Revelation 3:8

THE CHURCH’S HISTORY

‘I know thy works: behold, I have set before thee an open door, and no man can shut it: for thou hast a little strength, and hast kept My word, and hast not denied My name.’

Revelation 3:8

How would the angel of the Church of England have been bidden to write to us? Would he have written, as to Philadelphia, of an open door, and a little strength, the word kept, and the name confessed; or as to Sardis, ‘I know thy works, that thou hast a name that thou livest, and art dead’? All Church history is in those Chapter s of judgment; and how would our past and our present, how will our future bear that test?

I. The dark side of the story.—The candid and humble Churchman knows well how dark a side there would have to be in his picture if he were to tell the faithful truth about the Church of England. He would, I think, be prone to think of his Church with penitence and humility before he would dare to think of it with pride. He may not be greatly perturbed by her legislative impotence, although it is a scandal without excuse that a great national Church should be without a voice and without a means of expressing its corporate will. He may not be greatly disturbed by our parochialism, that deadly form of local paralysis, or by our diocesanism, which is only the same paralysis on a larger scale; he may be tolerant of our anomalies, our repugnance to reform, our all too normal alliance with the forces of reaction and inertia. Yet he will surely ask with shame, Where are the evidences of that prophetic insight which our Church ought to possess and use, the clear vision of social and spiritual needs, the hatred of wrong and the purifying fire of zeal?

II. A great inheritance.—And yet with all this, when the candid truth has been told about us as we are, we have a great inheritance, and that inheritance is neither dead nor impotent. When we are at work and alive, we have a gospel for the English people such as no other body can preach. Where you find a Church really living the characteristic life of our communion, knowing and loving its Bible and its Prayer Book, strong in intercession and united at the altar, there you have such a Christian power, so expressive of the best capacities of English religion, as no other body can afford. So much we may dare to say. And as we look backward to see how this inheritance has come to us, we can also see that we have been allotted a special and unique place in the Church’s story.

III. All religions bodies appeal to history.

(a) Be historical, says the Puritan; you can trace the degeneracy of the Church back to the earliest days of the second century. No sooner were the Apostles gone, and their generation passed away, than the Church began to make terms with the world. Institution after institution took shape which was not covered by the terms of the original covenant. The Church became secular, hierarchical, sacramental, mysterious; little by little corruption increased, and the mediæval Church, corrupt at the heart, is the logical outcome of that earliest Christianity which shifted from the anchorage of Apostolic custom. Be historical, therefore, and go back to the beginning. Cut away every form and institution which did not demonstrably exist in the Apostolic age; revert to the New Testament, and to that alone, and you will have a pure and a primitive Church once more.

(b) Be historical, says the Roman Catholic on the other side. The Church began with the commission to the fisherman; it has moved onward step by step, guided at all points, secured from error, guarded against vital corruption. It cannot need to look backward; whatever it adds to its creed must needs be only an explication of the original deposit, once for all committed to the saints. Trust the Church as it is, and submit, for it speaks with an infallible voice and lives with a life whose guarantees are wholly outside the order of nature.

Thus the appeal to history has issued on the one side in the subversion of the whole idea of the Church as a living society, and on the other side in that great disaster of forty years ago, the conciliar declaration of papal infallibility.

(c) But the Church of England has also its appeal to history. We do not reverence the past, neither are we its slaves. We believe in the teaching authority of the Church, but we are also conscious that in the New Testament there is a storehouse of principles by which the exercise of that authority can be and ought to be checked. We will not serve Geneva, because we are sure that our own life and order are both Catholic and Scriptural; neither will we serve Rome, for we know well that it is neither. And so to us, as to no other body, has been entrusted the treasure of such a Catholicism as can dare to protest when protest is needed, which can confront itself with the great dogmatic fathers of Christianity and know itself true to them, which can maintain and use the external beauty of worship without fearing any loss of spirituality; which can use, revere, and hold fast the sacraments without a touch of superstition. And in the ages to come, what need will there not be of such a positive, non-Roman, historical Catholicism as ours? Puritanism tends always to disintegrate; Ultramontanism is rotten at its foundations. Let us hold fast that which has been entrusted to us, for if we fail, who shall take the place that we are commissioned to fill?

IV. An open door.—We have before us a great open door; God has given us a little strength. Shall we go forward where the way is open? Shall we still hold fast the Word and confess the Name? The answer lies with you, with Churchmen one by one. Christ dawned in Britain seventeen hundred years ago; but He dawns still day by day, on each of us who know Him. Shall we let the brightness of His dawning

die away,

And fade into the light of common day?

That is our peril and the peril of our Church. If we let slip the freshness, the romance, the inspiration of the gospel, one by one; if it becomes to us an ordinary thing, a routine, a negligible commonplace, then, each by himself, we shall be doing our best to close the open door. If our Church is to fulfil her vocation she must fulfil it first in us, one by one. Therefore, as we look back on the story of that which has been, let us pray for the grace of vision, of daily inspiration.

—Rev. H. N. Bate.