THE question of sacraments forms a dividing line, not only between the actual separate Christian organisations, but between various groups within single organisations. There is still division on the number of the sacraments, though the discussion here is not so acute as it formerly was, and in all statements put forward in connection with unity it is proposed to recognise the two great sacraments of Baptism and the Eucharist without robbing lesser rites of the name.¹ Again there are still those who deny that the sacraments are necessary to-day. Both the Society of Friends and the Salvation Army, though miles asunder in their outlook on religion, are organised representatives of this class, but by no means represent its sum total. Then there are those who--so far as Baptism and the Eucharist are concerned--retain the rites of these two sacraments, feeling bound to do so because our Lord instituted them, but deny to them any sacramental value either of an objective or subjective character, giving to them a merely legalistic interpretation. Baptism and the Lord's Supper are commands--they must be obeyed; they must be attended to. [169] Some even go so far as to regard them as restrictions put upon the human will. It cannot be too strongly emphasised that this legalistic view of Baptism and the Eucharist leads to ritualism of the worst type, though those who hold such a view would strongly deny that they were in any sense ritualists, believing that ritualism is solely bound up with questions of millinery and processions.

      How are we to escape from this confusion? How are we to unite these opposite views in one Church of the Living God? Is there any way out of the maze? Surely the only way is to examine the situation historically. What was the Church intended to be? What was she in her first age, and what has she continued to be at her best throughout the ages?

      The older Protestantism was frankly non-sacramental. It held to the two sacraments and in places insisted on a "high" view of the Eucharist, but there was always within it the tendency to interpret the rites in a legalistic way, and a legalistic interpretation is opposed to a sacramental interpretation. Catholicism at certain stages has been as frankly legalistic, especially in its interpretation of the Atonement with which the two great sacraments are bound up. Quakerism, within Protestantism, though it rejected the two rites which the rest of Christendom retained, was in a certain sense sacramental in its outlook; for mysticism has never been able to dispense entirely with symbolism, and the main trend of Quakerism has been away from that form of Puritanism which sought to divorce religion from the whole of life. [170] And, after all, this is the real battle-ground between a sacramental and a non-sacramental Christianity--is Christianity concerned with the whole of life, with every day and not only with Sunday, with business as well as Church; is God everywhere, in all and through all, or is He confined to special acts and special attitudes?

      The sacramental principle forbids us to divorce religion and God from the common acts of everyday life. Sacramentalism is the mean between absolute transcendence or Deism, and absolute immanence or Pantheism. There are still those who take up the older Protestant attitude towards sacraments, but in orthodox Protestant circles there has been a distinct moving away from this position. Dale was a fore-runner in this movement,² and was ably followed by Dr. Forsyth, of whom Principal Mozley has recently said: "Whenever he dwelt on Christian institutions, if one may use the last word in the widest sense, and so as to include the Bible, he was ready to strike the sacramental note. For instance, he asks the question, What is the meaning of an effective, a valid ministry? and he answers: 'It means sacramental. That word is my keynote. The ministry is sacramental to the Church as the Church itself is sacramental to the world,' and its sacramental work lies in the conveyance of the Gospel of which it is the 'official trustee.'³ So arises his insistence on the sacramental character of preaching and his fear lest it should be lost, for 'to be effective our preaching must be sacramental. It must be an act prolonging the Great Act, mediating it and [171] conveying it.'⁴ And as he protested against any view of preaching which cut at the roots of its vital dependence upon and reverberation of and prolongation of the Gospel, so he protested against any view of Baptism and 'the Lord's Supper which reduced them to memorial rites."⁵

      Professor Cooper in Scotland was an able advocate of the return to sacramental values, and we have witnessed the same return in an exaggerated form in the Free Catholic movement in this country.

