SUNDAY READING.

Taranaki Daily News, 20 May 1922, Page 9

SUNDAY READING.

«‘THE COMMUNION OF SAINTS.” “You have come to Mount Sion, the City of the Living God, the heavenly Jerusalem, to myriads of Angels, in festal gathering, to the assembly of the first-born registered in Heaven, to the God of All as Judge, to the spirits of just men made perfect, to Jesus who mediates the New’ Covenant.” —Heb. XII. 22, 23. (Dr. Moffatt’s Translation.)

(By

Rev. A. H. Collins,

New Plymouth.) i

MEANING OF SAINTHOOD.

‘T believe in the Communion of Saints.” But do we? Do I? Do you? Is it a pions opinion or a rooted conviction ? It is just seven days since we met together and affirmed our belief in the “Holy Catholic Church” and in the interval we have been in contact with men and women, in business and pleasure. Do you think the impression we have made on any one of them is that we “believe in the Communion of Saints”? What have we done or said to cultivate the Communion of Saints? What do we mean by “Saints”? And what do we mean by “Communion”? A High Church clergyman said there had only been two Saints during the last three hundred years! A Japanese student, on visiting a fashionable home in London, wiped his shoes, not on entering the house but on leaving it! After a visit to England, Sadhu Sundar Singh declared he had only met two Christians! The popular idea of “Saints” is not flattering. Men use the word in a slighting, sneering way, and not a few of them would resent being called a Saint. They would rather be thought to be vicious than to be suspected of being Saints. The word suggests figures framed in a church window, inp.ne, romantic, unhuman beings, with soft, oval features, with a halo round their brow and a shepherd’s crook, or a eucharistic lily in their hand, with faces stupid and dull as a Dutch doll, and palpably no red blood in their veins. If, instead of mediaevalism, they turn to fiction, they think of “Stiggins,” “Chadband.” or “Uriah Heap.” the oily, unctuous hypocrites that Dickens 'has lampooned in his pages! But these are not the Saints of the New Testament, or “the Apostles ’Creed.” Artist and novelist have mistaken a feature for a face. The Saints of Corinth and Philippi, of Colosse .and Rome, were neither mythical nor poetic figures, neither milksops nor prigs. They had grave faults and silly foibles, yet the Apostles saw in them the promise and potency of Sainthood, as the naturalist sees the oak in the acorn, as the sculptor sees the statue in the stone. Follies and foibles notwithstanding, they were Saints in the making, they were sincere and serious men and women, and the number of such is far greater than critics and misanthropists dream. Of this I am sure, there is more genuine goodness in the world than some suppose. So with the word “Communion.” I know the facts that seem to controvert, and even disprove, “the Communion of Saints.” For what we often see is not communion, but division, not fellowship but strife, not union and goodwill but disunion and bad temper, not the Holy Catholic Church but wrangling and warring sects. An American visitor to a Scottish assembly heard the various speakers refer to, the U.P.’s, the TLP.’s and the I.P.’s, and when he rose to address the synod, he referred to this, and said: “Brethren, I notice you speak of the U.P.’s and the R.P.’?, and the I.P.’s. Why don’t you call jroursellves the split peas and have done with it.”?

A PLEA FOR UNITY.

It is all very sorrowful. The chasm that yawns between the Greek and the Roman, the Roman and the Anglican, the Episcopal and the Non-Episcopal Churches, seems to empty the word “Communion” of all vital meaning and reality. I am not disposed to make light of the Ugly facts. But let us avoid exaggeration, and let us seek for points of agreement rather than points of difference. In spite of all outward and organic disunion there is very real and substantial fellowship. In the Hymnology of the Churches the Romanist and Protestant, the Trinitarian and Unitarian, the Puritan and Ritualist, meet. When I turn to my book shelves, I find the same thing. Spurgeon and Newman. Thomas A’Kempis, and Channing, Richard Baxter, and Pere Lacordaire, stand side by side, and I am debtor to al] of them, and a host beside. Nay. more, the churches which ore furthest apart in outward form and organisation are one in loyalty to the deep and vital things of the soul. You could hardly find a, wider, deeper gulf than that which separates the Roman Catholic from the Baptist. But they worship the same God, they trust the same Redeemer, they kneel at the same Throne of God, and they seek the same Heaven. If by the infinite mercy of God we should reach the world of light and glory, we shall have to compose our differences, and learn to dwell together in unity and peax?e! Why not try to get together here? Why not emnhasise essential things now, and seek fellowship with all truth-loving, truth-seeking, truth-speaking souls on earth? Why put off Heaven feo long? Romanist, Anglican, Puritan, are one in Christ. We are not strangers, we are fellow-citizens, and members of the Household of God. The things that divide are human—church orders, creeds, sacraments and ignorance, specially ignorance—the things that unite are Divine, faith and hope and charity. We mis-know one another.

