IH NOV 8 1911 *j BV 600 .L33 1911 Lanier, John J. 1862-1942. The church universal The Church Universal Kinship of God and Man By REV. J. J. LANIER Vol. I. HARMONY OF SOME REVELATIONS IN NATURE AND IN GRACE ($i.SO postpaid) Vol. II. GOOD AND EVIL ($i.SO postpaid) Vol.111. SALVATION OF MAN (^^1.50 postpaid) Uniform cloth binding; each volume complete in itself. The set, ^3.50 postpaid. THE CHURCH UNIVERSAL (^1.50 net) * NOV 8 19i: A-^ • — rr**r The Church Universal A RESTATEMENT OF CHRISTIANITY IN TERMS OF MODERN THOUGHT BY REV. J. J. LANIER, B.D. AUTHOR OF *' KINSHIP OF GOD AND MAN The Reinicker Lectures Delivered at the Virginia Theological Seminary November the 7th, 8th, and 9th, 19 10 THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 191 1 ^// rights reserved Copyright, 191 1 By Rev. J. J. Lanier All Rights Reserved, including that of Translation into Foreign Languages CONTENTS PART I — THE CHURCH UNIVERSAL CHAPTER PACK I. The Church Universal 3 II. Religion and Theology 12 III. Christian Unity 28 PART II — THE SACRAMENTAL SYSTEM OF THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH IV. Threefold Sacrament of Eternal Life . . 41 V. The Sacramental System of the Christian Church 51 VI. Baptism a Spiritual Birth 65 VII. Baptism, Symbol of Baptism, and Sacrament of Baptism 87 VIII. Difference between John's Baptism and Chris- tian Baptism 94 IX. Baptism of Spirit, Water, and Blood Universal 109 X. Baptism and Sexless Birth 124 PART III — LECTURES ON THE CATECHISM XI. The Sacrament of Confirmation . . . .145 XII. The Christian Church 153 XIII. Essentials of Membership in the Christian Church 166 XIV. Come to Years of Discretion 175 XV. To do my Duty in that State in which it shall please God to call Me 187 XVI. What we renounce in Confirmation . . .198 XVII. Source of Authority in Religion . . . .211 XVIII. Communion of Saints 227 XIX. What the Protestant Episcopal Church has to contribute to the making of the Church Universal 247 XX. Confirmation a Sacrament 257 V NOTE The Second Series of the Reinicker Lectures, de- livered at the Virginia Theological Seminary Novem- ber the 7th, 8th, and 9th, 1910, consisted of three lectures — "Trinity in Unity," "The Sacramental System of the Christian Church," and " Virgin Birth and Baptism." The first lecture is not in this volume, as it is in Volume I, "Kinship of God and Man." The other two lectures in expanded form are found in this volume. The lecture on "Communion with God " is in Volume I, " Kinship of God and Man." In conclusion I wish that I could find fitting words with which to adequately express my sincere appre- ciation of the kindness of those who have read this book in manuscript and in proof, and especially Rev. G. Frederick Wright, D.D., LL.D., the editor -of Bibliotheca Sacra, and Bishop Nelson of the Diocese of Atlanta, and the Bishop of Fond du Lac who has written the Introduction. J. J. LANIER. 5901 Stone Ave., Birmingham, Ala., April the 13th, 1911. VI Theological Seminary, Alexandria, Va. December i8th, 1910. My dear Mr. Lanier : It gives me great pleasure to send you the enclosed testimonial of the Faculty of our Seminary. Sincerely, A. Crawford, Dean, Theological Seminary, Alexandria, Va. December 17th, 19 10. To the Rev. J. J. Lanier, Birmingham, Ala. : The Faculty of the Theological Seminary of Vir- ginia desire to express their high appreciation of the course of Reinicker Lectures delivered by you last Fall. It was unique in the attendance of the whole stu- dent body, and still more in the number of ladies present through the course, though the lectures dealt with purely theological doctrines, such as " The Holy Trinity," " The Virgin Birth," and " The Sacramental System." Whatever you handled you illuminated. The secret of it all is in your clear faith in the great doctrines of the Gospel, and your gift of vivid illustration by means of simple but apt analogies. We heartily add our testimony to the many enthu- siastic testimonials your friends have sent you. R. W. Micou, Berryman Green, Committee of the Faculty. vu BlBLIOTHECA SaCRA COMPANY, Publishers Editor, G. Frederick Wright, Oberlin, Ohio. Oberlin, Ohio, April 20, 191 1. Rev. /. /. Lanier, Birmingham, Alabama. Dear Sir: I am very much obhged to you for the privilege of reading in proof your lectures on The Church Uni- versal. They are very readable as well as instructive, and will serve to remove much misconception regarding the cathoHcity of the Protestant Episcopal Church. The distinction which you make between ^' baptism '* and ''the sacrament of baptism" is very effective. I doubt, however, if you have made it as clear as it should be that the acceptance of the Apostolic and Nicene creeds involves a belief in the statements of the Bible which is inconsistent with much of the current criticism. One of my old-time friends re- proached me recently for publishing a favorable notice of Chancellor Lias's work on the Nicene Creed, which (the Creed) he characterized as useless on account of its ''crude metaphysics." In your Church you have a great advantage in the conservative in- fluence of your Liturgy. But we Congregationalists have been compelled from time to time to formulate special creeds to shut out fatal errors from sapping the foundations of the whole Christian system, and rob- bing it of its power. I wish a wide circulation for your admirable volume in defense of fundamental truth. Very truly yours, G. Frederick Wright. ix Diocese of Atlanta, Rt. Rev. C. K. Nelson, D.D., S. Philip's Tower. Feb. i6, 191 1. My dear Lanier: The effect and force of your illustrations stick and cannot be forgotten. Your treatment of Holy Bap- tism is particularly strong — it is unanswerable by Baptist or Roman CathoHc; it states the facts, the universal facts, so "that a wayfaring man though a fool may not err." You present the human side of Confirmation — the vows and promises — finely and in a winning way. I regard the lectures as a distinct contribution to popular theology of the right sort, as well as a devout and intelligent acceptance of the Truth as it is in Jesus. Wishing your book a wide sale and distribution that a long-felt need may be suppHed, I am, as ever, with high appreciation, Yours sincerely, C. K. Nelson, Bishop of Atlanta, XI INTRODUCTION It is with much diffidence that the writer of this In- troduction undertakes the duty laid upon him, both on account of the responsibiUty of indorsing the work, and his felt inefficiency in deaUng with a production so noble in its ideals and so novel in its treatment of them. For a long time there has been a feeling amongst theological scholars that a new setting more in accord- ance with modern philosophy and its methods of thought should be given to Catholic theology. St. Thomas will always be regarded as the culmination of scholastic and mediaeval science as based upon the Aristotelian philosophy. The greatness of his work cannot be overestimated. But the scientific discov- eries of the last century have so altered our common methods of thought as to require a new apologetic. We have here in this work an effort to meet this want. Doubtless there may be expressions found which would not at once commend themselves to the ordinary theological student; nevertheless they may be worthy of his prayerful consideration. Religion and theology belong to different categories. The Church's rehgion is one based upon unalterable facts which are summed up in the Apostles' Creed. Theology is a science which philosophically deals with XIU xiv INTRODUCTION the relation of these facts to each other and to man. As a science, it has both its conservative element and its progressive one. We would ask that this book might be approached in a conservative and humble spirit, that seeks the illumination of divine wisdom. We can all gratefully acknowledge the noble imder- lying purpose that animates this work. It seems to the writer of the Introduction to contain some truths most important for our time. We have here set forth the great, grand fact of God's immanence in nature. He is not a great Being throned on some distant star, looking down upon a Creation He once made. The natural world is a revelation of His own Being, His Wisdom, His Beauty, His Love. Nature is the " Velamen Domini " of the Blessed Being. He is the ever near and ever present One. He is every- where and in everything. He notices the sparrow's fall, the growth of every blade of grass, the tear of every child, the cry of every one of His children. Again, the great, grand, majestic fact of the Incarna- tion is here, in this book, seen to be a primary thought of God. It was not an afterthought occasioned by man's sin. Ever, from all Eternity, God designed a creation which should culminate in an Incarnation of Himself. Man's triple nature as a microcosm formed a fitting point of this union between the Creator and the Created. The smalhiess of the planet formed no obstacle to His design. As God was to enter creation for the whole of it, He must come at some one point, and the loving hiddenness of God chose our earth as His marriage chamber. The writer ventures to sug- gest the work of Professor Wallace, ''Man's Place in INTRODUCTION xv the Universe/' ^ as worthy of consideration on this subject. True indeed, man had sinned and needed redemption. God's greatest, grandest work was not dependent on the fall of His creatures. But The Eternal did not let the sin of His child bafHe His pri- mary design. The many milHons of suns surrounding the earth, and the many millions and millions of years in preparation were to give dignity to His entrance. He came in the fulness of time that He might gather together in one all things which are in Heaven and in earth. Again, too, the Author brings out the Gospel dis- tinction between the Everlasting or immortal, and the Eternal Life. If the immanence of God in nature has been to many like a revelation of a new truth, so the writer humbly suggests that the recovery of the full doctrine of the Incarnation may be. The Incarnate Lord, by joining human beings to Himself, is forming a new creation, and joined together in Him they form a mystical body, its vast spiritual organism, or living Temple. Christ, Who did not leave His Church by the Ascension, abides within it. The truth we want to emphasize is this, that what Almighty God is to the natural material world, this God Man is to the spiritual world. As God is immanent in nature, so the God Man is present, the permanent Source of grace and light and truth to the Church. Let this truth be realized by all kinds of Churchmen, and differences will disappear, and the Church combine in love and union. Man is immortal by virtue of His own spiritual nature, but Eternal Life is the gift that comes to us ^Pub. McClure, Philips and Co. xvi INTRODUCTION through the Incarnate Lord. It signifies a new ele- vation of being, union of God Himself in Christ. We are united to God in three ways: (i) By power. *'In Him we live and move and have our being." (2). By grace. We are united by the Holy Spirit and Sacra- mental grace to the Humanity of Christ. *'As in Adam we all die," i.e., by an actual contact of natures, even so, In Christ we shall be made alive. (3). As Christ's humanity possessed, by His union with the Divine nature, the Beatific Vision, so we in Him, per- haps in a progressive way, attain to it. This union is called the union of glory. In its completed state, it secures us in a state of sinlessness, and consequently Eternal blessedness and joy. It is thus a tremendous question for every child of man to answer, ''Shall he attain to it, or reject it?" This book also brings out in a singularly fresh and vivid way the great law of Virgin Birth. The reply to the unbeliever that the Virgin Birth is a violation of the common law of nature is, that in respect to our Blessed Lord's Conception, it is not so. For the natural order, as we know it, only relates to the reproduction and extension of our own species. Now our Lord, accord- ing to His own declaration, was a preexisting Being. He said, '' Before Abraham was, I am." The manner in which a preexisting person would take upon him our nature necessarily differs from that of a non-pre- existing being. His coming therefore from one parent does not violate the ordinary law of human production. Moreover, and this our writer brings out very forcibly, there are two laws to be considered in the production INTRODUCTION xvii of human beings: the law of sexual reproduction of beings of the same kind, and the law of the Virgin Birth, or the introduction of a higher life into a lower. The former denotes a progressive evolution under God's cooperation, and the latter denotes the unfolding of the Divine plan by a new activity and gift. The Virgin Birth therefore as standing at the head of the new creative movement is not contrary to, but in ac- cordance with, general law. In this work we shall find also a most valuable argu- ment in respect to the Sacraments. If our nature is to be united to the humanity of Christ, sacraments are an obvious necessity. God, Who has made us with body and soul, gives spiritual gifts through human and material instrumentalities. This is the great law that runs throughout the natural world. The gift of being with immortal life comes through the agency of human parentage. The sustenation of natural life depends on the natural sacraments of food and environment of air and light. Sound is made the instrument of com- munication of thought, and by it the spirit of man passes into the spirit of man. Thus in the Christian Dispensation grace is given to us through sacramental agencies. Our author brings this out by a striking analogy of our natural birth by water, blood, and spirit, and these three elements in our new spiritual birth in baptism. The water stands for nature, blood for humanity, which may cover both the Church and Christ, and the Spirit or Holy Ghost. The whole sec- tion is worthy of serious thought. Moreover, we have here the great law of Christian unity. It is the grace that communicates to us the nature of Christ, that xviu INTRODUCTION unites Christians into an indissoluble family. We are thus one, as the Father and Son are one. The family has, however, become outwardly divided. The great problem before all Christians is, "How can it be a re- united family?" Our Lord prayed that it not only should be one, but be so united outwardly as to bear witness to His, and the Church's, divine mission. This supernatural effect can only be brought about by su- pernatural means. An enforced union, under an ab- solute monarchy as proposed by Rome, is of the earth, earthy. It bears no witness to a divine mission. The Church, one by sacramental grace, was to be one out- wardly by Divine charity. It was the spirit of sub- mission of local and national churches to the whole or universal body that was to bear witness to its super- natural origin and mission. We, who are churchmen, are realizing more and more that the Holy Spirit was given the Church at Pente- cost. It was not a temporary gift, but He came from Christ into His body the Church to enlighten, guide, and sanctify it. Pentecost was the birthday of the Church. It can no more be repeated than can Christ- mas Day. The Church, by the indwelling of the Holy Ghost, became a spiritual organism, having thus life in itself and capable of commimicating and preserv- ing Kfe. These are some of the grand truths which are to be found in this work. Not only will they help us to meet the needs of our time, but will draw the different schools, the Evangeli- cal, the Catholic, and the Broad, more closely together. Oh ! It is this that we so much need. We need espe- cially the increase of Divine charity, which will lead us INTRODUCTION xix to love and trust one another. Has not the time come for past warfare to cease ? All the three schools, the high, the low, and the broad, stand for separate but true ideals. The evangelical dwells upon the subjec- tive side of religion and the need of vital piety, and de- pendence from first to last on the merits of Christ. The high Churchman dwells on the objective side of religion as embodied in the Church, the ministry, and the Sacraments. The broad churchman seeks for reconciliation between reason and tradition. They are thus all good in their respective ways. Each has, however, the danger of its own extreme. The subjec- tive, apart from the objective, would lead to Quaker- ism; the objective apart from the subjective, would lead to formalism or Romanism; Rationalism, apart from authority, ends in Unitarianism. We need, avoiding extremes, to come together to learn from one another, to come closer to Christ, and be more filled with the Holy Spirit, to lay aside all suspicion and dis- trust, to act together in the spirit of divine love. We pray that this book may aid in this blessed consumma- tion, for if our dear and beloved Church would only become imited in heart and soul, what great things could not be done through it for the extension of the Kingdom of Christ. We ask for this book, dear Reader, your sympathy, your cooperation, and your prayers. ►i< C. C. Fond du Lac. PART I THE CHURCH UNIVERSAL THE CHURCH UNIVERSAL The word " catholic'' reminds me of an examination held by a Coimty School Commissioner in Southwest Georgia. One question was, Why is Geography a catholic study ? All these candidates seeking to teach the youth of Georgia failed most ludicrously to answer this question correctly, except one who said that Geography is a catholic study because everybody studies it, that is, it is not like music a special study but is a universal study. No attentive stranger attending the service of the Protestant Episcopal Church can fail to understand what the word catholic means, for every time we repeat the Creed we not only say that we believe in the Uni- versal Church but pray for it in these words : ''More especially we pray for Thy Holy Church Universal, that it may be so guided and governed by Thy good Spirit, that all who profess and call themselves Christians may be led into the way of truth, and hold the faith in unity of spirit, in the bond of peace, and in righteous- ness of life." In order to prevent any possible mis- imderstanding of what we mean when we say in the Creed, "I beheve in the Holy Catholic Church," we will begin with the definition of the Catholic Church and the Catholic Christian. 4 THE CHURCH UNIVERSAL The Church of Holy Scripture and ancient authors is the entire body of the baptized faithful. It is a house to which every Christian carries the key, whether he be Pope or layman, Archbishop or street corner Evangelist. No intelligent, spiritual, or godly minded person pretends that his own denomination, be it Episcopal or Independent, comprises the whole Church of God. Every Christian on earth and in Paradise is an essential part of the Church Universal. What then are all our denominations ? No one is the Church Universal. What are they then? They are religious societies within the one Universal Church of God, each giving to the Church that particular ser- vice which in the Providence of God it has been called upon to render. When we say in the Creed that we believe in the ''Holy CathoHc Church," we recognize that the Church of God is larger than any sect. A sectarian is one who limits the Church of God to his own sect. The catholic Christian is too large minded for this. He knows that there are Christians in all "the societies " in one Church of God ; for that which makes one a Christian in one society in the Church makes him a Christian in all — either a narrow sec- tarian Christian or a broad-minded cathoHc Christian — for there is only one way of making a man a Chris- tian, which is by ''a death unto sin and a new birth unto righteousness." One can be a Christian without being a Baptist, Methodist, Presbyterian, Episco- palian, or Romanist, as these words are defined to-day. What would you call such a Christian ? He is a cath- olic Christian and wants his society in the Church of God to be as large as Christ so that all humanity THE CHURCH UNIVERSAL 5 can be gathered into the one fold of Christ, called His Church. This is what the Church Universal means. But alas ! at the present time it is only an ideal in the mind of Christ, and in spiritual minded souls here and there who have outgrown sectarianism. The reality we have is as follows: "There is an infinite variety of religions in the United States. There are churches small and great, churches high and churches low, orthodox and heterodox, Romanist and Protestant, liberal and conservative, Calvinistic and Arminian, native and foreign, Trinitarian and Unitarian. All phases of thought are represented by them, all possible theologies, polity, ritual, usage, and worship. One may be a Pagan, Jew, or Christian, or each in turn. If a Christian, he may select one of the 125 or 130 kinds, or join every one of them in turn. If none of these suit us, each one can constitute himself into a church all by himself," I cannot get any comfort out of this strange state of affairs however much others may praise it. It makes me sick at heart and faint in soul ! It made the late lamented Henry Drummond say: ''What is religion ? What am I to believe ? What seek with all my heart, mind, and soul ? Every day a new authority announces himself. Poets, philosophers, and preachers try their hand on us in turn. New prophets arise and beseech us for our soul's sake to give ear to them. At length the theories, like the beams of light in the laboratory experiment, combine in the mind to make total darkness." This is the natural and inevitable result of having 6 THE CHURCH UNIVERSAL 187 differing sectarian societies, with 187 different creeds and methods of salvation, each setting up rival claims to be exclusively the Church of God. If it were possible to confuse people and make them lose their heads, this would do it. No greater blessing could be bestowed upon this land than for aU Chris- tian people to say with one voice : This is salvation t Believe this, and do this, and you will he saved ! Sectarianism has been caused, to a large extent, by Christian societies making non-essentials conditions of Church membership. What I can believe or not believe, what I can do or leave undone, and be none the better or worse man for so doing, is a non-essen- tial of membership in the Church of God. What all men must do and believe to be saved from a sinful life is the faith of the Church Universal. If more than this is made necessary for membership in any branch of the Church that instant it becomes a sectarian society in the Church of God, for it has added over and above the essentials non-essentials, and thereby makes it necessary for a man to believe certain things and do certain things, in order to become a member of that society of Christians, which is not necessary to make a man a Christian. In the past all of us lorded it over God's heritage, no one being able to say: "I am better than thou,'' "I did not do it." None of us to-day, except in a half- hearted way, believe in our past ^' plans of salvation." This shows that we have broken the anchors which bind us to the sectarian idea of the Church and are fast coming to the idea and ideal of the Church Uni- versal. We must constantly remember that only THE CHURCH UNIVERSAL 7 two or three Christian sects originated in America. Most of them had their origin in Europe, and as their members moved to America, they brought their societies with them, and set them up here. The sectarian Christianity which we have in America is largely of foreign importation, and as these foreign populations have fused and amalgamated into one American people the day is coming when the foreign sectarian Christianity imported from Europe will be fused into the Church Universal, so that a minister in one congregation is a minister in all, and a member of one congregation is a member of all. Fortunately for us the heat, the bitterness, the strife, and the controversies growing out of the forma- tion of sectarian societies we know nothing about, save as we read them upon the pages of history. But in the days of their origin and growth, as the readers of Church history know only too sadly and too well, the air was filled with anathemas of excommunication hurled against each and every one not of his sect and party, each claiming that salvation was to be foimd only within his walls. There is only a small per cent of the membership of any church that knows much about its history, but those who have taken the trouble to read know that in the "good old days '' there were genuine, giant, and uncompromising sectarians. The faith of the Church Universal was submerged and in danger of being lost beneath the surging billows of sectarian Christianity. But to-day, thank God, sec- tarianism is dying. For this sufficient reason, every sectarian society knows that membership in his particular sect is not 8 THE CHURCH UNIVERSAL necessary for salvation. When one reaches this con- clusion he ceases to be a sectarian and becomes a catholic Christian. Sectarianism for him is dead. Unless I am very much mistaken there are hundreds and thousands of Christians thinking and saying this to-day. They have ceased to care and bother them- selves about the quarrels of sectarian societies, and their conflicting ''plans of salvation.'' But they care more than they ever did for the essentials of genuine salvation, the Creed which enshrines these essentials, and the Church which is to be the embodiment and living organism of this salvation — which is the Church Universal, the body of Christ, the blessed com- pany of all faithful people, the temple of the living God. Most Christians find themselves members of so- cieties which have confessed that they have conditions of membership which are not essential to salvation. This is becoming intolerable and unendurable to men and women who are seeking the reality and marrow of things. They are asking the question more ear- nestly every day, what right has any body of men and women to form themselves into a society which they call the Church of God, and then make conditions of entrance into their society which they themselves acknowledge are not essential for salvation? Must one man believe and do one thing to be saved, and another man do another thing, and so on ad infinitum, until there is a particular method of salvation for every individual man ? When the thing is put in this way you see the absurdity of it. I go to my Baptist brother and say, "Do you believe THE CHURCH UNIVERSAL 9 that all Methodists, Presbyterians, Episcopalians, and Romanists are going to perdition when they die ? That no man can be saved unless he is wet all over with water? " He will at once say, ''No ! all Christians are saved and will go to Heaven when they die." I ask my Methodist brother if he believes that only Methodists are going to be saved. He says, ''Oh no, all Christians are saved and will go to Heaven when they die." My Presbyterian brother believes the same thing, and I cannot find it in my heart to beHeve that the Roman priest really thinks that all good people are going to perdition when they die because they are not members of the Roman sect. Here is the condition of sectarian Christianity in America to-day. We all admit that all Christians are good enough to enter Heaven, but are not good enough to become members of petty sectarian societies until we behttle our souls and surrender our mental integrity by subscribing to condirions of sectarian Church membership, which are confessed on all hands to be non-essentials of salvation, which a man can obey or not obey as he sees fit, and still get into the Kingdom of God ! Once people believed, and honestly believed, that unless a man was immersed, beHeved the Methodist Discipline, the Westminster Confession of Faith, The Thirty-nine Articles, or that the Pope was the infallible Vicar of Christ, the Supreme Head of the Church on earth, they could not be saved. As long as people believed this we could not help having sec- tarian Christianity, but to-day the great majority of Christians know that a man can believe all these lo THE CHURCH UNIVERSAL non-essentials, about which Christians have fought so pugnaciously and so long, and go to hell and be damned; and not believe one of them and go to heaven and be saved ! In the by-gone days of ignorance, prejudice, and bigotry, all sects were sincere in the contention that they were exclusively the Church of God, but to-day when one makes such a claim, he comes perilously near being a hypocrite, and at best convinces few be- sides himself. I would that these words might ring around the world and wake the sleeping conscience of every Christian — let us make the conditions of entrance into the Christian Church what a man must do and believe to be a Christian, and if we do not know what this is, let us close up our doors, and stop trying to deceive ourselves and the world by calling our ex- clusive holy clubs the Church of Almighty God ! For he who in this year of grace knowingly and will- ingly does aught to keep apart, or drive further apart, the broken fragments of the Christian Church, is an archtraitor in God's House and commits high treason against our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ who died to save us all. The fulness of time has come to let the dead past bury its now discredited, dishonored, and unholy dead. For the causes which disrupted the Church of God four hundred years ago are dead, and why not bury the ghastly corpse out of sight forever ! Why not have the Church Universal ? I do not condemn altogether sectarianism in the past. Good as well as evil has come out of it, for I believe that each and every one of the larger sects has contributed something necessary to the well-being THE CHURCH UNIVERSAL n and perfection of the Church Universal, and that it is by the union and contribution of them all that the Church Universal will be made in America, as the union of the Missouri, Ohio, Arkansas, and Red make the mighty Mississippi. In the two succeeding chapters I shall still further analyze some of the factors which have caused sec- tarianism. n RELIGION AND THEOLOGY What the world wants is not less but more and better theology, as it wants not less but more and better science. No man objects to theology, but to what he thinks is superstition and falsehood, in which every one joins him. One of the most instructive books it was my good fortune to read in early years was James Freeman Clarke's " Ten Great Religions." The title, however, is misleading; for there are not ten great religions. There are no doubt ten great theologies, but, as there is only one God there can be only one religion, which men believe to the extent that they beheve in rehgion at all ; for religion is the same the round world over. If men agree about one thing, it is religion which never did separate one man from another man. If therefore you find something pushing you and your fellow-men apart, know at once and infallibly that it is not rehgion ; for religion is the universal bonds of kin- ship and love which bind us together and us to God. But if religion has not separated mankind, theology has; and it is only in the great transition epochs of the world, when men transcend their imperfect the- ologies, that religion has been able to unite mankind and do its perfect work. The present time seems to be one of the rare periods of the world in which real progress can be made, because men are everywhere 13 RELIGION AND THEOLOGY 13 beginning to make a right and necessary distinction between religion and theology and the facts out of which they grow. The mission of Jesus was made possible, first to the Jew and then to the Gentile, by His transcending their theologies but not their religion. His point of contact and basis of agreement with both Jew and Gentile was, ''as your own poets have said we are the off- spring of God." His departure was in living a life and formulating a theology, as far as He formulated one, in harmony with this universal truth. This fundamental distinction between religion and theology, and the facts out of which both inevitably grow, was first made in the Christian Church by the Apostle Peter in these words, ''I perceive that God is no respecter of persons ; but in every nation he that feareth Him, and worketh righteousness, is acceptable to Him." (Acts 10 : 34-35.) The significance and force of these words grow out of the circumstances under which they were uttered. They were Peter's defence for admitting the Gentile convert, Cornelius, into the Christian Church, which brought down upon the head of the Apostle Peter, who admitted him, a storm of protest from the Jewish members of the Church, although it was in direct obe- dience to the explicit command of Jesus, *'Go ye, therefore, and teach all nations, baptizing them into the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost." Many have used this as an argument against the gen- uineness of the baptismal formula in Matthew's Gos- pel, saying : *' Surely the Jewish disciples, if Jesus had 14 THE CHURCH UNIVERSAL given this command, would have raised no objection to the baptism of a Gentile, but would have welcomed it. Making Gentiles members of the Christian Church, under such strong objection, looks very much like an afterthought on the part of Peter, and|not the original idea of Jesus." This contention would indeed be most plausible and convincing, if it was the only account we have of the disciples' failure to understand, and obey, the com- mands of Jesus. It does not, however, stand alone. It has been reproduced in the history of the Christian Church in every age. The truth of the matter is, that only under the initiative and guidance of in- spired leadership does the Christian Church obey the direct and explicit commands of Jesus, and by so doing make progress. Jesus knew that His disciples would not, and, in many instances, on account of their igno- rance and prejudice, could not understand His com- mands. He therefore said: "I will send the Holy Spirit who will take of mine and show it unto you." The union of Jew and Gentile in social and religious intercourse was so unusual, the possibiUty of it in their minds so remote, and the objection to it even on the part of St. Peter, the most opened-minded of them all, so strenuous, that it required a special revelation to convince him that Jesus really meant the Gentiles as well as the Jews to be members of the Christian Church. (Acts lo.) And had it not been for the inspired leadership of the Apostle Peter in this crisis of the Church, it would, as far as we can now see, have remained a petty sect of Nazarenes ; but his Baptism of this Gentile made it possible for this sect to become RELIGION AND THEOLOGY 15 the Universal Church of mankind under the leadership of St. Paul, when the courage of Peter failed him later on imder pressure from his sectarian Jewish brethren. The baptism of Cornelius marked the advent of in- spired leadership, and that order of thought which makes spiritual geniuses. For before this time the Apostles and their followers were Jewish sectarians, limiting God's acceptance of a man to that peculiar and exclusive type of theology in which it was their fortune to be educated ; but in this remarkable revolution of thought, wrought in them by the Holy Spirit, they passed from Jewish sectarianism into the one eternal religion of mankind. DIFFERENCE BETWEEN RELIGION AND THEOLOGY Jesus said: "Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind. This is the first commandment. And the second is like unto it, thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself. On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets." St. John says, "We know that we have passed from death to Hfe because we love the brethren." St. James says, "Pure religion . . . is to visit the fatherless and widows in their afHiction, and to keep himself unspotted from the world." The essence of religion as defined by these men is love of God and man. We now wish to find the eternal basis of love, human and divine. Do we not love father, mother, sister, and brother better than all others? And is not the fact of kinship the basis of human love ? Divine love is i6 THE CHURCH UNIVERSAL also based upon the fact of kinship, which Jesus stated when he said, "Call no man your father upon the earth, for one is. your Father which is in heaven.'* Christians therefore begin their Creed by saying, "I believe in God the Father," which is a statement of the kinship of God and man, and complete it by telling who God is — Father, Son, and Holy Spirit ; and still further expand it by stating what God does as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. The creed of Christendom there- fore is nothing more than a statement of the /ad of the kinship of God and man, upon which rehgion is based, and out of which it grows. The explanation, or, if you prefer, the attempted explanation, of these /ac/5 is theology. These facts are contained in the Apostles' Creed, and as we understand the significance of these facts better and better, and restate their relation in terms of new knowledge gathered from age to age, theology is constantly chang- ing. In other words theology is a science based upon facts as all sciences are ; and, like all sciences, it is constantly progressing; and because it is progressing it is changing. For instance let us take this initial fact and state- ment of the Creed out of which all religion grows, ''I believe in God the Father Almighty, maker of Heaven and earth." All the science, philosophy, and theology man will ever know cannot change this fact one iota. But if theology has not changed this fact, and does not care to change it, and cannot change it since it is a fact, it has so deepened its significance that God is glorified in His creation as never before in the history of the world. Let us take the old theological conception RELIGION AND THEOLOGY 17 of creation in two points only: (i) size of creation, and (2) how long in creating, and contrast them with the modern conception, and you will see what I mean. The old conception was that this earth was the largest piece of matter in the universe, and that sun, moon, and stars were simply electric lights hung up in the sky to light the earth. Contrast this with the changed conception which later-day theology teaches, that this earth is simply a speck of matter, and instead of one world there are innumerable worlds vastly larger than this, so that infinite space is filled with in- finite number of worlds. Which conception gives you the grander idea of God as Creator ? The old conception was that in six days of twenty- four hours each God created the universe, and then rested. The modern teaching is that the earth reached its present form through long geological epochs of creative periods lasting thousands, or millions, of years ; that when we look out into the heavens, we see worlds in all stages of creation to-day, some not as far advanced as this earth, and others dead like the frozen moon. As men are constantly born and dying on this earth so worlds out in the heavens are born and dying all the time. These six periods of the growth of the planets, and the life which inhabits them, are believed to contain the truth dramatically taught in the first chapters in Genesis. Which gives you the grander idea of God as Creator, to think of Him creating a universe about as big as our back yards, working only six days of twenty- four hours each, and then doing nothing, or to think of i8 THE CHURCH UNIVERSAL Him as creating throughout infinite time, and filling infinite space with infinite number of worlds ? Such a conception as this makes God Eternal and Infinite Creator. And so every Article of the Creed of Christendom, as we grow in knowledge, grows in depth and signifi- cance of meaning ; for in this way alone can we have a Creed true to the facts of life, so simple that it appeals alike to the child who thinks that he knows all it means, and also to the thoughtful Christian who knows that he will never exhaust its meaning through all eternity. While both alike believe the Creed, it means vastly more to the one than to the other. So these varying explanations of the facts of life contained in the Creed make differing theologies, which is well and good; for rightly changing theology means a more perfect understanding of the facts of religion. But trouble arises when one man says, '4f you do not accept my theology, you cannot be a member of my Church." This has split the Christian Church into innumerable sectarian societies, with which religion has had nothing to do at all. The trouble is caused by men who think that they have exhausted the mind of God when they have thought out their systems of theology, and what is good for one man must be equally as good for all men in all stages of growth. As a matter of fact, as the spiritual and mental natures of man go on growing in the likeness of God, this growth changes our theology to correspond, as the growing life of the plant changes the form of the plant from the blade into the stalk, and then into the full-grown ear. RELIGION AND THEOLOGY 19 The paradox of life is that in the midst of eternal change of form it remains unchanged and changeless. This great law expressed in terms of spiritual life is that religion remains unchanged in the midst of the ages ; while theology, the intellectual form with which it clothes itself from age to age, changes ; also, its bodily form, the Church, into which it organizes its institu- tional Hfe, changes from age to age, in proportion to the intensity, power, and activity of its deepening and expanding life. In the Bible we have this full, complete, and pro- gressive revelation of religion, culminating in the in- carnation of God as Christ- Jesus. And, as there was a continuously progressive revelation culminating in Jesus, so, since His departure in the flesh, theology has been growing, under the guidance of the Holy Spirit, into a more comprehensive grasp of this unchanging religion, which, in the fulness of time, came to perfec- tion in the person of Christ- Jesus our Lord. THE FACTS UPON WHICH RELIGION IS BASED Religion is based upon the facts of the universe, in the midst of which every man exists, whether he can explain them or not ; for because of these facts he lives, moves, and has his being, without which he would be non-existent. These facts are summed up in the Creed of Christendom, beginning with ''I believe in God the Father Almighty" and ending with ^^Life everlasting." The fundamental mistake made at the time of the Reformation, however, was not the assertion of the right, and the actual use of the right, by the individual 20 THE CHURCH UNIVERSAL Christian to do his own thinking, from which the Roman Church tried to persuade Luther and his followers to desist ; but the mistake was made by the sectarian Roman and then by the sectarian Protestant when he let his own thinking separate him from his brethren who could not agree with him, and to sub- stitute his individual theological thinking for the facts of religion contained in the Apostles' Creed, which is our bond of union with God and man. The bond of union which unites us is deeper than thought — it is as deep as life. The substitution of thought for the facts of life as the basis of Church unity is the funda- mental mistake both Romanist and Protestant made at the time of the Reformation and have , made ever since. The one body of Christians, however, who did not under the guidance of the Holy Spirit make this mis- take was the Reformed Church of England. Here the Protestant Episcopal Church has made a great con- tribution towards uniting a divided Christendom by placing religion, and the facts upon which religion is founded, the Apostles' Creed, above all theology. How great this contribution has been, and is, the thoughtful among all denominations have realized for the last hundred years ; for by making this necessary distinction between religion, and theology, and the facts of religion, every phase of theology in Christen- dom has found a home in the Protestant Episcopal Church without disrupting it. For instance take this article, "the resurrection of the body." Doubtless the time will come, if we ever perfectly understand what the resurrection of the body RELIGION AND THEOLOGY 21 means, when all will interpret this article alike ; but, if at the present time and stage of the mental and spirit- ual development of mankind, any party in the Church insisted upon all people in the Church accepting its explanation of this article, as terms of communion in the Church, it would become sectarian and at once disrupt the Protestant Episcopal Church into rival communions, growing out of the unimportant matter of the method of the resurrection of the body ; for all of us keep the faith, as long as we believe and teach the resurrection of the body, whether we can satisfactorily explain it or not. Even to-day, there are doubtless many Christians who believe and teach that the identi- cal particles put away in the grave are at some far dis- tant day reunited to the same spirit which they once clothed. Any one who believes this is just as orthodox as I am, who do not believe it, because the method of the resurrection of the body is not a part of the Christian faith, but a pious opinion growing out of one's education and personal equation. THE BONDS WHICH UNITE THE FAMILY What binds the family together ? It is not knowl- edge — for you have the infant of a day old at one end and the gray-headed father at the other. It is not sex — for you have brother and sister. It is not wealth — for you have rich and poor. What then is it which binds the family together, composed of so different and diverse elements ? It is kinship — sharers of a common nature by virtue of having the same father and mother — for Kinship cuts to the foundation of 22 THE CHURCH UNIVERSAL the universe ! The very essence of the Christian re- hgion is the kinship of God and man. If you were to apply the test of being members of the same family that Christians have thought necessary for membership in the Church of God, you would split every family in this land all to pieces. The babies would be in one family by themselves, the grown-up folks in another, the blue-eyed ones in another family, the red-headed ones in another, until you would abso- lutely destroy the idea of the family altogether, having nothing but a chaos of disconnected individuals. As nothing less than a common basis of kinship and love can kind the family together, so nothing less can bind the Church of God together. The kinship of creation, redemption, and sanctification binds us all to- gether in the one immutable family of God, the facts of which universal kinship make the Creed of Christendom called the Apostles' Creed. In this connection Bishop Wescott says : ''No interpretation of these great facts is added. They belong to life. They are in them- selves unchangeable. They stand before us forever in their subHme majesty, part of the history of the world. But as the years teach us more and more of the divine revelation which they convey, so we interpret them for ourselves, but we shall be slow to place our conclusions ^ even the simplest, by the side of the primary facts." (Words italicized by the writer.) CHANGING THEOLOGY DOES NOT CHANGE RELIGION So every man, who really thinks for himself, must remake into his own personality every phase of the RELIGION AND THEOLOGY 23 world-old theology through which mankind has passed ; for theology is the systematized knowledge of our rea- soned account of the universe. The facts of religion have the same relation to theology that the sun, moon, and stars have to astronomy. The astronomy may be all wrong, but the relation the heavenly bodies have to one another changes not ; so theology in certain re- spects may be wrong, certainly always imperfect, but religion changes only to be deepened and intensified. Neither do the facts upon which religion is based, the physical, mental, and spiritual relationships of the universe, as stated in the Apostles' Creed, change. As, for instance, in olden times the Ptolemaic system of astronomy was accepted, because it satisfactorily ex- plained to the ancients the relationships of the heav- enly bodies, as they understood them. But to-day all this astronomy is upset, and in its place we have the Copernican system; and should this system, like its predecessor, go up in smoke and out in ashes, the eter- nal relations of the heavenly bodies would change not, but go on chanting their wondrous music as when the morning stars sang together. Changing astronomy does not change the stars ; neither does changing the- ology change religion. There are Mohammedan, Jewish, Christian, and innumerable other theologies, but the religion of all these is the same to the extent that they have any re- ligion at all. Most of the religion of the world is in the heavens and not on the streets and in the market- places, so that the brotherhood of man is, as far as our race prejudice, commercial greed, and sectarian theol- ogies can make it, an "iridescent dream." 