Cornell University 
 Library 
 
 The original of tiiis bool< is in 
 tile Cornell University Library. 
 
 There are no known copyright restrictions in 
 the United States on the use of the text. 
 
 http://www.archive.org/details/cu31924029318015 
 
Cornell University Library 
 BT767 .B27 
 
 Holiness, a note of the church by the R 
 
 olin 
 
 3 1924 029 318 015 
 
 Mary Fitch Page Lectures 
 
 DEUVERED AT THE 
 
 BERKELEY DIVINITY SCHOOL 
 
 A. D. 1915 
 
 (i) 
 
BY THE SAME AUTHOR. 
 
 Meditations on the Office and Work of the Holy Spirit. 
 257 pages. $1.50 net. 
 
 Christian's Day. A Book of Meditations. 
 257 pages. $1.50 net. 
 
 Meditations on the Apostles' Creed. 
 531 pages. $2.00 net. 
 
 The Self -Revelation of Our Lord. 
 334 pages. $1.50 net. 
 
HOLINESS 
 
 A NOTE OF THE CHURCH 
 
 BY 
 
 THE REVEREND J. G. H. BARRY, D.D. 
 
 New York 
 
 EDWIN S. GORHAM, PUBLISHER 
 
 1 1 We«t 43th Sbeet 
 
 1915 
 
COPYRIGHT BY 
 
 EDWIN S. GORHAM 
 1915 
 
TABLE OF CONTENTS 
 
 PAGE 
 
 I. Dedicatory Letter ... 9 
 
 11. The Holiness of the Body of 
 
 Christ .... 35 
 
 in. The Universal Vocation to 
 
 Holiness .... 67 
 
 IV. The Holiness of the Priesthood 97 
 
 V. The Religions Life: An Ex- 
 pression of Holiness . t35 
 
Dedicatory Letter 
 
 To the Very Reverend 
 
 Selden Peahody Delany, D.D. 
 
 Dean of All Saints' Cathedral 
 
 Milwaukee, Wisconsin 
 
DEDICATORY LETTER 
 
 My dear Delany: — 
 
 A friendship now extending over many 
 years, a friendship begun between instruc- 
 tor and student in the Western Theological 
 Seminary and continued without interrup- 
 tion during the years which have followed, 
 is my excuse for dedicating this volume of 
 lectures to you. When I was invited to de- 
 liver the Mary Fitch Page Lectures in the 
 Berkeley Divinity School you encouraged 
 me to accept the invitation, and but for your 
 urging I might have declined the work. As 
 it turned out, it was a work agreeable to do, 
 and exceedingly pleasant in the actual ac- 
 complishment. The days that I spent at 
 Berkeley revived many memories of my 
 Seminary life there, recalling, as they did, 
 that time which I have always considered 
 the happiest of my life. There was a quiet 
 and charm ^about Berkeley which I have 
 never found anywhere else: and both the 
 quiet and the charm are still there under the 
 present leadership of its learned and able 
 Dean. 
 
 9 
 
DEDICATORY LETTER 
 
 Here are the lectures. After much thought 
 as to possible revision, I have concluded to 
 print them as delivered. They were written 
 under the pressure of a busy parochial life, 
 and there are no doubt many things in them 
 which might be better expressed. I have 
 doubted somewhat about the third lecture, 
 which is rather different in tone from tlie 
 others — unnecessarily homiletical, it may be. 
 That tone \\as due to the desire to speak 
 directly of the things of their vocation to 
 the priests and students whom I was ad- 
 dressing. I might, by revision, have brought 
 it more into unison with the tone of tlie 
 other lectures, but I ha\'e learned from ex- 
 perience to leave what I write as I write it — 
 so it stands. 
 
 Naturally, the subject of seminary life 
 and training was much in my tlioughts dur- 
 ing my stay at Berkeley. I could not but go 
 back over my, perhaps unusually, wide ex- 
 perience of seminary life: as you know, I 
 have seen a good deal of the life of three 
 seminaries. The old questions we have so 
 often talked over came back with renewed 
 force and insistance. I found myself ask- 
 ing — and the subject of my lectures gave 
 10 
 
DEDICATORY LETTER 
 
 shape to my question — Can the seminary 
 train men in hoHness of life? If what I 
 have attempted to express in these lectures 
 is anywhere near the truth, that would seem 
 to be the supreme end of seminary training. 
 Are our seminaries attempting it? And if 
 they are, as I suppose in some measure they 
 are, do they reach, or can they hope to reach, 
 success ? 
 
 I suppose that one answer to my question 
 would be that the aim of the seminary is to 
 train men intellectually for the work of the 
 priesthood; and that while it is bound to, 
 and does, offer them all possible aid and en- 
 couragement to perfect their lives spiritually, 
 it cannot, in the nature of the case, do more 
 than that. That, indeed, you cannot train 
 men to be holy; that is a matter between 
 themselves and God which no training can 
 effect. But if men cannot be trained in 
 holiness in seminaries, how can we expect 
 the men who go out from seminaries to 
 train men to holiness in parishes? And if 
 this latter is impossible I am frank to say 
 that I see no point or use in parishes at all. 
 But if it be possible to teach holiness in par- 
 ishes, it must be in seminaries. 
 11 
 
DEDICATORY LETTER 
 
 Another answer to my questioning would 
 be that the seminaries of the Church are 
 effectively training men in the life of holi- 
 ness ; that by their daily offices and frequent, 
 in some cases daily, celebration of the Holy 
 Communion, by meditations. Quiet Days 
 and Retreats, they are making all possible 
 effort to that end. It is true that the semi- 
 nary of to-day is quite different, devotion- 
 ally, from the seminary of twenty-five years 
 ago. This is thankfully admitted; but we 
 may still be permitted to ask : Is all done 
 that can be done? Are the results encour- 
 aging? 
 
 The results might be more encouraging. 
 I recently heard of a priest — he has since 
 been elevated to the episcopate — who on be- 
 ing asked why he did not give more sacra- 
 mental teaching, replied that he thought the 
 sacraments were very delicate matters to 
 speak about! Another priest answered 
 some question on the spiritual life: "The 
 spiritual life! I never heard of such a 
 thing." Kindred instances might be multi- 
 plied indefinitely; these are not isolated 
 cases. 
 
 The root trouble with our theological 
 12 
 
DEDICATORY LETTER 
 
 training, so at least it seems to me, is the 
 assumption that seminarians know how to 
 use the spiritual advantages which are of- 
 fered them. There is an ill-groimded belief 
 that the men who come fresh from college 
 to the seminary are trained Christians in 
 the sense that there are many trained Chris- 
 tians in our parishes. But the fact is that a 
 large number — perhaps the greater num- 
 ber — of the men who offer themselves as 
 candidates for orders are utterly untrained 
 spiritually: they have not been accustomed 
 to attendance at daily offices, they do not 
 make their confessions, they do not prepare 
 well for their communions, they do not know 
 how to make a meditation. And I think 
 that I am right in sa^ang that even those 
 seminaries which encourage men in these 
 and kindred practices, do not take pains to 
 teach the method of them. My own experi- 
 ence belongs to a past generation, but I do 
 not believe it without parallel in this. In 
 the whole of my life no one, except a semi- 
 nary classmate, ever spoke to me on the sub- 
 ject of my personal religion — not even the 
 priest who prepared me for confirmation. 
 Now the holiness of the priest must de- 
 13 
 
DEDICATORY LETTER 
 
 pend during the first and critical years of his 
 ministry on the conception of and impulse 
 toward holiness that he gained in the semi- 
 nary years. And my contention is that the 
 seminarian should be taken in hand as a 
 person ignorant of the art of spiritual living 
 and taught that art. It is not enough to 
 give him opportunities, as he does not know 
 how to use opportunities. We need to get 
 rid of the notion that spirituality is a vague 
 and intangible quality, conceived in mys- 
 tery, born in obscurity and reared in indefi- 
 niteness. The spiritual life is, no doubt, 
 born of God ; but so is the natural life. And 
 the spiritual life, like the natural life, is cre- 
 ated under certain conditions and subject to 
 certain laws. Neither develops in a lawless 
 and wholly unintelligible manner. There is 
 such a thing as spiritual science and, given 
 a good will, that science, like other science, 
 may be learned and practiced. The semi- 
 narian has not, at the time of his entrance 
 into the seminary, mastered this science. I 
 have no disposition to criticise seminarians; 
 they are as God made them and the public 
 school and the unchristian college have fash- 
 ioned them; but it is not necessary to be 
 14 
 
DEDICATORY LETTER 
 
 under any illusions about their spiritual pro- 
 ficiency. 
 
 Is this science of the spiritual life any- 
 where taught ? I do not know, but I confess 
 to doubt. And if it be taught, is it taught 
 to men as something which they are to teach 
 others, and of which an intellectual mastery 
 is sufficient; or is it taught as something 
 which they must needs master in their own 
 experience before they can at all teach it? 
 And if it be not taught, is there any likeli- 
 hood of the average man studying it sys- 
 tematically for himself ? We have no really 
 scientific treatises on Ascetics ; if one attempt 
 to study this subject one must do so in 
 writers brought up under a system alien 
 from our traditions, and in many particu- 
 lars quite unsuited to our circumstances. A 
 priest of mature spiritual judgment has not 
 much difficulty in sorting his material; but 
 should the young and inexperienced priest 
 be left to blunder about in the pursuit of 
 knowledge, which he is convinced is neces- 
 sary, but which he lacks judgment to col- 
 lect? No doubt much queer preaching to 
 which we are compelled to listen is due to 
 the well-intentioned but unguided foraging 
 IS 
 
DEDICATORY LETTER 
 
 of the clergy in devotional books gathered 
 from many sources. They return from 
 such raids laden with spoil; but like the 
 ships of Solomon, some bring gold and sil- 
 ver, and some peacocks and apes. 
 
 The Christian Church exists for the pur- 
 pose of making saints ; that is, to impart and 
 develop that supernatural life which is the 
 out-flow to man of the Incarnation of the 
 Son of God. And if I am right in my con- 
 tention that this life, as all life, is subject to 
 definite and ascertainable principles and pro- 
 duced by methods which can be taught, the 
 training of those whose business it will be to 
 impart spiritual teaching is a matter of the 
 gravest moment to the life of the Church. 
 Of course I understand that no graduate of 
 any seminary, however ideal, can be other 
 than a novice in the matter of dealing with 
 souls : skill and wisdom in these high mat- 
 ters come only from experience. But the 
 Church has the right to expect that the 
 young priest shall enter upon the practical 
 work of his ministry as one who has himself 
 been trained in matters spiritual, and there- 
 by has acquired a kind of experience which 
 16 
 
DEDICATORY LETTER 
 
 will guide him to the attainment of further 
 and deeper experience. 
 
 It is the right of the seminarian to be 
 carefully trained for the work which lies 
 before him, and to which- all his life is to be 
 given. It is the right of the young priest to 
 be guided through the initial and formative 
 years of his ministry. Like the young un- 
 der other conditions, he may neither desire 
 nor appreciate guidance and training; but 
 that is neither here nor there. He is not be- 
 ing prepared for himself that he may get 
 the maximum of pleasure or comfort out of 
 life, but for the Church, that through his 
 self-offering the Kingdom of God may be 
 profited. He will find his ministry suffi- 
 ciently full of temptations and difficulties 
 which arise out of its circumstances; it is 
 unjust that in addition to these he should be 
 handicapped by misdirected and imperfect 
 training and ineffective guidance. 
 
 Sent out from the seminary, what does the 
 newly ordained man find? He comes fresh 
 from a community life. His pursuits have 
 for years been mainly of an intellectual na- 
 ture. He has been a member of a group 
 drawn into close companionship by kindred 
 
 (2) 17 
 
DEDICATORY LETTER 
 
 tastes and common ideals. The group-influ- 
 ence has done as much to form him, it may 
 be, as the influence of his teachers. We can 
 look back to our seminary days and recall 
 the vivid joy of those long hours of enthusi- 
 astic talk when we poured out our souls in 
 aspiration, or listened delightedly to friends 
 who flamingly criticized the state of the 
 Church, and sketched what a closely 
 united body of sympathetic men could 
 do to improve matters. Whether the 
 future was to hold united social action, 
 systematic writing and teaching, a new 
 impulse to the Religious Life, work on 
 new lines in the mission field, it was at 
 least to be a future of energy and of self- 
 surrender to ideals worked out in common. 
 I do not, as you well know, speak slightingly 
 of these seminary enthusiasms. Those times 
 of self-outpouring in the night hours in a 
 seminary room, the lessons of the next day 
 forgotten, while one lives splendidly in the 
 future, are great and noble hours. They are 
 the expression of a spiritual energy which 
 the Church ought to be able to preserve and 
 utilise. Rarely does it do so — that is the 
 pity. The men who here are ready to sacri- 
 18 
 
DEDICATORY LETTER 
 
 fice themselves greatly are soon seized upon 
 by the unwisdom of the Church and thrust 
 into isolated and deadening positions, and 
 are presently found living unenthusiastic 
 and, in many cases, disappointed lives, bat- 
 tling against conditions they are unable to 
 master. At the critical moment of its devel- 
 opment this young enthusiasm of the Church 
 falls a prey to the need of bishops to fill a 
 position here or there, and is sent to be 
 stifled in the isolation of a country mission 
 or the curacy of a parish which is unsympa- 
 thetic of all the man's aspirations. Is there 
 an3'thing more pathetic in the life of the 
 Church than the unwisdom which is dis- 
 played in dealing with the j'oung clergy? 
 What real guidance does a young priest get 
 from his bishop, the natural source of guid- 
 ance to him? There is something grotesque 
 in the sending of a deacon to take charge of 
 a mission where he can neither fulfil the 
 office of a minister of religion in the admin- 
 istration of the sacraments, nor himself nor- 
 mally sustain his own spiritual life by the 
 reception of them. "I must have a man in 
 this place," the bishop says. I venture to 
 dissent. A^'^hat is needed is not a man, but a 
 19 
 
DEDICATORY LETTER 
 
 priest — which is an insufficient reason for 
 sacrificing a deacon. 
 
 But I am digressing into what looks Hke 
 a criticism of the episcopate; and that, you 
 know, my dear Delany, is far from my 
 thought. Let us return to the training of 
 the clergy. And here again it is not my 
 thought to criticise the administration of 
 seminaries. The seminaries have their work 
 cut for them by the canons of the 
 Church which govern the examination of 
 candidates for orders. And yet something, 
 whether in the way of revision of canons, or 
 in change of emphasis in seminaries, needs 
 to be done. Though I am specially con- 
 cerned with the spiritual training of men, 
 the intellectual training is involved. There 
 are various points of view from which the 
 same subject may be imparted. Take, for 
 instance, the teaching of Holy Scripture. 
 Looking back over all the seminary courses 
 we have known anything about, over all the 
 examinations of candidates for orders that 
 we have helped to conduct, can you recall an 
 impression that the teaching of Scripture 
 has resulted in spiritual knowledge? Let it 
 be freely granted that the priest who goes 
 20 
 
DEDICATORY LETTER 
 
 out to face modern conditions of life needs 
 to go with a modern point of view about the 
 origin and development of the Bible, with a 
 competent knowledge of the meaning of 
 criticism and its bearing on theological 
 knowledge in general. But is that all he 
 needs, is that what he primarily needs? 
 The Bible is a collection of writings, of 
 which the most important aspect, to a Chris- 
 tian, is that they contain a revelation of the 
 mind of God. Through them the Holy 
 Spirit speaks to the soul of man. Without 
 that message the Scriptures would be of 
 merely archaeological importance. And un- 
 less the student find the message his educa- 
 tion in the Scriptures is a failure. What the 
 Holy Spirit has to say to men through the 
 pages of prophets and teachers and evangel- 
 ists — this is the supreme thing for the 
 teacher to impart and for the student to 
 master. Unless the student has mastered 
 that, he will find himself facing a congrega- 
 tion which expects to be taught by him the 
 way of life with no adequate message to de- 
 liver. Those of us who have spent years on 
 the wrong track, and have with immense 
 difficulty found what we ought to have been 
 21 
 
DEDICATORY LETTER 
 
 taught, or at least taught to find, look back 
 with some excusable bitterness to the days 
 of our training in the Scriptures with all that 
 is of value in Scripture left out. We have 
 found ourselves talking platitudes when we 
 ought to have been echoing the Word of 
 God. We have found our way, if we have 
 found it at all, after much wandering and 
 many errors which we should have been 
 spared. If at last the Living Voice has be- 
 come audible over the welter of human 
 voices, we have been fortunate. 
 
 This shall suffice by way of illustration. 
 I will not take your time or try your patience 
 by saying the same things over in regard to 
 other studies. Nor, again, do I altogether 
 blame the instructor in the seminary : he 
 teaches what he has to teach, and is hard put 
 to it to get the time to teach a bare outline 
 of his subject. Having taught in seminar- 
 ies, I know the impossibility of adequate 
 presentation of subjects assigned in the al- 
 lotted time. What I complain of is that the 
 point of view of seminaries is so exclusively 
 intellectual and so little spiritual. It leaves 
 a man at best with an intellectual grasp of a 
 subject but without the power to translate it 
 22 
 
DEDICATORY LETTER 
 
 into terms of human life ; and when the man 
 faces his priestly work he finds himself at. 
 sea in the attempt to teach in terms of life. 
 His congregation has small interest in the 
 contents of his note-books which he pours 
 out upon them. They complain of the "dry- 
 ness" of his lectures. They are dry because 
 they are inhuman — the mere bones of knowl- 
 edge unclothed in flesh and blood. His bib- 
 lical lectures tell of the theories of critics 
 and the niceties of Greek and Hebrew gram- 
 mar; they do not retell in terms of modern 
 experience the adventures of God in His at- 
 tempt to educate the race. His theological 
 instruction is perfectly accurate — he knows 
 his Creeds and Councils and Summa; but 
 his accurate theological statements and care- 
 ful distinctions do not touch anything in the 
 experience of the men and women who are 
 trying to follow him. They find no point of 
 contact, they experience no impulse to ac- 
 tion, they are stirred to no response. 
 
 Is not this, perhaps, true: that theology, 
 to reach the lives of men and women has to 
 reach them through its translation into terms 
 of morals, ascetics, mystics ? A man may be 
 familiar with the higher mathematics and 
 23 
 
DEDICATORY LETTER 
 
 incapable of making a box or putting up a 
 shelf — and the average man has to make 
 boxes and put up shelves. The average 
 Christian, likewise, is concerned with the 
 conduct of life in detail. He has to resist 
 evil and do good; he has to fight against 
 temptation and develop the virtues. The 
 theory of these is, no doubt, contained in 
 dogmatic theology, but its application is, to 
 say the least, not obvious till it is brought 
 out in the branches of theological learning 
 specified above. The bulk of any priest's 
 theological teaching is along the lines of 
 these applications of dogmatic principles. 
 Every priest has to deal with complex moral 
 questions whether he will or no; they are 
 brought to him for his solution whether he 
 hears confessions or not. And it is a plain 
 fact that numbers of priests are utterly at sea 
 in the matter of moral knowledge. If one is 
 still capable of being surprised by anything, 
 one is constantly surprised at the ignorant 
 moral rulings which are reported to one. It 
 seems to be the assumption of our education 
 that any one can answer questions in morals 
 by the exertion of a little common sense. 
 But living is a tremendously complex affair 
 24 
 
DEDICATORY LETTER 
 
 under our modern conditions, and questions 
 continually arise and are brought to the 
 priest for solution which try all his resources 
 of knowledge and experience. I say they 
 are brought to the priest, but they are not 
 always. The parishioner learns after a while 
 the caliber of the priest and, perhaps, does 
 not bring them. I met a case not long ago 
 — a not unusual case — which a parishioner 
 had not carried to the rector on the ground 
 that such questions seemed to preplex and 
 upset him! It was thought best therefore 
 not to disturb him. It was considerate, 
 but — 
 
 Furthermore, the priest is not only a phy- 
 sician, but a guide. There are multitudes of 
 men and women who want to be guided to a 
 holier life. It is not true that people in this 
 age have become so materialised that they 
 do not want religion; it would be much 
 nearer the truth to say that religion has be- 
 come so materialised as not to supply what 
 people instinctively know to be their reli- 
 gious needs. One meets numbers of people 
 to whom the teachings of spiritual religion 
 come as a revelation. Such are eager for 
 guidance. But how can the priest unskilled 
 25 
 
DEDICATORY LETTER 
 
 in ascetic theology and to whom mystic the- 
 ology is an unknown field, the suspected 
 camping place of spiritual tramps and nonde- 
 scripts, give such guidance? What our par- 
 ishes need, if we are to escape our present 
 financial and sociological obsessions, is a 
 strongly developed spiritual ideal of life, 
 which can only come through definite ascetic 
 and mystic teaching. But whence are the 
 teachers to be expected ? The mystics of the 
 past were the greatest and sanest teachers 
 the church has ever had ; yet it still seems to 
 be thought that they were some sort of neu- 
 rotic persons, or, at least, very "queer." Our 
 ascetic teaching is so defective that I fancy 
 many persons, otherwise intelligent, think 
 that asceticism has something to do with 
 living in a cave or wearing a hair shirt. If 
 they venture on a search for ascetic instruc- 
 tion they are apt to fall in with some modern 
 book of feeble sentimentalism "adapted to 
 the use of members of the Anglican Com- 
 munion." Still there is all the more reason 
 why the clergy should be trained in these 
 high matters along the lines of the teaching 
 of the Church's two greatest mystic and as- 
 cetic writers, St. John and St. Paul : trained 
 26 
 
DEDICATORY LETTER 
 
 to the appreciation of Christianity as a hfe 
 distinct from all other life — the creation and 
 gift of God, and not patches of moral plati- 
 tude sewn to the already frayed garment of 
 conventional living. Having once seen that 
 the Christian life is a distinct thing with its 
 own principles of genesis and development, 
 its own end in the consummated union of 
 the soul with its Creator, it is not difficult to 
 ascertain the principles of that life, and to 
 teach others to appreciate and apply them. 
 
