Nor is it to be believed that the great movement of the Church of England which has taken place in the last half-century would have been the real and living thing which it has proved to be, if it had not rested upon Christ as the Incarnate Son of God. A
2o6 THE AMAZING GIFT OF LOVE
superficial criticism may identify this movement with questions of forms, of vestments, of architecture, of chanting the Church's offices ; or, perhaps, with higher questions, such as the power of the Priesthood, the grace of the Sacraments, and other doctrines or practices, which, more or less, divide opinion. And, doubtless, it is true that as the movement described as the Evangelical was a reaction from the preceding condition of the Church, and con- tained a reassertion of doctrines which had been allowed to fall too much into abeyance, so the next great movement gained strength from the fact that in the fervour of the evangehcal effort the symmetry of Catholic teaching had been to some extent lost sight of and injured. But allowing for all this, it may still be maintained that the real foundation of what is sometimes called the Catholic movement, equally with the Evangelical, was Christ, the Incarnate Son of God. Who can doubt this who has studied and loved Keble's " Christian Year " ? Foolish things may have been said, foolish things may have been done ; but these foolish things have not helped the movement ; they have tended to mar and hinder it. The wisest and best teachers, whether they be called High Church or Low Church, Catholic or Evangelical, so far as their teaching is wise, earnest, and true, can adopt the words of him who hated divisions, and simply styled himself "the servant of the Lord Jesus Christ," when he wrote to one of the Churches, " I determined not to know anything among you, save Jesus Christ, and him crucified."
The same thing may be said if we go back to the greatest movement of all which can be found in our English Church history, namely, the Eeformation of the sixteenth century. A variety of causes, as we all know, conspired at that time to bring about a great religious change ; a variety of smaller causes con- spired to determine the precise form which the change should assume in this country: general dissatisfaction with the then condition of things, long-standing jealousy of the Pope of Kome, the increase of learning, the translation of the Scriptures, the growth of the seed which John Wyclif had sown, combined with political and local causes to overthrow the Church as it then was. The traces of destruction are clear enough ; but what were the forces of conservation and growth ? Surely these were to be found in the fact that the wisest and best amongst the Eeformers held fast to the doctrine of Jesus Christ as the Son of God. Truly the Church needed a strong foundation in those terrible days; the storms raged and the winds beat upon the house ; and it fell not, because it was founded upon a rock, and " that rock was Christ." In this supreme crisis of the Church's history she needed no new
ST. JOHN III. i6 207
doctrine, no new faith, no new machinery, but only a clearing away of all that tended to obscure the visage of her Lord and towards substituting the legends and inventions of man for the faith once delivered to the saints.
And if I wished for another illustration of the point which I am now pressing, I would seek it in a very different quarter, namely, in that wonderful book known by the title De Imitatione Christi. The title, as we know, is taken from one particular portion of the volume ; but did you ever observe what an absolute misnomer it is as applied to the whole ? To speak of imitating another implies that imitation is possible; a child imitates its father or its mother, or a man sees his neighbour do a charitable act and he follows his example, or the pupil imitates his tutor, hoping to become like him ; and so when you read the history of Christ being kind and gentle, holy and devout and good ; when you read of His being constant in prayer, or of His indignation against hypocrisy, and His compassion for the ignorant and fallen, or when you are told that when He was reviled He reviled not again, when He suffered He threatened not, and so forth throughout the whole human side of His history, you feel not only that you can try at least to follow His example, but that you ought and would like to do it ; and if this were all, still more if Jesus Christ were such as Eenan and others would represent Him to have been, you feel that there is at least nothing impossible in an imitation of Christ; but the Christ of Thomas k Kempis is very different from our modern pictures of Jesus of Nazareth ; it is not only Christ the man, to be followed as an example, as all good men should be, but Christ the Son of God, who in the plenitude of His love and condescension holds converse with the human soul. And because this is so, the title of the book may be called a misnomer ; but also because this is so, therefore the book has its marvellous and unequalled power of influence and magical fascination; it is the record of the possible communion of the soul with God through Christ, which is unspeakably precious, just because Christ is infinitely higher than humanity, and is worthy of worship, but incapable of imitation.^