THE MIMIC APOSTOLIC LETTER.
TrIHE Bishops who signed the mimic apostolical epistle "to the
faithful in Christ Jesus" which has been published this week, can scarcely conceive the sense of profound despondency and humiliation which that document has produced on those who were so sanguine as to expect a frank and open recognition, by at least some of the Bishops who have appended their names to it, of the -wants of the Church of our day. Those who cling to their faith in Christ without wishing to misuse or ignore any one intellectual gift which God has given to the present generation, will have anuch ado to believe that the Bishops have not agreed on "a form of sound words" expressly intended as an evasion,—expressly intended to give the go-by to every question they were bound to face,—and therefore the farthest possible from words likely "to amend the things which are amiss, to supply the things which are lacking," and to make men "reach forth unto higher measures of love and zeal in worshipping God and in making known His name,"—the results for which the Bishops pray. Excepting the sentence against the Church of Rome, and the technical expres- sion, "Canonical Scriptures of the Old and New Testament," "there is not a word of the epistle which might not have been written eighteen centuries ago ; and this is, we suppose, the characteristic which persuades the Bishop of Oxford that the meet- ing which agreed to it was " apostolical." We thought, for our -own parts, that the Apostles were chiefly remarkable for delivering news intended to satisfy the greatest want of the soul of man. So far as we know their letters, they went as far home to the heart of the immediate wants of the people they addressed as it was possible for them to go. They did not study "forms of sound words" which should just steer clear of touching the thoughts and heart. If they had lived in the nineteenth century, they would not have thought it " apostolical " to evade its wants by mimicking the language of the first. "Apostolical" means, we suppose 'sent,' and
sent for a purpose. This pastoral can answer no purpose what- ever, and we should regard the Bishop of Capetown's wish to preoede such a document as this with, "It seemed good to the Holy Ghost and to us," as little short of imputing the utmost obliquity and feebleness of purpose to the Divine Spirit. These words were really prefixed in the Council of Jerusalem to an exceedingly practical and wise solution of the most difficult and urgent question which beset the Christian Church,—the question of the relation between the Christian Jews and Christian Gentiles. "It seemed good to the Holy Ghost and to us," said the Apostles, "to lay upon you no greater burden than these necessary things, that you abstain from meats offered to idols," &c.,—the dispute being in fact one of life and death almost for the Church of that day. Could the Apostles meet in council now, would they be less practical, less disposed to enter heartily into the immediate moral problems besetting the Church ? Would they not have said, "It seems good to the Holy Ghost and to us to lay upon your intellects no greater burden than is necessary ?" Would they not have frankly defined what intellectual convictions peculiar to the present day they did think and did not think essential to their faith? Would they and could they have put forth to the Church, in an age of distress and perplexity, a document either cleverly ignoring, or else only indirectly and ambiguously touch- ing, the real ground of distress and perplexity? If they had, they would at least have acted utterly differently from all that we know of the Apostolical action.
The Bishops may say, and truly say, that several of the Apostoli- cal letters are mere exhortations to love, unity, fidelity to the faith, and to patience until the end. And this many of them are. But under what circumstances ? First, under the obvious and avowed belief that the immediate personal coming of Christ would explain all that was difficult, and remove all that was oppressive to their hearts and minds in the then constitution of the world,—a belief in which we know that they were entirely mistake; at all events in the form in which they many of them held it. And, besides, to the Christians of that day the inner life, the "life in Christ," was an eutirely new world of faith and feeling. Perhaps it was even the purpose of God in not clearing away the delusion as to the immediate approach of a last day, to let the spiritual life of the first disciples root itself apart from the distractions of an external world of political strife and chaos, which they conceived to be the tokens of a universal dissolution, and to have no better meaning or purpose for them than the trial and perfecting of their faith. Anyhow, it is obvious that epistles directed to pro- claiming this inner life in Christ,' as the one new joy and the one great certainty of the Christian, were then really addressed to most real and most vital phase of life in the new Church. But for the leaders of Christendom in our day to plagiarize the vaguest expressions of the Apostolical epistles, when, as they well know, the whole burden and stress of the modern problem lies, not in any disloyalty to the claims of this bidden life, but in reconciling the new light of science and criticism with the uncritical and some- times untrustworthy history out of which the Christian faith justi- fies those claims, is a mere mockery of those whom -they profess to lead. The layman of to-day asks for bread, and these assembled Bishops give him a stone, in the shape of a little cut- and-dried exhortation, cut away from its context in the Apostoli- cal writings where it is touching and forcible, and repeated as a mere cuckoo cry by men who, if they had felt it with any depth,
would have been moved by it to say something quite different now. The notion that St. Paul, could he return to us now, and listen to the controversies which have coloured and shaped the whole life of this generation, would lend his name to a lifeless plagiarism from himself or his brother apostles, is in the highest degree absurd. Let us just look at some of the leading counsels of this piece of washed-out evangelical mimicry :—
"We pray," say the assembled Bishops, "that in His good time He would give back unto His whole Church the blessed gift of unity in truth. And now we exhort you in love that ye keep whole and un- defiled the faith once delivered to the saints, as ye have received it of the Lord Jesus. We entreat you to watch and pray, and to strive heartily with us against the frauds and subtleties wherewith the faith bath been aforetime and is now assailed. We beseech you to hold fast as the sure word of God all the Canonical Scriptures of the Old and New Testament, and that by diligent study of these oracles of God, praying in the Holy Ghost, ye seek to know more of the Lord Jesus Christ our Saviour, whom they reveal unto us, and of the will of God which they declare."