 The young priest has the right to expect 
 that his training for the priesthood shall 
 start him properly ; that however much there 
 remains for him to learn, he shall have noth- 
 ing to unlearn. He has the right to expect 
 that those who are responsible for his edu- 
 cation, and notably the bishop whose obliga- 
 tion it is to care for his training, shall see to 
 it that he begins his priestly career, not as 
 one fighting to light through dense clouds, 
 but with a definite sense of values as the 
 product of his education. There should be 
 some sort of well-grounded expectancy that 
 he should approach his first charge, not as 
 an experimenter dealing with unknown ma- 
 terials any combination of which may pro- 
 27 
 
DEDICATORY LETTER 
 
 duce surprising results, or none; but as one 
 repeating experiments which he has already 
 verified in his own experience, and with 
 whose methods and results he is therefore 
 familiar. His teaching may then be ex- 
 pected to display a certain orderliness and 
 control, revolving about central positions 
 and establishing truths that are fundamental. 
 The experience of many parishes in the mat- 
 ter of the instruction they receive is that of 
 disproportion and scrappiness. The whole 
 counsel of God is not declared — it is fortu- 
 nate if any of it is. Pet social theories oc- 
 cupy a disproportionate amount of the pul- 
 pit's energies; personal tastes and inclina- 
 tions become central ; doctrines are advanced 
 without reference to the spiritual experience 
 of the parish. It is said that in a certain 
 parish made up largely of undigested and 
 unconverted raw material for the Church, 
 the sermon on a Sunday morning was on 
 "The Advocacy of Our Lady." It is to be 
 noted that it was preached by a deacon 
 whom the bishop of the diocese had placed 
 in charge. Under the circumstances, one 
 does not feel like being too critical of the 
 deacon. 
 
 28 
 
DEDICATORY LETTER 
 
 Any one familiar with the life of semi- 
 naries knows what a tremendous amount of 
 enthusiasm and aspiration there is in them, 
 which somehow does not get out of them. 
 It is of course not to be expected that all the 
 men who thought that they were going to 
 become Religious or go out to the mission 
 work of the Church will do so. But ought 
 we not to expect that the spirit of sacrifice 
 which is latent in such enthusiasms should 
 be held, developed, directed ? Ought we not 
 to expect that the priest facing the first years 
 of his priesthood shall face them as a difificult 
 work demanding much of sacrifice from 
 him ? May we not expect him to give him- 
 self to some special work, missionary or 
 other, and stick to it till he has made full 
 proof of his ministry? Is it too much to 
 expect that he shall abstain from matrimony, 
 at least till he find out what the life of a 
 priest is? It would seem that the young 
 priest, like any other young man starting in 
 life — to put it on the lowest level — should 
 first of all solve the elementary problems of 
 his work, and justify his assumed fitness for 
 undertaking it, by some years of undis- 
 tracted labor. To entangle himself in the 
 29 
 
DEDICATORY LETTER 
 
 affairs of this life before he knows anything 
 of the hfe which he has offered himself to 
 God to live, often spells spiritual disaster. 
 All the time, energy, devotion, that the 
 young priest can find in himself to offer, is 
 but a small thing compared with the de- 
 mands that the priesthood makes upon life. 
 After all, the priesthood is not a profitable 
 profession or a comfortable mode of social 
 usefulness, that it should be approached thus 
 lightly. With the example before us of 
 struggle for the ideal which is embodied in 
 the lives of great scientists, artists, men of 
 letters, the assumption that the priest's right 
 is the right to be comfortable is dishearten- 
 ing. The call of the priest is the call to fol- 
 low a crucified Master. 
 
 I have been trying to say, my dear De- 
 lany, that the training for the priesthood 
 that candidates receive, should, at the very 
 least, give them a high ideal of the life be- 
 fore them, and fix in their minds the awful 
 nature of their vocation and the sacrifice it 
 involves. Frankly, I do not believe that this 
 is the result of training as it is now given. 
 I have no disposition to find fault or to criti- 
 cise any one. I am merely calling attention 
 30 
 
DEDICATORY LETTER 
 
 to certain facts — disastrous facts, I think 
 them to be. I myself, as the head of a semi- 
 nary, proved a failure — and resigned. Nat- 
 urally I have no solution to offer of the prob- 
 lems I could not myself solve. But the 
 problems remain and will remain unless at- 
 tention is focussed upon them till some spir- 
 itual genius arises who shall show us how to 
 deal with them. The one thing at present 
 clear to my mind, aside from the pressing 
 nature of the problems themselves, is that 
 their solution lies in the direction of a 
 greater appreciation of holiness as a matter 
 of personal obligation and as a thing that 
 can be learned. A learned priesthood is by 
 no necessity an holy priesthood; but an holy 
 priesthood will learn whatever is requisite to 
 the due exercise of its powers. If we start 
 with the right ideals we may expect at least 
 some progress on the right road. 
 
 Believe me, my dear Delany, sincerely 
 and affectionately yours. 
 
 J. G. H. Barry. 
 St. Mary's Rectory, 
 Tuesday in the 
 Octave of the Ascension, 
 
 1915- 
 
 31 
 
THE HOLINESS OF THE BODY OF 
 CHRIST 
 
 The Church, which is His Body, the fulness 
 of Him that filleth all in all 
 
 (3) 
 
THE HOLINESS OF THE BODY OF 
 CHRIST 
 
 Of the four notes of the Church enumer- 
 ated in the creeds, three have been the sub- 
 ject of frequent and exhaustive discussion. 
 What constitutes the cathoHcity of the 
 Church, and what defects of doctrine or 
 practice destroy the CathoHc character of a 
 Christian body and reduce it to a status of 
 the sect, are famiHar topics of inquiry. The 
 unity of the Church as theory, and methods 
 of restoring external unity in a Christendom 
 weakened and made ineffective through its 
 divisions, are increasingly felt to be among 
 the supreme religious problems of the day, 
 upon the solution of which many other prob- 
 lems of importance wait. Qosely bound up 
 with all practical efforts to restore the 
 broken external unity of the Church is the 
 nature of our belief in the Church's aposto- 
 licity — all plans for church unity have 
 sooner or later to reckon with this note of 
 the Church, which involves not only the as- 
 sertion of the Church's historic continuity, 
 but a belief that the powers conferred upon 
 35 
 
HOLINESS OF BODY OF CHRIST 
 
 the Church by its Founder are by His will 
 transmitted through certain sacramental 
 media. There remains one note of the 
 Church — the note of hoHness. This, it ap- 
 pears to me, has escaped the attention that it 
 deserves. It is no less fundamental to the 
 well-being of the Church than either of the 
 other notes : it cannot be considered but as 
 a necessity of its being. Without it, neither 
 arguments as to definition, though they be 
 world-wide in acceptance, nor unimpeach- 
 able lineage, will avail to constitute a 
 sound and health-giving Christendom. The 
 Church must preserve and manifest the holi- 
 ness conferred by its Founder, or it is dead. 
 A profound and growing conviction that the 
 problems upon the solution of which depend, 
 if not the life, at least the usefulness, of the 
 Christian Church in the immediate future 
 can only be hopefully approached from the 
 ground of its holiness, has led me to select 
 this note of the Church as the subject of 
 these lectures. I do not believe that any- 
 thing less than the holiness of the Church 
 manifested in the life of its members will 
 avail to remove the obstacles which exist to 
 the reunion of Christendom. Holiness is 
 36 
 
HOLINESS OF BODY OF CHRIST 
 
 the only quality that can dissolve age-long 
 prejudice, correct traditional misconcep- 
 tions, do away with the blindness and self- 
 will which prevent men from even consider- 
 ing the possibility of their being mistaken, 
 destroy pride of intellect, and confer the 
 humility which sees both self and others as 
 they truly are. 
 
 The holiness of the Church flows directly 
 from the holiness of its Head. Its essential 
 holiness results from this : that it is the Body 
 of Christ. The Christian religion is not a 
 theor}'-, a philosophy, a morality, but a life, 
 the life of Incarnate God which is imparted 
 to all those who receive Him, and by which 
 they are knit into a unity with Him, which 
 is His Body. The Christian Church actu- 
 ally came into existence when the Second 
 Person of the Blessed Trinity took our flesh 
 in the womb of the Blessed Virgin Mary and 
 our nature was forever united to God. This 
 Incarnation of the Son of God is a dynamic 
 fact : when the God-man has undergone the 
 transformation of the resurrection His spir- 
 itualized humanity becomes the source from 
 participation in which our humanity is re- 
 generated and endowed with new powers. 
 37 
 
HOLINESS OF BODY OF CHRIST 
 
 The regenerate man through his incorpora- 
 tion into Christ becomes a partaker of the 
 divine nature. 
 
 It is through this extension of the Incar- 
 nation by the incorporation of the regenerate 
 into Christ that this mystical Body of Christ, 
 which is the Church, is built up. The Body 
 of Christ reaches greater extension with 
 each succeeding baptism. Every child who 
 receives the sacrament of baptism passes 
 into a new sphere of being — is a new crea- 
 tion by virtue of this sacramental action. In 
 it is manifested a life which was not there 
 before, and this life flowing forth from the 
 Risen Head of the Body unites all the bap- 
 tized to Christ and to one another with a 
 unity which is independent of the super- 
 ficial divisions which hinder the manifesta- 
 tion of this unity in the exterior life of the 
 Church. 
 
 And this Body which is gradually built 
 up by the extension of the incarnate life of 
 our Lord in the regenerate is a Holy Body 
 because it is His. Through it is propagated 
 a holy life which is the life of God in the 
 souls of men. Those means of which the 
 Church makes use in the carrying on of its 
 38 
 
HOLINESS OF BODY OF CHRIST 
 
 work have reference, primarily, to this Hfe : 
 they are the organs by which this Hfe is 
 transmitted and sustained. 
 
 This seems less true, perhaps, in regard to 
 the teaching of the Church than it does in 
 the case of the sacraments. The teaching 
 function of the Church seems directed to the 
 education of the Christian and his guidance 
 in the matter of conduct. Those who find in 
 conduct, that is, in the moral life, the su- 
 preme meaning of Christianity, who mini- 
 mize belief and maximize action, find small 
 place for the sacraments in the Christian sys- 
 tem. The lesser sacraments are neglected 
 entirely, and the greater sacraments tend to 
 become insignificant and of infrequent ad- 
 ministration. Teaching becomes moral in- 
 struction as distinguished from instruction 
 in the theory and practice of religion, that is, 
 of the spiritual life. Exhortation aims at 
 stimulating to the performance of daily 
 human and social duties; till in the end the 
 ideal of the good citizen is substituted for 
 the ideal of the good Christian — or, rather, 
 the two ideals are confused. 
 
 But in reality the teaching office of the 
 Church has reference to the teaching of 
 39 
 
HOLINESS OF BODY OF CHRIST 
 
 revealed truth. The Church has not been 
 commissioned to teach the ordinary branches 
 of human knowledge which men may learn 
 from observation of the world. Its mission 
 is not even to teach rules of conduct in the 
 ordinary sense. Its mission is to make 
 known the revealed will of God, a will which 
 is revealed with a definite object, our sancti- 
 fication. This is the will of God, even our 
 sanctification. Revelation makes known the 
 meaning of God in His relation to human 
 life, and the necessary response of human 
 life if it will realize God's ideal for it. There 
 are made known to us our possibilities, in 
 that power is given us to become the sons of 
 God. And living in this relation as God's 
 children requires something quite different 
 from and far higher than the observance of 
 moral rules, which is but a form of legalism. 
 It requires a response of life to life. Its ful- 
 filment is the reproduction of the Christ-life 
 in the individual Christian, the recapitula- 
 tion in him of the Christ experience. This 
 is the spiritual life which progresses step by 
 step from birth through death and burial to 
 resurrection and ascension, till as a present 
 experience it is lifted up to dwell with Christ 
 40 
 
HOLINESS OF BODY OF CHRIST 
 
 in heavenly places. Thus the holy life of 
 the Incarnate is not set before us as the ob- 
 ject of our admiration and distant imitation 
 through the exercise of our own powers, 
 even when those powers are supplemented 
 by something which we vaguely call grace; 
 but it is set before us as a life to be repro- 
 duced experimentally, and for which no 
 other type of life can be accepted as a sub- 
 stitute. A moral life, no doubt, finds its 
 motives re-enforced by the principles of 
 Christian living; but its maxims cannot be 
 accepted as a substitute for those principles. 
 Holiness is not integrity of moral life, but a 
 supernatural creation of God the Holy 
 Spirit. The teaching of Christianity is not 
 the mere proclamation of truths; but those 
 truths when responded to, accepted by faith, 
 are found in experience to be dynamic and 
 filled with creative energy which lays hold 
 upon life and transforms it. 
 
 This energy which vitalizes Christian 
 teaching is the informing energy of God the 
 Holy Spirit, Who is the indwelling Spirit 
 of life in the Body of Christ. He is pre- 
 eminently the Spirit of Holiness, that is, the 
 Spirit which is not only possessed of essen- 
 41 
 
HOLINESS OF BODY OF CHRIST 
 
 tial holiness, but Who imparts and produces 
 hohness in all the members of the body. We 
 suffer grievous loss when we permit our 
 thought to stray from His immediate and 
 personal relation to us as the Spirit of Christ 
 sent forth to carry on the work of the In- 
 carnate in the edification of the body. As 
 the Holy Spirit was present in the material 
 creation, imparting to it the gift of imma- 
 terial life, so is He present in the new crea- 
 tion, ministering the gifts conferred on it by 
 its Risen Head. His work is the work of 
 the Inspirer and Sustainer of all good pur- 
 poses and actions ; the work of the Encour- 
 ager and Strengthener. He is the Adminis- 
 trator of the body; and whenever the work 
 of the body follows His will, it is successful. 
 The failures of the Church are failures to 
 seek the will and guidance of the Holy Spirit 
 and the substitution for these of the maxims 
 of earthly wisdom. The weakness of the 
 Christian Church to-day, and no one can 
 deny that it is weak, is due more than all 
 else to this : that it is attempting to find sub- 
 stitutes for spiritual power in the rules of 
 prudence which guide men in their material 
 interests. 
 
 42 
 
HOLINESS OF BODY OF CHRIST 
 
 If we consider more in detail the means 
 which are used by the Holy Spirit to create 
 the holy life of the Body of Christ in its 
 members, we find that the initial means is 
 baptism. It is impossible to over-rate the 
 significance of baptism. As the sacrament 
 of regeneration it effects that new relation of 
 the soul to Incarnate God which is the basis 
 of all subsequent sacramental action. Other 
 sacraments only restore, enlarge, or sustain 
 what baptism has initiated. The cleansing 
 of our nature and its union with God lifts 
 man to the level of the spiritual life which is 
 henceforth nourished and developed by the 
 ministries of grace. The baptized person is 
 possessed of a "character," which is inde- 
 structible. The new relation to God upon 
 which he has entered may be hindered in its 
 development, may be profoundly affected by 
 sin ; its normal results may be nullified ; but 
 there is one result which cannot be nullified 
 — the baptized person cannot become unbap- 
 tized: he abides God's son forever. Under 
 whatever circumstances of self-wrought ex- 
 clusion from the privileges of the Kingdom, 
 or of self-inflicted penalties, he abides God's 
 child, capable of restoration to all that son- 
 43 
 
HOLINESS OF BODY OF CHRIST 
 
 ship means as long as he is capable of re- 
 pentance. And even in that state of final 
 loss in which repentance is no longer able to 
 restore the forfeited capacity for the beatific 
 vision, it is possible to think of the nov^^ sub- 
 missive soul as participant of some conscious 
 possession of God which springs from a not 
 utterly destroyed sonship — thus enjoying so 
 much of the divine blessing as can still com- 
 fort it in its aeonian disaster. 
 
 This holy life which is the possession of 
 the baptized as the result of their incorpora- 
 tion into the Body of Christ, normally and 
 by God's intention, grows to strength and 
 maturity with the progress of Christian ex- 
 perience. We who are created in Him grow 
 up in Him, by a steady advance in the prac- 
 tice of the spiritual life. This advance to 
 Christian maturity — to the measure of the 
 stature of the fulness of Christ, to the status 
 of the full-grown spiritual man, should be 
 unchecked, but, alas, is not. The growth of 
 the Body of Christ to which our spiritual 
 growth should contribute, is in fact checked 
 and partially hindered by our failure to deal 
 adequately with sin and temptation. The 
 body which should be manifested to the 
 44 
 
HOLINESS OF BODY OF CHRIST 
 
 world as obviously the holy body of the In- 
 carnate fails partially of its witness and con- 
 veys a testimony which may be doubted and 
 even denied because of the imperfect nature 
 of our response to the divine life. The obvi- 
 ous fact of our sin supervenes to invalidate 
 the truth of our professions. We have to 
 argue about the holiness of the Church when 
 that holiness should be a matter of self- 
 evidence. Just as the life of the individual 
 Christian bears an uncertain and disputable 
 testimony to the claim that he makes to be 
 the child of God, so the sins and failures of 
 the Christian Church make it possible that 
 at any moment its claim to be the Body of 
 Christ may be disputed. Instead of the self- 
 evidence of explicit holiness we are driven to 
 fall back upon faith in the revelation of 
 God's mind, buttressed by the witness of 
 saintly lives here and there, and the infer- 
 ences to be drawn from a partial experience 
 which we recognize as being partial, and 
 therefore significant of the ideal whole. 
 
 It is with foresight of the necessities of 
 
 our fallen nature, the certainty of our failure 
 
 to meet sin successfully, that the Divine 
 
 Wisdom has provided the sustaining and re- 
 
 45 
 
HOLINESS OF BODY OF CHRIST 
 
 storing grace of the sacraments other than 
 baptism. It has provided that in our strug- 
 gle with temptation we should be constantly 
 supported by the divine strength ministered 
 through simple and easily accessible ways. 
 In the first place, the primary gift of son- 
 ship is completed and supplemented by the 
 manifold gifts of the Holy Spirit in the sac- 
 rament of confirmation. The effect of that 
 sacrament is a fuller impartation of the Holy 
 Spirit to the soul of the regenerate than took 
 place in baptism. And this permanent in- 
 dwelling of the Holy Spirit is intended to 
 strengthen us in our Christian warfare, 
 through the strengthening of our wills to 
 withstand temptation and the illumination of 
 our intellects to perceive the nature and 
 meaning of the conflict whereupon we have 
 entered. In the Church's intention this gift 
 is to be imparted at entrance upon years of 
 discretion, when the soul first discerns the 
 meaning of good and evil. But beyond in- 
 forming the conscience and strengthening us 
 for our contest the indwelling presence is 
 effective of a work of positive creation. It 
 is the office of God the Holy Ghost to create 
 in us the virtues of the Christian life. Those 
 .46 
 
HOLINESS OF BODY OF CHRIST 
 
 virtues, or fruits of the Spirit, as the apostle 
 calls them, are not of natural growth, but of 
 supernatural production. The natural man 
 has his own virtues; but the natural man is 
 incapable of the fruits of the spirit — he dis- 
 trusts and dislikes them. In the new morali- 
 ties which from time to time are proposed to 
 us they are absent. But our Lord taught 
 them in the Beatitudes and exemplified them 
 in His own life; and the Holy Spirit creates 
 them in the lives of those who yield them- 
 selves to Him. 
 
 It is a striking evidence of the holiness of 
 the Body of Christ that it values and aims 
 to produce these virtues — that it makes them 
 its test of individual sanctity. When — and 
 the when is of frequent occurrence — these 
 virtues are neglected or slighted, the evi- 
 dence for the holiness of the Church is ob- 
 scured. To attempt to substitute another 
 type of life for the Christian type is popular 
 to-day. I think, indeed, that I am not wrong 
 in saying that the Christian life, as taught in 
 the Sermon on the Mount and exemplified 
 in the life of our Lord, is neither considered 
 nor understood by the greater part of even 
 the Christian community. What men live 
 47 
 
HOLINESS OF BODY OF CHRIST 
 
 by in reality is social convention. The type 
 of conduct that passes current as a "good 
 life" is accepted without thought or discus- 
 sion as an adequate expression of Christian- 
 ity. In reality it can hardly be regarded as 
 an expression of Christianity at all. Cer- 
 tainly its whole character is different from 
 the Christ-life of the Gospels. Its motives 
 are motives of decency and social order; its 
 aims reputation and respectability. There is 
 nothing supernatural about it. It is a crea- 
 tion of public opinion and varies as public 
 opinion varies. 
 
