freedom. As this is the chief rock of offence, we may confine our attention to the question of our dependence on that Supreme Example.

As men have sought to deduce from the sayings of Jesus a whole and rounded scheme of the Divine mind, without themselves needing to have the mind that was in Him for its interpretation, so they have tried to solve all life's practical problems by asking the one question, What, inferring from what Jesus did, would Jesus here do?

No view of what His life was can make that other than a searching test, a test so searching that nothing, it might well seem, could go deeper. Nevertheless, to attach God's rule, in this external way, to Christ's example only obscures and misrepresents the significance of His perfect Sonship for making us sons of God. Except as we see as He sees, He is no revelation; and except as we determine our lives as He determined His, He is no reconciliation.

To depend on Jesus as an external authority for the 262 will of God is not, as is so often maintained, a right conclusion from the belief that He is pre-eminently the Word of God. On the contrary, the proof of His Divine commission is in setting us free from the slavery which hinders us from being our true selves, living our own life, and dealing with God's world as our true heritage; while, to remain a mere pattern to be copied would mark His failure to establish a living relation of God's children to their Father. The reason for the belief that God was in Him perfectly, reconciling the world to Himself, and that the Spirit was not given by measure unto Him, is just the way in which He sets us free. Did He rule from without, He would fall into the rank of mere human teachers, whose authority fades as they remove into the past. But He lives eternally in the present, because God's will of love is so perfectly manifested in Him that it needs no appeal except to the hearts of those who are willing to lay themselves open to be convinced. Faith in any truth He never needs to ask except by showing us how to look at it so as to know it to be true; nor obedience to any command except by manifesting the spirit in which we shall discern it to be our duty. Only what speaks to the image of God in us has a right to be called a word of God; and only what thus speaks to the image of God alone, and has no need of extraneous aid, has a right to be called His absolute Word.

To-day, as in the past, no one can come near Him in sincerity, without having new depths of sympathy 263 and humility stirred by being made to feel more deeply life's real suffering and see more largely life's real service, and without being enabled thereby more adequately to interpret the world as God's by a worthier discipline and a nobler duty.

No imitative life, nevertheless, is inspired, and no inspired life is imitative: and the mere imitation of Christ is so far from being an exception that it is beset by special limitations.

First, this method of directly copying Christ's example can be employed only for immense problems and imposing situations; whereas, in His own life, nothing is more striking than what He said and did to ordinary people casually met in ordinary circumstances, which would not have suggested to us any kind of spiritual situation. Though He never said or did anything except what everyone should have said or done in the circumstances apart, at least, from His special vocation as the Messiah, even in the same circumstances nothing but the same power of dealing with their moral possibilities would have discovered any moral possibilities. The chief question is how to discover the great in the small, the mind of Christ in matters so ordinary that we should never be arrested so as to ask ourselves what Jesus would do.

Second, no one ever does encounter the same conditions as another; and, even if we could successfully apply His example to our situation, the exactest imitation would only be lifeless, unedifying mimicry. The quality of all He said and did was derived straight 264 from His amazing insight, which was just perfect love. Though echoed to the letter, therefore, the soul of it would still be wanting, and would no more be His example than a death-mask is a living face. Our life also, if it is really to be living, must, like His, follow our own insight. As His own understanding of God's love was the fulfilment of His law, so our own understanding of it alone can be the fulfilment of ours.

Finally, this external use of Christ's example does not help us to overcome our worst moral failure. The supreme moral defect is not the lack of a good conscience, but the limitation of our insight, especially into the claims of our own vocation, which makes it so extremely easy to have a good conscience. The comfort of that limitation explains the readiness to impose rules, and, even when they are hard, to accept them, because we seem to know where we are and when we can stop. Even when rules are found insufficient, it may seem possible to find an external standard in an example: and, in a state of pupilage, pattern is much greater than precept and much longer of profit. Thus the Apostle could say to his recent converts from heathenism, "Be ye followers of me," though, even then, he indicated that it was no mere copying, by adding, "as I also am of Christ Jesus." But, when we imagine that we can finally direct our lives by mere imitation of the life of Christ, we fall into a misleading and distracting encyclopaedic estimate both of Christ's life and our own. How, we are 265 asked, can the life of Jesus have been perfect? Was He interested in art? Did He concern Himself about public service? Are we in our complex time to have no other interests than sufficed for His simpler age? And then we find that many interests which have nourished themselves from His spirit, are ruled out by His example. And His example, moreover, being thus tabulated according to interests, becomes a mere catalogue of doings, wanting altogether the spirit which dominated His real life and made it at once so large and effective. He also had His special vocation as Messiah, dominating all His interests, and it was part of His true perfection to restrict Himself to its performance and not to engage in all conceivable human activities. But, when we follow Him in a mere spirit of imitation, we are led to conceive our own duties as the overtaking of a great number of tasks, leading generally to doing many things in a spirit of restlessness, and not as the fulfilment of our own vocation, which, however restricted, is complete in its place in God's general purpose. Not till we abandon the hope of having a conscience satisfied that it has overtaken all possible duties, and learn to live with one never satisfied, even though concerned only with our own task, does the example of Christ become an inspiration to enable us to see our own service, and cease to be a pattern to enable us blindly to copy His.

