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OUR PULPIT.I

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OUR PULPIT. I THE POWEKFULNESS OF UNITY. By His Grace the Archbishop of Canterbury. Frenchrrl in Sf. Martin's. Church, Leicester, on Tuesday, October 14, on the occasion of the opening of the Church Congress. That they all may be one."—ST. JOHN xvii. 21. THIS is the fifty-fourth Church Con- gress. But it is unlike any that has gone before, because the occasion is alto- gether different from any that our coun- try or any other country has ever known. Reiterate as you will the fact—for fact it is-I question whether most of the men and women alive in England to-day realise in their daily thoughts that to us, as we are, has fallen, is falling, in the providence of God, the trust of being thu people called upon to see things through," at a time which (if we except the years of the Incarnation of the Son of God) is the most important in the whole history of mankind. We ourselves have seen with our eyes the vastest cata- clysm which the human race has known. In profound thankfulness we are stand- ing on its hither side. We are to handle its outcome, and that at once, feeling all the while that it is no isolated event in- dependent of the world's past or future. It is a massive and vital link in the chain of human history, in closest dependence on the past, and carrying, even as we handle it, measureless consequences for the future, These consequences take shape in the widest social and religious questionings, often wholesome and stimi^iting, or again, in our own coun- try, in the industrial nervousness and the perilous unrest which have been test- ing the fibie of England. Think what all that means for a gathering like ours this week: We may express it thus: These years count for more than any ever did. In them what counts most is what is said and done by the English- speaking peoples. Among the English- speaking peoples the foremost organised religious force is-the Church of England. We meet here and now as a great com- pany of that Church's men and women to face our facts and to consider our ways. Verily it matters exceedingly what we think and say. Take that in, and the week's work acquires a new character. What note shall we strike this morning as the dominant? "That they all may be one." I have taken as a text some words of our Lord's High Priestly prayer spoken in the presence of the little group gathered under the Paschal moonlight on the night before He died. That they all may be one that the world may believe that Thou didst send me." I suppose that in the religious talks and writings of to-day no single phrase is so ceaselessly appealed to, so constantly taken as a motto. And yet I sometimes wonder whether in habitual parlance we may be a little mishandling the woi-ds- twisting them a little from what He meant. No preacher here to-day but uses them as a reminder of the baneful- ness of schism, and of how our witness becomes ineffective in the world just by reason -of our unhappy outward divisions. That is now a truism. But truisms become so because they are true, and that ideal of oneness and fellowship in doctrine and practice is, no doubt, covered and stamped by our Lord's em- phatic words. But was it the primary meaning of those words? Was it the wrongness of schism, in the usual sense of that term, which was, if we may reverently say so, chiefly in His Mind that evening in the Upper Room? Per- haps so. I do not know. But it is at least possible that they, have a wider range, and that the thoroughness and concentration of effort by Christian people, rather than unity of doctrine or of ordered system, is the primary refer- ence in His prayer. Rival Compartments. Of course, it is amiss that we should now find ourselves penned into sundered and even rival compartments as regards our ordered ministry and our handling of the Sacraments of the Gospel of our One Lord. We long intensely that it should be otherwise.. It must be a fault or weakness in our vision which so dis- torts the proportion of things as to make it apparently essential to honest men that there must be these separate folds for the nurture or the usefulness of the one flock. Pray daily, strive daily, for such clearance of Christian men's spiritual eyesight as may without sacri- fice of honest allegiance to truth bring lbout a unity of ordered action in wor- ihip and in work. So many good men are, from different standpoints, looking bhitherward, and striving after and pray- ing for it. that these barriers to a com- /Ã pleter unity must, under His good Hand, give way, however wayward and pur- blind we His instruments may be. The Main Purpose. But I seem to see a peril that in our search for a Unity of Order among the holders of the one Faith we may leave, not indeed unremembered, but un- attended ho in the background, the main purpose of it all, the work which is