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ASPECTS OF THE OLD TESTAMENT

LECTURE I

All things are yours.-1 Cor. iii. 21.

THERE are few terms the precise significance of which it is more difficult to fix than the word 'catholic.' As applied to the Christian Church it connotes primarily her world-wide extension. The holy Church throughout all the world doth acknowledge Thee. To the idea of extension the idea of doctrine is added. The Church is catholic' inasmuch as she is the teacher of all truth needful for man in the conduct and development of his spiritual and moral life; she is the home of all graces and virtues, and the school in which every variety of human character may find its appropriate discipline. But there is another sense in which the Church of Jesus Christ is a 'catholic' society: to her most loyal children she is the imparter of spiritual breadth, she fosters a true catholicity of heart and temper. Faithfulness to the mind of the Church and submission to her discipline has sometimes been supposed, and with a show of justice, to involve hostility to the advancement of learning, cramped and petty views of things, and a one-sided estimate of human nature. And yet if the Church of God be the abiding-place of that Holy Spirit whose presence brings liberty, and the home of that charity which rejoiceth with the truth 2, Cyr. Hier. Catech. xviii. 23. Cp. Lightfoot on Ignat. ad Smyrn. viii. 2 2 Cor. iii. 17; 1 Cor. xiii. 6.

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a faithful son of the Church will have a just sense of the infinitude and many-sidedness of truth. He will cultivate in himself the spirit of candour, and width of intellectual sympathy. He will be keenly alive to the strength of an opponent's case1. He will discriminate carefully between what is essential and what non-essential in the cause he defends. And here probably his difficulties will begin. Indeed every thoughtful Christian has sooner or later to face a practical problem, upon the right solution of which the advancement of truth depends. He has to combine the temper of restfulness with that of mobility, the stedfastness of a soldier with the detachment of a pilgrim. While he is the faithful and selfforgetful guardian of a precious heritage transmitted from the past, a heritage of belief and usage which necessarily moulds his thought and shapes his conduct; while he cherishes all those heavenly gifts which pertain unto life and godliness2, he will yet be penetrated by the thought so simply and comprehensively expressed in the words, All things are yours. A Christian teacher or student will adhere jealously to the inherited rule of revealed truth, the immemorial tradition of the faith, and yet his utterances will be so far reserved, fragmentary, and incomplete as they correspond to the infinite mystery of godliness3. There was in Jesus Christ, the Word of Life, that which men could see with their eyes and handle with their hands; but there was also more than they could fathom with the intellect or express in forms supplied by human speech. In the presence of His unveiled glory they were as men who stammered, not knowing what they said. Accordingly in the earliest ages of Christianity at least, there was seldom absent from the minds of great teachers of

1 Chrys. Hom, in ep. ad Phil. 246 C, D H уар λаμπрà viêη kai ẻķ περιουσίας γινομένη αὕτη ἐστίν, ὅταν τὰ δοκοῦντα αὐτῶν ἰσχυρὰ εἶναι μὴ ἀποκρύπτωμεν· τοῦτο γὰρ ἀπάτη ἐστὶ μᾶλλον ἢ νίκη. 2 2 Pet. i. 3.

1 John 1. I.

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1 Tim. iii. 16.

Luke ix. 33.

the Church a deep consciousness of insufficiency. In them, reverence was ever, so far as might be compatible with fidelity to truth, reserved and slow of speech. Even their most confident dogmatic statements were, so to speak, forced from them by the 'obstinate questionings,' whether of devout faith or of self-willed perversity, and they were advanced with manifold apologies and qualifying cautions1. It has often been remarked how unsystematic are many of the utterances of the early fathers; they felt themselves to be moving 'in worlds not realized'; they had presages rather than clear intuitions of the largeness and splendour of the divine revelation vouchsafed to man in Jesus Christ. This circumstance explains the grandeur, and yet the vagueness, of some occasional statements made by such a writer as Irenaeus. He knew that the Spirit of the living God had entered into the visible universe in order to possess, appropriate, and hallow it. The vision of God Himself was the true life of man2, and human nature was already the receptacle of the grace and glory of God. Already man was a son of God, but it did not yet appear what he should be 3. Only it was certain that man's destiny was a continual assimilation to his Creator. Irenaeus clung tenaciously to the deposit of faith, but he felt that only the progressive unfolding of the divine purpose for humanity would adequately interpret the full content of the rule of truth. In our day, when knowledge widens its range with such bewildering rapidity, we too have to discharge a twofold obligation. We are bound to guard the faith committed to us in its integrity, but with due