 But the life of holiness which it is the 
 function of the Church to create is distinctly 
 supernatural in its motives and ends. It is 
 created and sustained by the divine action; 
 it seeks the approval of God. It aims to re- 
 produce the life of Christ in the personal 
 experience of each individual Christian. To 
 it sin is not so much the transgression of 
 the law of precepts and commandments, as 
 the refusal of the Christ-ideal as such, the 
 acquiescing in a lower type of life. There 
 are "good men," that is, men who conform 
 carefully to the current social standard of 
 morality, who are not righteous men; and 
 48 
 
HOLINESS OF BODY OF CHRIST 
 
 there are those who display manifold defects 
 of character and action who are neverthe- 
 less earnestly striving to live the life of 
 righteousness and in some degree succeed- 
 ing in their attempt. From the Christian 
 point of view human life must be estimated 
 by reference to its ideals and efforts, rather 
 than by its absolute success. The man who 
 really wills to be a great Christian and suc- 
 ceeds only partially is a better man, in the 
 Christian sense, than the man who attempt- 
 ing a merely social ideal succeeds in attain- 
 ing it. 
 
 The Church views the Christian not as in 
 a final but in a growing and progressive 
 state. It is interested in his progress and 
 pro\-ides the means for his support and con- 
 tinuance. It provides, too, for his failures. 
 Sin is not an irreparable disaster but a fore- 
 seen accident which can be dealt with by the 
 powers inherent in the Body of Christ. 
 Without in the least underestimating sin, 
 estimating it, indeed, as much more signifi- 
 cant and harmful than it is possible for the 
 worldly ideal to estimate it — for it regards 
 it, not as a ^-iolation of law but as a Anola- 
 tion of love — it pro^•ides a method of treat- 
 (4) 49 
 
HOLINESS OF BODY OF CHRIST 
 
 ment which is healing and restorative. This 
 method of treatment is known as repentance ; 
 and it is the only hopeful method of dealing 
 with sin. Social morality either rejects the 
 sinner, as an utter failure, from ordinary so- 
 cial life; or regards sin as unimportant, a 
 necessary accident in the process of human 
 evolution. But the Body of Christ brings to 
 bear upon the sinner the resources of the 
 divine love. It teaches the sinner to look 
 upon his sin as a wound to Him Who loved 
 him and gave Himself for him, as the scorn 
 and rejection of the divine work for his sal- 
 vation, as the revolt of the child from his 
 Father. The motives it urges for repentance 
 are not the social motives of injury inflicted 
 on self or others, but the supernatural mo- 
 tive of the divine disappointment of the 
 Father in His redeemed child. The sorrow 
 it seeks to excite is sorrow after a godly 
 sort, sorrow, that is, for having failed to 
 justify the trust that God has reposed in him. 
 This sorrow being excited, the soul is led 
 to the use of the healing sacrament of 
 penance, which is the application of the di- 
 vine love to the healing of the soul that has 
 sinned and repents of its sin. The suppres- 
 50 
 
HOLINESS OF BODY OF CHRIST 
 
 sion of the sacrament of penance through 
 large sections of the Anglican Communion 
 is an indication of its reduced vitality. It is 
 an indication of the under-estimate or false 
 estimate of the nature and resources of the 
 Body of Christ. It is inconceivable, from 
 the point of view of theory, that means 
 should be provided for the sacramental ap- 
 plication of the work of Christ in the one 
 instance of sin before baptism, and that no 
 provision of a sacramental nature should be 
 made for sin after baptism. If pre-baptismal 
 sin is to be normally dealt with sacrament- 
 ally, we should reasonably expect that post- 
 baptismal sin should be dealt with in the 
 same way. And if a minister of the word 
 and sacraments is capable of administering 
 and applying effectively the divine forgive- 
 ness in the one case, we may certainly ex- 
 pect that he will be capable of the like min- 
 istry in the other. And such indeed is the 
 method by which the Church has treated 
 post-baptismal sin throughout the ages. By 
 what name this ministry is called, whether 
 the sacrament of penance as it has come his- 
 torically to be called, or otherwise, is unim- 
 portant; the important thing is that "Al- 
 51 
 
HOLINESS OF BODY OF CHRIST 
 
 mighty God hath given power and com- 
 mandment, to his ministers, to declare and 
 pronounce to His people, being penitent, the 
 absolution and remission of their sins." His 
 promises of pardon and absolution of the 
 penitent do not hang in the air, as it were, 
 but are applied by definite persons through 
 definite instrumentalities which are at once 
 means whereby we receive this grace, and 
 pledges to assure us thereof. 
 
 This ministry of the divine forgiveness is 
 of tremendous importance to the develop- 
 ment of the life of holiness, as generating 
 in the individual at once a deep sense of the 
 guilt of sin and a new attitude of hopeful- 
 ness toward the spiritual life. The oft- 
 repeated allegation that frequent resort to 
 the sacrament of penance destroys the sense 
 of the sinfulness of sin and makes repent- 
 ance superficial and unreal, is founded upon 
 an inadequate observation and implies a lack 
 of actual experience in the reception and 
 ministration of the sacrament. There are 
 no facts of observation back of the convic- 
 tion that those who "go directly to God" 
 repent in a deeper and more sincere way 
 than those who make use of this sacrament. 
 52 
 
HOLINESS OF BODY OF CHRIST 
 
 Nor is it true that those who dedine the sac- 
 rament go more directly to God than those 
 who make use of it. Superficial and light- 
 minded persons will be such under all cir- 
 cumstances; but the use of the sacrament 
 will not increase either their superficiality or 
 light-mindedness. On the contrary, all the 
 circumstances and surroundings of the sac- 
 rament are such as tend to produce serious- 
 ness of repentance and stir the depths of 
 contrition. And inasmuch as the divine re- 
 sponse is pledged to us in the sacrament, it 
 is the basis of hopefulness. The weak- 
 nesses which we find in ourselves impress us 
 with the constant need of grace, if we are to 
 overcome them, and the sacrament of pen- 
 ance is the constant ministry of grace to the 
 soul which has found its need. For the sac- 
 ramental action is not limited to the removal 
 of the guilt of sin. There is also in the sac- 
 rament of penance, as in other sacraments, 
 the impartation of sanctifying grace. The 
 spiritual faculties are vivified and edified, 
 the wounds inflicted by sin are healed, and 
 hindrances to the life of union with our Lord 
 having been removed, the life is restored to 
 the stability and energy which had been im- 
 53 
 
HOLINESS OF BODY OF CHRIST 
 
 peded by sin. The life of the body is nor- 
 mal only when this constant exercise of its 
 cleansing and healing power goes on unhin- 
 dered. The sacrament can be thought of as 
 of exceptional application only in the sense 
 in which sin can be thought of as of excep- 
 tional occurrence. 
 
 Just because sin has to be reckoned with 
 as a steady factor in human experience the 
 ministry of grace that meets it and provides 
 for its removal and healing must be constant. 
 To put it otherwise, repentance is not an oc- 
 casional act but a continuous spiritual ex- 
 perience. The life of repentance is one 
 aspect of the life of the Body of Christ — 
 that aspect which reveals it as seeking in- 
 creasingly to purify itself and gain in depth 
 of spiritual experience and positive holiness. 
 The branches abide in the vine on condition 
 of their progressive purgation. While the 
 body, as such, is essentially holy, the mem- 
 bers are of relative holiness and must grow 
 up in the body with an ever deepening par- 
 ticipation in its life. And because the mem- 
 bers of the body are not only members of 
 Christ but, through their common inherence 
 in Him are members one of another, there 
 54 
 
HOLINESS OF BODY OF CHRIST 
 
 must be an interaction of their penitence as 
 of their other spiritual activities. The mem- 
 bers not only rejoice together but suffer to- 
 gether; and their inter-communion means 
 that their energy is diffused throughout the 
 body, and that the various members are af- 
 fected by the experience of one another. No 
 member lives an isolated life, but shares in 
 the experiences of the others. In this sense 
 we repent for one another, that is, our spir- 
 itual activities, transmitted through the body 
 effect certain releases of spiritual energy in 
 the lives of others. The Christ-experience 
 is reproduced throughout the body, and the 
 members of the body enter into and partici- 
 pate in His atoning work. Our Lord is, as 
 has often been pointed out, the great Peni- 
 tent—His assumption of the sins that were 
 not His, and His suffering on behalf of 
 them, is essentially a penitential act. 
 Through His self -identification with us in 
 the Incarnation He is enabled to become our 
 representative : potentially the representative 
 of the race, actually the representative of all 
 those who are brought into union with Him 
 by their incorporation into His body. And 
 this incorporation is an incorporation into 
 55 
 
HOLINESS OF BODY OF CHRIST 
 
 His work, a participation in His experience, 
 by which the life and action of Christ are 
 recapitulated by the body as a whole, and by 
 each living member of the body. There is 
 no ground for excluding our penitence from 
 this totality of experience. We repeat the 
 penitential experience of Christ, and make 
 up that which is behind in His sufferings, 
 because such action on our part is not iso- 
 lated action but the corporate action of the 
 members of Christ. Looked at from another 
 point of view, it is the repentance of Christ 
 which is individualized in us, and our repent- 
 ance is in reality Christ repenting in us ; just 
 as none of our spiritual activities have their 
 origin in us, but are the activities of the 
 Christ Who dwells in us. The life of God 
 i? imparted to us through our union with 
 our Lord. 
 
 Another phase of the divine action in cre- 
 ating and sustaining the life of union comes 
 into view when we look to another sacra- 
 ment — ^the sacrament of the Body and Blood 
 of Christ. This sacrament, considered as a 
 communion, is the continual offer of Himself 
 by Incarnate God to the members of His 
 Body. If one may venture so to express it, 
 56 
 
HOLINESS OF BODY OF CHRIST 
 
 it is the continual pouring of Himself into 
 the soul of the believer that He may abide 
 with him as the principle of his Hfe. It is 
 the means of the indwelling and abiding 
 Presence in the soul of the Christian. Life 
 is the meaning of the divine mission. / am 
 come that they might have life, and that 
 they may have it more abundantly. He 
 that eateth me, even he shall live by me. 
 Whosoever eateth my flesh, and drinketh 
 my blood, hath eternal life. It is chiefly by 
 constant participation in the Sacred Human- 
 ity of Christ that the gift of eternal life 
 which was communicated to us through the 
 sacrament of regeneration is perpetuated and 
 sustained. Minimizing interpretations of 
 the meaning of the Holy Communion not 
 only render null and void the entire body of 
 the teaching of the Church from the days of 
 St. John and St. Paul onward, but they ren- 
 der the sacrament itself a meaningless thing, 
 a clumsy instrument of altogether inferior 
 ends. It is only as we view this sacrament 
 as the means whereby an actually present 
 Redeemer imparts the reality of His Incar- 
 nate nature to the regenerate soul that we 
 are able to understand it as a further and 
 57 
 
HOLINESS OF BODY OF CHRIST 
 
 crowning act in that process of sacramental 
 action which we have been following. 
 
 The sacred humanity of our Lord is re- 
 vealed in this sacrament as that which com- 
 municates and sustains that gift of everlast- 
 ing life which our Lord came to impart and 
 which is our bond to the eternal life of God. 
 When we think of the Body of Christ as the 
 Spirit-filled body, we think of it as a body 
 in which God the Holy Spirit is operating 
 the sacramental actions which remove all 
 obstacles which hinder our union with our 
 Lord, and effecting that "our sinful bodies 
 may be made clean by his body, and our 
 souls washed through his most precious 
 blood, that we may evermore dwell in him 
 and he in us." This process by which the 
 life of the body is extended and intensified, 
 is the edification of the body, its expression 
 toward its ideal, which is the inclusion of 
 the race which has been redeemed, by actual 
 participation of redemption. We must bear 
 in mind that the purpose of the Incarnation 
 is not fully realized as long as any human 
 being remains out of Christ; that is, is not 
 incorporated in the Body of the Incarnate. 
 This of course means that the scope of the 
 58 
 
HOLINESS OF BODY OF CHRIST 
 
 Incarnate work is wider than the earthly 
 church in which it has its starting point, and 
 reaches to all human life, in whatever state 
 of being, unsatisfied till that life, in its de- 
 gree and capacity, has through the body been 
 brought into relation with God. The im- 
 partation of the sacred humanity to us nec- 
 essarily goes on as long as we are imperfect, 
 and yet retain the capacity for perfection; 
 and is therefore one of the divine operations 
 in our soul which continues beyond the pres- 
 ent life — continues until the saved soul be- 
 comes competent of the beatific vision. And 
 even beyond that, as Christ remains incar- 
 nate forever. His Incarnation is the con- 
 tinuous support of our continuous union 
 with Him; the approach of the creature to 
 the pure divinity of the Blessed Trinity is 
 continuously mediated by the humanity of 
 our Lord. And we may believe that all 
 progress in the "other world" is due to an 
 increasing participation in the divine-human 
 nature of the God-man, begun in sacramen- 
 tal action here and continued by what heav- 
 enly action we know not. But we do know 
 that He which hath begun a good work in 
 us, will perform the same until the day of 
 59 
 
HOLINESS OF BODY OF CHRIST 
 
 Jesus Christ — until that day, when perfect 
 in body and spirit with a perfectness never 
 attained on this earth, we are presented in 
 Him to the Father, the perfect outcome of 
 His Incarnate work. 
 
 And even in our imperfect state, while the 
 body is still in the process of its edification, 
 we are presented to God in Him. There is 
 another aspect of the Holy Eucharist by 
 which it is the continuous presentation of 
 the Incarnate in a sacrificial aspect. His self- 
 presentation with His mystical body, that is, 
 with all those who are incorporate in Him. 
 This is that sacrifice which is continuous in 
 heaven and is, not repeated, but presented 
 on the altars of the earthly Church; "the 
 one perfect and sufficient sacrifice, oblation, 
 and satisfaction for the sins of the whole 
 world." Incapable of repetition because in- 
 capable of cessation, this one sacrifice is for- 
 ever the source of hope to sinful men. We 
 forever plead the eternal merits of this one 
 sacrifice as the basis of our hope and our 
 confidence in our approach to God. And 
 the Church as the extension of the incarna- 
 tion of Christ itself becomes merged in the 
 sacrificial offering of its Head and is able 
 60 
 
HOLINESS OF BODY OF CHRIST 
 
 to offer itself in union with Him; and each 
 individual member of the Church partici- 
 pates in the offering, and presents himself, 
 his soul and body, "to be a reasonable, holy, 
 and living sacrifice," with the well-grounded 
 hope that being accepted in the Beloved, he 
 will receive an increase of His grace, and 
 "be filled with grace and heavenly benedic- 
 tion, and made one body in Him, that He 
 may dwell in us and we in Him." The 
 earthly Church, passing the time of its prep- 
 aration and probation here, will be presented 
 in Him, its Creator, Redeemer and Sancti- 
 fier, as the living and heavenly Body of 
 Christ, His Bride, forever knit to Him in 
 the participation of an indissoluble life. 
 
 It has been my purpose in this lecture, by 
 setting out the essential nature and inner 
 life of the Church, the Body of Christ, and 
 in sketching its operation in regenerating, 
 renewing, and developing the spiritual life 
 of man in growing union with that body, to 
 present the holiness of the Church as the 
 manifestation of the holy life of its Head 
 through the members whom He has incor- 
 porated into Himself. Holiness is not then 
 an accidental quality of the Church, but is 
 61 
 
HOLINESS OF BODY OF CHRIST 
 
 of the very essence of its being. Inasmuch 
 as it is the Body of Christ the Church needs 
 must be holy, and all the members of the 
 Church must share in the holiness of their 
 Head. And from the point of view of the 
 present lectures, holiness, a note of the 
 Church, must be a thing capable of recogni- 
 tion and estimation. It must be not only 
 theoretically of the essence of the Church; 
 but it must be a quality manifested in the life 
 of the Church, a quality so evidently mani- 
 fested that it, so far forth, indentifies the 
 body possessing it as a manifestation of the 
 Body of Christ. A body, if vfe can conceive 
 such, which did not care for nor seek holi- 
 ness, which was content with some lower 
 ideal of life — let us say social goodness — 
 could lay no claim to be identified as the 
 body of Christ. However good and worthy 
 its purpose, we should see in it something 
 other than the Church of the living God. A 
 claim on the part of such a body to proclaim 
 the true doctrine of the gospel, or its pos- 
 session of certain ordinances, would not of 
 itself constitute a valid claim to recognition 
 as the Church. It must further show that 
 its teaching and ordinances are so connected 
 62 
 
HOLINESS OF BODY OF CHRIST 
 
 with the incarnate Hfe of our Head, as to be 
 means of manifestation and transmission of 
 His Hfe to His members, so that His holy 
 Hfe may be in them, and by them be mani- 
 fested to the world, so that their witness 
 shall be evidence of the reality of their 
 union with the Incarnate. 
 
 We must therefore proceed to a descrip- 
 tion of the life of the Church, or certain 
 phases of that life, as means of the mani- 
 festation of the holy life of Incarnate God in 
 His members. 
 
 63 
 
THE UNIVERSAL VOCATION TO 
 HOLINESS 
 
 To them that are sanctified in Christ Jesus, 
 called to he saints 
 
 (s) 
 
THE UNIVERSAL VOCATION TO 
 HOLINESS 
 
 In the preceding lecture it was my object 
 to emphasize the fact that the hfe of the 
 Body of Christ is a holy and supernatural 
 life, flowing out from Christ, the Head of 
 the Body, and through the action of the 
 Holy Spirit communicated to all members of 
 the Body by means of media instituted for 
 that purpose, in such wise that all who are 
 in the Body are partakers of that life in pro- 
 portion to their receptivity. We must now 
 go on to consider the holiness of the Body 
 of Christ as a holiness to which all members 
 of the Body are called, the ideal aim of their 
 Christian activity. The universal vocation 
 of Christians is a vocation to sanctity. 
 
 This admits of no doubt. "The Saints" 
 was the earliest designation of the Christian 
 community, and this designation regards not 
 simply their separation from the world, but 
 their separation to God. There can be no 
 complete account of the life of these primi- 
 tive Christian communities which fails to 
 take note of the aim, the movement of their 
 67 
 
VOCATION TO HOLINESS 
 
 life, as ideally tending toward a fuller ap- 
 propriation of that gift of eternal life which 
 Incarnate God came that they might have. 
 "I am come that they might have life and 
 that they might have it more abundantly." 
 As we read Saint Paul's letters to those 
 groups of converts which he had brought 
 together to be the Church in such and such 
 a place, we often have the feeling that he is 
 soaring far over the heads of his readers in 
 his development of the meaning of the 
 Christian life. But I doubt if he actually 
 did lose touch with them. Those fundamen- 
 tal conceptions of the Christian life which 
 seem to us so difificult of appropriation are 
 precisely the conceptions with which they 
 would have been most familiar. Just be- 
 cause they were fundamental to Saint Paul's 
 thought, they would have been what they 
 were first taught in being instructed for bap- 
 tism and the Christian life. It is indeed ex- 
 ceedingly instructive to remember, when we 
 lay down one of Saint Paul's Epistles find- 
 ing it difficult to understand, that it is not a 
 theological treatise for advanced students, 
 but a pastoral letter addressed to a congre- 
 gation, and that Saint Paul certainly ex- 
 68 
 
VOCATION TO HOLINESS 
 
 pected them to understand it. One suspects 
 that the modern congregation to which Saint 
 Paul's letters are read, often fail to follow 
 his tliought. and that tlie reason is tliat they 
 are uninstructed in just tliose fundamental 
 doctrines of the Christian faith with which 
 Saint Paul's first readers were familiar. To 
 the average modem congregation Christian- 
 it}" is a set of rules for the ordering of its 
 social relations, combined with a few rites 
 which are vaguely thought of as "means of 
 grace." — grace again being a term of quite 
 indefinite content. Saint Paul's hearers 
 would have conceived Christianity" quite dif- 
 ferently, as the gift of eternal life through 
 Christ into WTiom they had been incorpor- 
 ated and AMiose life-experience they were to 
 recapitulate and e:q)ress in their own living. 
 Tliey would have understood that the end of 
 their religious experience was not to make 
 them men and women of good moral lives, 
 and therefore A-aluable citizens of the social 
 state, but that it was to make them saints 
 and full-grown citizens of an Heavenly 
 Kingdom. Their fundamental relation was 
 a relation to God in Christ, and their essen- 
 tial life was the life lived with Christ in 
 69 
 
VOCATION TO HOLINESS 
 
 heavenly places. Holiness would have been 
 to them not the rare acquisition of certain 
 select souls, but the indispensable character- 
 istic of the Christian as such. 
 