to be wrought in the world and upon the world by the disciples of Christ viewed as a whole and working as a whole. We want to be able to make more of the real ononess which, thank Giod, is already ours, the oneness both in faith and in potential action of all who can and do kneel to Christ as their living Lord. We want to dwell upon and foster the power of that fellowship for united cor- porate impact upon the world, or pene- tration of the world, at an hour so tre- mendous, so inexpressibly difficult as this. That need not, it will not, inter- fere with complete loyalty to the dis- tinctive truths which, in our smaller circles within the Church of God, we conscientiously hold dear. The corpor- ate life which belongs definitely to our own Churchmanship claimsI need not say it here—our whole-hearted alle- giance. But that allegiance acquires an element of pml if it becomes so dispro- portioned as to obliterate or mar our loyalty to the larger whole, the Christian fellowship, the God-guided life and energy of all who profess and call them- selves Christians. The Question of Union For a closer organic and intelligent and visible unity among the sections of the Church of Christ we unfalteringly pray. The manner in which that out- ward visible unity in details of faith and order can come about, and the practical steps which we can take thitherward, perhaps in use of pulpit or even Altar, I do not discuss to-day. The subject is of great moment. It occupies at present, as we have seen in recent weeks, the minds of some of our foremost guides and thinkers. It will be handled this week in the Congress Hall by men whose grasp of sound principles, historic and doctrinal, is well mated with practical experience. And nine months hence, if it please God, some two hundred and fifty or three hundred fathers of the Church, gathered at Lambeth from every quarter of the globe, will endeavour, under the guidance of God the Holy Spirit, to bring to bear upon the whole question of the interrelation of the Church's different parts, the mature judgment—I am bold erumgh to say the right judgment—for which we per- sistently arid expectantly pray. That being so, I deliberately do not attempt a dictum this morning on the practical questions, under debate in Convocation or elsewhere, as to any enlarged use, occasional or regular, of our pulpits, or, if I may recall an old phrase, the fenc- ing of our Altars. For the reasons I have given we must wait a little longer for formal reply to the questions raised in regard to these administrative matters. Let no one fear that they will be indefinitely shelved. The point at issue is practical. It requires settle- ment, whether for or against any modifi- cation of existing usage.' But it must, like other questions, be fed calmly. Impetuosity on either side will not suffice. The war influence is complex. We are only, it has been said, stagger- ing back into equilibrium," and we have an increased tendency to impatience. It is natural, it is inevitable that men who feel acutely anxious about the matter, and who have no special burden of responsibility to carry, should be in- tolerant, even heatedly intolerant, of de- lay in reaching a clear-cut settlement. It belongs to some of us to endure that charge, so only that, as responsible officers, we be not in truth negligent or slothful or over-timorous. The danger of short cuts is proverbial. A rough- and-ready handling, an indignant promptness may easily, on one side or the other, hurt sensitive nerves in the bodv corporate, and grieve the very gentlest and most finely-fashioned of those to whom we owe, perhaps, the very nurture of o<tr souls. We shall learn the right balance of truth, the rMit balance of advantage, but it may take a little time. We shall find the right road, but it will not necessarily be by a short cut. Different Roadways of Faith. There is another thing which I desire to say. We think of our differences mainly as denominational, and we ascribe them chiefly, and quite rightly, to hereditary or traditional sunderings into distinct camps, some of which had an almost accidental origin. But we make too little, I think, of deep-down differences of temperament, which create 1 independent lines of cleavage, if cleavage it really be., inside as well as outside our own Communion. Some of us are prone to forget by what different roadways the truths of God-yes, even the deepest, the most sacred, the most unchallenged truths—come home to men of different make and temperament. To one type of Christian thinker, an Athanasius, a Thomas Aquinas, a Calvin, a Pearson, a Liddon, the revealed clepositum possesses from the first, or gains by degrees, a pre- cision, a positiveness, an accurate fitting-in of part to part, which give to the word credo a character, or rather a substance, complete, clear-cut, and satis- fying beyond all cavil or hesitation. To another group of Christian