1 See for instance Hilary's language in de Trin. ii. 2: 'Compellimur haereticorum et blasphemantium vitiis, illicita agere, ardua scandere, ineffabilia eloqui, inconcessa praesumere. Et cum sola fide expleri quae praecepta sunt oporteret, adorare scilicet Patrem et venerari cum eo Filium, Sancto Spiritu abundare; cogimur sermonis nostri humilitatem ad ea quae inenarrabilia sunt extendere, et in vitium vitio coartamur alieno: ut quae contineri religione mentium oportuissent, nunc in periculum humani eloquii proferantur.'

? Iren. Haer. iv. 20, 7: 'Vita hominis visio Dei.'

3 Cp. 1 John iii. 2.

carefulness to discriminate between what is and what is not of faith; on the other hand we have to bear constantly in mind that to us Christians nothing achieved or discovered by human faculties is without its bearing on the Christian revelation; all things are ours in so far as they throw light on the destiny of man, on the ways of the eternal God, on the methods and conditions of His self-manifestation. We cannot divest ourselves of responsibility for the use of our judgment in bringing all things to the test of Christian reason and experience. He that is spiritual judgeth all things, yet he himself is judged of no man. For who hath known the mind of the Lord that he may instruct him? But we have the mind of Christ1. With the creed of the Catholic Church in his hands, a thoughtful Christian may look round upon the universe of things with eyes that penetrate deeper than the surface of life. The world may present to him a confused and bewildering spectacle, like that which Wordsworth studied so observantly in the London of his day:

'But though the picture weary out the eye,
By nature an unmanageable sight,

It is not wholly so to him who looks
In steadiness; who hath among least things
An under sense of greatest; sees the parts
As parts, but with a feeling of the whole 2.

The Christian knows that in his hands he holds the clue to this tangled maze; the kingdoms of this world are on the way to become the kingdoms of our Lord and of his Christ. Thus the Christian slowly and gradually comes to recognize the inexhaustible significance of his creed. He finds in the Catholic Faith, 'loved deeplier, darklier understood,' that which will best minister to the intellectual and moral wants of the age in which he lives. To be truly catholic, in a word, is to be large-hearted; to be no mere votary of the past, but a student of the present; not a servile adherent of the creed, but a wise and sympathetic 2 The Prelude, bk. vii.

1 1 Cor. ii. 15, 16.

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8 Rev. xi. 15.

interpreter of it to living men.

We Christians should

set before us the task of endeavouring to understand our own age, its needs, its perils, its possibilities. We should ever look upward for light to see what knowledge, what aspect of truth, is most serviceable and necessary for the days in which we live. And conversely each new development in human life or social organization, each gift of civilization, each discovery of science, each achievement of human toil, energy, and skill, each true partus temporis, will be of vital interest in so far as it interprets to us more luminously the clauses of our creed and the ways of divine wisdom; in so far as it gives us a truer sense of proportion and a larger insight into the things of faith.

Of this catholic heart, this spiritual versatility, the most conspicuous example is to be found in the writer of the Epistles to the Corinthians himself, whose vocation it was to preach to the world the mystery of a catholic Church. The great charter indeed of the Church's catholicity is contained not in the present passage, but rather in others which lie behind it: All things are delivered unto me of my Father. All power is given unto me in heaven and in earth. This truth of the Church's lordship in Jesus Christ is one which we are sometimes apt to overlook; this it is of which the Corinthians especially are reminded in the text. Accordingly St. Paul sets down what has been called 'an inventory of the possessions of the child of God': All things are yours; whether Paul, or Apollos, or Cephas, or the world, or life, or death, or things present, or things to come; all are yours. The Corinthians were absorbed in the disputes of the hour-disputes which turned largely upon personal preferences for this or that individual teacher in the Christian community. They were glorying, as St. Paul with a significant allusion to prophecy points out, not in God the Creator of the Church, but in men 2 Matt. xxviii. 18.

· Matt. xi. 27; Luke x. 22.

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1 Cor. i. 31. Cp. Jer. ix. 23, 24.

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