By James Stalker
IN some respects the Church is a narrower body than even the family; for one member of a family may be taken into it and another left out; but in other respects it is wider even than the state; for members of different nations may be members of the same Church.
The family and the state are institutions developed out of human nature by its own inherent force and according to its own inherent laws; but the Church is a divine institution, planted among men to gather into itself select souls and administer to them supernatural gifts. It is not, indeed, without a natural root in human nature; but this root consists of those feelings in man which make him aspire to an enjoyment and satisfaction which are not to be found in this world of which he is lord, but can only be got as the pure gift of Heaven. Without revelation there is no Church. As the edifice of the Church rises above the homes of men, amidst which it is erected, and its spire, like a finger, points to the sky, so the Church as an institution is an expression of man's aspirations after a heavenly life-a life in God and in eternity, which only the condescending grace of God can supply.
I.
Jesus was born in a country in which there was already a true Church, founded on revelation and administering the grace of God. He was a child of that nation to which " pertained the adoption and the glory, and the covenants, and the giving of the law, and the service of God, and the promises." He was admitted into the fellowship of the Church by the ordinary gateway of circumcision; and a few weeks thereafter He was presented in the Temple, like any other Jewish child, in acknowledgment that He belonged to the Lord. Thus, before He was Himself conscious of it, He was, through the wishes of His earthly parents, shut in by holy rites within the visible Church of God.
The same has happened to us in baptism. But many who are baptized in childhood show no disposition in maturity to desire for themselves to be connected with the house of God. Jesus, on the contrary, as soon as He became fully capable of self-conscious action, adopted the pious wishes of His parents as His own and developed a passionate love for the house of God. When His parents lost Him in Jerusalem at twelve years of age they found Him again in the Temple; and, when they told Him how long and how widely they had sought Him, He asked in surprise how they could have expected Him to be anywhere else than there. * He was without a doubt a regular frequenter of the synagogue during His silent years at Nazareth; and strange it is to think of Him being preached to Sabbath after Sabbath for so long. *
When He quitted the privacy of Nazareth and began His public work, He was still a regular frequenter of the synagogue. This was in fact the centre from which His work developed itself. " He wrought miracles in the synagogues of Galilee."
Nor was He neglectful of the other centre of Jewish worship-the Temple at Jerusalem. He regularly attended the feasts; He sat down with His disciples in Jerusalem to eat the Passover; and He preached in the courts of the Temple. Even so secular a part of divine service as the giving of money He did not overlook: He sent Peter to fetch out of the fish's mouth a coin to pay for Him the Temple-tax; and He passed a glowing eulogium on the widow who cast her mite into the Temple collecting-box.
It is thus evident that Jesus was a passionate lover of the house of God. He could say with holy David, "How amiable are Thy tabernacles, 0 Lord of hosts; my soul length, yea, even fainteth for the courts of the Lord. A day in Thy courts is better than a thousand."
One sometimes hears even professedly religious people at the present day disparaging public worship, as if religion might flourish equally well without it; and, for trifling reasons or for no reason at all, they take it upon themselves to withdraw from the visible Church as something unworthy of them. This was not the way in which Jesus acted. The Church of His day was by no means a pure one; and He, if anybody, might have deemed it unworthy of Him, But He regularly waited on its ordinances and ardently loved it. There are few congregations less ideal perhaps than that in which He worshipped in wicked Nazareth, and few sermons are less perfect than those He listened to. But in that little synagogue He felt Himself made one with all the piety of the land; as the Scripture was read, the great and good of former ages thronged around Him; nay, heaven itself was in that narrow place for Him.
The Church is the window in the house of human life from which to look out and see heaven; and it does not require a very ornamental window to make the stars visible. The finest name ever given, out side the Bible, to the Church is Bunyan's Palace Beautiful. Yet the churches, which he was acquainted with, were only the Baptist meetinghouses of Bedfordshire; and in an age of persecution these were certainly as humble structures as have ever served for places of worship. No better than barns they seemed to common eyes; but in his eyes each of them was a Palace Beautiful; because, when seated on one of its rough benches, he felt himself in the general assembly and Church of the firstborn; and the eye of his imagination, looking Up through the dingy rafters, could descry the gorgeous roof and shining pinnacles of the Church universal. It is the sanctified imagination that invests the Church building, whether it be brick meeting-house or noble cathedral, with true sublimity; and love to God, whose house it is, can make the humblest material structure a home of the spirit.