thinkers, not less capable, not less reverent, not less loyal, the great verities of our Holy Faith come home in a different way and permeate and hold the recipient in a different manner. An Augustine, -a Pascal, a Joseph Butler, a Frederick Maurice, a Westcott, has a faith as deep, as impregnable, as dominant over his whole life as any one of those whom I have named. But the inspiration—I use the word in its truest sense-the. in- spiration given them is of a different kind. Put off thy shoes from off thy feet, for the place where thou standest is holy ground." Some here will remember how Joseph Lightfoot, Bishop of Durham, speaking in 1879 of Joseph Butler, Bishop of Durham one hundred and twenty years before, refers to the Vision of God granted to such men as he. 'They shall see His face.' The vision is only inchoate nowj we tateli only glimpses at rare intervals, .Revealed in the workings of Nature and the processes of history, revealed in the lives of God's saints and heroes, revealed above all in the record of the written word and in the Incarnation of the Divine Son." To the one set of thinkers the light glows no whit less-radiantly than to the other. The life is permeated by the same divine influence, but it comes naturally to the thinker or teacher of that type to express his faith in a rather different way; to clothe his definitions in other phrase ology. Dr Westcott was never tired of reminding us There are no outlines in nature," and the paradox is suggestive in our controversies. We have no right to expect of either group the tempera- ment, or the temperamental handling of great questions, which belongs to the other. If we carelessly or inadvertently suppose that the message of our Bob* Faith will come in the same way to every teacher, or every learner, who finds in it the lodestar for his life, we are for- getting the Apostolic teaching about the "divers manners," the TroKvrootrro^ of 0 Revelation of the living God. I am quite sure that these thoughts can be profitably borne in mind just now. The Larger Fellowship, I have dwelt too long upon this. The thought which I desire to leave with you, if it be possible, is of another sort. It is the recollection of the intense reality i and practicalness of the larger felloiv- ship which belongs to and ought to be used by Christian folk as such. That may sound the merest commonplace; but I do not think it is. It belongs in a marked degree to this great time. Our eyes are opened to the worth of it, and to the possibilities of it, as they never were before. It goes down to first prin- ciples. It goes out to wide horizons. In the fields of Picardy and Flanders, in the rest-billets behind the shell-swept salient of Ypres, or the scarred valleys of the Somme, or on the hills that overhang Thessalonica, thoughtful men have faced again and yet again the question why we were at war. And to those who were capable of such vision the issues at stake have loomed so large as to unite us- in our vision of them, and to dwarf into insignificance many sundering things that had in quieter days looked almost vital. If it was right to join in and to maintain that strife of unutter- able horror, it could only be because the issue was gigantic, and common to us all; nothing less than securing for Christendom, and through Christendom for the world, a juster, nobler standard of life and conduct, based imperishably upon the principles for which Jesus Christ had lived and died, bequeathing to men the power to secure them in His Name. Is there any one of us but has a new notion of fellowship, a wider horizon than be had six years ago? Thou turnest man to destruction; a,gain Thou sayest, Come again, ye chil- dren of men." We are coming again" into the old roadway, but it is, or it ought to be, with a new horizon, and with links of fellowship and stan- dards of proportion different from those of other days. Thousands of men have brought back to English homes and clubs and offices a wholly new conception of the vastness, the complexity, the living, glowing interest of the problems of Christendom nineteen hundred years after the uplifting on the Judsean hill of the Cross which was to draw all men- —all men—iMato Him. There are people, no doubt, who have just slipped back into the old groove, and whose daily talk keeps itself to the pettiest local or per- sonal things. But, happily for the days that are dawning, there are thousands and thousands to whom that is not so -who have acquired a new kind of in- terest in the whole contemporary life- 01 our time, who now turn readily to newspaper columns which they used for- merly to skip, and who have grown keen and alert about peoples and regions which only a few years ago were to them mean- ingless or uninteresting names. Or again, there are efforts and movements and calls, born of or fostered by the war, which need for their right understand- ing some notion of a far larger fellow- ship