24 THE CHURCH UNIVERSAL INCARNATE RELIGION WANTED What has always been wanted is an incarnate reli- gion, — heart and brain, spirit and body, hand and foot, laid upon the altar dedicated to the service of God and man, — the religion of Jesus Christ. Every heart throb of that man, every thought of his brain, every syllable of his lips, was incarnate religion. No act of his injured any man, but helped all. Every touch brought health, every word brought forth light, His very presence brought forth life. He was in Himself the glorification of God and man. In Him, lo, since creation's dawn began, religion Hves, breathes, and walks among men. His religion is love of God and man, and His theology is but the explanation of His religion. His highest praise is that he went about doing good. Every man who walks in this path of righteousness will some day wake up in the presence of God. No matter how crude, imperfect, or erroneous one's theology may be to start with, if his acts square with love of God and man, and his conscience is kept re- sponsive to the highest light vouchsafed him, he will be borne heavenward upon the wings of a mighty angel. Only so was the world gradually led into the fulness of that knowledge which we have in Christ- Jesus our Lord. The path of service and helpfulness to man is the only path of light to God. A man who knows nothing about theology and loves his neighbor is a better Christian than the man who thinks the profoundest things about religion and does not love his neighbor. RELIGION AND THEOLOGY 25 Of course, no one places a higher value upon the- ology than I do, and its inseparableness from religion, but rehgion and theology are two distinct things. Neither am I defending anything so foolish as to say that theology is not necessary, and that one theology is as good as another. What the world really wants is not less but more and better theology, as it wants not less but more and better science. No man really ob- jects to theology, but to what he thinks is superstition and falsehood, in which every one joins him. HELPFUL AND HARMFUL THEOLOGY We all agree that rehgion is love of God and man. All theologies are an attempt on our part to form as clear a conception as possible of God and His relation to us and to the universe ; and we may state this as being an axiom: theology may be a help or a hin- derance to us. Theology is a help if it kindles in our hearts a flame of love to God and man. But, on the one hand, our love towards our fellow-men is in such a rudimentary state, the pride in our infallibihty is so convincing, that we will be tempted to anathematize, if not to burn, one who differs with us theologically. On the other hand, our imperfect theology will so pic- ture God that the time will come when we will have to give up our theology or stop loving God, because our theology presents God to us in such wise that we can neither believe in Him nor love Him. When this time comes, the only thing to do is to cling all the tighter to religion, which is love of God and man, infalHbly knowing that anything which tempts us to isolate 26 THE CHURCH UNIVERSAL ourselves from our brethren, or injure them by word or deed, is born of ignorance, prejudice, pride, and sin. A theology, however, which may not be harmful but helpful in one stage of our development may, at a later stage, be more deadly than hemlock. What is one man's food is another man's poison. We recognize this law in the physical world, but will we ever do so in the spiritual world ? We can take this as an infallible guide: whenever the theology in which we have been educated, however much it may have helped us in the past, begins to cramp and contradict our love of God and man, it has done its work, and it is time for us to get another theology, for God is showing us new and better things. NOT LESS BUT BETTER THEOLOGY WANTED Religion is not dead but is alive and growing, as this present-day death of outgrown theology proves. It is the inevitable birth pangs of the age into a truer con- ception of Christ, into a higher life, and therefore into a better and truer theology which squares itself with all the facts of life. Rehgion has grown in the hearts of men until they see that nothing is religion except love of God and man ; that conduct is of as much importance as creed; righteousness as theology ; and that all creeds will re- ceive their final acceptance or rejection solely by the kinds of lives which they necessarily produce. Creed and Theology, Church and Sacrament, will always be as long as rehgion is in the world, but the time has come when all theologies will be swept away which RELIGION AND THEOLOGY 27 are not true to the facts of life, that stifle the divine instincts of the human heart, and do not teach us to worship a God more merciful than we are. And when I find such a soul as this, I stretch my hand across all ages, climes, and races, and clasp his hand in mine, in the fellowship of the one Father of us all, before whose throne we bow; for I have found a brother in Christ, the common head of the common race; and of a truth, "I perceive that God is no re- specter of persons ; but in every nation he that f ear- eth Him, and worketh righteousness, is acceptable to Him" — and him whom God accepts let no man dare reject! in CHRISTIAN UNITY St. Paul is always the statesman of the Church. He saw beneath the shallows of things into the eternal spirit of things, and in the midst of infinite variety saw all things united in God, and speaks of our oneness with the Father through the Son and by the Holy Spirit as the bond of Christian Unity. His outline is : (i) One God and Father of us all ; (2) one Lord, one faith, one baptism of all ; (3) one body, one spirit, one hope of all. (Ephesians 4 : 1-16.) Upon all these ones unified in God St. Paul bases the unity of the Church, and he no sooner states the unity of the Church than he shows the diversity in this unity in these words : ''Unto every one of us is given grace according to the measure of the gift of Christ." And the sin of sectarianism is that men have perverted and distorted this one gift of the divine Spirit into endless causes of division by using the richness and diversity of the one spirit as the power with which to rend the Church of God into paralyzing ineffectiveness by the strife and bitterness of sectarian narrowness, conceit, and prejudice. DIVINE UNITY OF THE CHURCH But happily and fortunately for us the essential unity of the Church of God is divine, which none of us can make or break. 28 CHRISTIAN UNITY 29 (i) There is one God and Father of us all. This is the basis of divine unity. We are all children of one family, — all of us, Romanist, Greek, Anglican, and Protestant ; yes, even Turk, Jew, Heretic, and Infidel. Of these the words of the prophet are true: ''Have we not all one Father ? Hath not one God created us ? " (Malachi 2 : 10.) And the Christian Church is the one home to which the Father recalls his wandering sons. Can there be many families, many homes, with one head ? (2) There is but one Lord Jesus Christ who died to redeem us, and ascended to raise us. There is only one Christ; how can those who call themselves by His name, who acknowledged Him as Lord and Master, ever be but one in Him ? (3) Since there is but one Lord, how can there be but one Faith ? For the Christian faith is simply the facts concerning the one Lord. (4) There is not only one God, one Lord, and one faith, but one baptism. Baptism is a means of express- ing our faith in God and His method of entering into personal union with us. It is therefore always one and the same. (5) This one baptism of all Christians makes them one body in Christ. In baptism we find stress laid upon the outward as well as upon the inward — stress laid upon the body as well as upon the spirit. Just as there are in every man two parts: the outward body which we can see and recognize ; the inward spirit which makes the body alive, without which there would be no body but a dead mass of matter. The Church is the one body of Christ (i Cor. 12 : 17) ; something which so THE CHURCH UNIVERSAL men can see and recognize; and the one Spirit, the Holy Spirit, whose indwelHng makes the Church, the incarnate body of Christ, aHve. This is the Scriptural and ideal oneness of the Church ; One Father to whom His wandering children are brought back ; one master, Christ, has brought us back ; concerning whom there is one faith; and into whose body there is one baptism; one Holy Spirit who inspires and makes aHve the one body of Christ and enables us to press forward to the one hope of our call- ing, even to the riches of our one inheritance in the kingdom of God on earth, in Paradise, and in Heaven. This is the complete outline of the divine unity of the Church; nothing is lacking; nothing is superfluous, for there is the one spirit incarnate in the one body, the Church. ONE SPIRIT AND ONE FAITH MAKE OUTWARD UNITY If any one at this point says, as people do say, that the present outward division among Christians is of no consequence; that if Christians have one spirit and one faith, it is enough, we reply : unity of spirit makes unity of body. When you separate spirit from body, we call that 'Meath." Nothing has ever worked or been effective in this world apart from body, not even God. Upon entrance into this world He came with body. ''The Word made flesh " is the universal pro- cess of how spirit enters and works in this world. And until there is enough vitality in the one spirit and the one faith of Christians to build us into one firmly knit and compactly organized body, to hope or CHRISTIAN UNITY 31 dare dream that the Church can do the work which God intends it to do is sheer nonsense. The fire under the open boiling pot generates steam, but it cannot turn a sewing machine. It is wasted power. But when you confine steam in a mighty engine, there is no limit to its power and usefulness because it is com- bined and unified in a body. One drop of water is a helpless thing, but when you have untold numbers of these combined and unified by granite walls, you have the rushing mighty Niagara sufficient to turn the ma- chinery of the world, and the St. Lawrence upon which to float the fleets of the world. The United States is a powerful country because it is united, and all the power of the units can act as one unit through the President. If this was not so, the United States would be no stronger than the strongest prize fighter in it. The forces and powers that are forceful and powerful are united and embodied forces and powers. Our Saviour, when He prayed that His Church might be one, knew what He was about. What He prayed and worked for is worth our while to work and pray for. But in the teeth of all this people try to persuade themselves that the Church of God splintered all to fragments is more effective than one united Church. The rapidity with which the Church spread through- out the Roman Empire is one of the many sudden and remarkable surprises of history. In one hundred years the Church was planted wherever the Roman eagles had been borne. Together with the wonderful pre- paredness of the world for the Christian religion, these words will give you the cause of its rapid spread: ''They continued steadfastly in the Apostles^ doctrine 32 THE CHURCH UNIVERSAL — the one faith ; in the Apostles^ fellowship — the one body ; breaking bread — the sacramental unity begun in one baptism ; the prayers — joining in common worship as children of the one Father; for a person who was a member of one congregation was a member of all, and a person who was a minister in one congre- gation was a minister in all. This unity, which won such signal, rapid, and far-reaching conquests in the first centuries, we have shattered into hundreds of fragments, losing effectiveness and power to the extent that the unity has been broken. DREARY CHAOS OF INFALLIBLE INDIVIDUALISM It is said that the darkest hour always comes just before the dawn ; so, when the Church is most divided, paradoxical as it may seem, there is most rational and genuine hope for Church unity. (i) The break with the monarchial mediaeval Roman Church was necessary before the Christian Church could have its higher and more perfect democratic and constitutional organization. Sectarianism is the price we paid for this, which, with all its attendant evils, has brought great gains. Sectarianism, with every variety of theology and form of ritual, has made it impossible for us again to identify religion with any one theology and ritual, but has taught us that these are the necessary stages through which men, when once they begin to think, pass in their attempts to under- stand Christianity. Without this perfect Kberty of thought, which the break with Rome made possible, progress in theology would have been an impossibility. CHRISTIAN UNITY 33 The break with mediaevalism which unshackled the human mind has been the indirect cause of giving us the grandest theology that the world has ever known. (2) There is hope of Church unity in the fact that the majority of the members of all Church Societies when asked why they are members of this or that Society reply: because our ancestors were; and we remain because of business connections and social ties. The hope in this state of things is that the children no longer find any interest in the things which divided our ancestors, because the forces and issues, partly political and partly theological, which divided the Church are dead forces and issues. The laity do not care enough about these things to disinter them from their decent burial in cyclopaedias. The hope in this state of things is that a Church, run upon ancestor worship, business connections, and social ties, cannot last and ought not to last. It takes God, and the truth of God, and all the truth God has revealed in Christ- Jesus our Lord, to keep our souls alive and make them grow into the fulness of His stature. Sec- tarianism makes lean, stunted, and starved Christians, because they feed upon fragmentary, sectarian truth, and not upon the whole truth as it is in Christ- Jesus. The people of this country will not let the dead quarrels of our ancestors forever separate us from one another. We will forever honor them for the sacrifices which they made for the precious truth which they have recovered and given us, and we will engraft and reincorporate it into the one Church of God — the truth which the Christian prophets have recovered for us. John Calvin rescued the doctrine of the sover- 34 THE CHURCH UNIVERSAL eignty of God and the election of man from the obliv- ion in which they were buried, and with them broke the rights divine of kings ; Martin Luther the doctrine of justification by faith, and with it broke the usurpa- tion of Pope and priest; Roger Williams fought to successful issue the right of every man to worship God according to the dictates of his own conscience ; John Wesley that religion is a vital personal spiritual experience in every individual soul. These are truths which the Church can never again afford to forget, if we are to have the Christian faith in the perfect proportions of its life-giving power and grace; but we who live to-day can most honor these men who rediscovered these priceless truths for us, by recovering that truth which they lost when they broke the unity of the Church. (3) The most hopeful sign is that we are beginning to recognize that there is some truth in every one of the 187 societies in the Church Universal, but all the truth in none, and that it takes all the truth to save us. There is secret and often openly expressed dissatis- faction in all the Christian societies in Christendom, not because of the truth which they teach, but because of the truth which they do not teach. This will be so until every Christian has all the truth of God in the beauty of its holiness. REAL UNITY AMONG ALL CHRISTLANS But what I wish to emphasize now is that when man has done his worst, there remains a real unity among all Christians which man cannot break; and because in CHRISTIAN UNITY 35 the deepest and most real sense Christian unity never has been broken, it is only a question of time and education when the grace of God will reunite into the unity of His Church that which we have shattered into hundreds of fragments. I mean this : there is a unity which must exist be- tween all Christians, whether they call themselves Anglicans, Evangelicals, or Romanists. Our unity in the deepest sense we cannot make nor can we break. Our unity is in God the Father. There is a unity among the children of a family which those children did not make and cannot dissolve. They may quarrel ; they may refuse to speak to one another ; they may live as far apart as the poles ; yet they are still brothers and sisters and can never be anything else. They did not make their brotherhood nor can they unmake it. So we will forever continue to say, ''I believe in the Holy Catholic Church," though the ignorance, prej- udice, and sin of man rend it into a million fragments. How are we one in spite of all these things ? In this way : One God and Father of us all — Him we all worship. Is there not One Lord? Whoever thought that Anglicans, Evangelicals, or Romanists believed in different Christs? Is there not one faith? Do we not all hold the same faith in Christ as expressed in the Creed ? And is there not one baptism? No educated Chris- tian says : I was Baptized into the Baptist Church ; I was baptized into the Episcopal Church; I was baptized into the Methodist Church ; even the Roman- ist says, as the great body of the Church has said in all the ages, that every one baptized with water into the 36 THE CHURCH UNIVERSAL triune name of God is baptized into the Church of God. There is but one baptism; it refuses to be called by any sectarian name ; it is Christian baptism. No person was ever baptized into any sectarian society. No sect ever laid its name upon the formula of Christian baptism and changed it, saying, I baptize thee into the Methodist, Baptist, or Roman society ; but every one who has been baptized was in this way : ''I baptize thee into the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost," which baptism makes one a member of the Church of God. For as St. Paul says, i Cor. 12 : 13 : ^'By one spirit we are all baptized into one body." And no believer in Christ who is sincere and true in his faith, no matter how mistaken he may be in his opinions, has lost the Holy Spirit. When we look around and see the fruits of the spirit in all the sects of Christendom, there is but one answer to be given — they all have the Spirit but none all of it, each only according to the gift of Christ; therefore each needs the other, and no one can be complete without the truth the other holds. Therefore the Church of the future will hold and em- brace in itself all the truth held in all the sects in unity. Here is the basis of Christian unity none of us made and none of us can break : One Lord, one faith, one baptism, one Spirit, one hope and calling for us all. Here we are all united. SUPERSTRUCTURES OF WOOD AND STUBBLE Our divisions begin the moment that we add to this foundation superstructures of antagonistic and mutu- CHRISTIAN UNITY 37 ally exclusive systems of theology which separate and bar us off one from the other. The practical question for all Christian people is what can we do to transcend these imperfect and exclusive theologies which have divided the Church of God into hostile sects? This is the purpose of ''Kinship of God and Man/' written from beginning to end in the interest of ^' Church unity." First of all, we can by the grace of God try to accomplish that hardest of all tasks, rid ourselves and those we can influence of unworthy prejudice. Alexander Stephens, in one of the most memorable speeches ever delivered in Congress, said : ''Prejudice ! what wrongs, what injuries, what mischiefs, what lamentable consequences have resulted at all times from this perversity of the intellect; of all the ob- stacles to the advancement of truth and human prog- ress in every department of knowledge — in science, in art, in government, in religion, in all ages and climes — not one is more formidable, more difficult to overcome and subdue, than this distortion of the moral as well as the intellectual faculties. One of the highest exhi- bitions of the moral sublime the world ever witnessed was that of Daniel Webster, who after Faneuil Hall was denied him, he in an open barouche in the streets of Boston proclaimed to a vast assembly of his con- stituents — unwilling hearers — that they had con- quered the winds and currents of the ocean; they had conquered an uncongenial clime; they had con- quered a sterile soil ; but they must yet learn to con- quer their prejudices !" What Alexander Stephens said to the people of the North and South needs to be said in every Christian 38 THE CHURCH UNIVERSAL society in the Church: let us conquer our prejudices; for our own prejudice, and the worship of our ancestors' prejudices, are far more potent factors in keeping the Christian societies apart than any supposed antago- nistic truths we may hold. The truth we hold, if truth indeed it be, cannot be antagonistic to the truth any other man holds, but complementary. This is the first thing never to be forgotten. Second, we can teach those committed to us what we believe and why we believe it, exactly what things are essential and why they are essential. Third, we can learn not to ignore the unity which already exists, but cooperate as chil- dren of the one Father, believers in one Lord, filled with the one Spirit, as the eternal basis of Christian unity and the only hope of Church unity. This we shall attempt to do in the succeeding chapters. PART II THE SACRAMENTAL SYSTEM OF THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH IV THE THREEFOLD SACRAMENT OF ETERNAL LIFE The author of the Fourth Gospel quotes Jesus as saying : *' Search the Scriptures ; for in them ye think ye have eternal life : and they are they which testify of me. And ye will not come to me, that ye might have life/' Jesus here teaches that we do not receive eternal life through our natural (psychic) birth, but through a spiritual birth which transcends our psychic birth. Before proceeding further let us carefully define the meaning of these words — eternal, ever- lasting, and temporal. When this is done, we shall find that ''Eternal Life" contains the distinct and unique message of Christianity. The best and perhaps the only way in which we can understand what Jesus means by eternal life is to contrast it with our psychic and material life, for we understand one thing only as we contrast it with other things. What is meant by our psychic and material life is stated in Gen. 2:7: "God made man's body (material self) out of the dust of the ground, and breathed into him the spirit of life, and man became a living soul (psyche)." Our highest birth, a spiritual birth, we do not receive from Adam but from Jesus, which St. Paul states in these words : "The first Adam was made a living soul, the second Adam a life-giving spirit." According to the teaching of the Bible man 41 42 THE CHURCH UNIVERSAL has a threefold birth; the first from the material world, the second from Adam, and the third from Jesus ; the first birth gives us a material self which is temporal, the second a psychical or mental self which is everlasting, and the third a spiritual self which is eternal. MEANING OF ETERNAL, EVERLASTING, AND TEMPORAL (i) These words define duration of life. Temporal life has both a beginning and an end, everlasting life has a beginning but no end, while eternal life has neither a beginning nor an end. This is quite familiar, but what is not as well known as it should be is (2) That these words define quality of life. Tem- poral life describes the life of nature below man; everlasting, the psychic life of man ; and eternal, divine life as it exists in God alone, and as He begets it in the incarnation of Himself as Jesus, and imparts it to us by baptism. This will become perfectly clear as soon as we know what the New Testament means by baptism. (3) Quality of life determines its duration. Out of the divineness of life grows its eternal duration, which always is — past, present, and future. (Rev. i : 8.) Out of the psychic quality of life grows its everlasting duration, which once begun always exists. Out of the material quality of life grows its temporal dura- tion, which to-day is and to-morrow is not. (4) We find this threefold quahty and duration of life progressively embodied in separate types; a monkey has material-sensational temporal life, Adam THE THREEFOLD SACRAMENT 43 psychic-human everlasting life, Jesus divine-human eternal life. The Hfe of the flesh is temporal, the life of the soul is everlasting, the life of the spirit is eternal. In the Christian we find this threefold life — temporal, everlasting, and eternal — incarnated in the unity of a material, psychic, and spiritual birth. We shall pass over our material and psychic births and return to them later, while for the present we confine our attention to our spiritual birth which makes us Christians, and, as such, partakers of eternal life. HOW WE KNOW THAT WE HAVE ETERNAL LIFE It is one of the most readily accepted of all axioms that one can know another to no further extent than their Hkeness ; as, for instance, a horse cannot know us as our child does, because our child partakes of our psychic nature, while a horse does not. It is also a truism that we may know a good deal about a person without really knowing the person. Only the pure know the pure, only the good know the good, only the brave know the brave. One person very rarely knows many people. We may meet them on the street, call their names, tell a good deal about them, and still not know the person, because there are in you no conscious deeps corresponding to the incarnate depths in the other person. Men and women may marry, and be given in marriage, and live together for years without really ever knowing each other, because diverse in the realm of their highest aspirations, hopes, and loves. To know human life I must be human, and to know 44 THE CHURCH UNIVERSAL the highest and deepest experiences of human life, I must have the deepest quality of human life. No less than yourself can know yourself; the same is true of God. Therefore because in Jesus we find the deepest quaHties of spiritual Hfe, purity and love, we for the first time know God and man, and understand what eternal Hfe means. *^ Blessed are the pure in heart for they see God. We know that we have passed from death to Hfe because we love the brethren.'' WHAT ETERNAL LIFE MEANS Let us clearly imderstand that, when God offers us the gift of eternal Hfe through Christ- Jesus our Lord, He is not making a proposition merely to per- petuate the pure, nor the sin-stained, psychic Hfe which if perpetuated forever would be endless, but not eternal Hfe. On the contrary Jesus teUs us that the only way in which we can get this eternal Hfe is by transcending the psychic Hfe which we receive by natural birth, by being born again, anew, and from above, by a spiritual birth. He teUs us what eternal Hfe is in this remarkable verse of Scripture : ''And this is eternal Hfe, that they might know Thee the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom Thou hast sent." ''Knowledge of God" is eternal Hfe. This knowledge of God comes through Christ, the eternal Hght which Hghteth every man who comes into the world,— Abraham, Moses, Plato, Buddha, aH sages and men of wisdom before and since His historical incarnation as Jesus — and he who par- takes of this knowledge of God is, to the extent that THE THREEFOLD SACRAMENT 45 he partakes of this knowledge, made a partaker of eternal life. This is what baptism does, of which the sacrament of baptism is the symbol. What baptism, the sacrament of baptism, and the symbol of baptism are, will be explained later on. WHAT BAPTISM DOES It is sufficient for the present to say that the sacra- ment of baptism is the symbol of the birth of eternal life, and when we understand what Jesus means by eternal life, we shall know that length of life, mere duration indefinitely extended, is not eternal life. Suppose a tree was planted to-day and then grew on and on forever, still that tree would not have eternal life though it would have everlasting life; that is, endless life. In like manner suppose that we run up the scale of life. Take any fish that swims, and reptile that crawls, any beast that walks, and conceive its life perpetuated forever ; not any of these would be made partakers of eternal life. An endless life, yes; but an eternal life, no ; for eternal life means more than endless duration of life as a fish, bird, beast, or psychic man. It transcends all such qualities of life. Excluding all lower orders of creation except man, and among men we will include the sensualist, the thief, the drunkard, and all immoral people ; and suppose the lives of these to be perpetuated forever, just as we now know them, without any advancement in goodness or increased wisdom in that knowledge of God which we have in Christ- Jesus our Lord, still the perpetuation of such a life as this would not be life 46 THE CHURCH UNIVERSAL eternal. Jesus never called such a life as this eter- nal life. In order for us to understand what Jesus is offering to the world, and what He calls eternal life, let us realize that duration, as measured in days, months, and years, has nothing to do with it, nor will it give us any idea of it at all. What He calls eternal life is a certain quality of life, the life of God Himself, which is without beginning or end, so that although He lived here upon the earth in the flesh as Jesus for only a few years, still that length of life is eternal life. It is the life which He had with the Father before the foundation of the world, and the life we must live if we would live in eternity — the sinless spiritual life which he imparts to mankind, and is given to us by our baptism into Christ. That quality of life, eternal life, He offers to us freely, without money and without price to-day and now, if we will give up our sinful life of flesh and blood which we are living, and take Him for our guide and loyal master to rule and shape our lives into the mould of His divine pattern, He will give us eternal life by the spiritual birth which our baptism into Him gives us. WHAT CONFIRMATION DOES We have already seen that we have an endless psy- chic life by our natural birth. Our souls will not be- come extinct at physical death. They will live on and on, from aeon to aeon, for all live unto God. So Jesus comes to us with this simple proposition : you have an endless life already by virtue of your psychic birth. What are you going to do with it, my brother ? THE THREEFOLD SACRAMENT 47 Reiterated in our more solemn hours which we all have ; in the stillness of the night, in some crisis of our liveSj upon the bed of sickness, in sudden peril and danger; when we are alone with God; just we two, God and myself face to face — no evasion, no escape. When God comes walking in the garden in the cool of the evening, and God says to me, ''My child, what are you going to do with your endless life? Some kind of a life you are going to live everlastingly. If it is going to be merely an everlasting sin-stained psychic life, it will be your greatest curse ! I gave you that endless psychic life that you might freely give it back to me and receive the blessing of a transcendent eternal life. Learn of me; and that knowledge will be eternal life." God by His eternal omnipresent Spirit and incar- nate as Christ- Jesus our Lord makes this offer to every child He has created out of the ground. When we by the help of God take Jesus for our Lord and say : *'Good-by lust; good-by revenge; good-by selfishness ; good-by lying and cheating and defrauding — out ! out ! ye thieves and robbers of life eternal ! Enter, enter, life eternal, and reign thou upon the throne of my heart !" This is what confirmation does, of which the sacrament of confirmation is the symbol, and is how we make the life of Christ given us in baptism our personal self-conscious life. WHAT HOLY COMMUNION DOES After this has been done, our salvation consists in keeping Christ continually in our hearts day by day, 48 THE CHURCH UNIVERSAL and day by day our hearts will be fashioned into Christ's heart as we feed upon Him. Then we must not let our anxieties and troubles push Christ out, but keep Christ in and he will push the troubles and anxieties out. We can conquer them through Christ, but apart from Him they will be sure to conquer us. How often have we thought about Christ during the past week ? How often have we said : ''What would Christ have me do in this matter? How would he have me conduct this office? How would I act if I were conscious that He was in this room watching me?" This is what I mean by keeping Christ in our minds and hearts in order that we may incarnate Him and make Him our life. This is what Holy Com- munion does, of which the sacrament Holy Com- munion is the symbol. When we live in this way, how much easier and sweeter life becomes. A mysterious power becomes ours, transfiguring our life into life eternal by the living God incarnating Himself in us. We perhaps wonder that our Christian life is the failure that it is, that we have not gotten the joy and peace and hope and comfort we ought to have gotten out of it. It is no wonder to me and ought to be no wonder to you. If we thought no more about our business than we do about Christ, and kept it no more in our minds than we keep Christ in our minds, our business would be no more profitable to us than our Christian life, perhaps, has been. Of course we are masters of our personal life and can do as we please. The service of God, if an acceptable service, must be one of perfect freedom ; but what I am insisting on is, that if we choose to live in the way THE THREEFOLD SACRAMENT 49 I have described, Christ is dead to us and we are dead to Him; and then we complain that the Christian Hfe is such a disappointing thing, when in reality we know very little about it, having perhaps never lived it one month in our whole life. We have not been in personal communion with Christ long enough for eternal life to spring up in us in all of its glory ; it is a feeble flame in us ; more smoke than fire ; more cold than heat ; the world has frozen us and we have not stayed with Christ long enough for Him to thaw us out and set us ablaze with Hfe eternal. The trouble is neither with our Baptism nor Confirmation, but our Communion with God has lapsed, or we have made it a formal thing. The following analogy will help us to understand how Holy Communion with God transforms us into His nature. There are certain kinds of water which have the power of turning all things cast into them into stone if they stay in these waters long enough. What- ever is cast into this kind of water loses its nature and partakes of the nature of the elements held in solution in the water. If it is a log of wood, it loses its nature of wood and instead of that gets a body of stone. As this mineral water has the power of conquering and subduing the nature of all things cast into it, so Christ imparts His nature to us, if we come to Him often enough and stay with Him long enough in Holy Com- munion. The log of wood at last exclaims: I no longer live but the log of stone lives in me, as St. Paul, after many long years of communion with Christ, said, I no longer live but Christ lives in me. Summary : Baptism, Confirmation, and Holy Com- 50 THE CHURCH UNIVERSAL miinion is the threefold Sacrament of Eternal Life, which is given unto us by Baptism into God ; which we ratify and make our own by Repentance, Faith, and Obedience, in Confirmation; which we maintain and keep everlastingly by Commimion with God through Christ- Jesus our Lord : "Who with our life and life's own secret joy Blend like some sweet beguiling melody, So sweet we know not we are list'ning to it Till the dilating soul, enrapt, transfused Into the mighty vision passing, swells Vast to Heaven." V THE SACRAMENTAL SYSTEM OF THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH It is only when we realize that the outward and visible universe is the revelation of the inward ,and invisible God that we for the first time enter the realm of religion; and, so, the Sacramental Teaching of the Christian Church contains the very essence of re- ligion. Question. How many sacraments hath Christ or- dained in His Church ? Answer. Two only as generally necessary to salva- tion; that is to say, Baptism, and The Supper of the Lord. Question. What meanest thou by this word " sacra- ment " ? Answer. I mean an outward and visible sign of an inward spiritual grace given unto us; ordained by Christ Himself as a means whereby we receive the same, and a pledge to assure us thereof. Question. How many parts are there in a sacrament ? Answer. Two; the outward and visible sign, and the inward and spiritual grace. Question. What is the outward and visible sign, or form, in Baptism ? Answer. Water wherein the person is baptized, in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost. SI 52 THE CHURCH UNIVERSAL Question. What is the inward and spiritual grace ? Answer. A death unto sin, and a new birth unto righteousness ; for being by nature born in sin, and children of wrath, we are hereby made children of grace. As we read these questions and answers I doubt very much if they mean the same thing to any two of us. Therefore, in this lecture, I shall try to clear away some of the difficulties, and explain what the Church means by these questions and answers. We hear many people saying that baptism is not neces- sary for salvation, and others saying that it is neces- sary for salvation. Where is the difficulty and what is the cause of this difference in opinion and practice ? You will find that when people differ, and honestly differ for ages, about fundamental things, it generally turns out to be a quarrel about words, or they are like the two knights of old who began to fight about the two sides of the shield, one saying that it was white and the other saying that it was black. During the fight, however, they changed sides, and to their as- tonishment, the one that said it was black saw that it was white, and the one who said that it was white saw that it was black, and as soon as they saw this they apologized and stopped fighting. Then it dawned upon them that a shield has two sides, one of which could be black and the other of which could be white. So they saw that each was right and each was wrong. If those two knights had changed places in the beginning, and each looked at it from the other's point of view, they would have saved themselves hard names THE SACRAMENTAL SYSTEM 53 and harder blows, and gotten at the truth so much quicker ; for the only way of seeing the truth another man sees is to come over to his point of view and look at the matter as he does. So, when people say that baptism is not essential to salvation, I always ask the person what he means by salvation, and what he means by baptism. The person generally says that baptism means *'wet the person with water while pronouncing the words ' Father, Son, and Holy Ghost. ' " To which I reply : "I entirely agree with you that this is not necessary for salvation, and if bap- tism meant this to me and nothing more, I would not turn upon my heels for it." So my friend and myself would, so far, be in perfect agreement, and there would be nothing to disagree about or quarrel over. I would then ask him to look at it from my point of view. Baptism means to me *'a death unto sin and a new birth unto righteousness," without which, I have no doubt, you will agree with me in saying that no man can be saved, if you mean by salvation a Christlike Hfe. Here, again, we would both be agreed and have nothing to differ about, for we would both have looked at both sides of the shield. We are also agreed that a man, in order to be a Christian, must have a spiritual birth which transcends his psychic birth, for as long as man is under the dominion of his psychic birth, the universal experience of mankind, as written in the decay and corruption of Babylon, Greece, and Rome, is that they are ''by nature born in sin and children of wrath." This does not teach, of course, that the innocent baby is a sinner, but it does 54 THE CHURCH UNIVERSAL teach that, if his psychic nature which he inherits by his natural birth is not transcended by a spiritual birth, which will dominate and control his psychic nature, the older the child becomes in years and mankind in civiHzation the more corrupt they will become, until, at last, we will call them blessed who rise up in wrath and destroy them. The two men who understood this better than all other men in the Roman Empire were John the Bap- tist and Jesus, who laid down their lives to beget into mankind a spiritual birth transcending its psychical birth. The movement begun by the one was carried forward and completed by the other. They both saw the necessity of repentance, but Jesus saw that the only kind of repentance which can really save is the repentance which grows out of a spiritual birth, and they both used the symbols of baptism, which, in one form or another, have been used perhaps ever since mankind has had any kind of religion. Passing over whatever significance baptism may have had among the Gentiles, we will briefly analyze the mean- ing of John's baptism "with water unto repentance," and Christian baptism ''into the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost." The two baptisms are kept perfectly distinct and separate by John, Our Lord, and the Apostles. These are the words used by John when he instituted his baptism: ''I indeed baptize you with water unto re- pentance, but He that cometh after me shall baptize you with the Holy Ghost and with fire." Here the two baptisms are kept perfectly distinct. Also in these last parting words of Jesus: ''And being as- THE SACRAMENTAL SYSTEM 55 sembled together with them, commanded them not to depart from Jerusalem, but wait for the promise of the Father which ye have heard of me. For John truly baptized with water, but ye shall be baptized with the Holy Ghost not many days hence." You see that these baptisms are kept as distinct as things can be, but because people persist in confus- ing the two, confusion worse confounded prevails. Keep also clearly in mind that on the day of Pentecost the sacrament of Christian baptism began. But before proceeding further, let us clearly fix in our minds the relation of John to our Saviour, and His baptism to Christian baptism. John was a preacher of righteousness, and it was his mission to gather together the people of Israel who believed that the coming of the Messiah was near at hand. Those who believed his message were baptized with water unto repentance. The outward and visible sign of John's baptism was water, and the inward spiritual grace was repent- ance. John understood and did his work well ; for by the sacrament of his preaching and baptism with water, he did exactly what he intended to do — repro- duce himself by making a John the Baptist out of every one of his disciples He did the work God sent him into the world to do. When our Saviour began His work. He found a band of disciples ready to hand, and as soon as He began His preaching, the inner circle of John's disciples, composed of Andrew and Peter and John and Thomas and Nathaniel, left him and followed Jesus. They 56 THE CHURCH UNIVERSAL had received their *' baptism of water unto repentance," and during the three years of training derived from their personal contact and communion with our in- carnate Lord, they were prepared to receive the ''baptism of the Holy Ghost and fire" which John had foretold. On the day of Pentecost they received this baptism. So you see the connection of the two men and their respective baptisms. It was the purpose of both to reproduce and multiply themselves in their disciples. The one by baptism of water unto repentance pre- pared the disciples to receive the baptism of the Holy Ghost. The baptism of one was temporary and soon to pass away, while that of the other is eternal — that is how every man is made a partaker of the life of God. In order for us to see the eternal and divine sig- nificance of Christian baptism, let us divide the his- tory of the world into its three Hfe periods. Go back with me to the time when this world was hurled 93,000,000 miles into space and began its revolutions around the sun, a seething mass of fire, until it cooled into such a condition that the oceans could be gathered into its shrunken sides, and the rivers were flowing from the mountains to the seas. When it had suffi- ciently cooled to become a trinity of solid, Hquid, and gas — earth, sea, and sky — God, by the direct action of His Spirit upon mother earth, evolved the lowest forms of hfe. Here begins the first period with the introduction of Hfe. Then life rose higher and higher as the result of the direct and continuous action of the Spirit of God upon these lower and succeeding higher forms of life, until He introduced psychic life, THE SACRAMENTAL SYSTEM 57 called man. And God said let him have dominion over the world. Here begins the second period with the advent of man. The second period is continued by psychic man reproducing himself and peopling the world with his order of life. Through long ages this psychic type of life went on developing through the rise and fall of empires, decay of civilizations, wars and rumors of wars, in the midst of tears, blood, agonies, and heart breaks — as in a roaring fiery furnace — until at last He appeared, to produce whom the Spirit of God had been toiling through all creative epochs with groans which cannot be uttered. At last He, the incarnation of God, stood upon the earth and said to the storm- tossed world, ^' Peace, be still." In Him we find not only a material and a psychical, but a spiritual birth, which no man before Him possessed, so that with Him ended the second life-period of the world's history, and with Him began the third and last period of its history. God said to the first Adam: ''Have dominion over the earth"; but of the second Adam it is said : ''All power in Heaven and earth is given unto me." And why does He appear upon the earth? To mock us with His power. His wisdom, and His sinless- ness? Only to be worshipped in His unattainable Czar-like grandeur? His life and His acts do not so teach. If there ever was a man who walked the earth, whose sole purpose was to communicate not so much what he had, but to communicate Himself to us and reproduce Himself in us, it is Jesus. Imagine a physician entering one of the wards of a 58 THE CHURCH UNIVERSAL large hospital, and as he stands before the halt, the lame, and the blind, they turn their weary pain- crucified eyes upon him and say : ''Why standest thou before us in all the glory of thy perfect health to mock us ? Depart ! The glory of thy perfection is our torture !" And he repHes : ''I have not come to mock you, my friends, by showing you perfect man- hood and health. I have not come to condemn you, but to save you by making my health your health. I have come to share with you your sickness and in- firmities in order that you may share with me my health and perfection." I leave you to imagine the picture of indescribable joy and worship which would take place in that hospital. Such is the relation which Jesus holds to the world. He is not come to condemn us, but that we might have life, and have it more abundantly. Picture now in your minds all hurtian life born in this world by natural birth — children of the first Adam, the psychic man — and put all these on one side ; contrasted with these and over on the other side, Jesus, another and higher order of life, the spiritual man who is the in- carnation of God ; and that it is His purpose to re- produce Himself in all children born of Adam, so that He will dwell in them and they in Him. How is this done ? The Church's answer has always been — sacramentally ! Here at once arises the necessity that we clearly understand what the Church means by a sacrament, before we can begin to appreciate the necessity and wisdom of the Church's answer. Long ago I came to the conclusion that a truth to be a religious truth must be a universal truth, and after THE SACRAMENTAL SYSTEM 59 giving you the definition of a sacrament, I will show you that this world in which we live is a sacramental world from center to circumference. The definition of a sacrament is as follows : (i) It is an outward and visible sign; (2) of an inward and spiritual grace; (3) this outward and visible sign is the means whereby we receive the inward and spiritual grace. The first illustration I will use is that of a watch. It is an outward and visible thing, but by means of this outward and visible thing we are made partakers of something which no one ever saw or can see — time. By means of your watch you know what time of day it is, and without your watch, or some other sacra- ment of time, you cannot do this. In a watch you have an illustration of what the Church means by a sacrament. The outward and visible thing called your watch is the means by which we receive knowledge of the in- ward and invisible mental thing called time. Thus these sacraments called watches become the regulators by which we go to bed, get up in the morning, eat our meals, go to church, and to business ; are born, live, marry, and die by. Destroy this sacrament of time, and you would upset every railroad in the United States ; and if you were out at sea for a long period during which the sun, moon, and stars were obscured by a fog, you would lose what time it is altogether ; and then destroy the natural sacraments of time — the sun, the moon, and the stars — and there would be no time, for time is the measure of motion. These outward and visible signs turn out to 6o THE CHURCH UNIVERSAL be wonderful things after all, beneath which we hear the moving of the spirit's wings. I take a savage with me into one of the marvellous Cathedrals of Europe and show him one of the won- derful creations of some inspired artist's brain. It is the wonderful painting of a mother and a child. To him it is paint and sorry stuff, or perhaps an idol to be worshipped, but to us it is a sacrament, an out- ward and visible sign of our Lord and His Mother. So all painting is a sacrament, an outward and visible sign of the inward and invisible creative truth in the mind of God and in the mind of man. Sculpture is a sacrament. I go into some art gallery, and see carved in stone the statue of a father and his sons wrapped in the coils of some serpents from the sea. It is an outward and visible sign, but it is more than that. It tells the story of the whole his- tory of man from the beginning of his struggles with the destructive forces of the earth and sea, which sooner or later overpower us and lay our physical life low in the dust. Not only in this instance, but in all cases, sculpture is the outward and visible sign of that which goes on in the artist's spirit behind the veil of flesh and blood. I can well imagine this conversation taking place between Captain John Smith and one of Powhatan's warriors. Captain Smith is sitting beneath one of Virginia's mighty oaks, reading one of the English classics. The Indian warrior asks him what he is doing, and Captain Smith replies: "I am listening to a mighty man talk who lived many years ago across the sea whence I came." The Indian in amazement ^THE SACRAMENTAL SYSTEM 6i says, "How is that?" Captain Smith points to the book and says, ''He is talking to me out of this book by means of these little signs and scratches you see here," and the Indian in a grunt of incredulity leaves him; but however incredulous that Indian may be, literature is the sacrament through which the spirit of God and the mighty dead do speak to us from beyond the stars. When you come to think how the spirits Moses, Isaiah, and Jeremiah communicate their thoughts to us by means of a few marks, it is no more mysterious, but is one with the central fact and truth of Chris- tianity, that by means of water and blood God be- came flesh, and that we by means of the same water and blood are regenerated in baptism, for the two stand or fall together. The incredible wonder would be on the other hand, for we never did and never can communicate with one another otherwise than sacra- mentally. There you are sitting in your seats and here I am lecturing to you, and there is no doubt that my spirit is in communion with your spirits. How ? Through the sacrament of sight and sound — nothing but a vibration of air — and yet through the sacra- ment of eye and ear and vibration of sound the orator's spirit passes into his audience and makes them shout, laugh, and weep as one body with himself, and yet many say that it is a relic of magic and superstition to think that God uses the sacrament of water and blood, through which he creates all psychic life born in this world, as the means of imparting to us spiritual Kfe! Try to live without drinking water and eating bread and you will soon find that they are the God- 62 THE CHURCH UNIVERSAL ordained channels through which the life of the spirit is maintained in this world. My body is the sacrament of my spirit, the means through which I am able to communicate with you. Body isolates my spirit from your spirit, making each of us individuals. Through the sacrament of our five senses we know and love one another. Destroy these, and then the silver cord is loosed and the golden bowl is broken, and we sigh, "Oh for the touch of a vanished hand And the sound of a voice that is still." Religious life without sacraments is not only im- possible, but all life would be impossible. Destroy God's sacrament of nature and we never v/ould have been. When we rise to the dignity of the majesty of the meaning of the Church's sacramental teaching, we look for God and life, infinite and finite, never on the outside of anything but always on the inside of every- thing. On the outside it is always mechanics — matter and motion — the outward and visible sign of the inward and invisible spirit, mind, and thought of God and man. The astronomers may sweep the physical heavens and never find the spirit of God, otherwise than as the outward and visible revelation of His Creative Spirit, as