St. Paul's Church

“ Paul was among the first to labour that Christ’s ideal of one holy catholic Church might be realized. Eighteen centuries have passed away, and the life of the Church, like that of St. Paul, looks like a failure. With more than half the human race still not even nominally Christian; with long series of crimes committed not only in defiance, but in the name, of religion; with each decade of years producing its unwholesome crop of heresies and schisms;—what has become of the Church’s profession of being catholic, holy, and united? ”

“ Paul literally loves the Church; how he longs to communicate his own enthusiasm to it; how he would die, almost does die, himself to bring life to them. All his hopes are bound up with theirs—his salvation with their salvation. He seems to 'fail from out his blood, and grow incorporate' into them. We are called to the same office as St. Paul, we have the same power working in us as he had working in him: we too shall have success in so far as we love—as we identify ourselves with those whom God has given us to take care of. ”

“ But the Church, as a visible organization of men, can be what it is—the city of God, His household and His sanctuary—only because it is pervaded by Christ's life and spirit. The 'stones of the building' are not merely placed side by side of one another, or held together by any external agency of government; they {120} are as branches of a living tree, limbs of a living body. In this recurrent thought, which will be presented to us in another form when St. Paul comes to speak of the head and the body, is the interpretation of all his theory of the Church. ”

“ Paul has unfolded the dimensions of the revelation of God given in the catholic church. The interests of the whole of mankind and of the whole universe which it is to subserve—that is its breadth: the eternal and slowly realized intention of God of which it is the expression—that is its length: the spiritual elevation up to which it takes men—that is its height: the gulf of sin and misery from which it rescues them—that is its depth. And now he is about to press upon the Asiatic Christians the moral obligations which this great catholic brotherhood involves. ”

“ That noble pile is the symbol of a nation's faith. All over the world St Paul's is known. It is the loftiest point in all these miles that make up London. Four millions of Christian men and women are clustered round its feet, draw breath and kneel in worship in sight of its cross. This is the greatest church built by the most practical race. When we consider that the most practical race on earth built this monument of faith, the opinion of the individual ought to be hushed before such a proof of devotion. ”

“ Paul's conceptions—and not any lower or narrower ones, Roman or Anglican or Nonconformist—become vivid to our minds. Then, knowing what we aim at restoring, we shall seek, in each parish and ecclesiastical centre, to concentrate almost more than to extend the Church, to give it spiritual, moral, and social reality, rather than to multiply a membership which means little. For if men can understand the meaning of the Church, as the city of God, the family of God, the sanctuary of God, in the world, there is little fear that whatever is good in humanity will fail of allegiance to her. ”

“ Christ said simply, 'I am with you all days,' and 'he that believeth and is baptised shall be saved, and he that believeth not shall be condemned.' It is in vain to urge that St. Paul speaks of the 'man of sin,' and of 'a falling away,'—he speaks not of the Church; and the very expression 'a falling away' shows that it is not the Church, but sects, to which he alludes—for the Church never fell away from any previous Church,—this is matter of {189} history; but all the sects, all schismatics, all heretics, fell away from the Catholic Church of Christ,—this is equally matter of history. ”

“ It is not necessary to go into the painful task of tracing the obvious decline of Christianity, and its absorption in the organization of the Church, which assumed the Keys of Heaven, and bound and tortured men on earth. It is beautiful to see the free piety of Paul, amid all his dogmatic subtleties,—a man to whom the world owes so much, [11] —and the happy state of the earlier churches; when no one controlled another, except by Wisdom and Love; when each was his own priest, with no middle-man to forestall inspiration, and stand between him and God ”

“ Paul, writing under the inspiration of the Holy Ghost, recorded that apostles and prophets were necessary in the church, not only for his days, but "till we all come in the unity of the faith, and of the knowledge of the Son of God, unto a perfect man, unto the measure of the stature of the fulness of Christ: that we henceforth be no more children, tossed to and fro, and carried about with every wind of doctrine, by the sleight of men, and cunning craftiness, whereby they lie in wait to deceive." ”

“ Each one has an interest in the well-being of the whole Church. We have an interest in the preservation of the sacred deposit of faith and grace in all nations; in the salvation of our neighbor, in the spiritual good of our posterity; in the prosperity of Christendom; in the conversion of the world; in the triumph of Jesus Christ; in the glory of God. All these are bound up in the cause of the Holy See, the Roman Church, the Sovereign Pontiff. It is only by the Catholic Church that mankind can be saved and that God can be glorified. Peter is the Rock on which this Church is built. ”

“ Paul's mind the Catholicism of the church is to lead the way to an even wider 'reconciliation.' Through the catholic union of men in the church the whole universe is to come back into unity. The kingdom of God is to be something wider than the church which exists to prepare for it. This principle once recognized secures that the church shall feel and exhibit a constant interest in all departments of knowledge and progress. The universe is one, and redemption is for the whole. ”

“ It is an awful thought that we thus live over the action of these subterranean fires; but they are in the control of the Almighty, and all we have to do is to submit to God’s will and merciful providence.”
St. Paul’s Church, of which Uncle Richard was a vestryman, owed its origin to the separation of certain persons from the Congregational mode of worship, and the formation of a society for the resumption of the Protestant Episcopal pattern, as long ago as the year 1712. ”

“ Similar development of the idea of the one ecclesia as including all members of all local ecclesiae does not lead St Paul to regard membership of the universal church as invisible.
But the mere history of the word ecclesia does not exhaust the subject. We must take into account not only the idea of the visible actual church, but also the ideal pictured by St Paul in the metaphors of the Body (Rom. xii. 5) , the Temple (1 Cor. iii. 10–15) and the Bride of Christ (2 Cor. xi. 2) . The actual church is always falling short of its profession ”