than has habitually held a place in our thoughts. Phrases are in common and rather superficial use about the growth of democracy," making the world safe for democracy," and so on. If we get down to the root of these ideas, they resolve themselves, for Christian thinkers at least, into a larger under- standing of fellowship in its worthiest, soundest sense, that they all may be one "-a fellowship of classes and groups and policies, carrying with it a mutual and reciprocal service of manhood and womanhood, working to- gether for the good of both. The Outlook At this hour it is all perplexing in a high degree. Some of us, I at least for one, looked forward, say last Christmas, to conditions of resettlement very dif- ferent. very far less complex and omi- nous, than those which we are facing in these autumnal months. We have been confronted in these last weeks by what were more than possibilities of the very gravest industrial catestrophe. To discuss to-day and in this place the rights and wrongs of those anxious days would be in the literal sense of the word impertinent." Weighty words have been uttered by the nation's foremost spokesman upon the vital principles which were at issue. The welfare and the will of the community as a whole, and not of any one section of it, must be paramount. But that carries the conse- quence that it rests with the community as a whole to see that no section of it is unfairly used. What is practically our whole people has, with admirable temper and common sense, stood firm for those two principles. They can claim sanc- tion human and Divine. They are asserted not least decisively by the Church of Christ. Into the details of their application we could not profit- ably enter' now. They must receive separate and full and, if need be, re- current handling, and free discussion, the freer the better. To nibble slightly at their surface would be worse than use- less. Our manhood has wrought and fought and faced death together. We are not going to be sundered in our efforts now. But .cast one look round, as on a day like this we are forced to look round, on the further horizon. The clouds loom dark indeed. Poor distracted Itussia, the ally from whom so many of our fellow-countrymen expected things immeasurably great when the war began, now maimed and bloodstained, and rent with internecine strife. If ever there was need for strong, sane, Chris- tian leadership it is there. And the Far East, with weird or tragic possibili- ties of the upgrowth of some truculent dominance resting on quite other titan a Christian basis, operating on quite other than' Christian lines. Or again, the bewildering and yet absorbing pro- blems of Illdia-our own India-or the perpetual tangle of the Nearer East, or the closer and more visible and tangible problems of the stricken Germany and its border nationalities. It would be easy to run on. Who that looks out on the tossing maelstrom of world-confusion and world reconstruction but must be solemnised and saddened by an almost paralysing sense of our inability to judge, or act, or even know? The Living Pulsing Force. Now for our message. Piercing into the centre of these thoughts comes appro- priately the memory of how our Divine Master expressed it in His prayer- "tThat they all may be one that the world may believe that Thou didst send Me." There we have it. Trans- late into terms of our Holy Faith the in- junctions to fellowship, the nature of the fellowship, the power of the fellow- ship. It becomes, when so translated, the living, pulsing force of His banded followers, telling actively, it might even come to be irresistibly, upon the world which He died to redeem. "That they all may be one." United in an unflinch- ing, untiring effort to make clear and strong and beautiful in word and act the message of His deathless love- united for that task in communion with Him, as week by week we show forth His death till He come; united eagerly with one another because such union is strength-" that the world may believe that Thou didst send Me." Are these mere vague or platitudinous words? I am quite sure that they are not. Every- where astir among men is the sense of, or the craving for, fellowship. In the Church of Christ, too, the desire is alight with a fresh flame. And the war has led us to a definite and careful scheme for an actual, not theoretical but actual, League of Nations. Take all these things, these movements, together. Bring in, explicitly and reverently, the prayer of Jesus Christ. Let our welding into new fellowship be something far more definite than a drawing together of men of goodwill. The war-worn peoples of the earth, the whole creation of men, seem to be groaning and travailing just now, waiting in earnest expectation for something. For what? Not for political schemes, however well-drawn, but for the manifestation of the Sons of'God," the arising of a force, in Europe and in