 Let us put it in this way : The essential 
 holiness of the Body of Christ, of which 
 each Christian is a member, must be repro- 
 duced in the experience of the individual, 
 and is the complete and only complete evi- 
 dence of his healthy functioning as a member 
 of the Body. It is fatal to our understand- 
 ing of the New Testament conception of a 
 Christian to allow our minds to be distracted 
 to any other conception of what constitutes 
 Christianity in action, as that it is the imita- 
 tion of certain external details of the life of 
 our Lord, or the aiming to follow certain 
 rules which may be deduced from his teach- 
 ing. The constant human tendency is to 
 substitute some lower and easier thing for 
 the full ideal of the Gospel life. The present 
 time in particular is witnessing a widespread 
 presentation of the gospel as a gospel of 
 good works. As a revival of the conviction 
 of the obligations and value of the corporeal 
 works of mercy, as an application of the 
 Gospel of Christ, this would be encouraging ; 
 70 
 
VOCATION TO HOLINESS 
 
 but it is not in the least encouraging if our 
 duty to our neighbor, as emphasized, has 
 taught us to obscure our duty to God. It 
 would indeed seem that our duty toward 
 God is our duty toward our neighbor. This 
 emphasis upon a religion of good works is 
 no doubt due to the widespread interest in 
 sociology which has been so marked a feat- 
 ure of the last few years, but that religious 
 teaching and practice has been so responsive 
 to a special trend of contemporary thought 
 is due to the fact that the confused state of 
 divided Christendom makes theological 
 thinking difficult and makes man eager to 
 seize upon an alternative which seems to af- 
 ford a way of escape from mental entangle- 
 ments. One fears that this presentation of 
 the Gospel as a Gospel of service to the 
 brother, as a process of changing the King- 
 dom of God into a Democracy, is ultimately 
 motived by weariness of controversy and 
 division, by the conviction that Christendom 
 ought to be one, and that if Christians can- 
 not be brought to unity on any theological 
 platform, it is well to take another platform 
 on which they can stand. That this basis of 
 unity is an abandonment and not a solution 
 71 
 
VOCATION TO HOLINESS 
 
 of our problem seems not yet to be consid- 
 ered. 
 
 For it would seem to be clear that it is 
 only in a very restricted sense, and in the 
 way of a by-product, that it is the function 
 of the Gospel to produce good citizens. It 
 is impossible to assent to the degradation of 
 the ideal of the saint to that of the ideal so- 
 cial man. The notion of sanctity does in- 
 deed contain that of social integrity and 
 uesfulness, but it is by no means exhausted 
 by it. The vocation of the Christian is to 
 the Kingdom of God, in which he should 
 bring forth the fruits of the Spirit. That 
 the Earth is the better for his action is a de- 
 tail and an accident. We have been so brow- 
 beaten by the edicts of materialism, so 
 taunted with indifiference to this world, and 
 with the sin of other-worldliness, that we 
 have felt compelled to vindicate our charac- 
 ters from the old charge of being enemies of 
 the human race. We have forgotten in the 
 campaign for self-vindication that in a true 
 sense indifiference to the world, and other- 
 worldliness, are precisely what should char- 
 acterize us ; that we are pilgrims and strang- 
 ers here, having no abiding city, but that we 
 72 
 
VOCATION TO HOLINESS 
 
 seek one to come; that our citizenship is in 
 Heaven. 
 
 We need to disentangle our thought from 
 the ambiguity of the expression "this 
 world." Taking the world to mean human 
 society, trying so to organize and to govern 
 itself that life shall be a tolerable thing for 
 all its members, Christians are not less but 
 more interested in this than other men. 
 Such organization and government is requis- 
 ite to the successful appeal of the Gospel. 
 As at present organized, or perhaps disor- 
 ganized, the appeal of the Gospel is effect- 
 ively hindered by the poverty and degrada- 
 tion in which large sections of humanity are 
 compelled to live. They can neither under- 
 stand nor practice the Gospel under their 
 conditions of life. It is useless to say that 
 the Gospel is for the poor and will enable 
 them, if they will accept it, to live Christian 
 lives under whatever social conditions. To 
 say that is to play with the facts. What the 
 New Testament means by the Christian Life, 
 that Eternal Life which is hid with Christ 
 in God, and is here evidenced by the practice 
 of the Sermon on the Mount and the pro- 
 duction of the fruits of the Spirit, does, it 
 73 
 
VOCATION TO HOLINESS 
 
 may be, sporadically exist in tenement 
 houses and slums ; but that the population of 
 tenement houses and slums will, or even can, 
 show such a life, no one who knows them 
 will believe. It must remain forever unin- 
 telligible to them. That this state of things 
 should be changed, Christians are not less 
 interested but more than other men. But 
 they are more interested precisely because 
 they see in the unfortunate inhabitiants of 
 these places not possible comfortable citi- 
 zens, but the potentiality of children of God, 
 and saints, and they feel eager for the im- 
 provement of life. The world to the Chris- 
 tian means more than human society well 
 organized and well governed, sleek and 
 comfortable. It means that society ener- 
 gized and vivified by the operations of the 
 Holy Spirit, and looking beyond material 
 comfort for the end of life ; still under what- 
 ever imposed conditions, living in the pil- 
 grim state, with eyes eager for the vision of 
 the city where their true citizenship is. And 
 furthermore we must as Christians insist and 
 expect that any permanent improvement of 
 human society, here and now, will be 
 brought about and made permanent by those 
 74 
 
VOCATION TO HOLINESS 
 
 whose aim it is to improve it for Eternity. 
 We are at present witnessing an appalling 
 demonstration of the outcome, and I believe 
 the necessary outcome, of the attempt to or- 
 ganize human society on the basis of mater- 
 ialism. Such things as we see in the world 
 to-day would be impossible in a society 
 ruled by spiritual motives. 
 
 Hence we must look on the saint, not only 
 as the exemplification of a certain spiritual 
 ideal, which is one among the many ideals to 
 be found among a widely diversified hu- 
 manity, and tolerated as the outcome of a 
 certain psychic trend, but we must look to 
 him as the one possessing the supreme secret 
 of life. He and he alone can tell us what 
 life really is in its possible fulness and com- 
 pleteness. He alone can show us what to do 
 with life and how tO' do it. The man who 
 views life from the standpoint of material- 
 ism may be anxious for life's betterment, but 
 he will fail because human beings are unable 
 to make life better if they have no motive 
 but that which materialism supplies. Mater- 
 ialism can never get rid of selfishness, and 
 it is selfishness which defeats all programmes 
 of social advance. Man is a "creature of a 
 75 
 
VOCATION TO HOLINESS 
 
 very nimble dishonesty," and there is noth- 
 ing in materialism to make him honest. It 
 is only the man to whom this world is but a 
 passing incident in God's activity who can 
 find what goes on here important enough to 
 sacrifice himself for its welfare. 
 
 What is the saint? What is this holiness 
 to which we are called? It is the manifesta- 
 tion of the life of Christ in the life of His 
 members. Those who are called to holiness 
 are called to union with the risen and as- 
 cended Lord, and to participation in His 
 Divine Life. So much we have already seen, 
 but what of the development of the life of 
 the individual? What do we mean by the 
 spiritual life? 
 
 The spiritual life is not simply a life 
 v.'hich takes account of spiritual things, 
 which recognizes the existence of a spiritual 
 world from which flows motives which af- 
 fect our lives here, if we will let them. The 
 spiritual life is not ordinary human life gov- 
 erned by a special set of principles. It is not 
 a series of acts, — the practice of such and 
 such things. The spiritual life, which is the 
 life of sanctity, is a distinct creation of God. 
 Man is made a spiritual being when he is 
 76 
 
VOCATION TO HOLINESS 
 
 regenerated and taken into the life of God 
 and endowed with the gift of eternal life. 
 The end of our Lord's mission is that they 
 might have life. His insistence is constantly 
 upon eternal life as a distinct gift. This 
 €ternal life is of course not immortality, 
 though it has been so conceived. Those 
 who lack it are not the less immortal, but 
 eternal life is the Divine Life imparted to 
 man, whereby he becomes a new creation 
 and is raised to a new plane of spiritual liv- 
 ing. It was that this might be possible that 
 God became incarnate, the other ends of the 
 Incarnation being subordinate to this. It is 
 therefore a dependent life, drawing con- 
 stantly upon the incarnate life of our Lord 
 with whom it is in union. And this union 
 is not a union of thought or idea, of faith or 
 love, but an organic union which can never 
 be completely destroyed, though it may re- 
 main undeveloped. Baptism cannot be re- 
 peated, because the union effected with our 
 Lord in baptism can never be utterly nul- 
 lified. 
 
 It is by virtue of this union that we have 
 come to be in Christ, and He in us. The 
 sphere of spiritual operation is not outward. 
 77 
 
VOCATION TO HOLINESS 
 
 "In Christ" is one of the characteristic 
 phrases of the New Testament. It denotes 
 precisely the fact of organic union, in that 
 the Christian and Christ are one, so one that 
 the hfe of Christ is manifested in and 
 through the Hfe of His members. As a 
 thing hved by us, the Christian Hfe is the 
 externaHzation of this fact of union. The 
 spiritual life is the process of the manifesta- 
 tion of the life of Christ in the life of His 
 members. 
 
 The evolution of the saint, then, is the 
 process of his appropriation and expression 
 of the life of the indwelling Christ from the 
 moment of his union with Him in baptism, 
 till his spiritual powers are so matured as to 
 be capable of the unveiled glory of the 
 Beatific Vision. 
 
 What we may perhaps call the programme 
 of the Hfe of those who are called to sanctify 
 is found in the Sermon on the Mount, which 
 is but the statement, in set propositions, of 
 what the human life of our Lord was in liv- 
 ing reality. It will be admitted by all that 
 the best comment on the Sermon on the 
 Mount is the life of our Lord himself. He 
 alone has fully practiced what He preached. 
 78 
 
VOCATION TO HOLINESS 
 
 We turn, therefore, from beatitude after 
 beatitude to its concrete illustration in the 
 life of Jesus. We cannot mistake the mean- 
 ing of humility and meekness and purity 
 and the rest, because we have them exempli- 
 fied before our eyes. And yet there comes 
 even to sincere Christians the feeling that as 
 a programme of life the Sermon on the 
 Mount is impossible. It has been lived to 
 be sure, but by one who is God as well as 
 man. 
 
 It is one of the radical difficulties of our 
 thought to understand the humanity of our 
 Lord. We are constantly yielding to the 
 temptation to make it something fantastic 
 and unreal, something more or less than 
 human. We substitute for the truth of God, 
 perfectly united with humanity, a God, if I 
 may so express it, hiding behind humanity, 
 a God who appears fitfully in our Lord's life 
 to enable Him to do what otherwise would 
 be impossible for Him. Our Lord thus be- 
 comes a kind of sublime magician who con- 
 trols the power of God when He needs it to 
 perform startling things. When it is put 
 thus baldly, we disclaim this description, and 
 deny that this is indeed our notion, but what 
 79 
 
VOCATION TO HOLINESS 
 
 else can we possibly mean by our objection, 
 when we are urged to action, on the ground 
 that our Lord did so and so, that He is God 
 as well as man. Whatsoever our Lord did 
 in His Incarnate life He did through hu- 
 manity united to God. He acted in a per- 
 fectly human way. All His acts were human 
 acts. The Holy Spirit dwelt in Him in all 
 fulness and His human nature was sustained 
 by that indwelling power; and through our 
 union with Him we have access to the same 
 source of Divine strength. Our weakness 
 i? the outcome of non-use of the source of 
 strength which is ours. It follows that the 
 programme of the life of sanctity is not im- 
 possible, because it has been already put in 
 operation. We can follow it by living in 
 Christ. 
 
 The objections directed against the Ser- 
 mon on the Mount, result from misconcep- 
 tions of its nature. It is not a series of rules 
 of conduct but enunciates principles of spir- 
 itual living. The method of our Lord's 
 teaching differs markedly from our habitual 
 method. We lay down a law, a rule, and 
 deduce the individual cases from it. Our 
 Lord teaches through a concrete case and 
 80 
 
VOCATION TO HOLINESS 
 
 leaves us to deduce the principle employed in 
 it and illustrated by it. The case he cites is 
 usually an extreme case, inasmuch as the 
 extreme case brings the principle into greater 
 clearness. We have turned the case into a 
 rule and then declared the rule impracticable. 
 The demonstration of this is, that if the 
 cases our Lord cites are rules of conduct and 
 not illustrations of principles, they are use- 
 less as being of no universal or even wide- 
 spread application. It does not happen to 
 the average man, after his school days at 
 least, to be smitten on any cheek, right or 
 left. Probably no one has even attempted to 
 compel you to go a mile with him, or taken 
 away your cloak ; but the principles involved 
 in these cases are of daily use and applica- 
 tion. They are the principles the practice of 
 which results in the development of the char- 
 acter-qualities enunciated in the beatitudes. 
 And the practice of them is the practice of 
 the Christ-life. The extent in which we 
 practice them is the measure of our success 
 in the life of holiness, for to gain that life is 
 the realization in experience of the human 
 life of our Lord; and strictly speaking the 
 Christian is not called to the imitation of the 
 (fi) 81 
 
VOCATION TO HOLINESS 
 
 Christ-life, but to the reproduction of it. A 
 misunderstanding of this fact lies at the root 
 of many failures. The vision of Jesus of 
 Nazareth going about doing good is so fas- 
 cinating that many have been led to think 
 that going about doing good is an adequate 
 expression of his life in the life of the dis- 
 ciple; but the disciple does not reach the se- 
 cret of the Christ life by doing good, but he 
 does good as the result of having read the 
 secret. The Tolstoian theory of the Chris- 
 tian life, which fascinated so many to admir- 
 ation, though it fascinates few to actual imi- 
 tation, embodies this same misconception. 
 We do not accept the life of Jesus by making 
 ourselves poor, or by working at manual 
 labor. Such things are the mere accidents 
 of life. It is a curious blunder to make them 
 its substance. 
 
 The practice of the Christian life does not 
 take certain characteristic forms of expres- 
 sion, those which have already been noted 
 as summed up in our Lord's teaching in the 
 Sermon on the Mount, but they flow forth, 
 as from a hidden source, from the central 
 fact of our union with him, resulting in the 
 reproduction of His life in us. The life of 
 82 
 
VOCATION TO HOLINESS 
 
 Christ is recapitulated in the life of the dis- 
 ciple. The disciple passes through the same 
 experiences as the Master, the member as the 
 Head. When Saint Paul comes to set out 
 in detail what must be the experience of 
 those he calls the saints, that is the members 
 of the Christian community, what he dwells 
 upon as of primary importance is not their 
 good works, or virtuous conduct, but their 
 spiritual experience. To him Christianity 
 is an experience which must be passed 
 through, the experience of the life of the in- 
 dwelling Christ. Recall for a moment how 
 he states this. We were buried with Hitn, 
 by baptism, into death, that like as Christ was 
 raised up from death by the glory of the 
 Father, even so we also should walk in new- 
 ness of life. Buried with Him in baptism, 
 wherein also ye were raised with Him. But 
 God forbid that I should glory save in the 
 Cross of our Lord Jesus Christ, whereby the 
 world is crucified unto me and I unto the 
 world. Grow up into Him in all things 
 which is the Head, even Christ. Even when 
 we are dead in sin hath He quickened us to- 
 gether and made us sit together in Heavenly 
 places in Christ Jesus. And Saint Peter 
 83 
 
;" VOCATION TO HOLINESS 
 
 adds, being born again not of corruptible 
 seed, but of incorruptible by the word of 
 God which liveth and abideth forever. 
 
 The birth, growth, crucifixion, death, 
 burial, resurrection and ascension of the 
 Christian, are spiritual experiences which 
 constitute the life of Christ in him, which 
 are his reproduction of the Christ life. These 
 things admittedly take place in the saint in 
 the process of his development from his 
 initial calling to sanctity to his actual attain- 
 ment of it. Those forms of Christian living 
 which aim at an imitation of the externals of 
 the Christ life, or a following of moral rules 
 deducible from Christ's life and teaching, 
 remain hopelessly exterior and fall far short 
 of Christian reality. 
 
 Furthermore these are not ideals of a 
 future life. The New Testament puts them 
 in the past. We pass through them with the 
 result that our life is now hid with Christ in 
 Heavenly places. It makes all possible dif- 
 ference with our religion whether we realize 
 this. The religion of external imitation is 
 rooted in the past. What Christ was, and 
 said, and did, is important to it. It is a 
 backward looking religion to which Christ is 
 84 
 
VOCATION TO HOLINESS 
 
 a Supreme Teacher, and which has great 
 difficulty in finding any place for the Living 
 Christ. Christ was manifested, and worked, 
 and taught, and returned to the Heavenly 
 state from which He emerged. Such a 
 thought of Christ and His work abundantly 
 explains the widespread difficulty which 
 men feel about our Lord's divinity. His vir- 
 gin birth, His resurrection and ascension 
 and His sacraments. Men find difficulty 
 about these things because they do not fit in 
 with what they understand as present Chris- 
 tianity. They are not helps but hindrances, 
 useless dogmas which are awkward to deal 
 with ; they do not correspond with anything 
 that at present exists ; they are irrelevant to 
 our Christian life. On the other hand, to the 
 Catholic Christian, the emphasis of religion 
 is on the present work of Christ. His reli- 
 gion is not a reminiscence of what Christ 
 did, but a present work of the living and as- 
 cended Christ. Christ is repeating His life 
 through him. He is externalizing the entire 
 Christ experience. He cannot construe 
 Christianity in terms of morals, but only in 
 terms of a vital, spiritual process. Christ is 
 being formed in him, and that formation is 
 85 
 
VOCATION TO HOLINESS 
 
 expressed in his living in the form of 
 sanctity. 
 
 This union of the spiritual personality of 
 man with Incarnate God, wherein the ex- 
 perience of the member recapitulates the 
 experience of the Head, is the life of holi- 
 ness. It is the process which goes on 
 through life, and after, reaching its con- 
 summation only in the vision of God. If 
 even that is a period to its growth, it cer- 
 tainly is not to its activity. As sketched for 
 us by the masters of the spiritual life, that 
 process goes through certain well-defined 
 changes which, taken together, define the 
 growth of the child of God in the life of 
 holiness. They are the stages in the build- 
 ing of the saint. They are, together, one 
 form of the expression of the holiness of the 
 Body of Christ. To our understanding of 
 what the holiness of the Church is, it is 
 therefore necessary that we follow these 
 steps in the development of the saintly life. 
 
 The first, the most elementary, stage is 
 that of purification. It is that stage which 
 is characterized by death unto sin. We can 
 perhaps get at it best by leaving the beaten 
 path of books, and asking ourselves what 
 86 
 
VOCATION TO HOLINESS 
 
 death is. Death, physical death, is marked 
 by failure to correspond to environment. 
 We only know life through its correspond- 
 ence, its reactions, and when these cease ut- 
 terly and no stimuli any longer provoke re- 
 action in the organism, we say that the 
 organism is dead. The friend by whose 
 familiar body we stand looks with unseeing 
 eyes, no longer smiles us a greeting, returns 
 no pressure of the hand, — he is dead. And 
 death unto sin exhibits the same lack of cor- 
 respondence to the appropriate environment. 
 It is dead to sin, to the world, conceived as a 
 set of influences opposed to God. The 
 stimuli of sin no longer call out correspond- 
 ences. The appeals of the world are made 
 in vain. The temptations which once stirred 
 us to febrile activity are displayed uselessly. 
 We turn with indifference from what once 
 fascinated us. But as physical death does 
 not prove the ceasing of consciousness, but 
 only its ceasing to respond to certain stimuli, 
 while we believe that it has actually 
 awakened to a larger life and a more in- 
 tense consciousness, so this death unto sin, 
 death with Christ and to the world, means 
 not a ceasing of spiritual consciousness but 
 87 
 
VOCATION TO HOLINESS 
 
 the transfer of it to other objects. Those 
 who are so dead have become aHve to God, 
 and to all things which belong to the spirit- 
 ual order. It is the awakening to a larger 
 life. 
 
 We express this truth otherwise when we 
 speak of it as a process of detachment and 
 purification. This is the ordinary way of 
 doing it, and in most of us it is a process 
 which consumes much time. The breaking 
 of sinful habits and inclinations, which in 
 most men are developed before the time of 
 conscious spiritual living, is a difficult task. 
 The dying to sin is a lingering death except 
 in rare cases. But the important thing is the 
 will to die. We die in intention long before 
 we die in fact; and it is this difficult and 
 painful process of making the spiritual will 
 dominant in the life which is the process of 
 spiritual crucifixion. We must experience 
 the Cross as our Head experienced it, and 
 no soul come to maturity is spared it. Our 
 spiritual discipline in this stage, not that it 
 is confined to this stage, is a going out after 
 Christ, bearing His Cross, and the Cross sig- 
 nifies the voluntary limitation of life for His 
 sake and the Gospel's. It is a thing that we 
 
VOCATION TO HOLINESS 
 
 voluntarily take up, and we take it up pur- 
 posely to associate ourselves with the dying 
 of the Son of God, that through participa- 
 tion in His death we may become partakers 
 of His resurrection. All must go, — all 
 things that restrain from purification of life 
 must go, — and they go hard. There is no 
 easy way of being crucified. 
 