suns, moons, stars, and milky ways, revealed there since creation's dawn. In like manner you can dissect the body of man and never find spirit as spirit, but only as spirit sacra- mentally reveals itself through body, and no sensible man believes to-day that you ever could. It is only when we do realize that the outward and visible uni- THE SACRAMENTAL SYSTEM 6$ verse is the revelation of the inward and invisible Spirit of God that we for the first time enter the realm of religion; and so, the sacramental teaching of the Church contains the very essence of religion, as Cole- ridge illustrated when he lifted up his eyes and looked upon the glaciers of Mt. Blanc and sang : — "Torrents, methinks, that heard a mighty voice And stopped amidst their maddest plunge ! Motionless torrents ! Silent cataracts ! Who made you glorious as the gates of Heaven Beneath the keen full moon ? Who bade the sun Clothe you with rainbows ? Who, with living flower3 Of loveliest blue, spread garlands at your feet ? God ! Let the torrents like the shout of nations Answer ! And let the ice plains echo God ! God ! Sing, ye meadow streams, with gladsome voices! And they too have a voice, yon piles of snow, And in their perilous fall shall thunder God !" But however much nature is the sacrament of God, the outward and visible means through which we reach the inward and invisible Spirit of God, not there do we find the highest revelation and express image of God. It is only when we look into the face of the Son of Man and Hsten to Him, saying, ''He that hath seen Me hath seen the Father," that we see the perfect outward objective revelation of God. The man Jesus is in Himself the perfect definition of the sacrament of the Church because He is the outward means whereby we are made partakers of the in- visible Spirit of God. One more analogy, in which I will compare the sacramental system of the school with that of the Church, and I will close this lecture. Imagine a per- fect and ideal school in which you have a perfect and 64 THE CHURCH UNIVERSAL ideal teacher who is the incarnation of all knowledge. A child enters that school in order that he may become the incarnation of the same knowledge that his per- fect and ideal teacher is. How is it possible that the knowledge which the teacher possesses can pass from him and become the vital possession of the pupil? The only possible means of communion between them is outward and visible signs, the sacramental system from beginning to end, you see. Through the sacra- ment of sound, spoken words ; through the sacrament of written words, books; through the sacrament of the five senses, the spirit of the teacher passes into and becomes the vital and living possession and self of the pupil. So you have the school and books and teacher upon which the pupil sacramen tally feeds. In the place of that ideal teacher substitute Christ, for the school the Church, and for initiation into the school baptism, and the analogy is complete. VI BAPTISM A SPIRITUAL BIRTH I DO not know how I can better explain what bap- tism in the New Testament means than by reproduc- ing the substance of a conversation which I had many years ago with a very intelHgent woman in New York, and repeated some days later to a Baptist minister on board of a steamer sailing from New York to Savannah. The woman to whom I refer said to me: "I want to have a talk withyou about baptism, as I have chil- dren for whose religious training I am responsible, and it is my heart's desire that they shall grow up to be Christian men. My mother and I cannot agree about it. She thinks that baptism is necessary to make them Christians, and that children who die un- baptized are lost. My mother is old-fashioned, but one of the best Christians I ever knew, and I am very anxious for us to think alike about religion. I have come to look at things more through my father's eyes, who is also one of the best Christians I ever knew, and yet he was unbaptized. If I could have my children grow up into men like him, baptized or un- baptized, I would say: 'Lord, now lettest thou thy servant depart in peace.' You see how the matter stands. Can you help me ? " F 6s 66 THE CHURCH UNIVERSAL I saw at a glance how the matter stood with her, and that, unless she could see a deeper and truer in- terpretation of baptism than she had been taught, she would be lost to the organized forces of Chris- tianity, and that it might take a life time for her to discover how much she would lose by her action. A few weeks later on a voyage from New York to Savannah I met the Baptist minister to whom I have referred, and again the matter of a deeper and truer interpretation of baptism was forced upon me in a most practical way, this time in connection with Church unity. The Baptist minister at once began by saying: ''Yes, the subject of Church unity is in the air, is the will of Christ as expressed in His last prayer with His disciples, and is the live burning question of the day; but there never will be any organic union between your church and mine until we can come to some common agreement about a good many questions upon which at the present time we are hopelessly divided." "Mention one of them," I said. "To begin with," he at once replied, "you know that baptism separates us from all other Christians. For instance your Church teaches baptismal regeneration, which means that a man is made a Christian by baptism, without which no man can be saved. On the contrary we teach believers^ baptism, which means that no one ought to be baptized until he personally accepts Christ as his Saviour. We say become a Christian first, then we will baptize you and make you a mem- ber of the Church. We baptize only Christians ; you baptize the world, the flesh, and the devil, and claim BAPTISM A SPIRITUAL BIRTH 67 that the act of baptism makes one a Christian ; while we teach that repentance, regeneration, and conver- sion make one a Christian. So you see that we are hopelessly divided." ^'So it seems that we are hopelessly divided," I said, "but only seems and not in reality, as you will soon see. The difficulty about all these questions grows out of (i) a faulty analysis of how one is made a Christian; (2) the definitions of words. When we shall have gone into these two points fully, the mists and alienations of centuries of Christian misunder- standing will melt away in the clear Hght of a fuller knowledge." *'To begin with the definitions of words," I said, *Hell me what you mean by baptism?" "Immer- sion is baptism," he said. "Nothing more?" I said. "What do you mean," he said. "Do you not baptize into the name of some one?" I said. "Oh, yes; in the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost," he said. "The reason why I have called your attention to the name into which we baptize," I said, "is because it is one of the distinctions between Christian baptism and John's baptism. Christian baptism is into the name of God, while John's baptism is not into the name of anything. But as I was once a Baptist my- self I know that you have left out one of the essen- tials of Baptism as it was taught me when I was a child, for when I was a child, I was taught Apostoli- cal Succession as one of the essentials of Christian baptism." "You are entirely mistaken," he said; "the Baptist Church has never taught any such doctrine as that, 68 THE CHURCH UNIVERSAL for it has always protested against the doctrine of Apostolical Succession in the Episcopal Church and Infallibility of the Pope in the Catholic Church. We teach that any number of individual Christians, if they teach the true doctrines of Christ, can form a Church any day and anywhere they please. We are individualists; we beUeve in the personal liberty of the individual to do his own thinking without asking any let, leave, or hindrance from My Lord Bishop or Infallible Pope." "You think that you are very liberal," I said, "but in reality you are not. You claim to allow per- fect liberty of thought to the individual, but you do this to no further extent than he thinks your thoughts. The moment he begins to exercise that liberty of thought you theoretically grant him, and he reaches conclusions other than yours, you turn him out of your Church. You claim to know the true doctrines of Christ, and that your Church, and your Church only, teaches the true doctrines of Christ. How can you possibly do this unless you are infallible? And you claim Apostolical Succession; for you claim that your Church is the only Church that teaches the truth exactly as the Apostles taught it, and your Church organization is the only one exactly like the Apostolic Church. "Part of your infallible teaching is that baptism is (i) immersion, (2) in the name of the Trinity, (3) by a man who has been immersed by a man who has been immersed in succession by a man from the Apostles back to John the Baptist. And then you at once admit that all this infallible teaching is not BAPTISM A SPIRITUAL BIRTH 69 worth a straw because it is not necessary for salva- tion. The life, nerve, and center of the Baptist Church, as you have just admitted, is the doctrine of believers^ baptism, and in this doctrine you hold and teach Apostolical Succession; and not only this but you claim the infallibility of the Pope because you will not have fellowship with any body of Christians who do not teach your true doctrine of Christ. '^ Without controversy let us clearly recognize the fact that any body of Christians who call themselves the Christian Church must claim Apostolical Succes- sion and Infallibility, and teach both, unless they wish to commit suicide. We all must claim for ourselves succession from the Apostles because the Christian Church must be as old as the Apostles. It is a matter of historic fact that every body of Christians who are in existence to-day do derive their organiza- tion and teaching from the Church founded by the Apostles. I am not arguing for any theory of Apos- tolical Succession, but for the fact. *' Also every separate body of Christians in the world do claim and teach infallibility when they set up a Church of their own and claim to know and teach, and they only, the true doctrine of Christ; and any Church begins to disintegrate the- moment that it begins to doubt its infallibility. And because the Churches of to-day are doubting their infaUibility they are disintegrating and losing their power. The whole question of Church unity consists in finding again an infallibility which will convince not only a sect, but the whole body Christendom, of an infalli- bility which is really infallible. No Christian can have 70 THE CHURCH UNIVERSAL any objection to the doctrine of Apostolical Succes- sion and Infallibility as such. In fact you and I are in search of both; but what we wish is some- thing genuine, objective, and real; not a partial and defective infalHbility growing out of our own subjec- tive individuality. In other words we are in search of the truth ; and the truth is infallible. The infalli- bility we are in search of is an infallibility which squares with all the facts of life in the universe of God, man, and nature. This is the test to which any infallibility which endures must continually be sub- jected. It must satisfy all the tests, both of the objective facts as well as the subjective experiences of life. ''Let us now bring your Apostolical Succession and Infallibility to the trial of this test. Would you accept a person whom I would immerse in the name of the Trinity of God as a member of your Church without rebaptizing him?" ''I would," he said, ''but a great many Baptists would not, for this is one of the questions on which our churches are divided." "Very well, then," I said, "we will not discuss this feature further than to suggest that you, and the men like you, who are giving your Church a truer conception of baptism, whether you reahze it or not, are doing an absolutely necessary work in reuniting a divided Christendom. "But you consider immersion, or wetting one all over with water, absolutely essential to baptism?" "Yes," he said, "there is no baptism without immer- sion." "But you do not consider baptism essential to salvation ? " I said. "No; baptism is not an essen- BAPTISM A SPIRITUAL BIRTH 71 tial to salvation," he said. ''If a person tells me upon his death-bed that he has repented of his sins, and accepts Christ for his Saviour, that man is saved whether he is baptized or not." ''Then," I said, "why baptize anybody?" "Simply because Jesus commanded it," he said. "My brother, it is not fair nor satisfactory to answer me like that in a discussion of this kind," I said. "For wx are now trying to find out what Jesus commanded, and why He commanded it. Furthermore, let me here say once and for all that whatever you and I beheve about the Bible, people to-day as a whole no longer believe anything simply because Jesus, the Bible, or the Church teaches it. People to-day beHeve noth- ing upon authority alone, but only that which they believe can undoubtedly be shown to be a fact. They believe only that which they believe squares with the facts of life, which knowledge of the facts, they claim, is as well known to them as to the writers of the Bible, and enables them to test the infallibility of the dogmas of Christianity, whether in or out of the Bible. Access to the facts of rehgion, they claim, is as open to them as to Moses and to Jesus. The doors which they opened have never been shut, so that any one who wishes, and has the necessary training and ability, can enter and test the facts of religion as in any other department of knowledge; they say, by their fruits ye shall know them. Anything that is not neces- sary to produce a Christlike life must at once be ruled out as an essential of the Christian religion." "Let us now accept this, their point of view, and bring the New Testament teaching of baptism to the 72 THE CHURCH UNIVERSAL same test that is applied to any teaching of science; as, for instance, that water is H2O, and is a necessary fac- tor of embodied Hfe on this earth. "I am quite sure that when Jesus taught the Church, or, if you please, when the Church under the guidance of the spirit of truth — it makes no difference to me who first said, 2 plus 2 equals 4, since it is the truth — began to baptize every creature into the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost, taught that this positive, absolute, universal command to baptize, when we understand it as those who insti- tuted it understood it, is absolutely necessary for the salvation of every creature. This positive command of Jesus, according to your definition of it, you take upon yourself to break in certain cases because you do not understand what it means, and say that it is not necessary for salvation in any case because the person is saved before he is baptized. This ought to make you doubt that your definition of baptism is the correct definition because it has, as the mathematicians say, reduced this command of Jesus to a reductio ad absur- dum, your definition of it being nothing more than wetting one all over with water in the name of the trinity. Jesus and the Christian Church mean more than this by baptism; therefore, I sympathize with your logic which makes you in certain cases set aside the command to baptize, and say that it is not neces- sary in any case, because you have imported into the meaning of the word ' baptism ' an unscriptural meaning. "Take these words of Jesus (St. Luke 12:50): ^But I have a baptism to be baptized with and how BAPTISM A SPIRITUAL BIRTH 73 am I straitened until it be accomplished!' Jesus in these words certainly has no reference to baptism as you have defined it. He is pointing to that agony of spirit, mind, and body He is to undergo in the cruci- fixion, that cup which in the Garden of Gethsemane He thrice prayed might be taken from Him. Again in these words : ' For truly John baptized with water, but ye shall be baptized with the Holy Ghost not many days hence.' This was certainly baptism, but not a drop of water was used. The baptism of John, as every one knows, was not Christian baptism. On the day of Pentecost the Apostles received their Christian baptism, when the tongues of fire rested upon them and they were filled with the Holy Spirit." ^'Ah," said he, "I begin now to see what you mean by baptism — baptism of the Spirit ! Baptism with- out water is certainly new and strange doctrine to be kept out of the Baptist fold. I admit that there can be a certain kind of baptism without water. There- fore I am exceedingly anxious to hear your interpre- tation of John 3:4,' Except a man be born of water and the Spirit he cannot enter the kingdom of God.' " '^My dear brother, this passage teaches that hap- tism is a spiritual birth; therefore it is an exceedingly unfortunate passage for your definition of baptism, (i) You have said that baptism is not necessary for salvation ; this passage says that it is. (2) You have said that one must be a Christian before he is baptized. This passage says that spiritual birth is the essence of baptism — is baptism par excellence. Does not being ^born of the Spirit' make one a Christian? And is not baptism necessary for salvation since spiritual 74 THE CHURCH UNIVERSAL hirth is baptism? Every Christian believes and teaches this without exception — that a spiritual birth transcending our psychic birth is absolutely necessary to make one a Christian. What necessary factors must combine in unity to produce this spiritual birth? What three necessary factors do combine in unity to produce our material, psychic, and spiritual births? Blood, water, and spirit combined in unity produce our natural birth. Every child is born of water, the blood of human parents, and the Spirit of God — the three in unity. But to enter the kingdom of Heaven we must be born again. This second birth, this spiritual birth, is also born of water, blood, and spirit — the regenerating water of nature, the regenerat- ing blood of Jesus, the regenerating Spirit of God — leave out any one of these factors, and the spiritual birth of man, which Jesus calls baptism, would be an impossibihty." "This is all so new to me," said he, ''that you will have to go slow. The Churches have made baptism mean nothing more than wetting one with water for so long that you are going to have a hard time in getting them to see what the New Testament means by baptism as you have interpreted it." ''But," I said, "this is not my interpretation. It is the interpretation of the Universal Christian Church, as enshrined in its formularies of the sacrament of baptism." "I see that you make born of water one thing, and born of the Spirit another thing. What is the differ- ence ? " "They are in reality one birth, as I will show you BAPTISM A SPIRITUAL BIRTH 75 later on," I replied, "but before we begin with this let me suggest that, as you understand the sacrament of baptism, this passage has not the slightest reference to it at all, because you have not the faintest idea that baptism is a spiritual birth. When we understand this passage as Nicodemus could only have understood it, we will for the first time begin to be drawn together." "Wait a minute," said he; "you have used the ex- pression sacrament of baptism. What do you mean by it?" "I will explain what sacrament means later on, but not just now," I said. "The thing in hand is the interpretation of this passage. Remember that Jesus startled Nicodemus by saying, 'Except a man be born again he cannot enter the kingdom of God.^ Nicodemus said, ' How can a man be born when he is old? Do you mean to tell me that the people who teach reincarnation are right ? That a man can enter a second time into his mother's womb and be born ? * 'No,' says Jesus, 'ye must be born of water and the Spirit. That which is born of flesh is flesh ; that which is born of Spirit is Spirit.' Jesus is here contrasting man's psychical birth with his spiritual birth. "As a matter of fact, the absolute and necessary condition of all birth, as far as we know it on earth — material, psychical, spiritual — is water. The trouble is that you and your Church have not correctly analyzed spiritual birth into its necessary factors. The three absolutely necessary factors in any kind of human birth whatsoever, as far as we can know it, are Spirit, water, and blood in unity. Before we can, however, enter Christ's kingdom of life, which He calls the Kingdom of God, we must have a birth which 76 THE CHURCH UNIVERSAL transcends our psychic birth. St. Paul clearly saw this when he said : ' First the psychical man, after- wards the spiritual man.' The psychic man must have a psychic birth, the spiritual man must have a spiritual birth. Every child is born an animal by means of water, blood, and Spirit ; never is one born a Christian by natural birth, but has to be made one by a sexless spiritual birth of water, blood, and Spirit, after he has received his psychic birth." ^' Stop ! Stop ! " said he. ''I accept that interpreta- tion." ''But why do you so gladly accept this inter- pretation?" I said. ''Because," said he, ^'it relieves me from the necessity of believing that one must be baptized in order to be saved. I do not believe that Abraham, David, Isaiah, and the untold millions who lived before Jesus and since, and who never were baptized, cannot enter the kingdom of Heaven." "But," I said, "I do believe that one must be bap- tized not only before he can enter the kingdom of Heaven, but before he can get near enough even to see it." "Then," said he, "you and I do not mean the same thing by baptism." "Of course we do not," I said. "Baptism in the New Testament means a genuine bona fide spiritual birth, while you make it mean nothing more than wetting one with water. Now let us see if we cannot reach an agreement. ' ' Jesus said : ' Ye must be born of water and the Spirit before ye can enter the kingdom of God.' Both psychic and spiritual births are born of water. God, man, and nature — Spirit, water, and blood — neces- sarily cooperate to produce psychic birth after it is BAPTISM A SPIRITUAL BIRTH 77 once introduced into the world. Water is the life and symbol of nature, blood of man, and Spirit of God. Also water is the symbol of the immanence of God, blood of the incarnation of God, and Spirit of the transcendence of God ; for God is immanent in nature, incarnate as man, and also transcends, that is, is greater than man and nature. This is what St. John means when he says : ' There are three who bear wit- ness, the Spirit, and the water, and the blood; and these three agree in one.' (i John 5:8.) "Water, Blood, and Spirit, that is, God and Man and Nature, continue to act upon the child after they have produced its psychic birth. Every child has three births — material, psychical, and spiritual. Water, blood, and Spirit produce all three. St. Paul in his Epistles, and especially in Romans and Galatians, is constantly contrasting our psychic and spiritual births. 'The works of the flesh (the psychical man) are these : adultery, fornication, uncleanness, lascivi- ousness, etc. — of the which I tell you that they which do such things shall not inherit the kingdom of God. But the fruit of the spirit is love, joy, peace, long-suffering, gentleness, etc. . . . which things are the kingdom of God.' (Gal. 5 : 9-25 ; Rom. 14 : 17.) " We are now ready for the scriptural definition of baptism. ^^ Baptism is the process of changing the psychic man into the spiritual man, without which no one can enter the kingdom of heaven. In the sacrament of baptism we use the factors which produce this spiritual birth. What did Jesus mean when he said : ' Go ye into all the world and baptize every creature into the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost,' but 78 THE CHURCH UNIVERSAL go ye into all the world and make Christians out of every creature ? We may rest assured that He means vastly more than wet every creature with water in a mere ceremonial rite. *^Let us consider for a few moments the significance of baptizing into the name of the trinity, and not in the name of the trinity, which you will note is one of the differences between the translation of the baptismal formula in the Authorized and Revised Versions of the Bible. In the name of the trinity means that this ceremonial rite is performed by the authority of the trinity, an act done simply because Jesus commanded it; as when Ethan Allen captured Ticonderoga and the British officer asked by whose authority the sur- render was demanded, replied : ' In the name of the great Jehovah and Continental Congress.' When a prisoner is pardoned and the sheriff lets him out, he does it in the name of the governor; that is, hy the authority which the governor delegates to him. So the expres- sion in the name of means hy authority of, as the prisoner is released from jail by authority of the state. The correct translation of the baptismal formula is not in the name of God, but into the name of God. The former expression means hy the authority of God, while the latter means into the character of God. This will become perfectly clear as soon as we know what the word name means in the Bible. " Among us to-day the name of a person tells us noth- ing about the character of the person who bears the name, but in the Bible the character of the person is contained in his name. For instance, Abraham means father of a multitude, Isaac laughter , Jacob supplanter. BAPTISM A SPIRITUAL BIRTH 79 Israel prince with God. The names of these men reveal the characters of these men as perfectly as the names Old Hickory and Stonewall reveal the characters of two of our Generals in American history. Baptism into the name of Jackson can mean nothing less than give people a character like Jackson's. So baptism into the name of God means change the psychic man into the spiritual man, the carnal man into the God- like man. All that we dare hope to be in time or eternity is wrapped up for us in the baptismal formula, for in the New Testament baptism and spiritual birth mean the same thing." ^^So," said he, '^you define baptism as changing the psychic man into the spiritual man ? " ^' Yes," said I. *'And baptismal regeneration is the process by which the psychic man is changed into the spiritual man?" said he. ''Yes," said I. "I would like then to know what means you use in this process by which you change the psychic man into the spiritual man," said he. ''I will tell you most gladly," said I. "We use the same means that you use in the Baptist Church in making people Christians, for there is only one possible way in which any man ever was made a Chris- tian, and that is by baptism. But let me tell you a story, and you will see what I mean. "One of the greatest Christian works done at the present time in England is, from all accounts, that of Lady Henry Somerset. She goes down into the slums of London and gets abandoned men and women and succeeds in regenerating about sixty per cent of them. How does she do it ? She first builds beautiful houses in which everything is kept spotlessly clean. They 8o THE CHURCH UNIVERSAL are surrounded by beautiful lawns, flowers, and trees. The managers of these homes are the highest type of consecrated Christian men and women of common sense. In the chapel daily prayer is offered, asking God to bless and sanctify this work with His Holy Spirit. Then she puts these people to work in the midst of these beautiful and pure Christian surround- ings. This is how she baptizes these outcasts into the name of God with water and blood and spirit — the three in one. '' She could have kept them in London and used the Spirit of God and the same consecrated Christian men and women, but would have failed, because that element of spiritual life which comes through the regenerating power of water would have been absent. She would have left out one of the factors absolutely necessary to make a Christian. For it is no less and none other than the Spirit of the living God immanent in nature who folds all His tired children upon the bosom of mother earth and nurses us back to life again. Back to the trees, and grass, and flowers, all ye who would be regenerated ! This is the meaning of the myth of the fabled Antaeus who regained his strength as often as he touched the earth." *'Call to mind now these remarkable words of St. John : ' There are three who bear witness, the Spirit, and the water, and the blood ; and the three agree in one.' (i John 5 : 8.) In regenerating these outcasts in London Lady Henry Somerset uses water, which is nature in her purest, cleanest, and most beautiful life-giving forms ; she uses blood, which is the highest and most consecrated type of Christian men and BAPTISM A SPIRITUAL BIRTH 8i women; then through prayer she uses the Spirit of God who as such transcends His embodied life as man and nature. In this threefold way she uses the one Spirit of God as the means through which to regener- ate these outcasts of London. *'This is what the Apostles understood when they were commanded by the Lord of life to go and baptize the nations with the trinity of water, blood, and spirit into the trinity of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. By this time I trust that you begin to see something of that herculean task committed to the Church when it was commanded to baptize psychic humanity into God. Baptism meant to the Apostles nothing less than clean- ing out that Augean stable of the immoral and deca- dent world of the filthy and polluted Roman Empire by imparting the spirit of Christ to its peoples. To baptize the United States means to cleanse the United States of its material, mental, and spiritual corruptions and defilements by engrafting the spirit of Christ into the people of the United States. The men in politics to-day who are really trying to give us a ' square deal ' by keeping our national resources from being de- stroyed, and open to all, are in reality, though they may deny it theoretically, baptizing this nation into God. The symbolic rite which we perform in the Church, called the sacrament of baptism, teaches us that we are to save the childhood of this nation as Lady Henry Somerset regenerates the outcasts of London. The sacrament of baptism teaches us that we cannot baptize this nation, if we let the greed of the sinful manhood of the nation destroy, or bar out the children of the nation from free access to, the life- 82 THE CHURCH UNIVERSAL giving and regenerating powers of God, man, and nature." *'At last I see what you mean," said he, ^^and I be- lieve that you are right." "Yes," I said, "in the sacrament of baptism we use vera causa; that is, the forces and powers of God which actually do change the psychic man into the spiritual man. We use water because it is the Ufe of nature and symbolizes the life of nature below man, which plays an absolutely necessary part in making man grow into the fulness of the stature of Jesus, who grew up among the moun- tains by the sea of GaKlee in a home all washed clean. So must the child be born and Hve if it would grow up into a Christian. At last we are learning in all our schools what Wordsworth has taught us — to lead our Children back to God through nature and by means of nature. The world is at last learning how pro- foundly true the Church's sacrament of baptism is, and why in that sacrament we use a piece of water, and now for some two thousand years have unhesi- tatingly said that water is one of the absolutely neces- sary factors which God uses in creating our material, psychical, and spiritual births — and is as necessary for the one as for the other, (i John 5 : 6.) "But blood is as necessary a factor in baptizing the child as water is. The child of nature alone is a savage. As nature, of which water is the symbol, feeds his body and creates his five senses, so the society of Christian men and women, of which blood is the symbol, creates in the child of nature the Christian type of character. Savages create in their children the savage type of character, while Christian civiliza- BAPTISM A SPIRITUAL BIRTH 8$ tion, of which the Church is the mother, creates the Christian type of character. In the sacrament of bap- tism water represents nature, the minister and the sponsors represent the Church, teaching that it takes a Christian to make a Christian ; that the whole Church is sponsor and is responsible for the creation of the spiritual birth of the nation. And, lastly, by prayer we invoke God, our heavenly Father, to send His Holy Spirit into the mind and heart of this child, so that, in the fulness of its divine meaning, the child may be ' a member of Christ, a child of God, and an inheritor of the Kingdom of Heaven.' So we use water, and blood, and Spirit in baptizing the child into the name of Father, Son, and Holy Ghost. So all Christians are made." ''And when do they begin to be made? " he said. ''Let me tell you another story," I said. "A woman once came to one of our priests and said : ' I have a child whom I am very anxious to educate properly, and I wish to begin at the very earliest moment. When ought I to begin ? ' ' How old is your child ? ' said the clergyman. 'Five years old,' said she. 'Madam,' said he very slowly, 'you have waited five years too long; you ought to have begun the moment he was born; for his education does begin the moment he is born, whether you direct it or not, and whether you wish it and will it or not.' "So the Church has always taught, however much it may have been misunderstood and misinterpreted, , that the spiritual birth of the child begins as soon as the child is materially born; and, if you ask how, the answer all through the ages has been by water, 84 THE CHURCH UNIVERSAL blood, and spirit — just as Lady Somerset regenerates the outcasts of London. In the place of these out- casts suppose she had children coming fresh from the hand of God, would not the same means create the same spirituahty in them ? If not, why not ? Would not the same spirituality be much easier to create in them, because the twig is much easier bent than the tree? *' Furthermore what would you think of a mother who would dehberately so act that her child would be born a cripple ? Would she not be a criminal ? Has not the child the same right to be spiritually well born as to be physically well born ? Do not the parents take part both in the child's spiritual and natural births ? ''Some two or three years elapse between the time the child is born naturally until it is born psychically; that is, wakes up to self-consciousness and says /. What sort of an '/' ought the child to find itself to be when it comes to self-consciousness ? What ought we to be doing with the child during these most plastic years of its Hf e ? Can we so train the child that when it comes to self-consciousness, and for the first time says I, it will not only be a psychic, but a spiritual, consciousness and I ? " Some people tell me that they cannot remember when they learned to read, for they learned to read before they can remember, as they always learn to talk. In like manner is it not possible to have children say : * I do not know when I became a Christian ; I waked up in this world and found myself one.' *'This is the Church's ideal and is what baptismal BAPTISM A SPIRITUAL BIRTH 85 regeneration means ; not the awakening of the spiritual nature of the child by the emotional methods of the hot-house process of the protracted meeting, but the creation of spiritual hfe in the child by the natural and normal methods of Christian nurture, well known and well tested by the experience of all ages of the Christian Church. The abnormal method of the protracted meeting finds its fitting and proper place, not in dealing with children, but as the last resort of the Christian Church to bring hardened and aban- doned sinners to repentance. This method of produc- ing conversion does the child great wrong, for it corre- sponds to the violent purgative methods of materia medica, and to the methods of the state in dealing with hardened criminals. Both methods have their place, but it is positively criminal to subject the young child to this kind of treatment. The Church's method from the beginning, both in the Mosaic and Christian dispensations, is right, which is to take the young and tender child fresh from the hand of God and so nurture and train it that the child's spiritual nature and con- sciousness will dawn as naturally as its psychic con- sciousness, and both together. *^In conclusion I would like to impress it upon you that your child does begin to be regenerated as soon as it is born, and that you do begin to baptize it either into the world or into God as soon as it is born. For clearly realize that the world baptizes as well as the Church, and that they both baptize with spirit, water, and blood, as soon as the child is born. If you let the world baptize your child with its sin-stained water, blood, and spirit, it will be made a worldling; if the 86 THE CHURCH UNIVERSAL Church baptizes your child with the regenerating Spirit, water, and blood of God, it will be made a Christian. And, lastly, that it is that baptism alone with which the Church baptizes your child that can overcome the baptism of sinful men which baptizes it into the world, the flesh, and the devil." VII BAPTISM, THE SYMBOL OF BAPTISM, AND THE SACRA- MENT OF BAPTISM The essence of the gospel as St. Paul preached it is that ''there is neither bond nor free, neither Jew nor Greek, neither circumcision nor uncircumcision, neither male nor female, but a new creature in Christ- Jesus." He taught that not until the eternal Son of God, who is immanent in nature and incarnate as Jesus, is incarnate in us are we saved. So he says : *'My little children, of whom I travail in birth again, until Christ be formed in you ; for as many of you as have been baptized into Christ have put on Christ." (Gal. 4:5; 3:27.) St. Paul interpreted baptism as putting on Christ, the forming of Christ in us, which makes us new creatures by a spiritual birth which tran- scends our psychic birth. This is how he understood : "Go ye into all the world and preach the gospel to every creature, baptizing them into the name of the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Ghost." Let us make this practical and bring it home to our- selves as vividly as possible. A little child, sent from heaven, is born into your home. It is not sent into a heathen home ; for its father is a Christian father and its mother is a Christian mother. You hold the new- born baby in your arms and the first thought that comes into your mind is: "I want this child to be a 87 88 THE CHURCH UNIVERSAL good man. I want him to be a benediction to his family, a blessing to his country, and an honor to his God." You ask yourself in all humility and reverence and in the sight of God : ''How can I make him a Christian and when ought I to begin?" At such a time as this, feeling as you do these sacred obligations resting upon you, the supreme thought in your mind is: ''I want to know the truth, nothing but the truth, and the whole truth — how can I make my child a Christian? When ought I to begin? I do not wish to lose a minute, and I do not wish to go wrong." So the Christian parent asks himself to-day as Chris- tian fathers and mothers have asked themselves all through the ages. How did they answer this ques- tion? Was their answer right? What was their answer ? Their answer was and is : In making your child a Christian you must use all the life there is in the universe except sinful life. Understand that your child has three births. The first birth is a material birth which takes nine months to complete. Now ask yourself what necessary factors cooperate to produce this birth ? As you ponder upon this you soon see that the trinity of God, man, and nature — each plays an absolutely necessary part in producing this birth. "There are three who bear witness, the Spirit, and the water, and the blood ; and the three agree in one." By using a figure of speech in which a part is taken for the whole, St. John instead of nature says water, and instead of the incar- nate life of God says blood, and instead of the trinity of God transcendent says Spirit. THE SYMBOL OF BAPTISM 89 During nine months, Spirit, water, and blood co- operating create the child's material birth ; the same three factors continue to act upon the child, and in the course of two or three years evolve its psychic birth; the same three factors continue to act upon the child, and, in course of time, evolve its spiritual birth. So God, man, and nature, acting in unity, create and evolve the child's threefold birth — ma- terial, psychical, and spiritual. How we are made Christians is taught in symbols, which symboKc action is the sacrament of baptism. The justification of this symbolic action is its truth. For (i) it teaches us how we are made children of God, (2) by symbolically using Spirit, water, and blood, the vera causa of spiritual birth; (3) the vera causa and the symbolic action are one act in the sacrament of Chris- tian baptism. What is a symbolic action? When I write 2 plus 2 equals 4, this is a true symbolic action, because it is true, not only in the moment of time in which I am writing it, but because it is eternally true. What is the difference between baptism and the sacrament of baptism? Baptism is the eternally acting vera causa producing spiritual birth, while the sacra- ment of baptism is the personal, definite, and specific application of this eternal vera causa to the individual by the Christian Church for the purpose of regenerat- ing him ; as when I raise the sail in my boat, I use the wind, which is blowing all the time over the water, to now blow my boat; as the manufacturer builds his factory by the riverside in order to use the water which is running all the time to now turn his factory. go THE CHURCH UNIVERSAL Baptism is the vera causa which is making us Christians all the time, while in the sacrament of baptism we use the vera causa symbolically; that is, only for a few moments of time. This symbolic action is as follows : (i) water is used; (2) blood is used — the minister, sponsors, and con- gregation; (3) the Spirit of God is used by the invoca- tion of prayer. What is a sacrament? A sacrament (i) is an out- ward and visible sign of an inward and spiritual grace; (2) this outward and visible sign is the means (3) whereby we are made partakers of this inward and spiritual grace. What is the outward and visible part in the sacra- ment of baptism ? Water, blood, and prayer. What is the inward and invisible part in the sacra- ment of baptism ? The Spirit of God, man, and nature. What is the spiritual grace which we receive from the union of the visible and invisible parts in the sacra- ment of baptism? Birth of the spiritual man tran- scending the psychical man. (Catechism : a death unto sin, and a new birth unto righteousness.) What is meant by water in the sacrament of bap- tism ? (i) It is a part of the world of nature ; (2) it is the life of the world of nature ; (3) it is the symbol of the immanence of God in the world of nature. Is water necessary to produce spiritual birth? Yes ; the Spirit of God moving upon the face of water creates our threefold birth — material, psychical, and spiritual. We have no knowledge of life embodied in this world in which water is not one of the factors used in producing it. THE SYMBOL OF BAPTISM 91 What do you mean when you say that our spiritual birth is generated by water, blood, and Spirit? I mean that our spiritual birth is generated by the com- bined and unified action of God : (i) as he is immanent in nature, (2) as He is incarnate in His Church through Christ- Jesus our Lord, (3) as He eternally transcends His immanent and incarnate earth life. What is the difference between the sacraments of the Church and human sacraments; as, for instance, the flag of our country? The sacraments of the Church are vera causa, the factors which actually produce life, while in human sacraments the symbols do not produce the Hfe symbolized. As, for instance, the flag of our country is not a part of our country, and does not produce our country, while in the Sacraments of Bap- tism, Confirmation, and Holy Communion, the sym- bols are none of our artificial making to represent the life symbolized, but the symbols used are the vera causa which produces life. I now wish to show you as quickly as possible that this eternal life process, of which the sacrament of baptism is the symbol, begins the moment the child is born; for the very grounds out of which the sacra- ments of the Christian Church legitimately and neces- sarily grow are that they are eternal life processes. When the baby is born in this world, it has eyes and sees not, ears and hears not, a tongue and tastes not, a nose and smells not; for when the baby is born, it is nothing but a bundle of possible psychic sensations, which are differentiated into its self-conscious five senses later on. The combined action of Spirit, water, and blood generate its material birth in its mother's womb, 92 THE CHURCH UNIVERSAL but as soon as it leaves its mother's flesh womb and enters the larger womb of the world of nature, the same Spirit, water, and blood — by which is meant God, man, and nature — seize hold of the child and begin to evolve its mental life involved in its ma- terial birth. So after two or three years it wakes up and says /. I have said that the Hght creates the eye cells with which we see, and so with all of the other material senses ; but while the material process is going on, the psychical process is also in operation, for neither the eye in itself, nor the ear in itself, ever sees or hears ; for, if so, a corpse could see and hear. My eye or ear through which I hear and see is as much an instrument as an ear trumpet or a microscope is. What I wish you to see is that until self-consciousness is aroused there is no seeing, hearing, etc. We can do none of these things while we are asleep, but only when we are awake. If you are asleep, I can take a visible thing, a pin, and by sticking it into you awake you, by arousing into activity that invisible thing called your mind. This is what God, man, and nature begin to do with the child as soon as it is born. They stick all sorts of pins into the new-born baby, and continue to do so all through its hfe. The winds, Hghts, colors, and odors of nature ; the whole organized Hfe of humanity ; and the Spirit of God — all seize hold of the baby as soon as it is born and begin to wake him to his psychic life. Compare now the child born of the Indian, subjected for centuries to the wild, lawless, and untamed life of the wilderness, with the child born of forty generations of Christian ancestors in the midst of Christian civiliza- THE SYMBOL OF BAPTISM 93 tion. Will they wake with the same consciousness? Will there not be incarnate in the one all the instincts of savage life ? While the Christian child, nurtured and trained in a Christian home, will, or ought to, come . to his psychical consciousness with a spiritual conscious- ness also. We find this same law operating in the tame and wild animals; as, for instance, in the dog and wolf. So I could illustrate this great law in a thousand ways, but I think that I have said enough to make it plain. So I will conclude this lecture by calling your attention to two remarkable men, one in the New Tes- tament, and the other in the Old Testament, Samuel and John the Baptist. Call to mind their parentage, boyhood, and how they were filled with the Holy Ghost from their mothers' wombs. That which in that far- away age of the world was the abnormal birth ought to be in a Christian civilization the normal birth of children born of Christian parents. They ought to come to self-consciousness not only with a twofold material-psychic consciousness, but with a threefold material-psychic-spiritual consciousness. This is the ideal birth which the Christian Church has taught all through the ages is the possible birth of every child, realized for the first time in the birth of Jesus, which He reproduces through His Church in all psychic human- ity. This is what the Church means by baptismal regeneration — that spiritual birth which psychic humanity cannot possibly produce in itself, but is gen- erated in psychic man by God acting through His In- carnate self in His Church, and His Spirit immanent in the world of nature. By Church we mean those who have been spiritually born of God — Christian people. VIII DIFFERENCE BETWEEN JOHN S BAPTISM AND CHRISTIAN BAPTISM It is one of the most difficult things in the world to recover the original Christian meaning of the word "baptism." Nevertheless it is well worth our while to do so, because until this is done there is not the ghost of a chance of reuniting a divided Christendom. The Evangelical Churches mean one thing by bap- tism, the Roman Church means another thing by bap- tism, while the writers of the New Testament mean still another thing by baptism. Here we have the inevi- table cause and source of widespread confusion and mis- understanding in the Christian Church. Let us see if we cannot unravel the threads of this tangled maze and get at its truth. The Evangelical Churches mean by baptism nothing more than wetting one with water in the name of the trinity. It has nothing to do with saving a man either symboHcally or really from a sinful life, and tells us nothing about how we get our spiritual birth, which, all of us are agreed, saves us from a sinful life. Because baptism has been emptied of this, its spiritual signifi- cance and Scriptural meaning, it has become as dead and empty as a sepulchre, a ceremonial rite, the mean- ing of which has been lost, and continued simply 94 CHRISTIAN BAPTISM 95 because Jesus commanded it. Any other method of initiation into the Church, as far as many see and understand, might have done just as well, if not better. But just as soon as we know that, in the sacrament of baptism, there is used symbolically and actually the vera causa of spiritual birth, then it is seen at once how impossible any other symbols could have been used than the ones that are used, because Spirit, water, and blood — the symbols used in the sacrament of baptism — do, and alone can, create our spiritual birth. Of course, if baptism means nothing more than wet- ting one with water as the method of admitting you into an artificial human society, baptism as a religious sacrament is a nonentity ; and no reasonable spiritual- minded man or woman would give it five minutes^ thought. We may rest assured, upon general prin- ciples, that Jesus never would have assigned to such an empty rite as this the place of supreme importance which He gave to baptism when He said : '' Go, bap- tize all nations into the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost." But as greatly as I beHeve that our Evangelical brethren have erred in interpreting the meaning of baptism, our Roman brethren on the other hand, I believe, have fallen into an error even more fatal. They teach that no person can be saved imless he is wet with water in the name of Father, Son, and Holy Ghost. I quote you the words of an author who, though not a Romanist, teaches the Roman interpreta- tion of the sacrament of baptism. He says: ^'Here the question suggests itself, Are all unbaptized persons (those not wet with water in the name of the trinity) 96 THE CHURCH UNIVERSAL then lost? Before replying categorically yes or no, we must explain clearly what we mean by lost. If we mean by lost that they are in the torments of hell, no ; unless they have sinned against the light of nature; for it is quite possible for a man who is unbaptized (one not wet with water in the name of the trinity), but who lives a life according to his knowledge and light, to enjoy in eternity what we call ''natural beati- tude"; that is, the happiness of all his natural facul- ties." 1 In answer to this we reply : through psychical birth, and this is what our author means by natural birth, we enter the realm of psychical Hfe only, and no other, of course. The truth this author is contending for is that no one can enter the kingdom of God, which is the kingdom of spiritual life, except through a spiritual birth; but his error lies in thinking that spiritual birth is limited to, and takes place only in, the sacra- ment of baptism; while the very raison d^etre of the sacraments of the Christian Church is that they are the symbolic acting in a few moments of time of the eternally creative and redemptive action of God. The justification of the sacrament of baptism is that in it Jesus teaches how we are spiritually born : not by spirit alone, but by spirit and blood and water, in imion ; that is, by God transcendent, immanent, and incarnate. Here you have the opposite and contrasted effects of baptism as taught by the Evangelical and the Roman- ist. The Evangehcal and the Romanist both teach that baptism is wetting a person with water in the name of 1 Words in parentheses added by writer. CHRISTIAN BAPTISM 97 the trinity. The Evangehcal rightly says that there is no magic in the words of this ceremonial rite to change the character of the individual, and, by so doing, effect the destiny of his soul. There is no magic, of course, in the sacrament of baptism, as in it there is used, for a few moments of time, the factors which produce spiritual birth all the time. The trouble with the Evangelical is that he has not sufficiently analyzed the process of spiritual birth to know that spirit embodied as water and spirit incarnate as blood are as necessary factors in producing spiritual birth as transcendent spirit is. He erroneously thinks that the action of the Spirit of God, which comes as the result of his agonizing prayer, bringing peace to his storm- tossed soul, is the only factor used in producing his spiritual birth. In fact he does not know that his spiritual birth must come first, and is the cause of his prayer of repentance and faith, through which he throws off the dominion of the flesh and begins to live the spiritual hfe of God. Stop a moment here and think what this means. Two men are both contentedly Hving the life of the flesh, and both are happy. To-morrow one is wretched and miserable and in the agony of conflict, fighting the sinful desires of his flesh. The other is as contented and happy to-day in the same lusts of his flesh as he was on yesterday. What makes the difference between the two ? What change has taken place in the soul of the one which has not taken place in the soul of the other ? The one has come into self-conscious possession of his spiritual birth, wrought out in his soul by God through His Church, while the other has not. Repen- tance, faith, and prayer, on the part of the person 98 THE CHURCH UNIVERSAL spiritually born, cannot precede his spiritual birth. They are the result not the cause of his spiritual birth, as I will explain in detail in another chapter. The Romanist says, if the magic rite of the sacra- ment baptism is not performed, the person can never be spiritually born, and will quote you these words of the Lord Jesus: "Verily, verily, I say unto thee, ex- cept a man be born of water and of the Spirit, he cannot enter the kingdom of God." Here our Evangelical and Roman brethren are in hopeless conflict; both thoroughly in earnest, one as learned as the other, one as good as the other, and both accepted with God. What is needed is not less zeal but more light, and the power of looking at the sub- ject from the point of view of the other. When this is done, the most curious thing about the whole matter is, strange as it may seem at first sight, that they are both wrong in the thing in which they both agree, if I have correctly interpreted them. They both agree that Christian baptism is wetting one with water in the name of the trinity of God by one who is a Christian, and that the whole process of spiritual birth begins and ends while pronouncing the words: "I baptize thee in the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost." The fundamental mistake they both make is that this ceremonial act is baptism; when in reality it is not baptism, but the sacrament of baptism. Baptism is birth into Christ's kingdom of life ; the absolute vera causa of this spiritual birth is Spirit, blood, and water — by which St. John means God, man, and nature. This vera causa is symbolically and actually used in the sacrament of baptism, because CHRISTIAN BAPTISM 99 God eternally uses it in creating spiritual birth. In fact it is the only way in which we know that human birth of any kind, material, psychical, or spiritual, ever has entered this world. It is in perfect accord with physiology, psychology, and metaphysics; with science, human experience, and the Scriptures, which the Church has been symbolically teaching in the sac- rament of baptism from the beginning, however much it has been misunderstood and emptied of its divine meaning, on the one hand by our Evangelical brethren, and obscured by our Roman brethren on the other hand. For many millions of years there was no other kind of birth on this earth other than a material birth cul- minating in the highest type of the animal ; but even this birth would be an impossibility without the coop- eration of Spirit, water, and blood in unity. For many thousands of years there was the psychical birth of man transcending this material birth, but it, like the animal birth, was wrought out by the combined action of Spirit, water, and blood. Then there was finally wrought out in this world another birth transcending this psychical birth, called spiritual birth ; it also being wrought out by the combined action of Spirit, water, and blood. This highest birth of man, which in us takes place after, and transcends, our psychical birth, is what the Christian Church means by Baptism. This birth, which in reality begins to take place as soon as man is psychically born, by the regenerating action of Spirit, water, and blood, foimd its first complete consummation in the incarnation of the eternal Son of God, which is symboHcally reenacted in the sacra- loo THE CHURCH UNIVERSAL ment of Christian baptism, in which the very vera causa — God, man, and nature — is used, through which God incarnates himself as Jesus and reproduces His incarnation in us. These words exactly describe Christian baptism which brings this spiritual birth into the world: ^'Verily, verily, I say unto thee, except a man be born again, he cannot enter into the kingdom of God. That which is born of the flesh is flesh, and that which is born of the spirit is spirit.'