"RECONCILIATION."
(To THE EDITOR OF THE " SPECTATOR."] SIR,—I should have requested you ere now to have allowed me to say a word on the subject of "Reconciliation" as affected by the Voysey trial, had not illness prevented me. I have felt a call on me in connection with what took place on the same subject at the Lambeth Conference, and to which reference was made in your columns. The meaning there affixed to the word was the same as that given on the present occasion, but it was then waived on the part of those who objected to it, on the score that the document in which it occurred was to be received as an " Eirenicon," and not as a definition of faith. And of so little importance did the matter then seem in most eyes, that when in the subsequent Convocation attention was drawn to the subject, the objection was overruled on the plea given by a then eminent, and now still more eminent, dignitary of the Church, that it was " a microscopic criticism." This cannot now be said to be the case. And what was then said was no doubt enough to show how very grave an issue underlay the surface. For the words of the celebrated and highly orthodox Dr. John Mason Neale were quoted, —the words, I mean, in which, when writing on this subject under the head of the Clementine Liturgy, he expresses himself as follows — " Notice here and again presently the unscriptural phrase" (he is quoting the word recon- cile, as used in the Lambeth Evangelical, and as laid down by the present judgment, in the sense of the object of the Incarnation being the reconciliation of God). " According to St. Paul's teaching, it is man that must be reconciled to God, not God to man. This appears to me," he says, " a good argument in favour of the belief that St. Clement's Liturgy was never really employed by any Church. Such an error might easily escape the notice of an individual writer, but the marvellous accuracy of the early Liturgistswould not have allowed the phrase to remain in use."
The matter, however, has assumed a different and more formid- able aspect when the phrase objected to has been formally accepted by the Church, and defined as her meaning, accompanied with the sanction of penalties. It is probable, however, that the infliction of penalty by the late judgment was induced by other reasons than the use of this word in the sense objected to, and would be considered undesirable and impossible of infliction for this reason alone. But is the path of clergymen who hold the word in the sense objected to absolutely clear, although it may be free from penalty ? Is there no duty which they owe to themselves and to the truth upon the subject? Can they remain• members of a Church which intentionally obscures, it would seem, that which to them is the essence, and which (if it be not the essence) is the power of the Gospel ? To my own mind, at this moment the conviction comes that this is no final stage, and that it is yet scarce realized on either side how grave the matter is. That the issue will be in behalf of the truth we cannot doubt. And most men have come to the opinion that little is to be gained by the breaking into or out of Churches. But no doubt the difference implied in the mean- ing and the application of the word is fundamental, that is, as the object of the Incarnation is held to be the reconciliation of man, or of God. In the first case, we receive it as its name Revelation implies, as a key to the character of God and nature ; in the other, as a mystery over and above the already present mysteries of God and nature. It is probable that this will be felt to be a wrong description, because we are so much in the habit of mixing up the two conceptions that we scarcely realize that it is but from the first we are receiving light, yet if we examine we shall find it to be so. For in the second, the reconciliation of God, by the death of Christ, there is nothing in ourselves to which we find response. We cannot, on the one hand, attribute the reconciliation to an offering on the part of Christ as man ; we are lost, on the other, in the conception of the reconciliation of two Gods. And assuredly it has not that effect which the Incarnation was to have, that of giving us " fellowship " with God, a fellow- ship which was to be—as only it could be—the result of a means of understanding being given to us, as it was when the life of the Eternal was manifested to us, that we might know in Christ, and by knowing live. If we attempt to understand the view by construct- ing theories of justice, manifestations of law, we are forgetting that all such explanations belong to the Incarnation, as having for its object the reconciliation of man, and have no place and are unnecessary for any explanation to us of it as being for the recon- ciliation of God.
I do not forget that thousands have " found peace " by the theory in question, or the recognition that the initiation of the act, whatever its meaning, was with God one of love, and will ever have the effect of reconciling man ; but then this is a very different kind of reconciliation, for it is one irrespective of being in any way the means of drawing us near to God in " fellowship " or by " understanding." It can never give us the place of sons, and is but as under the old law of bondage. And how great a part of the obscurity and perversions of Christianity for so many ages may we not attribute to this latter view—that darkness whereby the better portions of Europe have had their conceptions of Christi- anity resolved into the meaning of the sacrifice of Christ being the sending up of perpetual masses to appease an angry God ? " Its missa est." And again, in other portions where the concep- tion has transformed the character of God and his mode of opera- tion into regions unknown and obscure. The best, for example, of our missionary (Protestant) records abound in sentences like this, " When kindly treated in sickness they (the negroes) often utter imploring words to Jesus, and we may hope that they find mercy through his blood, though so little able to appreciate his sacrifice." And again, as if God in Christ had not always offered us an infinite proof and gauge of his good-will towards us, or a Revelation of his eternal nature towards us on the Cross, do we not constantly hear sung, without a thought of this, such words as these in our churches :-
"Seven times he spake, seven words of love,
And all•three hours his silence cried
For mercy on the souls of men : Jesus our Lord is crucified.
"Come let us stand beneath the cross, So may the blood from out his side Fall gently on us drop by drop : Jesus our Lord is crucified " ?
—or such prayers as these, " Lord have mercy upon us, Christ have mercy upon us," apparently without the idea that all the while an infinite and eternal pledge and proof of that mercy are welling above us from the Cross ? " Ah ! wounded Head," gazing on us, and not understood by those who say they see.
The doctrines of " grace," as they are most truly called, are virtually excluded by this view, and that " forgiveness of sins " which was to Luther life from the dead is lost in a desire to provide for the safety of the character of God. It is the old contest between the Law and the Gospel under a more subtle form, which would kill out love and grace by making provi- sion for their safe exercise, and so it is but too often only prodigals and magdalenes who can believe in the parable, which applies to all, and which also, no doubt, sets forth that which God says is to all. But I should not say so much, or should not have said anything in my position, had not the subject before been coupled with my name, or that I deem it not other than the first duty of a Bishop to confess the truth and to contend for it, as it appears to him. And these are not days when any one who believes in Christ or God can sit silent and see Christianity relegated to the past as a darkness of the night, while we believe Christ is, if rightly under- stood, the light of men, and heir of all the ages. Catholicism sub- stituted for Christ has turned the thought of Southern Europe to simple infidelity, if not to Atheism ; let us take heed that Pro- testantism does not the same thing, in another way, for the North. But our comfort is this, that turn it any way, " He must in- crease," for he is not only the light, but the moving power of all things. Yet can he only benefit us by the light which he affords. And surely if there be a choice of interpretations, that is to be pre- ferred in which most of the light is to be found ?—I am, Sir, &c.,
ALEXANDER EWING, Bishop of Argyll and the Isles.
Palermo, Sicily, 25th March, 1871.
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