 The spiritual person reaches the confines 
 of the second stage of his development be- 
 fore he has utterly passed out of the disci- 
 pline of the first stage. That second stage 
 is the stage of spiritual knowledge and illu- 
 mination. What is characteristic of this 
 stage is a more direct knowledge of God, 
 His will and purpose for us. Where before 
 we have heard with the ear, and believed the 
 report of others, we now see and know for 
 ourselves. The religious consciousness, 
 which has always been to some extent opera- 
 tive though dim and clouded, is now purified 
 and capable of more energetic action. The 
 Christian at this stage has direct knowledge 
 of God, — is conscious of His presence and 
 action upon himself. He can now be said to 
 know God by direct spiritual intuition. I 
 would not be understood as maintaining that 
 89 
 
VOCATION TO HOLINESS 
 
 all good Christians have this direct intuition 
 of God, and that it is the indispensable test 
 of their advance in sanctity. There may be 
 something to be considered in matter of tem- 
 perament, — of psychic make-up. There is a 
 certain relevancy in the distinction between 
 the once-born and the twice-born, but I 
 would express my belief that our uncon- 
 sciousness of God and the spiritual world is 
 often less a matter of incapacity than of in- 
 attention. After all, even in physical mat- 
 ters, we see what we are looking for, and 
 what we do not expect to see we miss, and 
 more of us would be conscious of God, and 
 of our Lord's presence and action, if we 
 were alert to spiritual possibilities. These 
 things have been known, and are known, to 
 multitudes of Christians whom we would be 
 far from calling saints in the conventional 
 sense, but who are obviously far on the road 
 of sanctity. I am not speaking of visions 
 and ecstacies of the extreme mystic type, but 
 simply of that consciousness of God's pres- 
 ence in dealing with us which it appears to 
 me is one of the notes of a life lived with 
 Christ in God. It is not to be expected that 
 this consciousness should be continuous, — 
 90 
 
VOCATION TO HOLINESS 
 
 even in the highest saints it is not that, — 
 but those who are hving in Christ should 
 certainly be aware of His indwelling, at least 
 from time to time, and feel the certainty of 
 His guidance. I am certain that this is the 
 experience of many who have never learned 
 to describe their experience, or who hold it 
 too precious and intimate to be described. 
 We construe our experiences in the termi- 
 nology which we have learned, and translate 
 it in words become habitual, and if our vo- 
 cabulary be faulty our expression of our 
 experience will be faulty too. This would 
 not matter if it were not that the limitations 
 of our expression serve to block our vision 
 of greater things possible to us, for we grow 
 towards our ideal, and an imperfect ideal 
 prompts only to meagre efforts toward 
 growth. 
 
 The growth in the knowledge of God, as 
 in other things, is the result of effort, — the 
 effort to co-operate with the work of the 
 Spirit. The terms through which we ex- 
 press to ourselves our religious life are apt 
 to become dead terms. It requires ever re- 
 newed efifort to get at their meaning. Many 
 of them are of inexhaustible meaning, and 
 91 
 
VOCATION TO HOLINESS 
 
 the energies of our spirit may be constantly 
 spent in the effort to get deeper into them. 
 But the result of this effort is well compen- 
 sated by our increase in spiritual knowledge 
 and experience, — the soul is illuminated by 
 the Divine presence and we learn the Source 
 of its light. 
 
 It is then that the soul enters the third 
 stage of its progress and finds itself in a 
 deeply realized union with God. This we 
 may regard as the stage of those who attain 
 great holiness in this life and whom we are 
 wont to think of, in our ordinary conceptions 
 of the Christian life, as the saints. Their 
 lives have become nearly perfect expressions 
 of the Christ life. They have passed upward 
 from the region where sin is a common ex- 
 perience, through the path which is lit by 
 God's manifested presence to consummated 
 union with Him. They walk with God here, 
 and have come to the borders of the land of 
 far distances and glimpse the walls of the 
 city which is the end of their pilgrimage. 
 In them we see, so far as we may see it on 
 this Earth, the complete expression, of the 
 life of holiness, which it is the mission of 
 the Incarnate to create. In them we read 
 92 
 
VOCATION TO HOLINESS 
 
 the meaning of our Lord's life and work, — 
 that spiritual creation which He died that 
 man might be. In these children the Divine 
 Wisdom is justified and the ways of God 
 with man made plain ; and in them we learn 
 the truth of the saying that "God became 
 man in order that man might become Di- 
 vine." 
 
 Such, roughly enough and in poorest out- 
 line, is that aspect of the holiness of the 
 Body of Christ, the one Holy and Catholic 
 Chvirch, as the fact is expressed and em- 
 bodied in the life of individuals. Holiness 
 so understood is the dynamic power of the 
 Incarnate Life of the Son of God. Laying 
 hold upon and eliciting response from the 
 lives of men, it views human life not as 
 capable of obeying certain rules which re- 
 sult in conduct pleasing to God, but as cre- 
 ated with the potentiality of knowing God, 
 and loving God, and being raised to the 
 Divine friendship through participation in 
 the Divine Nature. Such a view makes hu- 
 man life intelligible, — makes all its upward 
 struggle through the darkness and tragedy 
 of human experience possible to contemplate 
 without horror. The journey of the soul to 
 93 
 
VOCATION TO HOLINESS 
 
 God is a glad pilgrimage, whatever the 
 roughness of the way, and so understood 
 human life is not only a pilgrimage to God, 
 but a pilgrimage with God. God joins us at 
 the outset, in the impartation of Himself in 
 our baptism, and leaves us never, but is with 
 us to administer the viaticum as our eyes 
 close in death. He is the Indweller who has 
 been the strength of all our strength, the vir- 
 tue of all our virtue. 
 
 All that we can claim of our own is the 
 ready will wherewith we welcome Him, and 
 even so "we could not have found Him if 
 He had not first found us." When we have 
 been nailed upon the Cross, He has been 
 nailed beside us, and when we have been 
 buried He has shared our tomb. He too has 
 been our resurrection and our life and has 
 lifted us up to the Heavenly Places where 
 our expanding life is more and more lived 
 wdth Him. He is our Alpha and Omega, 
 our first and our last. 
 
 94 
 
THE HOLINESS OF THE 
 PRIESTHOOD 
 
 All authority is given unto Me in heaven 
 and in earth. Go ye therfore — 
 
THE HOLINESS OF THE 
 PRIESTHOOD 
 
 In the preceding lectures we have thought 
 of the Church as the embodiment of the holy 
 life our Incarnate Lord, to participate in, 
 and to express which, the individual Chris- 
 tian is called. Beside such individual ex- 
 pression of the holy life in the experience of 
 the members of the Body, there is what we 
 may, perhaps, call a functional expression 
 of it. That is to say, the inherent holiness 
 of the Body functions through certain or- 
 gans whose meaning is that they minister 
 to the development of the holiness of the 
 Body in all its members. Such organs of 
 the Body are called in our ordinary phrase- 
 ology "channels of grace" : that phrase fixes 
 attention upon the results which they 
 achieve: my purpose is rather to fix atten- 
 tion upon the organ itself, not as a means of 
 transmission, but as a means of expression 
 of the Body's Life. 
 
 The function of the Body which we are 
 to consider now is the function of Priest- 
 hood. Our Lord is the One and Only 
 Priest, having assumed the entire signifi- 
 cance of priesthood to Himself when He 
 
 (7) 97 
 
HOLINESS OF THE PRIESTHOOD 
 
 entered upon the mediatorial work of the 
 Incarnation. The symbolic priesthood of the 
 preceding dispensation was fulfilled in His 
 actual priesthood, and the typical sacrifices, 
 having fulfilled their use, were superseded 
 by the actual sacrifice of the Incarnate Life. 
 This, of course, does not and cannot mean 
 that priesthood and sacrifice have passed 
 away ; but that the imperfect and typical sac- 
 rifices and priesthood are fulfilled in a per- 
 manent and abiding sacrifice and priesthood, 
 the perfection of which renders other priest- 
 hood and sacrifice impossible. Our Lord 
 did not assume a temporary priesthood to 
 offer a passing sacrifice, the purposes of 
 which being fulfilled it could be laid aside: 
 both priesthood and sacrifice are aspects of 
 mediation, and are needed as long as media- 
 tion is needed. Our Lord abides a priest 
 forever, and, as a priest, has somewhat to 
 offer, because of the constant need of hu- 
 manity to approach God through him. We 
 cannot approach God through memory of, or 
 faith in, a past act. We approach through 
 a door in heaven which is presently held 
 open by the mediatorial action of our Lord. 
 It is the mark of a mistaken and incompe- 
 
HOLINESS OF THE PRIESTHOOD 
 
 tent religion that it strives to center our 
 thought on the past. All the acts of our 
 Lord's Incarnate Life are preparatory for, 
 and have reference to, His present action. 
 That He was once offered, as a sacrifice for 
 sin upon the Cross, is preparatory to His 
 present action upon sinners whom by that 
 lifting up He is drawing to Himself. His 
 state, both as priest and sacrifice, is an eter- 
 nal state: He is a priest forever, and offers 
 one sacrifice forever, because both priesthood 
 and sacrifice are forever the needs of those 
 who approach God through Him. Every 
 sin that is committed needs the absolution 
 of an existing priest through the application 
 of an existing sacrifice to its forgiveness. 
 Our Lord's sacrifice is one and incapable of 
 repetition because it is incapable of cessa- 
 tion : but it is capable of application to each 
 new sin of man. That is the consolation of 
 sinners, that there is a living way into the 
 Holy Place through the perpetually offered 
 sacrifice of the humanity of Christ. 
 
 The reason for the Second Person of the 
 Ever Blessed Trinity taking upon Himself 
 our Humanity was that He might perma- 
 nently unite that Humanity to Himself. As 
 99 
 
HOLINESS OF THE PRIESTHOOD 
 
 we have noted, the Body of the Incarnation 
 is a growing Body, growing by the constant 
 addition of the human beings who are incor- 
 porated into Him by the action of the Holy 
 Spirit in the sacrament of baptism. And it 
 is through the Mystical Body so constituted, 
 that the Incarnate action of our Lord, to-day 
 and ever, is mediated to His members. His 
 Incarnate powers are, so to say, lodged in, 
 and committed to, the Body as such : they 
 are the powers of the Body. But in their 
 exercise they are distributed through func- 
 tions which are specially created for this end. 
 The office of mediation belongs to the Body 
 of Christ as such : but its exercise is through 
 a special organ of the Body created to that 
 end, the Priesthood. The Body of Christ 
 has a priestly character, and the several 
 members of it partake of that priestly char- 
 acter; but the exercise of priestly powers is 
 through its appropriate organ, the priest- 
 hood of the Body, or Church. 
 
 We may express this truth in this way: 
 Jesus Christ instituted the Priesthood for 
 the purpose of carrying on in the world the 
 work which He began in His Incarnation 
 and continues through the extension of His 
 100 
 
HOLINESS OF THE PRIESTHOOD 
 
 Incarnation which is His Body, the Church. 
 It was not that He was going away into a 
 distant heaven, and was leaving behind Him 
 means of spiritual helpfulness for men : He 
 was not going away at all, essentially. In 
 the Priesthood He was providing the means 
 by which He being still present would work. 
 He sends His Priests to the work of mani- 
 festing and propagating the Holiness of the 
 Body, but He does not send them as a man 
 sends a servant, away from Himself; but 
 He sends them rather as a king sends an am- 
 bassador : the majesty and authority and 
 inviolability of the king being in his ambas- 
 sador. Christ is in His priest, and speaks 
 and acts by him. The priest's acts are 
 Christ's acts. The priest has not some 
 shadowy and reflected priesthood ; his priest- 
 hood is Christ's priesthood : there are not 
 many priests, but only One. In every 
 priestly act, it is the One priest Who acts. 
 The priest does not absolve, Christ absolves. 
 The priest does not sacrifice, Christ sacri- 
 fices. 
 
 Therefore those who have received the 
 gift of priesthood have been raised to a new 
 condition, endued with a new character. The 
 101 
 
HOLINESS OF THE PRIESTHOOD 
 
 priesthood is not an office that can be as- 
 sumed and laid down. Just as the baptized 
 man is not the same as the natural man, but 
 has a special character which can never be 
 laid aside or lost, has been made a member 
 of Christ and a partaker of the divine nature, 
 so a priest is not merely a Christian man of 
 special training and bearing a special office, 
 but has passed into a new spiritual condi- 
 tion. He is now united with Christ in 
 priesthood ; and yet so that there are not two 
 priesthoods, a real and a representative, but 
 one priesthood, the priesthood of Incarnate 
 God. 
 
 I dwell upon these things, not because 
 they are new or unfamiliar, but just because 
 they are not. You who are gathered in this 
 Seminary, are gathered as those who seek 
 priesthood; you will shortly claim that you 
 are called to the priesthood by the voice of 
 God the Holy Ghost. It is the old and 
 familiar things which you are in danger of 
 losing grip on. And the first step to being a 
 holy priest, is the realization of what is in- 
 volved in being priests at all. We cannot 
 have too high a conception of our priest- 
 hood ; but the result must be that the higher 
 102 
 
HOLINESS OF THE PRIESTHOOD 
 
 our conception, the deeper our sense of our 
 own imperfection in it. That is what we 
 need to develop, the sense of our own un- 
 worthiness as the priests of God. People 
 have been at all times prone to talk of priest- 
 craft and sacerdotalism, having, no doubt, 
 but vague notions of these as things which 
 they do not like ; but unfortunately there have 
 always been conceptions of priesthood which 
 have given ground for the talk. In the dawn 
 of the Church an Apostle had to warn priests 
 that their function was not to be lords over 
 God's heritage, but ensamples to the flock. 
 It seems to me that such an attitude toward 
 the flock is born of too mean, and not too 
 high a conception of the priesthood : it is 
 born of a conception which fundamentally 
 separates the priest from Christ. The priest 
 conceives himself as endued with an inde- 
 pendent authority, an irresponsible power, 
 not as presenting to men in his priesthood, 
 Christ Himself. Priesthood which does not 
 start from the side of authority, but which 
 conceives itself as presenting to men, not the 
 power but the character of Christ, will stir 
 no opposition. It is inconceivable that any 
 one who has felt the true dignity of priest- 
 103 
 
HOLINESS OF THE PRIESTHOOD 
 
 hood should be guilty of the offences which 
 stir men's wrath against sacerdotalism. The 
 meekness and gentleness of Christ will 
 frighten no one. But there is nothing of 
 Christ or His commission to us in a self- 
 assertion which tyrannizes over others who, 
 after all, may be our superiors in character, 
 as they cannot but feel ; in that arrogance of 
 rule which rides rough-shod over the rights 
 and privileges of others; in that contempt 
 for others' feelings and prejudices which 
 wantonly destroys the peace of many a par- 
 ish and the usefulness of many a priest. One 
 often thinks that there is no such position of 
 spiritual danger as that of a priest or bishop 
 of the American Church. I once asked a 
 woman to dedicate her boy to the priest- 
 hood, and her answer was: "God forbid; I 
 know of no such dangerous place in life." 
 She had known many priests and she had 
 seen their danger — the danger of a position 
 vi^ithout control. We have no discipline; 
 there is no adequate definition of rights and 
 duties; we are subject to no healthy criti- 
 cism. We go where we will and we do 
 what we will, and if we do not get on in one 
 place there is always another open. It is no 
 104 
 
HOLINESS OF THE PRIESTHOOD 
 
 one's business to tell us plainly what we are 
 like. And the position of a bishop is worse 
 than that of a priest. 
 
 The only thing which can protect us from 
 this stupid and disastrous conception of 
 priesthood as unbridled authority, is a deep 
 and humble conception of priesthood as the 
 showing forth of the character of Christ. 
 If we start there we start well. For it is 
 our fundamental conceptions which will de- 
 termine our character and work. Our con- 
 ception of ourselves will determine the con- 
 ception formed of us by those to whom we 
 are sent. And further, the conception we 
 permit men to form of us will affect their 
 conception of Him in whose Name we as- 
 sume to speak. 
 
 Let us take one or two of the titles by 
 which priesthood is described, and see if we 
 can draw from them any helpful thoughts 
 about the nature of our priesthood. In the 
 first place, we are called ambassadors. On 
 Christ's behalf then are we ambassadors, as 
 though God were beseeching you by us. 
 That is St. Paul's way of stating the fact. 
 An ambassador is one who is sent to repre- 
 sent his sovereign. But just because of this 
 105 
 
HOLINESS OF THE PRIESTHOOD 
 
 intimacy of relation, because he bears in 
 himself the personality of his state, he on 
 his part must be careful to maintain the dig- 
 nity, the character of his state. He is not to 
 be a machine through which business is 
 done, or messages are transmitted, so that 
 one man as well as another might fulfil the 
 ofifice; but there is need of his intelligence 
 and will. He must be in thorough sympathy 
 with the policy of his country. He must, if 
 one may so express it, think the thoughts of 
 his sovereign. Much is necessarily left to 
 his activity, his intelligence, his insight; in 
 emergencies he has to take action which will 
 commit his government. His position is one 
 of responsibility, trust, rather than authority. 
 Indeed, it is not the authority of his state 
 which he is sent to represent, but its mind. 
 
 Now all that is true in a higher degree of 
 priesthood. We are to represent, not the 
 authority, but the mind of Christ. There is 
 too much "shirt-sleeve" diplomacy in the 
 priesthood. Priests sometimes act as though 
 the personality of Christ were merged in 
 them, and not their personality in Christ. 
 But it is the mind of Christ which we are 
 making known. And like the ambassador 
 106 
 
HOLINESS OF THE PRIESTHOOD 
 
 we can only do that if we are sympathetic 
 with it, if we recognize the aims of God and 
 make them our own. Only as we do this 
 can we escape the special dangers of priest- 
 hood; that flaunting egotism which often 
 writes itself large over the priest's actions; 
 that crass officialism which the word ecclesi- 
 astic so often connotes ; that ill-bred audacity 
 by which men assume that they can do what 
 they please because of, their office. This not 
 to represent Christ, one of the noteworthy 
 things of whose life is the delicate sympathy 
 Vv'ith which it touches other lives. And the 
 representative of Christ must cultivate just 
 that delicate sympathy which is in Christ. 
 To be able to rule is, in the first place, to be 
 able to understand. To impose one's will, 
 irrespective of circumstances and conditions, 
 is mere tyranny. Our Lord's dealing with 
 men was founded upon complete knowledge 
 of human nature. He knew what was in 
 man. Practically, at any rate, we base our 
 trust in His sympathy upon our conviction 
 of the completeness of His human experi- 
 ence. And we can go no way toward win- 
 ning people to Christ by any road other than 
 that of sympathetic knowledge. For again, 
 107 
 
HOLINESS OF THE PRIESTHOOD 
 
 it is characteristic of the action of God that 
 He respects human freedom. He does not 
 compel men into obedience. He does not do 
 things because He can. His method of deal- 
 ing with human souls is the method of at- 
 traction. He draws men by the appeal to 
 that which is best in them ; by setting before 
 them an ideal of life. It is not God's power, 
 but God's character, as revealed in Christ, 
 which is the constructive force in religion. 
 Force is the most futile of things; the com- 
 pulsion of the ideal is the one compulsion 
 which is effective. God does not even resort 
 to the intellectual compulsion of proof; he 
 insists that we act, if we act at all, on faith. 
 In other words, intellectual, divorced from 
 moral, conviction, is valueless. // they be- 
 lieve not Moses and the Prophets, neither 
 will they believe though one rose from tlte 
 dead. It is the things that are pure and 
 honest and of good report which by their 
 intrinsic attractiveness determine advance in 
 life. 
 
 Priests and bishops, therefore, are not 
 
 satraps set to rule over provinces of God's 
 
 Kingdom, but ambassadors sent to interpret 
 
 the character of their King. It is as though 
 
 108 
 
HOLINESS OF THE PRIESTHOOD 
 
 God were beseeching men by us. That God 
 beseeches men is a very wonderful and preg- 
 nant conception, and a conception that the 
 ecclesiastic, more than most men, is liable to 
 miss. It was excusable in an Elijah to miss 
 the point of the divine method ; it is inexcus- 
 able under the Gospel. The priest's power 
 is the power of his character, and the power 
 of his character is the degree in which it re- 
 flects the character of Christ. That cannot 
 be insisted on too strongly. We are continu- 
 ally lapsing back into a theory which implies 
 that we are going to forward the work of 
 God by machinery. That what we want is 
 proof of Christianity. Philosophical and 
 theological books; demonstrations of the 
 possibility of the miracles of the Gospel ; all 
 the intellectual baggage of an aggressive 
 campaign; these are good and necessary in 
 their way and place; but the Gospel did not 
 conquer the Roman Empire by such means, 
 nor has it ever conquered anything by them. 
 It won its victories in the first place, because 
 Christianity presented a certain life. It was 
 not even the miracles of Christ which won 
 His influence, but the character of Christ. 
 And it has not been the intellectual tradition, 
 109 
 
HOLINESS OF THE PRIESTHOOD 
 
 but the character tradition which has iiept 
 Christianity a Hving force in the world. 
 Each Christian generation has set before the 
 world a type of character _which nothing but 
 Christianity has been able to produce, and 
 by that it has lived. In the last analysis in- 
 tellectual error is disastrous because it leads 
 to error in life ; to misconceive the character 
 of God is to misrepresent the character of 
 God. 
 