* To bring this spiritual birth into the world, and universalize it, as the psychic birth of man was imiversalized through Adam, God was born as Jesus, Hved, died, and rose again. Baptism into the name of Father, and Son, and Holy Ghost, by means of Spirit, water, and blood, is how this eter- nal Hfe of God is continually reproduced in the life of man. When we read in the Bible about being ^'baptized into the name of God," we say, oh, this is simple enough; it means pronounce the words " Father, Son, and Holy Ghost," while pouring on the water. If it meant this and nothing more, the Church never would have bothered its brain about baptism. Life is too fifll of realities to spend it in such trifles as this, you may be well assured. We begin to appreciate something of the subHmity of the meaning of ^'baptism into the name of God" when we know that the name of a person is used in the Bible to reveal his character, the very innermost es- sence of his personality. For instance, the name of Jacob means cheater, supplanter, which describes the character of Jacob as he began his Kfe; but by CHRISTIAN BAPTISM loi bitter experience and the grace of God Jacob's charac- ter was changed, and he received a new name which de- scribes his new-born character. His name was changed from Jacob to Israel which means prince with God. So when Jesus gave his last command and com- mission to His Apostles, saying, ''Go ye therefore and teach all nations, baptizing them into the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost," it meant vastly more than put water on people in the name of God. Baptism means make people Godlike. Baptism means putting into us the Godlike heart, mind, love, and sacrifice. Baptism means making us par- takers of the divine nature. Baptism means saturat- ing us with Divinity. Baptism means making us partakers of the very nature of God: Father, Son, and Holy Ghost. Thus did the Apostles receive their full and final commission, which can be written on a scrap of paper, held in one corner of the brain, but which means noth- ing less than the age-long regeneration of the world, by lifting humanity into God. How were these poor weak men to accompHsh this stupendous work ? They knew not. They were told to wait at Jerusalem until they were endued with power from on high. When the tongues of fire rested upon them, that which was dark was made luminous by the baptism of the Holy Ghost. After this they knew how the spiritual man is born. How simple it all seems to us now, as all great things, when accomplished, seem so very simple ! They remembered how Jesus had said, ''Where two or three are gathered together in my name, there am I in the midst of them." They understood how the I02 THE CHURCH UNIVERSAL great and eternal purpose of God had been wrought out through the subhme personahty of Christ- Jesus our Lord. It burst upon them in a blaze of glory, and flashing tongues of Pentecostal fire, that God had in- carnated Himself as that one matchless, splendid, heroic, self-sacrificing human fife, not that His incarna- tion might end with that life, leaving the world blacker and more helpless for that one isolated incarnation, as one vivid flash of lightning leaves the world more bHndingly dark after that flash has gone, but to be reproduced in all men. As Jesus was conceived by the Holy Ghost and born of the supreme faith of His mother, so the Church was conceived of the Holy Ghost and born of the supreme faith of the disciples in that upper room in Jerusalem, through which Christ will forever reproduce and extend His incarnation for His blessed redemptive work in the world. The Church is the extension of the incarnation of Christ in the world, for the purpose of teaching and baptizing the world into the spiritual nature of the most high God. Before his departure He showed how we are born into, and then nourished in, His Kingdom of Hfe, by two simple sacraments, in which is used the vera causa of this eternal birth and nourishment, which is sym- bolically taught in the Sacraments of Baptism and Holy Communion. They are both outward and visible signs of eternally acting spiritual grace. In the action of the Sacraments of the Christian Church, we see the eternally creative and redemptive action of God imma- nent, incarnate, and transcendent, for the salvation of the world. CHRISTIAN BAPTISM 103 In the sacrament of baptism we are taught how we enter the Kingdom of God's eternal Hfe ; in the sacra- ment of Holy Communion we are taught how we are nourished in this Kingdom of eternal life. The es- sence of baptism is that it is the extension of the in- carnation; the essence of the Holy Communion is that it is the extension of the resurrection. This in- carnate life of God, which is the Church of God, has the power to take the new-born child and mould his charac- ter into that of God, as the state can mould the for- eigner into the citizen. There pour into our Repub- lic, year by year, representatives of every nation of Europe. They come here. Englishmen, Germans, Irish, Swedes, Poles, and Italians. Their nationality is stamped upon them, so that simply by looking at them we know that this one comes from Germany, this one comes from Ireland, and this one from Italy. But we make them all Americans. They lose their na- tional traits of character and national features of face, because we put into them the American spirit which stamps them with the American face. We regenerate them, we make them over again, we make Americans out of them. And just as America has the power of making of all nations one American nation, so the Church has the power of making all peoples a new people, a Christian people, by baptizing them into God. If you wish to make your child a Frenchman, you must rear him in France ; you cannot rear him in America and make a Frenchman out of him at the same time. If you wish to make your child a savage, let savages have the rearing and the making of him, I04 THE CHURCH UNIVERSAL and to be sure he will be baptized into the savage spirit and be made a savage too. In like manner, do we wish ourselves and our children to be partakers of the spiritual nature of God, then by baptism we must make them children of God. If we wish our children to become scholars, we must send them to school where scholars are made. We must send them into the atmosphere, the environment of scholarship. They must associate with scholars, in order to imbibe their spirit and become scholars. They must be set to doing those things, the very doing of which will make the scholar grow in them. So if we wish them to become Christians, the first thing to do is what St. Paul did, arise and be baptized into fellowship with Christ, that we may imbibe His spirit and learn the secret of His life, and do those things, the very doing of which make us grow into His likeness. To-day people are standing without the Church of God waiting ! waiting ! to become Chris- tians ! before baptism into the Church ! Why, if we ever wish to become Christians, it is that baptism with which the Church of God baptizes us that makes us Christians ! A boy stands looking into the water where his fellows are swimming and says : ^'I wish I could swim too, but I am not going into the water until I learn how to swim." His companions shout back to him : " If you ever learn how to swim, you will never learn out there on land. Come into the water and learn how to swim by trying to swim. A person never learned to swim in any other way." Christians are made as swimmers are made. They CHRISTIAN BAPTISM 105 are not made by standing out in the world wishing that they were Christians too, and trying by their unaided powers to live a spiritual life; but they are made Christians by coming into the Church, and doing those things which God has appointed, the very doing of which makes Christians. How are soldiers made? They are made by going into the camp first and being drilled into soldiers afterwards. Soldiers are made inside the camp, not outside the camp. How are Masons, Odd Fellows, and Knights of Pithias made ? They are not made outside the lodge but inside the lodge. We look around and see that no one insists upon a child being a learned person in order to gain entrance into a school, because the school is established for the express purpose of giving knowledge to the ignorant. We look around and see that no one insists upon a person being a full-fledged soldier in order to gain en- trance into West Point, because West Point is estab- lished to train him in the art of soldierhood after his entrance. How sorely puzzled we must be, then, to find it seriously insisted upon that one must be a Chris- tian before baptism into the Church, when the very mission of the Church is to make Christians as the school makes scholars. The more we inquire into it the more confident we become that this confusion is caused, and grows out of, a very grave misapprehension of what the Church is ; by making the Church a mere human organization like John's collection of disciples; and identifying Christian baptism with John's baptism. While in reality it is impossible to conceive two things more io6 THE CHURCH UNIVERSAL distinctly unlike than John's baptism and Christian baptism, the Christian Church and John's collection of disciples. The difference between the two was dis- tinctly stated by St. Paul when he rebaptized some of John's disciples with the form of Christian baptism. The account is found in Acts 19 : 1-5. ''And it came to pass that, while Apollos was at Corinth, Paul, having passed through the upper coasts, came to Ephesus, and finding certain disciples there, he said unto them. Have ye received the Holy Ghost since ye believed ? And they said unto him, we have not so much as heard whether there be any Holy Ghost. And he said unto them, Unto what then were you baptized ? And they said unto him, unto John's baptism. Then said Paul, John baptized with the baptism of repentance, saying unto the people that they should believe on him who should come after him, that is, on Christ- Jesus. When they heard this, they were baptized into the name of the Lord Jesus." From the foregoing we see that St. Paul held the two things to be so distinct and totally unlike that, although the disciples had received John's baptism, they had not received Christian baptism, and must be rebaptized. What is the difference between the two ? The differ- ence between the two is : — (i) John's baptism did not transcend, but was a re- formation of, the psychic life of man. He had no other life to give. (2) Christian baptism transcends our psychic life, and makes us new creatures by a spiritual birth. It is the life Christ has to give. CHRISTIAN BAPTISM 107 John preached repentance unto the people, and when they repented, he baptized them with the form of his baptism, to make them ready to receive the Messiah when He came. His baptism was the sign of a past act; something already wrought out in the soul, a psychic repentance. Christian baptism is not the sacrament of a past act ; of something already accomplished in the soul of man, but it is the evolution of a new spiritual birth in the soul by means of water, blood, and Spirit, so that we may have future growth into the ful- ness of Christ- Jesus. John's baptism made a man nothing that he was not already before his baptism. It evolved no new fountains of life in the soul, but left the man to fight the battles of life in the strength of his old psychic life as before. Christian baptism is into God that we may have, as the result of this spiritual birth, the highest spiritual life of God Himself in our souls, as the power with which to fight the battles of life. Lastly the distinction between Christian baptism and John's baptism is a distinction of time. The one came before the coming of the Holy Ghost, the other could only come after, for Christian baptism was impossible by the Church until the descent of the Holy Ghost on the day of Pentecost, at which time the Apostles received their Christian baptism. When St. Peter baptized the three thousand on the day of Pentecost, for the first time in the history of the world was there administered the sacrament of Christian baptism. In conclusion, let us get clearly and unalterably fixed in our minds the fundamental life principle of the Church of God. io8 THE CHURCH UNIVERSAL The Church is the kingdom of God ; and this king- dom, as all other kingdoms, has the power of repro- ducing itself. As America takes in the EngHshman, German, and Dane, and by baptizing them into the American spirit makes them Americans, so the Church has the power of baptizing mankind into the life of God, making them Christians. That Process by which a foreigner is made an American is called natu- ralization; that process by which we are made Chris- tians is called baptism. II If a man wishes to become an American, he cannot do so by living in Europe. He must live here, and, by living among us, go through a process of naturalization, or baptism, into our life. Thus we make an American out of him. So if a man wishes to become a Christian, he must transcend the environment of the kingdom of the world, and by baptism into the kingdom of God, a Christian will be made out of him. And then inside the kingdom we continually dwell in this spiritual en- vironment of God's life, which will make the spiritual man grow in us into the full stature of a Christian. From the Sacrament of Baptism we go on to the Sacra- ment of Confirmation, in which we make this spiritual life given us in Baptism our very own personal self- conscious life. From the Sacrament of Confirmation we go on to the Sacrament of Holy Communion with God ; so, with faith and prayer, repentance and sacri- fice, we work out our salvation, at first, with fear and trembling, and, finally, with self-confidence and cer- tainty. IX BAPTISM OF SPIRIT, WATER, AND BLOOD UNIVERSAL Question. Who gave you this name ? Answer. My sponsors in baptism ; wherein I was made a member of Christ, a child of God, and an in- heritor of the kingdom of heaven. In the use I make of the Flood Narrative, which is used in the office of baptism, it makes no difference whether it is '^mythical" or ^'historical," as what I wish to show you is the eternal truth which, either view you take of it, it contains. It is sufficient for my purpose that I use it, as it is used in the baptismal ser- vice, as a ''figure of speech." Without further comment I would like to rivet your attention upon these words: "Wherein few, that is, eight souls were saved by water, the like figure where- unto baptism doth also now save us." This at once carries us back to the days of Noah, in which the long suffering of God waited while the ark was preparing, and presents something well worth our while to inquire into — the same outward and visible thing saving some and destroying others. We are perfectly familiar with how water became the agent of destruction by drowning the world that remained out of the ark, but we are not so familiar with how water saved the eight souls. 109 no THE CHURCH UNIVERSAL We understand perfectly that, if we have a basket of decaying apples, and in that basket of decaying apples there are eight sound apples, the only way in which these sound apples can be saved is to separate the sound apples from the rotten apples. So the flood was the outward visible material means by which the invisible God separated the righteous souls of Noah's family from the mass of corrupt souls surrounding them. Water, by destroying the mass of morally cor- rupt souls in the world, saved the eight righteous souls, by giving them a new world free from the moral contami- nation of these corrupt souls. The destruction of this hopelessly corrupt race gave humanity a new start in the environment of a new world in which to work out its salvation with fear and trembling. In this *' sym- bolic event" we see that water is both the means of God's salvation and destruction of the world. The same is true in all such wars as the French Revolution. The same is true in all the destructive agencies which we see at work in the world of nature. They destroy and at the same time build up. It requires only the most superficial knowledge of the world's history to see how water again and again has been God's means of saving the world by separating the righteous from the unrighteous. Most signally was this illustrated in the life of Israel in the passage of the Red Sea. It has often been remarked that the Red Sea is like a snail after it has cast its shell. It ends in its northern extremity in two long narrow gulfs, corre- sponding to what the children call the ''feelers" of the snail. One of these narrow gulfs, terminating in the BAPTISM UNIVERSAL iii sand of the desert, was that portion the Israelites crossed. On one side of the encamped hosts of Israel were the mountains, on the other impassable swamps, in the rear the Egyptian army, and in front the waters of the Red Sea; thus they seemingly waited in a death trap, only to fall into the hands of the Egyptians in the morning, and be driven back again into bondage in Egypt. But Moses knew the topography of that country too well to be thus caught in a death trap. Directly in front of him, stretching across that narrow bay, there was an elevated bank of sand over which at low tide there were only a few feet of water. Napoleon during his campaign in Egypt came very near losing his life at this spot in the Red Sea. At low tide, and when the wind is blowing from the northeast, it is very easy to cross at this place, but at the turning of the tide the water rises so rapidly that it is exceedingly dangerous. Napoleon was warned of this by his guides, but paid no attention to their warning, until, upon recrossing, the water began to rise so rapidly that he came very near losing his life. While Moses and the Israelites were waiting, en- camped by the waters of the Red Sea, to cross by the morning Hght, Moses was praying to Almighty God for help, as was the custom of Washington and Jackson, and the effectual fervent prayer of the righteous man availed much then as now. The account reads : ''And the Lord caused the sea to go back by a strong east wind all that night, and made the sea dry land." The waters were divided by this elevated ridge of dry sand running across this narrow inlet, and there was a wall 112 THE CHURCH UNIVERSAL of water on their right hand and on their left hand, as the strong east wind pushed and piled the waters down the Red Sea, leaving this ridge of sand dry land. During the early morning the Israelites crossed over, and as soon as the Egyptians found out what was tak- ing place, they pushed on after them, only to have their chariot wheels sink to the hubs in the soft wet sand of the sea, and in the furious plunging of the horses the wheels broke off at the axles ; so the Egyp- tian host was entangled and lost in the sea. With the return of the morning the wind died down, the tide arose, and the sea returned with all his strength and the Egyptians fled against it, but of their chariots and their horsemen and all the host of Pharaoh which came into the sea, not so much as one of them remained. Thus the Lord overthrew the Egyptians in the sea. Thus again did water, the outward and visible means of God, save the righteous and destroy the wicked. With that sea of water rolling between Israel and the land of the Nile, the sphinx, and the Pharaoh, it sepa- rated like a living flame of fire the lives of the two peoples for centuries. The Israelites had served their long apprenticeship in the arts and industries of Egypt, and with Moses at their head, learned in all the wisdom of the Egyptians, were now to begin their new career of spiritual education, beginning with the pro- mulgation of the Law on Mt. Sinai, continued through the forty years' wandering in the wilderness, and fifteen hundred years under prophet, priest, and king, which was consummated in the coming of the Messiah. BAPTISM UNIVERSAL 113 If they had lived in the land of Pharaoh, this spiritual education of the race would have been an impossibility. They would have been crushed and turned into a mummy by the preponderating and powerful civiliza- tion of Egypt. Israel must come out of Egypt, and the lives of the two nations be separated. Israel must be educated by the desert wilds and the mountain fastnesses before becoming fit for self-conscious union with the living God. When Israel crossed the Red Sea, her old life ended and her new life began. The material means God used was the sea, and to show how God uses the same means in all time to accomplish the same results, connect just for a moment our own history with that of Israel. 1492 years before Jesus was born, Moses led the chil- dren of Israel out of Egypt and crossed the Red Sea ; 1492 years after Jesus was born Columbus crossed an- other sea upon the modern miracle of white-winged ships, and discovered another promised land. As Egypt 1492 years before Christ bore in her bosom two irreconcilable civilizations and spiritual ideals, repre- sented by Pharaoh and Moses, so Europe 1492 years after Christ bore in her bosom the two irreconcilable civilizations and ideals of kingcraft and democracy. Again and again had the issue been tried in Europe between kingcraft and democracy, but always in favor of kingcraft. But under the providence of God, when in the fulness of time the issue was tried in America, the greatest friend and ally that America had was God's eternal sacrament of life-giving water, this time the broad waves of the stormy Atlantic rolling three thou- sand miles between them, without which America 114 THE CHURCH UNIVERSAL never would have been free. As the stars in their courses fought against Jabin at the brook of Kison, as the winds and the waves fought against Pharaoh at the Red Sea, so in the American Revolution the broad Atlantic fought for American freedom. Too long have we been accustomed to divorce God from the life of nature and the life of humanity, and by a mighty giilf separate spiritual life from material life, saying that nature and human nature are unfit for the habitation of the living God. If people wish to do this, of course they have a perfect right to do so ; they have a perfect right to draw a hard and fast line between the spiritual and material worlds and call the one natural and the other supernatural. They have the perfect right to do this, but they have no right to claim that they get such a view from the Bible, which teaches that God is omnipresent, maketh the flames of fire his ministering spirits, Cometh walking upon the wings of the wind, and makes our bodies the temple of His Holy Spirit. There is not a square inch of matter in the universe which is not the embodiment of spirit, matter being the ever outward and visible sign through which the ever invisible spirit works. God has three relations to us, corresponding to the three persons of the Trinity. God the Father creates us, and then carries forward and develops our spiritual education by the double process of the inward and purely spiritual communion of His still small voice in our souls, and by the outward and visible presence of His incarnate life as Jesus and in His Church, and by His embodied immanent life in the world of nature. I now wish to concentrate your minds upon the BAPTISM UNIVERSAL 115 fundamental truth we have reached that God creates and carries forward our spiritual growth unto perfec- tion by acting upon our souls from within and from without, inwardly by the inspiration and creative act of His Spirit and outwardly by the world of man and the world of nature, so that we find these three factors uniting to make every child that is born in this world : (i) God, (2) human persons, (3) the world of nature. This is the threefold way the one God, immanent, in- carnate, and transcendent, creates us and makes us grow in wisdom, and in stature, and in favor with God and man. If this is a religious truth, it must be imiver- sal and necessarily act through all time and all space and in all history. This is exactly what we find in the history of the world, beginning with savage life in the Garden of Eden and then sweeping onward in the world's history, with an ever higher and higher evolu- tion until the spirit of nature and with supreme con- trol over the powers of nature, and the spirit of man and with supreme control over the spirit of man, and the spirit of God and with supreme control over all things in heaven — in other words, God immanent, incarnate, and transcendent, culminate bodily in Jesus to whom all things in heaven and on earth are given. We will now see these working separately in the world's history until in the fulness of time this con- summation is wrought out in the incarnation of God. To begin with the first human family in the world, let us note the influences which make the character of the child born in that family. It is the Spirit of God act- ing through the father and the mother, through the world of nature around him, and the Spirit of God tran- ii6 THE CHURCH UNIVERSAL scendent acting directly upon the spirit of the child. As generation after generation is born into the world, each of these threefold influences goes on acting more and more powerfully upon the race as Eden recedes in the past, and as man, for better or for worse, more and more comes into possession of the divine gift of free will. As to whether these forces will be for his weal or his woe, as they go on acting more and more power- fully, will depend upon how that free will is exercised. If that free will is exercised to abuse, misuse, and desecrate these God-given powers intended for our up- building, they will become the sources of our destruc- tion. Bread rightly used is the source of health and life. Bread abused brings gluttony and death. Disobey the Spirit of God and He leaves us to our own devices; abuse nature or human nature and they will finally turn upon us and destroy us. So all along the course of human history we see the shores of time strewn with the wrecks of individuals and of empires who have taken the downward path of devolution instead of the upward flight of evolution. I do not care to trace this downward tendency into devolution which we see all aroimd us. I will trace for you the upward flight of humanity as portrayed for us in the Jewish race, be- ginning with Abraham, in whom we find a newer and higher creation of the divine Spirit than in his kindred and in his countrymen. Acting under the divine guidance of the Spirit of God, he leaves a thickly populated country of uncongenial spirits, and under other skies as a keeper of flocks living near to nature's heart, he begins life anew in that land, which, from the time he stepped upon it, became the sacred soil of BAPTISM UNIVERSAL 117 Palestine. When his heaven-sent son, Isaac, was born, the human race began to tread higher table lands of spirituality. The Spirit of God from within and from without through the human society of his parents and the world of nature around him acted more effectively and more powerfully perhaps than upon any child born in the world up to this time. That these channels of communion might be kept open to his descendants, note how carefully Abraham sends back to his father's people for Isaac's wife, and Jacob gets his wife from the same source, until the type becomes fixed — so fixed that from that time until this time the face of the Jew has not changed ; so fixed that whether he treads the Arctic snows or India's coral strand, Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob walk the earth. So arose somewhere in the plains of Mesopotamia the beginnings of that inspired race, whose type became so fixed in the land of Palestine that they became the spiritual torchbearers of the world. I would furthermore ask you to note, as the in- ward influence of the Spirit of God touched the spirits of the most highly developed ones of this race and in- spired them, how they laid stress upon keeping pure the race and returning to their country. With Moses it became such a passion that he spent his life in leading them back through the sandy deserts and rocky wastes to their native land. You will also notice that every inspired prophet of that race had as the burden of his message : keep open the channels of communion with God (i) by inward purity of personal life, (2) by keep- ing the race pure by non-intermarriage with other races, (3) by dwelling in Palestine. ii8 THE CHURCH UNIVERSAL Why this age-long and persistent dwelling upon the outward and visible ? Why not cultivate the inward and spiritual and let the outward and visible go ? Simply because it is impossible. The prophets of Israel were inspired enough to know that God does use the outward and visible to communicate Himself to man, and that he who begins to neglect the outward and visible always ends by losing the inward and spiritual, as he who breaks the earthen vessel not only loses the vessel but the priceless water which it con- tains. Never in the history of the world has this age-long stress laid upon the outward and visible been more richly rewarded and more fully justified; for in that wonderful land, an epitome of every variety of scenery and climate in the world, ranging from the snow-capped Hermon in the north to the torrid valley of the Jordan in the south, in that marvellous race produced and edu- cated in that marvellous land, the inspiration of God reached high-water mark, until God finally incarnated Himself and walked the hills of Galilee. Carefully note that in the incarnation of God as Jesus we see no new powers — neither material, nor psychical, nor spiritual — which have not always been acting and will never cease to act. These are but the world-old and eternally creative and begetting activi- ties of God deepened, intensified, and brought to per- fection of culmination in His incarnation. Remember the channels through which God has always been acting to create and develop the spiritual- ity of the race : (i) by His Spirit acting directly from within, (2) outwardly through the personality of man, BAPTISM UNIVERSAL 119 and (3) the world of nature. God acted powerfully for the upbuilding of the race through the personality of such men as Moses, Elijah, David, and Isaiah — but however greatly never perfectly — all that they are separately and more than they are all combined is in Jesus, in whom for the first time in the history of the world God so perfectly, so completely, so finally, and so absolutely revealed Himself that he who gazes upon the face of Jesus gazes upon that of the Father. I would furthermore ask you to observe that God's creative and spiritually begetting activity, inwardly and invisibly and outwardly and visibly, by His Spirit through the word of nature and human personality, was carried to perfection in Jesus, not to end with Him, but through Him to be made universal. To miss this is to utterly misunderstand and destroy the message and meaning of Christianity. Again let me point out to you, as soon as He ascended into heaven, how the Spirit of God continued operating without cessation. Ten days after His As- cension the Spirit of God descended upon the human race with a might and a power that it had never known before as a whole, convicting the world of sin and of righteousness, and, by taking the things of Christ and bringing them to the remembrance of the Apostles, opened their eyes to the true significance of the Lord's Christ. Also the other age-long visible channels through which God communicates His Spirit were em- phasized with their deepest and most perfect signifi- cance — for when Jesus took a piece of water and said baptize humanity into God with this, and took a piece I20 THE CHURCH UNIVERSAL of bread and said this is my body — nature swung in the mind of man into its rightful place and relation to deity, as the visible means through which the invisible God creates, redeems, and sanctifies us. So through the man Jesus there comes the perfect revelation of nature, of man, and of God ; for in Him we find all the evolution of the ages ending in the incar- nation in Him of the powers of nature, of man, and of God. But in all this we see nothing new acting for the first time, for God began acting upon and commimicat- ing Himself to man through the spirit of nature, and the spirit of man, from the moment that the first family came into the world ; and this went on acting with a cumulative force and power through all the ages, until at some time it must reach perfection, which it did in Jesus. With Him the old order ended and the new began. He cut time in two and tied it in the middle. That which had taken all time and all ages and all men and God to make in Him, He would use all ages hence- forward to reproduce in all men, so that it would be impossible for the world to be the same after His birth as before it. The mission of Jesus is to indwell in every man and every man in Him, so that the type of life born with Him in the world will not cease to be in the world after He has transcended the world. The means which He had at His disposal were the outward and visible world of nature and of man and of the invisible world of God transcendent. He used all these, and began by select- ing out of the mass of His coimtrymen the best avail- able material that He could find. The twelve Apostles BAPTISM UNIVERSAL 121 He gathered around Him, ate with them, drank with them, talked with them, lived with them, suffered with them, and died for them, so that at the end of three years His spirit passed into them and became their spirit. On the Day of Pentecost that spirit which came to birth in Him came to birth in them. So we hear Him saying unto them, "As my Father hath sent me, even so have I sent you " — as I have reproduced my life in you, I now send you to reproduce my life in that of the world by baptizing every creature into the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost — "and lo, I am with you always, even imto the end of the world." So the Church was foimded, the divine organization, the outward and visible body of this inward and new type of Hfe born in the world with Jesus. So after the Christian Church was founded we have two types of life in the world, and we are made partakers of both by the forces and powers outside and beyond ourselves. By our psychical birth we are made partakers of the Adam t5^e of life, by our spiritual birth, which the Church generates in us by means of Spirit, water, and blood, we are made par- takers of the Christ type of life. These two types of life are so distinct in the world that they cannot be hid but are known of all men. In the tropical seas between the two Americas there rises the wonderful gulf stream " Which lips our southern strand, And through the cold, untempered ocean Pours its genial streams, That far oflf Arctic shores May sometimes catch upon the softened breeze Strange tropic warmth and hints of summer seas." 122 THE CHURCH UNIVERSAL As that vast volume of tropic water keeps together in one body, different in temperature and in color through the cold Atlantic, through which it pours and changes the climate of all western Europe, so the Christian type pours through the history of the world, changing the moral and spiritual atmosphere of every nation with which it comes in contact. How is this most powerful, spiritual, subtle, and divine type of Hfe born in the world ? Does it generate itself by springing up spontaneously? In all the history of Ufe on this planet we know of nothing bring- ing itself to birth. Nothing ever borned itself natu- rally or spiritually. Every child coming to natural birth has a father and a mother, and every child spirit- ually born has a spiritual father and a spiritual mother — God the spiritual father and the Church the spirit- ual mother. So the Church's answer to the question how our spiritual birth is generated is: by baptism into the name of the Father and of the Son and the Holy Ghost, by the Church, with the Spirit and water and blood, I was made a member of Christ, a child of God, and an inheritor of the kingdom of heaven. Let me give you a perfect analogy. In the spring of the year when the gardening fever comes, you take some seeds in your hands, go out into the garden, dig some holes, drop in the seeds and cover them up and wait. Just as soon as you cover those seeds the earth seizes hold of them, begins to make them germinate, and in due course of time pushes them up through the soil. Let us note the factors which bring these seeds to birth. There was the seed, the man, the earth. Then the man dug a hole, put the seed into it and BAPTISM UNIVERSAL 123 covered it up, and then the earth-spirit brought forth the Hving plant, which the man cultivated afterwards. Here you have the visible and invisible agents by which that plant's Hfe is developed. Now in the place of the seed substitute the child, in the place of the earth the Church, for the earth spirit the Holy Spirit, and you have the visible and invisible factors by which spiritual life is developed into self -consciousness in every person. In conclu- sion, as that seed can do nothing to born itself, neither can the child do anything to born itself spiritually or psychically. The one is as much of an impossibility as the other. Both must be brought about by forces and powers other than the thing born. As the sun- light, rain, and heat prepare the physical conditions by which the earth is enabled to bring to life the seeds in her bosom, so the spiritual forces generated in the Christian Church are the means by which the miracle of our spiritual birth is wrought out on the earth. X BAPTISM AND SEXLESS BIRTH In the preceding lectures I have led you into the holy place of the Sacramental System of the Chris- tian Church. Let me now lead you into its holy of holies by showing you the logical and necessary con- nection between Baptism and Virgin-birth. Stated in a sentence it is this : Virgin-birth is the method of the introduction of eternal life ; Baptism is the repro- duction of this eternal life in us ; in both Baptism and Virgin-birth we see the eternally creative, begetting, and redemptive action of God ; in both we see the sex- less Virgin life of God, man, and nature, in operation ; and, finally, both are spiritual creations and begetting processes which transcend all psychic-sex creations and sex-begetting processes whatsoever. So that while Virgin-birth and Baptism are in reality one pro- cess, we call them by the two names of Virgin-birth and Baptism, reserving the former to describe the introduction of all Hfe, the latter to describe the repro- duction of the life of Christ in the Christian Church. What is a Virgin any way in a religious sense ? And what is Virgin-birth in the sense that Christianity uses it? Here we must entirely free ourselves from all heathen conceptions, and do some clear and exact thinking. Virgin-birth is an absolutely sexless birth. 