Leading Homily.

THE LARGENESS AND SIMPLICITY OF THE PRIMITIVE CREED.*

“Unto me, who am less than the least of all saints, was this grace given, to preach unto the Gentiles the unsearchable riches of Christ; and to make all men see what is the dispensation of the mystery which from all ages have been hid in God, who created all things; to the intent that now unto the principalities and the powers in the heavenly places might be made known through the Church the manifold wisdom of God, according to the eternal purpose which he purposed in Christ Jesus our Lord." Eph. iii. 8-12. (Revised Version).

HE noticeable thing is the largeness, the simplicity-if I may add the word, the infiniteness of the primitive creed. On no other than the broadest basis can you build up a Church which shall be truly catholic-which shall embrace the world. In the face of the rapid and violent disintegration of Christian belief-with M. Rochefort in Paris parodying the Christian sacraments, and initiating little children by a form of his own into what

*An address delivered in connection with the Church Congress at Newcastle-on-Tyne, October 4th.

VOL. XLIX. No. 5.

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he calls the gospel of free thought, and the International Federation of Freethinkers holding its three days' conference in London, and delighting to trample on some of the most cherished hopes of man by announcing that the Union Démocratique of France is organising a great freethought demonstration on All Souls' Day-we cannot afford to bandy words upon disputable propositions-to divide ourselves into divers and almost hostile camps, each with its doctrine and interpretation; we dare not break up a great Church, with its mission as clearly stamped upon it as ever mission was stamped upon a Church planted even by Apostles' hands, into fragmentary and partisan organisations, powerless because disunited, incapable of discipline because following the voice of no one leader, recognising the sound of no one battle-cry. If union ever was strength, it would be strength now, and union is only possible on the broad basis of an historical, not a theoretic, Christianity. But I pass on once more. And what is the function of men-the part they have to play in this great conflict terminable only with the Second Advent of Christ, between light and darkness, truth and falsehood, good and evil? What is the office of the Church, in the word's largest sense, as the divinely endowed, but yet human, institution, which it pleases God to use as His instrument in carrying out these far-reaching, eternal purposes? "The Prophetical Office of the Church" was the title of one of the great theological treatises with which John Henry Newman enriched the literature of his country while he was yet the vicar of a parish in England, and before he became a Cardinal-Prince of Rome; and so Paul seems to regard the Church, as a

whole, as a vast institution for prophesying to men in the name and for the truth of God (Eph. iv. 7, fol.). I am not careful to attempt an exact exegesis of this famous passage. Richard Hooker and others have done this, with more or less felicity. But it is evident that here is no thought of order, but of function. It is no question whether there are three or four ranks in the hierarchy of the Church, or even more. We need not even stay to discuss, with any pretence to accuracy, the possible discriminations in the writer's own mind. of the fourfold elements into which the work of ministering is distributed, and to which the edifying of the body of Christ is due. With our imperfect sources of information we could not be sure of our conclusions, with whatever parade of learning they might be marshalled, even when we had arrived at them. The great proof, we know, of at least one Apostle was that "through mighty signs and wonders, by the power of the Spirit of God, from Jerusalem and round about unto Illyricum, he had fully preached the Gospel of Christ." To teach himself, and to charge others to teach; to give heed to reading, to exhortation, to teaching, to be able, by holding to the faithful Word according to the teaching, both to exhort in the sound doctrine and to convict the gainsayers-this was Paul's highest conception of the office of a Christian Bishop. Even when the kingdom of God was being set up in the world, they were the prophetical rather than the regal acts of its Divine Founder that struck men's minds, and drew the crowds after Him. "A great prophet," they said, "hath risen up among us; and God hath visited His people." And so it seems to me that now people are not seeking priests to absolve or to offer sacrifice for them, but

mind to be men?

prophets who cant each them and guide them. Prophets, evangelists, pastors, teachers-these are the needs of the Church to-day. Priests, possibly, for quiet ordinary times, but prophets for crises. And if anyone cannot see that the Church is passing through a crisis now-fiercer, sharper, more intense than any which has tried her for generations-he cannot read the most obvious signs of this time. And can we, who claim, sometimes too exclusively, the prerogative of teaching, feel that we are teaching men that which it most concerns them to know? Are we helping them to be no more children, tossed to and fro, and carried about with every wind of doctrine ? Are we enabling them to be babes in malice, but in Have we ourselves that grasp of truth which comes of experimental conviction, and of nothing besides, and which alone can make men strong or free? To build up the body of Christ by the spirit of prophecy is no common gift and no ordinary responsibility. To be able rightly to divine the word of truth is putting the highest faculty to the noblest use. What names stand out most conspicuous on the pages of the Church's story? The names of her great prophets and teachers -men like Athanasius, and Gregory, of Nazianzum, and Chrysostom, and Augustine, and Bernard, and Savonarola, and Luther. These were they who stirred the hearts of their generation, and made religion as a living force and not as a crystallised tradition, possible in the world. I have been looking over the pages of our earliest ecclesiastical historian to gather up the story of how the Christian Church was first planted in Northumberland, in the days of good King Oswald, just twelve centuries ago. In the seventh century it

had two famous Bishops-St. Aidan and St. Cuthbert, with an interval of fifty years between them—who took the title of their see, not from Newcastle, but from Lindisfarne. This is the story of Aidan: "It is related that, when King Oswald asked for a prelate from the Scots to minister to himself and to his people the word of faith, there was first sent to him a man of an austere disposition, who, when after preaching for some time he made no progress, returned to his country and related in the assembly of the elders that he had not been able to effect anything in teaching the people to whom he had been sent on account of their being intractable men, and of a harsh and barbarous disposition. Then they held a great debate in Council as to what was to be done; and Aidan, who was present, said to the priest concerning whom the meeting was held, 'It seems to me, brother, that you have been too hard with your unlearned hearers, and have not afforded them, according to the Apostolic teaching, first the milk of easier doctrine, until being nourished by degrees by the Word of God, they should be capable of receiving the more perfect, and of performing the sublimer precepts of God;' which being heard, the faces and eyes of all that sat there were turned towards him, and they earnestly discussed what he had said, and decreed that he himself was worthy of the episcopate, and ought to be sent to teach the unbelieving and unlearned, since above all things he was proved to be endued with the grace of discretion, which is the mother of virtues; and accordingly they ordained him and sent him to preach. And he, in course of time, as he had before appeared to be adorned with the guidance of discretion, so afterwards exhibited the other virtues