II.
Although the Church of Christ's day was of divine origin and He acknowledged it to be the house of God, it was frightfully full of abuses. Though an institution comes from God, man may add to it that which is his own; and by degrees the human addition may become so identified with the divine institution that both are supposed to be of a piece and equally divine. The human additions grow and grow, until it is almost impossible to get at what is God's through that which is man's. Some successful souls, indeed, still find their way through to the reality, as the roots of trees seek their way to the sustenance of the soil between the crannies of the opposing rocks; but multitudes are unable to find the way, and perish through trying to satisfy themselves with what is merely human, mistaking it for what is divine. At last a strong man is raised up to perceive the difference between the original structure and the human addition; and he tears away the latter, breaking it in pieces, amidst the wild outcries of all the owls and birds of darkness that have built their nests in it, and discloses once more the foundation of God. This is the Reformer.
In Christ's day the accumulation of human additions to the religion which God had instituted had grown to a head. No one knows how it had begun; such things sometimes begin innocently enough. But it had been immensely developed by a misconception, which had crept in as to what the worship of God is. Worship is the means by which the empty human soul approaches God in order to be filled with His fulness, and then go away rejoicing, to live for Him in the strength thus received. But there is always a tendency to look upon it as a tribute we pay to God, which pleases Him and is meritorious on our part. Of course, if it is tribute paid to Him, the more of it that can be paid the better; for the more of it there is, so much the greater grows the merit of the worshipper. Thus services are multiplied, new forms are invented, and the memory of God's grace is lost in the achievements of human merit.
This was what had happened in Palestine. Religion had become an endless round of services, which were multiplied till they became a burden which life was unable to bear. The ministers of religion heaped them on the people, whose consciences were so crushed with the sense of shortcoming that the whole joy of religion was extinguished. Even the ministers of religion themselves were not able to perform all the orders they issued; and then hypocrisy came in; for naturally they were supposed to be doing those things which they prescribed to others. But they said and did not; they bound heavy burdens and grievous to be borne on other men's shoulders, while they themselves would not touch them with one of their fingers. It was high time for a reformer to appear, and the work fell to Jesus.
The first outburst of His reformatory zeal was at the outset of His ministry, when He drove the buyers and sellers out of the Temple. Their practices had probably commenced with good intentions: they sold oxen and doves for sacrifice to the worshippers from foreign countries, who came in tens of thousands to Jerusalem at the feast and could not easily bring these animals with them; and they exchanged the coins of Jerusalem for those of foreign countries, in which the strangers of course had brought their money. It was a necessary thing; but it had grown to be a vast abuse; for exorbitant prices were charged for the animals and exorbitant rates of exchange demanded; the traffic was carried on with such din and clamour as to disturb the worship; and it took up so much room that the Gentiles were elbowed out of the court of the Temple which belonged to them. In short, the house of prayer had become a den of thieves. Jesus had no doubt noted the abuse with holy anger many a time when visiting the Temple at the feasts; and, when the prophetic spirit descended on Him and His public ministry began it was among His first acts to clear it out of the house of God. The youthful Prophet, with His scourge of cords, flaming above the venal crowd, that, conscious of their sin, fled, amidst tumbling tables and fleeing animals, from before His holy ire, is a perfect picture of the Reformer.
It is said that the high-priestly families derived an income from this unholy traffic, and it is not likely that they felt very kindly to One who thus invaded their vested interests. In like manner He aroused the resentment of the Pharisaic party by turning into ridicule their long and pretentious prayers and the trumpets they blew before them when they were giving alms. He could not but expose these practices, for the people had learned to revere as the flower of piety that which was the base weed of vulgarity and pride. He had to consent to be frowned upon as a man of sin because He neglected the fasts and the Sabbatic extravagances which He knew to be no part of religion; and still more because He mingled with publicans and sinners, though He knew this to be the very course of divine mercy. He was compelled at last to pluck the cloak of hypocrisy entirely away from the religious characters of the day and expose them in their true colours as blind leaders of the blind and as whited sepulchres, which appeared fair outside, but inwardly were full of dead men's bones.
Thus He cleared away the human additions piled about the house of God and let the true Temple once more be seen in its own fair proportions. But He had to pay the penalty. The priests, the stream of whose sinful gains He had stopped, and the Pharisees, whose hypocrisy He had exposed, pursued Him with hatred that never rested till they saw Him on the cross. And so, in addition to the name of reformer, He earned the name of Martyr, and Himself became the leader of the noble army of martyrs, which in a thin line deploys through the centuries.