True conscientiousness does not arrest itself at infallibility, even under the guidance of Christ's 266 example. It is not determined by undeniable duties, but by steadfastly following the light, however dim; and it is seldom faced by questions of right and wrong at all, but is constantly faced by better or worse, wherein it must ever choose the things that excel. Thus alone does man truly do God's will and ever advance in the knowledge of it.

The influence, therefore, of Christ's example is not to be directly our pattern, but to inspire and succour the faith which sees love to be life's final meaning and last word of power, and so to enable us to discern for ourselves its guidance and to set our hope unwaveringly on its victory. Instead of saying, Look on me and I will show you the exact life which is adequate to the will of God, Jesus says, Come unto me all ye who labour and are heavy laden seeking to meet these external standards, for I am meek and lowly in heart. This means a heart ready to accept what God imposes upon it, and only what God imposes. For this reason His yoke is easy and His burden light, and we find rest for our souls. The ease is not because the task is small or because we can deal lightly with its obligation. To deny self and take up our cross is not easy. But if the spirit of our following is meekness and lowliness of heart, we find that the will of God is the will of love and so is the perfect law of liberty, which is the realisation of our own souls, as well as the consummation of all things.

The second wrong way of belonging to the 267 Communion of Saints which makes it impossible to know the will of God as our own will, is mystical.

Mysticism is here used in the sense, already explained, of impersonal absorption in the Divine and not in the sense of the mysterious depths of life which are inseparable from everything truly personal. Nothing passes so far beyond the senses as those personal relations which evoke the finer sympathies. So far do they pass with the living into the unseen, that it may well be that those who, after they had served their generation, fell asleep, have left more behind them than their achievements and their example. Most of all the Captain of our salvation has been included, with a warm sense of trust and companionship, in the most enduring part of living fellowship.

That sense of touching through experience the deeper things which give experience meaning, may be called mystical, and then mysticism is just another name for religion. But it is not the mysticism here meant. Mysticism proper seeks to pass beyond all the ordinary forms of experience to a corporate oneness, which is effective as we merge our personal will in it till absorption mechanically effects agreement.

Vague ideas of relief from the burden of our personal life by absorption in some wider life are probably always floating in the public mind. Being survivals of tribal ideas, in few of us are they extinct, but, in times of great national crisis, they well up with special force, and we have much talk of the 268 State or the Church as super-personalities. At most they could be only super-individuals, but, so conceived, they would still be only Brocken shadows of the misty tribal mass morality up through which mankind has slowly and painfully climbed, and which, when the storms lift it, again surges round our heads. What they lack is precisely the moral fellowship which alone is personal, wherein we are free as we are more perfectly directed by love, and loyalty to others and loyalty to ourselves confirm each other and are never in conflict, and fellowship is an emancipation and never a subjection.

As all social combinations are a mixture of tribal and ethical bonds, we must expect the revival of such ideas respecting them, and we may even have to admit their utility for a time But the essential quality of the Communion of Saints is to be ethical and not tribal. Wherefore, such ideas in connection with it work only confusion of mind and perversion of spiritual issues, till the insight and courage of the saints to hear and do only what God demands may become an offence.

Instead of spending time on considering this mystical relation to the Church as the body, we can deal with the problem more concretely and by way of pre-eminence by again considering the true relation of the members to the Head.