      Liberal Protestantism from an historical examination of the New Testament documents was bound to admit that the Church of the first century was sacramental in its outlook, but disliking both sacramentalism and supernaturalism which it too readily equated, it regarded Pauline Christianity as a perversion of the teaching of Jesus, and so retained--not the old, but a more ethical Protestantism, on the grounds that such a religion was taught by Jesus Himself. But the later movement in Protestantism--the Eschatological--has gone even further. Liberal Protestants could not support their position without regarding the Synoptic Gospels as unhistorical. The mind of the Church was reflected in these Gospels, and they could not be taken as authentic records of the sayings and doings of Jesus. The Eschatological school has demonstrated that the Liberal Protestant arguments against the Gospels are themselves unhistorical, and that Jesus is in the main what He is portrayed to be in the Synoptics. It is not St. Paul who was [172] mistaken, but Jesus Himself.⁶ Historically, however, Jesus cannot be taken as a Teacher of ethics apart from His doctrine of redemption, and His stress upon sacramental values. Both St. Paul and our Lord were anti-legalistic in their teaching about religion, but they were not anti-sacramental.

      Christianity is founded upon the greatest of all sacraments; for Nature and revelation are in the truest sense sacramental: Christianity is founded on the Incarnation--God manifest in the flesh. The channel of the spiritual in the highest of all revelations was physical. And it is not only Catholics who claim that the Church and the sacraments are extensions of the principle of the Incarnation. "The Church then is the continuation of the Incarnation, the expression of Christ in the world, His body, that by which His personality comes from time to time into human relationship with mankind, just as the body of any individual man is that by which his personality has dealings in the material sphere with other men."⁷ It is impossible to read the Colossian and Ephesian epistles without realising that this was St. Paul's view of the Church, and for two centuries whilst the Church remained non-sacerdotal (in the magical sense) it was positively sacramental. But sacramentalism is not higher pantheism. In the former the physical symbol is conceived of as the channel of the Grace of God, the means of its manifestation in time and space; God is beyond and above the symbol, at once outside it and yet acting through it; [173] limiting Himself and yet not limited by the symbol in the sense that the symbol is God. The symbol mediates God, but is not in itself either God or part of God. Thus, whilst it is true in a sense that God is everywhere, yet the very idea of sacraments necessitates the manifestation of God through specific acts and at specific points such as the Incarnation, the Church, Baptism and the Eucharist. Immediacy of contact with God is not possible in the absolute. There must of necessity be means of grace. Even mystics have never been able to leave the realm of symbolism entirely. So says Dean Inge: "The religious attitude is one of the highest conceivable seriousness. Its subject is reality in the final and highest sense. It can acknowledge its own imperfection, but not acquiesce in its illusions. It reverences its symbols while admitting their inadequacy. We know that they are not creations of our fancy, like artistic symbols, but spontaneous projections of a deeper faculty which we dare not trifle with. Hence comes that reluctance to subject religious symbols to rationalistic tests, which we observe everywhere in human history. If we remember this peculiar attitude of the religious consciousness towards symbolism, we shall find a ready solution of one of the apparent inconsistencies in mystical thought, which even a sympathetic critic of mysticism such as Royce regards as a fundamental contradiction. I mean the fact that mysticism, the differentia of which is the craving for immediacy in the knowledge or vision of God is at the same time intimately associated with symbolism. Mysticism has no love for symbols that are merely [174] symbols--'loose types of things through all degrees.' It rests in no half lights; it longs to tear the heart out of every experience. It longs to dive into the hidden reality behind phenomena, and in so far as it succeeds, it treats the phenomena as symbols. But the temper which makes playthings of symbols--which finds an æsthetic or fanciful pleasure in them--is above all things alien to it."⁸

      Again, the sacramental principle is not magical. True it has often been so put forward in the name of Catholicism. But if, in the words of Mr. A. E. J. Rawlinson, sacraments are the "effectual channels of the grace of God, and not merely aids to the imagination, symbols of corporate aspiration, or potent occasions of spiritual self-suggestion,"⁹ they can only be so regarded for those who approach them in a right attitude. They are channels of spiritual grace and as such demand a spiritual response on the part of those who seek the grace of God in them. God is a Person and personal contact is not possible without real fellowship. At least the New Testament knows nothing of magical or mechanical conceptions of those greater rites we call sacraments, and such views in themselves are alien to the true sacramental principle. Mechanical and magical views of sacraments rob them of any value in the intellectual or moral realm, and in the New Testament the sacraments are great instruments of moral reform as well as a means of sealing belief. [175]