 It behooves the priest, then, to see to it 
 that he is representing the character of 
 Christ rightly. The conversion of souls de- 
 pends on that. In all our work that, ulti- 
 mately, is our dependence. Brilliant preach- 
 ing, executive ability, activity, social quali- 
 ties, may make a parish successful ; they will 
 never make it Christian. A successful parish 
 is by no necessity a converted parish. A 
 converted parish starts from a converted 
 priest. 
 
 Let us notice another title by which priests 
 are called — Stewards. I suppose the point 
 about stewards is that they are the adminis^ 
 trators of that which is not their own. The 
 aspect under which we have to view them, 
 then, is that of responsibility. 
 110 
 
HOLINESS OF THE PRIESTHOOD 
 
 There are thoughts which are famihar 
 thoughts, and which, nevertheless, come to 
 us at times with fresh vividness, and over- 
 whelm us by the greatness of their implica- 
 tions. Such a thought to me is that of the 
 dependence of God upon man : the extent to 
 which the work of God waits upon its hu- 
 man instruments. The progress of the 
 Kingdom of God seems to be conditioned 
 absolutely upon human activity. When men 
 have set themselves in a spirit of devotion 
 and sacrifice to that work it has prospered; 
 otherwise not. Whatever may be our the- 
 ories, we cannot but feel that it makes an 
 immense difference to a soul whether it dies 
 Christian or no. Although we may feel no 
 doubt of the salvation of such heathen as 
 have lived by whatever light and guidance 
 God gave them, still there is a vast differ- 
 ence between a heathen, even the best, and a 
 Christian. Heathen salvation and Christian 
 salvation are two things. But God has made 
 the Christian salvation of the heathen de- 
 pend upon the activity of the Christian 
 Church, that is, upon the activity of the 
 priesthood, for we must not shirk our re- 
 sponsibility. And what a spectacle history 
 111 
 
HOLINESS OF THE PRIESTHOOD 
 
 unrolls before us. With our usual tendency 
 to a baseless optimism, we are wont to dwell 
 on the triumphs of missions, the long roll of 
 saints and martyrs who ha\-e splendidly and 
 heroically dedicated themselves to God in 
 this work. That, set by itself is, no doubt, 
 magnificent ; our admiration is well spent on 
 a Xavier or a Patteson. But put where it 
 belongs in relation to the opportunities and 
 resources of the Church — is it splendid? 
 God gives the resources ; God creates the op- 
 portunities; and He has given in lavish 
 abundance. Opportunities and resources, 
 however, are nothing without use. And 
 who can deny that on the whole the history 
 of Christianity is a history of misuse and in- 
 comprehension. As missions are not my 
 theme, but only a passing illustration of it, 
 I will not dwell on details — but what com- 
 parison is there between the resources of 
 Anglo-Saxon Christianity and, not its ac- 
 complishment, but its effort ? And the same 
 thing is true in every department of work : 
 the gulf between resource and effort is tre- 
 mendous. 
 
 It is not that we come short of the ideal ; 
 humanity may always be expected to do 
 112 
 
HOLINESS OF THE PRIESTHOOD 
 
 that; but that we have failed pitifully. We 
 have wasted and we still every day waste 
 our Lord's goods. Look at the phenomena 
 of waste in the lives of priests. I shall not 
 speak at length of the intellectual life of the 
 priest, but for the moment look at the waste 
 of it. Think, if you will, of what a man of 
 average intellect may accomplish. With the 
 opportunities of intellectual training he has 
 in school and college and seminary ; with his 
 opportunities afterward in active priestly 
 life when he first begins to see the needs of 
 special work, we might expect that priests 
 would be exceptionally informed, at least : 
 that they should be experts in their trade : 
 that the special tools of their calling would 
 be ready at hand, and that the hand would 
 be trained to use them. We would as soon 
 think of a surgeon holding his knife awk- 
 wardly and cutting in the wrong place, as a 
 priest unskilled in giving moral advice. We 
 should think scorn of a lawyer ignorant of 
 law — we are rather surprised if a priest 
 show more than an elementary knowledge of 
 theology. We go contemptuously asleep un- 
 der a prosy lecturer who bungles his subject ; 
 but we are expected to keep awake through 
 (8) 113 
 
HOLINESS OF THE PRIESTHOOD 
 
 what impossible sermons! And this is not, 
 I would insist, because the average priest is 
 below par intellectually; it is purely a phe- 
 nomenon of waste. God has given him a 
 mind which he has not cared to use, has 
 given him opportunities which he has not 
 seized. One consequence of this is the 
 spread of error in the uncultivated fields. 
 
 The power of error lies not in its own per- 
 suasiveness. It were absurd to suppose error 
 more persuasive than truth. And the dan- 
 ger that assails the Church, and which it is 
 a part of the duty of the priesthood to keep 
 away, is not a danger which comes from the 
 outside. The Church has never been endan- 
 gered from without, but always from within. 
 Our fortress is impregnable ; but only in the 
 sense in which any fortress is impregnable, 
 if it be adequately defended. And it is the 
 function of the priesthood to defend it. We 
 are pledged to "banish and drive away from 
 the Church all erroneous and strange doc- 
 trines contrary to God's Word." Surely 
 one aspect of the Holiness of the Body of 
 Christ is the purity of its doctrines ; and that 
 the doctrines may remain pure, there must be 
 a priesthood skilled in sacred studies, and 
 114 
 
HOLINESS OF THE PRIESTHOOD 
 
 filled with holy zeal for the deposit of truth 
 which they are called to administer. We so 
 easily miss the importance of being at our 
 best, and consequently miss the opportunity 
 and obligation of our Stewardship. 
 
 I would press this obligation of the Stew- 
 ard as being in the first place an obligation 
 of self-administration. What God has con- 
 fided to me to be administered for Him is in 
 the first place my own life with all the gifts 
 and endowments that that implies. My first 
 duty as steward is, not to view myself with 
 complacency as one who has attained to a 
 position of dignity and honor; but to view 
 myself with humility and fear, as one set in 
 a place of immense danger and responsibil- 
 ity. In that position we have to deal with 
 questions which are of eternal importance. 
 There is something even terrifying in the 
 position of the young priest who finds him- 
 self placed in the charge of a parish with 
 cure of souls, and compelled whether he will 
 or no, to deal with problems which neither 
 age nor experience nor training has fitted 
 him to deal with. If ever there was a man 
 driven to cast himself utterly on God it is 
 that man. He has lived for years in an aca- 
 115 
 
HOLINESS OF THE PRIESTHOOD 
 
 demic world where the questions he asked 
 were answered apart from the friction of 
 real life which gives them their only vitality. 
 The sense of responsibility for souls did not 
 enter as one of the factors of his decisions. 
 And now he is plunged into a world where 
 the problems are problems of life and death, 
 a world where men and women struggle at 
 death grips with fierce passions, or are hope- 
 lessly entangled in intellectual problems the 
 issue of which is too often spiritual disaster. 
 It is sad to know that there are priests to 
 whom this darkling world of spiritual dis- 
 tress is as unknown as the back of the moon. 
 And they are men who have failed in the 
 stewardship of their lives ; failed at all to un- 
 derstand that priesthood means steward- 
 ship; that the powers which they are per- 
 mitting to lie unused are precisely the powers 
 of which God will demand an account. The 
 correspondence columns of church news- 
 papers are a pitiful display of clerical in- 
 competence and triviality of interest — of 
 men dreaming in the presence of a decaying 
 civilization, and living in a non-existent and 
 impossible world; endlessly discussing ques- 
 tions which time has long ago decided and 
 116 
 
HOLINESS OF THE PRIESTHOOD 
 
 tossed into its dust-bin. It is required before 
 all things that a steward be found faithful — 
 faithful in the cultivation of himself to deal 
 with the obligations of his time. To realize 
 myself to my highest potency is my duty ta 
 the God who has made me His steward. 
 
 I shift the emphasis of the problem when 
 I attempt to realize myself for myself ; when 
 the world or the Church becomes the field of 
 my self-advancement. The priest is bound 
 to the ascetic life. For essentially asceti- 
 cism, if I understand it, is a realization of life 
 for God and not for self. Asceticism is not 
 the disuse of this or that. Still less the ulti- 
 mately Manichaean attitude toward the 
 world as being an evil thing, or the body as 
 being an hindrance to the spirit; but asceti- 
 cism is the putting of this world in its proper 
 place as the instrument of the spirit. The 
 ascetic sits loose to the world, dominating 
 and controlling it, and making it his servant 
 for spiritual ends. To the Christian, asceti- 
 cism is a means to an end. If he limits his 
 use of the world it is not because he regards 
 the world as evil, but because he will keep 
 control over his own life. And no man can 
 keep control over his own life, except he dis- 
 117 
 
HOLINESS OF THE PRIESTHOOD 
 
 cipline himself by denial, except as he dis- 
 cover that he can dispense with anything 
 which the world has to offer. He is careful 
 not to entangle himself in the aflfairs of this 
 world. His self-denial is the evidence of his 
 self-control and the means of his self-obla- 
 tion. The ascetic is therefore able to place 
 the total energy of his life at the disposal of 
 God. He is absorbing nothing selfishly. 
 There is a temper which is curiously oppo- 
 site to all that. As the Roman tax-farmer 
 was placed in charge of a district with the 
 sole obligation of paying to the state a fixed 
 revenue, and had himself the enjoyment of 
 what beyond that he could collect, so we find 
 men taking an analogous attitude toward the 
 service of God. They owe God stated and 
 limited service. Beyond that all is theirs. 
 Tliey are free to make self-appropriation of 
 much of life. They have the right to this 
 or that for themselves. It is not that they 
 belong to God, but a certain limited revenue 
 from them. This, as I understand it, is the 
 explanation of the worldly priest. He pays 
 tariff on his priesthood. He does his work, 
 he tells himself; as though his work were 
 the allotted labor of a slave. And his work 
 118 
 
HOLINESS OF THE PRIESTHOOD 
 
 done he throws himself into the enjoyment 
 of hfe. Within certain hmits of decency he 
 is free of the world. Now the steward of 
 God is not free of the world at all. He is 
 bound to consecrate his whole energy. Even 
 his amusements must come within this rule. 
 He is not free to take amusement because a 
 certain amount of life belongs to him; but 
 he is bound to take relaxation because the 
 health of his life requires it — because with- 
 out it he would be a less fit or serviceable 
 instrument of God. It is a necessary part of 
 his self-development, and therefore falls 
 within the administration of his office and 
 not without it. But that at the same time 
 governs and limits the nature of his amuse- 
 ment; it must be such as to render him a 
 better steward. 
 
 There is one more title of the priest which 
 I want to notice : the priest is called Watch- 
 man. And I will ask you to think of this in 
 the same subjective way in which we have 
 been treating the other aspects of priesthood, 
 with a view to emphasizing it as a function 
 of the holy life of the Body of Christ. I 
 will ask you to think of the priest's duty as 
 watchman as primarily a duty to watch over 
 119 
 
HOLINESS OF THE PRIESTHOOD 
 
 himself. That is to say, it is still a question 
 of self-realization for the end of greater ser- 
 viceableness. The qualification of the watch- 
 man is not first that he watch, but that he be 
 fit to watch. 
 
 The sphere of this watchfulness, it seems 
 to me, is in the first place over one's ideals. 
 There is nothing which we are more liable 
 to lose. It is the usual experience that we 
 start well. We go out to our work with 
 high ideals of what the priestly life is and 
 involves. Those ideals may be mistaken in 
 certain particulars; they may need discipline 
 and purification; they may be modified 
 through experience ; but at bottom they were 
 good ideals, and we wanted more than any- 
 thing else to be good priests. We had zeal 
 and enthusiasm and hope. We had plans 
 and anticipations over which now, perhaps, 
 we smile a little sadly when they have come 
 to dust mostly. We had courage to meet 
 difficulty and even failure, which it is good 
 for us if we have retained. Well, all that 
 is far behind us, and the world which re- 
 A^ealed itself sun-flushed to our eager vision 
 looks gray enough now in the retrospect. 
 That, too, does not matter much. What 
 120 
 
HOLINESS OF THE PRIESTHO0_P 
 
 does matter is the ideal — has that too faded 
 with the fading of the dawn? Do we look 
 back at that too with a smile that is half 
 sadness and self-pity as a thing belonging to 
 that world which vanished with the break- 
 ing of our dreams? The weariness of high 
 ideals is a constant experience everywhere; 
 but woe to the priest who once yields to it. 
 Our dream of reality and our experience of 
 reality are vastly different, but nevertheless 
 if we have been sustained through the diffi- 
 culty of our ministry it was the dream that 
 sustained us. It is the existence of the ideal 
 which makes the real tolerable. 
 
 The ideal is that which, being as yet un- 
 attained, seems to us attainable. It is the 
 most desirable thing of its order. It is the 
 element of desire; therefore, that is import- 
 ant. Many have ideals which they never 
 attempt to realize. Many more see ideals 
 and admire them from a distance. But their 
 admiration is languid and efifortless. The 
 desire of the ideal is energizing and stimu- 
 lant. It matters little that we do not 
 actually attain it: the effort to attain will 
 carry us far. The sculptor or the painter 
 finds that the material through which he 
 121 
 
HOLINESS OF THE PRIESTHOOD 
 
 must work seriously limits the expression of 
 his thought. He conceives a form which is 
 perfect; but when he turns from his work 
 with the confession that he can do no more, 
 the vision of his imagination still has a 
 beauty which his creation lacks. The mu- 
 sician sits at the organ and calls forth melo- 
 dies which are so subtle that they pass over 
 the too gross senses and speak directly to 
 the soul; but over the soul of the musician 
 there are ever more stealing melodies which 
 refuse to be translated; which are as the 
 voices of angels singing as they go upon 
 their errands of mercy, which are echoes of 
 the far-off heavenly music of the harpers 
 harping with their harps. But musician and 
 artist alike do what they do by virtue of 
 their vision ; and if they had never conceived 
 the to them impossible they never would 
 have risen to the level of their actual attain- 
 ment. 
 
 It is the ideal which sustains and stimu- 
 lates. Much of life is weary drudgery, if 
 you view it by itself. If our eyes were fixed 
 on present attainment, which most often 
 means present imperfection and failure, how 
 long should we be able to keep ourselves to 
 122 
 
HOLINESS OF THE PRIESTHOOD 
 
 our work? Work for work's sake lands us 
 in impossible plodding. Work for the vis- 
 ion's sake is the only hopeful work. We 
 smile over the child's crude drawing; but is 
 it not merely of a piece with all life — an at- 
 tempt, faulty and bungling, to render the 
 ideal ? The important thing is that the child 
 has an ideal to render, not that he bungles it 
 in the rendering. We bungle life sadly in 
 any case ; our attainment falls how far below 
 our conception. The perfect man, the meas- 
 ure of the stature of the fulness of Christ, 
 is that which we have to translate into the 
 terms of an actual priestly experience : and 
 how does our translation differ much from 
 the child's crude sketch? But there is the 
 intention behind them both, and it is the in- 
 tention which counts. 
 
 But the ideal makes us uncomfortable. 
 Our constant failure saddens and perplexes; 
 the unsuccessful struggle ends perhaps in 
 disheartenment. There come times when 
 far from being stimulated, life grows very 
 somber under the pressure of the unattained. 
 Then is the time when the watchman needs 
 all his watchfulness, for then the enemies of 
 the soul throng about its very gates. Then 
 123 
 
HOLINESS OF THE PRIESTHOOD 
 
 is the time of the very special temptation — 
 what good? Why not adjust oneself to 
 life? The world is a very good place, and 
 life can be made a very tolerable thing by a 
 little compromise. Why insist on impos- 
 sible standards and put oneself out of sym- 
 pathy with the world ? Why insist on being 
 different ? 
 
 Are we to meet this state of things by a 
 change of ideals? By getting rid of our 
 vision ? Are we going to stop watching and 
 set our people the example of a perfectly 
 commonplace and easy Qiristianity, which 
 they will regard as sensible because it puts 
 no strain upon them? That is the choice 
 which is offered to every priest sooner or 
 later : Make these stones bread. What is 
 the good of being uncomfortable in the wil- 
 derness ? And then it comes out what one's 
 conception of priesthood is. Then it comes 
 out whether one has been watching over 
 those ideals of the priestly life with which 
 one started, or whether they have faded in- 
 sensibly and vanished without our notice. 
 Then it comes out whether the pursuit of the 
 ideal life of the priest is all in all to us, or 
 whether it has become a mere theory, which 
 124 
 
HOLINESS OF THE PRIESTHOOD 
 
 we stow away in our intellectual lumber 
 room, while our actual working theory is to 
 get on with this world. 
 
 And the thought of the temptation of the 
 comfort of low ideals suggests this further 
 thought : in what does lie the essential sig- 
 nificance of the priest's life? What is its 
 last word? And surely if that life be the 
 presentation of the Christ-life — if the Christ 
 is in the priest, so that the priest can be 
 called Alter Christus, there can be but one 
 answer. The priest's life finds its completest 
 expression in that which is the antithesis of 
 compromise — sacrifice. The priest's life is 
 the expression of the priestly life of our 
 Lord, of which the essence is sacrifice. Our 
 influence on others is the influence of our 
 lives as sacrificed. Influence, be it noted, in 
 the broadest sense; not transient influence 
 over this or that person or community, but 
 abiding influence in the kingdom of God. 
 The influence of a personality we are apt to 
 narrow down too much with our limited no- 
 tions of the practical. We are all more or 
 less tainted with materialism. But when I 
 speak of the total influence of a personality, 
 I am disposed to take an account of a man's 
 125 
 
HOLINESS OF THE PRIESTHOOD 
 
 prayers as well as his guilds ; and the num- 
 ber of the Eucharists that he offers, as well 
 as of the calls he makes. And I would start 
 from the degree of his sacrifice. The influ- 
 ence of the saints is an abiding influence in 
 the Kingdom of God no matter what par- 
 ticular type of the saintly character they dis- 
 played, whether active or contemplative. In 
 either case they attained saintliness through 
 sacrifice. The practical question is. Do we 
 believe that, and are we aiming at saintli- 
 ness through sacrifice? We are fond of 
 quoting that "the blood of the martyrs is 
 seed of the church" ; but I doubt whether we 
 really believe it. We do not believe that a 
 man may profit the church more by his 
 death than by his life; or what is involved 
 in the saying, by his failure than his success. 
 From the practical point of view the mar- 
 tyrs were certainly failures : they were cut 
 off in the attempt to do something, and left 
 it undone. If a man attempts to convert a 
 heathen village and meets martyrdom there, 
 he may be a hero, but he has failed in what 
 he undertook, as much as an American priest 
 who undertakes to convert a Protestant par- 
 ish and is driven out. What is needed is 
 that we enlarge our view of the man's life 
 126 
 
HOLINESS OF THE PRIESTHOOD 
 
 in either case. What essentially the man is 
 doing is offering his life to God. His life is 
 the matter of sacrifice. The conditions of its 
 acceptance, whether through success or fail- 
 ure, are for the divine determination. But 
 that, apart from that one is more important 
 than the other is not true. The priestly 
 character finds its completest expression 
 through sacrifice. Not merely the external 
 sacrifice of things and opportunities ; but the 
 internal sacrifice of self. For all sacrifice is 
 ultimately self-sacrifice. Christ offers Him- 
 self, and His work as the expression of Him- 
 self. The priest "ought to offer himself for 
 an oblation to his divine Master, in body, 
 soul, and spirit, with all his faculties, powers 
 and affections, in life and unto death." 
 
 It would seem that this identification of 
 himself with the sacrificial life of Christ 
 through the offering of his will is the con- 
 summation of the priest's union with his 
 Master. We must certainly look upon the 
 priest's union with our blessed Lord as 
 something over and above the union of the 
 behever with Christ, which is the basis of 
 the spiritual life. The priest is joined in the 
 sacrificial work of Christ ; is taken up into a 
 closer intimacy. One approaches the thought 
 127 
 
HOLINESS OF THE PRIESTHOOD 
 
 with a feeling of awe. But it is a false hu- 
 mility to put away such thought as involv- 
 ing a conception of oneself of which one is 
 not worthy. If we are rightly priests, it is 
 because God has chosen us to be such, be- 
 cause our Lord has raised us to the life of 
 union with Him in His priesthood, because 
 the Holy Spirit has given us the gifts of 
 ministry. We might well shrink if we had 
 thrust ourselves into the priest's office for a 
 morsel of meat ; but the word of God to us is. 
 Ye have not chosen me, hut I have chosen 
 you and ordained you. We may not shrink, 
 then, but rather face the fact of our priest- 
 hood in all its tremendous implications; and 
 above all, face it in the sense of this self- 
 responsibility, which I have been endeavor- 
 ing to emphasize. 
 