“ The pontificate of Paul III. forms a turning-point in the history of the papacy. The situation at his accession was grave and complex: the steady growth of Protestantism, the preponderant power of the emperor and his prolonged wars with France, the advances of the Turks, the uncertain mind of the Church itself—all conspired to produce a problem involved and delicate. Paul was shrewd, calculating, tenacious; but on the other hand over-cautious, and inclined rather to temporize than to strike at the critical moment. His instincts and ambitions were those of a secular prince of the Renaissance ”

“ Paul teaches the Ephesian Christians that all that belongs to the glorified Christ is to belong also to the Church, which is His body. It is Christ who gives to all creatures whatever various gifts of life they have. He 'filleth all in all'; that is, 'He filleth the whole universe with all variety of {81} gifts.' But something much more than various gifts—the sum total of all He is—He pours, or intends to pour, into the Church, so that the Church as well as the Christ shall embody, and thus be identified with, the fulness of the divine attributes. ”

“ Paul said to the elders of the {23} Church at Ephesus, after he had labored three years with them, that he knew that some of their own number would turn away from the faith, and seek to lead away disciples after them. None, we presume, in this generation will pretend that he has the experience of Paul in building up the Church of Christ ”

“ Paul's idea of the unity of the Church forbids us to conceive of it as complete in this world. Each particular church with its own organization has a certain relative completeness, but it gains all its meaning and life through fellowship in the body of Christ—the whole society of men who, having Christ for their head, live in the unity of a life derived from Him. The head of the body is out of sight. ”

“ It would have been so, for a long time now, if the Church of Christ had followed better the precept and also the example of St Paul. Had the apostolic missions been sustained more adequately throughout Christian history, and had the apostolic Gospel been better maintained in the Church in all the energy of its divine simplicity and fulness, the globe would have been covered—not indeed in a hurry, yet ages ago now—with the knowledge of Jesus Christ as Fact, as Truth, as Life. ”

“ Christians are obliged to believe that St. Paul was neither an enthusiast nor a cheat, because the church has decided that he was divinely inspired: the church has decided this important point of belief, according to the Acts of the Apostles and epistles, which, as we have shown, were both rejected by many sects of the primitive Christians, and which, as we have proved in the course of this work, are filled with contradictions and absurdities. ”

“ The Catholics believe that their Church is in possession of the doctrine taught by Christ, and listen to it as they would to Him. Judge from this how strong and lively must be the faith of a Catholic, how firm and immovable, since the voice of their Church is the voice of their Saviour, and the interval of eighteen hundred years disappears as they every day hear the voice of Jesus. There cannot be any division in this Church. ”

“ If there be one thing more remarkable than another in the history of the Apostle Paul, it is the place he occupied towards the churches he planted. He never intrudes between them and their Lord, either in what concerns their individual consciences as saints, or their collective conscience as a church; but associating himself with them, it may be, in a matter of discipline, he says, “When ye are met together with my spirit, deliver such an one to Satan.” ”

“ Let him once begin to realize the Incarnation, and he will find he is taking the road to Rome: he will find that there is such a thing as a visible Church, and such a person as the Mother of God. To the Catholic, on the contrary, the Incarnation is everything. It is the fount of the whole system to which he glories in adhering. The Church exists for nothing else. The world exists for nothing else. The world for the Church, the Church for Christ, and Christ for God. ”

“ If Greeks, Italians, and Englishmen are to be content to belong to different churches; if among ourselves we are to have one church for the well-to-do, and another for 'labour'; if any individual who is offended in one church is to be free to go off to another where he or she likes the minister better—where does the need come in for the forbearance and long-suffering and humility on which St. Paul {163} insists as the necessary virtues of the one body? ”

“ Salvation, as we shall see, is as much social or ecclesiastical as it is individual; and perhaps there is nothing more wanted to correct our ideas of what St. Paul understood by justifying faith than an impartial study of the Epistle to the Ephesians. It is true that this great epistle only freely developes thoughts which were already unmistakably in St. Paul's mind when he wrote his epistles to the Corinthians, and even those to the Thessalonians. Already the social organization of the Church is a prominent topic, and the ethics of Christianity are social ethics. ”

“ It follows that the communion of which the Pope is the Supreme Head, is the true Church established by Jesus Christ—One, Holy, Catholic, and Apostolic, incapable of falling away, and infallible in doctrine. The foundation of this great and world-wide Church is the Papal Supremacy of St. Peter and his successors, and its principal portion is the Roman See. If I prove that this foundation was laid by Jesus Christ, it will be evident that the Church founded upon it is the true Catholic Church, and the faith of that Church the true Christian and Catholic faith. ”

“ If this Church be not The Church of Christ, I ask you where is it to be found?
In the second letter she says:
"After much reflection I must confess to you their system appears reasonable, natural, and convincing. With us, they consider the Holy Scriptures as the most respectable testimony of our faith, and they profess a strict adherence to them; they have for them the greatest respect; and the Catholic priests support from the Bible what they {178} teach the people, and I am certain that they study and understand the Scriptures as much as our ministers. ”

“ His immediate object is the church through which He acts upon the world and into which He calls every man. 'I pray,' He said, 'not for the world, but for them whom thou hast given me.' 'He gave himself for us that he might redeem us ... and purify unto himself a people for his own possession [8] .'
Once more we notice in this passage a significant hint as to St. Paul's conception of baptism. There is no doubt of the spiritual efficacy which he assigns to it. And we observe in germ a doctrine of 'matter' and 'form' in connexion with the sacraments. ”