When the mystical way is taken, salvation is separated from His teaching and example and made to depend directly on His person. So hard a

distinction has sometimes been drawn between His person and all that ever manifested it, as to make it appear that we could depend upon Him for salvation, though nothing He ever said or did found any echo in our hearts or made any demand upon our lives. His person becomes a mysterious vehicle of forces, effective as they do not work through truly personal moral relations either with God or man, but directly and overwhelmingly by forces of omnipotence. But this has no relation to Jesus that even suggests the dealing of men with Him in the Gospels, and it reduces His life to little more than an interesting relic of antiquity. The essence of the Gospel appeal is humble, patient, suffering love, among us as one that serveth and not as one that sitteth at meat: and with such an appeal a mystical communication of spiritual force is in no way concerned--except that it is used as an example of ascetic renunciation of the world, though Jesus Himself said emphatically that it was nothing of the kind. The main concern is with the risen Christ, not as One manifested to be the Son of God with power, according to the kind of holiness which He manifested in His life, but as the one Divine omnipotent power in which we lose the isolation of our personal being, though the fact that it was once humanly manifested may be valued as bringing it nearer.

As Pascal says, we touch the risen Christ only through His wounds, but when it is for an ascetic renunciation to sink ourselves in His glory or to absorb ourselves in the Church as though it were His 270 glorified body, and not His body only as we, in our mortal conflict, manifest the spirit which brought Him to the cross, we merely substitute for reconciliation, in our whole personal life, to the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, a vast shining abstraction of power, which does not transform but wrongly removes the burden of the world. If it do not spare us the conflict, it merely sets us in it as tools of the most High, and does not send us forth with high hearts to the battle in which we must win our souls as the children of God.

The end of our whole relation to the Communion of Saints is not to save us from the burden and responsibility of being persons, but by showing us that persons are the only storehouses of God's purpose which do not pass away, to inspire in us ever deeper devotion to the personal values which are life's meaning and goal, and the only unchanging end of this ceaselessly changing world, for the sake of which we can endure all things as well as hope all things.

The third, and least Christ-like way of all of conceiving the Communion of Saints is to regard it as the institution of One, who, by rising from the dead and ascending to glory has ended all humility of appeal.

He who humbled Himself was exalted. He who came as a country workman in mean garments, comes as the Son of Man with glory on the clouds of 271 Heaven. This is taken to mean the close of the rule of meekness and the opening of the rule of might. After a short and fruitless attempt at saving men by service and sacrifice, God, it would seem, went back to domination and compulsion, overriding when He had failed to persuade and fashioning subjects when He had not succeeded in winning sons. Thus the life of Christ becomes a temporary episode in God's dealing, and ceases to be an eternal revelation of His mind concerning what is truly coming from above with power. By this interpretation the practical application, as well as the theory of Christianity, has been so changed that there has often been no hesitation about claiming the Christian name, while repudiating the whole method of Christ as shown in His actual life and death and in the nature of the demands He made and of the blessedness He offered. As an interpretation of our own experience, it turns the Jesus of the Gospels in to a mere cause of confusion. In place of His humble fellowship, in which the last is first and the first last, and no man is called Rabbi and Christ is the sole authority, and that only because He is the one perfect teacher, we have the Church as a state, whose officials claim a greater submission than any other state has ever required, for their authority extends to belief as well as action, and to the heart in this life and its destinies in the next, where no other state has ever imagined that its writ would run. And even where the claim is much more modest, the Church is far too much associated 272 with the idea of power and far too little committed to the faith that love is the only way of winning the victory of the Kingdom of God.

The joyous spirit of His followers, so downcast before, shows that in some sense they took the Resurrection to mean that all power was given to their Lord in Heaven and in Earth, but it was because His method had been vindicated, and not because it had been changed. To Peter it meant that He was a man approved of God, His method, which seemed to be defeat, being shown to be God's way of victory. To Paul it declares Him to be the Son of God with power according to the spirit of holiness, the spirit He manifested in meekness and lowliness. For both, the Resurrection merely made plain the meaning of the life and death of Jesus, that the moral order of love is the will of God, the last, the Divinest victory over all evil, the natural, the all-prevailing, the irresistible dominion, such as is given to no overriding might; and it called them to like service in the assurance of like victory, not because God had substituted power for love, but because He had shown them that love in the end alone is power, and its fellowship the one perfect bond at once of liberty and order.