THE BISHOP OF ARGYLL dINT MATERIALISTIC CHRLSTIAN fry! ! ! ME Bishop

of Argyll last week published a charge to his clergy, by way of caution against "gross conceptions of the Sacraments" in which he traverses generally, with that depth of * On Materialism in Christianity. Being the Substance of a Charge delivered at Lockgrlphcad, September 19, 18f6. By the Right Rev. Alexander Ewing, D.C.L., Bishop of Argyll and the Idles. London : Bosworth. insight and thoroughly spiritual feeling which Dr. Ewing always displays, what he calls the 6 materialist ' view of Christian influ-

ences. And he means by the materialist view that which attributes spiritual influence to material causes, and which supposes that Christian influences can be communicated "apart from any co- operation of the mind." Thus the Roman Catholic Church attri- butes to the absolution and other ministrations of a priest, how- ever infidel and evil at heart, a really divine grace due to his- official character, due to his formal participation in the great

agency of the Church, and says that this grace proceeds from the mere "work which he works" (ex opere operate), apart quite

from the spirit of the human agent who effects it ; but it adds

that a new and additional grace is given by the agency of a good priest, who performs these acts with faith in his heart, an addi- tional grace which proceeds not from the mere "work worked,' but from the "work of the worker" (ex opere operands), and is granted through the spirit, as the other is granted

through the mere physical agency, of the human agent. Dr.. Ewing assails this so-called " Sacramental " principle of the Catholic Church altogether, and maintains, on the contrary, that all the power of divine revelation is exerted by enlarg- ing the spiritual knowledge of man,—that no merely physical medium can carry divine influence, except symbolically, by drawing upon our associations with historical or spiritual truth and suggesting illustrations of that truth,—that matter can only

come into relation with mind by "being invested with a spiritual garment," "by acquiring, that is, not a change of substance or a preternatural power, but a character which being of the nature of, so can have access to, the mind." In short, adds the Bishop, "it must be connected with knowledge, and by

thus associating itself with things unseen, become the means of their conveyance." At first sight this would be a good deal more than most thinking men would be disposed to admit. It would be impossible that a powerful symbolism of any sort should exist if' mere association of ideas were the only explanation of it ; if there were not a possibility of secret sympathy between the material world and the spirit, which enables the former to become the channel of the latter. How will any association of ideas, for-

instance, explain the religious power of music, whether natural, as

of the winds and waves, the sighing of the wind in the fir trees, the break of the ocean on the beach, —or artistic, as in the oratorio musks of Handel or Mendelssohn ? These things are but physical sounds —spherical vibrations of acoustic waves affecting a certain system

of nerves. And yet that they manage somehow to convey to the spirit,—not to the intellect, not to the knowing power,—the infinite.

wants of man, the infinite pity of God,—and to shadow forth even the name of Him who is called 'wonderful, counseller, the mighty God, the Everlasting Father, the Prince of Peace,' few will ven- ture to deny. So, too, that beauty,—material beauty, if any beauty

be material,—beauty, at least, which could not be perceived butt

for material things,—beauty of earth and sky and cloud, of sun- rise and midnight, of flying shadows and tranquil suns, does con-

vey a divine grace to the spirit of man, quite apart from mere association with definite "knowledge," very few even of the most Protestant of Protestants will doubt. If Dr. Ewing had meant te deny that there are plenty of material media by which divine grace is conveyed without even any power on our part to inter- pret intellectually the mysterious language, so to speak, in which it is so conveyed, we could not have agreed with his argument,,

though we should heartily have assented to his special conclusion.. But that the Bishop does not mean so to narrow the divine agency as to exclude ft from working spiritual effects by physical meane the following passages will, we think, show :—

" For salvation, my brethren, can come but by knowledge, as wo hare said; by the knowledge conveyed in Revelation. If we look at the character of salvation we shall see that so it must be. For salvation means healing, or deliverance, from spiritual disease. Revelation fir the remedy. It heals by bringing us nigh to God in conscious know- ledge, and this saves us. Our spiritual health comes by apprehending the character of God in Christ, and by our acquiring conformity to that. character. We are saved by what we see ; by 'beholding, as in a glass, the glory of the Lord, we are changed into the same image.' And this. change saves us ;—we are saved by knowledge But it may be. said, there surely are good conditions of the spirit independent of know- ledge? There is a healthy and happy condition of the spirit which is irrespective of knowledge, for example in childhood, in the faith which, is apart from reason, in the truths which love apprehends without any intellectual process, in beauty taken in by the senses, in the influence. of society, in what is called the spirit of a book, of a picture, of an act, of a man; all spiritual conditions these independent of knowledge. No doubt they appear to be such. Yet if we look at these things closely we shall discover, I believe, in all of them, beyond the mere animal feelings, more or less of an intellectual process and presence of know- ledge. The child's happiness in great part arises from a perception of security and fullness ; love goes to the very root of being, and discerns

causes and reasons apart from conscious process ; and beauty impassively absorbed has yet its effect greatly dependent on a perception of the fitness and harmony of things ; social influence, again, is mainly de- pendent on a discernment (it may be unconsciously) of its intents. I think, we may say with certainty, that all spiritual truth, which has in it of the nature of independent place, has so distinct a being as to be only reached by intellectual process. If it is incapable of definition or intellectual process, it has no real being, as I conceive."

