The War and Unity: Being Lectures Delivered At The Local Lectures Summer Meeting Of The University Of Cambridge, 1918
Religion
The War and Unity: Being Lectures Delivered At The Local Lectures Summer Meeting Of The University Of Cambridge, 1918
Christian sociology; Christian union; Social change; World War, 1914-1918 -- Religious aspects
I should be the very last to deprecate either prayer or effort to
advance this perfect end. It ought to be the ultimate aim of all of us,
since it is Christ's. We must do nothing to hinder it: we must do all
that may be lawful for us to promote it. But it should be pointed out to
such as look exclusively towards the East and Rome, first, that a juster
view of those great Churches--great gain as it is--affords little excuse
for ignoring the Churches of the Reformation, and for leaving the large
numbers of devout Christians in the lesser sects without either the hope
or the means of supplying defects which are now, for the most part,
rather inherited than chosen; second, that the divisions and
"variations" among all who in East or West, in England or in Scotland,
in the 11th or the 16th century, felt themselves bound to repudiate the
Papal Supremacy, have supplied, and still supply, the Papacy with a
chief weapon against all of us alike, and in favour of those extreme
pretensions which have been a chief cause of, and remain a chief
obstacle to reunion; and third, that nothing is more likely to bring
about that kinder attitude toward the East and us which we desiderate on
the part of Rome than a large and generous measure here and in America
of "Home Reunion"--effected, of course (as it can only be effected), on
the basis of the Catholic Creeds, a worship in the beauty of holiness,
and the Apostolic Ministry.
Anyhow, this is what we are finding in Scotland. Scotland, I know, is
but a little bit of the world: its largest churches small in comparison
with those of England and the United States, not to speak of the vast
communions of Rome and of the East. But the experience even of a small
part may intimate what may be looked for in much larger sections of what
after all is essentially the same body. For the Church, the Body of
Christ, in all lands and in all ages is one in spite of its divisions.
Christ is not divided. It is "subjective unity" not "objective" which in
the Church on earth is at present, through our sins, "suspended." Well,
in Scotland; where, let me remind you, the confession of Christ alike as
"King of the Nations" and "King in Zion," and of the visible Church as
His Kingdom on earth, was never laid aside, either in the National
Church or in the churches which separated from it (we laid aside much
that we should have done well to keep, but we stuck manfully to this);
we have had within recent times quite a number of incorporating unions;
including two of considerable note--the union in 1847 which brought
together in the "United Presbyterian Church" the two main sections of
our 18th century "Seceders," and the union of 1900 of the United
Presbyterians with the great mass of the "Free Church" of 1843--the
union that has given us the "United Free Church." I doubt if to either
of these unions the hope of a future Catholic Reunion contributed, at
the time, much or anything. I know there were some in the Church of
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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