2. Unity will never be secured by banishing the question of the Church from our public speech ; unity is to be gained only by arriving at right views about the Church. It is difference of view that keeps us apart at present ; it is only a true under- standing of the Church that will ever bring us together.
^ Behind all the divisions and antagonisms I detect a real spiritual unity. And as I gaze at all these sects at war amongst themselves, I seem to behold them melt into a glorious and blessed fellowship. Behind these manifold and differing churches, I believe there is a Holy Catholic Church. Turn to your hymn-book, and you will see what I mean. Men who belonged to different churches, and who were separated from one another by ecclesiastical party walls, meet in our hymn-books ; Koman Catholic, Anglican, Non- conformist— they jostle one another in its pages. When we want to sing the praises of Jesus, this is what we sing :
Jesus, the very thought of Thee, With sweetness fills my breast;
* J. D. Jones, Things Most Surely Believed, 147.
EPHESIANS I. 22, 23 5
and it is the monk, Bernard, that leads our song. When we want to offer a prayer for guidance we cry :
Lead, kindly Light, amid the encircling gloom, Lead Thou me on ;
and it is Cardinal Xewman that leads our song. When we want to sing of our duty to foreign lands and heathen people, this is the hymn we sing :
From Greenland's icy mountains, From India's coral strand ;
and it is the Anglican Bishop Heber who leads our song. And when we want to sing of the " sweet wonders of the Cross " we say:
In the Cross of Christ I glory.
Towering o'er the wrecks of time ;
and it is actually the Unitarian, Sir John Bowring, who leads our song. There is a Catholic Church. Even the most exclusive churches are constrained to acknowledge it. Isaac Watts never was allowed to preach in Westminster Abbey, but scarcely any great function takes place there but they sing Isaac Watts's hymn:
0 God, our help in ages past. Our hope for years to come.
There is a Catholic Church. Behind all our divisions there is a great and blessed unity.^
3. The doctrine of the Church reaches its completest statement in the Epistle to the Ephesians, and perhaps the words of the text ^^m up the Apostle's teaching. We do not sufficiently recognize the ardour of faith which glows in St. Paul's language. Chris- V tianity was then a very small thing in the world ; it had behind it ' | no famous history, rich in heroic and saintly memories ; it had I not expressed itself in a vast and various Literature, including the masterpieces of the human mind ; it did not preside over the world's proudest civilization. Christianity was the creed of a few obscure communities scattered thinly over the Eoman Empire, and composed mostly of the humblest members of society — slaves, freed-men, poor artisans. The Apostle could be under no ^ J. D. Jones, Things Most Surely Believed, 159.
6 THE CHURCH
' delusions on the subject ; and, as a matter of fact, he was now in prison at Eome, in a position well calculated to chasten enthusiasm. Yet he writes in these sublime terms of the Church. The little Christian congregations become transformed by his ardent faith. He sees them inspired with Divine energies, commissioned for eternal destinies, crowned with heavenly beauty. All the world is petty in comparison with them ; they are marked out for universal sway. All history leads up to them, and in their fortunes is bound up the welfare of the nations. They enshrine the hopes of the human race, for they carry the graces of the Eedemption. The historic triumph of Christ finds in them its visible expression ; they are the instrument of His conquests.
^ The work which Christ came to do on earth was not completed when He passed from the sight of men : He, the Head, needed a body of members for its full working out through the ages : part by part He was, as St. Paul says, to be fulfilled in the community of His disciples, whose office in the world was the outflow of His own. And on the other hand His disciples had no intelligible unity apart from their ascended Head, who was also to them the present central fountain of life and power.^
The subject is the Church as the Body of Christ. We may consider —
I. The Use of the Words " Church " and " Body." II. The Ideal Church. III. The Ideal made Actual.
I.
The Woeds "Church" and "Body."
1. Church. — The word " Church " is used in the New Testament ^- upwards of one hundred and ten times ; and the fact that it occurs so frequently, and that it is used in the most solemn and important connexions, is sufficient proof of its pre-eminent importance, and sufficient reason why our ideas of its significance should be consistent and luminous.
(1) In not one single instance is the word used to describe a ^ F, 3TK. Hdft, 2716 ChrisiicmjEccksia, 148.
EPHESIANS t. 22, 23 7
building, whether of stone or of other material, of imposing splendour or of humble pretensions. When the places in which we meet for the worship of God are called by this sacred name* it is by that common figure of speech by which ideas are trans-\ ferred from the thing itself to the principal instrument, or means, ) by which it is embodied, or represented. Thus, when we speak of the power of the press, we mean not the mere iron or steel of which it is constructed, but the thoughts and ideas and informa- tion that are by its means multiplied and spread abroad.