And this is from Bishops who, as everybody knows, would never have been assembled in Council at all had not one of their own number, a colonial bishop, not present, been "diligently studying" those oracles of God with results which His own order do not like,
-.-which are, indeed, as we believe, in many respects mistaken re- sults,—but which no one sincerely holds to be anything but honest results, deduced by a thoroughly pious mind trying to reconcile honestly the natural with the spiritual revelations of God. We say that for Bishops whose conference is due to the commotion created by honest episcopal criticisms on the manifold historical errors of the Pentateuch, to exhort merely parenthetically "the faithful in Christ Jesus to hold fast as the sure word of God all the Canonical Scriptures of the Old and New Testament," with- out an attempt to define in what sense they hold thew to be "the sure word of God," is a mockery to minds disturbed by the recent discussions and earnestly bent on finding out the truth. If the expression has any moral effect at all, it will be taken to meant—and no doubt this was the object of those who drew, but by no means of all who signed it,—that every word of the Canonical Scriptures, once clearly ascertained, is of divine in- spiration. If that was the meaning—as it will be the popular interpretation—of the pastoral, it would have been, we will not only say common Christian candour and straightforwardness, but the barest honesty to say so. To hint a meaning which is certain to be adopted by the people at large, but capable of being disavowed and explained away by those who give the hint, is not merely not apostolical, it is pure equivocation. Now, those who know anything of our Church, know that there are to this epistle the signatures of men who have pub- licly maintained again and again the competency of criticism to detect scientific and historical, if not, as we believe, moral errors in what are called the Canonical Scriptures. We may be mistaken, but we do not in the least doubt that there are more than two or three bishops signing this pastoral who would flatly deny, for in- stance, that Deborah's blessing on the treacherous Jael, the wife of Heber the lienite, was "the sure word of God ;" nor do we doubt that there are several who would admit frankly the various inconsistencies and errors of the early history, and admit also that historical error cannot possibly pretend to be "the sure word of God." We say, then, that this passage of the pastoral is not only evasive and unreal, but that it gets its unanimity of signature by being so ; that it gives the go-by to the most honest men's diffi- culties, and yet professes to take the tone of apostolic fervour and evangelic love. It is a sham in a pious garb ;—a political move disguised in saintly recitative ; a shifty manoeuvre saturated with the phraseology of inspired love.
Or take this, again :— "Brethren beloved, with one voice we warn you; the time is short: the Lord cometh; watch and be sober."
Now, if that has any of the meaning it had in the mouths of the Apostles, it warns of the approaching end of the world, of the second coming of Christ in the sense in which the Apostles under- stood it, of the winding up of things temporal, of those who are "alive and remain being "caught up to meet the Lord in the air," where they shall be "for ever with the Lord." Does it mean this in the "one voice" of the Bishops? Does the Bishop of St. David's, for instance, who has expressly objected to the prayer in the Burial Service, in which God is entreated "shortly to accom- plish the number of Thine elect, and to hasten Thy kingdom," that it in a measure dictates to Him what He understands far better than we,—does he mean to say that in the sense in which it will certainly be popularly understood,—the sense in which certainly some, if not all of the Apostles understood it,—he does believe the time to be "short," and the Lord to be "coming." Can he have made up his mind that God is going to do what he thinks it hardly right to pray to God to do ?
We are aware that various interpretations may be given of these phrases. But we say, that this being a protest addressed to all "the faithful in Christ Jesus," laymen as well as clergymen, should be so written that its most obvious and popular interpre- tation should be the one accepted by those who sign it. Either these Bishops wish to inflame the misleading dreams of a rapidly approaching day of judgment, or they are using popular language in an unusual sense, into which it has been strained in order to disguise the fact that some of our Lord's Apostles anticipated in their own lifetime an event which never occurred.
Again, the Bishops tell "the faithful in Christ Jesus" to show forth "that ye are, indeed, the servants of Him who died for us, to reconcile Ms Father to us, and to be a sacrifice for the sins of the whole world." We are well aware that this is the language of the Second Article, and that it was, therefore, very difficult for any bishop to decline to sign it again. But we are also aware that since the time when the Articles were drawn up, the controversy as to the supposed conflict of purposes between the Father and the Son suggested by this language, has assumed quite different proportions, and that there is more than one bishop who would anxiously reject the ordinary and popular interpretation of this phrase,—namely, that there was a wrath in the Father towards humanity not shared by His Son, but, on the contrary, appeased by His sub- mission to the cross. The careful introduction of this language at the present time into the pastoral has a meaning of its own,— and it is, we know, a meaning which some of the Bishops who have signed this pastoral have disowned, and would, we conclude, if individually appealed to, disown again. The Bishop of Argyll, for instance, has attacked this forensic theory of atonement in pamphlet after pamphlet. How can he justify its significant use in this document ?
On the whole, those laymen in the Church of England who claim to be honest disciples of Christ, and to feel that it is the greatest business of life to reconcile God's natural with His revealed truth, to use His full light whether given us through Christ, or through nature, or through history, and not to be one thing in their prayers, another in their studies, and a third in the world, have reason to complain bitterly of this mock pastoral. Such words of it as are true and divine they had before on better authority. What they wanted was honest and learned and pious men's sincere judgment on modern difficulties, and they have got a "form of words," which is so composed as to catch signa- ture from men holding the most opposite convictions. What Church can flourish with such blind guidance as this?
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