 There is one word which sums up pretty 
 well the priest's attitude of response toward 
 our blessed Lord, and that is the word 
 Purity. The priest's life must be a life of 
 progressive purity. As I understand it, that 
 means the gradual disentanglement from all 
 things that soil or tarnish the soul. Not 
 simply actual sin, as we count sin, but the 
 unworthy motive, the rebellious thought, the 
 128 
 
HOLINESS OF THE PRIESTHOOD 
 
 unruly imagination. We are pulled down 
 sadly at times by things which are hardly 
 sins. There are moments when what we 
 have sacrificed for the priesthood comes over 
 us : Behold, zee have left all and followed 
 Tluw The tliought of the houses and lands 
 which we might have won in the market- 
 place of the world ; the visions of quiet 
 homes which might have been ours; the 
 savor of the luxuries we have sacrificed. 
 The temptation of these things is none the 
 less keen because we ha^•e never had them; 
 possibly might have missed them altogether 
 if we had aimed at them. At least others 
 have them, the friends of our youth ; we see 
 them now in lives of quiet contentment ; and 
 we have been brought of God out into the 
 wilderness, and in the place of the pleasant 
 food of Eg}-pt we eat this manna, and at 
 moments our soul loatheth this light bread. 
 \\'e thought in the eagerness of our youth, 
 in the first entliusiasm of our vocation, that 
 we were going straight to Canaan, with its 
 milk and honey, its com and wine. And we 
 are here in the wilderness, with Canaan a 
 distant vision caught from mountain peaks, 
 and perhaps only in the moment of death. 
 (9) 129 
 
HOLINESS OF THE PRIESTHOOD 
 
 "Poor Moses, thou too sawest undulating in 
 the distance the ravishing hills of the Prom- 
 ised Land, and it was thy fate nevertheless to 
 lay thy weary bones in a grave dug in the 
 desert! Which of us has not his promised 
 land, his day of ecstasy, and his death in 
 exile?" But it presses the lesson that if we 
 want happiness we are to look up for it, to 
 seek it not in the creature, but in the Crea- 
 tor, to seek it in deeper realization of our 
 union with God in Christ. Our souls are 
 ever restless and unsatisfied here. "The 
 bosom of the Creator is the creature's home." 
 We find it hard to give up our toys. We 
 find it hard to understand that if we attain 
 God, that is enough. But that is the simple 
 truth. "There is but one thing needful — to 
 possess God. All our senses, all our powers 
 of mind or soul, all our external resources, 
 are so many ways of approaching the divin- 
 ity, so many modes of tasting and adoring 
 God. We must learn to detach ourselves 
 from all that is capable of being lost, to bind 
 ourselves only to that which is absolute and 
 eternal." 
 
 For our relation to the world is changing 
 and passing; but our relation to our Lord is 
 130 
 
HOLINESS OF THE PRIESTHOOD 
 
 an eternal relation. We are priests forever. 
 \\"e can never lose that character which was 
 conferred upon us at our ordination. We 
 may be lost priests, but priests we shall be 
 still, "\^'hether in the light of glory or in 
 the outer darkness we shall be priests, ac- 
 cepted or cast out eternally." 
 
 And to insist perhaps over much, priests 
 raised to the participation of the Eternal 
 priesthood of our Lord that we may mani- 
 fest to men the Holy Life of His Body: 
 proofs, we may say, of the continual opera- 
 tion of that Holy Life. Men, therefore, 
 whose chief characteristic ought to be a pas- 
 sionate devotion to the Person of our Lord. 
 That passionate loyalty, that sense of identi- 
 fication with our Master, that responsibility 
 for His honor which counts fidelity more 
 than death, that is the intimate quality of a 
 priest's devotion, that constitutes his hero- 
 ism. "Heroism that is the brilliant triumph 
 of the soul over the flesh — that is to say, 
 over fear; fear of poverty, of suffering, of 
 calumny, of sickness, of isolation, and of 
 death. There is no serious priestly life with- 
 out such heroism. 
 
 That was the Apostle's view ; / coutif all 
 131 
 
HOLINESS OF THE PRIESTHOOD 
 
 things but loss that I may win Christ, win ta 
 deep knowledge and love of Him, win to 
 understand the meaning of the union 
 wrought with Him by my priesthood. The 
 priesthood is to-day what it was then ; it be- 
 comes us to live it as men lived it then. We 
 are to seek in our own priesthood what the 
 saints found in theirs ; and if we seek as they 
 sought we shall find as they found. And 
 finding, we shall exemplify and commend 
 that Holiness which is the outpouring of the 
 Divine Life of the Incarnate through all the 
 channels of His Body. 
 
 132 
 
THE RELIGIOUS LIFE 
 
 If any man will come after Me, let him deny 
 
 himself, and take up his cross 
 
 daily, and follow Me. 
 
THE RELIGIOUS LIFE 
 
 The ways of the Spirit are many, and 
 many are the modes and manifestations of 
 the holy life of the Body of Christ. The 
 time allotted me permits of the treatment of 
 but one more manifestation of this life, and 
 that shall be the outworking of the life of 
 the Body in that institution known as the 
 Religious Life. It will be felt of course that 
 the Religious Life is not like the universal 
 vocation of Christians to holiness, or that 
 special function of the Body which is priest- 
 hood, are inherent and essential manifesta- 
 tion of the life of the Body. That is true. 
 We can conceive of the Church as existing 
 and developing in the world without that 
 special manifestation of its life. It is how- 
 ever true that the life of the Body did, from 
 very early times, begin to manifest itself 
 through the Religious Life, and it can hardly 
 be asserted that the Religious Life is an ex- 
 cresence upon the Body of Christ, a false 
 and mistaken development, turning the tides 
 of the Church's life into undesirable chan- 
 nels. In the providence of God the Reli- 
 135 
 
THE RELIGIOUS LIFE 
 
 gious Life was developed and directed to 
 action of the highest usefulness to the 
 Church. It is indeed impossible to see how 
 the Church could, or can to-day, meet many 
 of the problems which it is called to solve 
 without the institution of Religious Orders. 
 The fact that there have been periods in the 
 history of the Church during which the Re- 
 ligious Orders showed a certain amount of 
 degeneration, is no more an objection to the 
 legitimacy of their existence than the degen- 
 eracy during the same periods of the priest- 
 hood itself is a proof of its illegitimacy as 
 an organ of the Body, or the failure of the 
 Christian community at any time to reach 
 the ideal of the Gospel life is a disproof of 
 Christianity itself. The complete acceptance 
 by the entire Church of the Religious Life 
 as a mode of its self-expression, and the 
 work of vital importance to the growth and 
 defense of Christianity done by the Religious 
 Orders, is a sufficient defense of the Reli- 
 gious Life, if such defense be indeed needed. 
 Not that that is all that can be said for the 
 Religious Life as a function of the Body of 
 Christ, only that that by itself would be 
 enough to say ; but indeed the Religious Life 
 136 
 
THE RELIGIOUS LIFE 
 
 is one special manifestation of the ascetic 
 ideal of the Christian Life as portrayed in 
 the New Testament. At the heart of the 
 depiction of the Christian Life in the New 
 Testament is of course the human life of the 
 Son of God. That life was an ascetic life ; 
 that is to say, a life of severe self-limitation 
 for certain ends. It would no doubt be pos- 
 sible to fill a volume with denials that our 
 Lord was an ascetic, but such denials are 
 perfectly futile in view of the facts, and they 
 all ultimately rest on His saying that where- 
 as St. John the Baptist because of his absti- 
 nence was accused of having a devil, the 
 Son of Man because He came eating and 
 drinking incurred the reproach of being a 
 gluttonous man and a wine bibber. I do not 
 suppose we want to rank ourselves with 
 either set of critics, nor do I suppose that 
 because our Lord says that He came eating 
 and drinking, we are to infer that He did 
 not, under certain circumstances, practice 
 self-denial in food and drink. It is evident 
 that He did not lead the same type of ascetic 
 life as St. John the Baptist, but that is not to 
 the point. Certainly He did lead a life of 
 severe self-denial, voluntarily assumed for 
 137 
 
THE RELIGIOUS LIFE 
 
 the ends of His mission. He willingly as- 
 sumed human poverty and toil. He lived 
 the life of a wandering teacher who had not 
 where to lay His head. He learned obedi- 
 ence through the things which He suffered, 
 and having become obedient to the Cross He 
 tasted death for all men. If ever there was 
 an ascetic life, His was such. 
 
 The mistake that is made in the matter of 
 asceticism is to assume that certain extreme 
 types of early and mediaeval asceticism are 
 the normal types, and that the true ascetic 
 is one who inflicts upon himself certain 
 penances, which seem to us to be excessive, 
 and tortures that are misjudged. But such 
 examples of extreme asceticism have in all 
 times been relatively rare and have failed of 
 the approbation of the Church. They have 
 often been but a passing phase in a man's 
 life, a phase which he himself later regarded 
 as mistaken, as is the case, for example, in 
 the life of Blessed Henry Suso. But such 
 types do not rule the ascetic ideal. The ideal 
 is ruled by the life of our Lord, by His 
 teachings in the Sermon on the Mount, and 
 by such utterances on the spiritual life as St. 
 Paul's account of the fruits of the Spirit. A 
 138 
 
THE RELIGIOUS LIFE 
 
 life which aims to embody the Beatitudes, 
 and produce the fruits of the Spirit, is what 
 is meant by the ascetic life. A life of pa- 
 tience, long-sufifering, meekness, gentleness, 
 self-control. You will say that this is the 
 life that all Christians are called to live. I 
 quite agree with you. All Christians are 
 called to be ascetics. 
 
 The difference between the Christian vo- 
 cation and the vocation to the Religious Life 
 is that, under the impulse of the latter, men 
 and women seek to realize their ideal 
 through a special set of inhibitions. They 
 accept certain limitations as aids to ascetic 
 self-expression which are not necessary to 
 the ascetic life as such, but are felt to be 
 desirable by certain individuals and under 
 certain circumstances; but these limitations 
 are not arbitrarily chosen. They are at least, 
 to express it as gently as possible, indicated 
 in our Lord's teaching. They are of course 
 what are called the Counsels of Perfection, 
 and are embodied in the three vows of chas- 
 tity, poverty and obedience. I do not see 
 how any one can read the nineteenth chapter 
 of the Gospel according to St. Matthew, and 
 139 
 
THE RELIGIOUS LIFE 
 
 not feel that these vows are well grounded 
 in our Lord's teaching. 
 
 One difficulty which is felt in this matter 
 no doubt grows out of the assumption that 
 because the teaching of our Lord as to the 
 Counsels of Perfection assumes that only 
 some children of the Kingdom will be found 
 able to adopt them, the adoption of them 
 constitutes a spiritual aristocracy, a superior 
 caste within the Church. This surely is not 
 the meaning of our Lord's teaching, nor is 
 it the meaning of writers on the spiritual 
 life. Much language to be sure has been 
 used which may be thus construed, but that 
 surely cannot be its intention, and for this 
 reason, that all such teaching rests on the 
 assumption that the following of the Coun- 
 sels is not a matter of self-choice, but is gov- 
 erned by the further fact of vocation. 
 
 Now the following of a special vocation 
 does not constitute any one a superior per- 
 son, or a person superior to one not having 
 that vocation. Vocation is an added 
 responsibility in life. It imposes special 
 responsibility and special obligation. In a 
 way no doubt it is also a special privilege,, 
 but not in the way of imparting, ipso facto^ 
 140 
 
THE RELIGIOUS LIFE 
 
 special sanctity. We are all bound to follow 
 whatever vocation God sends us, and those 
 who are called to the Religious Life are but 
 following their vocation as any one else in 
 the Kingdom of God follows his. I should, 
 therefore, hesitate to say, as is often said, 
 that the Religious Life is a higher life than 
 the life of the ordinary priest or layman. I 
 should but say that it is a life of different 
 obligation and privilege; and I should fur- 
 ther say that those who are called to follow 
 the Counsels of Perfection are not at liberty 
 to decline the call on the ground that they 
 are but counsels and not of universal obliga- 
 tion. The Lord's Counsels are the Counsels 
 of a King, and those He calls to a certain 
 Tvind of life must follow. Certainly we do 
 not gather that the rich young ruler was 
 quite within his rights when he declined our 
 Lord's call, to sell all and follow Him, or 
 that he went back to the enjoyment of his 
 wealth other than as one who had made the 
 great refusal. This matter of vocation in- 
 deed is a matter of fundamental importance. 
 It assumes that the type of life we choose in 
 this world is not, or ought not, to be a mat- 
 ter of mere whim, but that what we are to 
 141 
 
THE RELIGIOUS LIFE 
 
 be is indicated in the providential shaping 
 of Hfe. We are what we are under responsi- 
 biHty and penalty. There is an allotted place 
 for us in God's world which it is our prime 
 business to find. We ought to recognize this 
 in the ordinary affairs of life, as well as in 
 affairs which are specifically religious. We 
 do recognize it in relation to the priesthood, 
 and the Bishop requires the affirmation of 
 belief in vocation before he proceeds to ordi- 
 nation, and it is required, under circum- 
 stances of added solemnity and self-search- 
 ing, in those who offer themselves to the 
 Religious Life. Here the novice is not taken 
 upon his own valuation of his vocation, but 
 he is required to undergo a long period of 
 testing with a view to the establishment, or 
 disproof, of the reality of his vocation. He 
 must prove not only his inclination but his 
 capacity and fitness to live the life, which is 
 outlined by the three vows, before he is per- 
 mitted to take them. He is so tested that 
 both the novice himself, and the Order that 
 receives him, may be assured, as far as may 
 be, that he is indeed called of God to this 
 special relation to our Lord. 
 
 The life of the Religious, in response to 
 142 
 
THE RELIGIOUS LIFE 
 
 his vocation, is the entire consecration of 
 his personaUty to our Lord, under the forms 
 which our Lord Himself has indicated. 
 Such consecration is not the taking up of a 
 new form of service, as one might pass from 
 the position of a parish priest to that of a 
 teacher, — it is the surrender of self for our 
 Lord's and the Gospel's sake. If we think 
 into the subject a little we see how complete 
 and thorough this self-surrender is. It is 
 the consecration of the entire personality as 
 expressed through its three chief functions, 
 the affections, the reason and the will. The 
 vows are directly related to these three ele- 
 ments of our complex personality. 
 
 The vow of Chastity is the surrender, the 
 consecration, of the affections. The point is 
 not, of course, that the married life is un- 
 chaste, or that the affections are evil. The 
 point is that the center of the affections has 
 changed, — they are to be directed wholly to 
 our Lord. His person is to be the object of 
 our human affections. His demands are 
 very stern, — He that loveth father or mother 
 more than me is not worthy of me, has spec- 
 ial application to the Religious Life. We 
 know human life very superficially, if we 
 143 
 
THE RELIGIOUS LIFE 
 
 do not know how often human affection 
 blocks the path of duty, the path to 
 God. Well, the Religious is not to en- 
 tangle himself in such affections; espec- 
 ially he is not to create new centers of 
 affection, — new ties which, however holy 
 under certain circumstances, he is called 
 away from. That such ties are ordinarily 
 allowable, and desirable, is primarily the 
 meaning of his being called from them. The 
 fact that in abandoning them he is giving up 
 what, save for his vocation, he might have, 
 is the essence of his sacrifice. It is a great 
 offering, precisely because the instinct of 
 human affection is so holy and so deep. The 
 desire for home and family and children is 
 elemental and it is these deep-rooted desires 
 which must be suppressed, under the im- 
 pulse of another and higher desire, — the de- 
 sire to follow our Lord in the way of a naked 
 life. Naked, to follow the naked Christ, is 
 the ideal of the Religious. But the vow of 
 Chastity is not simply a vow of physical 
 purity, which would be but negative after 
 all. The physical chastity is the symbol of 
 a deeper purity which the Religious seeks. 
 It is the symbol of that inner purity, the 
 144 
 
THE RELIGIOUS LIFE 
 
 purity of heart, which is the medium of spir- 
 itual vision. The pure in heart shall see 
 God, — that is their beatitude. It is by the 
 abandonment of all centers of affection out 
 of God that the Religious seeks the fellow- 
 ship of God. This simplification of desire is 
 the way to this vision. I do not say that 
 there is no other way, but this is one way, 
 and the way the Religious is called to walk. 
 He seeks to be separate from all other affec- 
 tions that he may give himself utterly to the 
 love of God. 
 
 As the vow of Chastity is the expression 
 of the consecration of the affections, the 
 abandonment of them, that they may be 
 found entire in Christ, so the vow of Pov- 
 erty is the expression of the consecration of 
 the reason. It is far deeper, therefore, than 
 the mere giving up of personal possessions. 
 That is a comparatively light thing. Ordi- 
 narily the Religious gains more than he 
 loses, in the assured use of the necessities of 
 life. The poverty of the reason is a thing 
 harder to achieve than any poverty of physi- 
 cal things. The function of the reason is to 
 order, to choose, to select, and the Religious 
 seeks to gain the humility of the reason that 
 
 do) 145 
 
THE RELIGIOUS LIFE 
 
 he may avoid the dangers of egotistic self- 
 assertion, self-guiding, self-pleasing. The 
 lust of the eye is the danger he fights. He 
 submits himself to the mind of the Order, as 
 greater and truer than the mind of the indi- 
 vidual. The mind and purpose of the com- 
 munity become his mind and purpose. 
 
 It is perhaps needless to say that this con- 
 secration of the reason is not to its impover- 
 ishment but to its enrichment. We cannot 
 cease to exercise the reasoning faculty, but 
 the Religious seeks to exercise it under cer- 
 tain checks and limitations which purify it 
 from egotism and selfishness. He becomes a 
 member of a community which seeks certain 
 ends, under certain conditions, and under 
 those conditions he contributes his due share 
 to the life of the Order, but always in a 
 humble consciousness of the higher reason 
 which is that of the Order. He is in the 
 way, therefore, of gaining through his sacri- 
 fice that gift of humility, which is one of the 
 great gifts of the Spirit to human life. His 
 ideal is no longer the gain of anjrthing for 
 self, but that poverty of spirit which is a 
 beatitude, the due meed of which is the pos- 
 session of the Kingdom. The humility of 
 146 
 
THE RELIGIOUS LIFE 
 
 the reason is indeed the gateway to great 
 riches, because it places its possessor in the 
 position of a learner. He becomes as a little 
 child who can be instructed in the things of 
 the Kingdom of God. Proud, self-assertive 
 reason closes the gate to a learner, because it 
 assumes adequate possession and is unrecep- 
 tive of new truth and impatient of guidance. 
 But the Religious needs the humility of the 
 child, that he may be led to ascend higher in 
 the path of the Spirit, and dive deeper into 
 the mysteries of the spiritual life. To learn 
 requires a spiritual capacity that teaching 
 never does, and the good Religious is ever a 
 scholar in the school of the Spirit, which 
 leads the willing mind to the knowledge of 
 the deep things of God; and on the basis of 
 this consecrated and sacrificed reason, of this 
 spiritual poverty, have been built those 
 amazing structures of spiritual guidance 
 which are the writings of the Saints. When 
 one runs over the great books of guidance, 
 which form one chief branch of the riches of 
 the Church, one is astonished at how large a 
 proportion of them come from the sanctified 
 reason of the Religious. 
 
 The third vow of the Religious is that 
 147 
 
THE RELIGIOUS LIFE 
 
 which consecrates the will, — the vow of 
 Obedience. It is here, perhaps, that human 
 nature struggles most and grace wins its 
 greatest triumphs. The pride of life dies 
 hard. To surrender one's self to the will of 
 an Order, to have one's life directed in the 
 minutest particulars, to have the very mo- 
 ments of one's day ruled and assigned to 
 various tasks, to go or stay in this place or 
 that, as authority may assign, that is a su- 
 preme test of vocation. Yet that is the full 
 expression of the Christ-attitude toward life. 
 / came not to do mine own will, but the will 
 of Him that sent me. Thy will he done. 
 We can only reach this attitude toward life 
 by self -surrender, — by willing subjection. 
 The will of God, you may say, is what we 
 are subject to, but there is room for abund- 
 ant self-will in that form of self-subjection. 
 We interpret the will of God for ours. The 
 Religious finds the expression of the will of 
 God in the will of his superiors. As his rea- 
 son is merged in a larger reason, so his will 
 is merged in a larger will, the will of the 
 Order. So he seeks to lose self in another 
 way. His blessing is now the blessing of 
 the meek, whose chief characteristic is their 
 148 
 
THE RELIGIOUS LIFE 
 
 willing submission to the providence of God. 
 They are those who desire nothing for them- 
 selves, who are contented under all circum- 
 stances, who know how to be poor and how 
 to abound, who accept life as it is ordered 
 for them. Such are not will-less; but the 
 consecrated will, — all the more to be de- 
 pended upon because it is consecrated, — 
 directs itself under the guiding purpose of 
 which it is a part. Weak they are not. They 
 are strong with the strength of those who 
 can do all things through Christ who 
 strengtheneth them. 
 
