Page:Sermon at the Church Congress 1902.djvu/10

6 the Church, the mutual distrust and defiance of those who press the reality, the significance, the necessity of sacraments, and those who more or less deny or distrust them, and who look for the reality and purity of religion to what they describe as more independent and direct contact with God. This is the conflict between the Roman Catholic and the Society of Friends, between the Churchman and the Plymouth Brother, and in a degree, within the English Church and even within the Presbyterian Church of Scotland, between the High Churchman and the Low; being in truth, far more than is recognized, a difference of mental temperament before ever it is one of objective creed. This is the conflict which controversy, especially in its baser and more ignorant forms, is ever exasperating and hardening, flinging backwards and forwards the charges of superstition and irreverence, of materializing and desecration, and trying its hardest to persuade brethren in Christ that they can have no communion one with another. May we, to-day at least, turn our thoughts from this opposition, real and undoubted as it is, to rest them upon that which is, to say the least, as real, but much more often overlooked—I mean the underlying unity beneath the opposites?

For is it not true that the thing for which, each in his own way, these unlikes (where genuine) are alike eager, is the presence, real, living, spiritual, of God Himself with and in His own? It is Christ among us, Christ in us, and God through Christ. It is for this that in his rage of desire one man will break the mould of every form to get straight, as he thinks, at the precious ointment of the presence; to secure this, surer than all words, safe from dependence upon wavering moods, another man will exalt to the uttermost the consecrated method, the definite, local, almost visible gift. Surely, we find this inner unity in the likeness between the most spiritual utterances of widely separated men: it is witnessed even by the kinship between weaker tendencies, as in the parallelism between the sentimentalism of some sacramental devotions and that of some evangelical hymns, which harp on thoughts and phrases such as the sweetness of Jesus.

We, brethren, in the Church of God, have this happiness and blessing that our Lord Himself has in part, at least, decided for us this matter of method by giving us definite sacraments of His power and presence: decided it, that is, not by the defining language of words which divide and perplex, but by the silent speech of acts which unite; acts of utter simplicity, yet of richest mystical power. Happy we, if resolutely minimizing controversy by rising to what is really highest, we can unitedly lay hold upon the truth of the living Giver present to give us in His own way living gifts, parts of the one Gift which is life from Himself. Happy if we can recognize that different races, times, and strains of opinion or temperament may treat these great things of divine operation with more or less of simplicity or splendour,