124 BAPTISM AND SEXLESS BIRTH 125 Virgin life, in a religious sense, is life which forever transcends sex, and in which sex-passion can never arise. It is the realm of the eternal life of God which we see incarnate as Jesus and reproduced as the spirit- ual life of the Christian Church. Perhaps I cannot get you to see clearly this truth in a better way than by a brief explanation of these words of Jesus, recorded in St. Luke's Gospel, 20 : 34-36. "And Jesus answering said unto them, the children of this world marry and are given in marriage : but they which shall be accounted worthy to obtain that world, and the resurrection from the dead, neither marry nor are given in marriage : neither can they die any more: for they are equal unto the angels, and are children of God, being the children of the resurrection." In this passage Jesus says that there is neither marriage nor giving in marriage in heaven, because in the resurrection we transcend and cast off sex which we receive by our psychic sex-life from below. We in reality have sex for only a portion of our life and soon cast it off, either by old age or by death, after its tem- porary purpose has been served. But, whatever else we may be, we are always essentially spirit, and, as such, we have a sexless self which transcends sex and is always Virgin, for there are always depths of our life in which sex-passion never stirs, because it never exists there. We instinctively and correctly speak of the infant as neither he nor she but it, because an infant has no gender but is sexless — a virgin, in the rehgious meaning of this word. With the arising, however, of the first sex-passion, the child in addition to being 126 THE CHURCH UNIVERSAL it — sexless spirit which it never ceases to be, for spirit as such is always sexless — becomes he or she. After the temporary use of our brief sex-life has served its purpose, which is for reproducing individuals from below by psychic-sex life, we cease to be he or she in any sex sense, and continue our sexless virgin life which we receive from above by our spiritual birth, minus our sex-life which we receive from below} What the Church means by Virgin-birth and Bap- tism is so profound and vast a subject, that the ques- tion is not so much what to say as what not to say in the process of condensation, so as to lose nothing in clearness and in simpHcity, and at the same time re- veal the magnitude and importance of these tremen- dous subjects. However, as best I can I shall try to do this, and at the same time make it intensely prac- tical for you. I often meet earnest-minded spiritual men whose morals are on a par with the best men in the Church, and whose Hves in a high degree exemplify the virtues of the Christian faith. In the beginning of my min- istry this was one of the standing wonders to me — why these men did not openly confess Christ before the world, and by confirmation unite themselves with some organized society of Christians, and by doing so multiply their power for good in the world. Sometimes these men are frank enough to tell a minister, after they have come to know him well, where the trouble lies. They say: *'I have often thought of being confirmed, and would Hke to do so ; 1 For a detailed discussion of Virgin-birth see Vol. I, " Kinship of God and Man." BAPTISM AND SEXLESS BIRTH 127 but before I can do so, I must say that I believe that Jesus had a sexless birth. I cannot say I believe that without saying I believe what I do not believe; and I am sure that if I am damned for it everlastingly, God does not wish me to say I beHeve what I do not believe is the truth. ''Besides, I cannot see how believing in the Virgin- birth of Jesus can make me or any one else a better or a worse man, or how this kind of birth is any more necessary for God to incarnate Himself as man than any other kind of birth. In fact I never have been able to see why it is necessary for God to incarnate Himself as man in order to save man. Why can He not save man by staying up in the skies, just as well as by coming down to the earth and becoming man ?" Now suppose some one really in earnest, and whom you dearly loved, were to come to you in such a state of mind, how would you help him? Would you be able, as St. Peter admonishes, to give a reason to every man that asketh you of the hope that is in you? As best I can I shall try to answer these questions. Why one should object to Virgin-birth is not because it is any more mysterious than any other kind of birth, but because it seems to be useless because it is falsely assumed that there is only one soKtary instance of Virgin-birth in the history of the incarnation of life, namely, in that of Jesus ; but I shall now try to make plain to you that the only conceivable way in which the first of any kingdom of life can get into this world is by a Virgin, that is, a sexless birth. If this can be shown, then it becomes unreasonable not to believe in the Virgin-birth of Jesus, since He claims to be the 128 THE CHURCH UNIVERSAL introduction of a new kingdom of life. When the question is so stated, Jesus is at once seen to be the supreme illustration and culmination, and not the exception, to this imiversal law of the introduction of all forms of life. But the objector at this point says : ^'Once upon a time, before the doctrine of evolution was demon- strated, it was reasonable to think that every new type of Hfe was a special creation, and had no evolu- tionary relation to existing lower kinds of Hfe. For instance, directly out of the dust the grass was made, directly out of the dust the animals were made, directly out of the dust Adam was made. No one of these types derived its life from any other type of created Hfe. But now we can no longer beHeve this, for we know that evolution is as true as gravitation, and the doctrine of evolution teaches that all higher forms of Hfe grow directly out of lower forms, so that they are organically and derivatively related in one great Hfe series from the dust up to your highest man Jesus." To which I reply : ''You say what any man, believ- ing as you beHeve, must say. Let me, however, say that the Christian Church beHeves aU that you be- Heve ; but to be thoroughly rational, that is, true to all the facts of Hfe, it is forced to beHeve more. The trouble with your type of man is that you do not know, or if you do, you ignore, and refuse to use your reason about only one half the facts of Hfe — the reproduc- tion of incarnate life, which of course is a sex process. The trouble with many in the Church is that they refuse to use their reason at all. Between the two the BAPTISM AND SEXLESS BIRTH 129 Church is between the devil and the deep sea. The man who refuses to use his reason is always supersti- tious; the man who uses his reason about only one half the facts of Hfe always ends as a skeptic. The Chris- tian Church is neither, though some of its members are both." If we would be led astray, neither by superstition nor skepticism, let us get all the facts of life before we begin to reason about them. The reproduction of life is one half of the facts, the introduction of Hfe is the other half of the facts of life. Both are unbroken processes from the dust up to Jesus. Through the law of sex-heredity life is one unbroken series of repro- duction from below, and by Virgin-birth is one un- broken series of introduction from above. The Church denies neither but shows the necessity of both. Let me show you how as briefly as I can. (i) Since God is sexless, and He uses all His lower creation as the womb in which to beget His spiritual offspring, His lower creation is to Him, in His spirit- procreating diction J sexless : the Virgin mother of His embodied life. (2) The doctrine of Virgin-birth teaches that, in the evolution of life from a lower to a higher form, the creature is used in a sexless way, that is, as a Virgin, by the direct action of the Spirit of God, so that the whole life series from the star-strewn dust to Jesus are derived from above by Virgin-birth. (3) The doctrine of Virgin-birth, stated in its broad- est outline and deepest sense, is that God does not make all new types of life directly out of the dust, though it is used in making all forms of life as is stated I30 THE CHURCH UNIVERSAL in the book of Genesis, but, by the direct action of His Spirit successively upon the lower forms of life, evolves the successive higher forms of life, as in a three-story house the second story is built upon the first story, and the third story is built upon the second story. The carpenter builds his house as directly by building one story upon another as he does when he builds a one-story house on the ground. In fact how can a three-story house be built otherwise than by building one story upon another ? Life is an organically related three-story structure, built both from above and below, one story built upon another story. (4) We can never understand the meaning and necessity of Virgin-birth until we understand the trin- ity of gender — male, female, and neuter — taught in every grammar. Neuter gender is the gender of God, and expresses His relation to all His creation from the highest to the lowest, in all His spirit-beget- ting processes. It is His eternal method of the intro- duction of all life ; furthermore, it is the only conceiv- able process of divine begetting, since God is sexless, and He in His spirit activity is alone the creator and begetter of the first forms of all life. (5) After life is introduced and begotten in this sexless way, then the creature cooperates in repro- ducing the second form of this life by the sex law of male and female, separately or combined. Here we have the origin and the necessity of the three genders. The neuter gender is the gender of God, and of Virgin-birth, through which all life is introduced ; male and female is the gender through which all psychic human life is reproduced. BAPTISM AND SEXLESS BIRTH 131 (6) God never ceases to beget His life, for there is an eternal outgoing of life from Him ; in the Sacra- ment of Baptism we see in one act both the introduction and reproduction of His spiritual sexless begetting activities. This doctrine of the Virgin-birth, which I have stated for you in these six propositions, our objector knows nothing about; he has been so hypnotized and ob- sessed with the idea that it is a myth, and so contrary to all the facts which he imagines he knows, that he has not the faintest idea of what it means. If he will do some genuine original thinking, he will soon find that this doctrine alone explains a whole lot of facts which he knows, but does not know how to use in his philosophy of life. He will also find, upon a careful examination, that all his objections to the doctrines of Christianity, as taught in the Apostles' Creed, grow out of his deistic carpenter conception of the universe, while the Christian Religion grows out of the fact that the Universe is the Living Organism of God's eternal life. Therefore, it will be necessary for me to briefly outline and contrast for you these two concep- tions of God, the infinite Spirit, to His embodied life as nature, and His incarnate life as man. Our objector's criticism of the Christian Religion falls to the ground as soon as you point out to him that his deistic conception of God, which is not the Christian conception of God, makes God a celestial carpenter mechanic, far away and above us, who once and for all created the world and us as a carpenter does his wagon. Out of this conception grows the Mo- hammedan and Jewish conception of God which has 132 THE CHURCH UNIVERSAL masqueraded as Christianity. Jesus in giving us the Christian Religion has transcended all such concep- tions as these theologies teach. We ought, however, never to forget that ''the car- penter conception of the universe" is not the concep- tion of the prophets of God who wrote the Old Testa- ment. Their conception of God is that He is far more intimately connected with nature and with man ; that He does not indwell mechanically in nature and in man, as we indwell in our wooden houses, but vitally as we indwell in our flesh and blood houses ; that He indwells both in nature and in man in so vital and living a way, that, if He were to have the relation to the world that a carpenter does to his wagon, the world would be a corpse. But God so vitally lives in the world that in the deepest of senses the Hfe of the world is His life, and the life of man, in all respects except sin, is His life. During the time, however, between the closing of the Old Testament Canon and the birth of our Saviour, this truth was largely lost in Israel ; and one purpose of our Saviour was to recall the people of His day to the truth which the prophets had taught their fathers. So we hear Him beginning his ministry with these words: "I am not come to destroy the law and the prophets, but to fulfill them." One is perfectly safe in saying that this truth of the vital living relation of God to man and to nature is one of the oldest known truths in the world. All the reformations in the world have been caused by re- gaining this truth, and all the dark ages in the world have been caused by losing this truth. It is certainly BAPTISM AND SEXLESS BIRTH 133 the ancient account of things as recorded in the book of Genesis, which St. Paul reiterates in his Epistles, and all our modern discoveries about prehistoric man show how vividly and clearly they realized that the great spirit indwelt in nature, and was in com- munion with their spirits. Out of the conception that the world is the living organized life of God, under limitations of form, space, and time, the Christian Religion naturally and neces- sarily grows, has been historically developed in the world, and all through the ages has inspired the proph- ets, nerved the patriot's arm, and justified the martyr's death, until at last, in the fulness of time, there came that far-off day which Abraham saw and was glad; how that God would incarnate Himself in His Son and David's son, and in Adam's son, and in Eve's son. In this lecture, as I am minded to go a little deeper into these things than I have ever done before, I am tempted to draw back for fear that I may not be able to carry you along with me. I am almost tempted to quote you the words of the writer of the Epistle to the Hebrews: "for when by this time ye ought to be teachers, ye have need that one teach you again which be the first principles of the oracles of God ; and are become such as have need of milk and not of strong meat." Just think how the Christian world has degenerated since those early days, when the Epistles of St. Paul were as easily understood by his audiences as your letters are by your friends to- day. But I am persuaded that the time has come to carry on an aggressive warfare of the Christian faith, and that we must begin this warfare by a vigorous 134 THE CHURCH UNIVERSAL campaign of education in the household of faith itself, for the greatest difficulty confronting us is the indiffer- ence and ignorance of our own Church people of the great fundamental principles of the Christian religion. I will go further and say that we need to be fed, not only upon milk, but upon the strongest meat of the Word of God, if we wish to grow in our own personal Christian life, and maintain the Christian religion in the world. I say all this because it grows out of my own personal experience. Some years ago I read a book by James Lane Allen with the title, ''Reign of Law," which in part reads Uke my own autobiography. The large sale of the book at the time of its publication had its significance in the fact that thousands found themselves pictured in it; but the weakness of the book consists in that it does not answer the problems which it raises, and by not doing so leaves the impression that they cannot be answered ; at least does not give the answer the best men in the Church give, and therein consists the weakness of this book and those like it, and their danger to the half -educated ignorant. I said a few moments ago that out of God's living vital relations to the world and to man, the Christian religion naturally and necessarily grows, the essence of which is summed up in three words, — Immanence, Virgin-birth, and Incarnation of God, — and I must now make it plain what these words mean and how they are necessarily connected. The immanence of God means indwelling of God in both a hidden and a revealed manner, as my spirit dwells in my body in such a manner as both to conceal BAPTISM AND SEXLESS BIRTH 135 and to reveal me. My body reveals as much of my spirit to you as can be touched, seen, and handled, and no more; it conceals the balance of me, which I will illustrate in the following manner. The most ignorant clerk that ever weighed crackers in a corner grocery store can tell you how much Shakespeare weighed, the ignorant tailor can tell you accurately his size, the camera portray the lineaments of his face — all these can describe Shakespeare more accurately, as far as they go, than the profoundest philosophic and poetic genius that ever lived. But this Shakespeare revealed to you in this manner, as perfectly as a mask, conceals the Shakespeare who walked the streets of London, and tells us nothing about the Shakespeare we love so well to-day. These masks of flesh-bodies, behind which we hide and out of which we peep, both conceal and reveal us. They reveal us, because with- out them we could not know one another on this physi- cal plane; they also conceal us, because our bodies reveal so little of us ; because we are so much more and greater than these masks of the night, these flesh and blood bodies. The body of the person sitting next to you conceals you from him and him from you ; but could our bodies as perfectly reveal us now, as they will when our incarnation of God is complete, when instead of masks of our spirits our bodies become the perfect revelation of our spirits, answers the question, Will there be recognition in heaven ? It answers the question for us by saying that we will have then for the first time a thorough introduction to ourselves, to one another, and to God. To return from heaven to earth, let us constantly 136 THE CHURCH UNIVERSAL remember that, while God is immanent in nature and in man, and while they reveal something of God, they conceal vastly more than they reveal, for it is only in the incarnation of God that we have the perfect revelation of Him. For instance, I take a few grains of powder in my hands, and look at them, touch them, taste them — harmless enough, these black grains, thinks the untutored savage. But confine them in the rock-ribbed mountains and touch them with a spark of fire, and the earth trembles as in the earthquake shock. Titanic power is immanent, that is, concealed and potential, in those innocent-looking black grains, which, under the proper conditions, become young volcanoes, belching forth fire and hurling tons of pon- derous matter through the air as if hurled by an arch- angel's hand. But there is nothing, perhaps, which at first conceals and afterward reveals more than an egg, and noth- ing, save the commonness of the occurrence, blinds us to the perpetual marvel wrought out before our eyes. There it is, a mass of protoplasm, wrapped only, as the divine artist can wrap, in a thin tissue sack, incased in a shell of lime; but, under the proper conditions, the life involved in that shell is evolved into the living chicken, and finally resurrects him into the crowing cock, when the immanent type of life becomes perfectly revealed by becoming incarnate. So much for the immanent or concealed life of God in the world. So far as the immanent life of God is concerned, it is alike in the sunlit stars, the grain of sand, in man, and in the highest archangel. It is simply the world-old teaching of the real omnipresence BAPTISM AND SEXLESS BIRTH 137 of God, which teaches that God is as truly in the grain of sand as in Jesus, as the chicken is as truly in the egg as it is in the crowing cock. But we see in the world all kinds and degrees of life separated from one another by impassable gulfs, every creature having life in itself after its kind and propagating life after its kind. This brings us face to face with the mystery of how these gulfs between different t3^es of life are crossed, and starts us search- ing for the bridge that connects them. The Church answers that the bridge connecting the two last and highest types of life is sexless Virgin-birth ; and, if so, then to be consistent, this bridge must extend back- wards imtil it connects the gulfs of all the other types of life. The problem of how the one eternal life and Spirit of the universe becomes incarnate as individuals can be explained only by sexless Virgin-birth. But first what does the incarnation of God mean? Since God indwells in a stone, a tree, an ox, in Adam, and in the perfect man Jesus, wherein do they differ and wherein is one higher and better than the other ? In answer I ask you to return with me and look a little deeper than we are accustomed to do into the first chapters of Genesis; for, as a wise Rabbi long ago has said, he who understands the first chapters of Genesis understands the mystery of the universe. In that chapter we are told that in the beginning the earth was without form and void and darkness was upon the face of the deep, and the Spirit of God brooded upon the face of the deep. This is so simple that any child can understand what it means, if it has ever watched a hen brood her eggs. Why does a hen brood her 138 THE CHURCH UNIVERSAL eggs ? To evolve the life out of the egg which she has first involved in the egg when she made the egg. The hen completes the process of involution when she lays the egg and begins the process of evolution when she begins to hrood the egg. Considerable time generally elapses between the two processes. So in the he- ginning, when God made the world — whenever that was — He involved His life in the world-egg, and then by brooding the world-egg with His Spirit He evolves out of the world his immanent life which He involved in it in the beginning. But this is done by degrees of an ever onward and higher evolution of life, beginning in the mineral kingdom and continued through all forms of higher life, until finally all of His involved immanent life becomes openly showed and fully revealed in our Lord Jesus Christ. This is the incarna- tion of God and is what the incarnation of God means. As St. John says : ^'That which was from the beginning which we have heard, which we have seen with our eyes, which we have looked upon, and our hands have handled of the Word of Life, which was with the Father, and was manifest unto us, declare we unto you." So that while it is true that the underlying, hidden, omniscient, divine life in the world is the same in all things, that which makes the difference in living things is the degrees and kinds of divine life not im- manent in all but embodied as each. Through spiritual sexless Virgin-birth the one life and Spirit of God becomes differentiated in and as all. The lowest qualities only of divine life are embodied as grass, but enough to teach us that when we walk the dewy fields, we tread the jeweled courts of heaven, if BAPTISM AND SEXLESS BIRTH 139 we were but aware of it, and not so dulled by stale custom as to call what God hath made, common and unclean. When we reach the animal kingdom, we enter upon another higher series of another kind of life, and so on through all forms, until in the higher animals coming events cast their shadows before, and we see in them the prophecy of the incarnation of mind as man. In man we find the beginnings of the incarnation of the mind and moral nature of God, self-conscious and free activity, which begins in Adam, and rises higher and higher through all the centuries as it is outlined for us in the genealogy of St. Luke, until in the Virgin's Son we have the express image and revelation of the Father in whom is summed up all things in heaven and on earth. I wish you now to notice that the incarnation of God is not something which begins and ends in Jesus. The beginning of the embodiment of the eternal and only Son of God began in the first forms of life on this planet, and, as St. Paul says, throughout all the blood-stained history of the ages, He struggled with groanings which cannot be uttered, until the sin-stained nature of man was bleached in Jesus, through whom the consumma- tion of the incarnation was wrought out. I would also ask you to note that the incarnation is not an afterthought with God, but His first thought, His eternal purpose which the sin of man did not thwart but delayed; furthermore, that Virgin (sex- less) birth is the age-long historical life process on the planet, not an isolated and lonely episode by itself when God suddenly breaks with all past life processes I40 THE CHURCH UNIVERSAL on the planet, but the only method through which any new quality of life ever has come to birth on this planet. A very little reflection will show us that sex- less birth is a very old process known to Scripture, and will become an integral part of evolution when the doctrine is fully stated. The law as I discovered it and stated it twenty years ago, while I was a student at Berkely Divinity School, is this: The first and the second of its kind are not embodied in the world in the same way. Sexless birth is the law of the introduction of life, and sex birth is the law of the reproduction of embodied life. Listen to these words which are repeated in the first chapters of Genesis every time that new and higher t3^es of life are embodied. "And God said. Let the earth bring forth grass (literally, the young tender thing) the herb yielding seed after His kind, whose seed is in itself upon the earth ; and it was so." Let us analyze what this means : The first form of vegetable life came into the world without springing up from a seed, the second came from the seed which was pro- duced by the first form. In other words, the first form of life came into the world by a divine sexless Virgin-birth as follows : The earth, which is sexless, is the mother ; God by His spirit-procreating act caused sexless mother earth to bring forth the first form of life higher than the mineral kingdom. And we find this formula repeated all through the first chapters of Genesis as God embodied more and more of His life in this world. All kingdoms of life enter this world by a super- natural, sexless Virgin-birth of the first individual of BAPTISM AND SEXLESS BIRTH 141 that kingdom, its head and king. It is unlike any other existing type of life, as it partakes of qualities of life possessed by no other type, imparted directly by the Spirit of God, the eternal Life-Giver. Unless this is so it is not a new kingdom of life, it is the per- petuation of an old t)^e of Hfe, and not an inflow of new and higher qualities of the life of God never hitherto incarnate. At Bethlehem, now some two thousand years ago, the Word was made flesh as Jesus. Some thirty years later He was crucified, and on the third day He arose, and afterwards He ascended into Heaven. What relation do that birth and that resurrection have to all other human beings? Is it to be limited to Jesus or does He, as head of the spiritually begotten life of God, reproduce His spiritual type of life, as Adam reproduces his psychic type of life? And if Jesus reproduces His type of life, how is this done ? It is the teaching of Christianity that the birth and resurrection of Jesus are to be reproduced in all men, and the sum total of the process by which His birth is reproduced in us is what the Church means by the Sacrament of Baptism; and the sum total of the process by which the resurrection of Christ is wrought out in us is what the Church means by the Sacrament of Holy Communion. By Baptism and Holy Com- munion the incarnation and its benefits are extended to all who will receive it. That birth which came to completion in Bethlehem and to its consummation on Calvary is in process of reproduction here and now in the Church of God. This is the Holy of Holies of the Sacramental System of the Christian Church. 142 THE CHURCH UNIVERSAL Summary : If that kingdom of life born with Jesus is not to die with Him, He, like Adam, must have the power to reproduce His type of life in the world. This is true of all kingdoms of life that live. So if Christ has not the power of reproducing Himself, there will be Christ but never a Christian. But He who was conceived by the Holy Ghost has the power to impart to others the same spirit of which He is the incarnation. This is true of all kingdoms of life. Here is the reason why the Western Church has held so tenaciously to the doctrine that the Holy Spirit proceeds from the Son as well as the Father. As Adam's kingdom of life depends upon his power to beget and send forth that spirit of which he is the incarnation, so Christ's kingdom depends upon His power to beget and send forth that Holy Spirit of which He is the Incarnation. So He said to His Apostles : Wait for the coming of the Holy Spirit with which ye shall be baptized not many days hence. Ten days later Christ did send the Holy Spirit into the inmost lives of those await- ing disciples in so vital a manner, that His spirit became their spirit, His life their life. His body their body, the Church of the living God. Christ begat Himself in them so that the new kingdom of life let down from heaven as Him would be reproduced and perpetuated as His Church on earth by the baptism of every creature into the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost. PART III LECTURES ON THE CATECHISM XI THE SACRAMENT OF CONFIRMATION At the close of the Baptismal Service the Sponsors are reminded of the duties which they have assumed in these words: ''Ye are to take care that this child be brought to the Bishop to be confirmed by him, so soon as he can say the Creed, the Lord's Prayer, and the Ten Commandments, and is sufiiciently instructed in other parts of the Church Catechism set forth for that purpose." When the child has been so instructed, and is pre- sented for confirmation, he is asked: ''Do you here, in the presence of God, and of this congregation, renew the solemn promise and vow that was made at your baptism; ratifying and confirming the same; acknowledging yourself bound to believe and to do all those things which your sponsors then undertook for you?" The person confirmed answers, "I do." Numerous objections have been made to this method of teaching and training the young child, the most serious being that, as religion is entirely a matter between the individual and God, no one has any right to promise to bind the child to any religious belief, but wait till the child grows up and let him choose for himself. We reply that, if we understand the Christian religion, we have an entirely different conception of it. We reply that thou shalt not lie, L 145 146 THE CHURCH UNIVERSAL cheat, steal, covet, and murder — in other words, thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself — is as much a part of the Christian religion as thou shalt love the Lord thy God. We reply that Christianity is essen- tially social as well as the private relations of the individual to God. Of course there are a great many things which we have no right to promise for the child, and bind him to do on coming to the years of discretion, or to bind ourselves to do for him. For instance, we have no right to promise that he shall be a lawyer, live in America, marry this or that person, or do a hundred other things which I could mention. But God and humanity do hold us responsible for the actions of the child until he can act for himself, and we are bound to so train him that he will grow up to be a good man, which we cannot do without teaching him the ten commandments ; to teach him his kinship to God, which we cannot do without teaching him the Apostles' Creed; to teach him that he cannot live apart from communion with God and man, and, there- fore, we must teach him the Lord's Prayer. It is not binding upon us that we shall teach our child any of the hundreds of peculiar non-essentials of religion which have rent the Christian Church into as many sects, but it is binding upon us, who are Christians, to do all that we possibly can to make our child grow up into a Christian. Therefore, all any Sponsor promises in the vows which he assumes for the child is that he will teach the child only those things which he must absolutely do and believe in order to be a Christian of any kind. It is binding THE SACRAMENT OF CONFIRMATION 147 upon us to make our children catholic, not sectarian, Christians, which you will see as soon as we know what Catholic Christian means. This we cannot know until we understand what the Catholic Church means, and the Essentials of its Membership, which I shall briefly state in the two succeeding chapters. But before I do so, let me state the fundamentals out of which they both grow, which fundamentals the person ratifies in the Sacrament of Confirmation. FUNDAMENTALS /. Religion. — ''Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind. This is the first and great commandment. And the second is like unto it ; thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself. On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets.'' This is absolutely all of religion, which came to perfection in Christ- Jesus our Lord. //. The Facts of Religion. — Religion is based upon the unchangeable facts of life, the substance of which is the Fatherhood of God and the Sonship of Man — the Kinship of God and Man. Around this central fact, and necessarily growing out of this vital and personal relation of God and man, human history became what it is, the essence of which is summed up in the Apostles' Creed — the facts upon which religion is based. Apostles' Creed I believe in God the Father Almighty, maker of heaven and earth ; and in Jesus Christ His only Son our Lord ; who was conceived by the 148 THE CHURCH UNIVERSAL Holy Ghost, born of the Virgin Mary : Suflfered under Pontius Pilate, was crucified, dead and buried : He descended into Hell : the third day He rose again from the dead : He ascended into heaven, and sitteth on the right hand of God the Father Almighty : from thence He shall come to judge the quick and the dead : I beUeve in the Holy Ghost : the holy Catholic Church : the Communion of Saints : the forgiveness of Sins : the resurrection of the body : and the life everlasting. Amen. ///. Theology. — Theology is the explanation of the facts of life. Great Christian thinkers have thought out systems of theology, which, in the place of religion and the facts of religion, have become the I artificial bond of union and also of disunion among Christians, breaking the unity of the Church into warring sects. The cause of the disunion of Christen- dom has not been religion, but a narrow and intolerant spirit creating mutually exclusive and antagonistic systems of theology, upon which Christian societies have been erected. To this add despotism in church government, and the attempt to enforce uniformity in the ritual of worship, and I believe that we shall have the most potent causes of Christian sectism. IV. Catholic Theology. — The nearest approxima- tion the Catholic Church has to what may be called a system of theology is the Nicene Creed. Any profounder interpretation or greater expansion of the facts of the universe than is contained in the Nicene Creed mankind eagerly awaits. Nicene Creed I believe in one God the Father Almighty, Maker of heaven and earth. And of all things visible and invisible : And in one Lord Jesus Christ the only begotten Son of God, Be- gotten of His Father before all worlds, God of God, Light of Light, very God of very God, Begotten, not made, Being of one substance THE SACRAMENT OF CONFIRMATION 149 with the Father, By whom all things were made : Who for us men, and our salvation came down from heaven, And was incarnate by the Holy Ghost of the Virgin Mary, and was made man. And was crucified also for us under Pontius Pilate. He suffered and was buried. And the third day He rose again according to the Scriptures, And ascended into heaven, And sitteth on the right hand of the Father : And He shall come again with glory to judge both the quick and the dead : Whose kingdom shall have no end. And I beheve in the Holy Ghost the Lord and Giver of Life, who proceedeth from the Father and the Son, Who with the Father and the Son together is worshipped and glorified, Who spake by the Proph- ets. And I believe one Catholic and Apostolic Church. I acknowl- edge one Baptism for the remission of sins. And I look for the resur- rection of the dead, And the life of the world to come. Amen. V. Catholic Church. — The Catholic Church, by which is meant the Universal Church of Christ, while tolerant of all systems of theology not destructive of the revelation of God given in Christ- Jesus our Lord, is not founded upon, nor committed to, any sectarian system of theology ; but is founded upon the facts of religion, its bond of unity being love of God and man, the breaking of which is schism. VI. The Catholic Christian. — There are Christians in all the societies in the Church of God; for that which makes one a Christian in one society in the Church, makes him a Christian in all. There is only one way in which a man is made a Christian, which is by ** a death unto sin and a new birth unto righteous- ness," which spiritually unites us all in God. One can be a Christian without being a sectarian, and the less of a sectarian there is about him, the more of a Christian he is likely to be. Such a man is a Catholic Christian, and wants his society in the One Church of God to be as big as Christ, so that it can take in all humanity created in the image of God. I50 THE CHURCH UNIVERSAL This is what the child ratifies in his confirmation in the Christian Church — nothing more nor less than obedience to the laws of the Christian life, which was promised for him, and began to be imparted to him, in baptism. This he must now make his own by an act of his own free will and choice. The part the per- son must do for himself, and cannot be done for him by any one else whomsoever, is gathered up in the sacrament of confirmation; the part the person cannot by any possible means do for himself, but must be done for him by persons outside himself, is gathered up in the sacrament of baptism. What one cannot do for himself is to horn himself. We all clearly see that psychical life is imparted to us in a threefold way : by the Spirit of God, humanity, and the world of nature. The same law holds good in our spiritual birth, which is also imparted to us in a threefold way : by the Spirit of God, the Church, and the world of nature. We cannot do anything to born ourselves psychically or spiritually, but if, after we receive psy- chical or spiritual birth, we continue to live either life, then 7, and no one but I myself, must conform to the laws of life; that is, ratify and confirm them, if I continue to live. How I am to make the spiritual life, which the Church gives me in baptism, my own personal life, is gathered up by the Church in the sacrament of confirmation, in which Sacrament I make this spiritual life my very own by conforming to the laws of this kingdom of spiritual life. What are the laws by which I make the life of Christ my life? It is that I must continue to co- operate with, and continue to receive help from, those THE SACRAMENT OF CONFIRMATION 151 who give me this life. This is the law of every kind and form of life without any exceptions whatsoever. If the child continues to Kve after it is born in the family, it must conform to those laws which create the family, otherwise it will destroy that family and itself. For instance, no human family can continue to exist otherwise than upon the basis of the ten commandments, which, together with the Creed and the Lord's Prayer, are what the person ratifies and con- firms in his confirmation. I shall explain these more in detail in the next chapter. I said just a moment ago that the only way in which we can live the Christian Hfe, and make it our personal life, is by remaining in communion with the source whence we receive this life, which is God, His Church, and His world of nature. We cannot live the Christian life in isolation, but only in fellowship with others, as we are social beings. That assistance, without which we are not made strong enough to ratify our baptismal vows, must come from the Holy Spirit God and His Church, which is gathered up and taught in the sacrament of confirmation. What is the outward and visible part in the sacra- ment of confirmation ? The Minister and the Bishop. Whom do the Minister and the Bishop represent? The whole Church which confirms us. What is the invisible part in the Sacrament of Confirmation ? The Spirit of God and His Church. Where do we see the outward and visible and in- ward and spiritual parts of the Sacrament of Confir- mation united? When the person to be confirmed kneels, and the Bishop places his hands upon his 152 THE CHURCH UNIVERSAL head, and prays: "Defend, O Lord, this thy child with heavenly grace : that he may continue thine forever; and daily increase in thy Holy Spirit more and more until he come to thine everlasting kingdom.'' This is how the person in the sacrament of con- firmation ratifies his baptismal vows, and how the Church sacramentally helps him to live his Christian life. Let us now see how these fundamentals grow out of a true conception of the Christian Church. I have not stressed in this chapter the part the Holy Spirit takes in confirmation as much as many would wish to see perhaps. Why I have not done so is because everybody takes it for granted. You will find the divine side in confirmation more fully de- veloped in the chapter, "Come to Years of Discre- tion." Note. — All Churches have some kind of Confirmation. It is a pity that they have not set some of their theologians to thoroughly work out its logical completion of Baptism as taught in the New Testa- ment. I have been confirmed according to the two rites of the Baptist and Episcopal Churches. In this chapter I have described that of the Episcopal Church. In the Baptist Church this is the way I was confirmed : After the candidates were baptized in a mill-pond two miles from the Church, we returned to the Church and were received into it by the minister praying that God would give us the aid and assistance of His Holy Spirit so that we would live a consistent and useful Christian life. Then he and every member of the congregation gave us the right hand of fellowship, in token that we had the assist- ance of the brethren in keeping us steadfast and firm in living the Christian hfe. After this ceremony was finished, the Clerk was in- structed to enroll our names on the books of the Church. I do not know whether this individual Church still adheres to this custom, nor how far the custom is used by the Baptist Church as a whole. XII THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH In this year of grace it ought to be impossible for us to believe that any man, or set of men, ever did or can organize the Church of God, or make any of its rules and obligations binding upon the conduct and consciences of men. What man has made, man can unmake and better in the remaking; but the things which constitute the Church of God, and are binding upon the conduct and consciences of men, are the eternal laws of life, revealed by God, and discovered, loved, and obeyed by man. Who ordained that we should not lie, cheat, steal, and murder? Here we are plunged at once into the midst of the verities of the Church of God, for these things become of obliga- tion as soon as they awaken a responsive echo in our consciences. If then the Church of God is not a voluntary organi- zation arising among men, who organized it and when did it begin ? The Church of God began the moment He created man, it being impossible for God to create man without at the same time creating His Church ; for St. Paul says that the Church is the family of God, and Jesus founded his teaching and ventured His fortunes upon this statement, which contains the essence of His gospel, ''call no man your father upon the earth, for one is your Father which is in heaven.'' 153 154 THE CHURCH UNIVERSAL Sonship is as old as the family. The family begins as soon as there is father — mother — child. The one cannot exist without the other. Since the Church is the family of God, it has been in existence as long as God has had a child created in his image. As God is an eternal God — Father, Son, and Holy Spirit — His family is an eternal family, which began on earth when He made our bodies out of blessed mother earth and breathed His Spirit into us, and has been going on ever since, becoming more and more perfect as the race grew in wisdom and in stature and in favor with God, until in the fulness of time the earthly family of God was perfected in Christ- Jesus, through whom mankind received its spiritual birth. BOND UNITING GOD AND MAN What is the essence of the family ? Is it not that which binds the family together ? In a word, is not the essence of the family kinship? Do not all the obligations, duties, and responsibilities of the family grow out of kinship? Do not these begin with the creation of the family ? This spiritual kinship, deeper than blood kinship, is the bond uniting God and man, creating those everlasting relations between God and man which make the Church the family of God. It is true that the world is continually forgetting this, the central truth of the Christian religion, to which our Saviour sharply recalled the world when he said, "one is our Father, God in heaven." If we would understand the reHgion our Saviour taught the world, we must ever keep clearly in mind that the THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH 155 essence of His "glad tidings" is that the kinship of God and man is of so real, deep, and divine a nature, that our earthly nature is but a shadow of this ; that out of this kinship of God and man grow mutual responsibilities and obligations, beginning on God's part the moment He creates us, and on our part at the dawn of reason and conscience. Very briefly but as clearly as I can, let me explain these four things: (i) when we become children of God ; (2) God's responsibility to us ; (3) our respon- sibility to God ; (4) the three things which make the Church of God. WHEN WE BECOME CHILDREN OF GOD I do not see how we can give any other answer than our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ gives to this question, which is that we are children of God, though not spiritual children of God, the moment we are born, for His Spirit imparts our psychical as well as our spiritual birth. We have human and divine parent- hood both in our psychic and spiritual births; the first through God and our natural parents, the second through God and His Church. As the little baby lies in its mother's arms, it is as truly her child as it ever can be and she as truly its mother as she ever can be; and also God is as truly its Father as He ever can be, for God never puts in us anything more than He puts in us in birth; for in birth all heaven and earth are potentially wrapped up in the child. From this time on and forever it will be development and education of the child imtil the 156 THE CHURCH UNIVERSAL spiritual man rises up in him in all the glory of his resurrection into the express image of his heavenly Father. In the Bible we are called Children of God in three senses, corresponding to our material, psychic, and spiritual births: (i) we are children of God by creation; (2) we are children of God by regeneration; (3) we are children of God by the resurrection, which threefold birth is completed in us when our regenera- tion, repentance, and conversion have wrought out unto perfect fruition the fulness of the stature of Christ- Jesus in us. HOW WE ARE MADE CHILDREN OF GOD The Christian religion teaches that we cannot make ourselves children of God, for the child never creates itself, but is always begotten of human and divine parentage, receiving sonship as a free gift. We can no more make ourselves spiritual children of God than we can make ourselves psychical children of God. Let us here guard against an error, — without in any way denying or obscuring the truth contained in this error, — that the emotional experience of what is called conversion makes us children of God. The truth of the matter is, that no kind of an emotional experience makes me a child of my earthly father un- less he is my father already. The same is true of God. Sonship and the consciousness of sonship are two dis- tinct things which must never be confused. Conscious- ness of all kinds comes after and as the result of hirth, not during birth, nor before it. Know once and for THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH 157 all that no kind of birth is an instantaneous process, though the act of conceiving is ; and that an interval of time, more or less extended, intervenes between conception and hirth, and the consciousness of birth — material, psychical, and spiritual. The act of con- ceiving all three is one instantaneous act ; the process of material birth extends over a period of nine months, the process of psychical birth over several years, and the process of spiritual birth over a still longer period of time ; only when the birth is complete, does the consciousness of it dawn in us. Nine-tenths of the trouble in theology is caused by confusing, and then identifying, spiritual birth, or baptism, with the con- sciousness of spiritual birth, or confirmation, in which we begin self-consciously to exercise those spiritual powers which spiritual birth gives us. The trouble is that baptism and confirmation are confused by the inexact thinking of the popular theo- logical mind, which does not correctly analyze the distinction between conception, birth, and self-con- sciousness. Baptism is spiritual birth, in which the person spiritually born can by no possible means take any part ; in confirmation the person begins to self- consciously use his spiritual life which his spiritual birth gives him. Births of all kinds are necessarily unconscious pro- cesses to the person born. So our spiritual birth in baptism is as necessarily as unconscious a process as our material and psychic births. As soon as the con- sciousness of our spiritual sonship arises in our souls, which spiritual sonship God creates in us through His Church, then it becomes binding upon us to turn away 158 THE CHURCH UNIVERSAL from our lower nature, which we inherit through our natural birth, and conform to the laws of our spiritual nature which our spiritual birth gives us. Greater confusion cannot possibly arise in the Chris- tian religion than by tearing baptism out of its neces- sary position as spiritual birth, in which the person born can take no active part, and confusing it with confirmation, in which the person must take an active part. Evangelical theology means by baptism what Catholic theology means by confirmation. It is a great pity that this confusion has arisen, as it causes alienation between those who in reahty mean the same thing. In hirth the emotional experience is confined to the parent and unconsciousness to the person born ; while in confirmation the emotional experience of those spiritually begetting the child becomes the self-con- scious experience of the child spiritually come to self- consciousness, as he realizes that the infinite and eternal God of the universe is His Father, and as he begins to make this eternal spiritual life of his heavenly Father his own life, which God has begotten in him through His Church. This emotional experience comes as the person transcends the laws of his psychic life, and makes up his mind to obey the laws of the spiritual life of his heavenly Father, and by His gracious help try to live worthily of His infinite love. HOW THE CHURCH MAKES OUR SONSHIP Suppose a mother has twins, and keeps one with her and rears it at home, and sends the other to be THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH 159 reared among the Zulus of South Africa. The one she sends among the Zulus she will make a savage, while the one she keeps at home will grow up in her image and likeness. She will make it an American child, and if she is a Christian woman, she will make it grow into Christian consciousness. In the place of the mother substitute the Church and you will have the parallel complete. Because the child is the mother's own child, blood of her blood and flesh of her flesh, she makes and keeps it a mem- ber of her household in order that it may be baptized into her spirit and grow in her likeness. Because we are psychical children of God, and not spiritual chil- dren of God, in our natural birth, we are made mem- bers of the Church as soon as we are naturally born, in order to create a spiritual birth in us as soon as possible — so that the psychical and spiritual con- sciousness will dawn together and not separately, so that we will wake up in this world and find ourselves both American and Christian children at one and the same time. HOW WE MAKE OUR OWN SONSHIP But if we have nothing to do, and can do nothing, to make ourselves children of God, we have a great deal to do not to become children of sin, by letting our lower animal nature overcome our spiritual nature. For to preserve that fair and beautiful sonship, which God through His Church creates in us, will more than tax all our powers, and without that help which comes through the Holy Spirit and His Church in confirma- tion, our lives will end in failure. i6o THE CHURCH UNIVERSAL In the beginning we take no part in our own de- velopment except to eat and grow ; but after the Holy Spirit through the Christian Church has regenerated us, through which we know that God is our Father, — in a word, become conscious of our divine kinship, — from this time on we will have to make ourselves children of God by fighting our battles in our souls with the world, the flesh, and the devil. God is ready to help us, and the grace which comes through the gift of the Holy Spirit and fellowship in His Church is at our disposal, but it is our battle now, it is our fight; henceforth, it will be sink or swim, live or die, survive or perish. So far we have done nothing, everything has been done for us to make our sonship; but for- ever after we have been brought to the age of account- ability, if that sonship of God which comes through the Spirit of God and which the Church has trained and nurtured in us is to amount to anything, it must be by our loyally taking our place in the family of (k)d, and battling for righteousness in this world in which God has placed us. god's responsibility to us By starting and adhering to the fundamental truth revealed by Christ, that the tie binding us to God is that of kinship, we see why children have always been made members of the Church, the family of God. It is a queer idea of a family that has no children in it. A family without a child is a desolate thing, and where are we going to rear and train children if not in a family? And what is a family THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH i6i for if not to rear and train children? Because the Church is the family of God, and all children are God's children, first psychically and then spiritually, there is no other place for the child but in God's house, in order that he may grow up in the knowledge and love of God, his heavenly Father. It is the duty of a father to prepare a home for his children, protect them, and nurture them, which, if he can do and fails to do, makes him unworthy to be a father. Some time ago we were hearing a good deal about the peculiarity and central idea of the Chinese religion, which is ancestor worship. While ancestor worship is one half of the truth of religion, it was about all there was of the older conception of religion. It was something which bound only one way. It was their conception and idea that the child was under all the obligation to the father, and the father under no obligation to the child. The older theologies of the world taught that God was an irresponsible despot, and could do as he pleased with man, and was under no obligations to man. Christianity completes this one-sided idea of religion, and dwells upon the obligations of the father to the child, as well as the obligations of the child to the father. Christianity emphasizes the rights of the child. For we ought to remember more frequently than we do that no child can take any part in bring- ing itself into existence; no child was ever asked to be born ; without its will or consent life is forced on the child. This places the father imder never ending obhgations, unending duties, and never d3dng respon- sibilities to the child. i62 THE CHURCH UNIVERSAL And is not this the kind of religion Christianity has been proclaiming from the housetops ever since it has been in the world ? Is not this the whole long story of the age-long revelation of God contained in the Old and New Testaments ? God loving us while we did not love Him, sending His rain upon the just and unjust alike, giving us from day to day our daily bread, forgiving us our sins seventy times seven, seek- ing, finding, and saving us when lost? While Him- self sinless, sharing with man his shame and degrada- tion, so that if ^'I go down to hell, thou art there also " ? This is the revelation of God contained in the Bible, and do you wonder at the omnipotent power that Book has over the kingdom of human souls, and why the Christian asserts that it contains the perfect and final revelation of God and man, and the only eternal religion there can be, or ever has been, in the world? God does not repudiate His responsibilities growing out of His kinship to us. The character of God revealed in the Bible is Jehovah Sabaoth, a man of war more marred than the sons of men, who does not say go, but