Not a few of that army have also been reformers. They have risen against the abuses of the Church of their day and perished in the attempt. For the New Testament Church is no more free than was the Old Testament Church from the danger of being a scene of abuses. The condition of the Christian Church at the time of those men of God to whom we are wont specially to apply the title of the Reformers was remarkably like the state of the Old Testament Church in the time of Christ: man's additions had completely overlaid God's handiwork; religion had been transformed from an institution for the administration of God's grace into a round of forms and ceremonies for procuring God's favour by human merit; and the ministers of religion had become blind leaders of the blind. By the Reformation God delivered His Church from this state of things; and never since, we may hope, has there been anything like the same need of reform. It would be vain, however, to suppose that in our time or in the section of the Church to which we may belong there are no abuses needing the reformer's fan. Though we may be insensible of them, this is no proof that they do not exist; for the Church even in its worst days has been unconscious of its own defects, till the proper man has appeared and pointed them out; and in all ages there have been those who have believed themselves to be doing God service when resisting the most necessary changes. **
III.
The name Reformer, where it is truly deserved, is a great one in the Church; but to Jesus belongs one much greater; for He was the Founder of the Church.
The old Church in which He was brought up was ready to vanish away. It had served its day and was about to be taken down. He Himself prophesied that of the Temple there would soon not be left one stone above another; He told the woman of Samaria that the hour was coming when they would neither in Gerizirn nor yet on Mount Zion worship the Father, but the true worshippers every-where would worship Him in spirit and in truth; and when He died, the veil of the Temple was rent in twain from the top to the bottom.
He founded the Church of the New Testament in His own blood. By the shedding of His blood He abolished the imperfect relation between God and men mediated by the blood of bulls and of goats and established a new and better relationship. So He said in instituting the Lord's Supper, " This is the new covenant in My blood." The new house of God is illuminated with the perfect revelation made by Him of the Father; and in it are administered the new and richer blessings purchased by His life and death.
But in building the new house of God its Founder did not wholly discard the materials of the old. *** He instituted the Lord's Supper in the very elements with which on the evening of its institution He and His disciples were celebrating the Passover. The forms of worship and office-bearers of the Christian Church bear a close resemblance to those of the synagogue. Above all, the Scriptures of the Old Testament, with the figures of their saints and heroes, form part of the same volume as the Scriptures of the New.
Jesus Himself did not draw out in detail the plan of the New Testament Church. He contented Himself with laying its foundation, which none else could have done, and sketching the great outlines of its structure. He entrusted to it His Gospel, with the sacred charge to preach it to every creature; He gave to it the twelve apostles, whose labours and inspired teachings might serve as the second course of foundation-stones laid above the foundation which He had laid Himself; He empowered its officers to admit to, and exclude from, its fellowship; He instituted the sacraments of baptism and the Lord's Supper; and, above all, He left with His Church the promise, which is her star of hope in every age; "Lo I am with you always, even to the end of the world."
This foundation-laying work of Christ was done once for all and cannot be repeated. Men dream sometimes of the Christian Church passing away and something more advanced taking its place. But "other foundation can no man lay." Only the building up of the Church on this foundation is now left to us. This, however, is part of the same work and may be done in the same spirit in which lie laid the foundations.
In the first place, those who undertake it require to gee to it that they build straight on the foundation. There is much that passes for Christian work that will not in the end be acknowledged by Christ, because it is not building on the foundation which He has laid. If that new covenant in His blood be ignored in which He declared His own work to consist, or if the foundations laid by His apostles in His name are not recognised, we may build a church of our own, but He will not recognise our labour.