Here it is clear that Dr. Ewing means by "knowledge," all which serves, in any way, whatever way it be, to bring the divine life

close to us,—to help us in recognizing it, even when we cannot, strictly speaking, comprehend it, or know what it is which makes our recognition sure. So that when he• says that matter "never p3.sees3 into mind so as to become mind," all he means is that physical agencies can never, as matter, pass into mind, but only as already expressing mind. If music passes into mind, it is be- cause music proceeds from mind, and expresses the mind of its

composer before it passes into the mind of the hearer. It is not as mere physical sound, but as the mystical language of emotion, that it passes into mind. So, too, natural beauty affects us as it does,

not by its physical characteristics, but by expressing the crea- tive thought and love of God. It is its expression (and this is wholly spiritual), not its dimensions, its physical qualities, its colour, its form, apart from their expressive power,— which passes into our hearts and minds. The physical agency must reflect, or be believed to reflect, a mind at its source, before it can produce a spiritual effect on the mind Which

receives it. The telegraphic movements of the wire produce mental effects at one end because they are known to be produced by mental volitions at the other; and so physical symbols can only produce religious effects on minds which believe them to be expressive of divine causes. What the Bishop of Argyll denies, is,

so to speak, the subterranean passage of divine grace through physical media,—like• bread and wine,—in a channel that has no .expressive capacity, that makes no address to the mind. The

Catholic, and, to some extent now unfortunately, the Anglican, theory of the Sacraments, is that the physical substance of the bread and wine being identical with that of the body of Christ, passes into the physical constitution of the communicant, and operates physically to purify it, by this divine graft, from evil im- pulses of the flesh, just as we may suppose that an infusion of high blood from a long line of moral nobility might operate to ennoble the whole future organization of any family's descendants.

The Bishop of Argyll rightly regards this creed as a super- stition, likely to produce the gravest and most deteriorating effects upon the Christian Church. And why ? Because it induces

us to place confidence in a physical agency, which we begin by as- suming to have spiritual influences that no one even pretends to have

any power of verifying,—a physical agency which is not asserted to act through the consciousness, but directly through the blood, which does not throw any fresh light upon God, or remove any veil from

His countenance, but only asks us to believe that a magical trans- formation is effected by this means of which we may enjoy the fruits, but of the reality of which we have absolutely not only no knowledge, but no chance of obtaining knowledge. If we are to believe, not only without a revelation, but without the possibility of a revelation on the subject, that Christ purifies our physical constitution by the physical instrumentality of the sacramental bread and wine, there is no limit to the demands of this kind

which may not be made on our superstition. The medicinal -effect of extreme unction as a physical remedy rests on a great deal higher express authority than any purifying effect of the sacra- mental bread and wine exerted through their physical substance, and not through those spiritual acts of our Lord of which they are the symbols. Holy water, the exorcising effect of relics and charms, and God knows what spiritual magic, have just as good a right to be believed as the material efficacy of the bread and wine, apart from their spiritual language. If Christianity be not a revelation but a system of physical charms, all these things are

.equally entitled to be regarded as charms ; if it be solely a reve- lation, then nothing which does not reveal,—nothing which does not give us a clearer vision of God,—nothing which professes to produce an effect upon us by purely occult material causes, which

we cannot spiritually examine or even gums at, can be of the essence of Christianity.

To us the oddest of all facts has always been that this class of material superstitions should have gathered round the celebra- bration of the Lord's Supper. If there ever were a pure re- velation, a purely spiritual revelation, it was in the act which that sacrament is intended to renew and revivify for ever in our hearts. 'This is my body, which is broken for you," this is my blood of the New Testament that is shed for many for the remis- sion of sins,'—what language can express more plainly that the great act of divine self-sacrifice and self-surrender is to be the very body and blood of all truly Christian life, of all life which is fed at the fountain of life in Christ? Words like these are revelation, speaking from the spirit and to the spirit, symbolic words, just as the washing of the disciples' feet was a symbolic act,—but symbolic words coming fresh from the spirit of divine action and going straight to the spirit of human faith. How words so fall of direct meaning could ever have been turned into the words of an incantation is one of the most humiliating surprises of human history. Very finely and nobly does the Bishop of Argyll say :—

" Revelation, my brethren, is a revelation of our sonship to God in Christ, it bids us enter into the joy of the Lord,' and it enables us so to do, by telling us first what the 'joy of the Lord' is, and then, by giving it to us. Instead of this, the religion now proposed to us, prevents and destroys this, by cutting us off from knowledge and giving us a material object in its stead,—a material object which is not the subject of know- ledge, neither, indeed, can be but a thing which dims our knowledge and congeals our spirit, and substitutes a dead idol for the living God. It has been said to me, cannot die without the real body of Christ. I must eat the real body of Christ before I die. I could live in the Com- munion of the Church of England, but I could not die in it.' Surely this goes beyond even the grossness of Paganism ? We know of no kind of Pagans that profess to eat their God ! And what conception is that of God which allows that it can live apart from Him, but must not run the risk of dying without doing something which will render Him innocuous or appeased ? Is God a trap, or an enemy-to be insured and guarded against ? But are not similar conceptions (it may be uncon- sciously) couched under such gross ideas of the Sacraments as are indi- cated by such terms in connection with them as 'greater efficacy,' no barrier interposed,' and suoh like ?"

And finely, too, does he add that that "ministry does not fulfil its mission which greatly occupies itself with the accidents of its own authority or institution ;"—" if our light shine among men as it ought, we shall be but little occupied with the accidents of its , conveyance." We only wish there were many more bishops who feel how petty are the accidents of Church organization as com- pared with the infinite magnitude of the truth which the Church has to convey. We should have more hope for the Episcopal form of the Church,—which on the whole is, we believe, the best form in existence,—if the dignities it creates did not divert so large a force

from the elucidation of the faith which the Church has committed

to it to spread, to the defence of those human accidents of organi- zation which are not only not any essential part of the revelation, but are sometimes made, as, for instance, in relation to the sacerdotal view of the Sacraments, the occasion of distorting the revelation into something which ascribes to the sacerdotal office a false and artificial glory.