follow me ! He that is greatest of all is the servant of all, is the supreme and crowning glory of the Christian God, and is the secret of His eternal power over spiritual souls. THE THREE THINGS WHICH CONSTITUTE THE CHURCH The family is the unit on earth and in heaven ; and loving worship based on the fact of kinship is all there is of religion ; which is ancestor worship, child- worship, and brother-worship. Religion is that which THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH 163 binds the universe together all the way round in every direction. The Creed of Christendom therefore is and ought to be but a short and condensed summary of this tie of kinship which binds us to God ; who is our Father Almighty, binding His family in one in- dissoluble whole. . But every family must have its system of morals and code of conduct. If the tie of kinship makes the family of God, what only code of conduct can con- tinue to bind it together after it is made ? Evidently nothing less than perfect love, given under ten articles and specifications, the whole duty of man to God and to his neighbor, as contained in the ten command- ments. But why hold up to man a perfect code of conduct thousands of years before he is able to embody it in a life daily lived? Why say unto man, "this do and thou shalt live," when man is not going to do it and die? Why not lower the standard until it comes within our reach? Because nothing less can satisfy the father than that the child be as perfect as he is perfect; because man can grow only by having something above his head, which, in trying to reach, stretches his stature upwards; because nothing less than this can satisfy our moral nature created in the image of God ; because our hearts cry out within us that this is the only system of morals we can ever love, and is the only code of conduct we ought to obey. But how is one ever to get the help and inspiration to live the Christian life ? They who have been most successful in living the Christian life, and therefore i64 THE CHURCH UNIVERSAL have the best right to be our guides in this matter, tell us that this kind can come forth only by prayer and fasting. The Hfe of God can be Hved by the human soul only to the extent that we are in personal communion with God, the Hving fountain of our life. The secret source of the living spring is not found by digging beneath in the earth but in the rain which descends from heaven; so the secret source of the Christian life daily lived flows from communion with the unseen God, to whom the child is taught to pray in this manner — Our Father, who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name, thy kingdom come, thy will be done, on earth as in heaven. You clearly see that the Creed of Christendom, therefore, is nothing more than a statement of the ties of kinship which create and bind the family of God together ; the ten commandments is the perfect system of morals and code of conduct on earth and in heaven ; and the Lord's Prayer is the bond of per- sonal communion of the visible and invisible worlds with the infinite Father of us all. Do you not see how sublimely simple religion is? Nothing more nor less than kinship of God and man and the facts which grow out of this kinship. All of it is contained in the Creed, the Ten Commandments, and the Lord's Prayer ; in which we find the mutual obligations and duties, relations and responsibihties, privileges and friendships, of the family of God on earth, in Hades, and in heaven ; and he who shapes his course by these will never make shipwreck on the great high seas of life, but reach in safety the haven where he would be. Therefore when the child can THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH 165 say the Creed, Ten Commandments, Lord's Prayer, and other parts of the Church Catechism set forth for that purpose, he is to be brought to the Bishop to be confirmed by him, so that he may continue to tread in them all the days of his life. XIII ESSENTIALS OF MEMBERSHIP IN THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH What we must believe and do to be good men and good women are the essentials of membership in God's Church. What I can believe or not believe, what I can do or leave undone, and be none the better or worse man for so doing and believing, is a non-essential of Church membership. The conditions of Church membership ought to be the conditions of salvation. To be a real member of the one Church of God is to be in the way of salvation ; not to be a member of it is to be on the road to ruin. This is what we mean when we say, I believe in The Holy Catholic Church. What all men must beheve and do to be saved from a sinful life is the faith of the Catholic Church. If more than this is made necessary for membership in the Church, that instant the Church becomes a sec- tarian society, because it has added over and above the essentials, non-essentials. It has made it neces- sary for a man to become a member of our religious club, to beheve and do things which men can believe and do and be the worst men in the world ; not believe and not do and be the best men in the world. SECTARIAN SOCIETIES Fifty years ago we had genuine sectarian societies in this land. Each and every one lorded it over God's i66 ESSENTIALS OF MEMBERSHIP 167 heritage, making any and every condition of member- ship they saw fit — honestly beheving and teaching that a man could not be saved unless a member of our sectarian society. For this is the only way any church can originate: by convincing people that they cannot be saved unless they act and believe as we do. The Christian Church never would have been organ- ized if the people who lived at the time of its organiza- tion had not been convinced that '^In the name (the character) of Jesus Christ, and in none other is there salvation. '^ It was only when, and as, and to the extent, that they lost faith in the power of ''the shed- ding and sprinkling of the blood of bulls and goats and heifers " to save them from their sins did they abandon Judaism and believe that Christ was ''the way, the truth, and the life '^ ; to whom their prophets pointed, of whom their sacrificial system was typical, and in whom it was fulfilled ; that He had "come not to destroy anything but to fulfil all things," did they become Christians. And so, that which made the origin and perpetua- tion of the Catholic Christian Church possible is also the cause of the origin of all sectarian Christian so- cieties; namely, that the conditions of membership in his sectarian society are absolutely essential to salvation. When, however, that which separates the Sect from all other Christians is acknowledged to be a non-essential of salvation, its raison d'etre is dead. While the method of worship in the Church is non- essential, the great and overwhelming majority of Christians think, and perhaps will always think, that the Church ought to have a liturgical form of worship, i68 THE CHURCH UNIVERSAL that her ministers ought to be clothed in garments befitting the dignity and majesty of the worship of Almighty God; that the hymns, anthems, and Te Deums ought to Hft the hearts of the worshippers heavenward upon the wings of sublime music, that the very building ought to be a sermon in stone; ought to be all glorious within with statuary, painting, altar lights, and ritual worship, so that the moment the worshipper enters the door by the baptismal font he knows that he is in the house of the Almighty Father, and falls low upon his knees worshipping Him with his whole heart, mind, soul, and body. But these, how- ever good in themselves, are non-essentials; a man can as acceptably worship his Almighty Father in his shirt sleeves in a log hut, upon the bare sands by the sounding waves, and upon the mossy bank in the lonely forest, as in the grandest cathedral ever erected by man. The essentials of the CathoHc Church are the conditions of its membership. What must a man do and believe to be a member of the Catholic Church of God? I beHeve these four questions and answers are the absolute essentials, and absolutely all of them. Question. Dost thou renounce the devil and all his works, the vain pomp and glory of the world, with all covetous desires of the same, and the sinful desires of the flesh, so that thou wilt not follow nor be led by them ? Answer. I renounce them all, and by God's help will endeavor not to follow nor be led by them. Question. Dost thou believe all the articles of the Christian faith as contained in the Apostles' Creed ? Answer. I do. ESSENTIALS OF MEMBERSHIP 169 Question. Wilt thou be baptized in this faith ? Answer. That is my desire. Question, Wilt thou obediently keep God's will and commandments, and walk in the same all the days of thy life ? Answer. 1 will by God's help. This is what a person must beHeve and do to become a CathoHc Christian. This is what he must believe and do to be saved from his sinful life. This is what he must beHeve and do to be a Christian at all. Here is that Christianity which is rapidly becoming common and universal among all sectarian Christians, which is enabhng the most spiritually minded among us to gladly and joyfully say : ^' It is not necessary for a man to be a member of any sect to be saved; it is only necessary for him to be a Christian." Let us go over what it takes to make a man a Christian and see how wonderfully it draws us all together. Question. Dost thou renounce the devil and all his works, the vain pomp and glory of the world, with all covetous desires of the same, and the sinful desires of the flesh, so that thou wilt not follow nor be led by them ? This summed up in one word is repentance, and is what repentance means. Can a sinful man become a Christian, be saved from his sins, unless he repents ? Could I become a member of any Christian Society without promising to do the things involved in this question ? Questions 2 and 3. Dost thou believe all the articles of the Christian faith as contained in the Apostles' Creed, and wilt thou be baptized in this faith ? I70 THE CHURCH UNIVERSAL The first question demands on the part of the person repentance ; the second question demands faith ; the third question asks for an open avowal of this faith. The simplest form in which the Christian Faith and Creed appear is: *' Believe in the Lord Jesus Christ and thou shalt be saved. " But what does it mean to beheve in the Lord Jesus Christ ? The Lord Jesus said: *'I am in the Father and the Father in me, the Father will send the Spirit and I will send the Spirit. Ye shall be baptized not many days hence with the Holy Spirit." So Christ in his last command summed up what it is to believe in Him, and condensed it into the brief baptismal formula of the trinity : *' All power is given unto me in heaven and earth : Go ye, therefore, and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them into the name of the Father, and of the Son, and the Holy Ghost; teaching them to observe all things whatso- ever I have commanded you : and Lo I am with you always even to the end of the world." (Matthew 28 : 18-20.) This forever fixes the Christian faith so that the first Christian knew it as well as the last one will. It is faith in God the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost. This faith can never be added to nor subtracted from and remain Christian. And baptism into the Chris- tian faith is baptism of men into God, so that we may become the Hving temple of the living God, who is above all, and through all, and in you all. The Christian Creed is behef in God the Father, what He is and does ; the Son, what He is and does ; the Holy Ghost, what He is and does. It will always ESSENTIALS OF MEMBERSHIP 171 be : ''I believe in God who is the Father, Creator of Heaven and earth. And in Jesus Christ His Son, Our Lord, conceived by the Holy Ghost, born of the Virgin Mary, suffered under Pontius Pilate, was crucified, dead and buried : He descended into hell, rose again the third day and ascended into Heaven. I believe in the Holy Ghost, the Holy Catholic Church, the Communion of Saints, the Forgiveness of sin, the Resurrection of the dead, and the Life Everlasting." This you see is nothing more nor less than believing in the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost, and what each respectively is and does; the greatest possible condensa- tion being, '^ Believe in the Lord Jesus Christ and thou shalt be saved." Can a person become a member of any denomination without a confession or open avowal of this faith ? Question 4. Wilt thou obediently keep God's holy will and commandment and walk in the same all the days of thy life ? I wish you to notice particu- larly the answer to this question. How can one say yes unqualifiedly to that question when he knows that he is going to break God's holy will and com- mandment ? If the Christian Church asked any one to answer that question by a plain yes, I would never ask it. And yet, how can a man be saved, unless he does keep God's holy will and commandment? Nothing impure and unclean can enter into the kingdom of heaven. Is not this the only way any of us ever was or will be saved: by opening our hearts and letting God come into our lives and purify them ? The only right answer that can be given to this question is: 172 THE CHURCH UNIVERSAL I in myself am not able to keep God's holy will and commandment, and never can nor will be able to save myself. God alone is able to do this great thing; and only as He incarnates Himself in me — only as His mind becomes my mind, His love my love, His spirit my spirit — can I obey His commandments, and His holy will become my will. So the man conscious of his own weakness, but believing in the Almighty power of God, says : I will, by God's help. I know of no words in any language which express such an utter sense of humility, and at the same time and in the same words, such an unbounded assurance of power as these words: I will, by God's help. This has been the secret source of power in men ever since the days of Enos the son of Seth when men began to call upon the name of the Lord. The psalmist says : By the help of the Lord I will get me the victory over mine enemy. And by the help of the Lord, kings have ruled wisely upon their thrones, statesmen have made righteous laws in par- liaments and congresses, men and women have lived nobly and grandly in grinding poverty, and patriots have lifted the heel of the tyrant from the neck of the oppressed. By the help of the Lord the thief has been made an honest man, the liar the truthful man, the sot the sober man ; and by the help of the Lord men have conquered their sins and kept God's holy will and commandment. In conclusion I beg you to take note of several things. These questions and answers are the only conditions of membership that the Universal Chris- tian Church ever has required. They are summed ESSENTIALS OF MEMBERSHIP 173 up in three words: repentance, faith, and obedience. Before a sinful man can be saved, he must repent of his sins, believe in God, and obey His commandments. To the extent that we do this God saves us by incar- nating Himself in us as in Jesus. The Universal Church makes no non-essential a condition of membership ; for the sole purpose of the Church is to do the work Christ did while He was in the flesh, to save us from sin. So all her manifold forms of worship and varied kinds of activity make us better and more useful men, by making us more Christ-like. Beyond these simple questions and answers the Universal Church of Christ has no cut-and-dried theology. She does not attempt to fetter the think- ing of any man, but lets each man do his own the- ology, or none at all, so long as he does not attempt to bind it upon another as orthodoxy. I do not believe that any two members of the Church of Christ have the same theology, but we all have the same religion. In the one Church of Christ there are Calvinists, Methodists, High Churchmen, Low Churchmen, Broad Churchmen, Ritualists, all sorts and conditions of men. How can we all live together in peace in the one Church of Christ? Because Christ is big enough to comprehend us all, welcomes us all, died for us all, and is the Saviour of us all. This is the explanation that explains it all. Because all these differences of theology and ritual that divide us are non-essentials : but when it comes to the essentials, we all hold them with the vise-like grip of steel; believe them with our whole heart, soul, and 174 THE CHURCH UNIVERSAL strength, and assert them with all the power of the infallibility of our Lord and Master. What is salvation ? Christ is salvation, the author of salvation, and we are saved to the extent that we are like Him. Be it known unto you that in the name of Jesus Christ and none other is there salvation. And what must one do to be saved ? That which is necessary for us to believe and do for Christ to live in us. Believe in the Lord Jesus Christ and thou shalt be saved. Why? Because if I do truly beHeve in the Lord Jesus Christ, with my whole heart, mind, soul, and strength, I live; and yet not I, but Christ liveth in me. And these are the essentials of member- ship in the Church of God because the essentials of salvation now and forever. "Till the stars grow old, Till the sun grows cold, * Till the leaves of the Judgment Book unfold." XIV COME TO YEARS OF DISCRETION (To Be Confirmed) Religion has been defined as that which binds us to God. What then are the bonds which bind us to God? Many answers have been given to this ques- tion, and every different answer has made a different theology, which has been falsely called a religion. It would take me entirely too far afield to give you even a catalogue of the various answers men have given to this question. Chief among them, however, have been two or three conceptions which we must analyze and understand, because by transcending them the Christian Religion has been historically developed. The first conception is that God is simply a Creator, the great unknown power, outside of us and forever beyond us, making us what we are. He is the Creator and we are the things, God having about the same relation to us that a carpenter has to his wagon — us the things unknowing, and impossible for us to know, Him the Creator of us the things. All we have to say about this conception is that if this is the true bond which binds us to God, then we are God's things, and cannot know Him any more than a wagon can know its carpenter creator. 175 176 THE CHURCH UNIVERSAL Others have risen above this conception; as, for instance, the Mohammedan conception, which makes God an irresponsible Almighty despotic Czar, whom we are to fear and serve, because it would be an exceedingly dangerous thing to offend such an al- mighty despot, armed with unlimited and eternal means of excruciating torture. If this is the true bond which binds us to God, then indeed He is the abso- lute master and we are the absolute slaves, made for His own pleasure and for His own profit. If so, Allah il Allah is the only true God, and Mohammed is His prophet for all mankind. But in the far-away past ages of the world, in the person of Abraham dwelling in the plains of Shina, a nobler conception was vouchsafed to mankind. His conception of religion, that is, the bonds binding us to God, is that neither of an unknown agnostic creator God, nor that of an irresponsible despotic Czar ruling an infinite number of cringing slaves, but that of an infinite Creator who is at the same time the friend of man, and who reveals Himself by entering into cove- nant relations with man. The Jewish conception of God is that the bond between God and man, in addi- tion to that of creator, is such love as exists between friends. God the almighty creator, protector, and friend of man, the covenant bond of friendship being the ten commandments. This is truly a noble and an eternally true conception of God, that of the loving friend of man — which transcends many people's idea of God to-day. They conceived of this friendship of God as extend- ing to them not as individuals only, but as families, COME TO YEARS OF DISCRETION 177 tribes, and as a nation — even to the little children and babies. Therefore there arose among them three rites, or sacraments, embodying and teaching in a most effective way the gist and essence of their idea of these bonds which bind us to God — circumcision, confirmation, and the sacrificial meal of the passover. God was not only the friend of the grown-up people, but of every child in the land the moment he was born. The outward and visible sign among them of this was the rite of circumcision. Because he was a Jew, God was his friend, and therefore he was circumcised. The child did not have to do anything to make God his friend, God was that already, and therefore at eight days of age he was circumcised. No Jew ever doubted that God was his friend; it was taught him at his mother's knee, and he drank it in with his mother's milk. It was the spiritual atmosphere which shaped his life, as the snow and ice of the north shape the vegetation of the arctic regions, and the equatorial sun does that of the tropics. He was never taught to make God his friend, but he was taught to make himself the friend of God, and to Hve worthily of the friendship of God, and to return that friendship of God with which He had befriended his fathers all the days of their lives. So just as soon as the child had come to years of discretion, at about twelve years of age, as soon as the child had been taught and understood what a friend God had been to the nation, at that most critical and plastic period when childhood is budding into manhood, the child came forward and openly proclaimed his friendship to God, took upon himself for himself his covenant 178 THE CHURCH UNIVERSAL vows of allegiance, and joined in the third great national sacrament, the passover supper. After having been trained, nurtured, and reared in the admonition of the Lord, he now confirms that good teaching, and, taking upon himself all its duties and privileges, is admitted into the citizenship of this friendly host of the Lord. He had remembered his Creator and friend in the days of his youth, when the evil days had come not, nor the years drawn nigh when he could say that he had no pleasure in them. For he had taken that step which alone can make it possible for the years never to come in which we will have no pleasure in them, that step which can turn the evil of the days to come into a blessing, by pro- claiming and living up to that friendship with which God had befriended him all the days of his life. To the spiritual-minded Jew, religion, the bond which binds us to God, is the sacred and holy ties of friendship which walks and takes sweet counsel to- gether. But the religion which our Lord Jesus Christ revealed teaches that the bond binding together God and man, while containing all the sweetness of friend- ship, has in it depths of love deeper and more sacred than friendship, for the bonds which bind God and man together are the bonds of the kinship of Father, Mother, and Child. So the Christian religion destroyed nothing in the grand old revelation of God given in Jewish conscious- ness, but deepened its significance, added to it, fulfilled it, by revealing that the friendship of God to man is the kinship of Fatherhood, and the friendship of man to God is that of Sonship. This has always been the bond COME TO YEARS OF DISCRETION 179 binding us to God, though men did not know it till Christ revealed and demonstrated it. Henceforth and forever there is no room for any other religion, for when men have once steadily fixed their gaze upon the substance of this eternal truth of the Christian religion, nothing else satisfies the aspirations of our minds and the hunger of our souls. So I stand up before every creature made in the image and likeness of God, whether dwelling on the banks of the Thames or Congo, the Hudson or the Ho-ang-ho, and say you have nothing to do to make yourself a child of God, and you can do nothing to make yourself a child of God, for God and His Church make you His child, but you will have your hands full not to become a child of sin; in fact in your own un- aided power you will be sure to become so, and trail in the foulness of the gutter that fair image of God in which you have been made. Because you are a psychic child of God by natural birth, and in order that that birth may not make you a child of sin, you are made a member of the Church, the household of God, as soon as you are born, and then trained and nurtured in it until you come to years of discretion. So far you have done nothing for yourself except to eat and grow. God and His Church have given you your sonship as a free gift, but now you have come to years of discretion, and if you are to remain a Christian, you must make yourself one. You have at your disposal the power of grace which comes through prayer to assist you, the help which comes through the society of Christian fellowship, to help i8o THE CHURCH UNIVERSAL you grow in that sonship which the Church has be- gotten in you. It is yours to do with as you please. It is yours to take all that has been given you, and give back noth- ing in return, if you so choose. When we come to years of discretion, the whole wide world is before us in which we can play truant and turn prodigal to our heart's content. We can take these bodies of ours and make them so vile and filthy that the dogs on the streets will turn up their noses at us and run away from us in disgust. We can turn this body, in which God intends the whole universe shall dwell, as the sun does in the shining dewdrop, into the roaring flames of hell. This mind which was made for the uses of love, friendship, and affection, we can make so filthy that nothing except lies, hate, snakes, monkeys, and horned devils will take up their habitation there, turning the fair palace of the mind into the pandemonium of the damned, for we have come to years of discretion. But this is not the worst that we can do. We can bring our father's gray hairs in sorrow down to the grave, wring our mother's heart until it breaks with despair, and trample under foot friendships more precious than rubies. Still while we crucify them they will love us. You will also learn that the sting of sin is not so much the degradation it brings upon your- self but the pain it costs others. And upon whom does our sin bring pain? When the true and full account shall have been footed up, we shall find that our sin brings pain upon everybody and everything in the universe. The world of mind and COME TO YEARS OF DISCRETION i8i spirit are so intimately connected and closely bound together that when I sin against myself or any other individual, I sin against all, and I ask forgiveness of all angels, and men, and God. We live, die, and sin as members of one great family of God, so that we are a blessing or a curse to all. And what do we mean when we say that the child, having come to years of discretion, is ready to be con- firmed? Years of discretion means power of dis- tinguishing right from wrong, and making an intelli- gent choice of the kind of a life one would like to live. When a boy or a girl is passing from childhood and entering youth, there arise a feeHng of independence, and a wish to act for one's self. We will be tempted to shake off all control and obligations to others, try solely to please ourselves, and use our discretion to follow our own weak, selfish, and foolish will. Hith- erto our religion has been almost altogether a matter of direction by others ; as a child we did in our religious duties what we were bidden to do, but there comes a time when we feel ourselves more than a child. We take matters in our own hands and either confirm or disannul what has been done for us. If at this critical and turning point in our lives we let the grace of God turn into a safe channel these new powers of which we are growing conscious, and here, on the threshold of expanding life, make our first independent step by claiming, asserting, and confirm- ing our divine sonship, most happy are we in making this our first independent step in the path of godHness. Your power to discern, your right to choose, are recognized. No power on earth or in heaven can do i82 THE CHURCH UNIVERSAL it but yourself. It now remains for you to prove in the truest way that you have in deed and in truth come to years of discretion. But however important the part one is to take in his own confirmation — and it can hardly be exag- gerated, the part one must take in confirming what the Christian Church has done for us — still the first question which ought always to be uppermost in our minds is that we are to he confirmed — the part the Holy Spirit takes in our confirmation. For our help comes from the unseen God, apart from whom we are as weak as water, but by His help we can be made strong to do and to serve. The question asked every one when he is confirmed is as follows : *'Do ye, here in the presence of God and this congregation, renew the solemn vow and promise that ye made, or that was made in your name, at your baptism ; ratifying and confirming the same ; and acknowledging yourselves bound to believe and to do all those things which ye undertook, or your sponsors then undertook for you?" So confirmation does not lay upon any one a new obligation not resting upon him already ; it is acknowl- edging in a public and solemn manner the bonds of obedience and love to our Heavenly Father and to our neighbor, who have made us what we are; and the obligation of forsaking the world, the flesh, and the devil, which if not forsaken will destroy us. These obligations rest upon us from the dawn of our reason. This is what God whispers in the conscience of every one of us we ought to do the moment we reach the age of accountability. We ought to acknowledge COME TO YEARS OF DISCRETION 183 our kinship to God and man, and be loyal to it, by ratifying and confirming the same. The public recognition of this our duty is a very serious and important thing, as you answer, / do, to the one question asked you when you come to be confirmed. You are asked to answer this question audibly, and audibly means to be heard, and to be heard by whom ? Your parents and friends who come to see you confirmed? Your pastor? The bishop? The congregation? Yes, all these, and more than these. God Himself will hear you. Our Father in Heaven will hear it from you His child. He who died upon the cross to save you will hear you. The Holy Spirit who is to confirm you will hear you. How can you ? How dare you ? Shall you not be afraid? We could not and we dare not make this promise were it not for the thought to which utter- ance is given by the very next words you hear. For immediately after you have spoken these words, the Bishop says, expressing the faith and confidence of the Church, ''Our help is in the name of the Lord." Then we need not be afraid. Weak in ourselves, yet in the strength of the Lord we may be strong. I know of no words more comforting and beautiful, no words expressing at one and the same time such assurance and power and humility, as ''I will by the help of the Lord." When the help of the Lord is back of the human / will, all things become possible. The three factors which unite in confirmation are the Spirit of God, yourself, and the Christian Church. In baptism you are the passive agent receiving the spiritual life which God and His Church give you. In confirma- i84 THE CHURCH UNIVERSAL tion you are an active agent, for you must by an act of your own free will and accord make this spiritual life your own life. The most that the Church and the Spirit of God can do for you is to help you to make a righteous decision. God gave you your free will, and it is yours till you choose to give it to Him. For better or for worse God made you free, and you will be free till the end of time. God's Spirit alone can prepare any one for confirmation, and for that Spirit you yourself must pray: ''O God, give me a right spirit and create a clean heart within me." To any one who is thinking of being confirmed I suggest that he daily pray such a prayer as this: "Almighty God, my Heavenly Father, who hast created me in Thy image and likeness, and came down from heaven to redeem me, and through thy Holy Church hast created my spiritual sonship, and now hast called me to a knowledge of this my wonderful sonship, give me the power to live worthily in the duties of this sonship ; send thy Holy Spirit, the Com- forter, and daily increase in me thy manifold gifts of grace; the spirit of wisdom and understanding, the spirit of counsel and ghostly strength, the spirit of knowledge and true godliness; and fill me, C God, with the spirit of Thy Holy fear, now and forever." And in answer to this prayer God's Holy Spirit will prepare you for confirmation, and give you that assist- ance which will make you strong as you take your place in the family of God, prepared for you from the foundation of the world; make you strong to resist temptation, stand up for the right, and battle for good all the days of your life. COME TO YEARS OF DISCRETION 185 One more thought taken from the confirmation service — '^confirmation is to be ministered to the more edifying to them that receive it." This word edifying means building a temple. What has this to do with confirmation ? If we turn to the Epistle to the Ephesians, we shall see that [God intends us to be built as Hving stones in His temple of spiritual hfe. Turn to the First Book of Kings and we shall see that the temple in the earthly Jerusalem is a type of the heavenly Jerusalem, which is the kingdom of God. God intends you to have a place in that temple of spiritual life. However large the building may be, its smallest stone is needed for its perfection and com- pleteness. God intends you for a place in this temple of life. You would be incomplete without this temple, and the temple would be incomplete without you. If not, why did God create you differing from all other souls? Why did He redeem you? Why has He called you to a knowledge of your sonship ? What a grand thought that such a destiny is yours ! Will you not be a living stone in God's infinite temple of Hfe? Confirmation is for edifying; that is, build- ing you in your niche in that temple. As long as you play truant and turn prodigal, the temple cannot be finished. The whole family of God on earth and in heaven will sorrow for you till you come. Minor discords will be in its music till your voice swells the chorus into perfect harmony. The ninety and nine will be left in the wilderness until you come home. The infinite God will seek thee sorrowing till He finds thee, for when my father and mother forsake me, the i86 THE CHURCH UNIVERSAL Lord taketh me up. God does not desert His own. Until salvation come to all, His happiness is in saving the lost. We say that we believe that we have in the character of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ the perfect reve- lation of God. I often wonder whether we beheve that or are merely playing at make-believe. He was a man of sorrows, and acquainted with grief, more marred than the sons of men. Was God that kind of a God for only thirty-three years ? Or is He eternally that kind of a God ? Did Christ reveal a temporary God, who suddenly took it into His head to share the griefs and sorrows of His children? Some day you will wake up to the truth, and have this heathenish conception of God rudely shattered, when it is borne into your soul that you by your sins are now causing God pain, and wounding Him only as a sinning child can wound a loving parent. Some day your eyes will be opened and you will see that men have always been causing God pain, and that Calvary is not only the revelation of the pain that God once for all suffered in a few moments of time, but is the sacrament of the eternal miracle of God's most patient love, fathomless, immense, infinite, and eternal ; and that we are wounding such love will bow us in the dust of shame and remorse, as we beat upon our breasts and cry, God be merciful to me a sinner ! O God, I am a very beast before Thee ! I am no more worthy to be called Thy son ! XV TO DO MY DUTY IN THAT STATE OF LIFE TO WHICH IT SHALL PLEASE GOD TO CALL ME " And he put forth a parable to those which were bidden, when he marked how they chose out the chief rooms ; saying unto them, when thou art bidden of any man to a wedding, sit not down in the highest room ; lest a more honorable man than thou be bidden of him ; and he say unto thee, Give this man place ; and thou begin with shame to take the lowest room. But when thou art bidden, go and sit down in the lowest room; that when he that bade thee cometh, he may say unto thee, Friend go up higher : then shalt thou have worship in the presence of them that sit at meat with thee. For whosoever exalteth himself shall be abased; and he that humbleth himself shall be exalted." "To do my duty in that state of life unto which it shall please God to call me," means neither the "Caste System" of the East nor "Young America." I once heard a high dignitary in Long Island say, "Just look at these Irish ! When they were in Ireland, they scarcely had decent rags to their backs; now they dress as well as gentlemen and think themselves a good deal better." To this audible remark I made no comment, but thought that they would not have to be very high in the order of genus homo to be better than some who call themselves such, and by inheritance ought to be so. So far as their clothes are an outward evidence of their increased self-respect and laudable ambition to 187 i88 THE CHURCH UNIVERSAL rise and make the most of themselves, they ought to be bidden Godspeed. This remark called my attention to the unchange- ableness of imregenerate human nature through all the ages, and if I had beheved in reincarnation, I would have said, here is one of the mummied aristo- crats of Egypt come to Hfe again, wishing to establish here in America the old caste system of Egypt and In- dia, which is, that the child must do what the father did — if shoemaker, the child must be shoemaker; if butcher, the child must be butcher — wear the same cut of coat and live as much like his father as two peas in a pod. This is the Caste System of the East which the free and easy and unlimited wilderness life of America has done about all it can to break up. But on the other hand it has developed that spirit and attitude called ''Young America," which refuses to submit himself or herself, as the case may be, to any "governors, teachers, spiritual pastors and masters"; or to order themselves lowly and reverently to ''all my betters"; because there are no such. For the motto of Young America is "I am as good as any other man," which means that I am a little better than any other man. While of course the inordi- nate conceit and vanity of all this are extremely ludicrous to sensible people, where it is not worse, still it is very much better than the subservient spirit of the East, which cramps and crushes the children into the same unyielding caste of the fathers. But if " to do my duty in that state of life unto which it shall please God to call me" means neither the Caste System of the East nor Young America, what does it TO DO MY DUTY 189 mean? These words of the Catechism have caught the very spirit of Christ, as recorded by St. Luke, rebuking on the one hand the folly of overestimated power, and that other system which would chain a man where he does not belong. The spirit of the passage is that the Master places the man where he belongs, because his merits entitle him to that place. All this will come out very clearly if we read the pas- sage from the Catechism with the proper emphasis, which is, ''To do my duty in that station of life imto which God shall call me." It may be that where we are born is the place to which God shall call us, but just as often it is not. We may be born in wealth and God may call us to pov- erty, or we may be born in poverty and we may be called to wealth. It may be that God shall call us to follow in the busi- ness or profession of our fathers, or he may call us from a very humble station to one of great usefulness and power by virtue of the talents he has given us. The history of the world shows that very often where we are born is not that station unto which God calls us. Especially is this so in the greatest ones of the earth, for very few are born great and achieve greatness at the same time. Our happiness and usefulness in life depend not upon where man places us, but upon our finding the place unto which God calls us. How can we know the station unto which God calls us? Sometimes this is as clear as daylight, and then it is one of the knottiest problems one ever attempted to unravel. The first thing to guide us is in what direction does I90 THE CHURCH UNIVERSAL our ambition lie ? A great many silly, foolish things have been said about ambition, as if it were a sinful thing and a snare of the devil. Ambition is a good thing, and without it, man, woman, or child never amounts to anything. Ambition is to man what mettle is to a horse. Of course it can be abused like any other thing, as fire, for instance, with which we can either cook our food or burn our house down. We can let our ambition ruin us, and it is a very easy thing to do if God has given us a large share, and we let it do so ; but that is not what God gives us ambi- tion for. That is his way of telling us that he has work for us to do in the world, and one of His methods of guiding us to that work. It is a very necessary, I will say it is absolutely necessary equipment for the battle of Hfe, so necessary that you never saw a suc- cessful person without a goodly share of it. But even a better test, at least as essential a test, is what do we love to do best? If the thing we are most ambitious to do, and the thing we love best to do, is the same thing, we ought to fit ourselves to do that thing and try to do that thing, always remember- ing that experience must be the final test. If one goes into a business simply for the money there is in it, or because it may be considered more honorable than another business, without loving that thing; if one is in a profession simply for the fame, honor, or its social position, without loving that pro- fession ; besides being sure to make a failure of that business or profession, to what else shall I liken it ? Suppose we liken it to marriage. Certainly no one is called to marry a woman until he loves her. I TO DO MY DUTY 191 think it is Carlyle who uses words something to this effect, ''Happy is the man who has found his voca- tion." He has an unfaiHng source of pleasure and happiness whatever disasters may overtake him. To make a useful plow, design a beautiful dress, cook a wholesome meal, make a useful home, write a great poem, carve a magnificent statue, the joy and the pleasure which come from this are divine, it is sharing the creative power and working with God. Miss this, and you miss joy and happiness, and your life is a failure, however successful it may seem. There is a certain disgrace attached to work, but it does not consist in what it is generally supposed to consist. Disgrace in work consists in making use- less, shoddy, harmful things; and also in doing one kind of work when you are capable of doing another, I will not say better but rarer kind of work. Then the world becomes poorer and you prostitute your powers. Suppose the Apostles had done what they were asked to do: abandon the Ministry and serve tables! What a disgrace it would have been ! Not because they would have served tables, that is honorable enough, but other and rarer kinds of work, work which they only could do, would have gone undone. So when the quarrel arose in the early Church over the distribution of alms, the Apostles said: ''Seek ye out suitable men whom we may appoint over this work, for it is not meet that we should leave the word and prayer to serve tables." What disgrace would have attached to Shakespeare if he had abandoned the task of writing the profound- est poems the world has ever known, and contented 192 THE CHURCH UNIVERSAL himself with being a fanner at Stratford on the Avon ; to St. Paul if he had contented himself with making tents, instead of planting the church in Europe, and writing his inspired epistles. Not that tent making, serving tables, and farming are not as honorable and necessary as anything else, but the disgrace would have been in these men abandoning what God had called them to do, to do something else. The saddest thing in this world is to see a man or a woman misusing, abusing, and frittering away noble gifts of brain and heart upon things not unworthy in themselves, but to them positively disgraceful. But we ought also to remember that if God calls us to a certain station in life by virtue of the talents and gifts He has given us, we must make that calHng and election sure; for there is a doctrine of Works as well as of Grace. It is true that we can cultivate no talents and gifts which God has not given us. All the scrubbing in the world will not polish a pebble into a diamond ; but what I am objecting to now is that people imagine that the diamond polishes itself. They hear a great musician, read a great book, or see a house beautifully and artistically arranged, and they imagine that the person does this thing with no expenditure of labor ; when as a matter of fact these things come only as the price of great labor. Perhaps not at the time of creation, but the whole past life has been a preparation — all life has been the gym- nasium in which every faculty has been made alert, supple, and strong. God does not call any one very high who does not know how to work systematically, tenaciously, perseveringly, and bull-doggedly. TO DO MY DUTY 193 The gifts God gives us are the first call, our ambition shows the direction of the call, and if we add to this love which will wed us body and soul to our business or profession, so that we will forsake all others and cling only unto her for better or for worse until death us do part ; and then if we will work so that it will ab- sorb us by day and we will dream about it in the night, our calling and election will be sure, and there is no telling how high God may call us ; but if we are not called very high, as the world judges, no matter: in the end we will be sure to hear these words, "Well done, thou good and faithful servant.'' And is not that enough reward for any mortal man ? The talents God has given us, which we have faith- fully used and loved — not envying somebody else's — and by honest untiring industry we have developed, which we have linked and joined to the creative ac- tivities of God, by making useful and necessary things for humanity — is not this what it means ''to do my duty in that state of life unto which it has pleased God to call me" ; to add a few stones to the temple of life — is it not worth the while to live if we are granted the privilege of doing this ? God's relation to humanity in the Scriptures is spoken of under three figures of speech, all of which involve cooperation and inhabitation of God in man. First, humanity is called the body of God. We, by which I now mean our spirits, are necessary to give life and form to our bodies, and our bodies are neces- sary instruments for our work in this world. We live in the body and the body lives in us, both vitally united. So God lives in us, and we in him : we neces- 194 THE CHURCH UNIVERSAL sary to God, and God necessary to us. When God wishes a thing done in the world, he calls us to do it, and until some man answers that call it goes undone. God in this world works through and under the limitations of humanity, as we work through and under the limitations of this flesh-body. God is not some lonely aristocrat, wrapped in the infinite silence of Heaven, but is in fellowship and in communion with his creation, his children ; not above claiming kin with the humblest, though Principalities, Powers, and migh- tiest Archangels stand abashed before the splendor of his awful throne. Second, this communion and fellowship of God with us is of so tender and sacred a tie that in order to bring it down into our comprehension it is compared to that most holy and unselfish love known on earth — that of Husband and Wife. The relation of God and man is that of marriage. Thirdly, God compares his relation to us under the simile of a temple, which man builds and dwells in. The great temple of life, God alone does not build that for us, but we must cooperate with him in building it. The ages upon the ages in which it has been build- ing, since man first set foot in the garden of Eden and ever since — and the queer hands that have had part in building it! Infants as well as grown people and children; Princes and Commoners; artisans and artists; poets and bankers; Pharaohs, Caesars, and Napoleons; prophets and saints; traitor Judases, lying Peters, fanatical murderous Sauls of Tarsus converted into beloved St. Pauls — surely God mak- eth the wrath of man to praise and serve him, includ- TO DO MY DUTY 195 ing the Devil himself! Why should not they too, after they have repented them of their sins, and learned some sense in hell, and are willing to behave themselves as decent folks ought to do, dwell also in this wonder- ful temple of life all have had a hand in building ? I think those who toiled at the bottom and did all the dirty work ought to have as high a place as we who have done the frescoing and hung the pictures. For the Scripture somewhere speaks of the first being last, and the last first; and in the great day of assizes the Master will come along and tell some of us who have taken high seats to move down and let more honorable men have precedence. But if God calls us to the work he wishes us to do in the world through our ambition and love of cer- tain kinds of work, he does not always do so; for insuperable difficulties may arise which will simply put it out of the question for us to follow the bent of our dearest ambition and choice of work. And when this is so, one begins to know what the poet Virgil meant when he speaks in that innocent-looking little line about " the tears of things." What you would give your last drop of blood to do, you cannot do without trampling under foot the most sacred obH- gations laid upon man — Honor thy Father and thy Mother! If we do that, the most brilliant career in the world is not worth the having, and we would certainly not be doing our duty in that station unto which God has called us. Poverty may not necessarily do this ; on the contrary it may be a stimulating spur; still it may be of such a nature as to make one lay aside his 196 THE CHURCH UNIVERSAL ambition and listen in other directions for the call of God. Suppose you were assured of a brilliant professional career, and then duty to those dependent upon you absolutely demanded that you give it up, as in the case of Charles Lamb ; then you would have only a very small knot to untangle in human affairs — just enough to hint at the real 'Hears of things," as the stern-eyed Maiden called Duty took you by the hand and said : this way over this stony road and through these shadows lies the call of God, and were you to make the conquest and put your hand in hers — well it would not be written up in the histories of the world as one of its fifteen decisive battles, but nevertheless it would be one of those victories on which the destiny of happiness hangs, — something far more important to you — for it would bring no remorse to your soul, and raise no ghosts about your pillow at night to damn you ! And here there rises up before me a picture of Life unutterably sad and dazzHngly brilliant. It is the history of the heroic souls who have hfted higher the walls of the temple of life. Why