THE MAN, NOT THE TAG. We see each other inside out and upside down. Sometimes we cannot see- the man because of the label he wears! One man labels himself “Ritualist” or “Methodist” or “Baptist,” or some other “ist/' and we look so hard at the label that we fail to see the man. Yet a very little sanctified common-sense should be enough to teach us that the pilgrim to Zion is more important than the tag on his luggage. Why not begin to look at the man, and let the label pass? Is he a good man? Does he ring true? Js he living straight and clean? Is he as consistent, say as you are. then seek fellowship with that man. That is what Lowell means: “One feast, of holy days the qrest, I, though no churchman, love to keep, ‘All Saints,’ the unknown good that rest. In God’s still memory folded deep. The bravely dumb who did their deed, And scorned to blot it with a Name, Men of the plain heroic breed, That loved Heaven’s silence more than fame.” Yea, “I believe in the Communion of Saints,” Saint Tom and Saint Bill and

Saint Jim, who, like myself, are far from perfect, but hope to reach the Home of God at last, and cast our crown at Christ’s pierced feet. HEAVEN NOT FAR AWAY. But, after all, text and creed carry us farther than that. It is not of the Communion of Saints on Earth, but the Communion of Saints in Heaven, the Creed is speaking, and it is of that blessed fellowship our text is speaking. Dr. John Owen complained of his time that men did not sufficiently dwell on the present life of Christ, and proceeded to say that Christ is not living a life of glory only, but a life of office. “He ever liveth to make intercession, for us.” If Dr. Owen were living now, I think he might carry his complaint further, and say that we hardly think of the future life at all. or only think of it in a dreamy way. “There is a happy land, far, far away,” and we regard it as so “far, far away” that it is a case of “out of sight, out of mand," and if anyone speaks of the possibility of holding fellowship with “the Spirits or just men ma-r perfect,” we think he must be a Spiritualist or a Theosophist. or some other fearsome creature! Well, I am neither a Spiritualist nor Theosophist. I am just a plain 'man who believes “there rc more things in heaven or earth than are dreamed of in our philosophy,” and I say heaven is not “far, far away,” and it is not only possible, it is natural and inevitable, that devout men and women should enter into communion with the Saints in Heaven. “One family in Christ we dwell, One Church above, beneath.” TRUE MEANING OF WORSHIP. That is the true meaning of worship, though the meaning is nearly lost to this generation. In all true worship there is worship of the ever-living God, there is adoration of the Risen Lord, and there is ‘converse with the Holy Angels and with the living dead. Standing in the cemetery at Key Hill, Birmingham, Dr. Rendel Harris saiifr: “This cemetery is the emptiest place in Birmingham.” It is true of every “God’s Acre.” On visiting a church, a friend remarked to Bishop. Westcott, “How empty it is!” The Bishop answered in an awe-struck voice, “No, it is full,” and that is true of all churches. Napoleon, pointing to the Pyramids, cried to his troops: “Soldiers, forty generations look down on you.” The writer of the Epistle to the Hebrews said the same thing, “compassed about with so great a cloud of witnesses.” This is a Spiritual universe, we are living under spiritual laws, we are Spiritual beings, and we are surrounded by hosts of Spiritual beings. This heaven-earth, this earthheaven, and this inter-communion of Spirit with Spirit is the very soul of ] revelation. Creation itself is a \Spiritual deposit. Man is made in the image of the Spirit God, and man is Spirit. Everywhere, every when, and in everything, the Spiritual is implied, and without the Spiritual this universe would be a house without a tenant, a theatre without an audience, a temple without a worshipper. OH! men and women, back to your Bibles and learn the close and constant intercourse between earth and heaven. Read how God’s Angels came to Jacob, to Moses, to Joshua, to Elijah, to Jesus, to Peter, to Paul, to John. Read how “the Angel of the Lord encampet-h round about them that fear Him.” I could as soon think of summer without flowers as I could think of the Bible without these celestial visitors.

“Hand in hand with Angels, . Through the world we go, Brighter eyes are on us, Than we blind ones know.” • COMMUNION MEANS FELLOWSHIP.

But if this is a Spirit-filled world, do you suppose we can have no communion? Can there be no love, no sympathy, no comradeship? Has the accident of death cut us off? May two friends living on two sides of the Atlantic keep up fellowship, and two friends living on two sides of a grave jjtave none? Communion means fellowship, exchange of thought and sympathy, and to say that such communion ends at death is irrational and un-Scriptural. Death is simply physical dissolution. Personality survives, which means that thought and memory and love live on. But if thought and memory and love survive, do you suppose they cea.se to care, cease to serve, and cease to pray? If a mother enters Yonderland with full consciousness and expanded powers, so that she feels and knows as she never could on earth, is it reasonable or Scriptural to suppose that She forgets her children as the cow forgets her calf? For my part I believe that some of the best help that ever comes to us comes through the love and service and prayers of those who dwell in tpa.t Upper World, which is not “far, far away.” Some of out 1 notions of that world are about as far from truth and reality as prejudice and wild fancy can make it. The idea of Heaven as an everlasting sacred concert, or an everlasting spell of indolence, has no charm for me. I think of its as a place of service, with expanded powers of character that ripens and of faculties that grow. “Are they not all ministering Spirits sent forth to minister unto those who are the heirs of Salvation?” THE TWO WORLDS.

“There are two worlds,” says Oliver Wendell Holmes. “There are two worlds —a lower and a Higher, separated by the thinnest of partitions. The lower world is the world of question, the Higher World is that of answers. Endless doubt' and unrest here below; wonderful adoring certainty Above.” Yes, there are two worlds, yet communion is so close and so real that the soul need know no separation, and we should all be better men and women if we realised this. Not where the wheeling systems darken And our benumbed conceiving soars? The drift of pinions, would we harken, Beats at our clay-shuttered doors. The Angels keep their ancient places, Turn but a stone and start a wing! ’Tis ye, ’tis your estranged faces, That miss the many splendored things. But when so sad, thou eanst not sadder Ury: and upon thy so sore loss Shall shine the traffic of Jacob’s ladder Pitched betwixt Heaven and Charing Cross. Ye in the night, my soul, my daughter, Cry, clinging Heaven by the hems, And lo! Christ walking on the waters, Kot of Gennereth, but Thames! “I believe in the Communion of Saints, on,earth and in Heaven.”