      When we accept this wider view of sacraments as the channel of God's revelation and grace to us, and when moreover we return to an ancient conception which has been partly lost, in the West,¹⁰ the idea of the Holy Spirit in relation to the sacraments, the question of the number, whether there be two or seven or more, will not assume the prominence it has hitherto done. As the Bishop of Peterborough says: "We have yet to think out a clear theology of the Holy Spirit in relation to the sacraments, but at every point this need appears, and a truer understanding of this aspect of sacramental worship would have saved the Church from many exaggerations and limitations."¹¹ It is because this side of the sacramental teaching of the early Church has been neglected that so many to-day try to get away from sacramentalism altogether, or at least to limit the number of the sacraments to two. "The sacramental teaching of the ancient Church writers loses the appearance of exaggeration which attaches to it in the judgment of many modern believers when it is viewed in the light of the ancient doctrine of the Person and Work of the Holy Spirit. Men who held that the creator Spirit, who is the living energy of God, dwells in the Holy Catholic Church and is operative in her ministerial acts, could find no words adequate to express their sense of the greatness of His work in the sacraments."¹²

      If the sacraments are regarded as "the direct [176] working of God the Spirit on things material, to make them the expression and vehicle of things spiritual,"¹³ we can hardly limit their number to two. The quarrel about the two or seven sacraments is largely a quarrel about what the name implies. Nor can we definitely limit the number of the sacraments to seven. Ordination is either sacramental or it is an empty form; but preaching is just as sacramental. The old distinction, "ministry of the Word and sacraments" is scarcely a true one. Moreover with our present-day knowledge of psychology and medicine, we cannot deny a place to the sacramental healing of men's bodies.

      But it is not about these lesser sacraments that the battle for unity will be fought. We shall all recognise that they are lesser, and that it is about the two great sacraments of Christ's institution that we must come to agreement. Baptism and the Lord's Supper were sacraments of unity in the Apostolic days, and it is around these two great symbols¹⁴ of our faith that the Church will again gather itself unto unity. We shall look at some aspects of these two sacraments as related to the unity of the Church.

      We have already discussed in general the unifying influence of Baptism and the Eucharist,¹⁵ and seen [177] how in St. Paul's Christianity, unity was centred in these two institutions, how they stood as barriers to division. Sacramental Christianity is essentially corporate as opposed to more individual types, whether mystical or otherwise. Sacraments stand, as a witness to the fact that "God is no respecter of persons." What is the possession of one may be the possession of all. They make no demand which cannot be fulfilled by, every individual human being. Mystical experiences may come to some, and add to the value of our corporate Christianity, but the mystic way is essentially individualistic, and had it been the normal way of following God and receiving His revelation it would have shut out the majority of men from contact with Him. The sacramental way is for all.

      On the corporate side again, sacraments are essentially bound up with worship. "If Christian worship, on one side, is a revelation of God, then it follows that sacraments must be so as in a peculiar sense. For we cannot separate worship from sacrament. Every attempt to do so has resulted in emptying worship of life and isolating the sacraments in an atmosphere of 'magic' which may be a natural reaction against the exaggeration of their use as exclusive channels of Divine grace, but which ends in depriving them of all real significance."¹⁶

      Neither in the old nor New Testaments is the worship of God revealed to us as something individualistic only. "No man liveth unto himself" is true also of worship--it is true of the whole life of the Church. We may stay at home and read [178] our Bibles if we like, or we may be content to be fed like sheep, to merely drink in the words of some soul-stirring preacher; but in so doing we are not following the way of Christ. Christianity may begin with the individual, but it is corporate in its out-working. We may be wholly concerned with the salvation of our own souls either as puritans or as ascetics--but if we are He has warned us we shall lose them. And so Christianity from the first was a fellowship, and this fellowship was realised first of all in corporate acts of worship--the Breaking of the Bread and prayers.¹⁷ And Christians everywhere are coming to realise the value of the Eucharist as the great corporate act of worship. "Nothing is more striking in the Church life of the present day than the revival of the centralness, if I may say so, of the Eucharist, as the supreme meeting-place of God and Man."¹⁸