have not its heaviest stones been Hfted into place by the healthy, strong, and magnificent specimens of human kind ? Is it true as Dryden has said that " Great wits are to madness near allied And thin partitions do their bounds divide ? " Why have these consumptive, overwrought, and nervously strenuous souls worked so heroically, as Alexander Stephens, Alexander Pope, Coleridge, TO DO MY DUTY 197 Homer, Milton, Beethoven, and the crippled Athe- nian Musician saving the battle by his inspiring music ? They put us to shame, show us what can be made out of the worst conditions, what it really means to do our duty in that station unto which it has pleased God to call us. And because they were valiant men God blessed them abundantly. I have had people tell me : ''I am utterly useless now. I am a helpless invalid. What can I do in the world ? " And I reply: " You can do a great deal of good, if you but knew it, and would do it. One of the most inspiring persons I ever knew was a great invalid, who taught all who came in contact with her, patience/' And is not this one of the greatest needs of the world — patience! The lesson Milton at last learned when he wrote this beautiful Sonnet on his blindness : — " When I consider how my light is spent Ere half my days, in this dark world and wide, And that one talent, which is death to hide, Lodged with me useless, though my soul more bent To serve therewith my maker, and present My true account, lest he, returning chide ; * Doth God exact day labor light denied ? ' I fondly ask. But patience, to prevent That murmur, soon replies, ' Who best Bear his mild yoke, they serve him best. His state Is kingly ; thousands at his bidding speed, And post o'er land and sea without rest ; They also serve who only stand and wait.' " Only stand and wait! This is the hardest kind of service! Much harder than to post o'er land and sea without rest. XVI WHAT WE RENOUNCE IN CONFIRMATION THE TRINITY OF SIN : THE WORLD, THE FLESH, AND THE DEVIL In confirmation we promise obedience to the trinity of righteousness and renounce the trinity of sin. When we properly define sin, we shall find that it is an abuse, misuse, and desecration of our three- fold bodily, mental, and spiritual nature. So sin comes to us in a threefold form, because we have only a threefold nature to abuse, misuse, and desecrate. And that threefold form in which sin comes to us is called in the Catechism, and in the common parlance of men, the world, the flesh, and the devil. We are not to renounce the rightful pleasures of the flesh, on the other hand we are to get as much pleasure out of the flesh as we can, and the way to do this is to use and not abuse the flesh, to rule the flesh and not let the flesh rule us. What we are to renounce is not the innocent pleasures of the flesh, but the sinful lusts of the flesh. In like manner we are not to renounce the world, for we must live in the world in order to be of use in the world, and gain that all-round development of our powers which comes only by shaking hands, and rub- bing shoulders in social, business, and rehgious inter- 198 WHAT WE RENOUNCE IN CONFIRMATION 199 course with our fellow-men. What we are to renounce is the pomps and vanities of this wicked world. We are not to imagine that the world in itself is sinful. The world is as good as when God pronounced it good, until we begin to unmake it by abuse, misuse, and desecration. But there is one thing which we are to renounce without any equivocation or mental reservation what- soever, and that is the devil and all his works. What the devil and his works are I shall explain more m detail later on. What we are now clearly to see is that sin in this threefold form has assailed all men, and conquered all men, until in Jesus sin was conquered and Satan trampled under foot, and because He has done so there springs up in our hearts the hope and faith that we can do so in His might and power. In the Bible we meet these three tempting powers on two most important occasions, which is the sym- bolic type of the tragic redemption wrought out in every soul that is redeemed. We find recorded in the third chapter of Genesis the temptation of Adam, typical of, and reenacted in, all men born of flesh. It is said that man was placed in the Garden of Eden, which means that all men are created in inno- cence, knowing neither good nor evil. But in the midst of this garden there grows a tree both of good and evil, which God revealed to Adam, commanding him not to eat of the tree of evil. Which means that sooner or later there arises in all innocent souls knowl- edge of good and evil, right and wrong, at which time we always hear the voice of God in our souls command- 200 THE CHURCH UNIVERSAL ing us to obey our knowledge of good and refuse the evil. For the moment that we eat of the tree of evil we are cast out of the garden of innocence into a world filled with the thorns of sin, with the flaming sword of the cherubim turning this way and that, until our eyes do at last close in death. So in this parable of the temptation and fall of man, it is said that the tree was *'good for food," which is the flesh tempting us, saying that it is good for man to live by bread alone, no matter how we get this bread. Let us make our highest ambition to be a fat sleek animal, live in a grand house, ride in an elegant rubber- tired carriage, make this our ideal, and live by bread alone. It is also said that the tree was "pleasant to the eyes," which is the temptation of the world, its show and its appearance, tempting us when in Rome to do as Rome does, bow a willing servant and cringing slave at the shrine of the changing fashion of the hour, whether right or wrong. Lastly it is said that the tree "was to be desired to make one wise," which means that knowledge apart from goodness is the wisdom of the world building its towers of Babels only to end in the confusion of tongues. We will be tempted to grow in that wis- dom which springing from, and at the same time increasing spiritual pride, is the sin of the devil. When temptation came to the second Adam to turn stones into bread, He answered, thou shalt not live by bread alone; when the temptation of spiritual pride came to Him to cast Himself down from the temple. He answered, thou shalt not tempt the Lord WHAT WE RENOUNCE IN CONFIRMATION 201 thy God; when the temptation of the world came saying, all the kingdoms of the world will I give thee, if thou wilt fall down and worship me, He said, get thee behind me, Satan. At the first time this threefold temptation gained a great victory ; the second time they suffered at the hands of Jesus an utter defeat, and in His strength every son of man can conquer them. Speaking more particularly, what does one mean when he renounces the devil and all his works? By this is meant to renounce that self-willed and pre- sumptuous spirit, which is satisfied with itself and its powers, which leads us away from God and goodness into the most idolatrous form of self -worship, making us inordinately self-conceited, and a nuisance to every- body who comes in contact with us. The truly great ones of the earth are always humble, never satisfied with themselves, because they know that they have infinite powers of growth, and however wise and learned they may be, it makes them more childlike, for they know that they have just begun. Blessed are the poor in spirit for they, and they only, are filled with the riches of God's infinite Ufe. The kingdom of heaven is Hkened to a little child, because the little child possesses the spirit of progress by virtue of its docility and teachableness, which we must for- ever keep in order to go on and ever on in the growth of the knowledge of God. A self-willed and presumptuous spirit, which is satis- fied with itself and its powers, destroys the progressive spirit of man, by degenerating into the worship of self. But this is the lowest form of devil worship. 202 THE CHURCH UNIVERSAL When we first hear of the devil, he is tempting others to sin. Every one who worships self and tempts another to sin is according to his or her ability a he or a she devil. The greatest created spirit in the uni- verse who is tempting others to sin and is most success- ful therein is the devil par excellence, which the Bible tells us is one who falls by the pride and imholy ambition of self -worship. Every good man, woman, and child is an incentive and power to make others good, and every sinning person is a temptation to make others sin. You have influence, perhaps more than you think, with compan- ions and friends. A sneer, a laugh, a discouraging word may incline the wavering balance in the wrong direction, or induce a weak child of God to sin. Or an invitation coming from you, asking another to join you in sin, may lead astray one who but for that temptation would never have so sinned and fallen. We ought to take the utmost care never by ridicule or persuasion to influence another life in the wrong direction. In confirmation we promise to renounce the devil's works. And what more devilish work can we do than by our influence to hinder the work of God's grace in another soul? But ought we not to do more than merely refrain from hurting another soul? Ought we not also try to assist him in doing what is right? I do not mean to advise any one to make a great pro- fession about his religion ; to talk much or cant about it — this is nauseating. But in a quiet way you can exercise much influence for good, especially by the kind of a life you lead, and doubly so by what you WHAT WE RENOUNCE IN CONFIRMATION 203 are rather than by what you profess to be, and show that in truth you have renounced these two chief works of the devil — encouraging evil and discourag- ing good. The power of the world makes itself felt in different ways at different periods of Hfe. In earUer years it makes itself felt as a temptation leading us into a too great regard for the opinion and practices of others. I of course am not referring to that proper deference, which not the young alone, but all should pay to those whose example is worthy of imitation. I am speaking of the ^'wicked world," of finding yourself among those whose standard of acting and speaking is not that of goodness, and then of your being afraid or ashamed of being different from them. But if your life is going to be worth anything to yourself or to others, if you are going to use the spirit of ''ghostly strength," if you are going to have any true manhness or woman- liness in your character, you will often have to take an independent stand and act differently from others, often too when your doing so will be most difficult. But do not think that the Christian life consists in taking stands like a balky horse. When you do take a stand, let it be on some eternal principle of right, justice, and common sense. Let it be upon something you are sure will be for the strengthening of weak knees and making human kind happier and better. And when you have taken your stand, and are sure you are right, drive ahead with all your might ! Later in life the world will make its power felt in another way. You may, through God's grace, have formed a character of some independence; then the 204 THE CHURCH UNIVERSAL care of this world or the deceitfulness of riches, if you make haste to be rich, will choke the good seed, and will make you barren and unfruitful in the knowledge of the Lord God and that spirit of wisdom which teaches what life is for. The spirit of the world, with its narrow views, empty pretences, and its vain shows, will try to make you Hve for lower aims. But if we in truth renounce the pomps and vanities of the world, we will not run the risk of losing our souls for the sake of getting rich quick, or making a show beyond our means,'or gaining some high position in the esteem of the world. Yet men and women do lose their souls for such petty things as these. By losing your soul I mean your self-respect, your peace of mind, your honor that feels a stain like a wound, becoming a toady fawning at the feet of others, bought by the smile of some worldling, or made miserable by the frown of some conscienceless piece of clay. Yet men and women sell their souls for such baubles as these, and they certainly sell out cheap in the world's market of vanity fair. By renoimcing the world you do not renounce innocent, rational amusements and pleasures. You renounce sinful pleasures. And in this matter of pleas- ure we must put duty above pleasure, and when inno- cent pleasure interferes with our duties, the pleasure must go to the wall. You also promise to renounce the sinful desires of the flesh. God has given us nat- ural feelings, desires, and appetites; has given them to us for our own good, and has joined pleasure to their due gratification. But if we follow their lead for pleasure alone, as a dumb animal who has no higher WHAT WE RENOUNCE IN CONFIRMATION 205 nature, the flesh will gain the mastery over us. We must take rest, and rest is very pleasant, but if for the pleasure of rest I take rest when I do not need it, and when I should be at work, I fall into the sin of sloth. I must eat, and it is pleasant to do so, and God made it a delightful thing to give us pleasure, but because of this pleasure I am in danger of becoming a glutton, and so with all our appetites. There are two things in this life that it is com- paratively easy to do, and because it is easy to do there is not very much virtue in either. We can throw down all the restraint, which we ought to place upon the appetites of our flesh, and very easily become a glutton, plus any other number of swinish things. It is easy to do this. On the other hand we can go to the other extreme and become a fanatic, and starve the natural appetites of our bodies, and we may honestly persuade ourselves that this method of pro- cedure is exceedingly pleasing in the sight of Al- mighty God. And here let me add that this is the only course left for some people. With them it is a question of absolute abstinence from pleasures other people can indulge in. With them it is, if thine eye offend thee, pluck it out; if thine hand offend thee, cut it off. With some it is a question of entering the king- dom of heaven halt, lame, and blind, or not at all. And we ought not to cast stumbling blocks in the way of these. While it is comparatively hard to do, many can, like John the Baptist, come neither eating nor drink- ing. But the Kfe of the ascetic is not the hardest nor the best kind of life to live. The hardest thing in the 2o6 THE CHURCH UNIVERSAL world to do is to practise moderation and live it, and not go off at a tangent into some extreme. The hard- est thing in the world to do is to come both eating and drinking, yet neither a glutton nor a wine bibber. This is the way the Son of Man did, and it is the perfect thing to do. But to come to the principle of the matter, we must make up our minds, that since we have renounced the flesh, a sin of the flesh cannot be excused by such excuses as : I like to do so and so, it is very pleasant so to act, it is natural so to do. We must once and for all settle this with ourselves, that if we are going to live an earnest Christian life, we must do many things we will not like to do, and leave undone many things that we would like to do. Unless we make up our minds to do this we cannot live a good life, nor a self- consistent life of any kind. To sum up what we have said so far: when I say that I will renounce the devil and all his works, I promise that I will shun presumption and pride, and be scrupulously careful in no way to encourage evil or discourage good in another; when I say that I renounce the sinful desires of the flesh, I promise not to let the natural or perverted desires of my flesh be my rule of conduct, but will hold them in subjection to my higher spiritual nature; when I promise to renounce the pomps and vanities of this wicked world, I promise not to let the opinion of others be my rule of conduct, but the will of Almighty God, my heavenly Father, as he has revealed it to me through Christ- Jesus our Lord. And still I would not like to leave the subject just WHAT WE RENOUNCE IN CONFIRMATION 207 here because I feel that it might produce in your minds a one-sided impression. I shall therefore go more into detail as to what it means to be worldly. I do not call worldly the beautiful in any of its forms, for a sense of the beautiful, and a desire to create the beautiful, is a part of "our image of God," our soul's likeness to Him who made everything beautiful in its time. I do not call beautiful houses and furniture worldly, when they are not the expression of mere vulgar am- bition and vulgar waste. When they modestly corre- spond to our means and the situation, they are the natural surroundings of man, the natural prince at the head of a princely creation, to whom squalor is disgrace and spiritual insanity. Nor are taste and time and money spent in adorning the person in beautiful dress worldly. The young maiden adorns herself instinctively, and when this is done in moderation and modesty, it is her most Chris- tian duty to do so. It is her natural and spiritual birthright to make herself as beautiful as she can. Consider the lilies how they grow; they toil not neither do they spin, yet Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these. He who with his own hand painted the wings and crest of the birds, who carves and sculptures every wave cast upon the shore, who made beautiful the human form, and that most exquisite work, the human countenance, He who can do nothing that is ugly any more than He can do anything that is foolish, shall we slander Him by deforming and disgracing the human body, the high temple of the Spirit of God ? 2o8 THE CHURCH UNIVERSAL Nor do I call a handsome way of living or the amusements of life worldly. I wish everybody could live handsomely and have plenty of amusement, and I believe they will yet do so if we can ever make them Christians. As to amusements, human nature needs them as much as it does work. From innocent diversions the mind and heart come back with new and deeper dehght in the higher objects of Hfe. Besides we who live in the house of our Divine Father ought to know that pleasure is in itself right and is our birthright. I am not bound even to show that amusements improve my health. If I enjoy them as a bird does its flight, that is enough, so I transgress no law. Human nature demands pleasur- able excitement, and if not taken in pure forms, will be taken in gross sinful forms. But when amusements are such as to discountenance better things; make tasteless sober duties, gentle affections; the duty of Hfe homely; if your Tyrian purples make the stuff of every-day duty look gray and homespun — such amusements are worldly and most decidedly pernicious. But in all of our amuse- ments and in all of Hfe's affairs, let us not impose the rule for gray-headed saints, and a very questionable rule even for them, upon the young, calling that sin which is no sin, blackening a world already black enough, and forcing the live human being to become a mummy. The effect is either to drive people into a hypocritical sensualism, or open opposition to religion, and to their own conscience, while Christ and His pure religion must bear the blame for people's distorted and diseased WHAT WE RENOUNCE IN CONFIRMATION 209 imaginations. Who then are worldly men and women ? Worldly men and women are those who for the sake of the wicked world's good opinion, or rank in its corrupt society, sacrifice their better selves, their friends, and the truth. Aspirations for good society we all must approve, for society is one of the most helpful facts about us, but by good society I mean people with refinement and thoughts, with good hearts and inward nobleness, and to sacrifice something to make such people friends is wise indeed. But the worldly man or woman takes the motto of Zadok, the founder of the great sect of the Pharisees — "separate not yourself from the majority." If the majority turned Buddhist, how long would the worldly man or woman remain Christian ? So they snap their most sacred obliga- tions and follow still the changes of the moon. There are several sorts of worldlings. There is the so-called worldling of the senses, who is his own worst enemy, but may be true and kind at heart. There is the worldling of vanity, the creature of a silly imagination, a painted butterfly — no one can be very harsh with this kind. But the genuine worldling is one whose soul has been turned into cold glittering selfishness; the poised, cool, calculating, systematic worldling of a devil, who shines and smiles and is all iron below ; who, if fashionable interest back him, will set his iron heel on the most sacred truth and crush the tenderest heart — for him the deepest place is reserved in hell. I sometimes wish there would appear new Apostles on the earth to preach common honesty and honor, 210 THE CHURCH UNIVERSAL kind hearts, manliness to men, and womanliness to women, for all of us are in some degree tainted. It is impossible to stand so near to the great ocean of worldliness and not be sprinkled by its spray. Of the higher and more universal form of worldliness I have scarcely spoken at all. I mean that imiversal exaggeration of the world that now is, and from which we are so soon to take our departure. Immersed in the present moment and in the things of the sense we forget to fling open the windows of our souls and let in the light from the great invisible world above and beyond us. Why so eager, anxious, and fretted about the things which perish with the using ? Ah ! gracious God ! make us a little wiser ; help us to live soberly and righteously, in this present world, looking for the coming and glorious incarnation of the eternal Son of God in us as in our blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ. Note. — In some parts of this chapter and in " Come to Years of Discretion" I am indebted to "The Sevenfold Gift," one of the best tracts on Confirmation I have ever seen. XVII SOURCE OF AUTHORITY IN RELIGION In the days of Caesar Augustus, there was born in Judea a child whom his mother called Jesus. After he had grown to manhood His wonderful words, His wonderful deeds, and His wonderful life bound to Him by strong ties of affection a band of disciples of pure and spiritual souls. He did not tell His disciples who He was. He let His wonderful life do that. His wonderful words of truth, His miraculous works of mercy, stirred that land as it had never been stirred before. One day when He "came into the coast of Caesarea Philippi, He asked His disciples, saying, whom do men say I, the son of man, am ? And they said, some say that thou art John the Baptist ; some say Elias; and others say Jeremiah, or one of the prophets. He saith unto them, but whom say ye that I am? And Simon Peter answered and said, Thou art the Christ, the Son of the living God. And Jesus answered and said unto him, blessed art thou, Simon Bar- Jonah : for flesh and blood hath not re- vealed it unto thee, but my Father which is in heaven. . . . Upon this rock will I build my Church, and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it." And upon that rock has the Church of God always been builded : upon the power of men to say, as St. Peter first said, "Thou art the Christ, the Son of the 211 212 THE CHURCH UNIVERSAL living God." Everywhere the simple story of His life has been told by lips of flesh and blood, or printed upon the page in cold type; men have confessed ''Thou art the Christ, the Son of the living God, and our Father in heaven has revealed Him unto us/' as He did unto St. Peter. As a matter of fact, the simple story of Him has been handed on from generation to generation by word of mouth, by a succession of disciples begotten of Him, continuously through those who beheved in Him from the beginning. Others wrote an accoimt of Him which became fixed in the four immortal Gospels, which will live forever as the high-water mark of that inspiration with which God hath inspired men. Men will not let the knowl- edge of Christ and His Hfe perish, unless they sink to the level of brutes. When men hear His words to-day, as they did 1900 years ago, they say, ''Thou hast the words of eternal life." The more we know of His marvellous deeds of love. His wonderful death of sacrifice, and His most wonderful resurrection into glory, millions say what Simon Peter first said, "Thou art the Son of the living God." Not because an infallible Simon Peter said it ; not because it is written in an infallible book; but because the living God reveals it to us. As long as the Christ of history has the power to seize hold of men's hearts and make them confess with their hearts, mouths, and lives — "Thou art the Christ, the son of the living God" — so long will His Church last. This is the rock upon which it is founded — upon Christ- consciousness in the human soul. SOURCE OF AUTHORITY IN RELIGION 213 Men will never cease to believe in Christ, for He has never deceived them. Men will never repent living the Christian life, because it always satisfies them. The only cause of repentance we men will have is that we have not followed more closely in His footsteps. We have faith in Christ because He satis- fies the hunger of our souls. For with Him great light springs up, and life is radiant with the glory of God, and without Him we sit and wring our nerveless hands in the gloom and darkness of the shadow of death. THE CREED OF CHRISTENDOM GROWS OUT OF CHRISTIAN EXPERIENCE So Christ, in the beginning and unto the end of time, draws His disciples unto Himself by His marvel- lous personality, and the high, helpful, and inspiring truth He offers to men. Virtue and life go forth from Him to them who will receive it. His ''follow me" is powerful, and His instruction is enlightening, uplift- ing, and transforming. His time for work is among us in the flesh, as the man Jesus was, very short, and only the beginning was possible during His brief life upon the earth. Yet He left behind Him in the world a group of men and women, spiritually changed by the touch of His personality, and instructed in the prin- ciples of all truth and life. Thus Christ is the creator of the Christian people, by reproducing and begetting Himself in every indi- vidual disciple. As the driving wheel is the embodied power of the engine, so Christ through the Holy 214 THE CHURCH UNIVERSAL Spirit is the incarnate personal power and life of God awakening, reproving, consoling, spiritualizing, and opening heaven over earth for all mankind, in all ages, in all climes, and in all races — for He is all in all. So Christ made and makes the Christian people, and through the experience we undergo in being made Christians, the universal Creed of Christendom is born, ever new and ever old, as it is rewon and reproduced in the individual and in the world everlastingly. First Christian life, then the record of that experience per- petually reproduced and witnessed in us — the Apostles' Creed. The Creed, we ought to remember, is not abstract intellectual truth like mathematics, but the highest truth and life the Church of God knows by living it. So Christ becomes the vital living possession of the Christian people by becoming their life — I no longer live but Christ lives in me. The New Testament contains the record of this spiritual experience, through which we, and the first Christian people, passed, and is reproduced in all men of holy and humble heart, unto the end of time. So whether the New Testament is true or false, inspired or not inspired, no one is competent to say until he is inspired to live the Christian life. For the final and absolute test of the inspiration of the Christian Scriptures is the innumerable hosts of Christian people it has led to live inspired lives. As Samuel Taylor Coleridge said long ago: ^'The Bible is in- spired because it inspires me." Nothing but the immense reality, vitality, and truth, through which Jesus and His disciples passed, SOURCE OF AUTHORITY IN RELIGION 215 could have brought forth the Christian Creed as a Hving self-conscious life. We greatly misjudge if we think that the Christian faith, as formulated in the Creed of Christendom, is the cool adoption of a set of opinions spun out of the intellect as a philosophic speculative doctrine. It is the record of the glowing realization of a world of spiritual verities first lived. Then an effort on the part of the mind to tell the deepest experiences the human heart has ever felt, and the formal expression of the profoundest mys- teries the human spirit has ever known, lived, and loved. Before Christians said in the Creed — ^'I believe in the forgiveness of sins" — their sins had been for- given. Peters, Pauls, and Mary Magdalenes were telling of that '^ peace which passeth all understand- ing," which they had experienced in passing from the bondage of sin into the liberty of the children of God. And herein is the secret of the tremendous power of the Creed of Christendom — because it is the Hving experience of Christian people. So a Chris- tian people came into existence, created and begotten of the ever living Christ, and then into history with their personal experience formulated as the Apostles' Creed, which will live forever, because it is alone the true answer to the deepest questions mankind has ever put to itself, (i) To know whence we came and our relation to the Author of the universe; (2) to obtain relief from the guilt under which our conscience labors ; (3) to have before us a perfect ideal of moral rectitude; (4) to obtain definite assurance of the destiny which awaits us beyond the grave. 2i6 THE CHURCH UNIVERSAL CHRIST THE ANSWER TO ALL THESE QUESTIONS Christ Himself is the answer to all these questions, and to any other question we may ask about ourselves and God. When we ask who God is, Christ replies : ''He that hath seen me hath seen the Father. I am in the Father and the Father in me. I am in you and you in me." When we ask ourselves what perfect man is, Christ replies : ''Which of you convinceth me of sin ?'' When we ask ourselves how we are to be freed from the guilt of sin and the consequences of sin, Christ replies: "I am the propitiation of sin." When we ask ourselves what is our fate beyond the grave, Christ replies : "I am the resurrection and the life." "O man, ask me any question you please and I am always the answer. I am always God's way to man and man's way to God," says Christ- Jesus. These are the truths upon which our destiny hinges, and what we need to beUeve to be saved. And be- cause all these truths are enshrined in the Apostles* Creed, beginning with "I believe in God the Father Almighty" and ending with the triumphant shout of "Life everlasting," the Church of God asks the one simple question: "Dost thou believe all the articles in the Apostles' Creed?" Knowing that if Christ be lifted up He will draw all men unto Him and the Father in heaven will reveal in our souls that we are the children of God, planting the Church upon the rock of Christ-consciousness in the human soul, against which the "gates of hell cannot prevail." SOURCE OF AUTHORITY IN RELIGION 217 THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH REFUSES TO BUILD RELIGION UPON THE CHURCH OR BIBLE, BUT USES THEM AS WITNESSES TO THE TRUTH OF THE CHRISTIAN RE- LIGION Belief in these great fundamental facts of the faith of Christendom, stated so simply and sublimely in the Apostles' Creed, is all and absolutely all that the Universal Church of Christ requires one, whether lay- man or minister, to believe as his confession of faith. ''Dost thou believe all the articles contained in the Apostles' Creed?" This is the only question the Universal Church of Christ permits the minister to ask one concerning his faith. No minister is per- mitted to ask a further question — ^' Why do you be- lieve the Apostles' Creed?" The Catholic Church never has and never will ask a person that question, however much others have thought it their duty to ask it. One can beheve the Creed for any reason that is satisfactory to himself. Dost thou renounce the world, the flesh, and the devil? Dost thou believe all the articles contained in the Apostles' Creed? Wilt thou be baptized in this faith? Wilt thou obediently keep God's holy will and commandments ? The Church of Christ per- mits no minister to ask more than these four simple questions and answers as conditions of membership. The moment any one goes beyond these simple questions and answers, so sublimely simple and all- inclusive, you plunge at once into the dreary chaos of combative sectarianism, and divide mankind into at least three hostile camps ; for there are at least three 2i8 THE CHURCH UNIVERSAL well-known reasons people give themselves why they believe the Christian faith. One man says: ^'1 be- lieve the Christian faith because the Church has taught it from the beginning, down through all the ages back to Christ and beyond, for it has been taught in essence and substance ever since 'men began to call upon the name of the Lord.' " So the person says, I believe in Christianity because the Church teaches it. I believe the Creed upon the au- thority of the Church. I reply: ''That is satisfactory to some of the pro- foundest minds the world has ever known, and has guided an innumerable host of saints over the fiery marl and burning sands of incarnate life into that peace of God which passeth all understanding. But that is your own private affair; the Church of God cares only to know that you believe the Creed, not why you believe it." Another man says: "I believe the Creed of Chris- tendom because I believe that from the beginning there have been men whom God in a special sense, above and beyond all other men, directly inspired to know Him and His eternal truth, and that through them, and through them alone, God made the perfect and final revelation of Himself to mankind. I be- lieve that this perfect and final revelation of God is contained in that book we call the Bible. I believe the Bible first, and then I believe the Creed because it is contained in the Bible. I believe that the Bible is verbally inspired from Genesis to Revelation, every word of it the ipse dixit of God, eternal, immutable, and infallible." SOURCE OF AUTHORITY IN RELIGION 219 I reply: ''That is your own private affair. The Church cares only to know that you believe the Creed." But a third person comes and says, "I would be- lieve the Creed of Christendom if there was no such book as the Bible, and no one else in the world be- lieved it but myself. I do not believe the Creed because a great and venerable book contains it, nor because a great and venerable Church has taught it from the days of Seth to the present time. I believe the Creed of Christendom because my reason tells me that it is the only rational thing for me to beHeve. I know that I did not create myself. I know that I did not create the universe. I know that I am a spirit and that there is infinite Spirit, who is in the universe and in myself, in my image and likeness, however much He is infinitely greater than I am, and however much He differs from me in my present state of development." To such an one I reply, "If that is a sufficient reason why you should believe the fundamentals of the Christian faith, that is your own affair, and God speed you in getting as many as you can to agree with you." These are the three reasons people give themselves for believing the Christian reHgion. One believes it because his reason convinces him that it is true, an- other bases it upon the Bible, another upon the authority of the Church. The Christian rationalist bases his faith upon the essential reasonableness of the universe, our Roman brethren upon the teaching authority of the Church, and our Evangelical brethren 220 THE CHURCH UNIVERSAL upon the authority of the Bible. The Universal Church of Christ says, I do not care three straws why you believe the Apostles' Creed, so long as you live by it. If you do that, you will be saved, and if you do not, you will be lost ! Because people have been so narrow and foolish as to think that it was necessary and binding upon all to beheve the Creed for the same reason, and that people who could not give the same reason for their belief in the Christian faith could not work and wor- ship together in the same Church, has been a most potent and fruitful cause of ignorant, prejudiced, wasteful, ungodly, and sinful sectarian strife. But the most uselessly foolish thing of all is that Chris- tians have imagined that these three reasons why the Creed of Christendom has been believed are antagonis- tically and fundamentally different. They are not. They are unified in one higher and all-inclusive reason. ST. Peter's confession of faith When St. Peter's confession of faith in Christ was made, it is most significant and of the greatest im- portance for us to remember that Jesus considered it of enough importance to the well-being of rehgion among men, to tell St. Peter why he believed in the Christian religion, and in so doing uncovered for him the cause, source, and foundation of his faith. All through the ages His doing so has been more than justified, and never more so than at the present time. Jesus did this, not only that Peter might know the foundation of his personal faith in Him, but also, I SOURCE OF AUTHORITY IN RELIGION 221 believe, in order that we in later ages, in the midst of these clamorous confusion of tongues, might have uncovered for us the basal rock of faith in God, in all men and in all ages. Jesus did not tell St. Peter that his confession of faith was based upon the prophets, who ages before had told of His coming, and given the minutiae of his birth, person, and death. Jesus told St. Peter that his faith was not based upon the inspired prophets of the past, however much inspired they were. Jesus also told St. Peter that his faith was not based upon the highest living human-inspired teaching voice of the age — though John had borne testimony to Christ in no uncertain voice. Jesus said : Peter, be it known unto you, and unto all men henceforth and forever, that your salvation does not depend upon the writing of books, however infallible, nor upon the authority which comes from the unanimous voice of bodies of men, however much inspired; but the highest God in the universe, my Father and your Father, speaks to you personally — heart to heart, mind to mind, spirit to spirit, and I over against I — revealing that I am in you and you in me, and that I am your Hfe hid in God. Of me the prophets have spoken, of me the Apostles will bear witness, because the same Spirit which now speaks in you, revealing to you that I am the Son of the living God and you are a son of the living God, is the same Spirit which spake in the past and speaks in the present, individually and collectively in the voice of the redeemed. And you understand that Spirit which spake in the past, and speaks in the col- 222 THE CHURCH UNIVERSAL lective voice of the present, because the same Spirit speaks in you. By the same Spirit the prophets spake; by the same Spirit Jesus, the Son of the Hving God, was born; by the same Spirit every Christian is born. So the Spirit is one and the same, speaking in the past, present, and future, individually and collectively, in mankind. The people who base their faith in religion on the Bible trust the utterance of the Spirit in the past; those who base their faith upon the collective voice of the Church trust the utterance of the Spirit in others now living; but neither you nor I can under- stand the Spirit which speaks in the Bible and in the Church, until it speaks in us. So in this way, and in this way alone, can we have the witness of the Spirit of truth individually and collectively in the past and present and future — always; so that every man hears in the tongue in which he is born the same Spirit uttering the wonderful Word of God. I am never sure that I hear the voice of the Spirit until I test His utterance in my own personality by His utterance in the whole body of the faithful in the past and in the present — in other words, the Bible and the Church. Then we are as near infallibility as we can get. The trouble with us who trust the inner light ex- clusively is that we do not correct the refraction of His rays in our own personality by His witness in humanity collectively in the past and in the present. SOURCE OF AUTHORITY IN RELIGION 223 RELIGION, CHURCH, AND BIBLE At this point we can ask in the proper spirit, and without fear of being misunderstood, what is the rela- tion between Religion, the Church, and the Bible? Which came first ? As a matter of fact both are based upon the same Spirit as He has uttered Himself in the past and in the present. Which came first? The United States or the history of the United States? Which came first, the song, or the love which inspired it? As a matter of fact, first came the Spirit of God binding men together in one living organism, in which each individual finds his own and the common Hfe of hu- manity hid in God. Then this brotherhood went on growing throughout the ages and expressed its deepest soul experience and highest spiritual thirst for God in that matchless literature and God-inspired Book we call the Bible, which fimds its glorious consumma- tion in making God and man one in Christ- Jesus our Lord. So we find that the Bible is last and religion is first in order of time, and that the Bible is founded upon the authority of the Church, and the Church upon religion; that is, upon God speaking in our souls, individually and collectively, in the past and in the present. If this is not so, it would be impossible for you or for me to ever know that the Bible is inspired, or that the Church teaches the truth of God. The historical order of Religion, the Church, and the Bible is as follows : In order to get the connection we will go no further back than the time of Abra- 224 THE CHURCH UNIVERSAL ham, from whose time till the time of Moses we will estimate to be about four hundred years, during which time not a word of the Old Testament perhaps was written. Moses is commonly accepted as the man who formulated the fundamentals of the Jewish the- ology known as the Mosaic Dispensation. He may have written parts of some of the books in the Old Testament, but these books continued to be written for a thousand years, completed probably about 150 years before the birth of Jesus. Neither is the Christian religion founded upon the New Testament. Probably the first book in the New Testament to be written is the Epistle of St. James about 50 A.D. Many of the first Christians died before a single line of the New Testament was written. The last book in the New Testament was written prob- ably about 100 A.D. By this time three generations of Christians had lived. But it was not until 325 a.d. that the Church collected these writings, decided which were inspired, collected them into the Canon of the New Testament, and distributed them among the Church. Do you now understand why it is an impossibility for the Christian religion to be founded upon a book, however much that book may be inspired, and con- tains the history and statements of the facts of re- ligion ? And why the Church refuses to require any one to say that he beheves the Apostles' Creed upon the authority of the Bible? Because the Christian faith is older than the New Testament. Because the Christian faith built the Church and wrote the New Testament. SOURCE OF AUTHORITY IN RELIGION 225 The greatest mistake that our Evangelical Churches ever made is to teach the people that the basis of the Christian religion is the Bible. The Bible is the authoritative text-book of the Christian religion, but religion is no more founded upon it than mathematics is founded upon Sanford's Arithmetic. The mistake of the Roman Communion is that they teach we must accept religion upon the authority alone of an infallible Church and Pope. The souls of men will never have rest, and ought not to have rest, until they learn that the eternal basis of religion is on a firmer foundation than either the Bible or the Church, whose proper function is to bear witness to the truth of the Christian religion. The basis of the Christian religion is in the living God, who to-day lives in the souls of men and in- spires them as truly as He ever did. The Church, the Bible, and Reason, all have their place and necessary function in religion; but their function is not properly stated by saying that religion is founded upon any of them. Guides, interpreters, and witnesses they are. All of them invaluable wit- nesses to the faith. The Church is the living witness to the truth of religion and the facts upon which it is founded. The Bible is the authoritative witness of the facts which led the first people to become Chris- tians. I believe the Creed of Christendom more strongly because it is found in the Bible. I believe it more strongly still because it has been taught in the Church from the beginning. But I believe it most strongly because it harmonizes and binds into one Q 226 THE CHURCH UNIVERSAL organic unity all the truth in the universe of God that mankind knows anything about. We have come to a time in the history of the world when nothing but realities will be tolerated. Only those things can be accepted as sacred which in themselves awake the sense of reverence. Only those things are inspired which have the power of inspiring. There need be no fear to submit the Christian religion, the Christian people, and the Christian Scriptures to this test. They have won their way into the world, and will continue to win their way in the world, upon their intrinsic power to inspire the world. They will all live because God continually bears witness that in them speaks "the still small voice," at the sound of which every true prophet and man of God removes his dusty sandals from off his feet, covers his face, and bows his head in adoration to the most high God. XVIII COMMUNION OF SAINTS "Our Father who art in Heaven : Hallowed be Thy name, Thy kingdom come, Thy will be done. As in heaven, so on earth." Whom does this leave out? Are we not praying for the whole living creation to come into saving knowledge, love, and communion with God, through Christ Jesus our Lord? I have said the living crea- tion of God, for with Him there are no dead — only a transition from one form of life to another form of life. And when our Lord Jesus Christ taught us to pray : — "Forgive us our trespasses As we forgive those who trespass against us, And lead us not into temptation. But deliver us from evil," whom does the us include? Certainly all the sin- ning souls in the universe who have sinned and need forgiveness, does it not? It does seem that, of all the Articles of the Chris- tian Faith, as contained in the Apostles' Creed, "Communion of Saints" would find the easiest and most universal acceptance among all who believe in the efficiency and power of prayer and that the death 227 228 THE ^CHURCH UNIVERSAL of the flesh-body neither annihilates the soul nor changes its moral or spiritual nature. Yet people do have difliculty with this most necessary, comforting, and helpful dogma of the Christian Faith. When we come to analyze, however, the difficulties which are supposed to stand in the way of believing this Article of the Apostles' Creed, we shall here, as elsewhere, find that the difficulties are caused by making several false assumptions, which, when removed, the difficul- ties at once disappear. The difficulty which people have in believing the Christian Religion, in whole or in part, that which leads them to reject the Christian Religion, if indeed they ever do reject it, when once they have come to really understand it, at last comes from two causes: the low estate of our spiritual nature, and the lazi- ness of our intellectual nature; for all men love to sin, and few to think. From these two sources come ninety-nine hundredths of the objections to the Chris- tian Religion. Unless I am mistaken, it will clearly be seen that the objections to the Christian Religion come from the two sources which I have mentioned, as soon as we state in the very simplest outlines the demands which the Christian Religion makes upon us. (i) The Christian Religion presents to the world in the person of Jesus Christ our Lord the highest ideal of holiness and righteousness that we can conceive, or even dream of, in moments of divinest inspiration. But Christianity presents religion to the world, not only as an ideal, but as an ideal realized and incar- nate as Jesus, God's idea of man as so perfect that no fault can be found in Him at all. COMMUNION OF SAINTS 229 (2) Out of the personality of Jesus grows the Church's definition of salvation, which is no other and none less than Jesus Christ Himself, so that no man is saved until the fulness of Christ- Jesus is wrought out in him. And right here, if we make one or two false assumptions, it becomes the easiest thing in the world to preach Jesus Christ, so that, instead of being the hope of the world. He becomes the despair of the world, unless we lower, debase, and vitiate what the New Testament means by salvation. (3) For when the perfect man Jesus is presented to us as our salvation, our weak undeveloped spiritual nature is very apt to turn skeptic and say — this is too high for me. It is useless for me to attempt to scale these dizzy heights. I can worship and adore from afar, but attain unto this never. I can never become such a man as Jesus is. (4) This protest of our weak spiritual nature has been so powerfully urged by the world, and has been so profoundly felt by the Church, that the Church has compromised with the weakness of our spiritual nature and the laziness of our intellectual nature, and, instead of preaching salvation as Jesus taught it, it has, by its substitutionary theory of the atone- ment, made salvation the easiest and cheapest thing in the world — so cheap, easy, and worthless that many would not have it as a free gift.^ This false theology of the substitutionary theory of the atone- ^ For the distinction between the "substitutionary theory" of the atonement and the "vicarious theory" of the atonement, see Vol. II, "Kinship of God and Man." The vicarious theory of the atonement contains all the truth of the substitutionary theory minus all of its impossibiUties. 