the world, claiming its place as la body of loyal sons of a living loving Father, revealed to them as Father, by His son, Jesus Christ our Lord, in fealty to Whom we go forth to do His Will, to set wrong things right, as He shall show us how. We can do it if we will, not « as citizens, but explicitly as Christ's en- listed soldiers and servants. Only thus —so I, at lerst, believe— can even the League of Nations, with the best inten- tions and the fairest rules you like, be- come an effective force among men. What the Congress Can Do. What is our Congress this week? It is a great muster of His sons and daughters, banded together under Sacra- mental promise, gathered for the gird- ing of their loins to His service at an hlmrof absolutely unique opportunity in the story of the world. We can dp something, surely, to further the fulfil- ment of that prayer. Some things lie outside our power to settle here, but visions there are of what might come to pass. Take one example-prominent, tar-reaching, obvious. Is it an imprac- ticable dream to think of a new welding together of His servants in many lands, avowedly, distinctively, as men and women loyal to the Lord Jesus Christ, taking in hand a task clamorously binding &upon us at this hour, the task of stemming the inflow or abaiting the need of famine, and then famine-sickness, which is threaten- ing vast regions of Europe and Asia in the coming year to a degree per- haps never known before? But that would not be all. Let the world once find us banded as followers of Christ,, and (fur impact, our- assault upon the evil things about us would take ia dif- ferent character, and "tell in a new way. To begin with our own land. Open-eyed and determined, we should as one united force face the wrongs and devilries. We should as Chris's folk face the dark places of intolerable hous- ing, urban or rural. We should fooe the dens of corrupting, desolating, bes- tial vice. We should face the enticing haunts of an intemperance which we have learned new methods of restrain- ing without wrong to any man. These are plain and obvious foes. To van- quish them will tax our courage and our resource. But there are enemies more difficult to con(Aiie,r than even these. The noisy or flaunting vice of pavement or brothel has in the war years stained and harmed our manhood, both at home and overseas. Is impurity less shame- ful, even if it be less cowardly, when, under the disguise 'and misnomer of mere gaiety, it penetrates here and there into homes of luxury and super- ficial refinement, insidiously lowering for many the older standard of purity and modesty, and reticence and self-re- straint, and leading at the least a few into darker ways, sometimes down to the very depths of Satan P It is notably in fighting such c.orrupting wrongs as that that the avowed fellowship erf the whole Christian community as such, our abso- lute oneness in Him Who loved us, and. prayed for us, will be of priceless value. Let it be avowed and apparent what and Whose our standard is. Let us bo of one voice and one resolve in uphold- ing it, tht the world may believe that Thou didst send Me." The Subtler Sins. Then there are faults more subtle and more ^pervading, their bane being the greater because they infect good people unperceived. Instinctively, habitu- ally, we divide wrongdoings into two grades—the coarse and more open wrongs, the works of the flesh which are manifest in naked deformity and, on the other hand, the "respectable" faults, if we may use such' a word, which belong to good people's lives—the pride, the selfishness, the quiet jealousy, the unkindly talk, or, again, the sheer laziness and slackness and waste of power, talents, of capacity, education, opportunity left unused, hid in a nap- kin. Alertness to detect these sins is in accord with our Lord's, so to speak, assorting of human life and human wrong-doing. He saw unerringly how these can flourish in good people's lives, and for these accordingly were His sternest rebukes. Woe unto you, Scribes and Pharisees—could we perhaps trans- late it churchgoers, oommunicants Church Congress folk"? Or, again, Inasmuch -as ye did it not unto these .ye did it not unto Me." If the great cohort of His servants could stand together, solidly banded to detect, in themselves at least, these subtler sjnq and to fight them in His name, why then our whole life as Christian people would be a. different thing. The vision from 'the Upper Room would then draw nearer to fulfilment: That they all may be one that the world may believe that Thou didst send Me." And so we end as we began—the incompar- able greatness of this hour in the world's story, the unique opportunity for a new setting of our ole life— new conditions, new visions, new re- solves. A Congress gathered to face these facts-and in His time and His way to make ready for the harvest. Yes, and in due season ye shall yeap, if yo faint not." .r.;