All who take part in this work ought to build with His holy ardour. He thought it worth while to die for the sake of redeeming the souls of men; what sacrifices are we prepared to make in contributing to the same end? He gave His life; will we give up our ease, our effort, and our money? It was because He believed every single soul was more precious than a world that He died to save the souls of men. Are they precious in our eyes? Does their fate haunt us? does their sin grieve us? Would their salvation fill us with aught of the joy that thrills the angels in heaven when one sinner is converted? ****
There is needed, however, not only zeal but consecrated originality as well, in building this edifice. As I said, Jesus did not prescribe the minute details of the organization of the Church. He largely left it to human ingenuity to find out how best His work may be done; and the Church is only finding out still. New problems arise for her to solve, new tasks to be performed, and therefore she needs inventors and pioneers to devise the plans for her new enterprises and open up the way to new conquests. It is impossible, for example, to measure the blessing, which that man conferred on the Church who instituted Sabbath schools. He was no dignitary of the Church nor perhaps in any way a remarkable man, except in this-that he saw a vast work needing to be done and had originality to discover the best way of doing it. He led the way into the children's world, and ever since he has been supplying the best of work for the myriad's of willing reapers who have followed him into that most attractive portion of the harvest-field. There are plenty of other tasks awaiting solution from sanctified Christian genius; and I know no prize more to be coveted than that of being the first to show how Christian thought may exploit some new mine of spiritual knowledge, or Christian character rise to a new level of spiritual attainment, or Christian zeal reach the spiritual wants of some neglected section of the community.
*"Wist ye not that I should be in My Father's house? " So the Revised Version, correctly. * What was the man like who did it? Was he a wise man, who guided the footsteps of the Holy Child into the pastures of the Word and supplied Him with the language in which His own thoughts afterwards expressed themselves? or was lie an embodiment of all that Jesus had afterwards to denounce in Pharisee and scribe? No portion of a congregation is more awe inspiring to a minister than the children. Any Sunday there may be sitting before us one who is already revolving the thoughts which will dominate the future and supersede our own.
** Schism is the caricature of Reform. But Schismatic is often merely a nickname given to the true Reformer; and even real schism nearly always indicates the need for reform, as Schleier-nucher has proved in the profound discussion of Church Reform in his Christliche Sitte. He says: "Um also nichtigen Versuchen zu wehren, bedarf es zuvorderst der Unterweisung zu richtigem Schriftverstdndnisse, und dann. muss auch immer das Bcwusstsein erweckt werden, dass ein volliges Verstehen der Schrift nicht anders moglicli ist, als auf dem Wege der gelehrten Bildung. Ware in beider Hinsicht immer besser gesorgt gewesen, so wurden viele Abnormitaten nicht entstanden scin. Dazu kommt aber noch etwas anderes. Es tritt namlich nur zu oft der Fall ein, dass die Ehrfurcht, welchedie Laien haben ftir die Wissenden als solclie und fur die Kirchenreprasentation als Amt, ganziich wieder aufgehoben wird durch die geringe personliche Ehrfurcht, welche die Mitglieder der Reprasentation und in welchen sonst das geschichtliche Leben ist ernflossen. Wie sollte auch der Laie beides vereinigen, auf der einen Seite sich fiber jenen wissen in Beziehung auf Sittlichkeit und religiose Kraft, und auf der anderen Scite sich ihrer boherefl Erkenntniss unterordnen. Der geistliche Hoch-muth wurde also in den einzelnen nicht entstehen, wenn er nicht immer Vorschub fande einerseits in der Unvollkommenheit der Organisation, und andererseits darin, dass nicht Anstalten genug getroffen sind zur Verbreitung des richtigen Schriftverstandnisses, und die Menge jener verkehrten Versuche in unserer Kirche ist ein sicheres Thermometer fur den Zustand des ganzeii in dieser Hinsicht. Wir werden auch des Uebels nicht Herr werden, ehe die Grunde desselben gehobpn sind."
*** The apparent contradiction between speaking of Christ both as the Reformer of the old and the Founder of the new is partly due to the contradiction, expounded in the preceding chapter, between the will of God and the will of man. To finite eyes it cannot but seem that He was striving earnestly for ends, which were not realised, and that the results of His life were different from His intentions. Besides, old and new are terms which may both be applicable to the same object at the same time. It is more orthodox to speak of the Christian Church as the same with that of the Old Testament; but it is perhaps more scriptural to speak of it as a new Church. That is to say orthodoxy emphasizes the clement which is common to both dispensations, whilst Scripture emphasizes what is distinctive in the new.
**** "Christianity would sacrifice its divinity if it abandoned its missionary character and became a mere educational institution. Surely this Article of Conversion is the true articulus stantis aut cadeittis ecclesia. When the power of reclaiming the lost dies out of the Church, it ceases to be the Church. It may remain a useful institution, though it is most likely to become an immoral and mischievous one. Where the power remains, there, whatever is wanting, it may still be said that 'the tabernacle of God is with men.' "-Ecce Homo.