230 THE CHURCH UNIVERSAL ment has invaded every department of Christian theology and so vitiated it that it has done more than anything else to obscure the real purpose of Christianity, which, in the mind of our Lord Jesus Christ and His Apostles, is the formation of the spirit of Christ in us unto the fulness of the stature of Jesus, which ''fulness of His stature" gives us His control over the powers of nature and human nature. ''The works that He does, the same works shall we do" is the Gospel Jesus and His Apostles preached. Men have said. Oh ! no ! no ! no ! Salvation cannot mean this ! For I expect to attain salvation, and I can never attain this ! I am a saved man now. Several years ago, at a certain place, and in a certain minute upon which I can place my finger, I was con- verted and got rehgion. Since I underwent that expe- rience, all I have to do to get into heaven is to lie down and die a flesh-death. I am ready to go at any time. I ask in astonishment, all you have to do to get into heaven is to die a flesh-death ? Then don't you think that the Lord is very selfish in keeping you here on the earth out of so much enjoyment, when all you have to do is to die a flesh-death in order to get into such a heaven of happiness? This sounds very much like the Persian poet, Omar Khayyam, when he says : — " Why if the soul can fling the dust aside, And, naked, upon the air of heaven ride, Were't not a shame — were't not a shame In this clay carcase crippled to abide." The fundamental mistake which many Christians have made is that Salvation is something begun and completed in a few moments of time, and not an age- COMMUNION OF SAINTS 231 long process of growth into the fulness of the Stature of Christ-Jesus, begun on earth in our baptismal regeneration, progressively developed in our life after death, and completed in our resurrection — and not in the mere act of flesh-death. As a matter of fact, all the Christians that we know anything about on the earth are more or less sinful, but it is impossible even for us to conceive of any one being in heaven until he is perfectly pure and sinless. How then is this sin-stained nature of ours to be bleached whiter than snow ? Ah, that is simple enough, say the preachers of a type of Christianity the keystone of whose theology is the substitutionary theory of the atonement. In the act of flesh-death God makes us perfect in holiness if, just before we die this flesh-death, we believe that Jesus died as a substitute for the sins of the world, and we accept him as our Saviour in this substitution- ary sense. If we believe this just before we die a flesh-death, then flesh-death makes us perfect in holiness ; if we do not believe this just before we die, then flesh-death makes us perfect in sin — at least, makes it impossible that we shall ever live any other life than a sinful life. In other words, flesh-death unalterably makes us either everlasting Saints or everlasting Sinners. You are perfectly well aware that all this has been preached to the world as Christianity, claiming that it is derived from the Bible, and it alone represents the true and only teaching of the Bible, and because people have rejected all this they have been called skeptics, unbehevers, and what not. It has driven thousands 232 THE CHURCH UNIVERSAL out of the Church, and made a still larger number lose all interest in Christianity. Let me now show you, as quickly as possible, how these false assumptions have created these disastrous results. Also let me show you how any Clergyman of the Church, who identifies Christianity with this system of theology, will fail of his largest usefulness in preaching the Gospel of Christ to this generation of men and women. The first false assumption is made by putting Jesus upon an unattainable pinnacle and making him the incarnation of God such as we can never become, while the New Testament teaches that he was made in all points like us sin excepted, that we might be made in all points like him without any exception. So the Christian Church holds up this sinless Jesus as our Salvation, who is the source of our inspiration and hope because He imparts His life to us, which enables us to attain the same high estate that He has attained. He has attained what others had been struggling towards through all the ages and had failed to obtain ; but since the introduction of His lifegiving power incarnate in his Church in the world, we can stretch forth weak hands, grimed with the dust and sin of the earth, and, by the use of the lifegiving power of God incarnate in him — if sufficient time is given us — become as sinless as He is sinless. Because Jesus has pledged Himself to lift us as high into Heaven as He has ascended, and to make us as much the incarna- tion of God as He is the incarnation of God — because he is all this to us He is the source of our inspiration and hope ; and, if he is not all this to us, He becomes COMMUNION OF SAINTS 233 the source of our despair, and to talk about our being as perfect as our Father in Heaven is perfect, and to urge us to love God with all our hearts, minds, souls, and bodies, and our neighbors as ourselves, is the crudest and falsest sentimentality ever preached to humanity. Again the position of God incarnate in the History of the World is a source of inspiration and hope to us. He came incarnate at a remarkably late date in the History of the World — only some 1900 years ago — after untold centuries of human evolu- tion, and as the consummation of all human evolution, and as the maker of all human evolution. This, if nothing else, ought to teach us that we can attain the fulness of his stature only by travelHng the same toil- some steeps of the same strait and narrow path which Jesus has consecrated and forever made holy by his footsteps. And when does the New Testament say that we shall attain unto the fulness of Jesus ? At our flesh-death ? You cannot find this in the New Testament, which makes the consummation of our Salvation nothing less than attaining such a resurrection as Jesus showed to his Disciples during the forty days between His resurrection and ascension. The other false assumption which is at the bottom of the rejection that nothing less than the fulness of stature of Jesus Christ wrought out in us is the Gospel of Christianity, is that there is no progressive growth in goodness and in spirituaHty after our flesh-death, but that these few days and nights of feverish toil and grime on this little ball of dirt fix the limits of our growth and decide our eternal destiny. 234 THE CHURCH UNIVERSAL With all these false assumptions removed, and in the place of them the New Testament teaching, that there is progressive growth in goodness possible for all in our life after death, hope and encouragement are given to the feeblest beginnings of our spiritual nature, without lowering the standards of Christianity and salvation to the level of the substitutionary theory of the atonement, which our undeveloped and lazy moral, intellectual, and spiritual nature cries out for. For if we tell men that only those who have attained sinlessness, by overcoming all evil, is the kind of men God wishes us to be and the kind of a man every one wishes himself to be, and that this perfection is at- tained in a few moments of time by believing that Jesus was Crucified as a substitute for us, and all that we have to do after we believe this to get into His sinless heaven is to lie down and die, people can no longer believe this; because their own experience tells them that it is not true, and a careful study of the New Testament corroborates this experience. Because people assume so many things to be true which are not true, and then identify this false theol- ogy with Christianity, the Christian Religion is said to be so mysterious. The Christian Religion is easily understood when rightly approached, but if we start with a whole lot of false assumptions, of course, we will land either in mystery or in absurdity. It is like making a mistake in the beginning of a problem in Arithmetic. The error is going all the way through the example and makes the answer inevitably wrong. When the pupil finds that his answer does not correspond with that COMMUNION OF SAINTS 235 of the book, he ought not to cry out mystery, but say, I have made a mistake somewhere, and then hunt for the mistake until he finds it. What most people mean when they say that the Christian Religion is hard to understand, at least I have found it so in my own experience and in that of others with whom I have talked, turns out to be that we have assumed some- thing to be true which is false; for the Christian Religion in itself is the most essentially reasonable thing in the universe. If people then find any difficulty with that article of the Creed which says, *'I believe in the Communion of Saints," we shall find that the trouble arises in most instances by making some false assumption. In fact I have found that I cannot talk intelligently with people about the great fundamentals of Chris- tianity without defining the meaning of the words I am using, because some false assumptions are almost sure to be lurking somewhere in the ^background of thought, and false meanings are almost sure to be attached to words which have been used for centuries in the Christian Church. When I use the word " bap- tism," for instance, I find that people who have grown up in the midst of an evangelical environment, in which the whole meaning and significance of the Church's Sacramental Teaching have been allowed to fade away and become clean washed out, mean by baptism "wetting one with water in the name of the trinity," while the Church means by baptism "a death unto sin and a new birth unto righteousness." When the Church uses the word " Salvation " it means "that process of ingrafting the spirit of Christ in us 236 THE CHURCH UNIVERSAL by baptism and our growth through that spirit into the fulness of the stature of Jesus/' while many of our Christian brethren mean by Salvation "an emo- tional experience through which they pass in a few moments of time/' and not the incarnation and self- conscious possession of the sinless holiness and power of Jesus. When we talk about "Communion of Saints/' you would be surprised to find how many people think that we mean some sort of "mediumship " such as the spirit- ualists give exhibitions of from time to time. Of course it is absurd, but not more so than hundreds of other things which go unchallenged every day. What then does "Communion of Saints" mean? Anything new or startling, or something very easily understood and very familiar ? It is the latter. In the Creed as soon as we say that we believe in the "Holy Spirit," we immediately go on to assert what God as the Holy Spirit does; which is, first, the Creation of the Holy Catholic Church ; and, secondly, the Communion of Saints. Let us see the relation between them. The first work of the Holy Spirit on the day of Pentecost was the creation of the Christian Church by the impartation of His Spirit to the dis- ciples in the upper room. "Birds of a feather flock together," because they partake of, and share in, the same spirit ; so the very first fruit and evidence of the creation of the Holy CathoHc Church was "Com- munion of Saints." The very essence of the Christian Church is that there shall first be saints, and then these saints shall be in communion with one another, as St. John says: "We know that we have passed COMMUNION OF SAINTS 237 from death to life because we love the brethren." In the New Testament a saint and a Christian mean the same thing. And then, a little later on in the Acts of the Apostles, we find that this Communion of Saints is the bond which held Christians together, '' stead- fastly in Apostles' doctrine, fellowship, the breaking of bread, and in the prayers." The Communion of Saints is such a vital bond holding the Christian Church together, that when this bond is broken, it falls into fragmentary sects. As Baptism makes Christians, so Communion of Saints holds them together after they are made Christians. Not only is "Communion of Saints" the bond hold- ing Christians on earth together, but it holds all Christians together, living and dead. There are saints living and saints dead, and both are in communion with us in many ways. We all believe that such a saint as Isaiah lived thousands of years ago, and we are in communion with him whenever we wish to be, by reading his writing in the Old Testa- ment. When we do so, we are in as direct communion with him as I am with you and you with me now. There are many ways in which saints, as well as other people, have communion with one another. Through the medium of the printed page we have one method of communion with the spirits of the mighty dead. In this manner we are in communion with Homer, Virgil, Caesar, Shakespeare, and other great spirits who have gone on before. Shut off this kind of communion, and you and I would be shut up to the pettiness of our own thoughts, and the deeds of the world wovdd be limited to the paltry transactions, 238 THE CHURCH UNIVERSAL gossip, and scandal of our own insignificant neigh- borhood. But not only do the departed saints communicate themselves to us through the books which they have left to us, but through the links of the living men and women stretching back through the past, whom they have personally influenced while in the flesh. Our religion comes from Judea, our art and culture from Greece, our laws and government from Rome. Plato, Shakespeare, Caesar, St. Paul, are we not better ac- quainted with them, and do they not influence us more than the man across the street, or our next-door neighbor ? Do we not know them better, and are they not a greater power in our lives, than the people we brush on the street ? When a great or a good man is born into the world, he does not live unto himself nor die unto himself. He is the cause of the rising and the falling of many in Israel. He is a power let down from Heaven into the earth with which we must all reckon. Some new and diviner quality of life is born with him into the world which he is to communicate to others as they are able to receive it. And the greater the man is the longer it takes him to communicate himself to us. His generation will very likely, according to the age-long custom, stone him, and the next generation build his monument. But if he is good and great, the race will not let him die. He will live on in the world with an ever increasing force and power until he as permanently and as fixedly takes his place in the life of spiritual humanity as the fixed stars shine in the astronomical heavens. COMMUNION OF SAINTS 239 It always takes death to reveal the magnitude of the truly great ones. As you stand at the foot of Mt. Blanc you are not aware of its stupendous size. Move away some forty or fifty miles, then turn and look back, and you will see it cleaving the sky in its stupendous majesty. So the great ones of the earth have to be removed from the earth before we can cor- rectly measure their magnitude. They have to be taken away before we realize what an inspiration and help they were to us while they were with us in the flesh. While they lived in the flesh, they influenced the few with whom they came in personal contact. But, if after their death we find that they were truly great, nothing can prevent the circle of their power from widening until it becomes national; and then, if they are of the first magnitude, they overleap the bounds of their nations, and become not only national but world forces, as Plato, Moses, Homer, and Shake- speare. These men do not die when they cast off the flesh; they then only truly begin to live and communicate themselves to the world. Their spirits go marching on. Shakespeare is more alive to-day than he ever was. For the few who knew and loved him while he was in the flesh there are millions who know and love him to-day. Shakespeare — why, I know Shake- speare better than I know any of you sitting before me. Communion of Saints there always has been since saints have been. As the stars in the heaven communi- cate their light to us in the darkness of the night, so we walk in the paths of Christianity by means of the moral 240 THE CHURCH UNIVERSAL and spiritual light which the saints have shed all along our pathway and communicated to us. Strike out the sun, moon, and stars, and we would have total darkness ; so strike out one by one the great and holy ones who have trod the earth, and we would have moral and spiritual darkness. The Mississippi River is what it is by virtue of its tributaries. The vast volume of water which flows past New Orleans is the commingled and communicated waters of the Missouri, Ohio, Red, and Arkansas rivers, gathered from the Rocky Mountains on the west, the Alleghanies on the East, and the plains and valleys between. Break entirely the communion of these rivers, and where the lordly Mississippi now flows would be a dry bed. So if it were possible to break my communion and your communion with the saints, we would be moral zeros. So you see the transcendent importance of this article of the Creed. It is said that there is a chapel somewhere in Scot- land at which an old and beautiful custom once pre- vailed. The minister and the members of the congre- gation brought candles with them to the church. The Minister lights his candle and places it on the Altar, and then lights the candles of the members of the con- gregation from the candles on the Altar until the chapel is brilHantly lighted. So every saint — and every good person is a saint — is a light sent from God into this world, and while any saint by himself would be a feeble light shining in the spiritual darkness of the world, when they all combine the light of their Christ- begotten goodness, the world of humanity is made COMMUNION OF SAINTS 241 brilliant by the illumination of their spiritual light, as the stars of the heaven light up the earth. Every saint in the world is a fountain of goodness in the world whose fountain does not cease to flow in this world when he passes into the unseen world. He and his influence swell the fountain of goodness in the great world's life. So if you trace back the sources of the world's spiritual life, you will find that it took its rise in the past ages in the saints who lived long ago, through whose communion the sainthood of to-day is fed and kept alive. I have shown you that we are in communion with the saints, living and dead, through at least two channels: the written records and deeds which they have left behind them, and through the lives of living persons whom they have influenced from their day down to the present time, just as the volume of water which flows past New Orleans out into the gulf is the result of the mingling and communion of the waters emptied into the Mississippi; so in my life and in your life there lives something of the lives of all the saints who have lived in the world. So far you have gone with me, and now I would like to lead you still farther on and deeper into this truth of "the Communion of Saints." But before I can do so we must stop for a moment and come to some agree- ment as to what we mean by the word "influence." Take, for instance, the man Moses: does he still live in the world or his influence only ? I reply by asking you what is a man's influence but himself communicated to you ? There you are and here I am, and am I not in communion with you now ? And what is my com- 242 THE CHURCH UNIVERSAL munion with you but the exertion of my influence upon you through outward and visible and inward and in- visible means and agencies of the material and spiritual worlds combined in unity ? Don't you see that here we are plimged again into the very heart of the mean- ing of the Sacramental System of the Church ? And how it tells you, and it alone tells you, how one person is in communion with another person ? How that the outward and visible is the means whereby we are made partakers of the inward and invisible mind and spirit of another ? Take the poet Tennyson, for instance. When you read his poems, are not you and he as much in com- munion as if he were to recite them to you ? Perhaps more so, as the following story will illustrate. You are familiar with that poem called ''Sheridan's Ride." This poem at once sprang into popularity, and it happened to be written and first read as follows, as Mr. Murdoch told me when I met him many years ago in Philadelphia. Mr. Murdoch was giving at one of the theatres in Cincinnati a benefit for the Union Soldiers and Mr. Read wrote this poem for Mr. Murdoch to recite at this benefit which he was giving. It took the audience by storm, for Mr. Murdoch was one of the most fin- ished and powerful elocutionists this country has ever produced. When I heard him read the Witch Scene in Macbeth, I saw witches then, whether there are any witches or not. I would rather hear him read Macbeth than see any troop of actors, which have ever trod the stage, act it. But to return to my story: in all probability, if the COMMUNION OF SAINTS 243 poet Read who wrote the poem had read it to that audience instead of Mr. Murdoch, the chances are that it would not have been half so effective. This reminds me of a similar coincidence in the Bible — Moses and Aaron. Moses was the thinker but of stammering lips, while Aaron was the orator but, perhaps, of few ideas. So Moses spoke through the fluent orator Aaron and influenced the people. Don't you see that our influence is just so much of ourselves as we can project into another as the result of our communion with them ? One can do this best by spoken words, another by written words ; others not by words at all, but by the brush or the chisel; but whatever method is used it is always the sacramental method. Finally take pubHc opinion, that force which mar- shals armies, dethrones kings, and keeps a fretful realm in awe; what is it? An unseen influence, but in that unseen influence there resides the spirit of the nations with might and power transcending all the combined armies of the world. Conscience; what is it but an in- fluence ? Yet in that still small voice is the spirit of God, so that, in the supreme crises of the world, the voice of the people is the voice of God. Have I not made it plain to you that a person's influence is himself, and as much of himself as he can communicate to you? The question now takes this form. Do those whom we call the dead continue to in- fluence us, or we them, after they pass into the unseen world ? Well, since we are Hving and they are living, how is it possible for them not to influence us, and for us not to influence them? We chiefly think so because nine-tenths of the communion we have with one an- 244 THE CHURCH UNIVERSAL other in this world comes through the medium of our gross five senses. I am a spirit and you are a spirit, and just now I am in communion with you and you are in communion with me. How ? Through the vibra- tion of sound. Through this vibration of sound my spirit communes with yours. Now, of course, if we have no other way of communion save through our five senses, then death entirely sunders our communion, and not only sunders our communion, but annihilates us. But are we not spirit as well as matter ? Have we not spiritual facul- ties as well as material faculties, and are we not using our spiritual faculties, which transcend our material faculties, all the time ? Is there not such a thing as prayer ? Do we not pray for one another? Suppose your child was in Europe, would not your prayer be as ef- fective for him as if he were in the next room ? How do you know that death removes your child as far away from you as Europe? There are people living to-day in flesh and who have the power of communi- cating their ideas to other minds, and other minds receiving ideas from them, without using their five senses. But let us first approach this in another way. If a cannon is shot anywhere in the world, the con- cussion causes every particle of matter in the world to vibrate. It will do more than this. It will communi- cate itself to every particle of matter in the universe. So we are taught and so we believe. Since that law holds good in the material world, why does it not hold good in the spiritual world ? Why will not thought COMMUNION OF SAINTS 245 communicate itself to mind as vibration of matter com- municates itself to matter, both acting together, even beyond the milky way ? You are familiar with wireless telegraphy. They will erect one machine here and a thousand miles away they will erect another machine like it, both tuned to the same pitch, and so constructed as to register the most delicate vibrations, with no medium of communion save the universal ether. Are not the spirits of saints in tune, and is not spirit infinitely more delicate than a wireless transmitter and receiver ? So we have a uni- versal material unseen medium that spirits in tune can use as well as wireless telegraphy can use, and is the angel wings which have borne the influence of incarnate spirit to spirit since the communion of saints began. You are familiar with h3^notism — how that one person can, by simply willing it, put another person to sleep miles away. Are not these things well known unto all men, which, whatever use we may choose to make of them, show that our spiritual faculties tran- scend our five senses? As a matter of fact, man's spiritual faculties, ever since he has had spiritual facul- ties, have always transcended his five senses; and man by prayer, ever since man began to pray, has been in communion with God's spiritual world of un- seen spirits, and they with him. Never has the faith of the Christian Church in the effectiveness of prayer, as the universal means of communion of spirit with spirit, been more beautifully expressed than in these perfect verses of the poet Tennyson : 246 THE CHURCH UNIVERSAL "I have lived my life, and that which I have done May He within Himself make pure ; but thou, If thou shouldst never see my face again, Pray for my soul ; more things are wrought by prayer Than this world dreams of ! Wherefore, let thy voice Rise for me Uke a fountain night and day. For what are men better than sheep or goats That nourish a bhnd life in the brain, If, knowing God, they lift not hands of prayer Both for themselves and those who call them friend ? For so the whole round world is every way Bound by gold chains about the feet of God." XIX WHAT THE PROTESTANT EPISCOPAL CHURCH HAS TO CONTRIBUTE TO THE MAKING OF THE CHURCH UNI- VERSAL Nothing so stirs the emotions of the human heart, and nerves the Christian to such high endeavors of heroic action, as the great cause of missions; but in just what its greatness consists is too often obscured and forgotten, so that it is sometimes necessary to call ourselves up with a start and ask, what meanest thou by these words " Missions " and '' Missionary " ? For every one that is sent is not necessarily a missionary. Therefore, whatever the popular meaning of the word ^' missionary " may mean, the real missionary is one who lifts us from a lower to a higher plane, and, by doing so, causes us to make progress. The word " missionary " I know means "one sent," but is not the justification of the "one sent" in that he brings "out of his treasures things new and old," and asks us to supplement the old we have with the new he has, because the new he has is as necessary as the old we have ? Once upon a time we used wooden plows until some man invented a steel plow. This plow he brings is not only a new plow, but it is better and more effective than the wooden plow, and by displacing wooden plows with steel plows the world makes progress. Such a man is a missionary ; 247 248 THE CHURCH UNIVERSAL and it is alone through men who have this spirit that progress is made not only in agriculture but in every department of life. This is why missions is such a great subject, and the missionary is of supreme worth, be- cause through this type of man comes the new and better to displace the old and worse. For the mission- ary is no missionary unless he brings something better than the best we have. This is so self-evident that we freely grant it when we contrast the Christian religion with all others. Progress and improvement is the watchword all along the line in every department of work and life. What higher motive therefore could one set before himself, and what richer reward could one propose to himself, than to take a plant or a human soul and im- prove its environment so that it can pursue its upward course of evolution to that high ideal which God in- tends it to reach? Is not this the motive of all Churches for home missions, and is it not a sufficiently powerful motive, to take the defective forms of Chris- tianity, and in many instances the distorted forms of Christianity, and turn them into the same sweet, natural, and wholesome thing God intends religion to be? The worth of a man or institution is in his ideal; that is, what he stands for and what he represents. To understand, therefore, the ideal of the Protestant Episcopal Church is to discover whether it should have home missions as well as foreign missions. In other words to understand what the Protestant Episcopal Church stands for in this land, that no other body of Christians does, is what we wish to know. In PROTESTANT EPISCOPAL CHURCH 249 what I am going to say I shall simply state its essence and guiding principle through its whole history, which is the contribution it has to give to The Church Universal. The guiding principle and essence of the Protestant Episcopal Church is (catholicity) indusiveness : (i) in conditions of Church membership ; (2) in interpre- tation of the Holy Scripture ; (3) in theology. INCLUSIVE (catholic) CHURCH MEMBERSHIP By Inclusive Church membership we mean that the conditions of Church membership ought to be such as to include all, and exclude none, who are Christians. We believe that nothing should be made necessary for membership in the Church of Christ that is not neces- sary to make one a Christian. Ask yourself what is nec- essary for one to do and believe to become a Christian. The Protestant Episcopal Church makes this its condi- tion of Church membership. We believe that to be a Christian, and what one must do and believe to be a member of the Christian Church, is one and the same question. The priceless heritage of the Protestant Episcopal Church is that its Creed is catholic; that is, contains nothing that is not absolutely necessary for the making of a righteous character. When people make other than this into creeds, then creeds come into contempt ; and you will hear people saying, and rightly saying, that creeds are not only not necessary for salvation, but are the useless impedimenta of Christendom. But no one, when he understands the Creed of the 250 THE CHURCH UNIVERSAL Protestant Episcopal Church, can point to a single statement in it and say that it is not necessary for his salvation. The guiding star of the Protestant Episco- pal Church has been to make its conditions of Church membership so inclusive that it will exclude no man who is a Christian ; not only because no body of Chris- tians has any right to do more than this, for more than this has not been commanded, but also because more than this is sectarian and sinful. That the Protestant Episcopal Church limits the conditions of membership in the Church to the abso- lutely necessary conditions of salvation is seen as soon as we carefully read the four questions which contain the conditions of membership in this Church. 1. Dost thou renounce the Devil and all his works, the vain pomps and glory of the world, with all covet- ous desires of the same, and the sinful desires of the flesh, so that thou wilt not follow nor be led by them ? Answer. I renounce them all ; and, by God's help, will endeavor not to follow nor be led by them. 2. Dost thou believe all the articles of the Christian Faith, as contained in the Apostles' Creed ? Answer. I do. 3. Wilt thou be baptized in this faith? Answer. That is my desire. 4. Wilt thou obediently keep God's holy will and commandments, and walk in the same all the days of thy life ? Answer. I will by God's help. The man who comes with this simple message, as the sum and substance of the Gospel which our Lord Jesus Christ preached, is, to an overwhelming majority PROTESTANT EPISCOPAL CHURCH 251 of the people of the United States, a missionary in every sense of the word. What he brings is new — for they have never heard it Hke this before. All over this country you will find people who are Christians, but the conditions of Church membership exclude them. They are often the best people in their commimities, but they cannot without perjuring their souls join any body of Christians who have made other than the essentials of salvation the conditions of Church membership. Here is the first great contribution which the Protestant Episcopal Church has to con- tribute to the making of the Church Universal. INCLUSIVE (catholic) INTERPRETATION OF SCRIPTURE Not only does the Protestant Episcopal Church stand for an inclusive Church membership, but, neces- sarily growing out of this fimdamental conception, it also stands for an inclusive interpretation of the Bible, and we mean by this that every man has the right to interpret the Bible for himself without for- feiting his membership in the Church of Christ. Occasionally you will find a man who is so possessed with the sectarian spirit as to claim that he, and he only, infallibly interprets the Bible. Then he will gather around him his followers who will agree with his interpretation and say that none other can be right. The next step is to organize themselves into a society and make that man's interpretation of the Bible their creed. The next step is to let no one into this society who does not believe that their preacher 252 THE CHURCH UNIVERSAL or priest only can infallibly interpret the Bible. The last step is to withdraw from the other Christians who cannot accept their infallible interpreter at his own, and their own, valuation, and say, *' We not only claim to infallibly interpret the Bible for ourselves but for everybody else in the world." What must be the inevitable effect upon character trained in such an environment ? When one submits to any such limitations, he must either surrender his mental integrity, or forever bar the way to all further possible mental and spiritual development save that of the sect to which one belongs. Compare a soul brought up in such an environment with one trained and nurtured in a Church inheriting the garnered wisdom and experience of all the past and present, with her face still towards the future as she majesti- cally moves onward into the greater and still greater light of eternal truth, so absolutely assured of her posi- tion that perfect freedom of interpretation of Scrip- ture is granted to all her members, assuring them that their private interpretations will never cause them to lose membership in the Church. The consequence of this has been that for hundreds of years the Protes- tant Episcopal Church has been the home of the greatest scholars in the world. INCLUSIVE (catholic) THEOLOGY Not only is the Protestant Episcopal Church inclu- sive when it comes to Church membership and inter- pretation of Scripture, but also when it comes to theology. In a sectarian church, membership is PROTESTANT EPISCOPAL CHURCH 253 limited to those of only one type of theology. On the other hand the Protestant Episcopal Church is committed to no one type of theology, but includes them all. That which makes the Protestant Episcopal Church worth while, and inevitably insures its future useful- ness and growth, is that it is an inclusive, and not an exclusive, Church. The purpose of the Reformers was to make the Church of England comprehensive enough to include all Christians of the race and exclude none, and in order to do this the Church has never accepted as its authorized teaching the theology of any one man, nor made the interpretation of the Bible a closed thing, any more than the scientists have made the interpretation of nature a closed thing. But there are many men who are not built on this large pattern, for time and again have men arisen in the Church and tried to make their interpretation of the Bible, God, and life, the only thing allowed in the Church, but the Church has always said : no ! first show us that you are infallible, and then we will have no theology but yours ! The result has always been that those who thought they were infallible left the Church, and those who knew they were not infallible staid in the Church, and let other men exercise the same right which they claimed for themselves. I would not, and could not, be a member of any body of Christians who permitted only one type of theology, no matter how true I thought that theology to be. Outside the Protestant Episcopal Church I am most in sympathy with that body of Christians called the Uni- versalists. If I were forced to cast in my lot with any 254 THE CHURCH UNIVERSAL one sect of Christians, it would be with the Universal- ists ; because they beheve, as I do, in the final salva- tion of all. While this is my faith on that disputed point, and while I could not be a member of any church which did not consider me as orthodox as anybody else who did not believe that, I do not claim to be infalUble, and if I did, I would be the blindest of sec- tarians. Furthermore, if I were to cast in my lot with that noble band of Christians called the Univer- salis ts, holding as I do the Catholic conception of the Church of Christ, I would mean by that act to say that no man can be a Christian without being a Univer- salist, which is not true. Furthermore, no body of Christians calling itself the Church of Christ has the right to exclude any one except on the groimd that he is not a Christian. A man can be a Christian and not get fellowship in the Universalist Society, and, there- fore, while I beheve in the final salvation of all, I could never be a member of the Universalist Society. It is too narrow. It includes only one type of men with only one set of ideas, while the Protestant Epis- copal Church includes all sorts and conditions of men who have Christ for their ideal of life. Let us always bear in mind that if the Christian faith is not held in its due proportions, it becomes the most terrific engine ever known for terrorizing, dwarfing, and damning the human soul. But the proportions of the Christian faith as held in the Protestant Episcopal Church neither suppress, destroy, nor terrorize any faculty of the human soul, but stimulate into their highest activity the most harmonious development of every power and faculty of body, mind, and spirit. PROTESTANT EPISCOPAL CHURCH 255 The Protestant Episcopal Church is a body of Christians truly Catholic because it beHeves that the Church of Christ is for all men created in the image of God; for the old and for the young, for the poor and for the rich, for the wise and for the ignorant; that the door of the Church must be kept as wide open as Christ left it; that every one who has Christ for his ideal, and is trying to realize this ideal, is acceptable to God, and ought to be gathered into His one fold; that no private individual interpretation of the Bible is necessary for salvation; that to force all men to accept some other man's interpretation of the Bible, whoever and however great that man may be, is sure, sooner or later, to dwarf and enslave the powers and faculties of the growing human soul ; that every man has the right to interpret the Bible for himself, resent- ing, as an insult to the God who made us, the dictation of any sect, which woiild make their interpretation of the Bible so infallible that, if you do not agree with them, they will turn you out of their societies ; that character rather than emotional excitabihtyis the basis of salvation, and that emotion is of no avail except as one of the necessary factors in the creation of Char- acter ; that salvation is the unfolding of man's trinity of body, mind, and spirit, in harmony unto perfec- tion ; that salvation of the human soul is so vast and sublime a thing that, although it is begun here on earth, it is completed only when we have attained the fulness of the stature of Christ- Jesus in the resurrection; that sectarian theology is a thing which man will forever outgrow, as his mind and spirit go on grow- ing in the image of God; that the rock upon which 2s6 THE CHURCH UNIVERSAL religion is founded is neither the Church nor the Bible, but the incarnation of God as Christ- Jesus our Lord, and through Him in all men who follow in his foot- steps. This is the essence of the contribution which the Protestant Episcopal Church has to make to the Church Universal. And until all bodies of Christians in this land teach these things, home missions by the Protestant Episcopal Church are as necessary as for- eign missions. For the mission of the Protestant Episcopal Church is to reunite the broken fragments of the Christian Church in America into a compre- hensive unity, in which no essential will be left out, and no non-essential will be imposed as a bond of tyranny upon the growing conscience and expanding soul of any Christian, as a condition of membership in the Universal Church of Christ. XX CONFIRMATION A SACRAMENT Some may be surprised that I call Confirmation a sacrament and place it on a par with Baptism and Holy Communion. Let me call the attention of such to the definition of a sacrament, as defined by the Universal Christian Church: (i) an outward and visible sign, (2) of an inward and spiritual grace; (3) through the outward and visible sign we are made partakers of the inward and spiritual grace. This is the definition of a sacrament which I have used throughout this book, and according to this definition, Confirmation is as truly a sacrament as Baptism and the Lord's Supper because it has the outward and visible part — laying on of hands ; the inward and spiritual gift — the grace of the Holy Spirit; imparted to us through this outward and visible sign. No one can possibly doubt this. Let me call your attention to its universality — the grace which comes through the clasp of a friendly hand. The commonness of its occurrence dulls us to its sacramental significance ; but suppose that you were a stranger in a large city, feeling depressed on account of your loneKness, and an intimate friend were sud- denly to meet you face to face and grasp you warmly by the hand, would not the grace of his friendship, 257 258 THE CHURCH UNIVERSAL imparted to you by the clasp of his hand, drive out the spirit of your loneliness and temporary depression ? In like manner the Holy Spirit imparts to us a spiritual blessing through the Christian hand of the Church. I am perfectly well aware that the definition of a sacrament as given in the Catechism contains five parts : (i) An outward and visible sign (2) Of an inward and spiritual grace given unto us ; (3) Ordained by Christ himself, (4) As a means whereby we receive the same, (5) And a pledge to assure us thereof. I have not asserted anywhere in this book that Confirmation has the third part of the definition of a sacrament — ordained by Christ Himself — if this expression means ordained while Jesus was in the flesh, before His crucifixion. And yet some, perhaps, may claim that I have no right to use the word " sacrament " in this sense. They claim that ordained by Christ himself is an essential part of the definition of a sacrament. To such I reply, what does ordained by Christ himself mean? Does not St. Paul say that the powers that be are ordained of God, and that all things are created through Christ Jesus? Before answering this question, however, let us ask and answer two or three other questions. Does the Protestant Episcopal Church teach that there are only two sacraments? Does it teach that any sacrament is absolutely necessary for salvation ? This book has been written in vain if any and every reader cannot answer these questions for himself. Let us once more go over these questions. CONFIRMATION A SACRAMENT 259 Question. How many Sacraments hath Christ or- dained in His Church ? Answer. Two only, as generally necessary to sal- vation; that is to say, Baptism and the Supper of the Lord. Notice that the Protestant Episcopal Church does not say how many sacraments there are in the Chris- tian Church, but teaches that there are two only as generally necessary to salvation — Baptism and the Supper of the Lord. So far as the Church's teaching is concerned there may be a million sacraments ; but in this question the Church is confining herself to the definite and specific object of defining how many sacraments are necessary for the salvation of every- body. In this question she is not concerned at all with whether Orders in the Church or marriage, for instance, are sacraments or of the nature of a sacrament or sacramental rites^ but is teaching how many sacra- ments are necessary for the salvation of everybody. It is not necessary for everybody to be married or be a Minister in order to be saved. If so, the Church would have said that there are four sacraments gen- erally necessary for salvation. The Church teaches, by the question and answer which I have quoted, not that there are only two sac- raments, but that two sacraments are generally nec- essary for salvation; and by the use of the word generally J that these sacraments are necessary for the salvation of all — priest or layman, married or un- married, man, woman, or child — all, everybody with- out any exception. Of course, always remembering that the words "Baptism" and the ''Supper of the 26o THE CHURCH UNIVERSAL Lord" are here used as the Protestant Episcopal Church has defined them, and not as some other bodies of Christians have defined them. The question following the one which I have quoted above is: ''What meanest thou by this word sacra- ment?" And the answer is: ''I mean an outward and visible sign of an inward and spiritual grace given unto us : ordained by Christ himself, as a means whereby we receive the same, and a pledge to assure us thereof." Two expressions are used in this answer which will repay careful examination : a means, and ordained by Christ himself. By saying that these sacraments are a means of our salvation, the Church does not teach that they are the only means; for this would teach that those who die without the sacrament of Baptism can never be saved — which, of course, the Church does not teach. We know that Spirit, water, and blood — the factors used in the sacrament of Baptism; and never forget the difference between baptism and the sacrament of baptism — by their combined action regenerate us. We know the factors which regenerate us in this world, but the Protestant Episcopal Church has never said that one who leaves this world unre- generate cannot be regenerated in the world into which we enter upon leaving this, nor has it presumed to say what factors are used in regenerating one in the world to come. This is not the purpose of the Church MiKtant. Its purpose and commission is to regener- ate human beings in this world by means of Spirit, water, and blood. What does the other expression, ordained by Christ himself J mean ? Certainly not instituted, for only one CONFIRMATION A SACRAMENT 261 of the Christian sacraments was instituted by Christ himself while He was in the flesh — the Supper of the Lord, and the Apostles did not understand that. The sacrament of Baptism was commanded by our Lord only after His resurrection, during the forty days, as He was upon the eve of entering His transcend- ant life which we call heaven. The sacrament of Christian Baptism was not instituted until the descent of the Holy Ghost on the day of Pentecost, which sacrament the Apostles themselves did not understand until their minds were enlightened by the baptism of the Holy Spirit. Our Lord did not institute the sacrament of Holy Baptism; it is an Apostolic Insti- tution, commanded by Christ, and begun by the Apostles under the inspiration and guidance of the Holy Spirit. This is all that the Protestant Episcopal Church can possibly mean when it says that the sac- rament of Baptism is ordained by Christ himself. Precisely in this same sense I believe that the sacra- ment of Confirmation is ordained by Christ. Li the face of the facts it is impossible for any man to say that it was not ordained by Christ. The reality of the sacrament of the Lord's Supper was enacted on the Cross on Calvary for the first time. The supper which Jesus ate with His disciples on the night before His crucifixion at best only anticipated that reality which took place on Calvary and through the Holy Spirit is reproduced in the life of every one who par- ticipates in the salvation of our crucified Lord. What I wish you to see is that if the Holy Spirit, which the Lord promised, had not come, there would have been no sacraments at all in the Christian Church. It was 262 THE CHURCH UNIVERSAL the coming of the Holy Spirit which made Christian sacraments possible. Even the sacramentjof the Lord^s Supper would have perished, had He not come, for although they had witnessed the crucifixion of our Lord they did not know what it meant imtil their minds were enlightened by the gift of the Holy Spirit on the day of Pentecost, when they for the first time saw the significance and necessity of the death of our Lord, and that His sacrifice must be reproduced in our lives — this is the reality, and out of this reahty grows the sacrament of the Lord's Supper. Therefore I unhesitatingly say that only after the coming of the Holy Spirit could the sacrament of the Lord's Supper be instituted in the Christian Church. Furthermore, all the sacraments of the Christian Church were in- stituted through the coming and gift of the Holy Spirit. The sacrament of Baptism was instituted through the coming and gift of the Holy Spirit, an Apostolic Institution commanded by Christ, but not instituted by Him. All of us admit that Confirmation is an Apostolic Institution through the inspiration and gift of the Holy Spirit, but was it like Baptism com- manded by Christ ? Listen to these words: "Appearing unto them by the space of forty days, and speaking the things con- cerning the kingdom of God.'' Who can say that Confirmation was not one of the things commanded by Christ at this time ? No man can say so, and have his words carry any weight. I do not wish, however, to prove anything by the argument of silence, — it is too dangerous, — but just for a moment please grasp CONFIRMATION A SACRAMENT 263 the situation and conditions under which our Lord was acting at this time, and the only possible means of making His commands effective — through the Holy Ghost. '^ Through the Holy Ghost had given com- mandment unto the Apostles . . . speaking of the things pertaining unto the kingdom of God . . . but when they believed Philip preaching the things con- cerning the Kingdom of God . . . the Apostles who were at Jerusalem came down . . . laid their hands on them that they might receive the Holy Ghost. (Acts 1 : 3-5; 8 : 12-16.) No one can doubt that Jesus commanded Confirmation through the Holy Ghost, that the Apostles obeyed this command, and that the Holy Spirit ratifies the gift of his grace. Let us see why Jesus commanded it through the Holy Ghost. He had instituted the sacrament of the Lord's Supper, but they could not understand it, nor reproduce it, un- til the reality had been enacted, and the Holy Spirit had enhghtened their minds with the significance of what it meant; He had commanded the institution of Baptism, but they could not imderstand it, nor obey this command, until the coming of the Holy Spirit, and even then not completely until the baptism of Cor- nelius; how much more then was it impossible for them to understand the sacrament of Confirmation, which our Lord commanded through the Holy Spirit before even they had been baptized by the Holy Spirit and been confirmed by the Holy Spirit? So He says : *'I have many things to tell you, but you are not able to hear them now; but when the spirit of truth is come. He will guide you into all truth, for He shall take of mine and show it imto you.'' I submit 264 THE CHURCH UNIVERSAL that if it was possible for Christ to ordain the sacra- ment of Confirmation in the Christian Church, this is the only way He could have done it, — command it through the Holy Spirit — acting as He was under the limitation of the ignorance of the Apostles. He could ordain it only through the Holy Spirit as He illuminated the minds of the Apostles. The thing He himself did many times — laying on of hands — but they did not imderstand it until the coming of the Holy Ghost, any more than they did the sacrament of Baptism and the sacrament of the Holy Communion. The three sacraments of the Christian Church are all Apostolic Institutions, inspired by the coming and gift of the Holy Ghost, and commanded by Christ through the Holy Spirit ; and will last as long as the Christian Church on earth does because they meet the needs and necessities of the Christian Church, and are true to all the facts of its life. 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