      There are things about us which remain always the same; things in our make-up which cannot change. We are all creatures of intellect, of emotion and of will. Nothing can alter this. We remain as our forefathers were, and in this we are of the common stock of humanity. Differences of temperament there are, and these are the marks of personality, but we cannot change our essential humanity. And so the religion which is to make its appeal to humanity is one which will satisfy each of these three sides of man's nature.

      Christianity has often been presented as a mere matter of intellect, and as such has then been non-sacramental. Again, it has been presented as [179] a matter of emotionalism, and as such has had little moral force. There are those who wish to present it as a matter of will and to rob it of its intellectual values and its emotional appeal. But Christianity is none of these things, or rather it is all of them. What Professor Peake has said of the Bible is true of Christianity--"Let us remember that there are other values besides this intellectual value of giving to us the truly accurate doctrines. There is such a thing as emotional value."¹⁹ And it is the two great sacraments which conserve this emotional value in Christianity more than anything else. It is no accident that they are both essentially connected with the Cross and redemption; that they both are to be preceded by true penitence born of love, and that from earliest times they have been the means of the expression of those feelings which are most sublime. God is not without emotion, neither is His religion; but apart from sacraments there is danger that emotionalism may develop into sentimentalism.

      It may be asked what is the intellectual value of sacraments? Both Baptism and the Eucharist are activities--they are bound up with the will. Besides being channels of God's grace they have covenant values. Baptism is the beginning of that obedience which makes our wills His, and the Eucharist, in a sense, is its continuance. Now in days when we have left behind the old departmental psychology, it will not be denied that the will is intimately bound up, both with the emotions and intellect. Action is the completion of all operations [180] of the mind, and activity itself reacts both upon cognition and feeling in the way of sealing a belief or emotion with which it is concerned. The states of cognition and emotion, it would seem, never pass over into the sum total of life and have their full effect upon the personality until they are translated into activity. It is here that Baptism and the Eucharist serve to fix the intellectual and emotional states, which have to do with conversion and sanctification. This is so, not only individually, but collectively: a man who before witnesses in the old heathen world had submitted to the rite of Christian Baptism was not likely in a few days to go back upon his profession. We know how under fierce persecution belief and emotions, which had been so sealed, remained firm. Pagans in their fight against Christianity recognised the power of activity as a seal to belief. It was not for nothing that they strove to persuade the Christian prisoner to cast a single grain of incense in the direction of the Emperor's statue; moreover, they did not fail to attempt to force this result by working upon the emotions, and they knew full well that once the emotion had been translated into activity the return to heathenism was complete.

      On the corporate side this sealing of intellectual and emotional states is also quite evident. It is quite clear that Christianity remained unified for at least two generations without either a body of Scripture, such as we possess, or without anything but the simplest of creeds, which creed did not enshrine some of its most real beliefs. How then was Christianity maintained in a unified form? Only [181] because its faith was sealed in two forms of activity, two redemption rites, two sacraments--Baptism and the Eucharist.

      The door to the intellect is through the senses, and on the religious side our knowledge of God may be mediated to us through all our senses. Sight and hearing are the chief senses through which this knowledge is mediated, but quite reverently we may claim that there is a knowledge of God communicated through the sense of smell, in the perfume of the wild flower. The sacraments not only mediate knowledge of God to us through the sense of sight, but also through that of touch. There are some who would have their knowledge of God mediated to them through hearing alone--whose sole idea of worshipping God is to hear a sermon, but in the New Testament, at least, sight and touch have an important part to play.²⁰ [182]

[EOCU 169-182]