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was no slight comfort to Lave it declared, by the one authority which all Christians acknowledged as Divine, that there were those living on the earth on whose judgment in these disputed matters the Church might rely with implicit confidence. In the highest sense of all, doubtless, this judgment was exercised by Him alone who taught " as one having authority, and not as the scribes," and who on the Mount of the new law drew the line be- tween His own commandments and what was said by them of old time. In a lower sense it was exercised, and has ever since been exercised, by all those who by their teaching or their lives, by their words or their example, have impressed the world more deeply with a sense of what is Christian holiness and what is Christian liberty. In an intermediate sense, it has been exercised by those whose special gifts or opportunities have made them in a more than ordinary degree the oracles and law- givers of the moral and spiritual society in which they have been placed. Such, above all, were the Apostles. By their own lives and teaching, by their Divinely sanctioned judgments on in- dividual cases (as St. Paul on Elymas or the incestuous Cor- inthian) or on general principles (as in their Epistles), they have, in a far higher sense than any other human beings, bound and loosed the consciences, remitted and retained the sins, of the whole human race for ever.
The Jewish scribe kept the treasury of knowledge. His keys were his powers of reading and understanding and applying the law of God. He was the expositor of God's word, the interpreter of God's mind, the commentator on God's counsels, the teacher of the truth made known to him by God. He hound the things of God — His laws, His ideals of life and duty, His lawful sanctions, His sacred and mystic revelation of Himself — upon men's hearts and consciences. He loosed men's minds and wills from any bondage, or any tyranny of unrighteous laws, and he enabled them to refrain from indulging in things forbidden. What the Jewish scribe with the keys of knowledge and truth and duty was to the Law, the Christian Church should be to the Kingdom of God. " Every scribe which is instructed unto the kingdom of heaven is like unto a man that is an householder, which bringeth forth out of his treasure things new and old." That describes both Christ's own office as the Master and His disciples as His Church.
3i2 THE KEYS OF THE KINGDOM
TJ Go into an observatory, and watch some astronomer as he is following the transit of a star. His telescope is so adjusted that an ingenious arrangement of clock-work is made to shift it with the transit of the star. His instrument is moving in obedience to the movement of the star in the heavens. But the clock-work does not move the star. The astronomer has made his faultless calculations; the mechanic has adjusted his cranks and pendulums and wheels and springs with unerring nicety, and every movement in the telescope answers to the movement of the star in the far-off heavens. The correspondence rests on know- ledge. And so when the things that are bound on earth are bound in heaven. Every legislative counsel and decree and movement in a truly apostolic and inspired Church answers to some counsel and decree and movement in the heavens. But then the power of discerning and forecasting the movements of the Divine will and government rests upon the power of interpreting the Divine character and applying its princi- ples of action, as that character is communicated to us by Jesus Christ.1
Tj Over thirty years ago Scotland was overwhelmed by a great commercial disaster through the failure of one of its leading banks. It was a calamity that could not stand alone, and day after day the strongest business houses were compelled to suspend payment. The distress brought upon the shareholders, many of them widows and orphans brought in a single morning to poverty, was so great that a gigantic lottery of six millions sterling was proposed. One half of these millions was to be given to sub- scribers. The other half was to be given to relieve the distress of those who were impoverished. The object seemed so praise- worthy, and the misery was so widespread and so extreme, that many of the wisest and clearest minds in Scotland gave it their support. Suddenly Principal Kainy, the foremost Christian minister of this land in his day, raised his voice. In a letter full of invincible argument, couched in courteous and appealing terms, he protested against this appeal to the very passions and follies, the greed and the gambling, which had produced the ruin. The scheme was dropped in a day. He had bound and loosed the consciences of men. All Scotland understood, for one moment at least, the true meaning of the power of the keys.2
2. The power given by these words perhaps goes further still, and implies, under certain extraordinary conditions, fitness and
1 T. Q. Belby, The Imperfect Angel, 266.
2 W. M. Clow, Ttie Secret of the Lord, 64.
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qualification to pronounce an unerring spiritual judgment upon the soul's relation to God. And this leads us to ask the question, Upon what conditions does this power of opening and closing the Kingdom of Heaven, and of retaining and remitting the sin of men, rest ? We observe, in the first case, that nothing whatever was promised to Peter, except so far as he was already the subject of a teaching inspiration, and was to become so in a yet richer degree in future days. He held the keys, and could bind and loose in so far as the Son was revealed to him by the Father and the Father by the Son, and not one iota beyond. He could not open the gates of the Kingdom by any private authority and apart from the possession of these truths. Then we come to the promise of this same power to the whole congregation of the disciples. There is no power of binding and loosing apart from Christ's indwelling presence within the Church. And then we come to the last case. Christ connected the power of absolution with a symbolic act, in which He made the disciples recipients of His own life, and partakers and instruments of the Holy Ghost by that fellowship. But it will be observed that there is no valid retention or remission of sin that can be pronounced to men, except by the lips of which the Holy Ghost is the unceasing breath. Given that condition in the case of either priest or layman, one may safely extend to him the power of absolution.