 These three vows, then, are the expression 
 of the complete consecration of the individ- 
 ual life — of its attempt to reproduce the ideal 
 life of the Gospels in terms of the Counsels 
 of Perfection. And the Religious Life must 
 be defended, if it need defense, on the 
 ground of the compulsion of this ideal. 
 Those who prefer the ideal of. classic 
 heathenism to the ideal of the Gospel 
 will naturally find the Religious Life an 
 intolerably stupid and wicked thing, im- 
 pertinently opposing itself to the blithe 
 joy in all natural impulses which is as- 
 sumed to be the right of human be- 
 149 
 
THE RELIGIOUS LIFE 
 
 ings. Knowing Mr. Lecky's point of view, 
 one is not surprised at the following: 
 "There is, perhaps, no phase in the moral 
 history of mankind of a deeper or more 
 painful interest than this ascetic epidemic. 
 A hideous, sordid, and emaciated maniac, 
 without knowledge, without patriotism, 
 without natural afifection, passing his life in 
 a long routine of useless and atrocious self- 
 torture, and quailing before the ghastly 
 phantoms of his delirious brain, had become 
 the ideal of the nations which had known 
 the writings of Plato and Cicero and the 
 lives of Socrates and Cato." This tirade is, 
 of course, negligible as criticism ; and merely 
 expresses, with a coarseness we need not 
 imitate, a preference for the heathen ideal of 
 life. But at its best the ideal of heathenism, 
 or as it is the present fashion to call it, 
 humanism, is an ideal of self-development 
 which is the enrichment of self for the sake 
 of self, and at its worst is mere animalism. 
 Both at its best and at its worst it is ever 
 with us, in the life of colleges and in the 
 life of slums; and it is essentially against 
 that theory of life that asceticism utters its 
 protest ; and if it protest carries it occasion- 
 ISO 
 
THE RELIGIOUS LIFE 
 
 ally to strange actions, that is but what we 
 might expect from the circumstances under 
 which it is uttered. Mr. Lecky's "without 
 knowledge, without patriotism, without nat- 
 ural affection," only means that at a time 
 when men thought that the intellect was the 
 sole test of truth or falsehood, right or 
 wrong, some ascetics were carried by the 
 intensity of their protest that truth and right 
 are otherwise discoverable, to an abandon- 
 ment of intellectual ideals : it means that 
 when, not the populace, but the very class 
 that magnified the intellect, were putting 
 that intellect at the disposal of an irresponsi- 
 ble despotism, and rendering worship to the 
 genius of Rome incarnated in a human 
 brute, there were men who took refuge in 
 the deserts and caves because of an ideal of 
 heavenly citizenship vastly more noble than 
 the narrow and selfish notion of patriotism : 
 it means that there were those who were 
 willing to sacrifice the comforts of human 
 affection, in the pursuits of a higher rela- 
 tionship, the realization of their new-found 
 sonship of the Eternal Father. That men 
 who were overwhelmed by the splendor of 
 the Heavenly Vision should for the moment 
 151 
 
THE RELIGIOUS LIFE 
 
 find earth uninteresting is not wonderful. 
 The wonderful thing is that, having the Vis- 
 ion, they ever readjusted themselves to earth 
 at all ! 
 
 But they did ; and unfortunately, in many 
 cases, only too completely : and most of the 
 defenses of the religious life which we read 
 to-day are based upon an appreciation of the 
 extent in which it has succeeded in making 
 itself useful to the world. Of course, we 
 Westerns are thoroughly utilitarian and 
 materialistic in our appreciation of life. 
 Even our religion has to justify itself by an 
 exhibition of the good it does. We seem un- 
 able to grasp the conception of worship as 
 the offering of self to the love of God. We 
 still construe the fruits of religion to mean 
 useful work. And where we can find those 
 who follow the Religious Life occupied in 
 "doing something useful" we give a quali- 
 fied approval. Religious Orders are there- 
 fore praised because they made copies of 
 ancient manuscripts, and preserved "the in- 
 tellectual tradition" ; the monk in the scrip- 
 torium becomes an admirable person. Reli- 
 gious are praised for their leadership in 
 education during the Middle Ages; for the 
 1S2 
 
THE RELIGIOUS LIFE 
 
 fact that they taught the rudiments of civih- 
 zation to the barbarians who overwhelmed 
 the Roman Empire. Among us, it would 
 seem that the Religious Life is tolerated be- 
 cause it produces a cheap type of church 
 worker. 
 
 But all these and the like things which are 
 the ground of our modern tolerance — it is 
 hardly more than that — of the Religious 
 Life, are not of the essence of the Life at all. 
 They are quite beside the mark. Most of 
 the failure of what seems to be religious vo- 
 cation, I take it, is not failure of vocation at 
 all. It is the revelation of the fact that the 
 aspirant was seeking some field of church 
 work, and had supposed that the Religious 
 Life was such a field. But the Religious 
 Life is what it claims to be, a kind of life, 
 not a kind of work; and if the life itself is 
 not justified it ought not to gain tolerance on 
 the ground that at any rate it is useful. The 
 works which are undertaken by Religious, at 
 least those which attract the praise of men, 
 are for the most part in the nature of par- 
 erga, undertaken for the sake of self-support. 
 In the choice of works for that end they have 
 usually chosen works such as are purely for 
 153 
 
THE RELIGIOUS LIFE 
 
 self-support, as the early communities busied 
 themselves with basket-making and agricul- 
 ture and so on; or more generally in later 
 times such works as are at the same time 
 useful for the advancement of the Kingdom 
 of God of which they are citizens. But it 
 cannot be too strongly insisted that the Re- 
 ligious Life does not exist for the sake of 
 work, but that work is a by-product of the 
 Life. 
 
 So understood, the Religious Life — to 
 touch one other criticism of it — is held to 
 be a selfish life. I understand that to mean 
 that it is a life which avoids social obliga- 
 tions (Mr. Lecky's patriotism) and material 
 productivity. A man who enters a Religious 
 Order is regarded as selfish; one who sells 
 groceries or milk is an unselfish member of 
 society, doing his duty by the community, 
 taking his due place in the social order. The 
 Religious, on the contrary, has left the world 
 to get on as it may, depriving it of the help 
 which it has a right to count on from him. 
 This is especially emphasized in the matter 
 of the continuance of the race. It is Mr. 
 Lecky again who criticizes the celibacy of 
 the Religious Life because it withdraAvs 
 154 
 
THE RELIGIOUS LIFE 
 
 from the duty of propagating the species 
 many of those whose quahties it is highly 
 desirable should be transmitted. This is, of 
 course, a very inconsidered piece of criticism, 
 inasmuch as the qualities desiderated are 
 largely developed and preserved by the Re- 
 ligious Life itself, and without its sustaining 
 power would have been swamped in the 
 struggle for existence. They are, moreover, 
 the spiritual qualities which are the product 
 of culture rather than of heredity. The ef- 
 fect, therefore, of a spiritual personality in 
 developing spiritual qualities in the circle of 
 his influence is far greater than it could pos- 
 sibly be in the training of a family, even on 
 the unlikely supposition that the qualities 
 would have been developed in any fulness in 
 the life of the world. But what may be ex- 
 pected to be the effect of the Religious Life 
 on society will appear as we go on. 
 
 At present it is time to return to the posi- 
 tive side of our statement. What the Reli- 
 gious Life is primarily aiming at is the pre- 
 sentation of the Christ-life. But all Chris- 
 tians have the like aim, as has already been 
 said. What then is the peculiarity of the 
 Religious Life ? It would seem to be this : 
 155 
 
THE RELIGIOUS LIFE 
 
 that its acceptance of the limitations of the 
 Counsels of Perfection has concentrated its 
 energies and rendered it more dynamic. 
 The energies of a life lived in the world are 
 of necessity dispersed, and consequently less 
 effective along any given line. To take but 
 a single illustration : the prayer-life of a man 
 or woman living under the pressure of busi- 
 ness or social obligation is much more re- 
 stricted than that of the Religious. It is re- 
 stricted in amount — in the measure of time : 
 it is probably restricted in energy through 
 the greater prevalence of distraction. In all 
 directions of spiritual activity the Religious 
 Life is more energetic. 
 
 Here is one great meaning of the Reli- 
 gious Life : that it raises the life of holiness, 
 which is the universal vocation of Chris- 
 tians, to a higher power and renders it more 
 dynamic. If we will recall what has already 
 been said of the Spiritual Life, that it is the 
 outflow of the Incarnate Life of the Re- 
 deemer, we shall see the importance of this. 
 The Incarnate Life is a creative life — crea- 
 tive of holiness, that is, Godlikeness, in those 
 whom it effectively influences. And those 
 so influenced become in their turn centers of 
 156 
 
THE RELIGIOUS LIFE 
 
 spiritual energy influencing other lives. The 
 influence of a spiritual personality will be 
 proportionate to the intensity of its spiritual 
 power. The presence of Religious Commu- 
 nities in any society tends to raise the spir- 
 itual level of that society as a whole, in that 
 spiritual power is concentrated in them and 
 is released through them. This is not a 
 matter of theory : any one who has had ex- 
 perience will testify to the truth of what I 
 say — that a Religious Community produces 
 a distinct rise in the spiritual life, not only of 
 its own members, but within the circle of 
 those who are in contact with it. And it 
 does this not simply because the members of 
 the religious community are engaged in 
 teaching religion to others ; it does it where 
 there is no direct teaching, through the 
 forces set in motion by its own spiritual 
 activities. 
 
 It is, therefore, an extraordinary mistake 
 to speak of Religious as having isolated 
 themselves from the life of the community, 
 as having withdrawn from the world to 
 which they have obligations which they have 
 no right to abandon, as having put them- 
 selves apart from the interests of their fel- 
 157 
 
THE RELIGIOUS LIFE 
 
 lows, as having declined their duty to their 
 neighbor, and so on. It would be impossible 
 for Religious to do these things even if they 
 wanted to : and they, least of all men, want 
 to. The most isolated hermit living in a 
 cave in the desert is still a member of the 
 human group, acting upon it and reacting 
 from it. The House of a Religious Order is 
 by no means a thing apart from human life 
 — the abode of an unproductive selfishness. 
 Indeed, the central thought of the Religious 
 Life is not isolation but contact. The con- 
 tact which it seeks is, to be sure, a contact on 
 other lines than those of business or social 
 interest. It is a contact of the spiritual or- 
 der ; it is an attempt at purely spiritual influ- 
 ence on the life of the community. So 
 far from being indifferent to the interests of 
 other human beings, the Religious is bending 
 his energies to awaken in other human be- 
 ings a perception of the true value of life, to 
 lead them to the understanding of life as a 
 spiritual thing. 
 
 The most obvious way in which the Reli- 
 gious attempts this is by his life of prayer. 
 I do not in this place need to insist upon the 
 power of prayer; and especially upon the 
 158 
 
THE RELIGIOUS LIFE 
 
 power of the united prayer of intercession. 
 I may perhaps be permitted to recall to your 
 minds in this connection the ceaseless tides 
 of prayer that flow through the Body of 
 Christ. It is involved in our belief in the 
 communion of saints that ceaseless and pre- 
 vailing intercession goes up to Him that sit- 
 teth upon the throne from all the members of 
 His Body, whether from those who are here 
 in exile, or those who are admitted to the 
 nearer Presence. It is through prayer that 
 the world's best work is done. And we must 
 needs be utter materialists to undervalue the 
 influence of a community a great part of 
 whose time is given to the work of interces- 
 sion. When men say that the life of the 
 Religious is a useless and a selfish life, they 
 must either be speaking as those who do not 
 believe in prayer, or in mere thoughtlessness. 
 When, indeed, we consider the power of 
 prayer, ^^•e shall find it difficult to overesti- 
 mate the value of even one Hfe whose prin- 
 cipal work it is. 
 
 But I have not yet stated what seems to 
 
 me a deeper and still more important aspect 
 
 of the Religious Life. I recall the truth that 
 
 that life is one which aims to present the 
 
 1S9 
 
THE RELIGIOUS LIFE 
 
 Christian life with an intensity impossible 
 under ordinary social conditions — it aims, 
 that is, at the reproduction of the Christ- 
 experience in a high degree of intensity and 
 completeness. Now, a chief phase of the 
 Christ-experience is the phase of sacrifice. 
 Our Lord's Incarnate work centers in the 
 offering of Himself as an atonment for our 
 sins. That sacrifice and atonement are con- 
 stant parts of His Incarnate activity. He 
 ever liveth to make intercession for us; and 
 the intercession which He makes is the inter- 
 cession of His sacrifice which He ceaselessly 
 presents, the one abiding sacrifice for the 
 sins of all the world, a sacrifice which needs 
 no repetition because it is incapable of cessa- 
 tion. Into this atoning work the extended 
 Body of His Incarnation enters, and in it 
 each member of that Body is privileged to 
 share. Sin is not dealt with through the 
 memory of an act, but through the applica- 
 tion of a living reality. And it is our volun- 
 tary assumption of the Cross which brings 
 us into union and participation in the aton- 
 ing work of our Lord : it is our sacrifice of 
 ourselves for Him, and through Him for 
 the brethren. Every pain willingly endured, 
 160 
 
THE RELIGIOUS LIFE 
 
 •every self-denial or self-limitation which is 
 directed Christ-wards is assumed to Him 
 and merged in His sacrificial life. Our 
 prayers, we know, avail for others — other- 
 wise we should hardly say them — and sacri- 
 fice is an acted prayer, the highest form of 
 prayer, inasmuch as the essence of sacrifice 
 is self-sacrifice. 
 
 And the self-limitation of the Religious 
 is, as we know, a sacrificial self-limitation. 
 The Religious does not limit himself for 
 self-gain, not even the spiritual gain of his 
 salvation ; but he limits himself as a form of 
 sacrifice; he gives himself in the Body of 
 Christ on behalf of his brethren. Think, 
 then, of the power of Christ's atonement as 
 it is released through the Religious Life. 
 Think of that power which seeks utterance 
 in every soul finding ever new channels 
 through the voluntary self-sacrifice of the 
 multitudes of the Religious, to lead it into 
 the lives of the redeemed children of God. 
 The Religious Life has ever been one of the 
 chief instruments of God in the conversion 
 and sanctification of souls. Think of it as 
 entering into Christ's sacrifice and pleading 
 it on behalf of the sins of the world. 
 (") 161 
 
THE RELIGIOUS LIFE 
 
 The Religious Life, then, is what its name 
 expresses, a Life. Those who are called to 
 it are called to live in a certain relation to 
 our Lord, to become means of His self- 
 expression in this world. All life is energy, 
 and as such expresses itself in results which, 
 when they are external, we call works. But 
 the works are the result of the action of the 
 life and are not to be confounded with it. 
 The life itself is imparted for spiritual ends, 
 and finds its significance in them. Those 
 who rightly enter the Religious Life, enter 
 it for the Life's sake, not that they may do 
 good works of this or that kind. 
 
 But there is one other aspect of the Reli- 
 gious Life as a manifestation of the Holy 
 Life of the Body of Christ, of which I wish 
 to say a word in conclusion; and that is its 
 aspect of protest. It presents a standing 
 protest against, not the worldliness of the 
 world, but the worldliness of the Church. 
 The Religious Life seems strange to us to- 
 day, if it does so seem, seems to involve so 
 much of strain and separation, because it 
 has departed less far from the ideals of the 
 Gospel than the Church as a whole has done, 
 — meaning by the Church, the Christian 
 162 
 
THE RELIGIOUS LIFE 
 
 community. The Religious Life was a much 
 less striking thing in its origin than it is 
 now, because those who followed that voca- 
 tion went but little beyond what was under- 
 stood to be the ordinary vocation of the 
 Christian. Christians took seriously what 
 the New Testament said about the world — 
 they were understood to have renounced it 
 and fled from it. But the time came when 
 Christians assumed that they had converted 
 the world, and when they, therefore, felt at 
 liberty to go back to it as a changed thing. 
 What of course had happened was that they 
 were changed and not the world. To-day 
 we are back in the thick of the world — so 
 back that we are unable any more to under- 
 stand what the world is. The line of de- 
 marcation between the Church and the world 
 has vanished, and it is for the most part 
 impossible to distinguish the Christian from 
 the worldling. One indication of this is that 
 there is an increasing difficulty in getting 
 spiritual religion so much as understood. 
 People do not so much as understand the 
 veriest common-places of the spiritual life. 
 They look upon the Sermon on the Mount 
 as a thing impossible to live by. The work- 
 163 
 
THE RELIGIOUS LIFE 
 
 ing maxims of the lives of Christian men 
 and women are the maxims of a purely 
 worldly morality. One consequence is that 
 the Religious Life is no longer a life a little 
 beyond the life of the average man or 
 woman, which they may easily pass into as 
 multitudes did pass in the early ages, but a 
 life of strange obligations and impossible 
 sacrifices. 
 
 But just because of this mingling of the 
 Church and the world we need the continual 
 protest of the Religious Life. We need its 
 protest that the life is more than meat and 
 the Body than raiment. We need its protest 
 that sacrifice is of the very essence of the 
 Christian life. We need its protest against 
 an ever growing materialism. We who live 
 on terms of friendship with the world, every 
 luxury of which we claim as our due and 
 right; we who have created a religious es- 
 tablishment so luxurious that we are reduced 
 to the constant need of wealth to support 
 us — we need to be told that religion is ill- 
 served by these things, and that we have 
 meshed ourselves in a net which is strang- 
 ling us. The existence of the Religious Life 
 tells us this ; it sets before us those who are 
 164 
 
THE RELIGIOUS LIFE 
 
 able to live in the detachment which befits 
 those who are the followers of a crucified 
 Master. Surely we need to be told these 
 things. 
 
 I am extremely conscious of the crudity 
 and incompleteness of these lectures. But 
 they are a faithful attempt to analyze, not 
 the abstract notion of Holiness, but the fact 
 of Holiness as an existing note of the Body 
 of Christ. I have dwelt upon the fact that 
 that Body is Holy by its very nature and by 
 virtue of the Source from which its life 
 flows forth. I have tried to put before you 
 Holiness as the universal vocation of Chris- 
 tians, as the quality that, before all others, 
 they should seek as the normal result of their 
 union with their Risen and Ascended Head. 
 I have attempted to describe the outflow of 
 the Holy Life of the Body in two special 
 cases. First, in the case of Priesthood, 
 wherein I have ventured to dwell somewhat 
 on the dangers of the priestly vocation, as it 
 seemed right to do in this place, as well as 
 upon the holy nature of the gift itself. And, 
 secondly, I have attempted an analysis of the 
 Religious Life, as one of the legitimate de- 
 165 
 
THE RELIGIOUS LIFE 
 
 velopments of the Life of the Body. For 
 whatsoever I have said in accord with the 
 mind of our Blessed Lord, I humbly thank 
 Him : if I have said anything contrary to 
 His mind, I ask His mercy. 
 
 166 
 
The Works of the Rev. L G, L. Barry, D.D., Rector of 
 the Church of St. Mary the Virgin, New York. 
 
 Dr. Barry's books have brought spiritual help and comfort to a 
 great many of the children of the Church which he has served 
 lon^, faithfully, and effectively. His wonderful grasp on thei 
 verities of the spiritual life, his deep knowledge of human nature, 
 and his remarkably practical insight into the spiritual needs of 
 men and women combine to give to his writings vital importance. 
 Esp^ially valuable are these works to souls disheartened or per- 
 plexed and the many sadnesses and sorrows, the trials and tribu- 
 lations, the doubts and temptations, of every-day living. 
 
 The Selef 'Revelation of Our Lord — A Book of Medi- 
 tations. 350 Pages. $1.50. 
 
 Every point that he touches is illuminated; and everywhere we- 
 find helpful suggestions. Most illuminating are his discussions 
 of the relations between Science and Philosophy and Religion; 
 of the Authority of the Church, especially that of our American 
 Church; of the^Holy Eucharist; and of many other matters that 
 are of vital interest to the earnest Christian. 
 
 The Christianas Day — A Book of Meditations. 
 257 Pages. Cloth, Gilt. $1.50 net. 
 
 The "Christian's Day" contains chapters on "Prayer," "Medita- 
 tion," "Temptation," "Repentance," "Confession," "Relation to 
 Others," "Work," "Pain," "Discipline," "The Supernatural,'* 
 "Thanksgiving." These subjects are all dealt with, not in a 
 speculative or theoretical fashion, but in a practical way, as by 
 one meeting real difficulties and answering actual questions. 
 
 The Apostles' Creed — A Book of Meditations. 
 535 Pages. $2.00. 
 
 Dr. Barry's_ "Meditations, on the Apostles' Creed" is a success- 
 ful and practical Correlation of i^reed and Conduct, the kind of 
 treatment of the subject calculated to help people disturbed by 
 attacks upon the Catholic Faith at the present time and develop 
 the vigorous, manly and positive type of Christian character. 
 
 Meditations on the Office and Work of the Holy Spirit. 
 257 Pages. $1.50 net. 
 
 A very devotional study of the Mission of the Third Person of 
 the Adorable Trinity, in the Church and in the individual soul. 
 It supplies just what has been felt as a need in the recent litera- 
 ture of the Church, a need that has not been so comprehensively 
 met by any other book that we have seen.