Church and Nation: The Bishop Paddock Lectures for 1914-15Temple, William
Religion
Church and Nation: The Bishop Paddock Lectures for 1914-15
Temple, William
Church and state
How are we to secure (this is our problem) that from generation to
generation men shall continue to feel that in the service of the Holy
Communion Christ comes to them as by His own appointment, and they have
only to be ready to meet with Him; and that in meeting with Him they are
united with the whole Church in the Holy Communion, the Communion of
Saints? I believe that the continued recitation of the Creeds in our
own and other branches of the Church is the main safeguard, not only for
ourselves but also for those who do not say the Creeds, against that
combination of Pelagianism and Unitarianism to which men always tend to
drift; similarly I can conceive that, just because we uphold the full
conception of sacramental worship, others are enabled to receive
sacramental grace at their communions. It may be so; I know not. Of
course it cannot be received if it is not there; but even if it is
there, its full benefit will not be enjoyed except by those who believe
in its full power. Two men may stand opposite the same picture; both
see the same lines and colours, the accidents; but it may be that only
one sees the artistic reality or substance—the Beauty—while the other is
blind to it. But the man who finds it does not put it there; the artist
put it there; and if he had not done so no one could find it there; so
too the reality of the Sacrament is the work of God. But our fruition
of it depends on our faith, and even on the exact content of our faith.
Now I do not for a moment believe that that faith in the full doctrine
of sacramental grace can survive through the centuries, if it is once
separated from the whole order which expresses it. Therefore, while I am
not entitled to deny, as I am equally not concerned to assert, that the
members of other denominations at their communion service receive the
same gift that we do; still I say that as trustees for the Catholic
order, and considering the matter in the light of the centuries, we have
no right to sacrifice any of those means by which this full doctrine has
been given to us, and by which perhaps it has been also preserved for
them.
V.—Fifthly, I would suggest that in any scheme for practical reunion no
man must be required to repudiate his own spiritual ancestry.
After all, if the Church is the fellowship of the baptized, then our
brethren of the separation, as we sometimes call them, are members of
the Church; but they are not members of our branch of the Church; and
their faith is corporate and active in their membership of their own
bodies; consequently we are bound to hold that they and their bodies are
parts of the Catholic Church in this time of the division—the division
which is due to sin.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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