440 A DEFINITION OF THE KINGDOM
use great plainness of speech) God does not care in the very least what or when or how we eat or drink, so as we do not damage ourselves or others. And He cannot be made to care, and therefore it cannot be made to matter.
^ To many minds a ceremony or a form comes with all the force of a principle or a fact. Not " what man has done man may do," but what man has done man must do is their creed, which cramps their limbs and chills their blood and makes them fail of the little good they are seeking. For no man by sheer imitation has yet reached his pattern. Even if in native power he is more than equal to the task, and so in outward deeds even excels his example, the flush and glow of original achievement which made the model a living, warm, breathing thing, is wanting to the copy, which is cold and stiff and dead.^
(2) The Kingdom of G-od is not a particular /orm of church service or ritual. How inevitable a tendency there is in all forms, even the best, to lose all the spirit which once animated them, and become like lifeless corpses.
^ I do not believe that the doctrines of sacerdotalism and of sacramentalism which are so much in vogue, and which some people would seem to wish to make the very essence of Christi- anity, as a power of sanctifying the human soul, are doctrines of a true priesthood, or of a true sacramentalism. There is a sad fact which we can neither hide from others nor ignore ourselves, which destroys all the comforts that would naturally flow from this conviction that all good men are really labouring for what they believe to be the extension of Christ's Kingdom, the cause of righteousness, and the good of the souls of men — namely, the fact that excessive ceremonialism is often attended by moral torpor and religious decay. Can history point to a single age, from the womb of time, in which an excessive addiction to ceremonialism and the externals of religion was not accompanied by a corres- ponding and proportionate dulness of the conscience and deadness to the higher forms of duty ? It was so emphatically in Isaiah's day. It was so again, though with a perceptible and instructive difference in outward manifestation — the hypocrisy was more highly organized, the mask more skilfully painted — in the days of Jesus of Nazareth. And with our present-day Epicurean cynicism, cruelly mocking at life, itself secure ; abjuring every high aim in the lofty pursuit of personal comfort ; checked by no moral con- siderations whatever in its froward path of pure selfishness;
* Phillips Brooks, Life, 51.
ROMANS XIV. 17 441
carelessly wrecking woman's honour, wickedly shattering simple faith ; discussing the most solemn verities, at least the most solemn questions, tooth-pick in hand, over olives and wine — with this unhappy, but only too legitimate, offspring of an age that has resolved religion into phrases, and God's service into a gorgeous ceremonialism, I do not feel disposed to hold either truce or terms. Of course questions of ritual must be settled, and St. Paul is careful indeed to tell us that he recognized a law : he speaks of the duty of conforming to the customs of the Churches ; he preaches distinctly that God is not the author of confusion ; he would have everything done decently and in order ; but the law was a law of liberty, not of bondage ; the customs were few and simple, and their aim seems to have been not a mystic symbolism, but practical edification ; and an elaborate ceremonial, each part in which has to be rehearsed by its actors that the tableau may be complete with a kind of mechanical completeness, would have been perhaps as far removed from St. Paul's ideal of " decency and order " as anything conceivably could be.^
^ Spirit is Eternal — Form is Transient ; and when men stereotype the form and call it perpetual, or deny that under other and very different forms the selfsame truths may lie (as the uncovering of Moses' feet is identically the same as our un- covering our heads — ay, and I will even dare to say, often with the covering of the Quakers, when reverence for God is the cause for each), then I feel repelled at once, whether the form be a form of words or a form of observance.^
And what are forms ? Fair garments, plain or rich, and fitting close, Or flying looselier, warm'd but by the heart Within them, moved but by the living limb. And cast aside, when old, for newer, — Forms ! ^
(3) The Kingdom of God is not identical with any particular Church. This follows necessarily. Yet it is a hard lesson to learn. In every religious communion we find a widespread temper of unrest and dissatisfaction. The man who wishes to take advantage of this unstable temper is always at hand. You must change your sheepfold. But what most people need is not a new Church, a new rite, a new system of doctrine, but a new surrender to the will of God, and a great increase of trust in His redeeming power.